Appalachian Coal Communities Brace For Coronavirus

Appalachia - including large swaths of Southwest Virginia - is to a large extent an economic basket case due to multiple factors two of which are (i) the decline of the coal industry (which continues to shrink despite Trump's ridiculous claims to bring it back), and (ii) the region's reactionary politics and embrace of right wing Christianity that discourages new, progressive business from even considering relocating to the area. Now, Covid-19 may be poised to wreak havoc on a population that in general has poor health and a shortage of hospitals and medical care access, especially since many lack heath care insurance (unlike most Appalachian states, Virginia and Kentucky have expanded Medicaid).  A piece in Huffington Post looks at  the potential catastrophe if coronavirus moves into into Appalachia in a major way.  Here are highlights:

Coal is no longer the commodity it once was, but its legacy in Appalachia remains: scores of miners with black lung disease who are now at a high risk of suffering from the coronavirus.

Coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, better known as black lung, is a scarring of the lungs caused by years of coal dust inhalation. At least one in 10 underground miners has black lung, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but experts say the actual number could be much higher. As the lungs scar, it becomes harder to breathe, so the thought of adding COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus, to the mix is terrifying to these workers. 

[M]any fear it’s only a matter of time until the virus contributes to a triple-whammy in Appalachian mining communities: a population with elevated health risks, an economy in free-fall and limited health care resources. . . . . “It’s probably just going to wipe us out.”

Appalachia, which stretches from New York to Alabama and once produced most of the nation’s coal, is particularly at risk from the pandemic because of its residents’ poor health. Appalachians are more likely than other Americans to have ailments such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes, due in part to smoking and a more sedentary lifestyle, according to the Appalachian Regional Commission, all of which could exacerbate the effects of COVID-19. . . . COVID-19 “would be a nail in the coffin.”

The Appalachian region has also lost dozens of rural hospitals in recent years, according to the University of North Carolina ― a trend in rural areas across the country. Black lung patients often travel an hour or more to visit doctors, Go said.  . . . And coronavirus has already stretched regional health care resources even thinner.

Telemedicine, which allows doctors to use video and other interactive tools to treat patients from afar, would be helpful during the pandemic, Doyle said. But, he added, many rural black lung patients have neither the technology nor broadband service for telemedicine.

The National Mining Association, which lobbied for these cuts, told HuffPost in a written statement that companies are “adjusting to this new reality and following government guidelines, with distancing measures being taken, increased cleaning schedules ... and limits on gatherings of groups.”

But in southern West Virginia, Doyle said he hasn’t seen much change in mining operations in recent weeks. Mine workers, recognizable in blue outfits with reflective stripes, are still walking around town as usual, he said, possibly spreading the virus without knowing.

“It looks to me like they’re going about their business,” Doyle said. “Until their co-workers start falling ill, I don’t think they’re going to change. A lot of people here are not convinced they need to do anything.”

Prospect of Virginia Gun Control Exposes Insanity of Far Right

Gun nuts in Richmond back in July 2019.

Some studies indicate that right wing extremism is now a far greater threat in America than any sort of threat from Islamic extremism.  Given the lunacy on display by far right groups and the gun fetish crowd in response to proposed sane gun control laws, this scary reality is now in open view with threats being made against the governor and one rural county in Southwest Virginia taking measures to allow the establishment of a county militia to oppose the state laws (one more example of why no one sane wants to move a business to that region of the state).  Added to the general insanity of the gun crowd is the deliberate dissemination of untrue conspiracy stories on the Internet by groups that exist in some bizarre alternate reality.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the situation which, to me, underscores why proposed gun control laws are needed now more than ever.  Here are article highlights:

Gun rights advocates and militia members from around the country are urging thousands of armed protesters to descend on Virginia's capital later this month to stop newly empowered Democrats from passing gun-control bills.

What began as a handful of rural Virginia counties declaring themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries” has jumped the state’s borders and become an Internet phenomenon. Far-right websites and commenters are declaring that Virginia is the place to take a stand against what they see as a national trend of weakening gun rights.

[A] Nevada-based group called the Oath Keepers said it’s sending training teams to help form posses and militia in Virginia. The leader of a Georgia militia called Three Percent Security Force has posted videos and calls to arms on Facebook, urging “patriots” to converge on Richmond. The right-wing YouTuber “American Joe Show” warned without evidence that Virginia will cut the power grid to stop the army of protesters — one of a host of false and exaggerated rumors spreading online. Law enforcement and public safety officials say they are monitoring the situation, including several instances of threats toward Gov. Ralph Northam (D). Even some gun enthusiasts expressed concern about the potential for violence at a rally planned for the state Capitol on Jan. 20. State police briefed Northam for two hours last week, according to one state official, and the governor plans to lead an all-staff meeting this week to go over increased security procedures. “Hopefully it’ll not be another Charlottesville,” Van Cleave said, blaming police and state planning for the violence that erupted during 2017’s Unite the Right rally around a Confederate statue.

[F]irepower is a concern for gun-control advocates, who also plan to turn out on Jan. 20 — Martin Luther King Jr. Day — for what is a traditional day of citizen lobbying at the state Capitol.

“There’s a dangerous intersection here of speech and guns, and what I think is critically important is that we don’t see the sort of armed intimidation and even violence that resulted . . . in Charlottesville,” said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel and policy director at Giffords Law Center.

Democrats won their majorities in November elections, ending a 26-year period where Republicans were able to quash any proposed restrictions on guns. After 12 people were killed at a Virginia Beach municipal building by a gunman on May 31, Northam vowed to pass some form of gun control. Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D) issued an opinion that militia members presenting themselves as peacekeepers could be violating state law. Beginning in rural counties, boards of supervisors — usually with hundreds of local residents looking on — have passed resolutions proclaiming that they would not enforce any unconstitutional effort to seize or restrict guns.

