KopitalkDeep in Trump country, coal miners with black lung say government is suffocating the 'working man'
MicroWaveapnews.com/article/black-lung-coal-miners-trump…
As director of the New River Health Association Black Lung Clinic, Emery’s seen guys as young as 45 getting double lung transplants as disease rates soar among miners forced to dig through more rock filled with deadly silica to reach the remaining coal — far worse than the dust their grandfathers inhaled.
A rule approved last year by the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration would cut the federal limit for allowable respirable crystalline silica dust exposure by half to help protect miners of all types nationwide from the current driving force of black lung and other illnesses.
But, now, it’s in jeopardy amid other Trump administration cutbacks and proposals targeting workers’ health and safety guardrails: Stuck in a politically charged environment that promotes industry, with lawmakers arguing to change it and the federal agency that wrote the rule not pushing to enforce it. Some angry retired miners with black lung are fighting back, demanding that Donald Trump honor promises he made to the people who voted him in.
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demanding that Donald Trump honor promises he made to the people who voted him in.
Isn’t he?
comeonitsnotlikeGetting real fucking tired of these whiny bitches.. they got what they voted for, they are winning for fucks sake!! “Uuuh, I’ve got a black lung, poor me, wääääähh”, SHUT UP!
ThePowerOfGeekAnd I bet to many of them it’s still all the Democrats’ fault.
MisterOwlWell, democrats welcome the shift to the right. They are just smart enough not to participate in it to avoid bad publicity (but of course don’t do anything about it).
Oxysis/Oxy
Pat_RiotTrump is Strangling the working man. He was always going to if he got his way, and he told us pretty much from the start what he was going to do. So very many Americans put their necks in his hands and asked for it
MushuChupacabra
HarkMahlbergBut at least those billionaires got to save a little money on their taxes and all those women are now trapped with children they didn’t want. /s
Have the day you voted for!
walden
Let me check my empathizinator… Nope, it’s busted. Dumbfucks get none from me today.
These are West Virginians. The poverty is staggering and coal work is all they have, what very little remains of it.
SchmooAppalachia in general has been spat on, kicked, and left to die by the ruling class after their usefulness ran out. When everything ran on coal it was the most lucrative region in the US and the labor movement was incredibly strong. The people there voting for trump is more the result of Democrats abandoning working-class politics than anything else. Trump pretends to be a champion of the working class and promised the return of the coal industry while Democrats dismissed them as unreachable and said they would phase out what remains of the coal industry to prevent climate change. When Republicans tell them climate change is overblown and clean coal is possible they want to believe it because they want a return to “the good old days” when Appalachia was booming. Democrats could have reached out to these people and offered an alternative, but their wealthy donors wouldn’t have liked any real solution and that’s who the party actually answers to, not the people.
This guy creates some of the finest journalism I’ve seen, maybe ever.
https://www.youtube.com/@PeterSantenello
One man and a selfie stick. No drama, no leading questions, no bullshit. He goes to places in America that few outsiders see or understand. His interviews in Appalachia leave me a bit weepy.
There’s one where he stops to talk to some adolescents fishing off a bridge on a back country highway. The fat kid is obviously quite smart, wants to be an historian. Made me sad to think such people are stuck there.
Hillary literally ran on getting coal miners training for new jobs. Fuck her, but fuck these morons constantly asking for handouts if it is (R) and spitting on offered hands if it is (D).
JoeBigelowYea but if their education system failed them and they succumbed to generational poverty and saturation level propaganda that makes them no longer my countrymen and undeserving of any sympathy.
Go watch some Peter Santenello journalism from Appalachia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9lSZlDJAC0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3O6bKdPLbw&t=1s
(dozens more from all over America)
You won’t, because you fear that empathy might change your view. I posted that for any non-fascists that might see this comment.
That’s my Saturday morning jam, mixed with Chris Okay going places white people are highly unexpected to be, Afghanistan right now.
I was being facetious above, I think too many people don’t realize how effective generational economic trauma and populist rhetoric and propaganda are.
Coal miners throwing their full-throated support behind the politicians that the coal industry executives want them to will always be mind boggling to me given their proud history of unionization. But I guess now they just hate trans people and abortion more than they like good wages and workplace safety
TallonMetroidRural Americans have spent the last 50 years getting bombarded by pedo-con media, and GOP gutted education to make sure they don’t have the tools to see past the lies.
