Death By Coal

Hillary got slammed hard in 2016 for a selectively edited comment about "...we're going to kill the coal industry..."

Of Course #1: Trump and the GOP seized on the opportunity to make empty promises in order to drag Hillary down and boost their own prospects because...

...Of Course #2: They always deliberately ignored the context. She was talking about how people worked their asses off - for generations - producing that coal and making the coal companies rich as fuck, and we can't just leave them to rot when the market and technology pass them by.

Of Course #3: The Press Poodles never clarified anything - they let the bullshit slide.

Because a good political slap fight sells lots of mouth wash and boner pills.

WaPo:

Murray Energy Corp., the private coal giant whose founder pushed the Trump administration for an overhaul of what it called “anti-coal” environmental policy, filed for Chapter 11 protection on Tuesday.

It’s the fifth coal company to land in bankruptcy court this year, in a rapidly shrinking industry that’s being squeezed out of the U.S. power market by cheaper options such as natural gas, solar and wind power.

The long-anticipated bankruptcy is another sign that President Trump’s efforts to save the sputtering coal industry, a central promise of his 2016 campaign, have largely failed.

It also speaks to the “significant stress on the coal industry today,” said Benjamin Nelson, a coal analyst and Moody’s vice president. Coal once fueled about half of all U.S. electricity; now it powers less than a quarter.

Penny post card - ca 1920
Pollution was a sign of progress and power, and it made us proud.

And the kicker:

That's Bob Murray - founder and CEO of Murray Energy. He has to wear a cannula because he needs the oxygen; because his lungs were damaged; because he worked in the mines.

Murray, who started working in coal mines at 16 to support his family, has long been a Trump ally, donating generously to his campaign and hosting a fundraiser in West Virginia this summer. Murray Energy operates more than a dozen mines throughout Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Illinois and Utah and produces 76 million tons of coal annually.

In 2017, Murray met with White House energy officials to offer an “action plan” calling for deep cuts in the Environmental Protection Agency’s staff, withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, a rollback of safety and pollution regulations, and the repeal of President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

Within a year, the administration followed through by pledging to withdraw from the Paris accord, delivering cuts at the EPA and beginning to repeal and replace the Obama-era plan to curb climate-warming emissions from coal-fired power plants.

There's very little that could better exemplify the perverse delusions of today's version of Unfettered Free Market Capitalism.