Tazewell County in Southwest Virginia went a step further, passing an ordinance that would enable it to raise a militia.

One white supremacist blogger wrote a widely disseminated post claiming that Northam planned to call out the Guard and cut power and Internet service to thwart gun supporters. That led to a meme with a fabricated quote in which Northam is made to say, “if you still refuse to comply I’ll have you killed.”

The conspiracy theory site Natural News posted an angry tirade about Northam, accusing him of starting a new civil war and suggesting vigilantes would kill any officials who tried to take their guns.

An anti-Semitic website said Jewish Democrats were “gun-grabbers,” including former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, the presidential candidate whose gun-control organization has poured millions into Virginia.

State officials declined to directly address the threats. “Our Administration is taking serious precautions to protect the safety of all visitors, policymakers, and staff during the upcoming General Assembly session,” Clark Mercer, Northam’s chief of staff, said via email. “This issue evokes strong feelings, but spreading lies, rumors, and misinformation is irresponsible and dangerous.

Northam is backing eight bills, the same package he submitted ahead of the aborted special session in July. Among them are measures to ban assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, bump stocks and silencers; require background checks on all firearms sales and transfers; cap handgun purchases at one per month; and create a “red flag law” to temporarily remove guns from people deemed a threat to themselves or others.

The proposed assault-weapons ban has been one of the most controversial measures, since the original bill bans not only the sale of those guns but possession — meaning people who already own them would have to give them up. Amid an uproar, Northam said a grandfather clause would be added to protect existing owners, but they would have to register their weapons.

All the outside attention has overwhelmed some of the homegrown gun rights advocates. Troy Carter, who helped rally support for a sanctuary proclamation in Amelia County outside Richmond, said he has seen the fiery language on social media.

“I am worried people will come here to Virginia and look for that opportunity to cause trouble,” he said. “It’s not going to be the sanctuary guys, because we just want peace and to be left alone.”

As noted, these insane forces underscore why Northam's package of laws is needed now more than ever,  These gun nuts are a clear and present danger to law abiding citizens.

Can a Southwest Virginia Coal Town Reinvent Itself?

Grundy, Virginia.

Here in Virginia rural area politicians continue to run on an agenda of "god, guns and bashing fags" and a majority of residents support Donald Trump who promised to bail them out of their economic plight but instead has mere made a show of hating the same people they hate: non-whites, gays, non-right wing Christians and, of course, liberals. Meanwhile their economic fortunes continue in a death spiral and the younger generations leave for more urban areas and a better financial future.  A lengthy piece in the New York Times looks at the efforts of one Southwest Virginia town's efforts to reinvent itself.  Lots of state and federal monies have been poured in seemingly with little success. The reason, in my view that the article does not address? The area remains very unwelcoming to outsiders and those in the racial and social demographic groups the residents and Trump hate and far too many of the residents cling to form of right wing Christianity that is nothing short of scary to progressive forward thinking people and businesses. No amount of economic development funding is going to change this obstacle to economic rebirth.  Thus, the economic decline and depopulation continues.  Here are article highlights:

GRUNDY, Va. — Jay Rife surveys the landscape — hundreds of flat, grassy acres reclaimed from a spent mountaintop mine once operated by the Paramont Coal Company. A few handsome homes stand on one end of the project. An 80,000-square-foot shell, to house some future manufacturing operation, is being built on another. For the intrepid, there are trails for all-terrain vehicles. There’s an R.V. park. The whole site has been wired for broadband. Elk have been imported from Kentucky for tourists to look at.

Buchanan County, where Grundy sits, has spent $35 million to $40 million on the development, called Southern Gap, some seven miles from town along U.S. 460. Mr. Rife, the head of the county’s Industrial Development Authority, says the project “is going to be the salvation of Buchanan County.”

Few places have had as many shots at deliverance. None, so far, have succeeded in stemming Grundy’s inexorable decline.

This corner of southwestern Virginia has long sought alternatives to coal as a source of sustenance. The Appalachian School of Law, which opened in the 1990s in the shell of Grundy Junior High School, was heralded as a new economic engine, lubricated — of course — with taxpayer funds. So was the Appalachian College of Pharmacy, founded in 2003 some 20 minutes down the road in Oakwood. County officials considered a dental school, but figured it was too expensive. . . . Then there is downtown Grundy itself, much of which was moved up the hill to avoid periodic floodwaters from the Levisa Fork, a tributary of the Big Sandy River.

Virginia estimates that the relocation and flood-proofing projects, started almost 20 years ago, cost $170 million in federal and state funds, more than $170,000 for every woman, man and child living in town today. The Army Corps of Engineers shaved off the flank of a mountain across the river to create an elevated platform on which the new commercial district would sit. Virginia’s Department of Transportation bulldozed much of the old downtown and routed U.S. 460 through it, built on top of a levee protecting what was left of Grundy’s old center. Finally, in 2011, Walmart opened a superstore to anchor the new site, perched somewhat oddly above a two-story, publicly funded parking lot.

Still, the effort does not quite amount to a reinvention. The economic engine is still the one that carried this corner of Appalachia through the 20th century. “We are a one-industry community, and that’s coal,” Mr. Rife said. A few steps from Walmart, an office of Welmore Energy, a coal-producing subsidiary of the Ukrainian steel conglomerate Metinvest, serves as a reminder of that dominance.

And that, today, is a problem. At the peak of coal’s fortunes in the 1970s, more than 35,000 people lived in Buchanan. Over 5,000 worked in the mines. Mr. Rife remembers downtown sidewalks in Grundy, the county seat, packed with thousands of people on weekend shopping expeditions. Karen Brown, the principal of Grundy High School, recalls Porsches and Mercedes-Benzes parked in the high school lot when she went to school there.

