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Massey Disaster Not Just Tragic, but Criminal
Massey Energy runs the Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine in Montcoal, W.Va., where 29 miners were killed last week. The loss of life is tragic, but the UBB explosion is more than tragic; it is criminal. When corporations are guilty of crimes, however, they don’t go to prison, they don’t forfeit their freedom—they just get fined, which often amounts to a slap on the wrist, the cost of doing business. No one makes this clearer than the CEO of Massey Energy, Don Blankenship. He has been the bane of climate-change activists and mine safety advocates for years. This latest mine disaster, if nothing else, will surely bring needed attention to this poster boy for malevolent big business trampling on communities, the environment and workers’ rights.
Days after the Massey explosion, Blankenship admitted in a radio interview: “Violations are, you know, unfortunately, a normal part of the mining process ... there are violations at every coal mine in America. And UBB was a mine that had violations.” The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette has consistently reported critically on Massey Energy and Blankenship, prompting him to attack its editors in a November 2008 speech, saying: “It is as great a pleasure to me to be criticized by the communists and the atheists of the Gazette ... would we be upset if Osama bin Laden were to be critical of us? I don’t think so.”
Initial speculation on the cause of the explosion is methane in the mine. The Massey UBB mine has received thousands of citations for violations, including many for failing to remove the methane with ventilation. Another cause may be the mine’s proximity to Massey mountaintop removal operations. Mountaintop removal involves the massive blasting away of mountaintops, providing access to seams of coal, but causing widespread destruction of the environment. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that a West Virginia state investigation into the explosion will include possible impact of nearby mountaintop mining operations. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson issued new rules restricting mountaintop removal on April 1, just days before the Massey explosion. Massey is the principal target of a growing grass-roots campaign against mountaintop removal. Among those arrested at protests have been renowned climate scientist James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and actress Daryl Hannah.
Sixteen miners died in Massey mines between the years 2000 and 2007. Elvis Hatfield, 46, and Don Bragg, 33, were killed in January 2006 in the Aracoma mine fire. Their widows sued Massey Energy and Blankenship. At the trial, their lawyers presented a memo written by Blankenship months before the fatal fire, instructing his deep-mine superintendents to focus on extracting coal over safety projects: “If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e. build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever), you need to ignore them and run coal. This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills.”
Coal pays the bills. And pays Blankenship’s salary, which, estimated by The Associated Press at $19.7 million, is the highest in the coal industry. Massey, who is a board member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is a fierce opponent of organized labor, a relentless denier of climate change and a staunch opponent of regulation. He said of government regulators, last Labor Day at an anti-union rally, “The very idea that they care more about coal-miner safety than we do is as silly as global warming.”
Blankenship poured $3 million into the election campaign of a candidate for the West Virginia Supreme Court, in order to replace a sitting judge who he feared would rule against Massey in an appeal against a $50 million judgment. The candidate he backed, Brent Benjamin, won the seat and voted to overturn the judgment. (The U.S. Supreme Court overturned that decision, citing Blankenship’s funding of the election, and the case served as the basis of John Grisham’s 2008 legal thriller, “The Appeal.”)
Pension funds and other large institutional investors are demanding that Massey fire Blankenship. The last of the 29 bodies of the miners killed in the Massey mine have been recovered. Their deaths should not be counted by Don Blankenship as the cost of doing business, but, rather, should top his criminal indictment.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
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44 Comments so far
Show AllThe poor miners are simply "collateral damage" in support of the empire. Coal mining has to be the absolute worst possible job on the face of the earth. Ten times their current hourly rate is not enough. The danger is constant and oppressive. I do not understand how people can mine coal. They have more courage and tenacity that I could ever muster in ten lifetimes. And they are treated worse than dogs.
Everyday men risk their lives in high risk jobs. Building skyscrappers. high voltage wires,fishing frozen waters etc. They do it because these occupations pay more than they could earn otherwise. Maybe we should reflect on how these civilians who are heros bring us the things we need in our daily lives. Lets quit worshiping our military and give credit to these guys who do dirty dangerous work.
