Awaiting Trump's coal comeback, miners reject retraining

[JA]

I have empathy for their situation. Not the deplorable way they respond to it.

Why would it matter anyway? These people supposedly hate special snowflakes and easily triggered politically correct liberals. Can dish it out but can't take it? I'm just "telling it like it is", the very quality they love about Trump.

I agree with you. I’m tired of the pussy footing and skating around that we do when it comes to uneducated white people because we can’t hurt their feelings. They have no problem getting in the gutter and expressing their disgust with affirmative action, Hispanic immigration, same-sex marriage, or any other policy that don’t like but they can’t handle the truth about an industry that is basically a ing death sentence. Stop trying to pander to ignorant people and tell them the truth.

The more I read posts from liberals like this the more I think leaving the Democratic Party was a good choice.

Same. I'm still awaiting my new voter registration card in the mail after leaving the party. I don't want to be associated with those people. Same mindset as you'd imagine a liberal Republican to possess; no thanks.

I sympathize a lot with these coal miners. Not only were they sold the myth that coal jobs would return, but even if they didn't believe that what other options are truly viable for them? Yes, this one man in the article is 33, but what about the rest of the coal miners who're rejecting retraining? Making such a transition simply isn't easy, especially when you likely come from a long line of coal miners, you recognize that coal mining is the only decent paying job in your community, and you probably don't know anyone in or anything about these new fields. And if there are no jobs to be found in your local area, what're you supposed to do? Uproot yourself from a community in which your family may have lived for generations? Try to sell your home (good luck) and relocate to a costlier urban area? And not to mention the limited or total lack of income obtainable during retraining, which makes providing for a family incredibly difficult.

To just shout at them: "do this or you deserve to suffer!" Is no different whatsoever from the standard right-wing mantras of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and "quit being lazy." It takes absolutely no consideration of the human condition, of the psychology behind their individual circumstances, the complexity of their situation, and the fact that this crisis has been caused by avoidable factors that are ultimately traceable back to the careless exploitation and disregard of significant segments of America (geographically and socially). What's been done to Appalachia is hardly different than what has happened to inner cities and the Rust Belt; they faced rapid growth, mass industrial exploitation, then the industries became increasingly automated and subjected to pressure from low-wage foreign competition, and then no level of the US government has taken accountability for the mass crises these policies create and inflict upon its citizens. Instead, the blame is shifted onto the individuals involved, as if all of these people had any say whatsoever in how these industries functioned, how automation occurred, where investment would go, or anything.

And now, when they're already suffering from declining life expectancy, surging mortality rates, drug addiction, alcoholism, chronic and intergenerational poverty, and the sting of austerity, deregulation, and diminishing social welfare programs, the response from the better-off parts of America are condescension at best, and visceral hatred at worst. Anyone who blames these individuals is falling for the right-wing myth of "personal accountability" and "individual responsibility," which hardly applies to this situation at all. Why not just go shout at the homeless that their condition is all their fault or tell folks in blighted neighborhoods that their poverty is a failure of their families? It's literally no different, except maybe these people are branded in the liberal imagination with a scarlet T because they belong to the "wrong party."

[pbrower2a]

I sympathize a lot with these coal miners. Not only were they sold the myth that coal jobs would return, but even if they didn't believe that what other options are truly viable for them? Yes, this one man in the article is 33, but what about the rest of the coal miners who're rejecting retraining? Making such a transition simply isn't easy, especially when you likely come from a long line of coal miners, you recognize that coal mining is the only decent paying job in your community, and you probably don't know anyone in or anything about these new fields. And if there are no jobs to be found in your local area, what're you supposed to do? Uproot yourself from a community in which your family may have lived for generations? Try to sell your home (good luck) and relocate to a costlier urban area? And not to mention the limited or total lack of income obtainable during retraining, which makes providing for a family incredibly difficult.

For many comes the need to give up on what were once reliable certainties that have become sure ruin. That could mean selling out one's most valuable asset (a house) and downsizing in  living conditions. No income during retraining?  There are grocery and 'dollar' stores; there are fast-food places. Getting the wife to work?

The best days of American life are probably over.   

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It is telling that Martin Luther King was planning on a tour of Appalachia  that never came to fruition because he got hit by a bullet from James Earl Ray. We can never say whether it would have been effective, but King recognized that the poverty of Appalachia was nearly as degrading and extreme as poor Southern blacks knew. Really, it is. Poor Southern blacks had never known prosperity. Poor urban blacks might have, only for the industrial jobs to vanish. Many of those poor urban blacks had participated in the Great Migration, abandoning the dire certainties of being field hands for working in the great factories of the Midwest. "Take 51 to Bloomington and 66 to Chicago" was good advice in Mississippi. But so was "Take 21 to Cleveland" either from South Carolina or West Virginia.

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Donald Trump offered a solution. It's a poor solution, one intended to intensify mass hardship so that elites can indulge themselves more. But sticking with the inevitable demise of coal country is one sure way to hurt one's children and grandchildren. Millions of black people have left the infamous Inner Cities for the suburbs, where the jobs and better schools are. It may be hard to see the wreck that is Detroit as evidence of progress, but as the Detroit jobs disappeared, the housing became worthless.

Yes, I hate Donald Trump. He has turned the American way of life from the slogan "You get what you pay for" into "You pay for what you get -- and oh, do you pay!" Bur he is not alone in making a nightmare of America. This man knows as little about manufacturing that he promises to bring back prosperity than he does about translating cuneiform inscriptions. He is the master of the Art of the Con, as is every demagogue who has ever existed -- and disappointed his early supporters.

Some people recognized this horrible man as a fraud very early. What began with me was the opinion "What is so special about this man of great claim but no technical expertise?" to my current disdain for him. But my life was miserable before he became President. By 2016 a plurality of Americans no longer believed in his ideology -- but he got the right votes.

His approval ratings show that many Americans who voted for him are gravely disappointed in him. One after another layer of potential support has peeled away. I cannot tell yet which layers of support those are. Industrial workers? Sure. There may be jobs, but no more industrial jobs are being created. The jobs opening pay near-starvation wages.

Donald Trump is a real-life Berzelius Windrip -- except that the bad President in It Can't Happen Here has no obvious professional background. (Berzelius Windrip was a druggist). We could be seeing Sinclair Lewis' novel on a great stage -- one extending from Nome (with a break for the North Pacific Ocean west of British Columbia) to Miami -- in real life.   
   

[Indy Texas]

In the early 20th century, when industrial growth and agricultural changes had made the grand country estates of the British nobility unsustainable, what did the former tenants and servants of those aristocratic households do? They moved to the cities and got different jobs.

