coal miners

belated, see chao, mcconn, black lung, worke safety

icn 919

...Few still cling to the idea as coal as a savior — not even the state's top energy official, Charles Snavely, a retired coal mining executive who works for Kentucky's Republican Gov. Matt Bevin. Snavely told a gathering of coal companies and representatives of southern governors in May that he saw a greatly diminished future for the industry.

Saving the Black Lung Fund

Black lung is caused by breathing in coal dust, which leads to inflammation, scarring, shortness of breath and respiratory failure. The complications can include chronic bronchitis; obstructive pulmonary disease, which keeps air out of the lungs; and lung cancer. It can take many years for the disease to develop, and there is no cure.

The federal Black Lung Disability Fund provides more than 25,000 miners or their dependents with cash assistance and medical benefits. The maximum cash assistance payments ranged from about $660 to $1,320 per month in 2018, depending on the beneficiary's number of dependents.

For more than 40 years, the disability fund was supported by taxes levied on each ton of mined coal.

But when the tax was rolled back by 55 percent on Jan. 1, as the mining industry had wanted, McConnell chose not to schedule a vote on legislation to stop the reduction. After the General Accounting Office reported in June that taxpayer obligations to the disability fund, already $4 billion in debt, could swell to $15 billion by 2050 without further action by Congress, McConnell remained noncommittal on bills to restore funding and cut red tape so that miners could obtain benefits more easily.

"What they have done is shift the cost to the taxpayers" from coal mining companies, said Phil Smith, spokesman for the United Mine Workers of America. "It's corporate welfare."

Steurer, McConnell's spokesman, provided a statement saying the black lung benefits have continued as they have been and that the "senator and his staff have been working closely with interested parties regarding future funding for the program, and will continue to ensure these important benefits continue."

Without further action by McConnell's Senate majority to restore the tax on coal, the disability fund could begin to run out of money as early as next year.

Only McConnell Can Fix the Pension Fund

The miners' pension fund, established under an executive order of President Harry Truman, today provides about 83,000 miners and their surviving spouses benefits that average $600 a month.

It is also in trouble and will run out of money in 2022 or 2023 without federal assistance.

The pension fund was paid for by payments from mining companies, but bankruptcies and mine closures have meant much of that money is no longer coming into the fund. Its fate is now tied to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, a federal backstop for failed companies that cannot meet their pension obligations. But the PBGC, also facing insolvency, often covers less than half of the pensions workers earned.

"Nobody else can fix this problem," Smith, the union spokesman, said of McConnell and all of the recent coal company bankruptcies. "There isn't enough coal industry left to fix this."

Remnants from the site of an underground coal mine. The state of Kentucky signed off on its reclamation in 1997. Credit: James Bruggers/InsideClimate News

Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, has introduced legislation to use money from the federal government's Abandoned Mine Land fund, a $2.4 billion pot used to clean up abandoned mine sites, to bolster the pension fund. The program is funded by a fee assessed on each ton of coal produced. He said in late June that McConnell was solely responsible for the lack of action on a bill.

With the pension fund very much on his mind, Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers, sidestepped a question at the National Press Club in early September about whether his organization would throw its weight against McConnell's re-election.

"If you ask Mitch McConnell, we have rallied against him almost every election," Roberts said.

But, he added, "our main goal here is to save our pension plan. If Mitch McConnell wants to be part of saving our pension pan, I will publicly thank him and say I appreciate it very much, and that ought to be helpful to him and his reelection. If he does not, then we will have to reevaluate that."

Stuerer said McConnell has been looking for a broader solution that would involve other troubled pensions.

When Coal Is No Longer King

In 2013, when McConnell as Senate minority leader was sharply criticizing Obama's coal record, two leading Kentucky politicians chose a different road, with thousands of coal families hurting from layoffs. Steve Beshear, the state's Democratic governor from 2007 to 2015, and Republican Hal Rogers, who has represented the state's Appalachian coalfield since 1981, agreed to hold a summit around a regionally difficult-to-swallow fact: coal was no longer king — and it wasn't coming back.