It is possible to remove methane from a mine with techniques like positive pressure ventilation. It is not done because of the time and expense involved in putting the fans down in the mine, (positive pressure to keep methane from seeping in) rather than the simpler task of installing the fans over vent holes and sucking the air up, (negative pressure which pulls seeping methane out). To save expenses miners are exposed to unnecessary danger. Unless of course maximizing profit is the prime necessity and apparently it is.
We are all collateral damage under capitalism.
Amy Goodman does a service to Americans that is unappreciated. She tells the truth and sometimes the truth is painful to hear. I think she is underrated as a journalist. Her radio program is not available in our area. She is not as popular as Rush Limbaugh because she is reporting facts. Recently according to Kieth Olbermann, Rush asked the question, why didn't the Union prevent the many safety hazards that caused the deaths of the miners? Where was the union? Most Americans are probably like me. I did not know that the Massey corporation did not allow the miners to unionize. The miners were told that the company would close down if they voted for a union although at least 70% of the workers wanted a union. Rush is an entertainer not a journalist or reporter of facts. Amy is an honest and compassionate human being and brilliant journalist. I wish the American people would look to other shows for entertainment and listen to real news reports like Amy Goodman.
Agreed, genie.
Joe
She's good but incapable of connecting the dots, like one poster mentions above.
Goodman would do a greater service to journalism and Americans if she daily exposed Obama as the war criminal and Bush clone that he is. The root of all our problems is that we keep electing Democrats to replace Republicans. That's like electing Jeffrey Dahmer to replace Ted Bundy.
It's all part of the same problem: corporatist corruption of the government and control of the country.
Why aren't YOU exposing "Obama as the war criminal and Bush clone that he is"? Pick your own rants. Don't expect others to do your ranting FOR you.
what a silly reply, I've been exposing Obaminable for at least 3 years, while Amy Goodman was covering his campaign favorably against Hillarity and McInsane for at least one year. She went gaga for Obomber election night the same way MSNBC did. I wished she had given Nader and McKinney the same air time on Democracy Now! Instead, she gave them close to nothing.
Ardath Bey: I agree. And like I said about 2 years ago when the country was gaga over Obomba: " The definition of political insanity: electing the same two party's over and over again and expecting a different result ! " I agree with Cynthia McKinney when she says: " We only have one party in America and that is the party of war and $$$$".
I agree. She is under-appreciated. I learn a lot of facts when I listen to Democracy Now. I can connect dots myself, just give me the facts -- and that's what she does.
I agree! Each and every morning, at 8 AM, I watch Democracy Now! on MNN, here in NYC. If I have to miss the show, I feel disconnected. In one hour, on most days, Amy, Juan and those who assist, put out more real news than a cable news channel puts out in 24 hours.
Right on genie! Amy and Democracy Now! have done so much to stay real, and to help the rest of us stay sane in a mad world. Talk about making a difference... I rally cannot imagine the u.s. media without her- what a wasteland that would be
Drill, Baby Drill! You see there was another earthquake, this time in China. I think the earth is trying to fight back by having quakes, sort of crying out in pain. Mother earth must be tired of being raped for profits.
Sioux Rose
M60: I echoed your sentiments/perceptions on a different CD thread this evening. The soul memory of the inner shaman is awakening in suburbanites and urban cowboys and girls... perhaps.
I hate to bring sanity into this, but China has always had more earthquakes. It's a big country. I've been a disaster groupie forever and China usually makes the news at least 10 to 12 times a year. We just have more 24hr news outlets now and news has been pretty quiet this week.
Blankenship's motto should be "Die, so I can live free."
Amy Goodman, and her program Democracy Now!, is never able to "connect the dots" linking the staggering number of social and economic crises now faced by working people in this country. To routinely listen to only Democracy Now! is to eventually believe that the "sky is falling" and nothing is humanely possible to end the destruction of humanity.
