More dirt, more corruption, more secret bribery
Streams? Oh who needs streams. Streams are just some hippy crap like candles and home-made bread and bicycles.
The Republicans have rushed to make sure that streams don’t end up being too clean.
Using an obscure law that allows Congress to review regulations before they take effect, the Senate voted to reverse the Stream Protection Rule, which seeks to protect the nation’s waterways from debris generated by a practice called surface mining. The Interior Department had said the rule would protect 6,000 miles of streams and 52,000 acres of forests by keeping coal mining debris away from nearby waters.
The Senate vote was 54 to 45, following a House vote for repeal on Wednesday.
“Make no mistake about it, this Obama administration rule is not designed to protect streams,” Representative Bill Johnson, a Republican from Ohio who sponsored the move to reverse the rule, said on Wednesday. “Instead, it was an effort to regulate the coal mining industry right out of business.”
For what purpose? Why would the Obama administration and Congress have wanted to regulate the coal mining industry right out of business? Just random trouble-making?
The Senate also moved to reverse a separate rule requiring publicly traded oil, gas and mineral companies to disclose payments to foreign governments for licenses or permits. The disclosure rule was aimed at curbing bribery and at helping resource-rich developing countries hold fossil-fuel companies, and their governments, accountable.
That’s hippy shit too. It’s much better to have universal corruption and bribery, because that way we all know where we are.
This is a common fear, actually–that the Democrats just want to shut down the mines. Hillary, in one of the big blunders of her campaign, fed the fires with a very easy-to-remove-from-context quote:
[quote]Look, we have serious economic problems in many parts of our country. And Roland is absolutely right. Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let’s reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these underserved poor communities.
So for example, I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?
And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.
Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.[/quote]
Guess which paragraph featured heavily in GOP propaganda during the campaign?
And, of course, even the fuller extent has her saying, “Yes the mines will go away and we will replace them with… something.” ‘Something’ usually turned out to be a broad, well-developed economic plan, but that doesn’t easily translate to someone feeling confident about what comes after the mine that provides ninety percent of the local economy goes away. This is one of the few cases where the ‘we need to pull in the working class’ refrain actually holds some water. Don’t tell them what your plan is going to do for the country; tell them what it’s going to do for Pickasaw, Michigan or Deepcreek, West Virginia.
And I call it a blunder because the Clintons KNOW this trick. “Think globally, act locally” was a Clinton mantra in the ’90s; it absolutely must be one today.
And this is why democracy cannot work. Unless we pull together as a country, we will all vote what we perceive as our own little area, and we will all be working against each other, instead of together. With this narrow of an interest, you can’t have democracy.
Yes, people are poor. Yes, people are desperate. Still, there is a need to find a better way forward, and one that promotes the interest of all the poor, all the tired, and still doesn’t sell the middle-class down the road.
Until we see ourselves as “us” instead of “me”, we are not going to have a workable democracy.
I see ourselves as an “us” but admittedly I do see “those types” as a “them”.
I work with “them” unfortunately, so I’m having to figure out how to bridge that gap and maybe encourage just a wee bit of thinking.
On the coal issue though, we’ve got natural gas and nuclear power; coal is obsolete and should be destroyed. If these communities can’t exist without it then move them to the cities and let their unproductive little towns die.
The problem – well, one problem – with this, is that these people do vote, and are working class people who are getting kicked in the head enough already, and you’re not going to look like a friend of working people if you’re apparently setting them up for more kicking in the head. That you’re peddling macroeconomic sense isn’t helpful politically, not if they’re not macroeconomically savvy and selfless patriots happy to let the invisible hand do what it will with their family income.
It would be something – if you can educate them even a little – if you could make them an offer of real help retraining, getting another job, and maybe relocating, and they could trust you to be able to make all that happen. If we had a parliamentary system, that may be a bit more plausible. Here though, they’d risk voting for a president who’d (apparently) take the coal jobs away and a Congress who won’t fund the safety net they’d be falling toward. No one wants to so much as think of risking that with their family, so they’ll vote for whoever tells them something they can make themselves believe. Here, getting a government that will prop up a dying regional industry is absolutely, no-contest easier than one that will help people deal with the fallout of changes in industrial dynamics and weaning ourselves off fossil fuels.