By Dennis J. Seese aka sundin
Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy — the company that owned the mine where disaster struck last week — notoriously commented to Forbes in 2003 that “we don’t pay much attention to the violation count” even though the same article went on to note that the company’s three biggest rivals mined “twice as much coal in the state as Massey” and were only cited 175 times collectively, as opposed to Massey’s 501 citations in 2000-2001. Blankenship chalked it up to Massey’s being “unfairly targeted” by regulators (a common theme). Yet, a member of West Virginia’s Surface Mining Board referred to one of the violations Massey wasn’t “paying attention to” in this time period as “absolutely the worst behavior by any company that any member of this board has ever seen over the decades that this board has been in existence.”
But, honestly, why should Mr. Blankenship pay attention to violations when he can buy sympathetic judges and friendly legislators adverse to enforcing, and in some cases favoring efforts to roll back, those unfortunate regulations?
