Page One reports on a Herald-Leader story about a coal miner who was disciplined after documenting mine safety problems and bringing the problems to the attention of the Mine Safety & Health Administration:

On April 27 last year, Howard, a veteran miner, took video footage of seven mine seals at Cumberland River’s Band Mill No. 2 mine. The seals, constructed to close off abandoned sections of underground coal mines, are supposed to be impenetrable so that explosive methane gas can’t seep into working areas.

These seals were so cracked that water gushed through them, the lawsuit says.

Before videotaping the cracked and leaking seals, Howard had documented the problems in writing in a Cumberland River preshift examination book and had told company officials, including the mine superintendent, two mine foremen, and two section foremen, about the unsafe conditions, the lawsuit says.

After nothing was done, Howard testified at a public hearing held by the Mine Safety and Health Administration in July 2007 and showed those in attendance the video he had taken of the mine seals.

MSHA later cited Cumberland River for multiple seal violations.

After the company was cited, Cumberland River officials gave Howard “a written warning of disciplinary action” for “taking a non-permissible video camera underground.”

Regardless of whether Cumberland River had a company policy about videotaping underground, Oppegard said Thursday, Howard had the right under state law to document and report to MSHA unsafe conditions at the mine.

What is particularly disappointing, Oppegard said, is that MSHA reviewed Howard’s case and found that the company did nothing wrong in reprimanding him.

This should come as no real surprise, as we’ve noted time and again that mine safety oversight is severely lacking under Labor Secretary Elaine Chao’s watch and receives no help from Sen. Mitch McConnell. Of course, why should he care if hard-working Kentuckians are injured or killed on the job, just so long as those campaign dollars keep on rolling in?

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Elaine Chao is quick to give American workers advice, but slow when it comes to doing her own job. I suggest we have a skills gap here.

Ken Ward Jr.
Staff writer
The Bush administration missed a legal deadline to finalize rules to require more and better-trained mine rescue teams across the nation’s coalfields.
Under a 2006 law signed by President Bush, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao was required to issue final rules by Dec. 15, 2007.
The rules are still not finalized, and are sitting at the White House, under review by the Office of Management and Budget.
OMB review of new government rules is required as part of an effort to balance the costs and benefits of federal regulations.
At issue is the first rewrite of federal mine rescue team regulations since 1982.
Last year, lawmakers mandated changes in the rules after questions about the nation’s mine rescue capabilities following the deaths of 19 miners in the Sago and Darby disasters and the Aracoma Mine fire, all in 2006. The changes were required as part of the Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response Act, signed by President Bush on June 15, 2006.
The MINER Act gave MSHA 18 months to finalize the new rules.
MSHA took nearly all of that time — 15 months of it — to write its proposed changes. The proposed rules were published in the Federal Register on Sept. 6, 2007.
A public comment period, also required by law, lasted until Nov. 16. MSHA submitted its final version for OMB review on Dec. 13, two days before the MINER Act deadline to issue the rules.
Sean Kevelighan, press secretary for OMB, said he could not provide a timeline for his agency completing its review of the mine rescue team rules.
Read more.

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The C-J’s James R. Carroll is reporting that a demonstration is being held at Sen. Mitch McConnell’s Washington office. Apparently, Kentuckians aren’t the only ones disgusted that Sen. McConnell (aka “Big Money Mitch“) is in the pocket of the coal industry:

One of those sitting in McConnell’s Russell Senate Office Building suite is Ted Glick, coordinator for U.S. Climate Emergency Council, a Washington-based non-profit group that supports efforts to combat global warming and to promote cleaner energy sources.

Glick said he and as many as 20 others have been staying in the office and have demanded a meeting with McConnell.

…

Glick’s group and others want Congress to keep strong provisions for renewable fuels in the comprehensive energy bill. The House passed the bill last week, but the Senate did not, and Glick faults McConnell.

People are pretty fed up with your obstructionism, Senator! And we’re just itching to vote you out of office next year!

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An article in the Washington Post paints a stark picture of mine safety oversight:

U.S. mine safety regulators failed to conduct inspections required by federal law at more than one in seven of the country’s 731 underground coal mines last year, a year in which the number of worker deaths in mining accidents more than doubled to 47, a government report says.

Budget constraints and a lack of management emphasis on worker safety by the Bush administration are responsible for the lapses, the Labor Department inspector general said in a report released yesterday. The report details the department’s failure to meet inspection mandates of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977.

Of course, we already knew that, now, didn’t we?

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(crossposted at BlueGrassRoots)

Mike Hall at the AFL-CIO blog has the lowdown:

Many U.S. senators and representatives are taking the lead in the fight to toughen up the nation’s mine safety laws. There is a desperate need for stronger mine safety rules, as tragically demonstrated by this summer’s Crandall Canyon Mine collapse and last year’s Sago, Darby and Aracoma mine disasters.

