Author: Mike Lillis

It doesn’t take much time browsing Mine Safety & Health Administration records to discover that the site of yesterday’s horrific explosion — Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine 30 miles south of Charleston, W.Va. — was an operation with some issues. There are thousands of safety violations cited over the years — 458 last year alone — including a repeated failure to remove combustible material from active work areas.

But don’t ask Don Blankenship to be overly concerned. The Massey CEO — and author of an infamous 2005 memo instructing his deep mine superintendents to ignore any requests unrelated to coal production — was interviewed by a local West Virginia news outlet today. The Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr. has this quote from Blankenship:

Violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process. You have inspections every day and it’s hard to differentiate sometimes between, you know, head counts or number counts of violations and the seriousness or type of it.

[Upper Big Branch] was a mine that had violations. I think the fact that MSHA and the state and our firebosses and the best engineers that you can find were all in and around this mine and all believed it to be safe … speaks for itself.

“Any suspicion that the mine was improperly operated or illegally operated or anything like that,” Blankenship added, “would be unfounded.”

From the office of Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) comes this statement, in which the nine-term senator vows to discover “who was responsible” for yesterday’s explosion at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine, and to “hold those parties accountable.”

That’s about the same message coming from the other West Virginia lawmakers on Capitol Hill in the wake of the disaster. But then Byrd goes a step further, blasting Massey for its history of violations at the Upper Big Branch:

At least 25 coal miners have died inside a mine that has over time amassed scores of safety violations, including 57 citations just last month. West Virginia’s coal miners are the backbone of a great nation that depends on their work. They deserve nothing less than a safe working environment, and an employer who respects and values their safety.

We must reexamine the health and safety laws we have put into place and what more may need to be done to avoid future loss of life.

The Charleston Daily Mail reported today that inspectors have found more than 3,000 violations at the Upper Big Branch in the last 15 years, most recently being last month.

Four miners are still missing, but rescue workers have delayed their search due to high levels of methane gas in the mine.

Even while Massey Energy is touting “another record setting year for safety,” the Charleston Daily Mail today has a different story:

Safety inspectors concluded as recently as last month that conditions at Massey Energy Co.’s Upper Big Branch mine posed substantial and significant risks to miner well-being before a Monday explosion killed 25 miners and trapped 4.

In March alone, U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration officials cited the mine, which is owned by Massey subsidiary Performance Coal Co., for failing to control dust; improperly planning to ventilate the mine of dust and the combustible gas methane; inadequate protection from roof falls; failing to maintain proper escapeways; and allowing the accumulation of combustible materials.

In the past 15 years, there have been more than 3,000 violations cited at the Upper Big Branch mine, the Daily Mail reports.

The violations appear “quite relevant” to Monday’s explosion, said Scott Simonton, a professor of environmental science and environmental engineering at Marshall University.

Not much to add here, really. All businesses hate red tape and government meddling. But in high-risk industries like coal mining the safety regulations clearly serve a purpose — though the influence of industry means that such regulations usually arrive as a response to a disaster like Monday’s, instead of anticipating such an event.

“It’s unfortunate, but every mine safety law we have on the books today was written in the blood of coal miners,” Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) said today.

The Daily Mail story seems to reveal that the problem is not about writing these laws, but enforcing them.

One by one, the powerful Democrats of coal country are calling for an investigation into yesterday’s explosion that killed at least 25 coal miners in Raleigh County, W.Va.

The latest is Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who just issued a statement vowing that he “will demand answers.”

We will leave no stone unturned in determining how this happened and in taking action for the future.

Rockefeller’s comments follow those by West Virginia Rep. Nick Rahall (D), who called this morning for “a thorough investigation” into the explosion, which struck Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine in Rahall’s district.

“It’s unfortunate, but every mine safety law we have on the books today was written in the blood of coal miners,” Rahall told reporters this morning.

