Trump campaigned heavily on that he would help coal miners and continues to trumpet how much he has done for coal miners yet he has refused to meet with or do anything to help coal miners who are struggling with pay and pension issues. He refused to meet with striking coal miners in West Virginia who hadn't been paid and is now refusing to meet with or help coal miners in Kentucky with their pensions. McConnell who represents these men also is refusing to help them legislatively. Trump portrays himself as the champion of the working man and the backbone of his support is white working men yet his policies have done little to help them when compared to those in the investor class. Things like the trade war, doing away with union protections and cutting back on safety regulations are hitting these people the hardest.
There is no helping a dead industry. We know Trump will say anything to get elected THEY ARE STILL VOTING TRUMP REGARDLESS OF REALITY
@FranchiseBlade In all seriousness Wages arent growing but there is no inflation. Lack of inflation is also a factor in yield curve inversion
In all seriousness, I posted articles from sources that aren't left wing discussing why most Americans aren't feeling the economic boom.
He should start a campaign in coal country. Forced attendance could be paid or else to keep them in line. Win, win baby!
I wouldn’t count on votes in coal country to go overwhelmingly blue but in a close election it doesn’t take much to tip the scales. Further McConnell might actually have a real race and alienating a portion of the base is something he should be worried about. This issue though is more than the next election. Coal is a dead end industry and Clinton was right when she said that coal jobs should be ended. What has happened though is that Trump has either willfully or out of ignorance mislead these people about the reality they face. That doesn’t mean that they should be forgotten. There should be programs to retrain them and transition the economy of coal country.
Clinton should've pushed clean coal initiatives like Dubya... And not follow through like Dubya. That would draw the ire of conservationists but the respect is there. Ofc, whether Hill was right or not didn't matter. Neither side trusted her.
Trump has lied his way to the presidency by duping less educated people with false promises of retraining. Unless the reports are inaccurate, The reality is that retraining is pure false hope. Someone needs to tell these folks the truth that coal jobs aren’t coming back, retraining doesn’t work, and a new solution much be brought to the table. I’m not sure if I think Yangs UBi is a good idea, but at least he is identifying the problem, telling people the truth, and attempting to address it.
I do a lot of research into post commentary analysis after every big disaster (9/11, bear sterns/Lehman collapse, dump) and ill share thoughts in this: Coal miners want blue collar “American jobs”. They don’t want to sit at a desk and serve a master with no work or proof to show for it. Retraining for the “New Economy” is not an option. Automated Tesla factories or recycling plants are different, yet still blue collar...too bad no one locally gives a **** for those things to attract companies there. Equal treatment in the case of welfare degrades their status and dignity. Republicans use dog whistles, but in a pure uncynical race-neutral way, this is the equivalent of communism...if we’re all equal, no one is special. No one has worked nor struggled for their property. It’s not really theirs and more state owned. This illusion is too much and the Matrix crashes. [the matrix survives, however, if there are winners and losers. The whites vs The blacks much more preferable than rich vs. poor. After all...I can climb status. I can’t climb color...] All politicians lie. This movement spawned from the ultimate betrayal of Bush (corporate welfare Tarp), metastasized from disillusionment of Changey Hope more-of-the-same Obama, went full Tea Party bloom when word came out that Welfare to the poorest unemployed caused trillion dollar deficits (plus more bailouts). Distrust from government skyrocketed and dual party subservience of rich 1% elites caused people to re-examine commercialized truths. The fact that academics could neither explain nor contain the Great Recession rightfully galvanized disillusionment of academia that had been simmering and brewing from the right for over 50 years. The Teaper movement radicalized conservatism through Palin-esque slogans. Nuanced matters (typically hard to explain and harder to learn issues) became unprovable discussions in many social circles. This meant discourse in those topics became matters of opinion or Belief. Libs with their Daily Show format for Infotainment; Cons with their talk radio/Fox News for their Angertainment. None of this is taking to account how social media walls-in existing social circles and worldviews. This opens the door to what I call (probably some academic name to it...) Common Sense Counterfactualism. Counterfactual thinking is the exercise of posing a what-if to a question already answered and either filling in the gaps or using some way to prove that your what-if is a legitimate alternative solution. When you put it together it's like saying: "We're knee deep in debt! If the country were a household, then we'd be all homeless by now!" "The government is bloated and inefficient! If I ran my Burger Kings like the government, then I'd be out of business years ago!"The answer to all of these grievances is to liquidate and run the government like a corporation. Doesn't matter if corporations are highly specialized and risk taking entities that are not focused upon collective individual wellness. Adam Smith, the Messiah of Capitalism, did not pen end-game Facsism, but that's where things converges if one connects the dots with this kind of c'mon guys, I can do this better myself! kind of thinking. Common sense apples applied to rainforest oranges. So back to your point. Tie in all these tangents while reading articles right around post-election, you'll see the narrative that these voters knew he was a liar. The differentiator was that he was a different liar. Con women held their nose and voted Trump because they rationalized that "his daughter turned out alright, so he knows how to take care of his own." An "outsider", "authentic" and "greatly successful" liar who is on your side is much more desirable than the same overpaid, underwhelming liar you've seen your entire life doing a job who takes your vote for granted. You can see it on this board post-election where a few posters were so sick of government that they wanted Trump to blow it up. Think about small town people who were (and are still) really desperate and had heard the same scripted lies for decades while their towns shriveled and faded away like the world's coral reefs (cough cough coal cough cough). They knew that Trump was an ******* and a liar, but he was keeping it real, and he would be their *******. And if they got duped...well same ol ****, different toilet. Nothing lost. At the very least, it cuts the smug sheeple down a peg.
