Coal country is in free fall and is pleading for help from Washington. That’s why the largest union in one of the dirtiest industries is broadly backing President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion green infrastructure package — an ambitious plan that has also won support from climate activists.
“Anybody who would not accept jobs where jobs are desperately needed is making a horrendous mistake,” Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, the country’s largest mine workers union, told CNN Business (4/20).
Biden’s American Jobs Plan calls for improving the nation’s infrastructure and shifting to greener energy in a bid to simultaneously address inequality and the climate crisis.
“We’re for infrastructure. We’re for jobs. We’re for moving manufacturing into coalfields. We’ll work the president on that,” said Roberts, who has known Biden for decades.
Climate groups largely support Biden’s infrastructure plan, although some argue it should go further to respond to the climate crisis.
The coal industry would benefit from the Biden proposals to rebuild bridges, ports and airports — all steps that would boost demand for steel, which typically uses coal as a key ingredient. The infrastructure plan also calls for expanding access to broadband in rural areas like Appalachia.
Roughly half of the coal jobs in America have disappeared since the end of 2011, a staggering blow to Appalachia. Much of those losses were driven by the abundance of cheap natural gas. Now the industry is losing ground to solar, wind and renewable energy.
After four years of former President Donald Trump trying and failing to revive the coal industry, there is an acknowledgement within the industry that more pain is coming — and new ideas are needed to blunt the damage.
“We’re coming to grips with the fact that we might lose more jobs here,” Roberts said. “We’re recognizing that change is coming fairly rapidly here.”
Roberts stressed the importance of investing mightily in carbon capture and storage, a breakthrough technology that injects carbon dioxide deep underground before it can warm the planet.
Although carbon capture has been loudly championed by fossil fuel players, climate activists argue the only lasting solution is a permanent shift away from fossil fuels.
Yet the American Jobs Plan calls for establishing 10 pioneer facilities to demonstrate carbon capture retrofit, accelerating carbon capture deployment and making it easier to retrofit existing power plants. The Biden plan also proposes $15 billion in demonstration projects for climate research and development priorities, including carbon capture and storage.
“To us, that’s a lifesaver,” Roberts said.
The International Energy Agency issued a “dire warning” (4/20) that detailed how the economic recovery from the pandemic is being powered in part by coal — putting carbon emissions from energy use on track for their second largest increase in history.
TRUMP’S SOUTH TEXAS BORDER WALL FOILED BY $5 LADDERS. Every month for the past decade, Scott Nicol has set out from his home in McAllen to roam the Rio Grande Valley in search of ladders used to scale the border wall in South Texas, Aaron Nelsen reported at Texas Monthly (4/21). In early April, he centered his hunt on an eight-mile stretch between the towns of Hidalgo and Granjeno, where an Obama-era wall meets up with a newly constructed piece of Trump’s wall.
The first stop of the day is a dirt field behind a flea market in Hidalgo. A pair of green and white Border Patrol SUVs are parked atop the 18-foot-high concrete levee wall, next to a section of bollard-style fence with a closed gate. Within minutes, Nicol has spotted a ladder roughly halfway up the levee; it’s about a dozen feet long and has only six rungs. “It’s made of cheap, rough wood, quickly nailed together because it is only going to be used once,” Nicol says. “Unlike the wall, these ladders are functional.”
“A few minutes later, as Nicol is inspecting the ladder, a group of about 30 disheveled migrants emerge from the brush after crossing the river into Texas from Mexico,” Nelsen writes. “Young men and women toting small children in their arms walk to the agents, who jot down their information as the new arrivals place their meager belongings into plastic bags. These migrants are not sneaking in; rather, they are seeking out US Border Patrol in this intensely patrolled area. A half hour passes before the agents open the gate and escort the group of migrants through it single file. They shuffle down the levee wall and onto a waiting bus bound for a processing center where they will request asylum. It’s early yet, a border agent tells me, and the groups will only grow larger into the evening. As for the ladder? ‘That’s from our regulars,’ one agent quips over his shoulder.”