What did farmers in Oklahoma do when the Dust Bowl made it impossible to continue farming their lands? They moved elsewhere - often to California, which was a whole world away back then.

I don't understand why we've come to this idea that people should be bound to their land and that moving even a few hours drive away is a completely heartless and unacceptable proposition, when that is literally what Americans have done for hundreds of years.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

It is a bit ridiculous to go up to a 50-something-year-old who has never done anything other than coal mining and say "why don't you take up coding?" The economic hardship of resuming schooling immediately after losing your job is stunning and people are being asked to transition into jobs that are totally out of their skillset or comfort zone.

True, but this guy is only 33 years old. In my mid-30s I pushed the reset button on my career. It was hard but doable.

You likely had a specific idea of what you wanted to do and expectations you'd be able to do it and not move from where you wanted to live.

What do you think the world owes a 33-year-old who is not willing to make a big change in order to have a career? Maybe you disagree, but I think his situation is different from a man 20 years older who will have a harder time learning new skills and will face serious age discrimination.

I don't disagree, but unlike many economists who come up with ideas of what's best, I realize that man is not a perfectly rational creature.

[Fuzzy Bear]

I guess I'm reacting to all of this by changing my avatar to "Other".

I'm not really an "independent".  I'm a registered Republican, but I'm one of those social conservatives who's economically liberal who'd be a Democrat if they didn't sell out the working class for their social liberal agenda.  And I really don't have much in common with the "Freedom Caucus".  (The Freedom Caucus never seems to advocate rolling back any excessively Draconian criminal laws, so I don't really see them as living up to their name.)

I'm an economically liberal social conservative.  There were once lots of me in the Democratic Party.  The Democratic Party would matter to working people if it were true again.

[JA]

In the early 20th century, when industrial growth and agricultural changes had made the grand country estates of the British nobility unsustainable, what did the former tenants and servants of those aristocratic households do? They moved to the cities and got different jobs.

What did farmers in Oklahoma do when the Dust Bowl made it impossible to continue farming their lands? They moved elsewhere - often to California, which was a whole world away back then.

I don't understand why we've come to this idea that people should be bound to their land and that moving even a few hours drive away is a completely heartless and unacceptable proposition, when that is literally what Americans have done for hundreds of years.

So, simply because that's how something was done in the past, that's how things should be done in the present and future? I'm not against retraining these folks into other areas; I'm 100% against the continuation of coal's usage in any form. Even the most radical of Democratic environmental policies are too weak, in my opinion. But you can't simply uproot people, displace them from their communities, and toss them into financial insecurity simply because "muh market." F*** the market and f*** anyone who thinks we, as humans, in a society as complex and sophisticated as ours, should have to be slaves to an "invisible hand," which is nothing more than private, wealthy investors, stockholders, financial "experts," and corporations calling the shots while we all just have to stand-by and watch as they dictate our lives to us. We, as humans, should control our destiny; each of us as individuals, not have some wealthy people scattered across the country and globe decide winners and losers, pick and choose where investments will go, whose community will face ruin next, whose job will be lost next, which law should be passed, whose views will be express on TV news.

[Badger]

I have empathy for their situation. Not the deplorable way they respond to it.

Why would it matter anyway? These people supposedly hate special snowflakes and easily triggered politically correct liberals. Can dish it out but can't take it? I'm just "telling it like it is", the very quality they love about Trump.

I agree with you. I’m tired of the pussy footing and skating around that we do when it comes to uneducated white people because we can’t hurt their feelings. They have no problem getting in the gutter and expressing their disgust with affirmative action, Hispanic immigration, same-sex marriage, or any other policy that don’t like but they can’t handle the truth about an industry that is basically a ing death sentence. Stop trying to pander to ignorant people and tell them the truth.

The more I read posts from liberals like this the more I think leaving the Democratic Party was a good choice.

True enough.  

What truths should the inner-city poor be told?  That their poverty is, largely, the decision of many young single females to bear children outside of marriage, by a male who is not likely to be prepared to act as a husband, father, and family provider (roles that provide family stability)?  That the negative conditions in impoverished urban communities are, in no small measure, made worse (if not caused) by the young male residents' criminal behavior within that community.  Why is it OK to lecture the unemployed coal-miners about their "bigotry", but OK to allow the anti-white sentiments routinely expressed in inner-city communities to go unchallenged?  Why are the inner-city poor that have no high school education, no training (often despite opportunities for such training), but who vote Democratic with regularity viewed by folks like RFK1968 as "low information voters"?

Aaand this is why I'm not a Republican, either.

Whenever we find a group of people who the government and our society has completely failed them, for generations, and now uplifting them from that situation is extremely difficult, the knee-jerk reaction is "Oh they're just lazy.", "Oh, they don't want our help.", "They need to address their own problems as a community first before we can help".

It's a sneering, condescending attitude that enrages me when I see it in either party.

I don't disagree with this.  I don't advocate the lecturing and sneering.  It serves no useful purpose. 

I DO think that the decline in family formation and family stability IS, however, an important factor in both urban and rural poverty.  The likely long-term outlook and long-term outcome of a child in a low-income family with two (2) marital parents in the home, in general, is so much more positive than long-term outlooks and outcomes of non-marital families that it amazes me that we have to educate folks as to the advantage.  This is not to say that the worst two-parent marital family, riddled with abuse and dysfunction, is better than the best single-parent family with a positive role model as head of household, but it is very much true in the aggregate.  Rural AND urban poverty is, very much, driven by out-of-wedlock births and the decreased stability of non-marital households (again, in the aggregate). 

Incidentally, one reason I am for single-payer healthcare is that it has the potential to stop the practice of folks deliberately not getting married so that delivery of a child can be funded by Medicaid; the present system PUNISHES poor married folks who are in the situation of having a spouse being pregnant but being up a creek as far as medical coverage for the child goes.

Fuzzy, I think you were making a mistake many conservatives do by mixing up cause and effect. The explosion of single-parent households in the Inner City, both African American and Hispanic, have next to nothing to do with the welfare system. What really happened is the industrialization took away steady working class income jobs from such neighborhoods. Sadly, even in the seventies and eighties the whole first fire last hired situation came to roost. Not to mention where the focus of the industrialization was in heavily African American communities like Detroit, Gary, East St Louis, Etc.

The end result is that it made a generation of Inner City young black males unmarriageable because there was no economic system by which they could support a family. That same phenomenon spread to Inner City Hispanic communities soon afterwards, and now has started praying on Rural white communities we're out of Whitlock boroughs are dramatically growing and number for much the same reason.

