At a time when we ought to see fewer deaths from coal mining, the number of fatalities has increased compared to last year. The greed of coal tycoons and…
At a time when we ought to see fewer deaths from coal mining, the number of fatalities has increased compared to last year. The greed of coal tycoons and politicians (who are sometimes one and the same) is the reason.
In the first seven months of 2017 there have been 10 coal-mining fatalities in our country. The year is just past the halfway mark, and there have already been more deaths this year than in the entire year of 2016. As of right now, we are on track to record more coal-mining fatalities this year than in the previous four years. With coal employment being at an all-time low, that can mean a few things: miners are being more careless, companies are cutting back on safety protocol and maintenance, or safety inspectors at both the state and federal level are cutting back on the attention given to each mine.
As an underground miner, I do know that miners often put themselves at risk with no pressure or persuasion from the company. I have done it more times than I can count, but I was lucky enough to not suffer any serious injuries. I also know that as market values change and profits begin to dwindle, many companies become more lax with safety initiatives and often have to reduce the amount of preventative maintenance done on equipment. All of that does result in an increased likelihood for accidents. I also know that many times mine managers would work out deals with state and federal inspectors to avoid fines and tickets, and sometimes to completely avoid a safety inspection at all. The industry is corrupt from the top down, and it’s no news for anyone who has worked in it.
The problem now is our political climate. We are seeing a steep decline in the coal market values and demand. There are companies cutting benefits to miners and cutting cost wherever possible to continue earning a profit. Now there are politicians and lobbyist groups working to cut environmental and safety regulations in an attempt to keep the coal companies in business, making a profit, and, in turn, keeping that black gold flowing into their political campaigns and pockets.
In 2014, Kentucky State Senator Brandon Smith, a Republican, was talking about EPA regulations on KET, the public TV network. In an attempt to discredit scientific proof of global warming, he said “The temperature on Earth is the same as it is on Mars, yet there are no coal mines on Mars.” This same senator, whom I must mention has never worked a single day in a coal mine, presented in February 2014 Kentucky Senate Bill 224, which would repeal the law mandating that Kentucky mine foremen complete a six-hour annual retraining conducted by the Kentucky Division of Mine Safety. The training cost the company nothing, aside from paying for the foreman’s time. Senator Smith said that allowing the companies to conduct their own training would save the company money while still offering the same training. You do the math, if you want. The company is still responsible for the time that mine foreman spends in training. And, if the company is the one providing the training, they would have to pay for the instructors, too. So the only way to cut cost would be to cut training completely, which I believe is what would have happened.
Then in March of 2016, Kentucky State Senator Chris Girdler, another Republican senator with no mining experience, presented Senate Bill 297, which would cut back on mine safety inspections. Senator Girdler, without knowledge of how the state and federal mine-safety inspections worked together, said: “Instead of coming in and writing you up for doing something wrong, you know, if you’re doing an underground roof-bolt system, maybe I’m gonna come in and say, ‘Hey, keep that elbow down. That way if something falls down, you’re not going to lose your arm.’ As compared to writing up a bulldozer for not having a windshield wiper working when it’s 90 degrees and sunny outside.”
That statement proves his lack of knowledge about roof control plans, operating a roof bolter, and, yes, that bulldozers and surface mining equipment do need windshield wipers on a 90-degree sunny day because dust and debris can cover the windows and create dangerous visibility problems.
Not long after that, West Virginia Republicans jumped on the wagon by proposing the same cuts to safety inspections in their state. To make matters worse, West Virginia’s governor is Jim Justice, who has made his billions on the blood and sweat of the miners in Central Appalachia.
Now, after the presidential election, we have the president and Republicans in Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, plus coal lobbyists and coal-corporation billionaires fighting to repeal a rule that would strengthen enforcement of safety standards on mines that repeatedly violate safety rules. The rule they want to set aside came after one of our nation’s most recent and largest mining disasters — the 2010 Upper Big Branch explosion which killed 29 miners in West Virginia. Similar regulation took place after the Scotia Mine Disaster of 1976, which happened in my home county of Letcher County, Kentucky. Shortly after that disaster, Congress and President Jimmy Carter enacted the Federal Mine Act of 1977, which revolutionized mine safety regulation and has protected the lives of miners ever since.