That is true, and also we all need to learn how to spot con jobs. It is a necessary life skill.
more than they like good wages and workplace safety
Not like they were being promised good wages and workplace safety by either major party. Voting for Republicans is definitely making matters worse, but at least Republicans offer them something (which of course is all lies, but that’s beside the point).
I think talk radio explains maybe 70% of these problems. A lot of good rural jobs for the last 40 years involved significant amounts of driving. Rich right wingers have run a network of talk radio psychos for years which reaches places that don’t even have cable tv.
Imo we’d solve a lot of the problem by just getting some mid grade lefty podcasts and playing them over radio in a lot of places.
a brutal way of looking at this is that the more of them that dies, the less people who will be voting for the party they voted for.
If the party wants to win the election, they should care about the people they voted for
SpitzspotEven the world’s smallest violin doesn’t give a fuck.
Have the day you voted for, idiots.
🍄🌵Psychonaut1969🌵🍄
Read someone call this a tardivarius a while ago. And still makes me smile when reminded of it.
edgemaster72Drowning hazard: 1 inch of water, submerged
Choking hazard: 1 inch of dictator chode, fellated
I don’t think most of you understand how desperate West Virginia is. They’re not retarded, the state government has been trying to figure ways out of their coal dependence. tl;dr: They are fucked.
Anyway, not a soul will watch this man’s journalism, but he’s the finest I know.
https://www.youtube.com/@PeterSantenello
Might change your views on a few things. But that’s scary!
Voting for a billionaire conman 3 times doesn’t really help your argument that these people aren’t mentally challenged
Similar to how industrial contaminants like lead and arsenic correlate to higher rates of violence I wonder if there’s a bunch of hazards associated with just being a republican. If its just like a side effect of low grade mercury poisoning or something.
Devolution
This is the epitome of the leopard meme. Still, I can’t help but feel sad - even for the misguided idiots that brought this harm into the world.
I can’t bring myself to feel bad for these people anymore. They’ve had countless times to realize how they were being taken advantage of but they never did. They have a mountain of evidence so big it makes Olympus Mons look like an anthill. And these people willingly voted to harm others, to dehumanize others, to abuse others. So I can’t even feel bad for them given what they’ve done.
Trump doesn’t care about them and their black lung. If the lung would be white, that would be another thing, but black? Never! 🙄
The worst part is, we can generate electricity without giving people black lung. Just a waste.
Yes but without beautiful clean coal America would become a communist state. That’s what our dear leader told us anyway.
“You are infected with the WOKE AGENDA! Only weak get the BLACK lung and use it as an EXCUSE. Everybody’s saying it. We will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN and remove the WOKE MIND VIRUS (which is also apparently invading lungs). THANK YOU YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!”
🤣 WTF is this photo?
It’s a real photo of Trump not giving a shit that someone fainted.
It’s also a nice metaphor for how he is treating the US.
🤣 Malania could faint next to him and he’d give no shits
I don’t think a single one of them didn’t vote to hurt some marginalized group.
I think they’re all actually single issue voters, and their issue was “hurting the right people” to maintain what they feel their status in the hierarchy should be.
Can’t sidestep the fact that heritage foundation and associates basically bought all rural media and pushed their manipulative agenda out pretty much with nobody blinking an eye.
It proves you have humanity.
The leopards are eating sooo well
I am very worried about the leopards’ health right now. They’re massively overeating, and getting very little exercise between meals. I hope the American people will have the sense to stop feeding themselves to them sometime next year.
Good news, then: Ozempic about to get cheap.
Nah. The lepords will look like the average american
On a somewhat related note, people may know that Pittsburgh is one of the top places in the US for medical research and treatment. It’s the home of Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, and many others. It has “the second-most hospitals and second-most doctors per capita of any in the nation”.
But why would the “Steel City” have such good medical care? It turns out that for a while, steel worker unions were really powerful, and one of the main benefits the unions fought for was good health care for their members. Now the steel industry is long gone, but what remains is a great medical system that was essentially founded by those unions.
Moral of the story? If you’re a worker in a dirty, dangerous industry, you can either vote for someone like Trump who will gut your healthcare and strip you of government protections, or you can form a union and get the protection you deserve.