Nicol, an ardent opponent of border walls, notes the irony: asylum seekers turn themselves over to agents who escort them through gates in the wall, while so-called regulars—unauthorized migrants—make use of rudimentary ladders to easily climb a barrier specifically designed to keep them out. “These ladders are probably $5 worth of hardware,” Nicol said, “and they’re defeating a wall that cost $12 million a mile in that location.”
He has amassed several dozen photos of ladders. They are almost always jerry-rigged, cobbled together from scrap lumber, and they are varied in length. Some are as long as the wall is high—about 18 feet—and others are just tall enough for a migrant to reach the top.
Rope-and-PVC ladders that make use of metal hooks are popular in areas upriver, but along the Granjeno-to-Hidalgo stretch of border, where it is a short dash from the Texas bank of the Rio Grande to the levee wall, simple wooden ladders seem to be the preferred technology. They are heavy, cheap, and rarely used more than once. Border Patrol agents drive their trucks over the ladders to break the rungs, then toss the mangled wood into piles. When the heaps grow large enough, the City of Hidalgo hauls them off to a landfill.
Nicol locates four more ladders as the wall stretches westward. He finds still another in Granjeno, where the newly built 1.3-mile Trump wall joins up with a 1.75-mile piece of wall authorized during the Bush administration and built during Obama’s presidency. The cost of the Trump wall in this area—an 11.4-mile stretch from just west of Granjeno downriver to the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge—runs to about $27 million a mile. In recent months, the number of apprehensions has soared. Border Patrol caught more than 171,000 migrants along the southern border in March, the highest one-month total in 15 years. Nicol is finding more and more ladders—further evidence, he said, that the wall is not about stopping people or drugs. “Border walls are just backdrops for politicians who want to rile up their voters,” Nicol said. “They have political value, and that’s what counts.”
SIX STATES GAIN CONGRESSIONAL SEATS AND SEVEN LOSE FOR THE COMING DECADE. The Census Bureau released long-awaited data from the 2020 census (4/26) showing six states will gain seats in the House for the coming decade while seven will lose a member. Texas was the big winner, gaining two seats. However, Florida, which expected to gain two seats, will only add one, while North Carolina will pick up one seat. Arizona, which expected to add a seat, won’t pick up any.
Four northern states with Democratic governors that President Biden won in 2020 — Illinois, MIchigan, Pennsylvania and New York — will each lose a single congressional seat. Ohio, a Republican-leaning state, will also lose a seat in Congress. California loses a congressional seat for the first time in its history, but nearby Democrat-trending states Colorado and Oregon both gain a seat. Montana, a once-purple state that has moved toward the GOP in recent years, will also gain a seat. West Virginia will lose one seat, moving down to two seats.
Biden defeated Trump by a margin of 306 to 232 electors in 2020, the Washington Post noted. If the result was repeated in 2024 under the new apportionment, with the Democratic and Republican candidates winning same states, the Democrat would still win comfortably, by a margin of 303 to 235. But Republicans will control line-drawing for 187 congressional seats over the coming year, while Democrats will control redrawing 75 seats. The rest will be redrawn by independent commissions or divided governments, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Democrats have a seven-vote majority in the House, with four vacancies (three of which are expected to vote Democratic in special elections).
The Trump administration’s attempt to manipulate the Census count by trying to add a citizenship question to the survey and exclude undocumented people from being counted may have inadvertently limited population gains in Texas and Florida.
Based on census estimates, in more than a dozen states, about half the gains are Hispanic people, including Texas, Florida, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, said William Frey. a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Whites accounted for more than half the growth in only five states, plus the District of Columbia. In 27 states, the number of Whites declined. Data on race and ethnicity won’t be released until later this year, but some states with high immigrant populations, such as Texas, Florida and Arizona, came in with lower populations than projected. “So I think it is reasonable to ask whether there was some undercount of Latinos,” Frey told the Washington Post..