Liberals have bashed Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) in recent days for blocking legislation to extend the filing deadline for unemployment benefits, the cost of which he wants to offset. But today, “Dr. No” revealed a more progressive side.

Appearing at an Oklahoma town hall gathering, Coburn took on some conservatives in the audience over issues as diverse as the scope of health care reform, the bias of Fox News and the geniality of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). The highlights:

1) Asked what he thought about the (nonexistent) provision in the health reform law that will jail those who don’t comply with the individual insurance mandate, Coburn shot down the myth. “The intention is not to put any one in jail,” he said. “That makes for good TV news on FOX but that isn’t the intention.”

2) He asked voters to divorce themselves from the biases of Fox News and think for themselves.

What we have to have is make sure we have a debate in this country so that you can see what’s going on and make a determination yourself.

So don’t catch yourself being biased by FOX News that somebody is no good. The people in Washington are good. They just don’t know what they don’t know.

3) And finally, when the audience hissed at Coburn’s characterization of Pelosi as “a nice lady,” he defended those remarks, even as he was quick to reject the Speaker’s politics.

“Let me give you a little lesson here — I hope you will listen to me,” Coburn said. “Just because somebody disagrees with you [doesn’t] mean they’re not a good person.”

No word yet on whether the audience took note.

h/t: The Hill.

As Congress vows to investigate possible violations at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine — where at least 25 miners were killed in an explosion yesterday — it’s worth noting that Massey has never really had a good track record when it comes to safety in its mines, as this 2003 Forbes piece indicates:

Over the two years through 2001 Massey was cited by West Virginia officials for violating regulations 501 times. Its three biggest rivals, mining twice as much coal in the state as Massey, were cited a collective 175 times. [CEO Don] Blankenship says Massey is unfairly targeted by regulators.

“We don’t pay much attention to the violation count,” he says.

He might start today.

h/t: Christopher Helman.

The stock price for Massey Energy might have dropped today, following Monday’s explosion at the company’s Upper Big Branch mine. But don’t count the coal giant out just yet.

Despite the disaster, Wall Street analysts still see strong earnings potential in Massey. ABC News reports today that analysts at Jefferies & Co. are encouraging investors to scoop up Massey shares. The reason?

“We believe Massey Energy is a well-capitalized Eastern coal producer and ranks as the largest, most diversified, and lowest-cost coal producer in Central Appalachia,” they wrote in a research note.

That “lowest cost” could in any way be related to a history of safety problems at Massey’s mines, of course, is of no interest to the barons of Wall Street. But it has caught the attention of Congress. As Aaron pointed out earlier, Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), the powerful chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee and a longtime defender of the coal industry, is calling for “accountability” surrounding the explosion.

Rahall might want to take a look at this short video clip, in which a young Don Blankenship, now Massey’s outspoken CEO, outlines his business philosophy.

“Unions, communities, people — everybody’s gonna have to accept that, in the United States, we have a capitalist society,” Blankenship said. “And that capitalism, from a business viewpoint, is survival of the most productive.”

h/t: Gooznews.

With conservatives screaming from the rafters about the elimination of a business tax deduction for retiree benefits in the Democrats’ health reform law, The New York Times responds today with a pretty convincing argument for why the change makes sense.

First, here’s how the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law has benefited companies:

For every $100 the company spends on retiree drug benefits, Medicare sends it a subsidy payment of $28. On top of that, the companies got a rare double tax break. The $28 subsidy is tax-free, and the company was allowed to deduct the entire $100 as a business expense.

Under the new reform law, the 28 percent subsidy remains, and it remains tax free. “But companies will no longer be allowed to deduct the subsidy as if it were an expenditure of their own,” the Times writes.

Sounds reasonable, right? Not in the eyes of the companies that benefit from the current system. They’re claiming that the change will hobble their hiring abilities (i.e., lower their profits). And conservatives are listening.

