Don Blankenship is well-known for his union-busting behavior and his lavish expenditures to control the West Virginia Supreme Court. (By paying for ads like this)
He is the CEO of Massey Energy.
He is not a credit to the coal industry.
He has been involved with the State Supreme Court for a long time.
That piece includes the famous “liable to get shot” footage.
The US Supreme Court got involved on this one. The highest court in the land made a ruling that said that justices must recuse themselves from making decisions for those who have given massive campaign expenditure on their behalf.
That chief justice was later defeated in the Democratic primary. He tried to make the excuse that he just ran into Don Blankenship in Monaco.
Maynard is now running for congress as a Republican. He’s running against long-time incumbent Nick Joe Rahall, and it will be a nasty campaign.
You can bet on it.
But Blankenship is so good at scaring the other elected officials in West Virginia and all the regulatory authorities that he can get away with all sort of safety oversights. After all, it is cheaper to pay the fine for his safety violations than to fix them.
His thought process probably goes something like this:
Don’t drill a shaft to let the methane escape. Costs too much. The fines aren’t anything anyway. We don’t have a union to worry about. Miners’ lives are expendable. My money isn’t.
Mining is a dangerous profession. There is no denying this fact.
However, it can be made safer. Mines throughout West Virginia are implementing state of the art safety measures to ensure that these workplaces are as safe as they can possibly be.
It’s too bad that this company decided it was a better investment to pay the fines than actually improve safety. 25 miners have lost their lives because of this calculus. 4 are still missing.
We can only hope that those 4 are okay.
But now you see how politics works in West Virginia.
We are living in little more than a banana republic.
And caudillos from the coalfields have lots of power.
They have the power to jeopardize the lives of their employees, as well as the health of the surrounding communities. Once they have made their money and the coal is gone, there won’t be anything left in these communities.
Just broken bodies, broken governments, and broken promises.
mining in america always seems to have quite a tragic means to an end.
have you ever read Storming Heaven? It’s about mining in West Virginia in the early 20th century.
Yes.
Denise Giardina and I went to the same place for undergrad.
We even have the same undergrad degree!
In fact, I voted for her party’s candidate for governor in the past three elections.
[…] See related post. […]
i think rahall and manchin are afraid of blankenshit
Yes.
Blankenshit is running Spike against Rahall, and Manchin ain’t too bright.
[…] See earlier post. […]