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Don Blankenship is filing papers to get back in the mining business. (h/t Crook and Liars.) Read the post here.
Don Blankenship, the former CEO of Massey Energy, who was cited as having the worst fatality rate in the mining industry prior to the 29 deaths at the Upper Big Branch explosion in April 2010, has filed paperwork to open new mines. Blankenship lost his job as CEO but faced no other penalties and paid no real price for the lives that were lost under his watch. He filed the paperwork on behalf of McCoy Coal Group Inc. of Belfry, Ky., in January, although the company has not sought a new mining permit.
Massey under Blankenship had a legacy that should prohibit him from ever working in the field of mining again.
Despite the blood on his hands from his policies of putting profits ahead of the lives of miners, ousted coal baron Don Blankenship types out a column for the Daily Mail to attempt to justify his dirtiest campaign in the state's political history.
Blankenship's For the Sake of the Kids campaign should have focused on safe mining practices, and then maybe he wouldn't have left so many children fatherless.
Via Ken Ward Jr. at Coal Tattoo, there is a moving piece on NPR about the ongoing grief of those killed because they were Upper Big Branch miners:
But Gene Jones believes speaking out is critical, especially as public memory of the tragedy fades. Jones, 50, lost his identical twin Dean in the explosion.
"We're just going to be forgotten," Jones says, while mine disasters are "going to continue and continue and continue to go on. We need it fixed."
snip
Gene and Dean Jones were so close in their mother's womb doctors detected just a single heartbeat.
"I was 10 minutes older than Dean," Gene said. "It's like part of me is gone."
"I think about him every day," Gene said from a conference room at Appalachian Power in Beckley, where he works as an electrical engineer. His hazel eyes welled with tears. "So I work a lot not to think about it."
An obituary Gene wrote for his brother that includes an image of Dean, broadly smiling, sits on the table. If it wasn't for Dean's mustache, the twins would look exactly alike.
Still, when Gene looks in the mirror he sees his brother. "When people see me they see me and Dean," Gene adds, referring to Dean's widow Gina and their now 14-year-old son Kyle. "When Kyle sees me he sees his daddy some and when he listens to me talk, he probably thinks, 'Whoa, that's my dad!'"
Nick Rahall voted in support of the Robert C. Byrd Mine Safety Protection Act. Alan Mollohan did not show up to vote on it. Shelley Moore Capito voted against it. The bill after all, would close loopholes that allow mines repeatedly in violation to continue to operate unsafely. The lives of the miners have less value than the profits of the mine owners and their shareholder dividends.
Ward reprints an excerpt from the moving obituary Gene wrote for his brother that highlighted the relationship Dean had with Dean's son Kyle.
His beautiful son, whom he loves with every fiber of his being, is also waiting. They will have dinner together and then they will spend the evening together. They love "The Andy Griffith Show." He has purchased his son all the episodes on DVD, and they watch them over and over. They love watching old westerns, the kind that he grew up watching as a boy. They love the Steelers. He has filled his son's whole room with Steelers' memorabilia. They love WVU football and basketball. They love to wrestle and play and their beautiful golden retriever joins in the play. They are constant companions, bonded in a way that most do not know. His son is sick. His son has cystic fibrosis, a progressive and debilitating illness, for which there is no cure. He has spent many sleepless days and nights pleading for his son's life and health. He adores him and wants to be there for him. He wants to comfort him in hard times and laugh and play with him in good times. He wants his son's life to be full and blessed. He will lead him safely to manhood. They will blow out the candles together on his May 1st 14th birthday; since last year his son was too ill to have a birthday cake. They are best buddies. His greatest ambition was to be a good father.
His greatest ambition was to be a good father. There's little I can think of more important or that has more value than being a good father.
As Gene points out, the more than $12 million that Massey CEO Don Blankenship will receive for simply retiring from the company is four times more than the settlement offered by Massey to the families of the dead. Blankenship's putting profits over the lives of the people was more valuable to Massey than the lives of the miners.
In a way, it's really the story of America in the 21st century. From the tax cuts for the wealthy that will lead to a budgetary trap down the road that will lead to cuts in Social Security and Medicare to the telecom immunity supported by Sen. Jay Rockefeller that allowed Bush administration officials and telecom executives immunity for breaking the law to spy on all of us, Americans are losing out to the powerful. The wealthiest get away with crimes of such scope that it is hard to fathom. The rest of us are losing our financial security, our hope and our liberties and many are cheering on our collapse because they cannot comprehend how they have been swindled.
"We're just going to be forgotten," Gene Jones says, while mine disasters are "going to continue and continue and continue to go on. We need it fixed."
Jones could just as well be talking in general about the middleclass and the poor as well as about miners.
The current system is about propping up the wealthiest and making sure the scales of justice are tilted in their favor to the point there is no justice.
Dean Jones was a good human being. But if the people in power truly respected him and the other 28 miners, the Robert C. Byrd Miner Protection Act would have passed unanimously so that no other teenage sons would have to miss their fathers because the mining company put profits over people and those responsible for doing so would be given jail sentences instead of tax cuts and millions in bonuses.
