Big, beautiful clean coal!

It's to die for. From NBC News:

Robert F. Cohen, whose term expired last month on the mine safety and health panel after he served under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, alleged in a scathing dissent that Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta had undertaken an illegal move cutting back on a worker safety rule that threatens to undermine the "most powerful tool for protecting the lives of the nation's miners." Cohen's criticism was in response to the Trump administration easing enforcement of a key worker safety rule against a West Virginia coal mine, despite finding "significant and substantial" violations at the facility.

The Department of Labor determined that Pocahontas Coal Company’s Affinity Mine would no longer be subject to tough enforcement actions taken against mines that repeatedly violate mine health and safety laws and receive a "pattern of violations" notice.

This "pattern of violations" rule, which the administration* now apparently intends to chloroform, was toughened up after 29 miners were killed in an explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in 2013. Naturally, once El Caudillo Del Mar-A-Lago moved in, the rule had to be loosened up again because Obama, that's why.

MANDEL NGAN Getty Images

In fact, the guy installed as the chief of mine safety and health had run a mine that had received two pattern-of-violations raps. At the time, Senator Joe Manchin, no great enemy of the coal industry, voted against the confirmation of David Zatezalo to that position, saying:

"After reviewing his qualifications and record of safety during his time in the coal industry, I am not convinced that Mr. Zatezalo is suited to oversee the federal agency that implements and enforces mine safety laws and standards."

Coal miners can't catch a break. They work in an incredibly dangerous industry that already is three-quarters of the way to obsolescence, but that has provided some sort of living to their families for generations. Their towns are blighted as the industry dies. The opioid epidemic has been positively murderous in places like West Virginia, as Eric Eyre's magnificent reporting has shown. The water often is unfit to drink and the air unfit to breathe, and the kids leave town and never come back.

Drew Angerer Getty Images

So, when a boisterous con-man comes to town and sells some balloon juice about how he, alone, can bring all of it back, they vote for him because they literally are at the end of their tethers. Of course, he gets in and he makes the job more dangerous, the water more foul, the air more gritty, their healthcare more tenuous, and then he comes back and tells them that they've never been better off.

"'Significant and substantial’ violations are referred to that way for a reason — people die, people lose limbs," says Phil Smith of the United Mine Workers of America, which sent a letter to the Labor Department questioning the decision to change its safety designation. "Every mine safety law on the books is written in a miner’s blood."

"President Trump has already put his disregard for coal worker safety into action by refusing to enforce the rule against a West Virginia mine operator repeatedly cited for endangering mine worker safety," said Charisma Troiano, press secretary for Democracy Forward, a liberal advocacy group in Washington. "Not only are President Trump’s broken promises on worker protections potentially unlawful, they could have dangerous and deadly results."

After all, even the most obvious con is essentially a betrayal.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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