Sen. Robert Byrd (D) and Rep. Nick Rahall (D), West Virginia lawmakers who represent thousands of Mountain State coal miners, are pushing hard for improved safety legislation, as are longtime champions of job safety like Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who would be hard pressed to find a coal mine in their states.

But Louisville Courier-Journal columnist David Hawpe writes there is one senator whom you might expect to be concerned about mine safety who is glaringly absent from the debate—Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell. Hawpe writes in an Oct. 31 column:

“Sunday night there was another death at a coal mine where the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration [MSHA], overseen by Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, is behind schedule in conducting required annual safety checks.

MSHA has been cramped by Bush administration cuts in budget and staffing, but you haven’t heard the senior senator from the state with the most coal mines, Mitch McConnell, Chao’s husband, raising the Capitol roof about that.

“Ineffective enforcement, outdated technology and inadequate safety standards are the heart of the problem,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., told a mine safety hearing earlier this month. He was able to figure that out, despite representing a state that’s short on coal mines.

Unlike McConnell, he also has noted the miserable record of workplace safety enforcement posted by the Bush administration in other industries.”

Hawpe goes on to note that Peg Seminario, AFL-CIO health and safety director, told a Senate committee that under the Bush administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration “has abandoned it’s leadership role in health and safety” and snuggled up to employers. Yet:

“You didn’t hear McConnell…call for action.”

McConnell has never been known as a job safety advocate. Take a look at this October 2006 article by Lexington Herald-Leader staff writer John Cheves, in which he explores how McConnell and Chao have operated as a “tag team” when it comes to sacrificing worker safety in favor of employers’ interests.

“When it comes to workplace-related issues such as mine safety, the McConnell-Chao marriage presents an intriguing target for industry donors. At the Labor Department, Chao has taken what some reports say is a relaxed attitude toward the regulation of coal mines and an approach that labor unions perceive as hostile.

Sometimes Chao achieves what her husband cannot in the Senate, such as a wage freeze her department instituted on certain farm workers.

Chao attends her husband’s fund-raisers, chats with his donors and seeds her agency with his former aides. Chief among them is Deputy Labor Secretary Steven Law, whose last job was helping McConnell tap donors—Bob Murray included—at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. They collected an impressive $187 million in four years there.”

For more on McConnell, his close relationship with Big Business, his fund-raising and other issues, click here to check out Cheves’ series of articles.

Labor will enjoy Fletcher’s coming massacre as much as anybody, and they deserve it, considering al of the hard work that they have put in during the campaign.

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Dave Meyer of OpenKY.com has a timely post about Mine and Health Safety Administrator, Richard Stickler. As has been reported in the media, Stickler is a former mining executive whose safety track record was less than satisfactory. And, as Meyer points out in his post, Sen. Mitch McConnell played a big role in Stickler’s recess appointment:

I know there has been a hold on the MSHA Director nomination on the other side of the aisle. I have been told that there will be an objection yet again today. But I want to plead with those from the other side who may believe that this is not the perfect nominee— he is the nominee, nominated by the President, reported out of the HELP Committee. If he were to be drawn down and this whole process were to be started all over again, we wouldn’t have an MSHA Director for months and months into the future. We need a permanent Director of the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

The McConnell/Chao/mining connection has been previously documented on DM-KY. Meyer’s post on the topic is definitely worth the read.

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With all the tragedy as of late in our nation’s coalmines and with Kentucky’s Senator Mitch McConnell and his wife Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao at the center of a web of money-grubbing and influence-mongering in Washington that has left these many coalmines the deathtraps that they are for the sake of the almighty campaign contribution and a few ticks on the profit margin, I think the analogy of Kentucky’s gubernatorial election this year being the GOP’s canary in a coalmine is a fitting one.

Watch this latest video from Jim Pence of DitchMitchKY and the HillbillyReport. What’s going on in the video with security personnel at the Kentucky State Fair trying to end an anti-war protest (until they’re set straight by the State Police) is fascinating enough, but what’s even more fascinating is what’s going on in the background: all those cars honking in support of the protest.

Recall that thirteen years ago in 1994, on the cusp of the so-called Republican Revolution, Kentucky served the Democrats in a similar capacity. Then the death in March of that year of Democratic Congressman William H. Natcher (KY-02)—who had represented the district since 1953 and who continues to hold the all-time record for consecutive votes in Congress at 18,401—set up a special election for the seat.

I was only 17 years old at the time, but I had been politically aware since the 1988 presidential campaign, when a longtime Democratic activist in my church started hauling me to rallies, the biggest of those being Democratic vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen’s appearance at the Big Tobacco warehouse in Owensboro, today the largest city in the Second District. I don’t remember anything about the substance of what was said there, but I remember the energy, the pomp, and the confidence among the Democrats gathered.

