The West Virginia Coal Forum is calling on all presidential candidates to respect and protect the coal industry and the miners who have built this nation.
The Coal Forum is an organization representing business and labor in West Virginia’s coal industry.
As the public now should be abundantly aware, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton made it clear this week that she will continue the Obama Administration’s war on coal.
“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” Clinton said Sunday night while boasting about her clean energy program — and with a big smile on her face, according to media coverage of the event. The remarks were made during at a CNN town-hall event.
In West Virginia, with more 12,000 miners laid off, hundreds of mine closures and over 65 million tons of lost production, her threats are nothing to smile about.
“At the West Virginia Coal Forum, we know it’s a tough time to be a coal miner. We’ve had it bad enough for the past seven years under the current administration. But when someone who wants to be a world leader states unequivocally her intention to put more of our proud miners and companies out of work, it’s time for the electorate to hit a giant pause button,” said Coal Forum Co-Chairman Chris Hamilton.
Clinton told the crowd she planned to use $30 billion in taxpayer funds to retrain coal miners for other fields, but as several media outlets pointed out this week, she might be hard-pressed to find an industry she supports.
“But retrain for what?” the New York Post wrote March 14. “Name a single working-class industry that the modern Democratic Party actually favors. (And, no, “green jobs” don’t count: They exist almost exclusively in liberal rhetoric.)”
The Coal Forum urges all presidential candidates to educate themselves about the reality of electric power generation and construction in the United States.
“This nation cannot thrive without using coal for power and to make steel. That’s the plain and simple truth,” Hamilton said. “And the rest of the world knows it. Anyone who wants to be president of this great nation needs to stand up for coal and stand up for steel.”