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posted by n1 on Monday May 15 2017, @09:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the free-room-and-board dept.

The World Socialist Web Site reports

Former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship was released from prison [May 10] after serving a one year sentence in connection with the April 2010 explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, which killed 29 coal miners. The Upper Big Branch blast was the worst US mine disaster in 40 years.

Blankenship served the first ten months of his sentence at the Taft Correctional Institution in Southern California. The facility, which houses many white collar criminals, boasts baseball diamonds and soccer fields along with tennis and racquetball courts. Blankenship was then moved to a halfway house for a month and spent the last month prior to his official release at his home in Las Vegas.

In tweets [that] Blankenship posted after his release, the millionaire coal boss showed no remorse for the deaths of 29 miners. He complained that at Taft he had to return to his room several times a day to be counted and could not choose what to watch on TV.

[...] In 2015, Blankenship was convicted on a single misdemeanor count of violating federal safety laws at the mine in Montcoal, West Virginia. The disaster occurred when a spark from a longwall machine ignited a pocket of methane gas, which, in turn, set off a massive coal dust explosion throughout the mine.

Multiple and grave safety violations occurred at the mine when Blankenship issued an order to "run coal", flouting regulations designed to prevent explosions. In an October 2005 memo to the company's deep mine superintendents, Blankenship outlined his priorities. "If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers, or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e., build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever), you need to ignore them and run coal", he wrote.

[...] Four investigations of the disaster found that bits on the longwall machine were broken and worn out, causing sparking. Water nozzles meant to keep the bits cool and prevent sparks were also broken. Proper ventilation to prevent the buildup of methane gas was lacking. Explosive coal dust was allowed to accumulate throughout the mine.

Previous: Massey CEO Indicted for Acts Resulting in Coal Mine Explosion that Killed 29


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  • (Score: 5, Touché) by TheGratefulNet on Tuesday May 16 2017, @03:35AM (2 children)

    by TheGratefulNet (659) on Tuesday May 16 2017, @03:35AM (#510378)

    and for those examples, one can list 100x as many where the ceo's were evil fucking pieces of shit, caring only for the next boat or mansion they 'need' to buy.

    if you are rich, you LIKELY got there via amoral methods. this is the USA, afterall.

    (are we WINNING yet? sigh)

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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 16 2017, @09:34PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday May 16 2017, @09:34PM (#510768)

    Something like 1/3 of rich people are rich because they were born rich and didn't do anything particularly stupid with their money. Which means that one of their ancestors may be one of these kinds of corporate crooks, but they themselves aren't.

    And yes, I agree that there are a lot of corporate crooks out there. They should go to jail. What I'm disagreeing with is the claim that many corporate crooks and their apologists make, which is the argument that if nobody does anything crooked nobody succeeds in business.

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  • (Score: 1) by Frost on Thursday May 18 2017, @01:50AM

    by Frost (3313) on Thursday May 18 2017, @01:50AM (#511496)

    For every Woz there's a Jobs. You only get rich being a good guy if you have a bad guy taking care of business for you.