I guess the big difference is that blacks and Latinos have long blamed, rightly in my view, economical E2 yes are overwhelmingly white. Rural White in contrast seem to primarily blame blacks and Latinos, and take a tax on Elite whites as an attack on all White's. Too many rural working-class whites in hard economic Straits still find more in common with purported billionaire Donald Trump then they do equally economically challenged blacks and Latinos on racial and cultural identity. And that's just damn wrong

[Fuzzy Bear]

I have empathy for their situation. Not the deplorable way they respond to it.

Why would it matter anyway? These people supposedly hate special snowflakes and easily triggered politically correct liberals. Can dish it out but can't take it? I'm just "telling it like it is", the very quality they love about Trump.

I agree with you. I’m tired of the pussy footing and skating around that we do when it comes to uneducated white people because we can’t hurt their feelings. They have no problem getting in the gutter and expressing their disgust with affirmative action, Hispanic immigration, same-sex marriage, or any other policy that don’t like but they can’t handle the truth about an industry that is basically a ing death sentence. Stop trying to pander to ignorant people and tell them the truth.

The more I read posts from liberals like this the more I think leaving the Democratic Party was a good choice.

True enough.  

What truths should the inner-city poor be told?  That their poverty is, largely, the decision of many young single females to bear children outside of marriage, by a male who is not likely to be prepared to act as a husband, father, and family provider (roles that provide family stability)?  That the negative conditions in impoverished urban communities are, in no small measure, made worse (if not caused) by the young male residents' criminal behavior within that community.  Why is it OK to lecture the unemployed coal-miners about their "bigotry", but OK to allow the anti-white sentiments routinely expressed in inner-city communities to go unchallenged?  Why are the inner-city poor that have no high school education, no training (often despite opportunities for such training), but who vote Democratic with regularity viewed by folks like RFK1968 as "low information voters"?

Aaand this is why I'm not a Republican, either.

Whenever we find a group of people who the government and our society has completely failed them, for generations, and now uplifting them from that situation is extremely difficult, the knee-jerk reaction is "Oh they're just lazy.", "Oh, they don't want our help.", "They need to address their own problems as a community first before we can help".

It's a sneering, condescending attitude that enrages me when I see it in either party.

I don't disagree with this.  I don't advocate the lecturing and sneering.  It serves no useful purpose. 

I DO think that the decline in family formation and family stability IS, however, an important factor in both urban and rural poverty.  The likely long-term outlook and long-term outcome of a child in a low-income family with two (2) marital parents in the home, in general, is so much more positive than long-term outlooks and outcomes of non-marital families that it amazes me that we have to educate folks as to the advantage.  This is not to say that the worst two-parent marital family, riddled with abuse and dysfunction, is better than the best single-parent family with a positive role model as head of household, but it is very much true in the aggregate.  Rural AND urban poverty is, very much, driven by out-of-wedlock births and the decreased stability of non-marital households (again, in the aggregate). 

Incidentally, one reason I am for single-payer healthcare is that it has the potential to stop the practice of folks deliberately not getting married so that delivery of a child can be funded by Medicaid; the present system PUNISHES poor married folks who are in the situation of having a spouse being pregnant but being up a creek as far as medical coverage for the child goes.

Fuzzy, I think you were making a mistake many conservatives do by mixing up cause and effect. The explosion of single-parent households in the Inner City, both African American and Hispanic, have next to nothing to do with the welfare system. What really happened is the industrialization took away steady working class income jobs from such neighborhoods. Sadly, even in the seventies and eighties the whole first fire last hired situation came to roost. Not to mention where the focus of the industrialization was in heavily African American communities like Detroit, Gary, East St Louis, Etc.

The end result is that it made a generation of Inner City young black males unmarriageable because there was no economic system by which they could support a family. That same phenomenon spread to Inner City Hispanic communities soon afterwards, and now has started praying on Rural white communities we're out of Whitlock boroughs are dramatically growing and number for much the same reason.

I guess the big difference is that blacks and Latinos have long blamed, rightly in my view, economical E2 yes are overwhelmingly white. Rural White in contrast seem to primarily blame blacks and Latinos, and take a tax on Elite whites as an attack on all White's. Too many rural working-class whites in hard economic Straits still find more in common with purported billionaire Donald Trump then they do equally economically challenged blacks and Latinos on racial and cultural identity. And that's just damn wrong

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1993/04/dan-quayle-was-right/307015/

This article forms the basis of many of my views on the relationship between the disintegration of the family and poverty.  (It's also where I get my "signature" from.) 

[Badger]

I have empathy for their situation. Not the deplorable way they respond to it.

Why would it matter anyway? These people supposedly hate special snowflakes and easily triggered politically correct liberals. Can dish it out but can't take it? I'm just "telling it like it is", the very quality they love about Trump.

I agree with you. I’m tired of the pussy footing and skating around that we do when it comes to uneducated white people because we can’t hurt their feelings. They have no problem getting in the gutter and expressing their disgust with affirmative action, Hispanic immigration, same-sex marriage, or any other policy that don’t like but they can’t handle the truth about an industry that is basically a ing death sentence. Stop trying to pander to ignorant people and tell them the truth.

The more I read posts from liberals like this the more I think leaving the Democratic Party was a good choice.

True enough.  

What truths should the inner-city poor be told?  That their poverty is, largely, the decision of many young single females to bear children outside of marriage, by a male who is not likely to be prepared to act as a husband, father, and family provider (roles that provide family stability)?  That the negative conditions in impoverished urban communities are, in no small measure, made worse (if not caused) by the young male residents' criminal behavior within that community.  Why is it OK to lecture the unemployed coal-miners about their "bigotry", but OK to allow the anti-white sentiments routinely expressed in inner-city communities to go unchallenged?  Why are the inner-city poor that have no high school education, no training (often despite opportunities for such training), but who vote Democratic with regularity viewed by folks like RFK1968 as "low information voters"?

Aaand this is why I'm not a Republican, either.

Whenever we find a group of people who the government and our society has completely failed them, for generations, and now uplifting them from that situation is extremely difficult, the knee-jerk reaction is "Oh they're just lazy.", "Oh, they don't want our help.", "They need to address their own problems as a community first before we can help".

It's a sneering, condescending attitude that enrages me when I see it in either party.

I don't disagree with this.  I don't advocate the lecturing and sneering.  It serves no useful purpose. 

I DO think that the decline in family formation and family stability IS, however, an important factor in both urban and rural poverty.  The likely long-term outlook and long-term outcome of a child in a low-income family with two (2) marital parents in the home, in general, is so much more positive than long-term outlooks and outcomes of non-marital families that it amazes me that we have to educate folks as to the advantage.  This is not to say that the worst two-parent marital family, riddled with abuse and dysfunction, is better than the best single-parent family with a positive role model as head of household, but it is very much true in the aggregate.  Rural AND urban poverty is, very much, driven by out-of-wedlock births and the decreased stability of non-marital households (again, in the aggregate). 

