Poor communities suffer the consequences of elitist policies
Le who will never have to experience the consequences of their actions. The people of Appalachia deserve better, and it is up to those who have the power to make a change to do so.
Even his fiercest critics must admit that Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance’s personal story is undeniably compelling. He grew up in impoverished, small-town America amid substance abuse, absent parents, and a general lack of opportunity with an overarching lack of hope. As he writes in his 2016 best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, his upbringing was “an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.”
In Ohio and beyond, communities that were once thriving, self-sustaining, and encouraging settlement are now struggling with few jobs and fewer reasons to stick around.
In 2019, when Louisiana State University (LSU) quarterback Joe Burrow won the Heisman trophy, he broke down in tears talking about his hometown in southeast Ohio, noting that “it’s a very impoverished area and the poverty rate is almost two times the national average. There’s so many people there that don’t have a lot and I’m up here for all those kids in Athens and Athens County that go home to not a lot of food on the table, hungry after school.”
For Vance, Burrow, and anyone else who grew up in these circumstances, it was not always this way. “Poor” regions are not made, they are allowed.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Ohio had 1,155 coal mines with more than 50,000 coal miners. By 2003, there were seven mines and only 2,000 mining jobs — respective decreases of 99 percent and 96 percent. Keep in mind, we do not use any less coal. Worldwide coal demand continues to increase. Only America’s share in the coal industry, America’s piece of coal pie, is smaller. We were once the world’s largest producer of coal, but we are now fourth, well behind China.
Somehow, in some green measure or eco-metric, buying coal from Americans would be bad for the climate, but buying coal from China or Indonesia is acceptable. Buying coal from miners in Ohio, where we have an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), safety standards, paid time off, health care, and labor unions is bad for the environment and causes climate change. Buying coal from Indonesia, where none of those exist, is somehow “green.”
In 2020, what seems like a lifetime ago in today’s political climate, a billionaire named Tom Steyer ran for president on a climate platform. No fossil fuels. Climate hysteria. Tough luck, Joe Burrow and coal miners. Steyer’s hedge fund, Farallon Capital, had hundreds of millions invested in Chinese and Indonesian coal. Yes, Steyer would be damned if coal miners in Ohio have a job, but he was perfectly fine with virtual slave labor in Southeast Asia. For the Earth, or something.
Poor towns are created by such green hypocritical opportunism in addition to the climate hysteria parroted by elitists like John Kerry. They are financed by billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, who has given over $1 billion to a campaign to close every coal plant in America. These men are not destroying their own communities and plunging their neighbors into poverty. Manhattan and Nantucket are safe. No, it is Appalachia that bears the brunt of their agenda. But Appalachia may soon have one of its own a heartbeat away from the presidency.
J.D. Vance escaped through the Marines and his gifted mind and pen. Joe Burrow escaped through football. But for the many who still live there, there is no escape.
When the mine, plant, or mill closes, the revenue for the entire community vanishes, and people are stuck. In most cases, their biggest and only asset is their house — which they cannot sell as there are no buyers. Businesses with no customers close. Downtowns empty out. Systemic poverty follows, and with it the worst of the human condition: depression, domestic abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicide.
The opioid crisis is hardest in these small towns. What else do you do when you have nothing, not even hope? You drown the sorrow in the cheapest, strongest substance you can find.
And the rest of America forgets you, dismissed and sneered at as flyover country, hicks, white trash, or inbreds. As comedian Bill Maher said in one obnoxious monologue, “We have chef Wolfgang Puck, they have Chef Boyardee. Our roofs have solar panels, theirs have last year’s Christmas lights.”
It’s easy to laugh at poverty and easy to ignore it too. “Learn to code” is an easy dismissal, as President Biden and others have suggested. But the poverty in these towns is not accidental or self-inflicted. The poverty was created by selfish, evil policies pushed by people like Tom Steyer under the guise of “climate change” so he could make money in Southeast Asia.
The policies were pushed under the false promise of libertarian economics, that the market would solve everything, that it is OK to give tax breaks for companies to send jobs overseas because that is the “free market at work,” even though left behind are people, American people, families, children, forced into a growing class of working poor.
Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, was an inspiration to me as I started my nonprofit, Power The Future, and his message is deeply personal to the millions of Americans left behind by pigheaded decisions hiding behind climate change or free markets. Vance is one of their own.
The focus of Power The Future, the heart and soul of our mission advocating for American energy, is the energy workers themselves. Yes, energy is everything — our national economy and foreign policy — but it all begins in small-town America, where energy workers live and breathe, and they, perhaps for the first time, have one of their own on the national stage.
Now this cause has a spokesman and champion of its own, and I could not be more excited about the future of the energy industry, the future of America’s economy, the future of foreign policy, because energy is everything, and energy now has a new face, one of us, with dirty hands and clean soul, to borrow a line from the late, great Toby Keith.
J.D. Vance on the presidential ticket has elevated a small-town boy who will end the carnage of America’s small towns and make their forgotten communities great again.
Daniel Turner is the founder and executive director of Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs. Contact him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @DanielTurnerPTF.
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