[Vision2020] Aggressive Audit of Poor Par for Course (Molly Ivins)

[Phil Nisbet]

Keely

I listened to the interviews of the families and that was their general 
contention.  And even assuming that West Virginia were flush with jobs, say 
down at the local Wally World, the pay and the skills and a lot more took 
the veteran miners underground.  The kid who was rescued was the rookie, 
with only three years on the job, while the rest of the men at Sago that day 
had decades underground.

Entry level wages for a muck stick operator, a surface guy plying a shovel 
are $11 an hour.  Guys with years in the business make very good blue collar 
wages for what is a highly skilled job.  They need to know how to drill 
blast patterns that only shot the seam, how to engineer supports, wire the 
electrical and set up air feeds, run coal and rock cutting equipment, keep 
muckers and tram systems going.  And I am sorry, but I do not know of too 
many people who ever work a mine because they were driven to it by economic 
need.  What might have been a reality in the 1900-40 is not one today.

I commented to you because I started to read Molly Ivins piece, caught her 
standard diatribe and simply had to say, yetch!  My comment is directed 
exclusively at Ms Ivins.  The dangerous papercuts she receives make it 
perfectly OK I guess to call people stooges for Mining Companies, as if a 
company wants to see twelve top flight employees killed, its mine crushed by 
an explosion and millions of dollars lost.  Saying that somebody is a stooge 
for something instantly says that the entity you are stooging for is 
disreputable and I have read enough of Molly's anti-mining pieces to know 
that in her High Rise Office space she sees mines as evil nasty places 
inhabited by the forces of darkness.

Molly and her ilk have painted pictures for all of you of Miners and the 
companies they work for that I frankly can not recognize from real life 
experiences in mines around the world.  From Captain Planet to Molly Ivins 
columns the impression keeps coming that Mining Companies must be forcing 
people below ground at the point of a gun, working hard to destroy the 
planet and getting paid by the acre of destruction they work hard to assure 
happens.  The image comes equipped with impressions of slave drivers 
whipping children through darkness lit only by feeble candle flickers.

Yes it’s silly to see the poor as somehow the root of corruption.  That’s as 
silly as dehumanizing a whole profession and demonizing its culture.  Its as 
silly as a writer sitting in a high rise office building risking nothing and 
dragging down more money than the President of the United States of 
America’s salary yammering about subjects she has no knowledge of using 
tired clichés to do it and all while twelve families are trying to find 
solace for their loses.

If nothing else, Ivins can always get my blood pressure going.  You may be 
right, she has a point somewhere in her piece there.  But at what point does 
a hit piece writer write one too many attacks and low blows?  She reached 
that point with me many years ago.

Phil Nisbet




>From: "keely emerinemix" <kjajmix1 at msn.com>
>To: pcnisbet1 at hotmail.com
>CC: vision2020 at moscow.com
>Subject: RE: [Vision2020] Aggressive Audit of Poor Par for Course (Molly 
>Ivins)
>Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 14:15:33 -0800
>
>Phil,
>
>Other than disputing your contention that the miners all loved their work 
>-- I think that you might find that not to be the case if West Virginia 
>were flush with other employment opportunities -- I really can't talk much 
>about mining.  The point of my post was Ivins' development into the 
>Bush-encouraged IRS and its picking out and picking on poor people.
>
>You know a lot more about mining than I do, but I bet you and I could both 
>agree that perhaps the greatest example of graft, corruption and greed in 
>the United States is not to be found among those families earning just at 
>or below the poverty line -- but they sure make a hell of a target, don't 
>they?
>
>Take care,
>
>keely
>
>
>From: "Phil Nisbet" <pcnisbet1 at hotmail.com>
>To: kjajmix1 at msn.com
>CC: vision2020 at moscow.com
>Subject: RE: [Vision2020] Aggressive Audit of Poor Par for Course (Molly 
>Ivins)
>Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 11:31:40 -0800
>
>Keely
>
>All I have to do is read Molly's routine that turns Miners into demons to 
>stop bothering with getting further.  Her standard is to pick somebody and 
>dehumanize them while singing a soft song for somebody else.
>
>MSHA has a dual mission.  They have to do mine inspections, but they also 
>are the only ones left who can also carry out the work of the Bureau of 
>Mines.  They are not the enemy.
>
>The coal companies are trying to mine and sell coal to the power industry 
>for turning out electrical energy.  They fight to keep costs down so that 
>the consumers do not pay higher electric bills.  They pay their workforce 
>higher wages than most industrial jobs do, for what is a very hazardous 
>profession.  They are not the enemy.
>
>Miner's love their jobs, which is why they work in an industry with such 
>high hazards.  Its a job that has a built in culture very different than 
>that on the street.  Its why the older miners would give their self 
>rescuers to keep the young guy alive.  They are not the enemy.
>
>Not one of the people involved in that tragedy was a stooge.  They were all 
>hands who knew the risks and did a job that others find distasteful or 
>frightening.  They are not demons from hell, bent on destroying the 
>environment or dollar hungry slime balls uncaring about worker safety.  No 
>doubt Molly typed her report on a computer powered by the coal that those 
>men dug, but instead of celebrating their lives and the gift that their 
>labor gave her, she terms their culture one of stooges.
>
>She can never know the generosity of those miners, guys who will give their 
>last dollar to worthy causes with nothing more than a shrug.  She will 
>never be as close as a team working on a face to any other person she 
>knows.  Molly's worse fear is a paper cut on the job, not the clear 
>understanding that one day the rock with your name on it is going to get 
>you.
>
>Mine safety is better now than it has ever been and hopefully it will get 
>better still.  But mining will always be a risky job, as anything involving 
>millions of tons of rock and high explosives and heavy machinery is bound 
>to be.  And there will always be men and women who love the work and are 
>willing to do it for the resources that you all enjoy.
>
>Phil Nisbet
>Just another stooge I guess, Molly Ivers told me so.
>
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