Every crisis is examined as if a singular event, caused by specific individuals or corporations, that can be easily remedied. All we need to do is to prosecute the culprit individual or corporation. replace Bush with Obama, etc. ad nauseum, any understanding that these many specific crises are all symptoms intrinsic to a capitalist economy. The syptoms are most pronounced with the collapse of U.S. and global capitalism.
A capitalist economy, operating only to maximize weatlh and profit to a tiny minority, has never beem able to fill the economic needs of the vast majority of people. Vast social inequaltiy, unending wars for profit, massive pollution and global warming, are all intrinsic under gangster capitalism.
Here is a socialist perspective from the World Socialist Web Site.
WSWS home page: http://www.wsws.org
full article here:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/pers-a14.shtml
Mine disaster exposes the brutal reality of American capitalism
by Jerry White
14 April 2010
(a couple of paragraphs excerpted here:)
In the nine days since a massive explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, West Virginia claimed the lives of 29 miners, evidence has continued to accumulate demonstrating the criminality of the mine’s operator, Massey Energy, and the complicity of the federal and state agencies that allowed the mine to continue operating despite ample warnings of an impending disaster.
...
Massey and its CEO Don Blankenship are not aberrations. They are true representatives—perhaps more open than others—of the business model of American capitalism. The relations that prevail in the mines are a concentrated expression of class relations under the profit system—relations of ruthless exploitation of the majority by a small and fabulously wealthy minority, who are backed by all of the institutions of the state and official society.
While funneling trillions to Wall Street, the Obama administration has embarked on an offensive against the working class even more sweeping than that conducted by Reagan in the 1980s.
...
None of the will be carried out by appealing to the powers-that-be. Miners and the working class as a whole can defend their interests only insofar as they are organized as a class to fight the corporations and their bought-and-paid-for representatives in both big business parties. This must take a conscious political and revolutionary form, on the basis of a socialist program.
The carnage in the mines can be ended only if workers take the industry out of private hands and put it under the democratic and collective control of the working people themselves.
People are more likely to pay attention to and learn from the facts arising from specific situations than from abstractions. Details and shifts in current events are important. Capitalism has been around for a while, and its character has changed dramatically during those years. Democracy Now is one of the few places in which developments are exposed in detail. By looking at details, the listener is able to intuit or understand more about the overall situation and how it is evolving. This is a valuable service.
I see an enormous amount of work, courage, honesty and thought going into these programs. Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez have analysts of quality as guests on the program on a regular basis. Perhaps there should be more coverage of struggles... and I still wish she wouldn't play music without explaining what it is!
Joe
On the arguably trivial and gratuitous point of CD's musical interludes, my sense is that Amy usually DOES make a point of crediting the music when the program resumes after each break.
However, sometimes she forgets, and the other anchors or moderators-- especially the young "rookies"-- are prone to ignore or overlook this bit of courtesy in the shuffle.
I couldn't resist responding, since once in a while I wait in vain for an interesting obscure music clip to be identified. ;)
I agree with Jerry that DemocracyNow! should make an effort to "connect the dots". Not necessarily through Amy or Juan. Maybe a third person should be assigned the task. The data and facts are out there and people need to hear it on the air on a daily basis. These ideas need more play than just in print.
Hi kat - I once took a class in American autobiography. For each bio, the teacher provided some background, not too much, about the historical period, the author and the genre conventions of that time. For class, the teacher had each of us select a short passage from what we had read, and then explain to the class why the passage had meaning for him or her. The class had people from many countries, many backgrounds. What was most surprising is the diversity of reaction to the same few pages. Some people were struck by meaningful passages that had gone completely over my head or under my radar. Who we are influences how we experience the same events or ideas.
In a news program, context is important. Pointing out patterns, history and relationships is useful. But, my point is that too much pre-digestion, commentary and interpretation from the newscaster can interfere with fresh perceptions and people learning to think for themselves. It is easy to slip from explanation into imposing one's viewpoint. Rant and cant (which I can slip into, so this is not an attack on others) have a minimal place in news coverage.
