These days, good-paying industrial jobs need not exact untimely deaths from pollution. In fact, development of clean renewable energy generators – the likes of wind turbines, solar cells, biomass – would create and support good industrial jobs in America. Blue collar union workers and green collar environmentalists are pressing lawmakers to pass comprehensive climate change legislation. The BlueGreens told audiences in August the choice for lawmakers is leaving a legacy of environmental hell or bequeathing climate unchanged.

This is the fourth part of an analysis of the swing state Pennsylvania. It focuses on the industrial southwest, a once deep-blue region rapidly trending Republican. Part five can be found here.

Pittsburgh and the Southwest

Pennsylvania’s southwest has much in common with West Virginia and Southeast Ohio, the northern end of Appalachia. Electoral change in the region is best understood by grouping these three areas together as a whole.

Socially conservative (the region is famously supportive of the NRA) but economically liberal, the industrial southwest voters typify white working-class Democrats. These voters can be found in unexpected places: Catholics in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, loggers along the Washington coast, rust-belt workers in Duluth, Minnesota and Buffalo, New York.

More below.

Obama Endorses Massacre of Peaceful Activists; Threatens UN Veto to Support Piracy & Murder — NormanB (“Deviations from the Norm”)

China and America decline to acknowledge what everyone else knows: China suppresses the value of its currency to gain a trade advantage over America. This is costing America untold numbers of manufacturers and millions of jobs. The U.S. Treasury Department, which is required by the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988 to name foreign currency manipulators in bi-annual reports, must label China in its April 15 account, then sanction China if it doesn’t begin balancing its currency.

A recent report issued by the AFL-CIO revealed the scope of the economic crisis facing young people: rising unemployment and anxiety about their futures, inability to buy their own homes or even move out of their parents’ houses and lack of basic health care and retirement security.