Incidentally, one reason I am for single-payer healthcare is that it has the potential to stop the practice of folks deliberately not getting married so that delivery of a child can be funded by Medicaid; the present system PUNISHES poor married folks who are in the situation of having a spouse being pregnant but being up a creek as far as medical coverage for the child goes.

Fuzzy, I think you were making a mistake many conservatives do by mixing up cause and effect. The explosion of single-parent households in the Inner City, both African American and Hispanic, have next to nothing to do with the welfare system. What really happened is the industrialization took away steady working class income jobs from such neighborhoods. Sadly, even in the seventies and eighties the whole first fire last hired situation came to roost. Not to mention where the focus of the industrialization was in heavily African American communities like Detroit, Gary, East St Louis, Etc.

The end result is that it made a generation of Inner City young black males unmarriageable because there was no economic system by which they could support a family. That same phenomenon spread to Inner City Hispanic communities soon afterwards, and now has started praying on Rural white communities we're out of Whitlock boroughs are dramatically growing and number for much the same reason.

I guess the big difference is that blacks and Latinos have long blamed, rightly in my view, economical E2 yes are overwhelmingly white. Rural White in contrast seem to primarily blame blacks and Latinos, and take a tax on Elite whites as an attack on all White's. Too many rural working-class whites in hard economic Straits still find more in common with purported billionaire Donald Trump then they do equally economically challenged blacks and Latinos on racial and cultural identity. And that's just damn wrong

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1993/04/dan-quayle-was-right/307015/

This article forms the basis of many of my views on the relationship between the disintegration of the family and poverty.  (It's also where I get my "signature" from.) 

I remember the article quite well when it came out. It was clear then, and a hundred times clearer now, Quayle and his conservative ilk were--are today still are--dead wrong. The idea that our of wedlock births are significantly increased by pop culture like Murphy Brown and hip-hop lyrics is downright laughable. While it's true acceptance of out-of-wedlock births becomes more acceptable as it becomes more common, the root cause is still fundamentally, overwhelmingly, de-industrialization and income gains going overwhelmingly towards the elite leaving a growing underclass of young males un-marriageable.

(A quick aside about Murphy Brown: She was a successful newscaster who decided to keep her baby after getting pregnant from a one night stand with her ex-husband. How in hell is anything she did do anything wrong?? What was she supposed to do? Join a convent after divorce? Have an abortion?!? Oh, and no one said anything about her ex-husband being at fault.)

Conservatives want to close their ears and deny nearly 40 years of economic dislocation for young males caused by policies they support, and try to shift the blame on scary cultural changes in music and non-Victorian sexual mores they fetishize (at least in public).

Reality is a demanding bitch, and gives no ground here.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

"Let them eat Code" - people in this thread.

[Beet]

You can't teach old dogs new tricks.

That's how snot-nosed young Progressives, many of whose idea of hard work is pulling an all-nighter studying for finals, view folks who have invested their bodies, health, and lives in a job that has been as much of a career for them as IT is for a computer nerd.

As someone who has had an IT career as a computer nerd and has for the past 10 years, I don't think you can compare coding to being a coal miner. As a computer programmer I sat in an air-conditioned, brightly lit room on a comfortable chair, and the only time I needed to get up was when I wanted the exercise. My shifts were seven and a half hours with an hour for lunch, and if I wanted to spent some time browsing the Internet, or hey, even Atlas, it was no biggie. And if I got fired, no biggie, because I don't have a family, a home, or a mortgage.

Coal miners do much more physical work, it's more continuously demanding, it's certainly more tiring, their shifts are often longer. They work underground in dark, often claustrophic spaces, with harmful chemicals in the air. They get dirty. There is the risk of accidents, although thankfully now due to regulations it isn't as much as before. If they support a family, they can't afford to lose their job. The parts of the country they live in aren't glamorous. I have a lot of respect for coal miners.

It's upsetting that my party, in its concern for environmental protection and climate science, both of which I believe in, have acted against the economic interests of this group. In my view, people should not be treated as a commodity who can simply be discarded when the "market" or a government priority changes to squeeze their profession, coal miners included. They are, after all, human beings, often with dependents. Retraining is not always a solution to this. If a person has worked in a job for a long time, if a person is older, they will reasonably not be easily trained to do something else, and even if they are, that something else may not pay as well or may cause social dislocation. What we need is to take this into account, and frankly, I believe, smooth over labor market changes so that some people are paid to work in a job even if the "market" says otherwise, until they can retire. So instead of just closing a mine or factory, there should be a slow transition where new people stop being hired, those who can retire retire, and those who want to retrain can retrain, but not everyone is fired all at once.

[Indy Texas]

In the early 20th century, when industrial growth and agricultural changes had made the grand country estates of the British nobility unsustainable, what did the former tenants and servants of those aristocratic households do? They moved to the cities and got different jobs.

What did farmers in Oklahoma do when the Dust Bowl made it impossible to continue farming their lands? They moved elsewhere - often to California, which was a whole world away back then.

I don't understand why we've come to this idea that people should be bound to their land and that moving even a few hours drive away is a completely heartless and unacceptable proposition, when that is literally what Americans have done for hundreds of years.

So, simply because that's how something was done in the past, that's how things should be done in the present and future? I'm not against retraining these folks into other areas; I'm 100% against the continuation of coal's usage in any form. Even the most radical of Democratic environmental policies are too weak, in my opinion. But you can't simply uproot people, displace them from their communities, and toss them into financial insecurity simply because "muh market." F*** the market and f*** anyone who thinks we, as humans, in a society as complex and sophisticated as ours, should have to be slaves to an "invisible hand," which is nothing more than private, wealthy investors, stockholders, financial "experts," and corporations calling the shots while we all just have to stand-by and watch as they dictate our lives to us. We, as humans, should control our destiny; each of us as individuals, not have some wealthy people scattered across the country and globe decide winners and losers, pick and choose where investments will go, whose community will face ruin next, whose job will be lost next, which law should be passed, whose views will be express on TV news.

So refusing to train for a new job and refusing to move and blaming everyone else is what passes for controlling one's destiny nowadays?

You yourself oppose them continuing to mine coal because of the environmental effects. But you don't think they should have to move. And you don't think they should have to train for new jobs.

So what is your plan? Does this 33 year old get to collect a pension for 60+ years? Are the rest of us expected to pay for that? Including those of us who have moved for work and who have changed careers before?

[JA]

In the early 20th century, when industrial growth and agricultural changes had made the grand country estates of the British nobility unsustainable, what did the former tenants and servants of those aristocratic households do? They moved to the cities and got different jobs.