US ECONOMIC CONFIDENCE HITS POSITIVE TERRITORY FOR FIRST TIME SINCE PANDEMIC. A Gallup tracking poll found that consumer confidence in the nation’s economy was a net positive in April—+2 points to be exact—for the first time since Donald Trump declared a national emergency in early March 2020, Kerry Eleveld noted at DailyKos (4/26).
After the brief national lockdown, Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index dropped to -32 in early April 2020 and has been climbing out of a hole ever since. The latest survey was conducted April 1 to April 21. The outlet’s Economic Confidence Index is an average of the public’s view of current economic conditions (“excellent/good” versus “poor”) and its outlook for the economy (“getting better” versus “getting worse”).
Even though the Economic Confidence Index hit positive territory for the first time in a year, Americans’ view of current economic conditions has been better at certain points throughout the last year. In terms of current conditions, the new survey found that 28% say they are either excellent or good, while 26% say they are poor. Last November, people put current economic conditions at a net positive of 13 points, with 36% saying conditions were excellent/good while 23% said they were poor.
A big part of what has driven the uptick in the Economic Confidence Index have been a steady rise in views of the economic outlook, which also hit a net positive for the first time since last spring. Today, 47% of adults believe the economy is getting better versus 46% who say it is getting worse.
“A year ago, when most of the country was living under stay-at-home orders, 22% said the economy was getting better and 74% worse,” writes Gallup. “Even in November, when Americans were relatively upbeat about current economic conditions, a solid majority of 55% said the economy was getting worse.”
One group of people that isn’t welcoming the newfound consumer optimism is GOP lawmakers, who seem more dismayed than anything by the fact that the economy hasn’t tanked since Biden took office. Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers spent much of the 2020 cycle warning of dire economic fallout if Joe Biden and Democrats took control of Washington. Then, once Democrats did take over, Republicans did everything in their power to stymie Biden’s overwhelmingly popular pandemic relief plan. Now that the money is flowing from that plan and the speed of vaccination rates has surpassed what Biden originally promised, consumers seem to be feeling pretty good. And that makes Republicans feel even worse.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the survey found that a strong majority of Americans — 57% — expressed “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence in President Biden to “do or to recommend the right thing for the economy.”
That 57% matched Biden’s overall job approval rating in Gallup’s survey, which is a smidge higher than FiveThirtyEight’s polling aggregate showing a 54.5% approval rating for Biden as we approached his 100-day mark.
R’S WAIT TO SEE IF TRUMP’S CHOICE LEAVES TEXAS FOR A GEORGIA SENATE RUN. A number of possible Republican candidates are waiting to see whether former University of Georgia football star Herschel Walker, a current Texas resident whom Donald Trump has publicly urged to run for the Senate, challenges Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, before they decide on their own plans, CNN reported.
That’s not welcome news for many Republicans, though, who fear what will happen if Walker, a political neophyte, freezes the field for months only to ultimately sit the race out. Said one unnamed GOP operative, “People are starting to get really nervous that Warnock is building this gigantic war chest, and we don’t even have a substantive candidate.”
Another party operative also conveyed “anxiety” about what would happen if Walker does run. While he’s still remembered well from his time at UGA in the early 1980s, CNN notes that his skeptics fear that he might not be able to “handle the enormous challenges” involved in taking on Warnock.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t sound especially happy about the idea of a Walker campaign, either. When asked about the former UGA player, McConnell responded, “Well, I’ve met him.” He continued, “I have no idea who we’re going to come up with down there. ... I think it’s wide open.”
Two potential Republican candidates, however, say they very much want Walker to campaign for this seat. Rep. Buddy Carter, who publicly expressed interest earlier this week, told Roll Call that he had encouraged Walker to run and would not make up his mind until Walker decides. Carter also told CNN that if “Hershel doesn’t run, then I can run,” so it very much sounds like he’d defer to him.