Be COMPASSIONATE to these People! They thought Trump would ONLY Harm Gays and Brownies and NOT them! An HONEST MISTAKE!
You can’t always get what you want but if you vote MAGA, you’ll get what you deserve.
Awww, such a shame.
They’re getting what they voted for (no sarcasm)
It can be a little sarcastic.
“And every day you’re in this place you’re two days nearer death. But you go.”
That’s not the coal song it’s the chemical song, silly.
https://youtu.be/yM4pXRFVpt0
Try this one on for size.
Yeah…I knew. It was just an example of desperation and sacrifice just to feed your family. I clicked your link, that is one good song.
I’m glad you like it.
Have an awesome day!
I thought coal was clean and beautiful, though?
It is. These miners are lying. It’s a false flag event. Fucking Biden!
/s.
Fuck Joe and Brandon! 😏
Green coal. It smells like strawberries. I’m eating a bowl right now!
Someone should tell these guys that we know their guy won the election, they can stop bragging about it.
I guess black-lung county voted to die. May they have the day they voted for.
They voted for bigotry, sexism, and Christian nationalism but ended up getting burned. Fuck’em. I have no sympathy.
It’s cathartic to watch them suffer.
The unfortunate thing is marginalized people suffer the most, so most of them are more than happy with the sacrifice.
On one hand, yes, on the other hand, I pity their stupidity that made them think trump was what they needed to fix their problems.
It’s terrible that Trump is going all in on coal and oil while also cutting back on the regulations that keep these people safe. At least they’re not working on windmill farms that are really hazardous to their health though. /s
Silicosis is a horrible way to go.
Who could have ever seen it coming
Coal causes so much fucking harm to this world.
It, alongside OIL and lead have to be some of the all time greats in terms of materials causing harm.
And their derivatives. Plastic is definitely up there, but kinda comes under oil.
Get what you voted for
They should complain to dear leader
Wow. I had a great-grandfather that died of black lung. Before I was born. When I was told this as a child, I never would have imagined I’d be reading about it still happening in 2025.
When I think about the race to get to renewables and the race to fully automate things like coal mining from end-to-end, and I see how people like Pedonald and his supporters cling to these lionized versions of coal mining as a vocation, that phrase about “who wants to be the last American killed in Vietnam” comes to mind…
Well no shit. You’d have to be amongst the dumbest motherfuckers on this plane to have not seen this coming. And no doubt those yokels voted for him, too.
Stupid is what stupid does..
I understand that in many coal mining towns, there really isn’t much other work than the mines due to a litany of historical and economic factors. If working in a toxic environment that is going to kill me in order to dig up a bunch of rocks that are killing the world is the only option, do it temporarily and save up enough money to leave?
I get that doing that is easier said than done, but it really seems like miners are completely dependent on electing republicans into office to keep their dying industry hobbling along. Then, the Republicans they elect act like Republicans and all of the miners go full surprised Pikachu that the mines get less safe due to removal of regulations. This cycle has been repeating for years. At some point, you have to stop doing the same thing and expecting different results.
There’s a lot of remediation, construction and maintenance work that the same skill sets apply to. It’s a matter of funding restoration instead of destruction.
But they’ve been told that for decades and don’t want it.
The push for reeducation instead of funding for coal is one factor that likely sank HilDog’s 2016 campaign. The debate on their side never got past “Me, change? No, you change!”
The same idiots voted for Trump again after having seen Trump do nothing to help them in his first term, so they’re just getting what’s coming to them.
Double lung transplants? Before 45? In this country? In one of the most impoverished parts of the country?
I can name maybe 5 people who deserve that. The average idiot who believed a psychopathic liar doesn’t deserve that.
He clearly needs more black lung. I think the government should cut the guardrails entirely who cares about those, just extra cost. This people will vote in a heartbeat anyway.
I don’t know how to feel about this.
These people have been left behind, and the one guy who said he was on their side is the biggest grifter and fraud in generations.
They had over 8 years to figure this out, but cognitive dissonance and constant programming via right wing media are strong.
Its the dummycrat cabal again trying to convince you that brown stuff hes droppin on you from a plane aint chocolate ice cream. Stay strong and dig into your wallets and give for the new ballroom to own the libs.