What did farmers in Oklahoma do when the Dust Bowl made it impossible to continue farming their lands? They moved elsewhere - often to California, which was a whole world away back then.

I don't understand why we've come to this idea that people should be bound to their land and that moving even a few hours drive away is a completely heartless and unacceptable proposition, when that is literally what Americans have done for hundreds of years.

So, simply because that's how something was done in the past, that's how things should be done in the present and future? I'm not against retraining these folks into other areas; I'm 100% against the continuation of coal's usage in any form. Even the most radical of Democratic environmental policies are too weak, in my opinion. But you can't simply uproot people, displace them from their communities, and toss them into financial insecurity simply because "muh market." F*** the market and f*** anyone who thinks we, as humans, in a society as complex and sophisticated as ours, should have to be slaves to an "invisible hand," which is nothing more than private, wealthy investors, stockholders, financial "experts," and corporations calling the shots while we all just have to stand-by and watch as they dictate our lives to us. We, as humans, should control our destiny; each of us as individuals, not have some wealthy people scattered across the country and globe decide winners and losers, pick and choose where investments will go, whose community will face ruin next, whose job will be lost next, which law should be passed, whose views will be express on TV news.

So refusing to train for a new job and refusing to move and blaming everyone else is what passes for controlling one's destiny nowadays?

You yourself oppose them continuing to mine coal because of the environmental effects. But you don't think they should have to move. And you don't think they should have to train for new jobs.

So what is your plan? Does this 33 year old get to collect a pension for 60+ years? Are the rest of us expected to pay for that? Including those of us who have moved for work and who have changed careers before?

I'd like to know where I said they shouldn't retrain for a different career. If my position is in favor of the abolition of coal usage, then obviously all workers within that field under a certain age (there's no particular limit, but let's say 55) should be retrained. My complaint is against (1) the way retraining is currently done in the US since it should include better social and financial support for individuals and communities, (2) the fact that after retraining many/most workers will have to relocate from their current local areas, and (3) the market is still in control of these factors. For example, rather than force coal miners who largely live in Appalachia from having to leave an area that the coal industry, along with the support of the US government, used as a base of extraction and industrial growth, thereby attracting most of the ancestors of the existing population, the government should conduct massive expansion of investment into the area to focus on tapping into its green energy potential, new infrastructure projects, social work projects to tackle the social crisis in the area, and support the growth of local and small businesses throughout Appalachia (the same applies to all suffering areas).

The people and the environment should be put first; the people, through their democratically elected government and empowered personal choices, should be in total control of their local environment and economy and, by extension, their destiny. It's not about paying anyone to "lay around;" it's about mitigating the harmful effects of a financialized market economy that has no regard for environmental impacts or the consequences for human lives. Give the power back to the people, where it belongs, and these people in Appalachia (and elsewhere) will have much better lives. Don't just throw them to the heartless, profit-oriented market and abandon them when the winds of profit change.

[pbrower2a]

I DO think that the decline in family formation and family stability IS, however, an important factor in both urban and rural poverty.  The likely long-term outlook and long-term outcome of a child in a low-income family with two (2) marital parents in the home, in general, is so much more positive than long-term outlooks and outcomes of non-marital families that it amazes me that we have to educate folks as to the advantage.  This is not to say that the worst two-parent marital family, riddled with abuse and dysfunction, is better than the best single-parent family with a positive role model as head of household, but it is very much true in the aggregate.  Rural AND urban poverty is, very much, driven by out-of-wedlock births and the decreased stability of non-marital households (again, in the aggregate). 

Incidentally, one reason I am for single-payer healthcare is that it has the potential to stop the practice of folks deliberately not getting married so that delivery of a child can be funded by Medicaid; the present system PUNISHES poor married folks who are in the situation of having a spouse being pregnant but being up a creek as far as medical coverage for the child goes.

Fuzzy, I think you were making a mistake many conservatives do by mixing up cause and effect. The explosion of single-parent households in the Inner City, both African American and Hispanic, have next to nothing to do with the welfare system. What really happened is the industrialization took away steady working class income jobs from such neighborhoods. Sadly, even in the seventies and eighties the whole first fire last hired situation came to roost. Not to mention where the focus of the industrialization was in heavily African American communities like Detroit, Gary, East St Louis, Etc.

The end result is that it made a generation of Inner City young black males unmarriageable because there was no economic system by which they could support a family. That same phenomenon spread to Inner City Hispanic communities soon afterwards, and now has started praying on Rural white communities we're out of Whitlock boroughs are dramatically growing and number for much the same reason.

I guess the big difference is that blacks and Latinos have long blamed, rightly in my view, economical E2 yes are overwhelmingly white. Rural White in contrast seem to primarily blame blacks and Latinos, and take a tax on Elite whites as an attack on all White's. Too many rural working-class whites in hard economic Straits still find more in common with purported billionaire Donald Trump then they do equally economically challenged blacks and Latinos on racial and cultural identity. And that's just damn wrong

When pay is low and uncertain, it is thoroughly rational to defer marriage and child-raising. It is also contrary to human  nature, and practices contrary to human nature are at best temporary measures. Human nature is what it is for good reason.

What has been true of urban blacks and Latinos is appearing in non-urban White America. Shattered dreams? Opiates and meth might provide an outlet. Is that new? No -- just a different group of people. Crime becomes more commonplace -- child abuse, petty thefts, and sex crimes.

I live in a hick town in the Midwest, and I can see the same sorts of poverty businesses that one expects in depressed areas of the big cities. Check-cashing places. Pawn shops. Payday lenders. Rent-to-own emporiums. I see stores closing only to remain vacant. But it's not only my town; it's in others nearby. This is rural America.

I look at this short German documentary (it is in German, but the visuals require no translation), and it looks (except that the victims of oppression are white) like what would expect from an East German propaganda piece from the 1970s  on how the monstrous capitalist system treats black people in Detroit or Cleveland. But this is a small city, the people shown are white, and it isn't the 1970s. This is now. If you can't understand the German speech, then you still need no translation of the images.

http://www.ardmediathek.de/tv/ttt-titel-thesen-temperamente/Armut-als-Familientradition/Das-Erste/Video?bcastId=431902&documentId=41946122

This is from ARD -- and not from "DDR TV".

Donald Trump won by offering scapegoats, but he cannot solve the problems that he was elected without valid solutions. Further enrichment of economic elites is likely to cause more economic instability and more distress.       

[Fuzzy Bear]

I have empathy for their situation. Not the deplorable way they respond to it.

Why would it matter anyway? These people supposedly hate special snowflakes and easily triggered politically correct liberals. Can dish it out but can't take it? I'm just "telling it like it is", the very quality they love about Trump.

