Don Blankenship Must Go To Jail.

Remember Massey Energy, 5 April 2010? The West Virginia mine explosion that killed 29 miners?

Behind that tragedy is a transparent case of judicial corruption in West Virginia. Caperton v. A. T. Massey Coal Co. was a 2009 decision by United States Supreme Court dealing with the circumstances under which a judge has a duty to recuse himself from a case. One of the judges in the West Virginia Supreme Court was a close friend of Blankenship's; with the case pending, Blankenship spent $3 million successfully campaigning to replace another judge he felt would be hostile to him in the $50 million Caperton case. As a result of these two cozy little situations, the State court held in favor of Massey, 3-2.

Here's a link to a Daily Kos article by Mark Sumner entitled The Most Dangerous Man To America, Is In America.

He's successfully bribed a state Supreme Court justice.

Adam Liptak reported in the New York Times on January 15, 2008:

A justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court and a powerful coal-company executive met in Monte Carlo in the summer of 2006, sharing several meals even as the executive’s companies were appealing a $50 million jury verdict against them to the court.

A little more than a year later, the justice, Elliott E. Maynard, voted with the majority in a 3-to-2 decision in favor of the coal companies.

He's also subverted an election of another justice to protect his profits. According to an article in USA Today:

In 2002, Caperton won a $50 million verdict against Massey after a jury agreed with Caperton's claim that Massey had fraudulently run him out of business. Massey appealed to the state's Supreme Court, but not before Blankenship used $3 million of his own money for ads to unseat a judge he considered anti-business and replace him with a judge he liked. Once on the bench, the new justice, Brent Benjamin, provided a crucial vote to overturn the $50 million verdict against Massey. Benjamin refused to recuse himself from the case — as Caperton had asked — saying he could be impartial.

Sumner says:

He's crushed smaller companies using illegal tactics, used his political connections to skate around massive violations of environmental rules, and not just repeatedly voiced the claim that global warming is hoax, but funded mock-science studies and attacks on climate scientists. Forget trying to clean up our energy system. According to Blankenship, even trying to conserve energy is communism.

And of course, there's the little matter of murder. Actually multiple murders. Enough murders to make Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer look like pikers.

But behavior like this pays pretty well:

In the same year leading up to the deaths of 29 people in Upper Big Branch, Don Blankenship took home over $17 million, including an $11 million "performance bonus." Since the explosion, Blankenship has retired. But don't worry, his golden parachute should keep him in hookers and caviar along the Riviera.

Sumner's article goes into some detail about the explosion, and into the ongoing Massey policy of sacrificing safety for profit. According to a report by the West Virginia Governor’s Independent Investigation Panel on the Upper Big Branch/Massey Energy Explosion  that came out this month:

Ultimately, the responsibility for the explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine lies with the management of Massey Energy. The company broke faith with its workers by frequently and knowingly violating the law and blatantly disregarding known safety practices while creating a public perception that its operations exceeded industry safety standards.

The story of Upper Big Branch is a cautionary tale of hubris. A company that was a towering presence in the Appalachian coalfields operated its mines in a profoundly reckless manner, and 29 coal miners paid with their lives for the corporate risk-taking.

The April 5, 2010, explosion was not something that happened out of the blue, an event that could not have been anticipated or prevented. It was, to the contrary, a completely predictable result for a company that ignored basic safety.

Here's more on that report from a piece by William Galston in The New Republic entitled Public Good:

Many systems created to safeguard miners had to break down in order for an explosion of this magnitude to occur. … Such total and catastrophic systemic failures can only be explained in the context of a culture in which wrongdoing became acceptable, where deviation became the norm. In such a culture it was acceptable to mine coal with insufficient air; with buildups of coal dust; with inadequate rock dust. The same culture allowed Massey Energy to use its resources to create a false public image …. And it became acceptable to cast agencies designed to protect miners as enemies and to make life difficult for miners who tried to address safety.

In an appendix, the report lists 18 individuals who responded to a state subpoena by invoking the Fifth Amendment and refusing to testify. They include Massey Energy’s former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, as well as its Chief Operating Officer, Vice President of Safety, and President of the Upper Big Branch mine. I don’t know how these people live with themselves. Keep this episode firmly in mind whenever you hear conservatives’ ritual denunciation of “burdensome, job-killing regulations.” Life-saving would be more like it.

I believe Blankenship bears personal, and not just corporate, responsibility for Massey's appalling safety record and in particular the 29 deaths at the Upper Big Branch Mine. In 2005, Blankenship wrote and circulated a memo to employees stating:

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.

Don Blankenship is corporate greed personified: Nothing, not even the lives of workers, can be allowed to prevent a rapacious and amoral corporation from squeezing out one more dollar of profit for its obscenely rich owners.