"25 Massey Energy miners are dead because OSHA couldn’t do anything more than levy fines"

The health care industry avoided accountability for exorbitant rate hikes, overmarketed and undertested products, and rescission of insurance coverage for trivial reasons. They killed the public option, and the reform bill that was supposed to rein them in turned into a bailout instead.

The financial industry looks like it’s going to avoid accountability for crashing the economy with dodgy financial instruments while regulators looked the other way; instead of fines and jail time, they got a $700 billion bailout. It appears unlikely that they’re going to be subjected to any meaningful reform either.

And now 25 Massey Energy miners are dead because OSHA couldn’t do anything more than levy fines for the thousands of safety violations at Upper Big Branch, and Don Blankenship decided he would rather pay than address worker safety.

These are just the most recent and high-profile examples of a business community implacably and successfully opposed to regulation and oversight in general. As dday puts it in his post on OSHA’s enfeeblement:
http://firedoglake.com/

where the local mine inspector said that there was nothing that indicated he should shut the mine down.

Of course he couldn't, the man lived in the area where this mine is located, if he shut the mine down, the workers would be out of jobs. They would lose the only source of income many of them have. He couldn't have that hanging over his head and still live in the area.

Industry inspectors need to be from somewhere else, without local interests so as to render an impartial decision on the safety or violations of the workplace. This needs to apply to all industry/safety inspections.

The deaths were avoidable, the 150-page report said, because five months before the August disaster in the north section of the mine, a similar collapse had occurred in a southern section, offering clear "red flags" indicating that the mine was unstable.

Rather than informing federal mining officials about the March collapse, the report said, the mine operator cleaned up the site and went on with work in a nearby section.

"Even after the near-disaster in March, the company forged ahead with plans to do the same kind of retreat mining in the South Barrier that it had done, with nearly catastrophic consequences, in the North Barrier," said Rep. George Miller, Democrat from California and chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, which conducted the investigation.

Aside from the instability indicated by the March collapse, known as a bump or bounce, the report said that notes from 2004 from the federal Bureau of Land Management, which owns the land where Crandall Canyon is located and leased it to the mine operator, clearly indicated that the mine had become unsafe and that pillars had already begun deteriorating.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/world/americas/08iht-08cndmine.12703849.html?_r=1

I wonder how many people will be applying for jobs with this company this week? I'm guessing quite a few.

OSHA wouldn't even be able to fine these worthless, greedy bastards. They want everything deregulated, yet they are too stupid to see the results of careless deregulation. I guess they have to be crushed to death in an unsafe workplace or be saddled with an industrially created illness before they'll understand that there are more important things than Corporate America's bottom line.

That belongs to the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). These are two completely separate agencies which do not have the same mission and do not work together. Both OSHA and MSHA do have authority to do "more than issue fines." The author does not know what he is writing about. I worked for OSHA for over 10 years and we could and did shut down operations depending on the circumstances.

It's that simple. Ever since the "Reagan Revolution". We can't regulate banks, mines, or anything else.

I don't know of any "person" that would not be convicted of negligent homicide at the very least for killing 25 people. So let me see -- when it comes to free speech in the form of monetary contributions to politicians a corporation is a person. Yet, if that corporate person kills a bunch of people we cannot apply criminal charges to it. How can we put this corporate "person" in prison where it belongs? If there were any justice in this country the entire Massey mining operation would be handed over the victims families just as Union Carbide should have been dissolved and its assets handed over to the victims of Bhopal.