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A coal company headed by a prominent Mitt Romney donor has laid off more than 160 workers in response to President Obama's election victory.
Murray Energy said Friday that it had been "forced" to make the layoffs in response to the bleak prospects for the coal industry during Obama's second term.
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Looking ahead, the coal industry faces a rule going into effect in 2015 that tightens the amount of mercury coal plants can emit, as well as regulations on mountain-top mining. Both will make coal production and coal-fired power plants more expensive.
The rules themselves are not Obama's doing, although he has implemented them fairly quickly. Most stem from the Clean Air Act, which was signed by Richard Nixon and strengthened during the first Bush presidency.
Certain Republicans are ignorant or have short term memory. Or maybe both. It is pretty appalling that the CEO has laid off 160 workers in an attempt to prove a point.
I mean the families of those 160 laid off workers will be angry ... not at Pres. Obama, but at their former employer. This can't be a good public relations stunt for the company. Might not customers cancel their orders and buy coal from a competitor?
The coal industry has had decades to clean up their act. Seriously, if it's a choice between cutting jobs and allowing the industry to continue spewing mercury into the air, I'd rather see the jobs disappear. Mercury pollution is no joke.
Mercury is a deadly neurotoxin. When it gets into the air, it falls in rain and enters the food chain, eventually ending up in fish we eat. Several of the lakes nearby have a consumption advisory on game fish due to mercury contamination. It's even found in significant quantities in large commercially fished species like swordfish and tuna. Think about that next time you make a tuna fish sandwich.
I mean the families of those 160 laid off workers will be angry ... not at Pres. Obama, but at their former employer. This can't be a good public relations stunt for the company. Might not customers cancel their orders and buy coal from a competitor?
If The One and his goons at the EPA get their way there won't be any competitors.
If The One and his goons at the EPA get their way there won't be any competitors.
You mean the duly elected President of the united States Barack Obama and his staff, and incase you dont know what the EPA does it tries to prevent idiots like this coal mine owner from just flushing all his deadly waste into the local rivers.
Power plants are shifting to cheaper cleaner natural gas. Does the coal mine operator think that the govt. should force power plants to buy what they don`t want?
This piece of human excrement has had a good run. Screw him and his kind. These laid off workers should be offered jobs in the green energy sector and blow this guy off the map once and for all. It's hard o believe that these types villians exist outside of James Bond movies.
Think of Murray's decision-making timeline here. Had Romney won the election, he would have gotten to appoint a new EPA team, sure. He would have also, most likely, had to contend with a Democratic Senate with no particular fear of the coal industry. (I'm excepting Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, who's up in 2014 and is probably already appearing on NRSC/AFP/coal money maps.) There was no need for him to sack these people so quickly. There was no guarantee that he'd be dramatically more profitable in, say, March 2013. But he fired them, because he's basically amoral.
I hope there aren't too many Murrays out there. Most of the CEOs who threatened to fire employees if the center-left party won the election have welshed on that promise. It turned out that all their threats and all their spending couldn't win Virginia, Pennsylvania, or Ohio for the Republicans. This is a position that you dread in politics -- total irrelevance, a future in which one of the political parties can blow you off and stiff your interests. Murray's not handling it well.
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