Shut the lousy mines down! If the coal industry can't take care of their own problems, then shut them down!
December 21, 2018
By Will Wright
Pikeville - Former Pike County coal miner Kenny Fleming (click here) put his hand to his chest and stopped to catch his breath.
“I get tired just talking,” he said during a recent interview.
Fleming is one of the more than 12,000 former miners who receive benefits from the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund, a program that helps miners afflicted with the deadly and debilitating disease pay for health care and some of their basic living costs.
Amid the largest surge of black lung cases in decades, the fund faces steep cuts that could, experts say, eventually leave miners like Fleming without the benefits they need to survive....
The coal industry is spinning out more and more cases of Black Lung and the industry's answer is to dump the care of those miners and their families on the backs of Americans. If Americans are going to have diminished quality of life for coal miners and the cost of the industry's disease besides, then they have the right to say what happens with the mines and the people effected by this horrible disease.
McConnell and his buddies in the coal industry are shutting down the lifeline to the miners and their families. The Republicans never cared about the coal mine workers, they only cared about their cronies in the back office.
The coal industry is spinning out more and more cases of Black Lung and the industry's answer is to dump the care of those miners and their families on the backs of Americans. If Americans are going to have diminished quality of life for coal miners and the cost of the industry's disease besides, then they have the right to say what happens with the mines and the people effected by this horrible disease.
McConnell and his buddies in the coal industry are shutting down the lifeline to the miners and their families. The Republicans never cared about the coal mine workers, they only cared about their cronies in the back office.
By Howard Berkes
Part one of a two-part series.
It wasn't supposed (click here) to happen to coal miners in Mark McCowan's generation. It wasn't supposed to strike so early and so hard. At age 47 and just seven years after his first diagnosis, McCowan shouldn't have a chest X-ray that looks this bad.
"I'm seeing more definition in the mass," McCowan says, pausing for deep breaths as he holds the X-ray film up to the light of his living room window in Pounding Mill, Va.
"The mass is larger and more defined in the right upper lobe," he continues, clinically describing the solid streak that shows up white on the X-ray of his lungs. "If you know white is bad and black is good, I'm in a lot of trouble."...