“This added burden to corporate America would be significant at the best of economic times, but unfortunately we’re living in the worst of times — when every spare corporate dollar should be spent on retaining or hiring new employees,” an emblematic critic wrote recently for Townhall.

“Added burden,” of course, implies an initial burden. But, as Ben Armbruster of Think Progress recently pointed out, some of the companies making the most fuss over the elimination of their pet tax deduction are among those that pay the least to Uncle Sam. It’s tough to cry for Boeing when its actual tax rate, at 3.2 percent, is about one-sixth of a middle class family’s.

Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons (R) — who tomorrow will join a growing list of state officials to file suit against the individual mandate in the Democrats’ health reform law — explained to Fox News today that he’s doing so because he’s “concerned about the Constitution.”

“It doesn’t bother me that every Republican is standing up for the Constitution and the rights of Americans and the Democrats are opposed to that,” he said, referring to his attorney general, a Democrat, who has refused to file the suit through her office. ”That shows their partisan politics, and they’re becoming the party of, ‘No, don’t interfere with our attempt to take over all of the health care industry in this country.’ This is a serious, serious infringement and erosion of the constitutional rights of Americans.”

It’s at times like this that it’s worth mentioning that the individual mandate was first pushed by conservatives as an alternative to a proposed requirement that businesses offer health benefits to all their workers.

In a telling piece published earlier this year, NPR health care reporter Julie Rovner spoke with one of the architects of that proposal, the conservative University of Pennsylvania health economist Mark Pauly. More than 20 years back, Pauly told Rovner:

“A group of economists and health policy people, market-oriented, sat down and said, ‘Let’s see if we can come up with a health reform proposal that would preserve a role for markets but would also achieve universal coverage.’ ”

The idea of the individual mandate was about the only logical way to get there, Pauly says.

Additionally, the individual mandate was seen as a way to to prevent those without insurance from sticking the bill to everyone else in times of medical emergency.

“We called this responsible national health insurance,” Pauly told Rovner. “There was a kind of an ethical and moral support for the notion that people shouldn’t be allowed to free-ride on the charity of fellow citizens.”

Indeed, it was the individual mandate, Rovner writes, that Republicans included in a 1993 proposal that was designed to compete with the employer mandate pushed by the Clinton administration at the time. Some pretty conservative lawmakers — including Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) — were behind that proposal.

Funny that two decades later the idea is suddenly deemed unconstitutional.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Commission is seeking $16.375 million in civil fines against Toyota after the automaker was forced to recall 2.3 million vehicles over an accelerator glitch, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced Monday.

The DOT says that the fine — the maximum allowable — is the largest civil penalty the NHTSC has ever assessed against a car maker for failing to report defects until long after they were allegedly discovered. Still, it’s irresistible to mention that the fine would represent $7.12 per car recalled.

With countless headlines reminding readers that jobless benefits begin expiring today, it was inevitable that each party would be slinging blame over the Senate’s failure to pass a filing extension before leaving town last month for spring break. Which is why you’ve got Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) yesterday accusing Republicans of “irresponsibility” and Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) returning fire today with charges that “Democrats thought it was more important to catch their planes” than help the unemployed.

Lost in the hostile little back-and-forth is the same thing that was lost during much of the debate over health care reform: The two sides simply don’t agree on the policy, and so no length of negotiation was likely to produce a compromise.

In the case of unemployment benefits ,the parties are much closer than they put on. Both want to extend the filing deadline, which is today. But the Republicans want to use stimulus funds to pay the tab. The Democrats don’t, arguing that a bit of temporary deficit spending amid the jobs crisis will pay dividends down the road. That’s it. That’s the disagreement. And both sides have an argument to back them up. Funny, though, how quickly the underlying issue gets lost in the mud.

Economic realities like the widening wealth gap and growing income inequality aren’t terribly popular topics on Capitol Hill, where most lawmakers still prefer to spout claims that merit and hard work – not family wealth and connections — are the surest dictators of success in this country. But don’t tell that to Rep. David Obey. The Wisconsin Democrat, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, shot out a statement this afternoon that points to the growing income divide as the driving force behind the voter discontent that’s threatening to unseat incumbents from both parties this November.