Coal is still the most prominent business, employing one in six workers in the county and accounting for one-third of its total wages. But it can no longer support such living standards. . . . The county population has declined to under 22,000, of whom almost 3,500 people receive disability benefits. Over a quarter live in poverty. And it is getting old. The only age group that has grown in the last two decades is the population over 55.

Grundy is hardly unique. It is one of many victims of globalization, technology and other economic dislocations that have wreaked havoc with small-town America. For years, most economists argued that rather than spend millions in pursuit of a new economic engine for such places, it would make more sense to help residents seek opportunities elsewhere.

But the proliferation of towns like Grundy across what used to be the nation’s industrial heartland — stymied by joblessness, awash in opioids and frustration — has prompted a new sense of alarm. . . . Lawrence H. Summers, once a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, put it this way: “There is probably no issue more important for the political economy of the next 15 years, not just in the United States but around the world, than what happens in the areas that feel rightly that they are falling behind and increasingly left apart.”

Migration, as economists would have predicted, has become an increasingly compelling option: Those lucky enough to find work somewhere else leave. They include Ms. Brown’s two daughters — Peyton, 23, and Bailee, 25 — who last summer followed their husbands from the coal industry to more stable jobs at the Toyota plant in Georgetown, Ky.

Overwhelmingly, they support President Trump, who promised to bring coal back. But it doesn’t look as if they have much faith in the promise. As Hoot Dellinger said, leaning over the edge of his booth, “This community will never prosper again.”

Without prosperity, who will stay? “Ninety percent of the girls become nurses and leave,” Mr. Ward said. “We’ve seen a lot of guys chasing gas up in the Marcellus Shale.” But even moving doesn’t always work out. As shale jobs there have waned, Mr. Ward added, “a lot of them are trying to come back, and there’s nothing to come back to.”

I do not know what the solution is since, far too many refuse to accept that their mind set and right wing religious and social views are perhaps among the biggest obstacles to positive change. 

Red and Blue Economies Are Heading in Sharply Different Directions

I have long maintained that part of the economic problems facing "red states" and red rural areas is that their social reactionary nature and hostility towards non-whites, non-straights and non-Christians makes them unattractive to the business of the 21st century and the future.  Here in Virginia, Southwest Virginia is a prime example.  That region continues to demand that state monies be used to turn around the region economically yet the residents (and, yes, there are exceptions) continue to embrace social, religious and political views that are anathema to the economic change they claim to want.  Now a study, as reported in the New York Times looks at the diverging paths of so-called blue economies associated with rising urban areas and those of red economies associated with rural and reactionary regions.  And yes, the red areas tend to be far more white and perhaps more racist.  Here are article highlights:

At a quick glance, red and blue metropolitan areas are performing equally well on average in the most watched indicators of labor market health. . . . Silicon Valley (blue) is booming. So is Provo, Utah (red).

But below the surface, red and blue local economies are worlds apart on enduring, fundamental measures that determine their future prospects and their biggest economic challenges.

The correlations between deeper economic measures and how the contrasting metro areas voted in 2016 are striking.

In bluer metros, more residents have college degrees: The 10 large metros with the highest educational attainment each voted for Hillary Clinton by at least a 10-point margin. Median household incomes are higher in bluer metros even after adjusting for the cost of living, which is higher in bluer metros as well. (Metro area is a better measure for a local labor market than a neighborhood, city, county or state.)

And bluer metros have a more favorable job mix for the future, with fewer manufacturing jobs, a higher share of harder-to-automate “non-routine” jobs, and a higher share of jobs in occupations projected to grow faster.

These measures — education, household income, cost of living, non-routine jobs and projected job growth — are highly correlated with one another, and with voting Democratic.

Other economic measures are less strongly correlated with partisanship but still show a pattern. Bluer metros have less year-to-year volatility of job growth. In part that’s because goods-related sectors like manufacturing and mining are more volatile and are clustered in Republican-leaning areas.

Home values have risen more in bluer metros than in redder ones. And blue metros have a higher prime-age employment-population ratio, even though the unemployment rate varies little by partisanship. That’s because red metros have a higher share of prime-age adults who are not in the labor force and therefore aren’t counted in the unemployment rate.

But there are a few places that vote differently than you’d expect from their local economic fundamentals. Colorado Springs and the Provo-Orem area, for instance, have education levels and an occupation mix more typical of blue metros but voted for Donald J. Trump in 2016 by a wide margin. On the flip side, Stockton, Calif., and El Paso look more like red metros economically but voted for Mrs. Clinton.

Why do some metros vote differently than their economics might suggest they would? Race, ethnicity and religion. Metros that vote Democratic despite having lower education and a job mix more typical of redder metros tend to have large Hispanic populations, including many in inland California and on the Texas border. Metros that vote more Republican despite having higher education and a blue-metro job mix tend to be whiter.

[I]ncome inequality — and all the social and political challenges that come with it — tends to be lower in redder metros. And while cost-of-living-adjusted household incomes are higher in bluer metros, cost-of-living-adjusted salaries for a given occupation are typically higher in redder metros.

There’s a reason for this difference: Bluer metros tend to have higher-paying occupations and fewer prime-age adults out of the labor force, which increases household incomes. But if you move from a bluer to a redder metro and find a job in the same occupation, you’re likely to get an increase in salary after taking living costs into account.

The economic challenges of blue metros — unaffordability and inequality — are different than those of red metros, which face lower living standards and greater risks of job loss. Even if the economy takes a back seat in the 2020 election to health care, immigration and President Trump’s record, these economic differences won’t be far from the surface. And if national economic conditions soften, these differences will become more reason for partisan disagreement on urgent policy priorities.

