Rusty Justice doesn’t think about Michael Bloomberg very often. But when he does — even if it’s just for a moment — it’s like remembering the gloating rich kid who stole his lunch.
The distaste started when the New York City billionaire donated $50 million to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign back in 2011, and continued when he poured in another $30 million this year. Rusty, you see, runs a land-moving company in Eastern Kentucky, and the anti-coal movement is playing a big role in systematically closing down the industry he’s worked around all his life.
Say what you will about the long-term environmental effects (Justice, for one, is very pro-coal) but the impact on the area’s one-source economy has been brutal. Some 8,000 miners have been laid off in the last four years — that’s more people than the entire population of Justice’s hometown, Pikeville. On the road to a cleaner energy future, the surrounding neck of Appalachia is looking like roadkill.
But Rusty’s unease with Bloomberg turned into a gut-deep animus last year, when the self-confessed hillbilly—if you’re from this part of the world that’s a self-identifier, not an insult—sat down for his weekly, three-hour, Saturday morning news-reading session. That’s when he came across Bloomberg’s latest jab.
“You’re not going to teach a coal miner to code.”
There he was, this business mogul, preaching “compassion” for the miners watching their world collapse — while simultaneously saying they couldn’t be retrained to work in America’s hottest industry.
“Mark Zuckerberg says you teach them to code and everything will be great,” said Bloomberg. “I don’t know how to break it to you …. but no.”
It wasn’t just about coal politics this time — on that stuff, at least, Justice can agree to disagree. This? This was just patronizing.
“It touched every button of every stereotype you can put on us, that we’re not smart and can’t do things and are pitiful and all that,” Justice told me. “It was like waving a red flag in front of a bull’s face.”
Rusty Justice thought he might know miners a little better than some fancy tycoon in New York did. That’s why, at dawn one October morning last year, he trotted down his driveway towards a silver F-150 truck idling in the street and drove some 150 miles along the Mountain Parkway to Lexington.
It was time to go and prove Bloomberg wrong.