Joe
I agree, Joe. If not for Democracy Now, most people would only hear the lies on the corporate media. They tell the truth. Sorry it's not perfect, but it's the best we've got right now, and I am thankful for it.
Sioux Rose
J CLIENTELLE: You raise an important point. I believe Jerry Wells was exposing the allowable limits of on-air discussions. The "S" word is still taboo in our culture; and due to it's being marginalized, it has now been co-opted by the teabag whirling dervishes who know not of what they speak.
Good point about the "S" word. Self-censorship is a potential problem.
Joe
Sioux Rose
JERRY WELLS: Thank you for your excellent posts. I read CD to come across deep thinkers like yourself.
Blankenship is atypical of the corporate culture where a sociopath rises to a position of authority due to his obsessive commitment to destroy, deny and obstruct any opposition to his company's bottom line. Unfortunately psychopaths (those who have no empathy for humankind or moral compass) are rewarded in a corpocracy (like the U.S.) or in any brutal dictatorship (Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union) and in fact are actively recruited by the upper echelon because of their ability to "make the hard decisions".
In a normally functioning democracy that serves the public rather than the private interest, a psychotic individual like Mr. Blankenship would never be allowed to be in a position of authority, would be under the care of a trained mental health professional and the community in which he lives would keep a close eye on his behaviour due to the danger he was capable of inflicting on himself and those people around him.
Other examples of people who suffer from the same mental illness and who have risen to power include, George Bush, Dick Cheney and pretty well everyone else in the last White House administration, the CEO's of almost every major corporation in the U.S., the Wall Street bankers as well as celebrity seekers on faux news programs like FOX who will say or do anything to get a chance to be on T.V.
Until the general public and the Supreme Court of the United States stops enabling these dangerous people to ruin our lives, little will change.
To say that "Blankenship is atypical of corporate culture" is to suggest that changing individual CEOs of a corporation will seriously change the essential nature and reason for existence of that corporation.
Corporations, a legal construction under capitalism, legally bind their CEOs to maximize profit for the owners of the corporations. To maximize profit at whatever means legally possible. Thus the mining companies will try to cut the costs which cut into profits. This has meant to forever minimize wages, minimize health care benefits, cut corners on safety considerations, etc. To maximize the "productivity" (exploitation) of the workers involved. This is intrinsic behavoir evident throughout the capitalist economy and in all for-profit industries.
Thus mining corportions will put off safety equipment as long as possible even if it means some fines. The fines typically administered are trivial compared to the costs of running a business with the safety measures installed. Politicians are lobbied (bribed), paid off with campaign contributions, etc. to maximize profit. If profit is not possible, the corporation will shut down, and in some industries have moved overseas to minimize labor costs.
Wars are essential to the maximzation of profit to the military-industrial complex.
The oil industry continues massive pollution of the planet, willing to pay armies of lawyers and politicians to maximize profit by doing nothing about the pollution.
Global warming is not addressed with recent "cap and trade" legislation, which protects the profits of polluting industry without shutting them down.
The "Health Care Reform" of Obama institutionalizes the profiteering of gangster corporations who effectively are killing tens of thousands to maximize profit.
The capitalist SYSTEM can never be reformed or fixed or "bailed out" that can eliminate
or even seriously ameliorate the intrinsic problems and crises generated by capitalism.
For further information read daily the World Socialist Web Site: http://www.wsws.org
We should drag the psychopaths into the mines, fields and sweatshops to serve a lifetime of indentured servitude in fear and constant terror, just as they have been behaving. They fear that the most.
Thank you your comment interested me "In a normally functioning democracy that serves the public rather than the private interest, a psychotic individual like Mr. Blankenship would never be allowed to be in a position of authority,"
I'm 46 yrs old and I have to say I've never seen a fununctioning Democracy as you describe. In fact I wok for two phycohtics as you described now. Course in this economy wher ya gonna go. even a year a go I would have hit the door as fast I could but now this type has come out of the woodwork to the point I wouldn't know where to go.