If the places that moved left between 2012 and 2016 continue getting bluer — and the places that swung Obama-to-Trump keep getting redder — the local economies of red and blue America will keep growing further apart.

Innovation and progressive thinking gravitates to blue regions while "conservatism," closed mindedness and an unwelcoming atmosphere toward those who are different concentrates in red regions. Both bring economic consequences. 

Hard Truths of "Saving" the Rural Economy

A lengthy piece in the New York Times looks at an issue plaguing large swaths of the country, including Southwest Virginia and Virginia's "Southside": economic decline in rural areas that seems impossible to reverse.  The piece looks at economic forces, especially the synergy of urban tech centers that works against rural areas, population decline and lower academic achievement that afflict many rural areas.  Here in Virginia, the economic mantra coming from the Northam administration is "all welcoming," yet in Southwest Virginia, the motto is seemingly "only white conservative Christians need apply."  All of the causation enumerated in the article are true, but nowhere are experts willing to call out what to me is another major cause of rural decline: right wing, hate based religion and an often too willing embrace of ignorance.  Progressive businesses want the best and brightest employees and care little about race, sexual orientation or religious belief - a mindset that is the opposite of what finds in Southwest Virginia. Here are article highlights:

Can rural America be saved?  There are 60 million people, almost one in five Americans, living on farms, in hamlets and in small towns across the landscape. For the last quarter century the story of these places has been one of relentless economic decline.

The election of Donald Trump, powered in no small degree by rural voters, has brought the troubles of small-town America to national attention, with an urgent question: What can be done to revive it?

Rural America is getting old. The median age is 43, seven years older than city dwellers. Its productivity, defined as output per worker, is lower than urban America’s. Its families have lower incomes. And its share of the population is shrinking: the United States has grown by 75 million people since 1990, but this has mostly occurred in cities and suburbs. Rural areas have lost some 3 million people.

These days, economic growth bypasses rural economies. In the first four years of the recovery after the 2008 recession, counties with fewer than 100,000 people lost 17,500 businesses, according to the Economic Innovation Group. By contrast, counties with more than 1 million residents added, altogether, 99,000 firms. By 2017, the largest metropolitan areas had almost 10 percent more jobs than they did at the start of the financial crisis. Rural areas still had fewer.

The Economic Innovation Group measures “distress” as a combination of data ranging from joblessness and poverty to abandoned homes and educational attainment. Since the 1990s, there has been an “intensifying ruralization of distress,” said John Lettieri, the group’s president.

[N]obody — not experts or policymakers or people in these communities — seems to know quite how to pick rural America up. States, municipalities and the federal government have spent billions to draw jobs and prosperity to stagnant rural areas. But they haven’t yet figured out how to hitch this vast swath of the country to the tech-heavy economy that is flourishing in America’s cities.

[F]actory jobs can no longer keep small-town America afloat. Even after a robust eight-year growth spell, there are fewer than 13 million workers in manufacturing across the entire economy. Robots and workers in China put together most of the manufactured goods that Americans buy, and the high-tech industries powering the economy today don’t have much need for the cheap labor that rural communities contributed to America’s industrial past. They mostly need highly educated workers. They find those most easily in big cities, not in small towns.

In a report published in November, Mark Muro, William Galston and Clara Hendrickson of the Brookings Institution laid out a portfolio of ideas to rescue the substantial swath of the country that they identify as “left behind.” They identify critical shortages bedeviling declining communities: workers with digital skills, broadband connections, capital. And they have plans to address them: I.T. training and education initiatives, regulatory changes to boost lending to small businesses, incentives to invest in broadband.

Wisely, they suggest that any federal government effort must choose its targets carefully. Better to focus on middle-sized places that are near big tech hubs and have some critical infrastructure, rather than scatter assistance all over the landscape. . . . . however, even the authors concede that they may not be up to the task. “I don’t know if these ideas are going to work,” Mr. Galston acknowledged when I pressed him on the issue. “But it is worth making the effort.”

This is the inescapable reality of agglomeration, one of the most powerful forces shaping the American economy over the last three decades. Innovative companies choose to locate where other successful, innovative companies are. That’s where they can find lots of highly skilled workers. . . . . This dynamic feeds on itself, drawing more high-tech firms and highly skilled workers to where they already are.

In hindsight, no amount of tax incentives would have convinced Amazon to expand in a medium-sized city such as Columbus, Ohio, rather than Northern Virginia and Queens,which sit in some of the largest pools of talent in the country. If even medium-sized cities find it difficult to compete, what are the odds that, say, a small town like Amory, Miss., where 14 percent of adults have a bachelor’s degree and a quarter of its 2,500 workers work in small-scale manufacturing, have a chance to attract well-paid tech jobs?

What if nothing really works? Is there really no option but to do nothing and, as some have suggested, return depopulated parts of rural America to the bison?

Instead of so-called place-based policies to revitalize small towns, why not help their residents take advantage of opportunities where the opportunities are? Geographic mobility hit a historical low in 2017, when only 11 percent of Americans picked up shop and moved — half the rate of 1951. One of the key reasons is that housing in the prosperous cities that offer the most opportunities has become too expensive.

[T]he costs of rural poverty are looming over American society. Think of the opioid addiction taking over rural America, of the spike in crime, of the wasted human resources in places where only a third of adults hold a job.

And if today’s polarized politics are noxious, what might they look like in a country perpetually divided between diverse, prosperous liberal cities and a largely white rural America in decline? As Mr. Galston warned: “Think through the political consequences of saying to a substantial portion of Americans, which is even more substantial in political terms, ‘We think you’re toast.’ ”

The distress of 50 million Americans should concern everyone. Powerful economic forces are arrayed against rural America and, so far, efforts to turn it around have failed. Not every small town can be a tech hub, nor should it be. But that can’t be the only answer.