As a nation, we need to take notice of the rising number of coal mine fatalities. We need to understand the correlation between those deaths and our political environment. The only thing different between this year and previous years is that our political leaders, their lobbyist friends, and the billionaire coal tycoons are cutting safety regulations in order to make an additional dollar.
As a co-worker once gave me some advice. “This damned job don’t do you a bit of good if you’re dead,” he said. “Now don’t cut no corners, don’t do anything that don’t feel right, and if you get pressure from the boss man, just tell him to go eat sh– because if they fire you, you’re better off eating government cheese than pushing up daisies.”
Gary Bentley is a former underground coal miner from Eastern Kentucky. You can read his stories of working underground here.
This story was originally produced by our publishing partner The Daily Yonder.
Hours after white supremacists' violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a car plowed into a crowd of counter-protestors killing one woman…
Hours after white supremacists’ violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a car plowed into a crowd of counter-protestors killing one woman and leaving scores hospitalized, President Trump read a strategically vague, equivocal statement from his private golf club in New Jersey.
He blamed “many sides” for the violence and hatred, and uncharacteristically neglected to call out the perpetrators – the KKK, neo-Nazi, alt-right and other hate groups who had just terrorized an American city. This verbal fuzziness continued with an oddly saccharin plea for mutual love and respect, and to “cherish our history” — which some viewed as a nod and wink to the “Unite the Right” organizers whose stated purpose for being in the city was to defend the removal of monuments to their Confederate heroes.
But former KKK Imperial Wizard David Duke was having none of Trump’s equivocality. From Charlottesville he tweeted, “I recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency.”
For those aghast at this weekend’s events, recall that not quite two years ago, candidate Trump dithered over Duke’s tacit endorsement, while the New York Times likened Trump’s success to Reconstruction-era politics. The following weekend, Saturday Night Live rolled out a “Voters for Trump” campaign https://youtu.be/Qg0pO9VG1J8″>spoof ad with ordinary people reciting banalities like “he says what I think” while the camera slowly zoomed out, revealing a housewife ironing a Klan robe as an audience burst into laughter. It was questionably funny then, but Trump’s candidacy at the time was still widely viewed as a joke. Saturday’s violence demonstrated yet again for the nation that America’s latent white supremacy is no laughing matter.
Now, 200 plus meme-filled days into this President’s term, America is faced with a serious choice: Keep laughing until it kills us, or take a long look in the mirror.
Trump’s statement doesn’t get a pass for legitimizing the resurgence of white supremacist violence, but he was right about one thing: “This has been going on for a long time.” Lest you think Charlottesville is an aberration, let’s revisit the rise of the “Second Klan” in 1915 — as good as any starting point for this all-too American story.
On a chilly Thanksgiving night in October 1915, a dozen or so hooded men assembled atop Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, Georgia – an American flag fluttering in the wind, a bible opened to the twelfth chapter of Romans, and a flaming cross to light the night sky. Inspired by the recent release of D.W. Griffith’s racist epic, Birth of a Nation, William Joseph Simmons and his disciples proclaimed the second rising of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
I suspect you can easily imagine this scene. That’s because the enduring media rendering of the Klan is deeply rooted in our popular imagination – fringe outcasts cloaked in ghostly costumes on a torch-lit hilltop. The snag in this fiery narrative is that it conjures up a characterization of racism as a cultural anomaly. Our collective imaginings of white supremacists, with all the stylings of Griffith’s film, have maintained this myth.
Historical scholarship of the WWI era paints a lesser-known, but more enlightening portrait of racism in America, the nature of the Klan, and reveals the 100-year shadow it casts over our nation’s current political and social divides.
The Stone Mountain version of the Second Klan remained an insignificant local group until well after the Armistice of November 1918, when in June of 1920 Simmons contracted with publicists Mary Tyler and Edward Clarke, partners in the Southern Publicity Association – a firm that had mastered the persuasive art of patriotic, nationalistic propaganda during WWI promoting the Red Cross, the Anti-Saloon League, the Salvation Army and the War Work Council (weaponized irony and smug memes serve as modern era white nationalism’s propaganda of choice).
Credit West Virginia and Regional History Center / West Virginia University Libraries
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West Virginia University Libraries
Ku Klux Klan members pose for photos at a camp meeting near Morgantown, W.Va. in May 1926.
