West Virginia's coal miners just made Joe Manchin's life a lot harder
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/10/manchin-bbb-coal-miners-vs-owners/
No paywall
https://archive.fo/FL7jn
For months, Sen. Joe Manchin III has sold his opposition to the Build Back Better proposal as driven uniformly by a brave and hardheaded assessment of the national interest. He has warned that BBB will fuel inflation and that its climate provisions will push energy markets to evolve too quickly and lead to a dangerous dependence on Chinese supply chains.
It just got harder for the West Virginia Democrat to get away with this stance. And the culprit is none other than coal miners in his home state, whose union is redoubling calls for Manchin to support President Biden’s agenda.
What’s happening now with miners seems like a seminal moment. Some of the worst tropes in our politics — Democrats harbor nothing but elitist ill will toward miners, and miners’ “way of life” must be defended at all costs — are cracking up and falling away.
All this emerges from a new report in the New York Times that illustrates the true nature of home-state cross-pressures on Manchin. He’s caught between the miners union and mine owners, who vehemently oppose BBB.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
just like him. 
They are in for a surprise, though. It's going to be more than a bumpy ride.
Not surprising that the union miners would take him to task.
GOOD!
Grind that intransigent POS into a pile of coal dust.
... paid in the future big time by fossil fuel industries and anything else is just a smoke screen. One of
the cornerstones of the BBB is clean, green, renewable energies, and the fossil fuel industries are worth
> $1 trillion as they are functioning right now and so Joe sees the BBB as something that must be stopped
and in stopping the BBB Joe might become W.V. only billionaire.
Anything he says about bipartisanship, child tax credits, supply chain, the economy, and so on is just crap.
This is from Sept. 2021
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100216005972
This state has so many out-of-work people; and it's a beautiful climate, a lovely mountain state, lots of property, low cost of living. Why can't they attract industry there?
It makes me wonder what's wrong with the leaders and politicians of West Virginia? There should be TONS of companies wanting to move there, only hours from Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore and the East Coast.
The problem is the dying coal industry - they own the politicians and they don't want any competition. The coal company owners act like oligarchs - they don't care how many West Virginians they starve, it doesn't matter to them.
The coal miners union knows their industry is dying and they have only a few desperate years left. The real course is to fight coal company owners by making them secondary, less important in the state of West Virginia. Make the coal owners lose their sweetheart tax deals and land deals that favor companies over workers. I know there are Democratic leaders who can do this in West Virginia.
