Discussion for article #230730
The man is clearly a sociopath. No empathy at all for any other person, just adherence to a system that he views with a religious fervor. Totalitarian regimes are made up of such people.
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Unfortunately, this bastard like Wilson and Pontenello(?) will get off.
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It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the comments on this piece. Rather routinely, pieces on something inane that’s been said by Cruz or Randy Paul or the pointless Graham or the burn-out McCain or some ridiculous glorified talk radio speaker at White Folks News, gather dozens even hundreds of comments. But this is a REAL thing, involving real people actually dying for an industry that’d be dead and gone already but for desperate people living in ignorant dream worlds being exploited by criminals such as Blankenship, who PAYS those for-hire pols and White Folks News personalities.
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“…everybody’s gonna have to learn to accept that in the United States you have a capitalist society, and that capitalism, from a business standpoint, is survival of the most productive…”
Wasn’t he the guy who also said religion is the opiate of the United States?
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There’s the difference between union and non-union.
The article explains it perfectly. Make money for the scumbags and if you die in the process, we will just get more hungry idiots willing to die for us to make more money.
Non -union, privatize, communism, all the same thing.
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He will not spend even 1 hour in jail.
He will not pay 1 dime in a fine
He is a member of the ruling class
The case will be dismissed
And he will walk
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“The Price of Justice: A True Story of Greed and Corruption” by Laurence Leamer is a stunning expose of Blankenship and how deep his corruption goes into West Virginia governance, all the way to the sitting Chief Justice of the WV Supreme Court.
The good, hard-working, and dignified but simple people of West Virginia have been this man’s pawns for decades. Note to Darren Wilson: this is what a demon looks like.
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I think it’s well past time that we should be seeing the death penalty for corporations.
They’re people, right?
Then let’s see the death penalty for these sociopathic organizations.
Hold these bastards accountable for the ‘people’ they run - they’re accessories to crime.
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I’m pleasantly surprised he’s on trial and some of his worst behavior is coming to light.
If he actually gets convicted and spends time in prison I will feel better.
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“making false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission in its aftermath.”
This is what will hang him, not the deaths.
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Coal thugs interrupting a 4th of July family picnic! I wonder what Blankenship has to say about these coal thugs!
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Mining regulation has always been problematic in the US, despite excellent mining engineering schools, health and safety legislation, and the theoretical potential to design environmentally responsible policy. First, you have direct agency capture, as we saw in the Macondo blowout and the MMS official who brought the phrase “snorting crystal meth off a toaster oven” into the vernacular. Second, you have institutional or legislative capture, so rules are loopholed or defanged. Also, you might reward relatives of the legislator with cushy jobs for doing the right thing. Several states, e.g. West Virginia, are just gone in this respect. Finally, in a mature industry like coal, you can force the workers to accept horrible conditions because they have no power of pricing their labor in the face of automation and environmental reasons for phasing out thermal coal at least. Blankenship no doubt has engaged in all these practices. It would be sweeter though if those that he bought off would all be forced to sweat it out in the dock.
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I don’t have it in front of me, but I’ve seen data that suggest that a disproportionate number of CEOs are sociopaths.
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Narcissists at least. Sociopaths are rare, and mostly male by a wide margin. The narcissist would usually cycle through “trophy” acquaintances until the acquaintances get fed up with being used. If married, a narcissist might have a trophy wife and be obsessed with possessing certain fetish objects. In a way, the narcissist is the ad agency’s dream consumer, a totally shallow asshole. The narcissist might be able to advance in the corporate ladder as they would seem brash and able to manipulate regular people. But that, too, would only last as long as they aren’t put on the spot and have to actually perform. Narcissists, while amoral like sociopaths and unsympathetic to those they injure, usually get found out before reaching the top. A real sociopath, unless rich and protected in his youth, has usually had run-ins with the law already in his teens so it would be hard to pass, say, the moral character background check for the bar, or criminal record for a security clearance. Sociopaths, as a rule, also do not have stellar academic records.
Those safety laws (CFR and all) hold all covered employers to the same minimum standards. Every company has the same cost of doing business. Profits for the stockholders flow equally.
There are short term profits to be made by non-compliance. Massey and our good friends at BP (Texas City 2005,2013; Gulf of Mexico, etc.) have done their very best to take those profits from the lives of their workers. The lists of MSHA and OSHA willful, and repeat violations are long and only of concern to the corporate lawyers who endlessly delay and argue to reclassify and reduce penalties. In the mean time violations continue and the next quarter’s profit levels keep the executives’ bonus payments coming. Cash incentive safety programs in general do a poor job of improving safety.
In the long run, industrial safety and health programs more than pay for themselves when production is not disrupted, and workers can attend to their work with the assurance that they are not forced to give their health, safety or lives as a condition of employment.
Coal bosses and the Congressmen whom they own, constantly bitch about any and all regulation as being bad for business. What a surprise. In the good old days mining bosses were more careful with the lives of mules than miners. If a mule was killed they had to spend money to buy a new mule. A miner on the other hand could just be hired. In all probability what little efforts made to safety by these companies had to do with keeping their equipment from being destroyed.
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A helpful reminder: Republicans want everything this guy did to be perfectly legal.
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hey, looks like we found John Galt.
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And if he walks, I hope one of the widows blows his brains out on the courthouse steps.
Certainly a normal person can assume there’s some sort of pathology going on in a person who insists that safety regulations be ignored and gets 29 people killed as a result. You guys mentioned sociopathy and narcissism, and I wonder myself if obsessing over money isn’t a factor, but there’s one other thing: ideology. I think as a rabid Republican this guy would view all regulations, including safety guidelines, as stupid and needless hindrances to his God-given right to make every penny he could. He’s heard it all his life from people he trusts. God knows there’s millions of people whose simplistic beliefs mess up their ability to make rational judgments; this guy just happened to be one of the more influential ones.
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