The American Dream still exists for those fortunate enough to be in the wealthiest 2 percent who control half of all the nation's wealth. For the rest of us, the disasters are going to continue and continue, but it's not going to get fixed.
Activist icon Mother Jones once said pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.
Peace be with the Jones family and all those who died to provide higher profits to cover Blankenship's exit bonus.
As Don Blankenship prepares to give up control of Massey Energy after the nation's worst mining disaster in four decades, angry shareholders who have been agitating for the coal executive's ouster aren't sure whether to celebrate or lament.
That's because corporate filings are revealing the staggering cost of his departure -- a golden parachute that will provide Blankenship with $2.7 million upon retirement, a free house for life, millions more in deferred compensation, and a "salary continuation retirement benefit" of $18,241-a-month that will continue for 10 years after his departure at the end of the year.
"The fact of the matter is, the company absolutely needs him to leave. You want to say, anything's worth it because the company has no future with him," said Per W. Olstad, a lawyer with CtW Investment Group, a shareholder group that has pushed for Blankenship to step down. "But it's an egregious payout. It's way beyond what he's earned. Given how destructive his mismanagement has been, he simply does not deserve it."
But the important thing to remember was coal paid the bills, not safety measures.
Via RLMiller, Massey Energy has placed an ad on Craigs List for a new CEO to replace videogame villain Don Blankenship:
Massey Energy seeks a new Chief Executive Officer to carry on its important work destroying the environment and jeopardizing the health and safety of its employees. This position will oversee all Massey Energy operations (but don't worry - stringent or really any oversight is not a corporate priority).
Key responsibilities:
-Ducking responsibility for grave accidents and enthusiastically (and with a straight face) shifting the blame to government agencies created to prevent such incidents.
-Denying climate change, hating the environment and hating anyone who might enjoy the environment.
-Trading campaign cash for congressional favor.
-Threatening members of the media.
-Personally persuading workers to abandon union organizing.
Other qualities of a successful candidate:
-Inattention to detail.
-A really, really, really short fuse.
-Love of vacationing with judicial and political figures responsible for decisions/rulings regarding Massey.
-Ability to whine in high stress work environments, despite media criticism.
-General flagrant disregard for miner safety a plus.
Outside of the purview of the position:
Addressing safety violations (The Upper Big Branch mine has been cited for 1,342 safety violations since 2005 whatevs.)
-Reporting accidents (Massey Energy did not report more than 20 accidents at the explosive mine for two years before the explosion.)
Must be comfortable in office dress code, camouflage.
Salary is $17.8 million, the highest in the coal industry, and can be expected to double from one calendar year to the next. Bonuses frequently awarded for absolutely no reason at all.
This is a full time permanent position and will not be eliminated like other Massey Energy jobs as the company increases reliance on mountaintop removal coal mining, which in addition to destroying West Virginian's livelihoods and communities, has the added benefit of destroying mountains, valleys and waterways.
(For more information about the coal industry visit here)
Massey Energy Co., owner of the West Virginia mine where 29 people died in April, climbed after it said Chief Executive Officer Don Blankenship will retire at the end of this month.
A judge ruled against Massey for a 2008 citation involving coal dust at the Upper Big Branch, which Ken Ward Jr. reminds us is what many investigators think was responsible for the blast that killed 29 miners, but Blankenship has insisted was not a factor.
And Chamber Watch points out that the Chamber of Commerce is not looking out for America, but for the wealthiest members, including Blankenship.
On behalf of corporate CEOs, who would personally gain hundreds of thousands - even millions - of dollars, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been lobbying heavily for a permanent extension of the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthy. The CEOs for whom the U.S. Chamber is lobbying include some of the wealthiest executives in the nation, who make tens of millions of dollars in annual income: bankers like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan (average income: $21,991,394), Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs (average income: $31,949,089), and John Stangfeld of Prudential Financial (average income: $16,375,447); coal mining executives like Massey Energy's Don Blankenship (average income: $12,739,276); and insurance company CEOs like Ronald Williams of UnitedHealth and Angela Braley of Wellpoint (average income: $16,196,989 and $12,204,978, respectively).[1] Each of these CEOs stands to personally gain at least $700,000 to $1.7 million if the Bush Tax Cuts are extended.
Deficits only matter to Republicans when they can hurt poor people, but if it's tax cuts for the wealthy, deficits don't matter.
The rich get richer and the rest of us get poorer. Too many in West Virginia have forgotten who we are as a people as they scrabble for the crumbs given to us by the barons like Don Blankenship, who has a contempt for the rules that keep his workers alive. In this deeply depressing and unfortunately too-sound-to argue-against speech by Bill Moyers, he writes:
Instead of enforcing the rules of fair play, government served as valet to the plutocrats. The young journalist Henry George had written that "an immense wedge" was being forced through American society by "the maldistribution of wealth, status, and opportunity." Now inequality exploded into what the historian Clinton Rossiter described as "the great train robbery of American intellectual history." Conservatives of the day - pro-corporate apologists - hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like "progress," "opportunity," and "individualism" into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right.