I agree with you. I’m tired of the pussy footing and skating around that we do when it comes to uneducated white people because we can’t hurt their feelings. They have no problem getting in the gutter and expressing their disgust with affirmative action, Hispanic immigration, same-sex marriage, or any other policy that don’t like but they can’t handle the truth about an industry that is basically a ing death sentence. Stop trying to pander to ignorant people and tell them the truth.

The more I read posts from liberals like this the more I think leaving the Democratic Party was a good choice.

True enough.  

What truths should the inner-city poor be told?  That their poverty is, largely, the decision of many young single females to bear children outside of marriage, by a male who is not likely to be prepared to act as a husband, father, and family provider (roles that provide family stability)?  That the negative conditions in impoverished urban communities are, in no small measure, made worse (if not caused) by the young male residents' criminal behavior within that community.  Why is it OK to lecture the unemployed coal-miners about their "bigotry", but OK to allow the anti-white sentiments routinely expressed in inner-city communities to go unchallenged?  Why are the inner-city poor that have no high school education, no training (often despite opportunities for such training), but who vote Democratic with regularity viewed by folks like RFK1968 as "low information voters"?

Aaand this is why I'm not a Republican, either.

Whenever we find a group of people who the government and our society has completely failed them, for generations, and now uplifting them from that situation is extremely difficult, the knee-jerk reaction is "Oh they're just lazy.", "Oh, they don't want our help.", "They need to address their own problems as a community first before we can help".

It's a sneering, condescending attitude that enrages me when I see it in either party.

I don't disagree with this.  I don't advocate the lecturing and sneering.  It serves no useful purpose. 

I DO think that the decline in family formation and family stability IS, however, an important factor in both urban and rural poverty.  The likely long-term outlook and long-term outcome of a child in a low-income family with two (2) marital parents in the home, in general, is so much more positive than long-term outlooks and outcomes of non-marital families that it amazes me that we have to educate folks as to the advantage.  This is not to say that the worst two-parent marital family, riddled with abuse and dysfunction, is better than the best single-parent family with a positive role model as head of household, but it is very much true in the aggregate.  Rural AND urban poverty is, very much, driven by out-of-wedlock births and the decreased stability of non-marital households (again, in the aggregate). 

Incidentally, one reason I am for single-payer healthcare is that it has the potential to stop the practice of folks deliberately not getting married so that delivery of a child can be funded by Medicaid; the present system PUNISHES poor married folks who are in the situation of having a spouse being pregnant but being up a creek as far as medical coverage for the child goes.

Fuzzy, I think you were making a mistake many conservatives do by mixing up cause and effect. The explosion of single-parent households in the Inner City, both African American and Hispanic, have next to nothing to do with the welfare system. What really happened is the industrialization took away steady working class income jobs from such neighborhoods. Sadly, even in the seventies and eighties the whole first fire last hired situation came to roost. Not to mention where the focus of the industrialization was in heavily African American communities like Detroit, Gary, East St Louis, Etc.

The end result is that it made a generation of Inner City young black males unmarriageable because there was no economic system by which they could support a family. That same phenomenon spread to Inner City Hispanic communities soon afterwards, and now has started praying on Rural white communities we're out of Whitlock boroughs are dramatically growing and number for much the same reason.

I guess the big difference is that blacks and Latinos have long blamed, rightly in my view, economical E2 yes are overwhelmingly white. Rural White in contrast seem to primarily blame blacks and Latinos, and take a tax on Elite whites as an attack on all White's. Too many rural working-class whites in hard economic Straits still find more in common with purported billionaire Donald Trump then they do equally economically challenged blacks and Latinos on racial and cultural identity. And that's just damn wrong

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1993/04/dan-quayle-was-right/307015/

This article forms the basis of many of my views on the relationship between the disintegration of the family and poverty.  (It's also where I get my "signature" from.) 

I remember the article quite well when it came out. It was clear then, and a hundred times clearer now, Quayle and his conservative ilk were--are today still are--dead wrong. The idea that our of wedlock births are significantly increased by pop culture like Murphy Brown and hip-hop lyrics is downright laughable. While it's true acceptance of out-of-wedlock births becomes more acceptable as it becomes more common, the root cause is still fundamentally, overwhelmingly, de-industrialization and income gains going overwhelmingly towards the elite leaving a growing underclass of young males un-marriageable.

(A quick aside about Murphy Brown: She was a successful newscaster who decided to keep her baby after getting pregnant from a one night stand with her ex-husband. How in hell is anything she did do anything wrong?? What was she supposed to do? Join a convent after divorce? Have an abortion?!? Oh, and no one said anything about her ex-husband being at fault.)

Conservatives want to close their ears and deny nearly 40 years of economic dislocation for young males caused by policies they support, and try to shift the blame on scary cultural changes in music and non-Victorian sexual mores they fetishize (at least in public).

Reality is a demanding bitch, and gives no ground here.

I certainly don't support a number of policies that have caused economic dislocation, and I don't deny the role of these policies in families ending up below the poverty line.  But the article is entirely correct in that the decline in family formation increase in family disintegration is, very much, a factor in families (A) entering poverty, and (B) remaining in poverty.  

"Dan Quayle" is, really, a side point in that article.  The point of the article is that we, as a society, have shifted our paradigm from one that focuses primarily on the needs of children (stability and continuity) that compels a family to form, and to stay together, to one that focuses on the needs of adults (options, choices, personal fulfillment, frustration with a partner) that drives one or both of the adults in a family with children to divorce.  The article also points out that this came about, in part, by removing the stigma of divorce, out-of-wedlock childbirth, etc.  "Pop Culture" is something of a side issue, it has been a factor in driving these trends, but not the only one.

[Fuzzy Bear]

I DO think that the decline in family formation and family stability IS, however, an important factor in both urban and rural poverty.  The likely long-term outlook and long-term outcome of a child in a low-income family with two (2) marital parents in the home, in general, is so much more positive than long-term outlooks and outcomes of non-marital families that it amazes me that we have to educate folks as to the advantage.  This is not to say that the worst two-parent marital family, riddled with abuse and dysfunction, is better than the best single-parent family with a positive role model as head of household, but it is very much true in the aggregate.  Rural AND urban poverty is, very much, driven by out-of-wedlock births and the decreased stability of non-marital households (again, in the aggregate). 

Incidentally, one reason I am for single-payer healthcare is that it has the potential to stop the practice of folks deliberately not getting married so that delivery of a child can be funded by Medicaid; the present system PUNISHES poor married folks who are in the situation of having a spouse being pregnant but being up a creek as far as medical coverage for the child goes.