Under the guidance of shrewd publicists, the Klan refashioned itself with a familiar brew of coded values: family, community service, law and order, patriotism, “Old-time religion,” hard work and economic prosperity, coupled with sober depictions of Klan members as pillars of respectable society. Their platform of hate against immigrants, Catholics, Jews and African Americans was not only disseminated through burning crosses and white-sheeted horsemen, it was carefully diffused through communities in the guise of family gatherings propagated through cheerful fliers. Picnics. Merry Go-Rounds. Proudly sponsored by your local Ford dealership.
Armed with this time-tested brand, Tyler, Clarke and Klan leaders hired a staff of seasoned organizers and set to work increasing the membership of the Klan. Within months, membership soared to 100,000, and by 1921 the Klan had chartered two hundred chapters, with nearly one million members. By the mid-1920s, they had enlisted more than 5-8 million people in nearly every state in the Union, and became a divisive force in the 1924 Democratic Convention held at Madison Square Garden in New York. Dubbed the “Klanbake” by journalists of the time – it represented the longest continuously running convention in U.S. political life. A populist force of reckoning, the millions-strong Klan opposed and defeated Catholic nominee Al Smith, then Governor of New York.
Historian Nancy McLean pulls back the deceptive cloak of decency worn by Klan members and illuminates the now-common embedded race-coding of neutral public policy issues in American politics in her book, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: the Making of the Second Klu Klux Klan:
“Most often the men who donned the order's robes and assembled beneath its flaming crosses were, as one contemporary put it, “… the good, solid middle-class citizens." Not only did the Klan draw from the broad middle of the nation's class structure, but it most commonly mobilized support through campaigns waged on the prosaic theme of upholding community moral standards.”
The Klan campaigned on values that appealed to an aggrieved white middle class whose status, centrality and power was threatened by the rapidly shifting economic landscape of the WWI era: urban industrialization, the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South, and a flood of Eastern and Southern European immigrants.
The gains and mobility of Black Americans struck a particularly painful chord among a plurality of reactionary populists, but what the Klan perhaps feared most were the hundreds of thousands of African American WWI veterans returning from fighting in Europe in 1919, and what these soldiers symbolized. Trained in combat, exposed to new experiences (and contact with African colonial troops) overseas, their sacrifices fighting had changed them forever. NAACP leader W.E.B. Dubois exhorted returning veterans to fight for their rights in a famous essay, Returning Soldiers, penned for the organization’s magazine, The Crisis, in May 1919:
We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it from France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.
And fight they did. In the Summer and Autumn of 1919, race riots erupted in three dozen cities and one rural county throughout the United States. Dubbed “Red Summer,” black veterans defended their communities from white mobs as racial frictions intensified amidst a post-war economic recession, industrial labor competition, overcrowded urban tenements and greater militancy among black war veterans. In the rural areas of the South, there were 64 lynchings in 1918 and 83 in 1919, including several Black veterans whose only crime was wearing a uniform. Just last week, while doing research on African Americans in WWI, I stood on a street corner in Chicago where one of the bloodiest of these riots occurred in August of 1919. This past does not feel distant.
The white reactionary response to the threat of Black social and economic gains was unequivocally asserted in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. A group of 50 or so Black WWI veterans donned their uniforms and weapons, drove to the county courthouse and offered to guard a young black man charged with assaulting a white woman in an elevator. This inflamed a white lynch mob of 1500, who looted gun shops and attacked the prosperous Black community of Greenwood (dubbed the Black Wall Street). The veterans fought a pitched battle overnight, until the local sheriff and arriving Oklahoma National Guardsman deputized the lynch mob, and used airplanes and machine guns to burn Greenwood to the ground. The message was clear. Gains in status, position and power for Black Americans was intolerable.
A similar gulf between the haves and have-nots existed just before the stock market crash of 1929. While the WWI era heralded post-industrial disruption, ours brings its own revolutionary moment with far-reaching impacts from technological change. Headlines abound about robots and artificial intelligence displacing both white and blue collar workers, while Silicon Valley Tech investment capitalists and the Koch-funded, libertarian Cato Institute explore “Universal Basic Income” for the majority of people who will be left behind in the brave new economy. The changing face of America, especially the increase in the Latino population and the influx of Muslims, is eroding longstanding privileges of white people in America. Finally, the ultimate symbolic dislocation of white power amidst this maelstrom of economic, social and technological distress — the election of America’s first African American President in 2008.
