{"id":23965,"date":"2019-08-25T00:23:14","date_gmt":"2019-08-25T08:23:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.richgibson.com\/blog\/?p=23965"},"modified":"2019-08-25T00:23:14","modified_gmt":"2019-08-25T08:23:14","slug":"rouge-forum-dispatch-exterminate-all-the-appropriate-brutes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.richgibson.com\/blog\/rouge-forum-dispatch-exterminate-all-the-appropriate-brutes\/","title":{"rendered":"Rouge Forum Dispatch: Exterminate all the Appropriate Brutes"},"content":{"rendered":"

We Say Fight Back!<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

www.youtube.com\/watch?v=fLT16LP4ACQ<\/a><\/p>\n

Unpaid Miners Blocked a Coal Train in Protest. Weeks Later, They\u2019re Still There.<\/span><\/h1>\n

\"Truckers<\/p>\n

A little after 4 p.m. on Friday, four hulking big-rig cabs, facing each other in pairs and taking up both lanes, brought the Kingdom Come Parkway to a standstill. On the highway between the trucks, a group of out-of-work coal miners raised a banner: \u201cNo Pay We Stay.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is the miners\u2019 plan in its entirety, and for close to three weeks, that is what they have done.<\/p>\n

A protest that began with five men blocking a train full of coal has grown into a small 24-hour tent city along some railroad tracks next to the highway. It has become a pilgrimage site for labor activists, a rallying point for the community \u2014 \u201ca tailgate party on steroids,\u201d as one local official approvingly put it. And it is the first organized miners\u2019 protest that anyone can remember for decades in Harlan County, Ky., a place once virtually synonymous with bloody labor wars<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The railroad blockade began in late July, about a month after Blackjewel, the two-year-old company where the miners worked, suddenly declared bankruptcy. Blackjewel owned mines in four states, and employed over a thousand miners in central Appalachia.<\/p>\n

\n

Miners learned in the middle of an afternoon shift that Blackjewel was shutting down immediately and putting everyone out of work. It did so without filing a mandatory 60-day advance warning and without posting a bond, required by Kentucky law, to cover payroll.<\/p>\n

Workers received no pay for their last week on the job. Then they learned that their paychecks for the previous two weeks had bounced. Bankruptcies and layoffs have become routine in the coal fields during a grueling industrywide decline, but no one seemed to recall anything quite like this.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIt\u2019s no different from robbing a bank,\u201d said Jeffrey Willig, a wiry 40-year-old father of six.<\/p>\n

In Harlan County, hundreds of miners found themselves with negative bank balances, staring down mortgages, car payments and medication costs. Some were alerted to the news by ex-spouses who had not gotten automatic child-support payments. Lawyers representing the miners in the bankruptcy proceeding estimated that Blackjewel\u2019s employees in central Appalachia were each owed $4,202.91 on average, for wages and benefits earned.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey was doing it as quiet as could be,\u201d said Dalton Lewis, 20.<\/p>\n

A fellow miner called him with the plan: \u201cCome on down here, we\u2019re going to stop this train.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This instinct runs deep in Harlan County. In the 1930s, efforts to organize miners led to \u201cBloody Harlan\u201d \u2014 currently a hashtag printed on protest signs \u2014 a deadly conflict pitting thousands of union miners against coal companies, law enforcement officials and strikebreakers. Blood was spilled again in the early 1970s during a bitter 13-month strike by workers at the Brookside mine, the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary \u201cHarlan County, U.S.A.<\/a>\u201d\u00a0 www.nytimes.com\/2019\/08\/19\/us\/kentucky-coal-miners.html<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

the1a.org\/shows\/2019-08-22\/the-1619-project<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0NPR Reveal on NYT 1619 Project: Hear a Times reporter describe how change in US has required Violent Revolution<\/h1>\n

podcasts.google.com\/?feed=aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLnJldmVhbHJhZGlvLm9yZy9yZXZlYWxwb2RjYXN0&episode=cHJ4XzE0OV80NWExOGI4ZC0wYTAzLTQ4ZmQtODQzOC1hYmIxYzcwY2M3ZWM&hl=en&ep=6&at=1566690814457<\/a><\/p>\n