Don Blankenship is as hard-bitten as they come, so he should have little trouble adapting to prison life, if that’s where he ends up.
Born in coal country, he grew up in legendary Mingo County, and graduated from Matewan High School. Feuding runs in his blood; his mother was a McCoy (of Hatfield-McCoy fame). Unlike many West Virginia youths, he went to college, and became a CPA. At age 32, he took a job with a subsidiary of Massey Coal Company, and worked his way up the corporate ladder, becoming Massey’s chairman, president, and CEO just 10 years later. He would stay in that position for a decade, during which Massey amassed an incredible record of safety violations, culminating in a mine explosion that killed 29 miners in 2010.
Yesterday, a federal grand jury indicted Blankenship for conspiring to violate federal mine safety laws, conspiring to impede federal mine inspectors, making false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and securities fraud. If convicted on all counts, he could get 31 years in prison, effectively a life sentence.
Massey Coal Company, at one time the fourth-largest U.S. coal mining company, doesn’t exist anymore. It was bought by Alpha Natural Resources in January of 2011. Blankenship did not go to ANR with the company; he retired in December of 2010. Perhaps we can infer that ANR didn’t want him. Or maybe, like some ballplayers, he was just too expensive; he was the coal industry’s highest-paid CEO.
Blankenship had a reputation for trying to buy politicians and judges. He was as rightwing as they come; he was a climate change denier and equated Jimmy Carter’s energy conservation program with communism. He apparently views the world as an every-man-for-himself jungle in which only the fittest survive. Not all of his mine employees did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Blankenship
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/11/read-don-blankenship-massey-mine-indictment
When you get right down to it, Blankenship is a poster boy for laissez-faire, Ayn Rand style capitalism. He’s a living example of what you’d get if there was no rule of law and our society became an unregulated capitalist jungle. With men like him, it’s hard to tell where rightwing politics leaves off and raw criminality begins. All I know is I don’t want to work for a company run by someone like him, and I don’t want to live in a society run by people with his attitude toward their fellow human beings.