The event in December 2013 drew 1,700 people. But not McConnell. He showed up in Pikeville a few days before the summit for a meeting of his own with hand-picked coal industry supporters to criticize the Obama administration's plan to curb carbon emissions from power plants.

The Beshear-Rogers summit launched the SOAR program, or Shaping Our Appalachian Region, a non-profit, non-partisan organization that has established a network of partners, including the Appalachian Regional Commission and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to create jobs, expand broadband, promote public health and fight opioid addiction.

To date, the program has begun a digital job training program through a $3.5 million grant from the ARC, helped support the installation of 800 miles of new fiber optic cable, helped create a call center for families seeking drug treatment, and supported a new treatment voucher program.

The move to strip mining in the Appalachian Mountains meant fewer mining jobs. Credit: James Bruggers/InsideClimate News

Jared Arnett, SOAR's executive director, said McConnell, while never an overt SOAR participant, "has been supportive (of SOAR) behind the scenes" and has "sent his staff to some of the meetings."

McConnell found the use of strong pro-coal rhetoric advantageous to what has always been his singular goal of winning elections, said Al Cross, the director of the Center for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky. Cross has covered McConnell his entire Senate career.

Cross said a McConnell staffer once told him during an unguarded moment that fully embracing SOAR would be seen as "throwing coal under the bus."

In written responses, Steurer, McConnell's spokesman, did not directly answer a question about his boss' participation in SOAR. Instead, Steurer ticked off a list of other accomplishments. They include protecting the endowment of Kentucky's Berea College, which largely serves Appalachian students, from a new tax so that it could continue to offer free tuition, and securing hundreds of millions of dollars for various economic development efforts serving the wider Appalachian region, including Kentucky.

The Quest to RECLAIM Abandoned Mines

Kentucky stands to get more than $100 million over the next five years to reclaim abandoned mines and promote economic development under legislation introduced in April known as the RECLAIM Act. In all, communities in 20 mining states would divide $1 billion.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Rogers and other House members representing coal country from both parties, calls for speeding up allocations from the Abandoned Mine Land fund, which has been growing since the late 1970s. Manchin has introduced a version of the RECLAIM Act in the Senate.

"We will need (McConnell) to champion this bill," said Dan Moseley, a Democrat, and the judge executive of Harlan County, one of more than 30 counties or cities across Appalachia that have backed RECLAIM. "We need some of these monies released."

So far, McConnell remains uncommitted to the legislation and has not scheduled Senate consideration. His spokesman, Steurer, said he will work to ensure funding to reclaim abandoned mine lands as well as for economic development efforts in Central Appalachia. "Our office continues to discuss the issue with constituents and colleagues," Steurer said.

Working with Rogers, McConnell did tap $425 million over four years from the U.S. treasury, beginning in 2016, for what they call an abandoned mine land pilot project, Rogers' spokeswoman, Danielle Smoot, said. Kentucky's share has been $105 million.

However that pilot project's scope is narrower, only six states, and its does not require any mining cleanup.

McConnell also released a letter in late August that he had written to the U.S. Labor Department on behalf of a group of laid-off miners in Harlan County who have since July been blocking a coal train to protest the fact that their final paychecks bounced after their company, Blackjewel, filed for bankruptcy. McConnell asked the department to do everything it could to help the miners. On Friday, the Labor Department announced it would continue funding employment and retraining services for eastern Kentucky coal miners including those who lost Blackjewel jobs with a $3.7 million grant; McConnell took credit for shaking that money loose.

Beyond the bankruptcies, coal companies in Kentucky and other coal mining states have left behind blasted mountaintops, streams that run traffic-cone orange with acid, underground fires, clogged streams and dangerous open mine portals.

