May 7, 2017: Coal Executives Screwed Miners - Sen. Mitch McConnell Wants Taxpayers to Pay the Bill

 5/7/17: Senator McConnell spends the day brushing up his prose for an Op-Ed article which will appear in the Washington Examiner. 

In coal country, meanwhile, we learn life is good for executives, maybe not so good for miners. Peabody Energy has gone bankrupt, which Fox News blames on Obama. Glen Kellow, who ran the company, receives a $15 million stock bonus payout. Previously, Peabody paid its top executive team $75 million (2012-2014), while losing $2 billion. In 2016 Alpha Natural Resources granted $12 million in bonuses to executives, in recognition of their sterling efforts in 2015, when the company lost $1.3 billion. 

Arch Coal executives earned $8 million in bonuses three days before the company declared bankruptcy.

__________ 

“You couldn’t say nothing.”

__________ 

 

Meanwhile, pay for a United Mine Workers of America union member averages $61,650, closer to $85,000 with overtime. But only 2% of miners are unionized, down from 40% in the 90s. Non-union miners make far less. Carlos Combs, 64, a third-generation miner, lost a union job twenty years ago. Of jobs with non-unionized operators, which are all he can find, he says, “You couldn’t say nothing. You had to take what they gave you.” Eventually, he developed black lung. 

According to The New York Times there’s a bit of good news for men like Combs. Or their widows. “Congress…reached a last-minute deal this week to finance health benefits for more than 20,000 retired miners – miners whose employers have long gone bankrupt, leaving taxpayers to pick up the tab.” 

In his op-ed article the next day, McConnell will bend reality in astonishing fashion. He writes: 

Last week, we achieved the success that thousands of retired coal miners and their families so desperately needed with the passage of my proposal [emphasis added]. And with President Trump’s signature, it is now law. You may recall that at the end of December, their health benefits were set to expire. If Congress had not acted, approximately 3,000 Kentucky coal miner retirees – and tens of thousands more around the country – would have seen their healthcare benefits end. After years of hard work in the coal mines, they deserved better than having to suffer as collateral damage of former President Barack Obama’s War on Coal.

 

Representing coal-dependent West Virginia, Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito agrees. Congress must find a permanent solution. “These men and women worked hard in dangerous situations to power America and were promised lifetime health care benefits in return.” 

In other words, Americans deserve help with health insurance if they are represented by Republican senators. 

And why did healthcare funds for miners dry up? Maybe, because top company executives were greedy.

 

POSTSCRIPT: This liberal blogger is happy to see miners’ healthcare coverage protected. He does wonder, however, how this doesn’t rile up the Republicans, who purport to hate “socialized medicine.” 

Also, f**k those greedy coal barons, who have been screwing their non-union miners in every way they possibly can.