Yet, a mere six years later the entire region of the Second District was seething against the political establishment and its status quo, its distance, and indifference. That establishment was Democratic.

Perhaps that environment is best encapsulated in a scene that has now been immortalized in Michael Moore’s latest film SiCKO. On August 29, 1994, at a rally in Owensboro, “Tobacco Rights Activists” burned an effigy of then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in protest of President Bill Clinton’s health care plan. With a bluegrass band playing the back ground, Stan Arachikavitz, president of the Kentucky Association of Tobacco Supporters, chanted “burn, baby, burn,” as the effigy was doused in gasoline and two women set it ablaze. When asked for comment by a reporter, Arachikavitz replied, “Hillary didn’t last as long as my Marlboro.” The nation was outraged, but there was a quiet satisfaction among many across western Kentucky.

At that rally was Ron Lewis, the Second District’s newly elected Republican congressman. In what had been a shock to Kentucky’s political establishment—if no-one else—Lewis had defeated longtime Kentucky State Senator Joe Prather in the May special election to succeed Natcher. Lewis had won with 55 percent of the vote on a turnout of less than 20 percent. A fundamentalist Christian, Baptist minister, and religious bookstore owner, Lewis had been recruited to the race by Senator Mitch McConnell, who had been narrowly elected to his own seat ten years earlier in 1984 on the coattails of Ronald Reagan.

You may recalled that Lewis’s campaign commercials in the special election had famously morphed Prather’s head into that of Bill Clinton, who was then near the height of his unpopularity. The national GOP considered the technique a success and went on to use it widely in the general election that year. Meanwhile, rumors had circulated in the district that Joe Prather was in Washington to look for a house. Perhaps it was just a rumor spread by the McConnell machine, but it might as well have been true, such was the arrogance and sense of entitlement of Kentucky Democrats of the day.

McConnell went on to recruit Republican Ed Whitfield—who had just as much personal dynamism as Lewis—to run in the First Congressional District in the fall. Both Lewis and Whitfield won; Whitfield became the first Republican ever elected to the First District.

My point with all this is that the political establishment in Kentucky at that time—conservative Southern Democrats—was a bloated and opaque bubble. Its bloated-ness allowed the good old boys to make room for more of their own inside and its opaqueness kept their less-than-altruistic dealings hidden from the masses, but those very same qualities kept the good old boys from witnessing the trouble that was brewing for them on the outside–in the real world.

Mitch McConnell burst their bubble.

Unfortunately, the Kentucky Republican Party that Mitch McConnell replaced the good old boy Democrats with was a political machine that set about inflaming the ugliest elements of Kentucky’s own culture: its racism, its bigotry, its sexism, its churlishness, its phobias, and its anti-intellectualism.

The thing to remember about Mitch McConnell (and this is something that his fellow Republicans in the U.S. Senate are discovering now about him in his capacity as Minority Leader) is that McConnell always has McConnell’s interests first. He’s not at all concerned about the long-term consequences of his tactics and actions on the people of Kentucky. What he’s counting on is that Kentuckians and the state’s chattering class will never fully digest the disaster that was McConnell’s Senate career so long as there’s plenty of pork named after him spread around the state.

Mitch McConnell took Kentucky, a state already at the bottom of the cultural and economic barrel of the nation, and he exacerbated the very social qualities of the place that had kept true progress (making gains on its peers, rather than playing catch up) out of reach for so long. McConnell’s strategy was to spear his political legacy with a wicked trident of slash-and-burn partisan politics, redneck populism, and moneyed corporate interests.

McConnell’s Kentucky GOP is today the political establishment in the state, and you can see what sort of establishment it is by the criminal behavior and incompetence of the administration of Governor Ernie Fletcher (R).

As I write, that Republican establishment is bunkering itself deep beneath the political reality on the ground in Kentucky. While Ernie Fletcher and his minions ratchet up their language of fear on expanded gaming and hate against sexual minorities and while Mitch McConnell continues to cultivate the corrupt environment of campaign finance in Washington that he fathered and stands steadfast behind the reckless presidency of George W. Bush, neither Fletcher or McConnell is making headway among Kentuckians.

Both are indeed consolidating support among their conservative base, but that base is shrinking. Kentuckians are waking up to the reality of what Fletcher, McConnell, and conservatives truly are.

The people of Kentucky are once again seething against their political establishment, but this time there is an energized and organized progressive Democratic party waiting in the wings. Whereas last time when Kentuckians cleaned political house they replaced bad with worse, this time the alternative to entrenched Republican corruption is a Democratic party that offers the hope of change and a better future for us all.

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When the mine worker widows held a press conference in Frankfort, Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher was nowhere to be seen, but let Peabody Energy Corp. ask him for millions of our tax dollars and he jumps through hoops. If that’s the kind of values he represents, then I’ve had enough of his phony values and his agenda!!!!!

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