Enter reactionary populism in shifting forms, from the coalescing of discontent among Tea Party members to the dramatic rise in militant “patriot” groups and the rebranding of white supremacy as the meme-loving “alt-right.” West Virginia University’s Director of the Center of Black Culture and Research Marjorie Fuller dissects this response in The Pendulum Effect.
Echoing the rise of the “Good Citizen” Klan of the WWI era, Tea Party ideologues originated as a decentralized, small-scale movement that was predominately white, male, nativist, patriotic, anti-immigrant, and politically conservative. It remained insignificant until shortly after the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009, when conservative PACs, such as the Koch brother’s FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity lent media know-how, funding and organizational expertise to grow its membership. They funded and organized “Town Hall” meetings and other patriotic-themed protests. Within five years, Tea Party affiliates were elected to political office, membership soared to nearly one-half million and sympathizers numbered in the tens of millions, with the movement becoming a divisive force in the Republican Party.
Does this all sound familiar?
If you find yourself bristling at the notion that the same forces that gave rise to the Tea Party movement, then Trumpism and the alt-right bear a resemblance to the reactionary populism that bred the Second Klan, let me stop you right there. This weekend and the past 200 days of escalating white nationalism, bears this trend out. Despite the Tea Party’s frequent and early assertion that their followers were not racist, several studies found that “racial resentment” was a greater predictor of Tea Party membership than political conservatism. Similarly, studies have confirmed that racism and xenophobia drove Trump’s election more than economic anxiety. Keep in mind the fraternal Klansmen of 1925 fancied themselves going about the noble business of upholding community values, patriotic virtues, nationalistic ideals and the ubiquitous, racially-coded theme of law-and-order. Trump emphasized these themes in his administration’s response to the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville: “What is vital now is a swift restoration of law and order and the protection of innocent lives,” he said.
Perhaps it’s entertaining to scoff at the caricatures and memes of Trump as a https://youtu.be/YqyQfjDScjU”>Chaplinesque fascist, as this keeps us at a comfortable distance from a terrible truth. And Trump, in his foot-dragging disavowal of the KKK and the alt-right violence in Charlottesville, must have more than a passing awareness of this truth.
Which means we needn’t look any further than the closest mirror to confront a familiar embodiment of latent white supremacy and white nationalism — cloaked, not in white sheets, but the pretense of “Good Citizen” in this divided, troubled America.
Forty years ago, President Jimmy Carter signed a law that literally changed the face of Appalachia.
The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA) was intended to replace a state-to-state patchwork of rules for strip-mining with a uniform federal standard. Four decades later, however, environmentalists say the law has fallen far short of its potential.
“Massive destruction, massive explosives — and only 300 feet away from someone’s home,” said Thom Kay, legislative associate at Appalachian Voices. “What is SMCRA doing if that’s still allowed?”
Louise Dunlap, who co-founded the Environmental Policy Center in the early ’70s and was such an integral part of lobbying for SMCRA that Carter mentioned her in his speech at the signing ceremony.
“On the 40th anniversary, we’re not celebrating because of the lack of enforcement and budget cuts,” Dunlap said, “but it is an anniversary that deserves recognition and a renewed commitment that the law be updated and enforced.”
Kay was quick to say that the environmental impacts of mountaintop removal mining and other forms of strip mining might be worse without SMCRA, but added that the lack of enforcement by states has severely undercut the law’s effectiveness. A federal investigation released in February, for example, found that West Virginia was lax in enforcement; a week later, Governor Jim Justice criticized state environmental regulators, not for failure to enforce federal laws but for dressing too casually.
The mining industry sees it differently. The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), the federal agency tasked with overseeing SMCRA, “has achieved a great deal in the past four decades – for the environment and reclamation of abandoned sites as well as for coal mining, employment and the economic well-being of coalfields,” wrote Luke Popovich, spokesman for the National Mining Association, in an email.
“But the distinguishing characteristic of this law has been the foresight Congress had in giving states primary authority over coal oversight and permitting. SMCRA is by design not a top-down, one-size-fits-all program. That’s in recognition of the plain fact that coal mining varies greatly with the great variety of the coal resource throughout the country–from the arid West to the Appalachian mountains,” he added.