The irony, of course, is that the funds used by state and federal programs trying to revitalize rural areas come from the the diverse urban areas and the very people that so many rural voters view with contempt or worse. 

Jobs Growth Favors Democratic Counties

Each month when I read Virginia Business magazine, there is a common thread: cities and counties in the so-called urban crescent of Virginia are largely thriving while rural areas and Southwest Virginia are struggle.  With the expansion of Medicaid under Gov. Ralph Northam, many of these rural areas are less likely to lose their local hospitals, but this will not change the reality that younger Virginians are fleeing rural Virginia for the cities and their suburbs leaving those rural areas with an aging and declining population.  Meanwhile, due to the "God, guns and gays" fixation of the populace, most new businesses prefer to avoid the areas and, instead, locate in the more progressive urban regions of Virginia.  The result is that the downward spiral in rural Virginia - and rural America -  continues.  A piece at PBS News Hour looks at the reality that job grow even in a supposedly strong economy is mostly focused on progressive, Democrat voting areas.  Trump has not delivered to his rural supporters who continue to allow themselves to be swayed by Trump's racism and pandering to gun and religious extremists.  Here are excerpts:

On average for the year-ended this May, 58.5 percent of the job gains were in counties that backed Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to an Associated Press analysis of monthly government jobs data by county.

Despite an otherwise robust national economy, the analysis shows that a striking number of Trump counties are losing jobs. The AP found that 35.4 percent of Trump counties have shed jobs in the past year, compared with just 19.2 percent of Clinton counties.

As more money pools in such corporate hubs as Houston, San Francisco or Seattle, prosperity spills over less and less to smaller towns and cities in America’s interior. That would seem to undercut what Trump sees as a central accomplishment of his administration — job creation for middle class and blue-collar workers in towns far removed from glitzy urban centers.

Job growth in Trump’s economy is still concentrated in the same general places as it was toward the end of Barack Obama’s presidency — when roughly 58.7 percent of the average annual job gains were in Democratic counties.

Yet the lack of transformative job growth in Trump areas hasn’t seemed to erode his support among Republicans, while hiring in Democratic areas have done little to improve his standing with those voters. For Trump’s core supporters, cultural issues such as gun rights, immigration and loyalty to the president have become dominant priorities.

But other issues preoccupy the minds of the party faithful in Trump strongholds such as Beaver County, Pennsylvania, northwest of Pittsburgh.

Chip Kohser, the county Republican chairman and the bristle-bearded founder of a farm share company, said his party members are rallying around their staunch opposition to gun control. “Our No. 1 motivating factor,” he said, “is Second Amendment issues.”

Since May 2017, Beaver County has lost 191 jobs. With the warmer summer weather, hiring is now on an upswing. But employers have fewer job applicants available as the labor force has shrunk by roughly 1,000 workers in the past 12 months, the result of decades of population loss that hit former steel towns such as Aliquippa, Beaver Falls and Midland.

The tax cuts haven’t stopped the outflow of people. Chatting over eggs, bacon and home fries, Kohser estimated that the tax cuts have added perhaps $1,200 to his annual household income and roughly the same to many others in the area — not likely enough on its own to rejuvenate the local economy.

Many of those forgotten men and women might cheer the president for slapping tariffs on imported goods to defend U.S. factory jobs or his vow to build a wall on the Mexican border to block illegal immigration. But for struggling communities waiting for jobs to be restored, Trump’s tax cuts — which were skewed toward corporations and wealthy individuals — have yet to deliver.

During the past year, the healthiest job gains have been in counties containing such vibrant cities as Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Seattle, all of them places that have favored Democrats.

Texas, which Trump won handily, reflects the geographic split in the economy. Within that state, Clinton — not Trump — won the counties that have accounted for bulk of that state’s job growth.

When the Pew Research Center asked voters in June to identify the nation’s most pressing issue, more of them chose immigration, race, political gridlock or Trump himself than the economy. The proportion of people who said the economy was their top priority fell to its lowest level in more than eight years.

Sixty percent of Americans told Pew that they see their midterm vote as an act of either supporting the president (26 percent) or opposing him (34 percent).

[C]onservatives and liberals have become more sharply split on such issues as confidence in the government and social institutions, religious participation and stances on marriage, sex and abortion.

In Pennsylvania, many Democrats see the choices made by Trump as putting democracy itself at risk. Their fears stem in part from his administration’s initial policy of separating refugee children from their parents and his seemingly deferential relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose nation interfered in the 2016 election, according to U.S. intelligence agencies.

“What I’m hearing daily is fear amongst people as to whether their democracy is slipping away from them,” said Nancy Mills, the Pennsylvania Democratic chairwoman. “I’m really hearing that more than anything else.”

[T]he economic growth he [Trump] promised would revitalize Beaver County may depend on its ability to attract immigrants as it did a century ago when the steel mills brought Germans, Italians and Eastern Europeans workers to the area.

Beaver County never fully recovered from the steel mill closures in the 1980s that caused the unemployment rate to spike at nearly 30 percent.

Many young workers with college degrees migrated east for Pittsburgh’s technology and medical care jobs. The result of this population flight is that Beaver County is rapidly aging, with a median age of 44.8 years old, compared with 37.7 nationwide and 32.9 in Pittsburgh.

Republican Rep. Keith Rothfus . . . said there was a clear path for generating job growth: Immigrants.  You look at areas of the country that are really thriving — there’s a significant immigrant population,” he said. “We need to do a better job of attracting immigrants here. This place was built on immigrants.”

But Rothfus has also been outspoken on the importance of tighter border security.  . . . As of now, Beaver County is still waiting on the job surge.