Nothing new here. These guys were crushed and/or suffocated.
More like them will die and the world will continue to turn.
They loved America, they loved the money, and they mostly probably voted for the one party system.
Why don't they strike? Because illegals will replace them more cheaply?
Next rolodex item: More hate stories against the working class?
Thank you Amy
---------
My name is Donald Blankenship I run the Massey Mines for safety regulations I haven't got the time.
So run miners run, Get down and dig the coal, don't listen to anyone who cares about your soul.
Communists and Atheists who write for the Gazette criticize my methods, well they ain't seen nothin yet.
If bin Laden criticized me I would just be proud, so if you don't like me, you can join his crowd
My name is Donald Blankenhip, I run the Massey mines, regulations are a drag, I appeal every fine.
Run miners run no matter who it kills You got to understand that coal pays the bills.
With my 19 million salary, I can buy the judge, Its the cost of doing business like dumping mining sludge.
In the Chamber of Commerce, I also run the board, we know silly global warming is a cause we can't afford.
My name is Donald Blankenship, I run the Massey mines, regulations are a drag, I appeal every fine.
We don't allow no unions in our coal mines, they just attack our business and our bottom line.
Coal pays the bills, provides all the thrills, this job is for real men without those Safety Frills.
My name is Donald Blankenship, I run the Massey Mines, I can just buy justice when widows and children whine.
My name is Donald Blankenship, so what's the big crime?
What kind of country are we that we allow someone like Blankenship to put his miners in needless mortal danger?
Does one need a license to operate a mine? If so, his should have been revoked a long time age. If not, why not?
Money runs the show more than ever so the old idea of a commons is now a dream.
Sioux Rose
FREE FALLEN: It's precisely the SAME attitude that sees no problem slaughtering foreign-born persons attending wedding parties or baby naming ceremonies, if they happen to reside in regions where US elite enterpreneurs are interested in doing "business." And that's really what it comes down to: life is seen as cheap, particularly when it gets in the way of big profit potentials, i.e. business. I'd rather be poor than rich holding the karmic debts of one like Blankenship.
Nothing wrong with money, long as you don't steal it from others.
But ... but ... but ... I thought it was all those OTHER cultures that did not value human life.
William Rood, patriotic citizen of the world
And where have you been??? They should just be thankfull they have a job!
Will ole Blankenship still get his weekly $378,846.15 for the week that the mine was shut down so tax money could be used to search for the bodies?
I can guarantee Don Blankenship that Jesus would not have treated people like he does. Does he literally call himself a Christian? Love thy neighbor as thyself. Obviously the pitiful don has no love for his neighbor nor himself.
If only more Christians would emulate Jesus.
Joe
i agree that massey and its managers should get some hard time. At the same time though one has to wonder why it is that massey can have thousands of safety violations and shrug them off as part of doing business. ok we don't need to wonder, cause we know all too well. the government agencies that do the inspecting and hand out the fines are in the service of capital. fine. but i still don't quite get it. why wouldn't obomber's minions find it advantageous to hammer a creep as spectacular as blankenship? the public would be enthusiastic. people really, really feel bad for those heartlessly abused miners, and those who were killed, and their families. he actually can do this- he can explain to the plutocrats that this guy has to be thrown under the bus, he's making them all look bad.
Not at all! He makes a profit, thats all his masters on Wall-St ask. if a handfull of plebes have to die ok, as log as production isn't held up, he may be in a bit of trouble for that. Goldman-Sachs runs this country for one reason only PROFIT! if you can help great, if not get your moldering corpse out of the way.
When Goldman-Sachs bought Obomber they interviewed him and Hilary and decided he was most lacking backbone and any sembelence of Morality. I'd expect if there were a god as advertised they would have had enough of Blankenships games and fried him with lightening!
The fact hes still knocking back martinis while the inmates at MontCoal go back to work is that there is no God, No Heaven and no Hell, except that which we make.
I wonder if the concept of citizens' arrest is applicable.
Joe