Cross-posted over at
Attytood, the blog.
"We were looking for friends, and we found one in George W. Bush." --
James W. "Buck" Harless, director of Massey Energy Co., to the Wall Street Journal.
Richmond, Va.-based Massey Energy Co., the nation's fourth-largest coal company based on revenue, was "gratified" to see the Bush win, said Katharine Kenny, investor relations director.
"A Bush win is probably a positive in that he has been very aware of energy issues in the country," Kenny said.
Massey shares closed at $27.51, up $1.39, or 5.3 percent, on heavy volume on the New York Stock Exchange. Other coal stocks ended higher yesterday, including Peabody Energy Corp., up 5.3 percent; Upper St. Clair-based Consol Energy Inc., up 4.6 percent; Arch Coal Inc., up 5 percent; and Walter Industries Inc., up 7.7 percent.
-- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Nov. 4, 2004, two days after President Bush won re-election.
They say that the payback's a bitch, and it must be true. Just ask America's coal miners.
Today, rescue teams are once again
working against the clock, trying to find two missing coal miners trapped when a fire broke out last night at the Aracoma Mine in Melville, W. Va. The two men are said to be 10,000 feet into the mine, with the fire still burning. For the second time in a month, we are praying for their families, and for their safe return.
Maybe it's just us, but it seemed like over the last 15 years or so, we hadn't heard about too many mining accidents. Then, in 2002, there was a big splash over the nine miners who were miraculously rescued in western Pennsylvania, a miracle that, in hindsight, also probably gave the public a false sense of security about mine safety.
Now, with 12 miners dead and a new drama in West Virginia, we are learning the extent to which regulation of the mining industry has been gutted in the five years (to the day) of the Bush administration, which appointed industry officials and lobbyists to run the Mine Safety and Health Administration and stalled on regulations to improve safety.
In the case of the recent Sago disaster, the operator has been slapped on the wrist for an increasingly worsening safety record, and the mine itself had been purchased by a union-busting outfit.
Now with the Aracoma mine, the safety record had been good for some time -- but had started to slip.
According to MSHA's Web site, the Alma mine received 95 citations from MSHA inspectors during 2005. The most recent were issued on Dec. 20, when the mine was cited with seven violations ranging from controlling coal dust and other combustible materials to its ventilation plan.
The mine was assessed $28,268 in penalties last year and has paid nearly $13,000.
It has not had a fatal accident since 1995. The mine had a better-than-average accident rate between 2001 and 2004, but it increased last year when 16 workers and one contractor were injured.
So what is more pathetic, the fact that the fines for safety violations are so small, or that operators don't even bother to pay them? The Bush administration said in the days following the Sago tragedy that there was an initiative to increase financial penalties for mine safety violations. But as the Charleston Gazette reported today, the truth is that MSHA had never even sent that proposal to Congress.
It's not like the owners of the Aracoma Mine don't have the money. It is a subsidiary of Massey Energy Corp., the nation's fourth-largest coal company -- and the largest when it came to raising money for the election and re-election of George W. Bush.
One of the most successful of the Bush Pioneers -- donors, like Jack Abramoff, for example, who raised more than $100,000 for the president's campaign -- is a fellow named James W. "Buck" Harless. And Harless, according to the Boston Globe, is...
a major Bush fund-raiser --[who] would get hundreds of millions of dollars in loan guarantees for a coal gasification plant. [His grandson] served on President Bush's energy transition team, a precursor to Vice President Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force, which developed the critical blueprint for the energy package on Capitol Hill.
In 2000, Harless reportedly raised $275,000 for the Bush campaign and gave another $100,000 to his inaugural fund. He and another West Virginia were invited to a invitation-only briefing on the new president's energy policy. Shortly thereafter, Harless was named a director of Massey Energy.
Massey had actually been involved in quite a pickle with the federal government when Bush took the oath of office. A Massey subsidiary was on the hook for a 2000 coal slurry spill in Kentucky that dumped an estimated 306 million gallons of toxic sludge down 100 miles of waterways -- called by one EPA official the worst environmental disaster in the history of the eastern United States.
This Salon story (you must watch a short ad to read it) explains what happens next:
By the end of 2000, Jack Spadaro and other investigation team members felt they were beginning to collect enough evidence to issue Massey Energy citations for willful and criminal negligence. In addition, it looked as though their own agency, MSHA, was going to be held accountable as well. But that all changed when George W. Bush moved into the White House. Within days of Bush's inauguration a new team leader was brought in to head the Martin County Coal investigation. The scope of the investigation was dramatically narrowed -- offering yet another dramatic example of how the wholesale takeover of the White House by the energy industry is having a real impact on real lives, not just on the whistle-blowers like Jack Spadaro but on the people he's trying to protect.
On April 3, 2001, Spadaro tendered his resignation from the accident investigation team and filed a complaint with the Department of Labor's Office of the Inspector General, alleging that Bush administration officials were obstructing the team's work. Spadaro also spoke out publicly when MSHA released its final accident investigation report in October 2002, which cited Martin County Coal for two minor violations with fines totaling $110,000, and left MSHA district officials completely off the hook.
Most of the complaints against Massey have been more on the environmental side rather than the safety side. As this Associated Press article from last November notes:
The company has angered environmentalists and some coalfields residents for Blankenship's emphasis on surface mines and his defense of mountaintop removal mining. Massey is in the process of ramping up its surface mining operations, projecting that they will represent 51 percent of the company's production next year.
The West Virginia Highlands Conservancy is among several environmental groups challenging the legality of mountaintop removal - a high-efficiency mining method that hinges on an operator being able to dispose of leftover rock and dirt by filling in nearby valleys. Fills have buried about 1,200 miles of streams in Central Appalachia.
But now, it appears that mine safety is slipping as well, at Aracoma just as it did in Sago. That's the way it is -- it usually takes a few years until all the chickens come home to roost. But for America's coal miners, the die was really cast five years ago today, the day that "Buck" Harless' "friend," George W. Bush, put his right hand on a Bible.