Former Ambassador to Luxembourg Randy Evans, who has reportedly been considering getting in, still has not publicly expressed interest in taking on Warnock, but like Carter, he also praised Walker to the stars. Evans extolled him as “a candidate that Trump Republicans, non-Trump Republicans, independents, traditional Democrats, and even many partisan Democrats can agree with.” Evans added, “It is why so many Georgia voters of all persuasions have taken to quoting the famous Larry Munson who was often heard to shout, ‘Run, Herschel, run.’”
Walker himself, though, doesn’t appear to be in any hurry to reach a decision. He told CNN, “Right now, (I’m) just going through the process and thinking about it. Not really talking a lot about it.”
Still, not every Peach State Republican is waiting on Walker. Businessman Kelvin King and banking executive Latham Saddler each entered the primary earlier this month, and CNN adds that former Rep. Doug Collins is “nearing a decision” whether to launch a second Senate campaign.
INSPECTOR GENERAL REPORTS SHOW HOW TRUMP OFFICIALS FAILED PUERTO RICO AND UNDERCUT EPA. A pair of reports show just how bad “government” was under Donald Trump, Mark Sumner reported for DailyKos (4/22). A HUD inspector general’s report shows how funds already allocated by Congress to assist in hurricane relief for Puerto Rico were delayed by by a series of Trump officials. A second report from the EPA shows that agency didn’t follow its own processes or perform any technical analysis in issuing a rule that supported a Trump executive order. Further, the EPA under Trump seems to have forgotten to take any notes, so that it “did not document who decided to skip these milestones and why.”
What the reports show are agencies being run by people who not only don’t have any experience in the critical roles being performed, they were actually inimical to those roles. Now that most of those in charge under Trump are out of office, they’re still working to cover up the chaos and deliberate sabotage that happened over the last four years.
In the case of funds for Puerto Rico, the Washington Post reports that during an investigation that began in 2019, access to information was “delayed or denied on several occasions.” HUD’s own inspector general found it difficult to move forward as senior officials refused to provide requested materials. As a result, the 46-page report is a “still incomplete picture” of why some funds for Puerto Rico never made it to the island, while others were awarded to companies or individuals who had neither the experience or ability to provide necessary services. And it took two years to get that incomplete answer.
Meanwhile, at the EPA, the failure to take notes or follow guidelines doesn’t really stop the agency from identifying the single individual behind the reason the EPA failed to even conduct an evaluation of a vital rule that changed fuel efficiency standards. The reason is that former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt simply decided that no technical review would take place, and that the EPA would sign its name to a change it had no part in either writing or evaluating.
When it comes to getting funds to Puerto Rico, the inspector general’s report identifies a series of key changes that got in the way of taking effective action. One of this was months of meetings with the Office of Management and Budget about the rules for releasing grants and who should be eligible to bid. As a result, HUD was blocked from even posting notices to release the funds.
Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September 2017. HUD and OMB were still unable to even get much of the relief funding posted by a self-imposed deadline of May 2019. In fact, much of the funding did not become available until Jan. 27, 2020.
TAX ON WALL STREET TRANSACTIONS PROPOSED TO FUND TUITION-FREE COLLEGE. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced legislation (4/21)that would make public colleges and universities tuition-free for students from families earning less than $125,000 a year—a proposal President Joe Biden ran on during last year’s general election.
The bill—titled the College for All Act of 2021 and funded by a tax on financial transactions in the stock market—would also guarantee tuition-free community college for all and invest $10 billion annually in under-funded education institutions.
Additionally, part of the proposal would double the maximum Pell Grant award to nearly $13,000 and allow students to use the money for living costs and other non-tuition expenses.
“While President Biden can and should immediately cancel student debt for millions of borrowers, Congress must ensure that working families never have to take out these crushing loans to receive a higher education in the first place,” Jayapal (D-WA), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in a statement.
“The College for All Act will free students from a lifetime of debt, invest in working people, and transform higher education across America by making community college free for everyone and eliminating tuition and fees at public colleges and universities for families making up to $125,000,” added Jayapal.
