Political Quotes

“I thank Senator Warner. I appreciate very much the hard fight to get in the middle of this with me and everybody else that is in this room right now that is in this fight because we have a lot of people's lives at stake. I came to the floor and warned that, without passing this bill, the American Miners Act, the UMWA pension fund would be insolvent by 2022, and that timeline could be accelerated to within a year if one of the major coal companies declared bankruptcy. Last night, that happened. Murray Energy, the largest coal company in the United States, filed for bankruptcy, making it the eighth coal company in the past 12 months to do so. Murray Energy has contributed 97 percent of the money going into the UMWA pension fund annually. With Murray's bankruptcy filing, the UMWA pension fund will become insolvent even faster. They are telling me, by this time next year, there will have to be drastic cuts into people's pension checks and, if not, eliminated. Most of those checks, I would remind everybody watching and listening, are $600 or less, and most of them are for widows from their husbands that have passed away. They still depend on them for their basic necessities of life. Once the United Mine Workers Pension fund becomes insolvent, this is going to start the snowballing effect. The crisis will truly go into a snowball effect and impact every other multiemployer and pension fund for America.…”