DON BLANKENSHIP: “MINE! UP YOURS! DROP DEAD!”

Considered the worst mining disaster in 25 years, the death toll in Tuesday’s mine explosion near Whitesville West Virginia has reached 25 fatalities. Thus far, seven bodies have been identified and 18 remain underground. Four persons are still missing.

According to a spokesperson for Massey Energy, the owner of the mine, the rescue mission has been suspended because rising levels of methane gas made further rescue and recovery operations unsafe. The mission will continue after boreholes are drilled to vent the mine of combustible gas.

One deceased miner, Benny Willingham, age 62, was only five weeks away from retirement, according to his sister-in-law, Sheila Prillaman, who said family members only learned of Willingham’s death from a list posted by the company.  Prillaman is angry because no company representative contacted the family in person to inform them of their loss.

Don Blankenship, the Chairman and CEO of Massey Energy, confirmed the casualty count with this statement (source):

”Our top priority is the safety of our miners and the well-being of their families.”

For a nation so jaded by corporate spin and the lack of investigative journalism, the statement renders itself invisible to scrutiny. Too bad it takes a tragedy of this magnitude to shed light on an Inconvenient Truth: Massey Energy, the nation’s sixth largest mining concern, is a repeat offender, a notorious scofflaw, and now … mass murderer.

According to federal records, Massey Energy has amassed over 3,000 safety violations (including 57 in the last month alone) for failing to develop and follow a safety plan. Data kept by the Mine Safety and Health Administration show three fatalities at the Upper Big Branch mine in the past 12 years. Last year, Massey paid a record $4.2 million in criminal and civil fines for “willfully violating mandatory safety standards” that led to the deaths of two miners (source).

Mining operators such as Massey Energy thwart new safety rules by overloading the regulatory system with appeals that clog the system and bog down enforcement. Operators employ this tactic to avoid paying fines, evade scrutiny, and stop regulators from shutting down mines for violations that put workers’ lives in risk. To date, the backlog of outstanding appeals has risen to 16,000 cases (source).

Blankenship is the epitome of a corrupt and morally bankrupt plutocrat. As the highest paid coal executive in the land, he has used his fortune to corrupt the system, bust unions, buy politicians, and influence justice. He is infamous for spending $3.5 million to defeat the election of a West Virginia Supreme Court Judge in order to overturn a $50 million fraud verdict against his company (source). These days, it has never been easier for a crook like Blankenship to dodge charges of graft.

How does the energy industry literally get away with murder? Companies such as Massey Energy and Koch Industries spend millions of dollars each year to confound the issues and distract the public by enlisting unwitting citizens to serve as their proxies. Here is Don Blankenship inviting the public to a Labor Day Tea Party event called Friends of America Rally:



Environmental extremists? Corporate America? Destroying your jobs?  It is an audacious deception worthy of Grima Wormtongue. Certainly we understand how free markets, union busting, and lower wages put more money in the pockets of Don Blankenship and David Koch. How does the gutting of occupational safety regulations benefit American workers? How do higher allowable levels of arsenic in public drinking water benefit growing children? How does toxic wash from mountaintop removal benefit downstream communities? Our news media covers the Tea Party rabble while our most pressing questions go unanswered.

At the 1992 Republican Convention, Vice President Dan Quayle attacked the concept of progressive taxation with this question: “Why should the best people be punished?” His remark affords us a glimpse into a mindset where the richest people are considered “the best people” at the pinnacle of an economic, social, and moral order (source) while the rest of us are mere serfs and vassals for their self-enrichment. What profits the plutocracy is defined as “freedom;” what benefits middle-class America is derisively termed ‘socialism.’

Priests' paradise -- Alaska

Every time I think the Catholic-priest-molestation scandal can't get any worse -- it does.

On the morning of January 14 in Seattle, Ken Roosa and a small group Alaska Natives stood on the sidewalk outside Seattle University to announce a new lawsuit against the Jesuits, claiming a widespread conspiracy to dump pedophile priests in isolated Native villages where they could abuse children off the radar. "They did it because there was no money there, no power, no police".....

These abusers in Alaska, Wall said, were specifically sent to Alaska "to get them off the grid, where they could do the least amount of damage" to the church's public image.

Read the whole thing (found via PZ Myers, who has plenty to say too). The leaders of the Church cared nothing for the children who had been victimized, nor for those whom they knew full well these creatures would go on to victimize in Alaska, so long as everybody kept quiet. They cared only for the Church's reputation. So it's most appropriate that that reputation is now being slowly and publicly shredded, lawsuit by lawsuit.

