cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/38457017
As director of the New River Health Association Black Lung Clinic, Emery’s seen guys as young as 45 getting double lung transplants as disease rates soar among miners forced to dig through more rock filled with deadly silica to reach the remaining coal — far worse than the dust their grandfathers inhaled.
A rule approved last year by the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration would cut the federal limit for allowable respirable crystalline silica dust exposure by half to help protect miners of all types nationwide from the current driving force of black lung and other illnesses.
But, now, it’s in jeopardy amid other Trump administration cutbacks and proposals targeting workers’ health and safety guardrails: Stuck in a politically charged environment that promotes industry, with lawmakers arguing to change it and the federal agency that wrote the rule not pushing to enforce it. Some angry retired miners with black lung are fighting back, demanding that Donald Trump honor promises he made to the people who voted him in.
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
demanding that Donald Trump honor promises he made to the people who voted him in.
Isn’t he?
Haha, as if there was anything honor-related with Donald Trump or his Republican minions.
Getting real fucking tired of these whiny bitches… they got what they voted for, they are winning for fucks sake!! “Uuuh, I’ve got a black lung, poor me, wääääähh”, SHUT UP!
Have the day you voted for
But at least those billionaires got to save a little money on their taxes and all those women are now trapped with children they didn’t want. /s
Have the day you voted for!
And I bet to many of them it’s still all the Democrats’ fault.
It’s all the inbreeding. It makes them stupid.
Well, democrats welcome the shift to the right. They are just smart enough not to participate in it to avoid bad publicity (but of course don’t do anything about it).
Trump is Strangling the working man. He was always going to if he got his way, and he told us pretty much from the start what he was going to do. So very many Americans put their necks in his hands and asked for it
Trump Lung.
Two in the thoughts, one in the prayers.
Let me check my empathizinator… Nope, it’s busted. Dumbfucks get none from me today.
These are West Virginians. The poverty is staggering and coal work is all they have, what very little remains of it.
Appalachia in general has been spat on, kicked, and left to die by the ruling class after their usefulness ran out. When everything ran on coal it was the most lucrative region in the US and the labor movement was incredibly strong. The people there voting for trump is more the result of Democrats abandoning working-class politics than anything else. Trump pretends to be a champion of the working class and promised the return of the coal industry while Democrats dismissed them as unreachable and said they would phase out what remains of the coal industry to prevent climate change. When Republicans tell them climate change is overblown and clean coal is possible they want to believe it because they want a return to “the good old days” when Appalachia was booming. Democrats could have reached out to these people and offered an alternative, but their wealthy donors wouldn’t have liked any real solution and that’s who the party actually answers to, not the people.
This guy creates some of the finest journalism I’ve seen, maybe ever.
https://www.youtube.com/@PeterSantenello
One man and a selfie stick. No drama, no leading questions, no bullshit. He goes to places in America that few outsiders see or understand. His interviews in Appalachia leave me a bit weepy.
There’s one where he stops to talk to some adolescents fishing off a bridge on a back country highway. The fat kid is obviously quite smart, wants to be an historian. Made me sad to think such people are stuck there.
Yea but if their education system failed them and they succumbed to generational poverty and saturation level propaganda that makes them no longer my countrymen and undeserving of any sympathy.
Go watch some Peter Santenello journalism from Appalachia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9lSZlDJAC0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3O6bKdPLbw&t=1s
(dozens more from all over America)
You won’t, because you fear that empathy might change your view. I posted that for any non-fascists that might see this comment.
That’s my Saturday morning jam, mixed with Chris Okay going places white people are highly unexpected to be, Afghanistan right now.
I was being facetious above, I think too many people don’t realize how effective generational economic trauma and populist rhetoric and propaganda are.
I thought we were only mining big beautiful CLEAN coal? What are they whining about?!?!
Well hurry up then.