Fuzzy, I think you were making a mistake many conservatives do by mixing up cause and effect. The explosion of single-parent households in the Inner City, both African American and Hispanic, have next to nothing to do with the welfare system. What really happened is the industrialization took away steady working class income jobs from such neighborhoods. Sadly, even in the seventies and eighties the whole first fire last hired situation came to roost. Not to mention where the focus of the industrialization was in heavily African American communities like Detroit, Gary, East St Louis, Etc.

The end result is that it made a generation of Inner City young black males unmarriageable because there was no economic system by which they could support a family. That same phenomenon spread to Inner City Hispanic communities soon afterwards, and now has started praying on Rural white communities we're out of Whitlock boroughs are dramatically growing and number for much the same reason.

I guess the big difference is that blacks and Latinos have long blamed, rightly in my view, economical E2 yes are overwhelmingly white. Rural White in contrast seem to primarily blame blacks and Latinos, and take a tax on Elite whites as an attack on all White's. Too many rural working-class whites in hard economic Straits still find more in common with purported billionaire Donald Trump then they do equally economically challenged blacks and Latinos on racial and cultural identity. And that's just damn wrong

When pay is low and uncertain, it is thoroughly rational to defer marriage and child-raising. It is also contrary to human  nature, and practices contrary to human nature are at best temporary measures. Human nature is what it is for good reason.

What has been true of urban blacks and Latinos is appearing in non-urban White America. Shattered dreams? Opiates and meth might provide an outlet. Is that new? No -- just a different group of people. Crime becomes more commonplace -- child abuse, petty thefts, and sex crimes.

I live in a hick town in the Midwest, and I can see the same sorts of poverty businesses that one expects in depressed areas of the big cities. Check-cashing places. Pawn shops. Payday lenders. Rent-to-own emporiums. I see stores closing only to remain vacant. But it's not only my town; it's in others nearby. This is rural America.

I look at this short German documentary (it is in German, but the visuals require no translation), and it looks (except that the victims of oppression are white) like what would expect from an East German propaganda piece from the 1970s  on how the monstrous capitalist system treats black people in Detroit or Cleveland. But this is a small city, the people shown are white, and it isn't the 1970s. This is now. If you can't understand the German speech, then you still need no translation of the images.

http://www.ardmediathek.de/tv/ttt-titel-thesen-temperamente/Armut-als-Familientradition/Das-Erste/Video?bcastId=431902&documentId=41946122

This is from ARD -- and not from "DDR TV".

Donald Trump won by offering scapegoats, but he cannot solve the problems that he was elected without valid solutions. Further enrichment of economic elites is likely to cause more economic instability and more distress.   

I am certainly in agreement with the solution indicated in the paragraph highlighted.   I do believe, however, that open borders and free trade a la Bush and Clinton are vehicles by which the economic elites are further enriched.  Not the only vehicles, mind you, but identifiable vehicles, nonetheless.

[DavidB.]

I'd like to know where I said they shouldn't retrain for a different career. If my position is in favor of the abolition of coal usage, then obviously all workers within that field under a certain age (there's no particular limit, but let's say 55) should be retrained. My complaint is against (1) the way retraining is currently done in the US since it should include better social and financial support for individuals and communities, (2) the fact that after retraining many/most workers will have to relocate from their current local areas, and (3) the market is still in control of these factors. For example, rather than force coal miners who largely live in Appalachia from having to leave an area that the coal industry, along with the support of the US government, used as a base of extraction and industrial growth, thereby attracting most of the ancestors of the existing population, the government should conduct massive expansion of investment into the area to focus on tapping into its green energy potential, new infrastructure projects, social work projects to tackle the social crisis in the area, and support the growth of local and small businesses throughout Appalachia (the same applies to all suffering areas).

The people and the environment should be put first; the people, through their democratically elected government and empowered personal choices, should be in total control of their local environment and economy and, by extension, their destiny. It's not about paying anyone to "lay around;" it's about mitigating the harmful effects of a financialized market economy that has no regard for environmental impacts or the consequences for human lives. Give the power back to the people, where it belongs, and these people in Appalachia (and elsewhere) will have much better lives. Don't just throw them to the heartless, profit-oriented market and abandon them when the winds of profit change.

*hat tip*

[mvd10]

Giving these people hope while fully knowing he can't fulfill his promises without f**ing up the rest of us probably is one of the most cruel things Trump has done.

[Bojack Horseman]

Obama didn’t kill coal, natural gas did. In fact, we’re watching coal’s corpse rot.

[Badger]

I have empathy for their situation. Not the deplorable way they respond to it.

Why would it matter anyway? These people supposedly hate special snowflakes and easily triggered politically correct liberals. Can dish it out but can't take it? I'm just "telling it like it is", the very quality they love about Trump.

I agree with you. I’m tired of the pussy footing and skating around that we do when it comes to uneducated white people because we can’t hurt their feelings. They have no problem getting in the gutter and expressing their disgust with affirmative action, Hispanic immigration, same-sex marriage, or any other policy that don’t like but they can’t handle the truth about an industry that is basically a ing death sentence. Stop trying to pander to ignorant people and tell them the truth.

The more I read posts from liberals like this the more I think leaving the Democratic Party was a good choice.

True enough.  

What truths should the inner-city poor be told?  That their poverty is, largely, the decision of many young single females to bear children outside of marriage, by a male who is not likely to be prepared to act as a husband, father, and family provider (roles that provide family stability)?  That the negative conditions in impoverished urban communities are, in no small measure, made worse (if not caused) by the young male residents' criminal behavior within that community.  Why is it OK to lecture the unemployed coal-miners about their "bigotry", but OK to allow the anti-white sentiments routinely expressed in inner-city communities to go unchallenged?  Why are the inner-city poor that have no high school education, no training (often despite opportunities for such training), but who vote Democratic with regularity viewed by folks like RFK1968 as "low information voters"?

Aaand this is why I'm not a Republican, either.

Whenever we find a group of people who the government and our society has completely failed them, for generations, and now uplifting them from that situation is extremely difficult, the knee-jerk reaction is "Oh they're just lazy.", "Oh, they don't want our help.", "They need to address their own problems as a community first before we can help".

It's a sneering, condescending attitude that enrages me when I see it in either party.

I don't disagree with this.  I don't advocate the lecturing and sneering.  It serves no useful purpose. 

I DO think that the decline in family formation and family stability IS, however, an important factor in both urban and rural poverty.  The likely long-term outlook and long-term outcome of a child in a low-income family with two (2) marital parents in the home, in general, is so much more positive than long-term outlooks and outcomes of non-marital families that it amazes me that we have to educate folks as to the advantage.  This is not to say that the worst two-parent marital family, riddled with abuse and dysfunction, is better than the best single-parent family with a positive role model as head of household, but it is very much true in the aggregate.  Rural AND urban poverty is, very much, driven by out-of-wedlock births and the decreased stability of non-marital households (again, in the aggregate). 