Too bad it comes too late for the kids who committed suicide.

Internet neutrality and the Courts

Marconi was still a young man when the need for government control of communications became all too obvious. Newsmen using the new wireless telegraph began to jam each others' transmissions accidentally and on purpose and battles were fought over frequency allocations. Someone had to step in with some rules to allow the technology to develop, to prevent it being used as a weapon in restraint of free trade and to make sure that those using the public airwaves would use it without disregard for the public interest.

I can almost hear throats clearing at those last two words, almost see lips forming words like collectivism, socialism, Communism, but without it, the guy with the most money has the podium and the guy who owns all the podiums: press, broadcast and now the Internet, might just as well be the government with all that power. The difference between a fair trial and murder; between a Hockey game and a viking raid (if there is a difference) is the rules, so save your breath. I don't want to hear it.

The FCC was formed for these reasons, but during the last administration, it's been almost exclusively concerned with promoting the interests of power companies who want to use the power lines to get into the internet business, and sometimes to the serious harm of other users of the frequency spectrum. Whether or not this has changed under the Communist/Fascist Antichrist from Kenya seems to matter less than the current posture of the courts. The District of Columbia Federal Appeals Court decided yesterday in favor of Comcast and against the authority of the FCC in it's attempt to mandate "net neutrality."

The new administration has been in favor of equal treatment for all internet users; in favor of a policy that would prevent Comcast, for instance from slowing down and restricting the content they don't like and making content they approve of faster and cheaper. Yes, yes, I know all about free market competition, but I'm talking about the real world here and that's a world where corporations collude rather than compete. It's a world where a small group can control information to the point where no one can compete successfully. As I said, the difference between boxing and assault and battery or even murder is the rules.

It's too soon to make scary assertions about how this will work out, but as restrictions on how much of all media outlets can be owned by one person, real or corporate have been loosened along with restrictions on how much information they can restrict in their own interest, it looks to me like we're once again shooting ourselves in the foot, slow motion style. Our obsessive fantasy of a 'no holds barred' marketplace leading to peace and order, prosperity and a well informed electorate is, along with our phobic horror of phrases like "public interest" may be making corporate demagoguery a more valid vision of the future.

Freedom's just another word

Somehow I've never been able to understand why preventing enormous and hugely profitable insurance corporations from dropping you because you kid was born with a heart defect or not covering your leukemia treatments because you forgot to tell them you had acne in high school makes us no longer a free country -- or perhaps only a "mostly free" country according to the Heritage Foundation.

But more confusing and more difficult to reconcile than quantum mechanics and relativity is the idea that allowing warrantless wiretaps and other unconstitutional government abuses don't have the same effect. Seems that President Ford was comfortable with giving the FBI discretion on whether or not to seek a warrant for probable cause for wiretapping on the advice of his Attorney General William B. Saxbe. That's a long time before the Patriot act that cemented the "almost free" condition into law - a law that the Democrats haven't yet repudiated. Silly of me that this might have interfered with my freedom nearly as much as an extra 2% on what I might make over a net $375,000. Freedom's just another word for profit.

Is it the threat to monopolistic and feudalistic aberrations of free-market Capitalism that make us almost free or is it things like restrictions on civil rights? I think the answer is obvious. Freedom isn't at stake when Exxon-Mobil payed less in income tax last year than a minimum wage worker did, but the minimum wage itself is a threat to freedom and a harbinger of a Communist takeover. But don't ask me to explain. Ask some other millionaire from the kind of "think-tank" funded by the oil cartel.

Because that's exactly who is telling us what freedom means. That's who would rather you didn't think of it in terms of freedom from want, fear, privation - or the FBI rummaging through your life looking for anything they like. There's little profit in privacy -- in your privacy anyway. There is big profit in usury so our freedom hasn't suffered by finance companies that can charge 200% and ask for more, but it's damn near communist tyranny to ask Exxon to pay what my gardener pays.

No, Obama is a tyrant and he's made us less free, not for the things he's done or hasn't done to force responsibility on Wall Street, not for failing to undo constitutional infractions or abuses of executive power, not for actually give most of us a tax cut, but for giving some of the protection we've been asking for against financial ruin, against having to choose between feeding our kids or dying of a curable disease.

I'm glad we have people like the Heritage Foundation around to explain things like freedom to us. We might have gone on thinking that being able to vote, to use public facilities, to be served in restaurants and hotels, to buy property wherever we can afford it, to get a job if we're not white or protestant or male or young or to send our kids to school had something to do with being free -- all those things that such grand sounding patriotic spokesmen like the Heritage foundation assure us are nothing of the sort. Without them we might have forgotten how free we were years ago when we had slavery, segregation, race laws, male suffrage, restricted housing, poll taxes and lynching parties. I'm glad they continue to keep up the good fight.

