Wow:
A West Virginia GOP Senate candidate, who was convicted in connection with the nation's deadliest coal mining explosion since 1970, is calling for mine safety measures on the eve of the 2010 disaster's eighth anniversary.
Don Blankenship was the CEO of Massey Energy at the time of the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion that killed 29 men. The Mine Safety and Health Administration blamed the company for safety violations and assessed $10.8 million in penalties, but Blankenship continues to fault the government.
In a lengthy statement Wednesday, Blankenship said natural gas exited the mine after the explosion and he blamed a change in airflow, required by MSHA, for the explosion. To prevent another disaster, he called for better use of technology and dividing MSHA into two separate agencies — one to regulate and another to investigate.
"My goal today is the same as it has always been," he wrote. "That goal is to honor these lost miners by using lessons learned from the accident to prevent other miners and families from ever experiencing such a tragedy again."
Blankenship described himself as a "political prisoner" while serving a one-year sentence, ending in May 2017, for conspiring to violate mine safety laws, and he has called for further investigation into the explosion.
This guy truly is a piece of shit and here’s some more about his record:
He became Massey’s president in 1992 and its CEO and chairman of its board two years later. Under his watch, the company grew to become the fourth-largest coal producer in the country, and the largest in Central Appalachia.
The company was repeatedly cited for environmental violations. In Martin County, Kentucky, in 2000, a company dam holding a sludge lake broke and 306 million gallons of coal sludge flooded into an abandoned mine and the Big Sandy River, shutting down water in several towns and killing fish and plants up to 36 miles downstream. The discharge, estimated to be at least 25 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill, was only one of many for which Massey was cited in the 1990s and 2000s.
Kevin Thompson, a Charleston lawyer, sued Massey twice for environmental outrages. In one case, he filed suit against Massey for building coal silos 235 feet from an elementary school, exposing children to coal dust and putting them at risk for asthma and black-lung disease. In the other, Thompson sued Rawl Sales & Processing on behalf of Mingo County residents whose drinking water had been tainted because the company injected 1.4 billion gallons of toxic coal slurry into abandoned underground mines, contaminating nearby rivers and groundwater.
“It caused five people to die and hundreds of kids who drank lead-tainted water to end up having emotional problems, mental problems, and mental disabilities,” Thompson said. “He ruined hundreds of lives to save a dollar. This is a man who doesn’t care about the public. When his wife complained about the water, he had a municipal water line run to his house from the Rawl office in Matewan. My clients didn’t get a drop of that. It all went for him.”
The conditions in Massey’s mines were just as bad, according to those who worked in them.
“When I first started working there, I said on my second day, ‘These people are taking coal mining back to the 1920s’—and that’s the way Don Blankenship wanted it,” said Stewart, who worked at Upper Big Branch from 1995 until the disaster in 2010. “Their safety record was fabricated. I saw more men injured, maimed, and killed in my first three years at Massey than I did in 20 years at Peabody,” which was the largest coal company in the U.S.
In 2006, a fire that started on a conveyer belt in Massey’s Aracoma Alma Mine killed two miners. Four mine foremen later pleaded guilty to federal charges of failing to conduct escapeway drills.
Four years later came Upper Big Branch, where a spark from a longwall shearer ignited a fireball that hit accumulated coal dust, triggering a massive explosion. The 29 deaths represented the worst coal-mining disaster in 40 years. Two government and two independent investigations blamed the disaster on Massey’s skirting of federal mine ventilation and coal dust standards, which contributed to the explosion.
While Republicans fear that Blakenship could screw up their plans to unseat U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D. WV), no one should take his candidacy for granted:
There’s more to it, of course, than just an urge to come home, although Blankenship’s attachment to West Virginia is such that he continued to live there even when running the Richmond-based Massey. Blankenship wants to settle a score. And for all his unpopularity—miners’ families have confronted him repeatedly at campaign stops—he is finding a receptive audience in a Republican Party motivated as much by hatred for Democrats as the advancement of conservative policy. (GOP leaders in Washington don’t share the enthusiasm for Blankenship, whom they consider as toxic as Roy Moore.)
“He has an ego and a pocketbook that rivals Donald Trump,” says former Democratic Rep. Nick Rahall, who, like most of the politicians in the state, dealt with Blankenship when his power was at his peak. “And he’s out to rehabilitate his image.”
But operatives in both parties now say there’s no denying Blankenship is in the top tier of candidates in the race, along with Attorney General Patrick Morrisey and U.S. Representative Evan Jenkins. The major reason? His time in prison didn’t deprive him of the fortune he earned running Massey Energy, and he spent more than $2 million on television ads before Morrisey and Jenkins’ campaigns could run their first spot on television.
But the deceptively low-key candidate with a well-earned reputation as a political brawler has a pitch seemingly perfectly designed for a Republican electorate in the era of Donald Trump. Blankenship’s foils are the same ones Trump battered on his way to winning 68 percent of the vote in West Virginia. When Blankenship mentions Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, two of the most reviled Democrats in this deeply red state, it’s not just a gratuitous name-check. It’s a personal feud, one that many still-out-of-work coal miners feel just as bitterly.
“I don’t know that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and so forth hate anyone more than they hate me,” Blankenship says, noting Clinton even criticized him in her book, “What Happened.” Or, as his political consultant, Greg Thomas, put it to me: “Having the opponent’s Department of Justice put you in jail is the ultimate street cred.”
If it comes down between Manchin and Blakenship, get ready for one nasty race:
A Manchin–Blankenship general election would be nasty and personal. The senator has said of the mine owner: “I believe Don has blood on his hands.” And Blankenship has charged that Manchin, who was governor at the time of the mine explosion, conspired with Barack Obama (not a popular figure in West Virginia) to send him to the hoosegow.
National Republicans understandably fear that this kind of grudge match would move a key Senate race away from the partisan and ideological issues where they have a big advantage in West Virginia. And even if Blankenship fades before May 8, he’s doing some damage to the other two candidates.
West Virginians seem split over Blankenship’s culpability in the death of the miners; their tendency to forgive him reflects the ancient dependence of the state on vanishing coal jobs and their defensiveness about federal efforts to regulate the industry. But if Blankenship makes it through the GOP primary, voters will have to come to grips with his decidedly mixed legacy, and his stretch in the slammer.
Despite my personal feelings towards Manchin, I refuse to let him be defeated by this evil, greedy scumbag. Already, this race is proving that Republicans are for the coal barons but Democrats are for the miners:
The United Mine Workers of America issued a batch of campaign endorsements Friday, backing candidates on both sides of the aisle for federal office.
Re-election campaigns for Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Rep. David McKinley, R-W.Va., will have the UMW’s support, as will state Sen. Richard Ojeda, D-Logan, in his run for the open congressional seat in the 3rd District. The union’s pick in the 2nd District remains up for grabs.
Speaking at Manchin’s campaign headquarters in Charleston, Cecil Roberts, president of the UMW, praised Manchin for his assistance in passing legislation that secures health care benefits for 22,600 union members who lost them as the result of bankruptcy reorganizations of major coal companies.
That legislation, however, did not include protection for miners’ pension benefits, as had been written in earlier iterations of the legislation. Roberts said Manchin will continue to fight those pensions in the Senate.