State enforcement—or lack thereof—coupled with the rise of large-scale mountaintop removal mining in the 1990s has changed the Appalachian landscape, and not just in a figurative sense, either. A 2016 study by researchers at Duke University found that mountaintop removal mining techniques had significantly changed the contours of southeastern West Virginia. Before mining, the area’s most common feature was steep slopes with a pitch of 28 degrees. Now, those slopes have been replaced by a new most common feature—a more or less flat plain with a 2-degree slope.
Although economic developers have long decried the general absence of flat land in Appalachia that can attract industry, only a small percentage of reclaimed mining sites were put to use for business, Kay said. A 2010 study by Appalachian Voices and the Natural Resources Defense Council found that 366 of 410 reclaimed mountaintop removal sites, or 89.3 percent, had no post-mining development other than forestry or pasture.
“I’m not completely satisfied with the legislation,” Carter said on August 2, 1977. “I would prefer to have a stricter strip mining bill. I’m concerned with some of the features that had to be watered down during this session to get it passed, but I think that this provides us a basis on which we can make improvements on the bill in years to come.”
Dunlap remembered that day as one of hope. A coalition of advocacy groups and coalfield communities had lobbied for nearly a decade to pass a federal law regulating strip mining. Twice, Congress had passed versions of SMCRA that were vetoed by Carter’s predecessor, Gerald Ford.
As lawmakers developed a new version of the bill, Dunlap’s group worked closely with Pennsylvania, which had passed a restrictive strip-mining law but was receiving pushback from the coal industry. Dunlap said that advocacy groups also kept close communication with coalfield communities around the U.S., using airmail to send proposed amendments to activists, then receiving feedback over the phone.
“We had a network of citizens around the country, who in some cases had been dealing with their state legislators,” Dunlap said. “We’d send the amendments out each day during mark-up. People would get them and call us, and tell us go with this, don’t go with that. Many of the provisions in the law were literally written by citizens.”
The improvements that Carter hoped for never really materialized. Take the stream buffer rule, first added in 1983 by the administration of Ronald Reagan.
Surface mine reclamation in progress at Kayford Mountain near the Raleigh and Kanawha County border in West Virginia. (Photo: Roger May)
“We feel like that was never properly enforced, and not just lax enforcement but bad interpretation,” Kay said. “We saw it as saying you cannot mine through streams, cannot dump your waste into streams. They saw it as you pretty much can; you just have to ask. They’d ask for a waiver and the states would give it to them. In cases we’ve looked at, there are very few examples where the state refused a company the ability to dump into a stream or mine through a stream.”
The rule was updated in 2008 under George W. Bush, but environmentalists saw the new version as even worse than the 1983 version, and it was ultimately overturned in court. The most recent iteration came late in Barack Obama’s second term, but wasn’t even implemented before Congress and President Donald Trump overturned it.
Jay Rockefeller — who lost the West Virginia’s 1972 gubernatorial race partly due to a campaign pledge to ban strip-mining, reversed his stance and, after winning election four years later — was one of several key elected officials who helped to stall SMCRA’s implementation and enforcement.
As SMCRA remained largely stagnant, coal mining technology moved forward by leaps and bounds. The use of mountaintop removal techniques jumped sharply in the ’90s, mining coal on a scale that SMCRA’s authors likely never imagined.
“Without SMCRA, a mine like Hobet might not exist,” Kay said. “The compromises that happened in passing that bill paved the way for mountaintop removal as we saw it in the ‘90s and early ‘00s. It didn’t legalize it in the sense that it was not legal before, but it did formalize what was allowed.”
The landscape-scale effects on the environment also changed communities. In places like Lindytown, residents whose families had dwelt there for generations sold their homes to coal companies rather than live so close to active strip-mining operations.
In a news release, Citizens Coal Council lamented that the promises of SMCRA have not been upheld, but only “honored in breach”—“that is, ignored, compromised, and twisted in their implementation and interpretation.”
“The 40th anniversary of the enactment of SMCRA is not a time of celebration of achievement, but rather, a somber reminder that after 40 years of implementation, and fully 60 or more years after grassroots efforts to see enacted a national program for controlling surface coal mining operations, the promises made by Congress to the people of the coalfields remain largely unkept,” said Tom FitzGerald, director of the Kentucky Resources Council, in the release.