Under the legislation, the federal government would take on 75% of the costs of eliminating tuition and states would cover the other 25%.
Described by Sanders’ office as “the most substantial federal investment in higher education in the modern history of the United States,” the bill would be funded by a separate measure (pdf) that would impose a 0.5% tax on Wall Street stock trades, a 0.1% fee on bonds, and a 0.005% fee on derivatives. That proposal would raise an estimated $2.4 trillion in federal revenue over the next decade.
Sanders (I-VT), chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said “in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, a higher education should be a right for all, not a privilege for the few.”
DON’T BLEACH IT AWAY: REMEMBER THE DAY TRUMP TURNED THE GQP INTO A DEATH CULT. April 23 marked one year since Donald Trump suggested Americans inject bleach to fight COVID-19, and a Florida-based family has been fraudulently selling a toxic bleach solution as a religious sacrament marketed as a “miracle” cure for COVID-19, cancer, autism, Alzheimer’s disease and more, federal prosecutors said.
A federal grand jury in Miami indicted Mark Grenon, 62, and his three sons, Jonathan Grenon, 34; Jordan Grenon, 26; and Joseph Grenon, 32; all of Bradenton, Fla. Prosecutors said they violated court orders and fraudulently produced and sold more than $1 million of their “Miracle Mineral Solution,” a dangerous industrial bleach solution, even after the FDA last year warned that the product the men were accused of marketing through the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing was “unproven and potentially harmful.”
The indictments came on the anniversary of when “Trump, technically elected president of the United States of America, stood up on national television and suggested he had found the cure for coronavirus that those silly doctors hadn’t considered: bleach injections,” Amanda Marcotte noted at Salon.com (4/23).
Standing at a podium in the White House briefing room, Trump said, “I see disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that.”
Trump also insisted, “I’m like a person who has a good you-know-what” while pointing to his head, Marcotte noted. He also threw out the idea of cracking people open and letting sunlight clean them out.
“The moment wasn’t just the end of any remaining dignity for the US,” she wrote. It was the end of the last remaining hope beating in liberal hearts that there was anything that Trump could say or do that would cause his followers to un-cleave themselves from the bosom heaving under that weirdly overlong tie. No, on the contrary, it was proof that the worst Trump acted, the more his supporters clung to him, determined to stick it to the liberals who kept laughing at them for voting for the wannabe fascist reality TV ‘billionaire’ in the first place.”
A week before Trump touted the potential “cure” at a briefing, Mark Grenon wrote the president promoting industrial bleach as a “a wonderful detox that can kill 99% of the pathogens in the body.” He added that it “can rid the body of COVID-19,” Ed Pilkington reported at The Guardian (4/23)
Bleach manufacturers as well as the FDA issued warnings that bleach should not be used internally, but chlorine dioxide solutions were being sold on the Amazon platform in September 2020, although usually with legal disclaimers that the liquid is “not marketed for internal use.” But Pilkington of The Guardian noted (9/19/20) that in the comments section, users discussed how many groups of bleach they were imbibing and explained how they were drinking the chemical to “disinfect ourselves.” Poison control centers around the country reported spikes in calls to poison control hotlines after Trump raised the possibility of treating COVID with disinfectants. The North Texas Poison Control Center received 46 reported cases of ingestion after 8/1/20, CBS’ DFW affiliate reported (8/25/20).
It wasn’t Trump’s first medical misdirection. On March 19, 2020, he had insisted that chloroquine and the closely related hydroxychloroquine, which is used to fight malaria and lupus, were potential treatments for COVID-19, and the following day he tweeted that hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin, an antibiotic, “have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.” Four days later, a Phoenix-area man was dead and his wife was hospitalized after they took a form of chloroquine used to clean fish tanks after they heard Trump recommend it. By August, the FDA had recorded 293 deaths of people who took hydroxychloroquine or related drugs in the first half of 2020, with treatment of COVID-19 stated the reason for using the medication in “more than half” of the case, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2021
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