Rothus, like most Republicans and their supporters would rather pander to white nationals and bigots than speak the truth that GOP policies are harming their base economically.  Meanwhile, the bigotry of the GOP base makes their strongholds unattractive to the very businesses that they need to attract.  Nothing Trump says or does will change this reality. His supporters need to look in the mirror if they want to see the real cause of their problems.

Trump is Accelerating Virginia's Shift to a Blue State

click to enlarge image

The reverberations of Tuesday's election triumph for Democrats continue to shake Virginia and my well lead to further Republican defeats next year: Ralph Northam won roughly seven out of Virginia's eleven congressional districts and could put Republican incumbents on the firing line in the 2018 mid-term elections. Change has been coming to Virginia for years now, but one thing seems to be accelerating change and a rejection of the Republican Party: Donald Trump.  While popular in backwards, reactionary Southwest Virginia, parts of Southside and a few areas with lots of military personnel and retirees - although Virginia Beach went for Northam - Trump is increasingly toxic everywhere else, especially in the large population areas.  The map above shows locality drawn to reflect the number of registered voters.  The take away?  Southwest Virginia and other rural areas simply do not have the votes to elect Republicans statewide if Democrats run good candidates and smart campaigns.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the seismic changes taking place in Virginia.  Here are excerpts:

The sweeping gains won by Democrats in Tuesday’s elections complete Virginia’s transformation into the only blue state of the old Confederacy. Where the Harry Byrd machine once conspired to keep black students out of white schools, now a transgender delegate will take her seat alongside Latino women, a socialist and only the second African American elected statewide since Reconstruction.

The old edifices are falling faster than the state’s Confederate statues — but those are under scrutiny in Richmond these days, too. Even Virginia’s most politically powerful corporation — Dominion Energy — is being rattled: Some 14 of the newly elected Democrats have pledged to refuse contributions and challenge the priorities of a company that’s known as the state’s shadow government.

Change has been coming to the increasingly diverse state for years, but the evolution was turbocharged by the provocative influence of Donald Trump.  The president’s victory last fall and subsequent knife-twisting tweets inspired a surge of Democratic candidates to run for office and pushed many voters to the polls.

“This election, more than anything else, was a Trump-effect election,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington. Democrat Ralph Northam won the governor’s race over Republican Ed Gillespie by a comfortable nine-point margin, but Farnsworth said the outcome could have been much tighter if not for highly motivated anti-Trump voters.

The sentiment turned up in voices across the state. In Fairfax Station, where Pam Rodriguez, 44, showed up in the chilly evening rain to vote for Northam partly because she is “not a fan of Trump . . . I loved the commercial where Northam called him a narcissistic maniac,” she said.

It was in eastern Henrico County outside Richmond, where a few days before the election Nick Hall was all set to vote for the Democrat for governor even though he wasn’t sure of his name. Hall just wanted to strike back at the party of Trump. “Trump is an idiot,” he said.

An especially striking aspect of that anti-Trump fervor was that most of those new candidates he inspired were women. Of the 15 Democrats who were on track to flip Republican seats in the House of Delegates, 11 were women.  All of the delegates they will replace are men.

Some Republicans saw Tuesday’s result as a tsunami that couldn’t have been avoided — thanks, of course, to Trump.  “I’m for 90 percent of what President Trump wants to do, but I’m against 90 percent of what comes out of his Twitter,” said former Republican delegate Dave Albo, who stepped down this year and on Tuesday saw his seat in Fairfax County go to a Democrat.  The president whipped Democrats into a frenzy, Albo said. “One of the rules of politics,” he said, “is pissed-off people show up.”

The results did, in fact, amplify the state’s divisions. Blue regions got bigger, as more suburbs flipped for Democrats — especially in the outer D.C. suburbs and around Richmond and Hampton Roads. But rural red areas went for Gillespie in great numbers, sometimes even more than for Trump last year.

Now, Democrats need to unite and take aim at winning congressional races next year and reelecting Tim Kaine to the U.S. Senate.  Trump will likely aid in that effort through his constant toxicity. 

Animus Towards Others - The Real Motivation of Trump's Base

Before the results from the elections on November 7, 2017, came in, Politico ran a piece that looked at Trump voters in southwest Pennsylvania and their continued allegiance to Trump despite the fact that Trump has to date delivered little if anything that is substantively making their lives better.  After some analysis, the piece gets down to what really continues to bind these voters to Trump: he displays animus towards the same people and ethnic groups that they despise.   The problem is, however, as Ed Gillespie discovered, on Tuesday, is that the animus that motivates Trump's base alienates a majority of voters.  A piece in Bear Drift, a conservative/GOP blog in Virginia looks at this other reality and the bind it will put on the GOP going forward.  First, here are excerpts from the Politico piece:

[P]olling continues to show that—in spite of unprecedented unpopularity—nearly all people who voted for Trump would do it again. But as I compared this year’s answers to last year’s responses it seemed clear that the basis of people’s support had morphed. Johnstown voters do not intend to hold the president accountable for the nonnegotiable pledges he made to them. It’s not that the people who made Trump president have generously moved the goalposts for him. It’s that they have eliminated the goalposts altogether.

This reality ought to get the attention of anyone who thinks they will win in 2018 or 2020 by running against Trump’s record. His supporters here, it turns out, are energized by his bombast and his animus more than any actual accomplishments. For them, it’s evidently not what he’s doing so much as it is the people he’s fighting. Trump is simply and unceasingly angry on their behalf, battling the people who vex them the worst—“obstructionist” Democrats, uncooperative establishment Republicans, the media, Black Lives Matter protesters and NFL players (boy oh boy do they hate kneeling NFL players) whom they see as ungrateful, disrespectful millionaires.  And they love him for this.

