Amy Goodman: Massey Disaster Not Just Tragic, but Criminal

[kpete]

Published on Wednesday, April 14, 2010 by TruthDig.com
Massey Disaster Not Just Tragic, but Criminal

by Amy Goodman

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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.

more:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/14

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