Now, in the Washington Post, "Trump’s promise to bring back coal jobs is worse than a con."
Apparently, "Market forces are sending coal the way of asbestos," claims the billionaire writer, who knows less about coal country than he does about soft drinks.
"The fact is, putting coal miners back to work is no more possible from a business standpoint than putting telegraph operators back to work taking Morse code or putting Eastman Kodak employees back to work manufacturing film rolls," declares the Post editorial by Michael Bloomberg.
"Politicians who ignore these market realities and make promises to coal communities they can’t keep are engaged in something worse than a con. They are telling those communities, in effect: The best hope they have, and that their children have, is to be trapped in a dying industry that will poison them. I don’t believe that’s true. We can save lives by ending coal production — just as we did with asbestos production — while also helping communities make the transition to 21st-century jobs."
As noble as Bloomberg's call to transition men in coal country from working jobs to getting unemployment. Or perhaps laboring in an Amazon warehouse until they die of a heart attack from trying to move 20 Blu Ray sets of Man in the High Castle within 15 minutes to environmental consultant parasites all the way from Seattle to Miami in under 3 minutes. (It's one of those modern 21st century jobs, don't you know.)
Still perhaps Bloomberg might apply his philanthropy closer to home.
The Washington Post, not to mention the Bloomberg magazine that shows up every week with a new garish cover, and the rest of the media are part of a dying industry. We can no more put media people back to work than we can restart the telegraph. And by funding them, we're only telling them that their best hope is to be trapped in a dying industry spewing toxic lies at America.
We can do better.
We can retrain angry social justice Post bloggers to driver Ubers. We can pack off Paul Krugman to work in an Amazon warehouse. We can dispatch David Remnick to post applications on TaskRabbit.
And we can help Michael Bloomberg transition to a rewarding career as a soda jerk through the hot new app, FIZZ.
It will be a difficult transition, but we can and should rescue these people. They need our help.