Del Signore said he’s been following politics far more than before because of Trump. Trump, he said, is just “more interesting.” So now he likes watching the news. “Ninety-nine percent of the time I watch Fox,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll be sitting there listening to all this Fox stuff, and I’ll say, ‘Maybe they aren’t right, maybe I’ll flip to CNN’—but every time I’ve found that Fox has been correct, and CNN is definitely fake news.”

There are some positives around here. Corsa Coal’s Acosta mine in neighboring Somerset County opened in June. So did Robindale Energy’s new Maple Springs mine. Rosebud Mining reportedly is working to reopen its facility in Cresson, but a company spokesman wouldn’t comment on the status of the project. The increased activity is largely the result of spiking Chinese demand. But even with potentially several hundred new jobs, the long-term outlook for coal is grim. An industry forecast last month from the BMI Mining Report projected coal production to grow by 6 percent and 2 percent this year and next year, respectively, but also noted: This “does not reflect an expectation for President Donald Trump to revive the sector and our longer-term view out to 2021 remains decidedly downbeat.”

But even this optimistic stance highlights some of the deep-seated troubles here. “Right now, if I could find 150 people, I’d put them to work,” Polacek said. He needs machinists. He needs welders. “But it’s hard to find people,” he said—people with the requisite skills, people who can pass a drug test.

“We just don’t have the workforce,” said Liston, the city manager. “If they are employable, and have a skill set, basically they already moved out of the area.”

Some of the later-in-life blue-collar workers who are still here can be loath to learn new trades. “We’ve heard when working with some of the miners that they are reluctant because they’re very accustomed to the mining industry,” said Linda Thomson, the president of JARI, a nonprofit economic development agency in Johnstown that provides precisely the kind of retraining, supported by a combination of private, state and federal funding, that could prepare somebody for a job in Polacek’s plant. “They really do want to go back into the mines. So we’ve seen resistance to some retraining.”

Johnstown and surrounding Cambria County, whiter, poorer and less educated than America overall, was famished for the message Trump delivered in person at War Memorial Arena last October. “Your government betrayed you, and I’m going to make it right,” he told them. . . . . It was what they so badly wanted to hear. On November 8, 2016, in Cambria County, Trump trounced Hillary Clinton by nearly 38 points.

By last week, though, John George told me that despite what they might have said, people here didn’t really believe Trump would make good on all his promises. “Deep down inside,” he said, “I don’t think anybody thought the steel mills were going to come back.”

Last week, he reported hearing for the past year at work, at Gautier Steel, exactly what I had been hearing in my conversations around town—a remarkable, undeniable, ongoing vehemence of support. . . . . So many people in so many other areas of the country watch with dismay and existential alarm Trump’s Twitter hijinks, his petty feuds, his penchant for butting into areas where the president has no explicit, policy-relevant role. All of that only animates his supporters here. For them, Trump is their megaphone. He is the scriptwriter. He is a singularly effective, intuitive creator of a limitless loop of grievance and discontent that keeps them in absolute lockstep.

More than anything, what seemed to upset the people I spoke with was the National Football League players who have knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality.

“You’re not a fan of equality?” I asked.   “For people who deserve it and earn it,” he said. . . . . “Like NFL players?” I said. . . . . “Well,” Del Signore responded, “I hate to say what the majority of them are …” He stopped himself short of what I thought he was about to say. 

The NFL?  “Niggers for life,” Schilling said. “For life,” McCabe added.

Given this mind set, it is little wonder that new, forward thinking businesses have little desire to locate in Southwestern Pennsylvania.  That mindset is not limited to that region of Pennsylvania.  It is alive and well in Southwest Virginia.  The problem is that what animates the rural racist voters increasingly repels the majority of voters in the rest of Virginia.  Here are highlights from the Bearing Drift piece:

First, the Democrats did not win the election; the Republicans lost it.  As the Republican standard-bearer at the head of the ticket, Ed Gillespie committed three fatal errors.

·        He invited Trump to campaign for him, the President with the lowest approval rating in modern history after only ten months in office.  Trump’s low approval rating is not so much a result of his obnoxious personality, bullying, and lying, but because he has failed to deliver on any campaign promises, from building a southern border wall to repealing and replacing ObamaCare to returning manufacturing jobs to the U.S. from overseas. Ed bought into that failure when he invited Trump to appear with him at campaign rallies. By my observation, Gillespie started to decline in the polls after Trump came to Virginia to campaign for him.

·        Gillespie tried the old fear tactic of blaming illegal immigrant gang violence like MS-13 on “sanctuary city” Democratic politics.  The problem is that there are no sanctuary cities in Virginia.  A sanctuary city is one that has passed local laws that counter-act Federal laws on illegal immigrants, such as refusing ICE requests to detain illegals arrested for crimes.  A sanctuary city is not defined simply by the presence of immigrants, legal or illegal.

·        Gillespie bought into the failed Republican promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare.  Millions of Americans have entitlement benefits under the Affordable Health Care Act and, for all its faults, the Republicans have failed to propose an alternative entitlement. And once the government institutes an entitlement program, you cannot take it away without losing elections. Social Security is a case in point. It was launched in 1934 as a safety net for elderly poor.  Today it is a Federal pension program for the middle class.

“God, guns, and guts” plays well in the rural southside and southwest, but economic growth, traffic relief, and good public education is what excites voters in the voter-rich areas.  Cutting taxes for transportation improvements and diverting public school money to Christian academy school vouchers doesn’t get you votes there.

Third, the Republicans continue to send contradictory messages. Individual liberty and personal freedom are not enhanced by government restrictions on issues ranging from hunting on Sundays to having an abortion, the latter having been the law of the land for almost 50 years and continuing to be supported as such by the most conservative Supreme Court since the Great Depression.