As we saw in John Raese's recent Senate bid, with his opposition to the minimum wage and support for elimination of the Social Security system, the Republican Party opposes even leaving the crumbs for workers. And many West Virginians who will never inherit wealth from a grandmother the way Raese made his money supported him. They have fallen for the lies told to them by the corporate apologists Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Faux News and are thoroughly convinced that they need to protect the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans or else they are not good Americans. The problem is not that they are rich. The problem is they are using their wealth to actively repress the other 98 percent by laying off people even when having record profits, by repressing wages, by consolidating political power through unlimited spending and through domination of the airwaves. They are not bound by the same rules as the rest of us and that is how they like it. Here in West Virginia we saw how Blankenship's bought-and-paid-for disgraced former justice had the audacity to run for the House of Representatives funded again by Blankenship's millions.
The inequities in the income system that are becoming even more extreme than in third world countries is allowing the wealthy to continue to assure the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. If only they did not work so hard to make certain of the latter part of that they could be forgiven for the first half. But it is not enough for them to be rich and make money. They want to take away more from us.
Class warfare is being practiced and we see the body counts in the deaths of coal miners just trying to do their jobs and we see it in the not-so-hidden toll of the uninsured and the underinsured dying from a lack of proper health care.
The story of America goes that the early settlers of America migrated from Europe to create new lives for themselves where everyone was equal. But now the story in the 21st Century is how many Americans are helping the ruling class turn them into powerless serfs, who divert their own fears by trying to repress even those less fortunate below them.
In West Virginia we've seen how Don Blankenship and his ilk destroy the landscape, leaving behind a toxic wasteland that poisons the people and leaves behind grieving widows all while hiding behind the flag and a pretense of populism.
West Virginians used to fight back and stand up to the barons. We need to do so again at the ballot box.
Via Ken Ward Jr. at Coal Tattoo, The New York Times has an editorial praising President Obama for taking action.
Over the years, the federal government has done far less than it should - and far less than the law requires - to guarantee the safety of Appalachia's miners. So it was a welcome break with grim history when the Labor Department asked a federal judge last week to shut down a Kentucky mine owned by the Massey Energy Company. The mine has been cited for about 700 safety violations this year alone.
Massey is also the owner of the violation-plagued Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, where a methane explosion killed 29 workers in April. The company is reportedly the object of two grand jury investigations in connection with that disaster.
What makes last week's complaint particularly interesting is that it is the first time the federal government has moved to close a mine since it was given that authority under the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act 33 years ago.
Don Blankenship wants to be able to put profits over the lives of people and it's going to cost the company still more money. Perhaps Massey shareholders should have dumped Blankenship long ago, but until they have an executive in place that recognizes rules are meant to be followed their mines should all be shut down. They are supposed to be coal mines, not death traps.
[Mine manager, in bathrobe and shower cap, opens door]
Manager: Yes?
Inspector: Good mawnin'. Is this the Seng Creek coal mine owned by...[flips up papers on clipboard]...Massey Energy?
Manager: Um... May I ask who wants to know?
Inspector: I'm sorry. Where are my manners? Yes, I'm from the Federal Mine Safety and Health Administration. Here's my ID. I'm just here for a little surprise inspection, is all. Shouldn't take more'n a few minutes.
Manager: Well, this is surely a surprise. Normally we're told in advance of your arrival.
Inspector: Well, I'm sure you have nothing to worry about, my good man, seeing as you've so steadfastly cleaned up your operations after all those accidents and explosions and deaths and whatnot. In fact, we were just sayin' this mornin' back at the office how wonderful it was to know that, of all the inspections we're doing this month, we could count on at least one mine operator---Massey Energy!---to pass with flying colors!
Manager: Um... Could you excuse me for just one moment?
[Manager, smiling, closes door.]
[Manager pulls out Blackberry and texts, furiously: CODE RED! CODE RED!]
[Manager opens door, still smiling.]
Manager: Well, you look like you've traveled a long way. Would you like some coffee? Tea? Pot roast? Game of chess?
Inspector: Thank you, thank you, but I think I just wanna do my little inspection and leave you to your mining.
Manager, under his breath: I think I want my mommy.
Act II: October 7
[The stage is bare except for a radio on a stool.]
Radio newscaster's voice: "A surprise inspection has turned up serious safety violations that could have caused an explosion at another Massey Energy Co. coal mine in West Virginia, the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration said Thursday.
Inspectors caught Massey illegally cutting too deeply into the coal seam at its Seng Creek Powellton Mine about 40 miles south of Charleston in Boone County, the agency said. A foreman also admitted skipping mandatory tests for explosive gases, and inspectors caught Massey cutting coal with ventilation curtains rolled up and left out of the way, MSHA said."
Mine manager, in bathrobe and shower cap, enters from stage right, holds up the loofah in his hand, and shakes it vigorously: Damn you, big government and your meddling ways! Daaaaamn Yooooooooou!!!
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