I love how coal miners are this great optic point... but honestly I don't see why we should care about them more than any other workers. Trump should lower taxes across the board and help everyone. I largely consider who tax plan a failure because he still takes too much from people.
Do you support his tax on American businesses and consumers on Chinese imports? Coal Miners are just a representation of a dying industry that we look to American presidential leadership to sort of figure out. Instead of real solutions to finding those workers a path to a new career we instead use them as a campaign political football and in the end refuse to have the balls to be real with them and provide that area of the US industry employment of the future. In Trumps case, he’s a grifter and not only saw the workers as a mark he could exploit for campaign ads, but also saw a buck to be made with the millionaires and billionaires who own the industry and abuse their workforce. He’s made their workplace more dangerous too by removing workplace safety regulations. So yeah Coal Miners aren’t going anywhere soon in terms of being a politically exploited industry. I just hope that under new leadership in 2020 we can get some solutions to incentivize new industries to come into these areas of the country that have workforce’s that need career transition out of a dying industry.
Blame Trump all you want but all politicians use the working class for vote pandering. Nothing unique about him. I agree that more needs to be done there. But outsourcing jobs to china isn't helping. Tariffs allow americans to be more industrious and hopefully some jobs can result. It is unlikely though because the next president will suck china's dick instead of standing up to them. Pretending they aren't a problem is a huge error. Do you not think the us should respond to china when they steal our intellectual property and BS their economic numbers? Do you support letting us bleed jobs to other countries?
Tariffs are all about execution. I’m obviously a Democrat, and Democrats believe in Tariffs traditionally if implemented properly. It must be done through Congress if at all possible because investors have to know that the tariffs will last past a campaign period. Prices are higher so the margins play well for domestic capital investment. But no investors trust Trump given his track record and there’s uncertainty with what will happen in 18 months. Trump was also dumb to go at China alone. TPP wasn’t the “Gold Standard” but building a coalition with our allies would have given us the leverage against China. It was stupid to engage them in this way and Trump just looks like a weak desperate negotiator which shouldn’t be a shock given his piss poor track record in business. So yeah I do blame Trump. I also think tackling a better trade relationship with China is key and tariffs are necessary potentially. Just not in such a pathetic desperate way that only hurts farmers and consumers. I just lost a customer in my role because the company relies on Chinese parts to manufacture, and they cannot properly forecast costs so they had to cut us as a vendor just because of the need to prepare their margins for uncertainty. Had this trade war been delivered in a concise strategic method, companies like my customer could have forecasted costs better and I personally would have more money in my pocket to feed my family. So no... again you have no idea what you are talking about. Democrats know tariffs. It’s only Trumplicans who just recently flipped flopped on the issue because your cult leader told you to blame everyone else with brown skin for your own problems.
Obligatory - for ****'s sake get some perspective, people - post. Target Corporation employs 360,000 workers. One retailer. All coal miners in the united states of america, combined? About 100,000 plus 80,000 more related jobs. Coal is and should continue to die. Because if it doesn't we will all die. The government, funded by taxes, should help retrain coal miners and other displaced workers, of whom there are a lot more than just coal miners /thread.
They were also looking at monkeying with electric generation to make us burn more coal, but they chickened out of that too. Lowering safety and environmental standards is just about the only thing he's done for the industry. Xi is doing a lot more than Trump for keeping it afloat because of how many coal-fired power plants they are building in China.