Virginia is not so much turning blue as it is becoming anti-red. And that, along with Donald Trump in the White House, is why we had a record voter turn-out Tuesday despite awful weather conditions.

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Will the GOP learn that it needs to abandon the Trump base in many states if it hopes to win elections going forward?  I doubt it.  The Christofascists and white supremacists are now too entrenched in the party grassroots to be defied. 

Trump and Gillespie Are Both Lying About "Bringing Back Coal"

One of the lies that Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, during his Russian assisted campaign and since is that he would end "the war on cal" and promised those in coal producing regions of the country that he bring back the glory days of the coal industry.  Like so much else that was promised by Trump and his sinister minion, Mike Pence, it was all a lie because there is no war on coal.  The decline of coal is driven not by government regulation but by economic conditions that nothing Trump does can reverse.  Thus, Trump's reversal of Obama administration regulations and moratoriums on leasing on federal lands will change nothing.  With cheaper and cleaner natural gas alternatives, coal fired power plants are on the decline both in America and around the world. Trump, of course, is not the only Republican lying about the ending the war on coal and bringing the coal industry.  Ed Gillespie has crisscrossed Southwest Virginia making the same disingenuous promises that Trump has trumpeted.  Now, Mike Pence is campaigning with Gillespie and telling the same lies.  Sadly, many in rural Virginia are believing the Trump/Gillespie lie that government regulation and the EPA are the problem and will likely be duped into voting against their own long term best interests.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the economic conditions that are really behind the death of the coal industry.   

It was depicted by energy executives and conservatives as a “witch hunt,” “a politically motivated sham” and a move that would “destroy mining in the West .” In January 2016, President Barack Obama imposed a three-year moratorium on federal coal leasing, which halted new projects and delayed pending applications for companies to extract coal from federal land. During that time, the Interior Department was to carry out an overdue review of the program’s social and environmental costs.

A year later, all this was an easy target for President Trump, who had promised to save the coal industry from oppressive regulations and slumping sales . On March 29, his administration lifted the moratorium and deep-sixed the study.
 [T]he president said he was “putting an end to the war on coal.” Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke argued that the leasing program was critical to “energy security” and “job creation.” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt followed that by moving this past week to repeal Obama’s Clean Power Plan, designed to limit carbon emissions.

But the moves to save this industry have actually exposed its weaknesses — and revealed a trend that coal companies and the Trump administration have not acknowledged publicly: The companies are scaling back, in some cases shedding workers and declining the opportunities the federal government now wants to give them. Despite Trump’s best efforts, the American coal industry remains on life support.

Outwardly, coal companies and their advocates have embraced Trump’s aggressive rollbacks as aids toward boosting production and creating jobs. These are central elements of Trump’s promise to “make America great again.” And the administration frequently boasts that coal is making a comeback. . . . But a recent White House talking point — that some 50,000 new coal-mining jobs had been created since the election — has been debunked. The figure is closer to 1,300. 

In private, coal company executives are deeply skeptical about the administration’s ability to alter market conditions. In numerous letters to Bureau of Land Management state offices that I obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, the coal industry acknowledged the continuing decline in demand, and in several cases, companies withdrew pending lease applications.

In the six months since that announcement at the EPA, companies have withdrawn five of 44 pending lease applications, and at least eight are indefinitely on hold. In a number of cases, companies have explained that their decisions are based on persistently weak market conditions. 

In the letters to state BLM offices obtained through FOIA requests, coal companies admitted that the future is not as rosy as they might have hoped or would like to project. Arch Coal, the second-largest supplier in the United States, referred to the “continued downward pressure on the Powder River Basin and subsequent reduced output over the past seven years” in explaining why it was withdrawing a lease application for a major new mine in Wyoming. Rhino Energy, which has operations in Appalachia and the West , said that “current coal market conditions remain depressed” and that it wouldn’t move forward with a lease for a proposed 14,000-acre mine in Colorado until that outlook changed. 

This is hardly the picture of an industry on the rebound, and it is squarely at odds with one of the central promises of Trump’s presidential campaign: that policy changes would revive the ailing sector and create thousands of new jobs in coal communities. Not that the administration hasn’t tried. . . . But it’s not enough to compensate for weak domestic demand, driven largely by the rise of natural gas as an alternative to coal.

In the end, lifting the much-vilified moratorium will have little, if any, impact on the price of natural gas (made cheap by the discovery of huge new deposits in the past decade and advances in drilling technology), declining domestic demand for coal (thanks to the shuttering of dozens of coal-fired power plants) or a relatively flat export market (because of price volatility and the cost of shipping). Those fundamentals won’t change anytime soon. And some companies seem to think their best bet is an outright bailout.

If there was suddenly a surge in demand for coal, the industry would be poised to ramp up production from existing mines. That is unlikely to happen. “We don’t think [the industry] is going to need new reserves from the federal government for a decade,” said Daniel Rusz, a research director at Wood Mackenzie, a global consultancy with clients in the financial and energy sector.

For coal’s champions, inside the administration and out, that’s the rub: The domestic coal market shows no signs of fundamentally changing, and without renewed demand, there’s no reason to pursue new leases. According to a March study by Headwaters Economics, 142 coal-fired power plants have retired generators or closed entirely since 2009. That trend is expected to continue. Just this month, one of the largest coal-fired power plants in Texas announced that it would be shutting its doors early next year; a spokesman for the company that owns it called the plant a “money loser.” 

“There are no new coal plants being built,” said Rusz. If companies open new mines, who is going buy the coal in 30 or 40 years?

Not a single ton of coal has been leased from the Powder River Basin since June 2012. “We still have a market moratorium,” Anderson points out. “We had it for four years prior to the official moratorium. And it’s still going.”