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In reply to the discussion: Awaiting Trump's coal comeback, miners reject retraining [View all]Squinch
(50,950 posts)1) No, it's not hundreds of thousands. The entire coal industry employs between 80 and 90,000 people. A fraction of those are miners. Most of those miners - and other coal industry workers -are in the west, not in what we think of as the coal belt. So the number is a fraction of what you allege.
2) They're rejecting any and all attempts to help them and insisting that the rest of us pay an enormous price to maintain their obsolete way of life. So yes, I will happily denigrate them.
3) These guys were never going to be the ones who made up the numbers for us. The turnout of people of color was what accounted for the differences in numbers between Obama's turnout and Hillary's. So if you go after these assholes, you aren't going to change the numbers by anything like a deciding margin.
My great grandfather delivered beer to bars in a horse cart. He made a great living. Then trucks showed up. He had to compete against a younger and better trained work force. Should he have insisted that the rest of us stick to horse carts? And if he had, would you be defending his insistence?
Money has been poured into retraining programs for these people, and they refuse to retrain. Hillary had a ready-to-go plan to make the coal belt and the rust belt opportunity regions for solar and wind energy. Those industries replace half the TOTAL number of coal jobs EACH YEAR. These idiots could have been sitting on a gold mine.
Enough. Screw them.