In contrast, Popovich said the NMA welcomes a renewed focus on state — not federal — enforcement.
“In recent years we’ve lost sight of that distinguishing and very valuable characteristic of SMCRA and now appear to be recognizing it once again,” wrote Popovich. “The law empowered the states; let’s let state agencies do their part Congress as Congress intended.”
Trump’s early actions indicate that he is unlikely to make SMCRA a priority. His administration’s budget proposal would cut $111 million in funding from OSMRE. The proposal includes eliminating the $89.9 million Abandoned Mine Land Economic Development Pilot program, which stands at the center of a fight over the related Revitalizing the Economy of Coal Communities by Leveraging Local Activities and Investing More (RECLAIM) Act.
Congress so far has shown an unwillingness to incorporate Trump’s proposed cuts in their totality. With a budget battle looming in September and October — as well as pending legislation such as the RECLAIM Act — lawmakers will make decisions in coming months that will affect the shape of SMCRA, and its corresponding effect on the Appalachian landscape, into the future.
A native of the Alleghany Highlands, Mason Adams (@MasonAtoms) is a contributing editor of 100 Days in Appalachia and has worked as a journalist in the Blue Ridge Mountains since 2001. He lives with his family plus dogs, cats, chickens and dairy goats in Floyd County, Virginia.
The U.S. Senate confirmed Wilbur Ross to serve as President Trump’s Secretary of Commerce on a 72-27 vote Monday night — with U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, voting against the billionaire businessman, citing Ross’ business dealings in the state.
“As a former governor, I understand how crucial it is for an executive leader to have his team in place, but as a senator it is my job to evaluate a nominee’s qualifications and determine if their vision aligns with the principles I have set forth in my years of work on behalf of West Virginians,” said Manchin in a statement issued Monday evening.
Manchin noted that Ross has wide experience in business dealings, including the Sago Mine just outside of Buckhannon, West Virginia — where 12 miners died in an explosion on January 2, 2006 — as well as Weirton Steel. Because of Ross’ dealings in West Virginia, Manchin said he felt compelled to conduct an “intense vetting.”
“Following my extensive vetting, meeting with him, watching his nomination and reaching out to West Virginians who have worked with him directly, I cannot in good conscience look the families of the fallen Sago miners or the Weirton Steel workers who lost their jobs in the eye knowing I voted to give Wilbur Ross a promotion,” Manchin added in his statement.
100 Days of Appalachia is published by West Virginia University Reed College of Media Innovation Center in collaboration with West Virginia Public Broadcasting and The Daily Yonder. For more on the project, follow along on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
Ross founded International Coal Group (ICG) in 2004, when he and other investors bought the non-union assets of Kentucky-based Horizon Natural Resources in a bankruptcy auction. The company acquired the Sago Mine in late 2005.
The Sago incident made national headlines as national news outlets initially reported that all miners involved in the incident had been found alive. In the end, only one of the 13 trapped miners, Randal L. McCloy, Jr., survived.
In the days following the explosion at Sago, Ross’ absence was “noticeable,” according to Davitt McAteer, a mine safety expert who lead an independent investigation into the Sago incident.
“He didn’t show up, though — being president of ICG — he was the ultimate responsible party,” said McAteer to the Ohio Valley ReSource.
Those on Ross’ team at ICG — including general counsel Roger Nicholson — have argued that Ross should not have been expected to be on the ground following the incident.
“I think it’s an unreasonable expectation that he be known perhaps in any of the areas where his portfolio companies operate,” Nicholson said in a December 2016 interview. “We don’t expect that of the chairman of McDonald’s Corporation, to be at every operation of everything that he might have an investment in.”
Manchin recently made headlines for his votes on other controversial Trump appointees, including his “no” vote for education secretary Betsy Devos and also being the only Democrat to vote to approve Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Glynis Board of West Virginia Public Broadcasting / Ohio Valley ReSource contributed to this report.
The stories of the hardworking, blue collar West Virginians who looked to Trump as an outsider willing to change the political order in Washington have…
The stories of the hardworking, blue collar West Virginians who looked to Trump as an outsider willing to change the political order in Washington have been told by both local and national media outlets, but the question now is whether he will stick to his word.