Incidentally, one reason I am for single-payer healthcare is that it has the potential to stop the practice of folks deliberately not getting married so that delivery of a child can be funded by Medicaid; the present system PUNISHES poor married folks who are in the situation of having a spouse being pregnant but being up a creek as far as medical coverage for the child goes.

Fuzzy, I think you were making a mistake many conservatives do by mixing up cause and effect. The explosion of single-parent households in the Inner City, both African American and Hispanic, have next to nothing to do with the welfare system. What really happened is the industrialization took away steady working class income jobs from such neighborhoods. Sadly, even in the seventies and eighties the whole first fire last hired situation came to roost. Not to mention where the focus of the industrialization was in heavily African American communities like Detroit, Gary, East St Louis, Etc.

The end result is that it made a generation of Inner City young black males unmarriageable because there was no economic system by which they could support a family. That same phenomenon spread to Inner City Hispanic communities soon afterwards, and now has started praying on Rural white communities we're out of Whitlock boroughs are dramatically growing and number for much the same reason.

I guess the big difference is that blacks and Latinos have long blamed, rightly in my view, economical E2 yes are overwhelmingly white. Rural White in contrast seem to primarily blame blacks and Latinos, and take a tax on Elite whites as an attack on all White's. Too many rural working-class whites in hard economic Straits still find more in common with purported billionaire Donald Trump then they do equally economically challenged blacks and Latinos on racial and cultural identity. And that's just damn wrong

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1993/04/dan-quayle-was-right/307015/

This article forms the basis of many of my views on the relationship between the disintegration of the family and poverty.  (It's also where I get my "signature" from.) 

I remember the article quite well when it came out. It was clear then, and a hundred times clearer now, Quayle and his conservative ilk were--are today still are--dead wrong. The idea that our of wedlock births are significantly increased by pop culture like Murphy Brown and hip-hop lyrics is downright laughable. While it's true acceptance of out-of-wedlock births becomes more acceptable as it becomes more common, the root cause is still fundamentally, overwhelmingly, de-industrialization and income gains going overwhelmingly towards the elite leaving a growing underclass of young males un-marriageable.

(A quick aside about Murphy Brown: She was a successful newscaster who decided to keep her baby after getting pregnant from a one night stand with her ex-husband. How in hell is anything she did do anything wrong?? What was she supposed to do? Join a convent after divorce? Have an abortion?!? Oh, and no one said anything about her ex-husband being at fault.)

Conservatives want to close their ears and deny nearly 40 years of economic dislocation for young males caused by policies they support, and try to shift the blame on scary cultural changes in music and non-Victorian sexual mores they fetishize (at least in public).

Reality is a demanding bitch, and gives no ground here.

I certainly don't support a number of policies that have caused economic dislocation, and I don't deny the role of these policies in families ending up below the poverty line.  But the article is entirely correct in that the decline in family formation increase in family disintegration is, very much, a factor in families (A) entering poverty, and (B) remaining in poverty.  

"Dan Quayle" is, really, a side point in that article.  The point of the article is that we, as a society, have shifted our paradigm from one that focuses primarily on the needs of children (stability and continuity) that compels a family to form, and to stay together, to one that focuses on the needs of adults (options, choices, personal fulfillment, frustration with a partner) that drives one or both of the adults in a family with children to divorce.  The article also points out that this came about, in part, by removing the stigma of divorce, out-of-wedlock childbirth, etc.  "Pop Culture" is something of a side issue, it has been a factor in driving these trends, but not the only one.

Families can't prosper in poverty. A unit that gets married has no greater chance to escape poverty without at least working class jobs to support them. Create jobs, families can follow. Expect moralizing to create stable families and thereby reduce poverty, and you'll achieve neither.

Cause and effect, FB. Don't mix cause and effect.

[Intell]

A lot of people in this thread to have a R avatar.

[Dr Oz Lost Party!]

The day his mindless supporters finally realize the coal industry’s death is inevitable is the day Hillary goes to prison, ok?

[Doimper]

I have empathy for their situation. Not the deplorable way they respond to it.

Why would it matter anyway? These people supposedly hate special snowflakes and easily triggered politically correct liberals. Can dish it out but can't take it? I'm just "telling it like it is", the very quality they love about Trump.

I agree with you. I’m tired of the pussy footing and skating around that we do when it comes to uneducated white people because we can’t hurt their feelings. They have no problem getting in the gutter and expressing their disgust with affirmative action, Hispanic immigration, same-sex marriage, or any other policy that don’t like but they can’t handle the truth about an industry that is basically a ing death sentence. Stop trying to pander to ignorant people and tell them the truth.

The more I read posts from liberals like this the more I think leaving the Democratic Party was a good choice.

If you're impressionable enough to allow the posts of anonymous Internet people to significantly shape your perception of a major political party, then bye. We're not going to miss you.

[IceSpear]

A lot of people in this thread to have a R avatar.

I'm pretty sure an R avatar would be more fitting for the "leftists" who are far more concerned with defending poor white men than they are about defending the countless marginalized groups many of those poor white men despise and who they vote to selectively punish. I'm not sure why so many of you continue to insist their hypocrisy is morally justifiable. "Shaniqua in inner city Chicago is a welfare queen for getting food stamps, but I EARNED my disability check!"

Politicians have known for centuries now that as long as you tell the poor whites they're above those "other people", usually blacks but now extending to other groups as well, they'll happily support you. They aid and abet their own victimization, and they do so with glee. I have far more sympathy for those who deal with their situation without scapegoating minorities for all their problems.

Resentful and prejudiced whites fuel fascism, which leftists claim to vehemently oppose. Yet you then continue to make excuses for their deplorable behavior. Ironic.

[Santander]

Politicians have known for centuries now that as long as you tell the poor whites they're above those "other people", usually blacks but now extending to other groups as well, they'll happily support you. They aid and abet their own victimization, and they do so with glee. I have far more sympathy for those who deal with their situation without scapegoating minorities for all their problems.

"Everybody seems to be here. Everybody white. The city auditorium is packed with sweaty, jostling bodies. Two little blond-haired boys try not to get stepped on as their mama, holding tight to their hands, steers them through the cheering crowd. The band is playing Dixie as the people clap their hands in time, and someone is waving a Confederate battle flag back and forth, back and forth. Sam and I stand together, understanding only a little of what is being said. The Governor talks about a lot of things, but mostly he seems to be telling us that we are better than the Negroes. We had not known that we were better than anybody."