Quote Originally Posted by simple man View Post
Boucher is for Boucher. And the TV cameras. He pays a lot of lip servoce to things that sound good, but won't stand up to inspection. I quit following him when he used longwall figures to warp the coal production for SWVA (80s)- not mentioning that 50% of the income base was gone from SWVA and in the hands of the folks that ran the large companies. 'Course that is good old capitolism. Forget the workers.
I can remember when Westmoreland first brought the longwall into Bullett Mine...my dad spent 23 years working there mainly as a roof bolter and driving a shuttlecar (seems he shoveled alot of belts too, cuz that's all he really ever talks about concerning the mines anymore..so I guess he hated doing that.). The day they started mining coal with it, he told me the miners were essentially working themselves out of a job, because the longwall enabled the Coal Company to quickly rip out the coal which was easy to get to...and after the easy part was done they'd be gone. And he was right.