At a Sunday night event in Charleston, West Virginia, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont challenged the president to keep his campaign promises of helping working class West Virginians who voted overwhelmingly to put him in office.
Sanders’ name is especially familiar in West Virginia, where he’s been an outspoken critic of economic inequalities and lapped the state last spring, with stops in Huntington, Morgantown, Charleston and even McDowell County, before defeating Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the West Virginia’s primary election.
Clinton went on to secure the Democratic nomination and — in November’s general election — now-President Donald Trump won nearly 68 percent of the vote in West Virginia, putting him 42 points ahead of the Democrat.
Sanders’s return to West Virginia’s capital city Sunday was not a campaign event, though, but a stop on a tour to promote his new book, titled “Our Revolution.” That, however, does not mean the event wasn’t political.
In his two hours on stage at the Charleston Municipal Auditorium, Sanders preached the same messages that underscored his 2016 campaign platform: redistributing wealth to a shrinking middle class, providing universal healthcare and protecting government programs like Social Security and Medicare, but instead of rallying the crowd around the “establishment’s” work against his progressive notions, Sanders had a new target.
“So to all of those people and more who voted for Mr. Trump, tell him to keep his word. Tell him not to cut Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security,” he said.
Eighteen percent of West Virginia’s population is over the age of 65, the traditional eligibility age for Social Security; another 18 percent lives under the federal poverty line. Fourteen percent of West Virginians under the age of 65 rely on disability benefits for their income, which includes Medicare or Medicaid coverage.
Yet West Virginia’s population — one that heavily relies on these government services – handedly voted for a party that often talks of cutting those services.
But Sanders said with Trump, that’s not surprising; the billionaire businessman-turned-president had a message that resonated with the people of West Virginia and many others elsewhere in America.
“’I, Donald Trump, I’m going to take on the establishment, the Democrats and the Republicans and I’m going to create a government that works for the working class of this country,’” Sanders said, mimicking the president.
“Now the truth is, it’s a good speech. The bad news is he never meant a word of it,” he added.
Sanders’s harsh criticism of the president, he said, is based on Trump’s appointments to head the nation’s top government agencies. Those nominees, some of whom have now been confirmed by the U.S. Senate, include long-time members of Congress, the CEOs of corporations and Wall Street institutions and major political donors — people who are not necessarily considered outsiders.
Several times during the address, Sanders warned about the impacts Trump’s policies will have on the nation’s future as a democracy. That included a travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries that was recently shot down in federal court.
“President Trump is trying to create a climate of fear from one end of this country to the other and what he is doing is what demagogues have always done, and that is to pick on minorities and try to divide this country up,” said Sanders.
Although the crowd of nearly 2,000 in Charleston welcomed Sanders’s criticism of the President, the Senator’s trip was not warmly welcomed in all parts of the state.
A town hall scheduled to take place in McDowell County Monday morning was scrapped Friday evening. The event was to be recorded as an MSNBC television special at the Welch National Guard Armory.
A statement released by the West Virginia National Guard’s Public Affairs Office Sunday said that the U.S. Department of Defense does not allow its facilities to be used for political or election events, including town halls, and once the details of the event were shared, policy prohibited the Guard from accommodating the event.
“[I] don’t know how it happened,” Sanders said in Charleston Sunday evening, “but let me tell the people who did that — if you think we are not going back to McDowell County to hold that town meeting, you are very mistaken. We are going to be there.”
Sanders attempted to end his Charleston appearance on a positive note, encouraging those who attended the event to get involved in politics at any level, whether it be in Washington or in their own back yard. Democracy is not a spectator sport, he told the crowd, and change doesn’t happen overnight, but even Trump’s West Virginia could become a progressive voice in the future.
It’s clear many of the adults living in Appalachia are focused on what the new president can do for the economy here, but they’re not alone. Young people also have their own concerns about Trump.
Students from Frankfort High School in Mineral County marched in the inaugural parade Friday in Washington, but before they left, they shared their thoughts about President Trump and their role in performing at his inauguration.
The story is a part of West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s collaborative reporting project, 100 Days in Appalachia.
The audio was collected by Nancy Andrews and Justin Hayhurst and produced by Dave Mistich. For more on the Frankfort High School band and to see their portraits, visit 100daysinappalachia.com.