Tea Party Express...to the Moon

Despite a smudge on my camera lens (it was impossible to see on the LCD screen in broad afternoon sunlight), I'm very proud of this video. The Tea Party Express is either a brilliant piece of surrealist theatre or a massive exercise in cognitive dissonance. Enjoy.

Tennessee Tea

Some people might give them credit for never giving up and of course, like congenital stupidity and genital herpes, the Republicans never really go away.

Yesterday's e-mail viral outbreak flared up with another version of a letter excoriating Barack Obama for such inexcusable acts of treason as not placing a flower at the World Trade Center crater with a sensitive enough wrist action and of course referencing that old groaner, the photo of him singing without his hand on his heart. Both these things and more, insisted the weeping and wailing writer are proof of his Christian hating Islamic faith and his mission to destroy all that is held dear by the pretend conservatives who hang upside down in belfries and eat bugs.

Not that such people actually write these things. Virtually all of the phony celebrity letters libeling and threatening Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton and the Obama family are written by the same, easily recognizable hand, although the attributions change from day to day. The faux outrage and breast beating pretend patriotism are always the same.

The letter I got was attributed to Sherry Hackett, the wife of the famous and raunchy comedian although she didn't write it nor likely did the others it's been "from" in the last 6 months. The person who forwarded it to me was crying for our country or so she says. Actually I think she welcomes any scurrilous and seditious screed that oozes from the Republican cesspool. I think it just hasn't sunk in that far from shoving things down America's throat, democracy has shoved change down theirs.

The desperation seems to call for deliberate denialism and cultivated delusion. If Obama takes off his shoes, that means he's a Muslim and not a Christian was a sentiment presented by a small townTennessee Tea Party organizer along with a picture of a shoeless president. Frankly I wish he were, but even so, it's a statement that could only be applauded by people not likely to be found at a Mensa meeting unless they're simply dishonest exploiters of the traditionally stupid.

For a group whose meetings sometimes draw dozens of people, God willin' and the creek don't rise, it can't be hard to avoid the leaders knowing that it's a tiny minority cult representing a fringe Right element, yet their solution to the problems posed by an electorate that emphatically rejected the Right in the last election is to go further right. The Washington Post quoted David Nance, the founder of the Gibson County Patriots, in Jackson, Tenn as saying

"This effort is to try to get the Republican Party to try to give us more conservative candidates"

and he believes it's working, yet his choice of Stephen Fincher, gospel singer and cotton farmer from Frog Jump, Tennessee for the State's 8th Congressional District seems to have little to do with stated Tea Party goals of reducing the cost of government and eliminating "entitlements" what with Fincher raking in a cool, conservative $200,000.00 per annum in farm subsidies and being financed by others riding the same gravy train. He's pulled down over $2.5 million since 1995. Of course that' just all tea in the harbor and doesn't seem to matter as much as the president with his shoes off or the stories about flag pins and tardy salutes, a too small flag on his campaign jet and the laying down of a flower at the WTC with insufficient wrist action as discussed in the letter Sherry Hackett didn't write.

The shame of it all really is that Barack Obama, with his continuing support of some unpopular Republican policies may be too conservative for Liberals and perhaps even for some centrists while this collection of Beverly Hillbillies wants to tell us he's a Muslim version of Pol Pot while selling a faux populist version of Corporatism.

It's more of a shame we don't seem to have any genuine conservative opinion worth reading these days, and of course if we'd had it earlier, we might not have needed it so badly now.

Cruel April

I'm sorry Mr. Eliot, but for me, April is no more cruel than any other month, particularly in the large part of the world wherein it represents no particular change of season. Yes, the jasmine blooms explosively here in April, but something always fills the wind with fragrant joy even if too many of us have had our cars repossessed, our homes foreclosed on and our assets ravaged by medical bills. Even the tired old Bunny had to walk home this year, or so I hear.

But hey -- In Western lands it's no longer open season for pogroms and persecutions and so far, Rupert Murdoch's dogs haven't got round to inventing the war on Easter they truly need to prop up their ridiculous fantasy about a war on Christmas. In April, people can still wish you a Happy Holiday weekend without stirring up one of O'Reilly's passion plays and even our Islamic Jihadist President had himself a sorta Seder, his ears sticking out from his yarmulked head like Mercury's winged helmet.