"You can't live safely near many of these sites, much less launch a business or get a local economy going," Eric Dixon, senior policy coordinator for Appalachian Citizens Law Center in Letcher County, told a Congressional committee in April.

In his 2016 budget proposal, President Obama included a $1 billion effort for linking economic development to reclaiming abandoned mines, which he called the Power Plus Plan, by accelerating spending from that abandoned mine fund. It went nowhere with McConnell.

McConnell introduced his own version of the $1 billion RECLAIM legislation in 2017 as majority leader but never moved it to the Senate floor for consideration.

Talking Mitch McConnell

On a sweat-dripping early evening in Whitesburg, Shad Baker, a self-described conservative Republican, agreed to talk politics and Mitch McConnell as he sold fresh-picked blueberries grown on a reclaimed strip mine for $10 a quart at the weekly farmers market. Like many others here, he can tick off a list of family members who worked for mining companies — dad, mom, grandfather.

...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/mitch-mcconnell-screwed-over-kentucky-miners-to-fund-russia-linked-aluminum-

no lnx

Here’s how Mitch McConnell screwed over Kentucky miners to fund Russia-linked aluminum plant: report

Written by Travis Gettys / Raw Story September 10, 2019

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked a measure that would have funded pensions and health care for coal miners in his home state of Kentucky, not long after steering almost the same Treasury Department funds to an aluminum plant linked to a Russian oligarch.

The Kentucky Republican doesn’t like the “Moscow Mitch” nickname that’s been stuck to him, but these latest revelations might make it difficult to shed, reported The Daily Beast.

McConell voted in January to lift sanctions on Rusal, a Russian aluminum company formerly headed by Putin ally Oleg Deripaska, and just days after the Treasury Department officially de-listed the company — it announced a $200 million investment in an aluminum plant in northeastern Kentucky.

Democrats have raised questions about how much McConnell knew about the investment before he voted to lift sanctions, but a Braidy Industries spokesperson told The Daily Beast the company never lobbied Congress about sanctions, and said no employee or director of the company ever spoke to McConell about Rusal, the only outside investor in the plant.

But, the website reported, McConnell’s connection to the Rusal-Braidy deal is deeper than previously understood.

While Rusal was lobbying the Trump administration to remove sanctions, the Kentucky Republican was pushing for federal funds to be used to help build the Braidy plant near Ashland, back in his home state.

The federal government has been giving Appalachian states millions of dollars since 2016 to help clean up abandoned coal mining land, and to assist in economic development there.

But McConnell and other Kentucky lawmakers, including Rep. Harold Rogers (R-KY), helped steer $4 million away from sewer and road repair in October 2018 to preparing for construction on the aluminum plant.

It’s not clear when Braidy Industries and Rusal began, but two sources with direct knowledge told The Daily Beast that McConnell was instrumental in helping them secure the federal funding that had been earmarked for community development in his state.

McConnell then blocked a bill sponsored by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) that would have pumped $4 million federal money into miner pensions.

The Treasury Department collects fees from coal companies each year that are then distributed to the Department of the Interior to clean up abandoned mines and improve the communities they’ve left behind.

McConnell argued that he wanted a more permanent fix to the pensions when he blocked Manchin’s bill, but he seemingly raided $4 million the Treasury fund to help start construction on the aluminum plant.

The Senate majority leader’s office defended the move, saying pensions should be addressed through a broader bipartisan measure, but coal miners are furious.

“We’re not ever going to quit until they give us what we’ve earned. We’re not going to quit until we get it,” said Dwayne Thompson, a retired Peabody Energy coal miner from Kentucky. “I hope Senator McConnell gets that. If he supports us, we will support him.”

Some miners believe McConnell blocked the pension funding because some union members had supported his 2014 opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, and one union leader said Congress has been stalling on assistance to them for years.

“Coal miners understand something — when people tell us ‘we’re going to pass legislation’… we don’t believe it,” said Cecil Roberts, president of the UWMA. “Anyone who understands how Congress works knows that that’s a fight.”