Serving King Coal

In Kentucky's Coal Country, A Resentment For Obama | Minnesota Public Radio News

Here in Kentucky the death of King Coal will be a bitter pill.  This beautiful Commonwealth has long been a victim of extraction industries that pillage the natural wealth and leave destruction.  The people in Louisa and in much of this state blame the environmentalists and Barack Obama for the death of King Coal but the blame is misplaced.

Years ago Kentucky enacted the Coal Severance Tax which was to return to those coal producing counties a portion of the wealth torn from their soil.  That money was to be used to diversify the economic base for the time that coal would necessarily decline as a source of revenue.  The blame for the dearth of economic opportunity we now face should be squarely laid at the feet of local and state governments and the short sighted people who ran them for their failure to have enough vision to lead the people along the path of prosperity using different economic models.  In this article one person even says that one of his relatives drives a Komatsu bulldozer.  The bulldozer isn't even American.

Now the time has come that we can no longer rely on King Coal to provide cheap electricity and decent paying jobs.  It has run its course, one that was completely predictable.  Natural gas is plentiful and cheaper and cleaner although it too will run its course as our dependency on the burning of fossil fuels must in order to save the human race.  Make no mistake, the planet will survive but the geological record holds proof that humans are not necessary.

Don't blame Barack Obama, there are those to blame who are much closer to home.

Eastern Kentucky once belonged to the Democratic Party who were much more instrumental in joining the miners in their pursuit of better working conditions and better pay. The mines were unionized and the wealth was spread around a bit better but the arrival of the strip mine and mountaintop removal killed many of the mining jobs and turned others into heavy equipment operators. John L. Lewis was a name revered in the hills of Appalachia and he fought tirelessly for the betterment of the miners. Unionization of the mines was the last reasonable attempt to force the Barons of the East to halt their extraction of wealth from Kentucky and leave some in the state for the betterment and prosperity of the citizens. With the changing of the industry and the successful use of wedge issues politically the Coal Barons were successful in separating the miner and his family from the organizations that had nurtured them.

It has always been the case that the Coal Barons have utilized home grown businessmen to act as front men for their operations giving the illusion that it was Kentuckians who were operating the mining business. For instance, it was a native Kentuckian, John C.C. Mayo, who first came up with the infamous broad form deed that allowed the coal extraction industry to buy mineral rights to property without paying a fair price for the land, a practice that often left the land devastated and unusable for any kind of agricultural purpose as it had been.

Even now we see the money extracted from the soil of Kentucky used by those who have profited much the same as a medieval lord would shower favors upon those who pleased him. Money from the coal industry has funded the housing for the University of Kentucky Basketball team requiring that the name of the lodge be “Wildcat Coal Lodge” in addition to some other stipulations requiring some other things such as these from the funding agreement:

The gift agreement, obtained by the Herald-Leader under the state's Open Records Act,

said the building "will include an exhibit in the primary entrance lobby which presents in print, photographic, sound, video, DVD and/or other format, a discussion of and tribute to the importance of the coal industry to the Commonwealth of Kentucky, which exhibit shall be reasonably acceptable to Craft."

The reverence for King Coal pervades the political system of Kentucky. It is political suicide for any person from most of the state to take a position contrary to the wishes of the coal companies. The Governor is on record as opposing the regulations of the Environmental Protection Agency designed to mitigate damage caused by these companies on the grounds that it constitutes a “war on coal”. The preposterous nature of this allegation serves to obscure the fiscal and political malfeasance that has occurred at every level with the failure to adequately prepare Kentucky for the demise of coal as a major source of jobs and support for Kentucky government and the citizens of this state. It has left Kentucky in a similar condition as a third world country that long was a colony of a major power that stripped it of its wealth and then left. The sad story is that, just as it was with John C.C. Mayo, the coal extraction industry has used the Commonwealth's own people to do the dirty work. The “War on Coal” is nothing more than good old capitalism and market forces doing what they do best, kill one industry when a more efficient one comes along. The crime is that we Kentuckians have been lied to and stolen from and are left as poor as we were before the “coal companies came with the world's largest shovel.”

In a just world those responsible leaders would be held to account for their malfeasance but economic justice is a rare commodity in Kentucky, even more so than in the rest of the nation.

So, now those few remaining miners and their families face the demise of King Coal blaming Barack Obama and those who “war on coal” for the unnecessary regulation that they say is killing coal production. Never mind the many times Kentuckians have trooped to the polls and voted against their own well being all along trusting their leaders to guide them to the Promised Land. The wealth that rightfully belonged to our state has been used to enrich the few and leave Kentuckians impoverished.

In addition production from Canada is a game changer.