Still, this Easter, drunken bikini-boaters clogged the waterways with their springy-breaky recklessness and the Sunday morning roads teemed with ridiculously dressed people making their one annual excursion to the Church of their choice, but Captain Homebound in his bathrobe enjoyed his smoked salmon and Blue Mountain coffee at poolside in peace.

I hope yours was just as good.

Has anyone remembered that MLK was shot to death on April 4th? Yes that's cruel, but something did rise from that, didn't it? May something good arise from our troubled times and may everything bad pass your house by this year.

Om shanti om.

Let's pity the victim

There should be an emoticon for a dumbfounded guffaw or something less childishly vulgar than WTF? to express my reaction to Michael Steele's attempt to make himself a martyr instead of a hypocrite. It would save so many keystrokes.

It takes a desperate man and a little man to dismiss the scorn over his involvement with the kinky strip club incident GOP contributors unknowingly funded. There's something distinctly oily about his assertion that he has a "slimmer margin of error" as a black man, even though that might be true in general.

"It's a different role for me to play and others to play and that's just the reality of it. But you just take that as a part of the nature of it"

he explained on Good Morning America this morning.

Whether or not he actually is held to a higher standard than a non-African American in his position as RNC Chairman would be, that frisky business is certainly at a level where anyone would be condemned for it and above the level where a white Democratic president might be impeached for it.

Yes, it's true that an honest politician (we're speaking hypothetically here) has to walk on eggs, so to speak and it's true that one of a minority group has to have even more delicate toes, but that certainly doesn't apply to a gleeful romp in the slime bucket, does it Mr. Steele? Falsely posing as a victim doesn't help real victims either.

Twilight of the Godwins

I have to credit the rhetorical craftiness of self-anointed conservatives who often get away with dismissing inevitable and even necessary comparisons by invoking Godwin's Law. Yes, it's inevitable that when discussing sudden transitions from civilized societies, the implosion of modern, liberal democratic, constitutional governments into to absolutist and racist tyrannies and the techniques employed, Hitler will come up. It's just as likely that Albert Einstein will come up in discussions of relativity or Tomas de Torquemada in studying the Inquisition. Just try to study the Bush administration and not think of Orwell. Try it, I dare you. Invoking Godwin as though it were more than a humorous observation is simply a tactical diversion and it seems to work by embarrassing the one who brought it up.

Barack Obama is hardly the first President to be accused absurdly of tyranny, fascism or of being a socialist, for that matter. Lincoln's assassin called him a tyrant, both Roosevelts were accused of being socialists long before the current president was born and in my day, anyone who didn't think it worth millions of lives to keep Vietnam from holding free elections was simply a Commie. Remember when Ho Chi Min wanted Humphrey to win so Happy Hubert was a Communist?

Hell, anybody who Joe McCarty didn't like for quoting the Constitution or really any reason at all was carrying that invisible card and his name was on the invisible list. Too bad there wasn't an easily produced "law" telling us that the longer a right wing apologia goes on, the more likely that Stalin or Mao will come up. Too bad there still isn't one, since people likely to make such transcendentally hyperbolic comparisons between the pragmatic, cautious Mr. Obama and absolute tyrants who caused tens of millions of deaths aren't likely to listen to arguments that are factual or too long to fit on a hand lettered cardboard sign. It would be nice to shut them off with Fogg's Law, wouldn't it?

As of late, discussions of the president begin with or are preceded by the rather airborne assumption that he's Mao Zedong, Joe Stalin, Adolph Hitler and Pol Pot rolled into some bearded bin Laden burrito, but then his father was black. Bill Clinton's father was only a white drinker and perhaps a philanderer so one usually had to wait for a sentence or two before the comparisons were dredged up -- and dredged up they always were. Yes, Bill was not only a murderer, not only going to "force health care down our throats" but going to give control of our armed forces to the UN. Bill, who murdered Vince Foster and ran a Coke smuggling operation out of Little Rock was planting nuclear weapons underneath our cities while indulging in Communist free love and of course his socialist tax increase was going to bankrupt our economy within months and destroy capitalism forever!

But no, it was terribly wrong to bring up fascism when his successor made that office the most powerful it had ever been, with the power to override congress and the courts and the Constitution. Terribly wrong when his propaganda machine began to scapegoat real and invented enemies, terribly wrong when he demanded and got special emergency powers by invoking threats that were substantially imaginary if not fraudulent. Smile and say Godwin and we're done.

Obama? Of course he's Communist and Fascist and never mind the contradiction. Of course he's a tyrant for the same reason Lincoln was a tyrant, the same reason Teddy Roosevelt was and FDR and don't you dare bring up Godwin this time!

DO YOU KNOW WHAT TODAY IS?