“Income for the middle fifth of American families rose only 15 percent from 1979 to 2006, and most of that growth came about because women are working much longer hours each year than three decades ago,” the statement says. “In contrast, those with incomes in the top ten percent saw their income grow 133%. Those in the top ten percent now receive half of all income in America.”

It gets more pointed.

Those even higher on the income ladder have had mindboggling income gains. In 2007, the average income of the top one hundredth of one percent reached $35 million, up almost ten-fold over the last three decades.  Meanwhile the rest of society was getting table scraps.

Obey goes on to outline the specific policy areas that have allowed that gap to grow, blaming “bad trade deals, unfair tax policy, toothless oversight of the loose financial activities of large corporations, and a systematic disinvestment in energy, science, education and other investment crucial to long term economic growth that benefits all Americans.”

“In the midst of all of that,” Obey adds, “why shouldn’t middle income taxpayers be angry?”

It’s a question worth asking this tax season, as most Americans are paying a higher income tax rate than the billionaire hedge fund managers of Wall Street.

For thousands of Americans without work and collecting unemployment insurance, the process gets stickier today with the arrival of the deadline for accessing the next tier of benefits — a deadline estimated to drop hundreds of thousands of jobless folks from the UI rolls this week.

This filing deadline is different than the “expiration of benefits” that many news outlets are reporting this morning. If you’re currently collecting checks in one tier of the five-tier process (which includes state help and four levels of federal help), those checks will continue to arrive until you exhaust the weeks remaining in that tier.

(Currently, state benefits run for 26 weeks; Tier I of the federal help for 20 weeks; Tier II for 14 weeks; Tier III for 13 weeks (for states with unemployment rates higher than 6 percent); and Tier IV for another 6 weeks for states with unemployment rates topping 8.5 percent.)

So, for example, if you’re on week 13.5 of Tier II benefits, you won’t be able to apply for Tier III later this week, when Tier II expires.

That’s not as harsh as having the checks stop for everyone, but nor is the deadline trivial. The National Employment Law Project estimates that 212,000 unemployed folks will lose their benefits this week, without the option of filing for the next level.

The Senate tried to extend that filing deadline through the end of April, but an objection by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) sent the lawmakers on their two-week spring break without passing the bill. The best they could manage was to launch the cloture process, which will allow Democrats to pass the bill despite the Coburn’s blockade. (The Oklahoma Republican wants to pay the $9.2 billion tab using unspent stimulus funds. The Democrats’ bill puts the tab on the deficit.)

The Senate is scheduled to vote next Monday on the cloture measure. The office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has said that the benefits will be retroactive to today.

Megan pointed this out more than a week ago, but today the editorialists at The New York Times are also highlighting the central flaw of the updated foreclosure prevention program announced by the White House last month: While the government offers financial carrots to entice the banks to rework mortgages in order to prevent foreclosures, there are no sticks to force the hands of those lenders.

Those efforts would reduce the monthly payment and restore some home equity, but as with earlier antiforeclosure efforts, lenders are not required to help. Despite government incentives to modify bad loans, lenders might wait to see if bigger incentives are offered later. They may also prefer foreclosure to modifications because the long foreclosure process lets them postpone taking losses.

Housing advocates have been pushing a series of proposals they say would tackle the problem — everything from mortgage bankruptcy reform to mandatory principal write-down programs. So far, though, all federal efforts to curtail foreclosures have hinged on the good will of the nation’s banks.

The Washington Post today runs a timely reminder that the nation’s unemployment rate will likely rise even as hundreds of thousands of jobs start being created. The reason is simple: The Labor Department equation used to crunch the jobless rate doesn’t consider those folks who’ve been so discouraged by the job market that they’ve stopped looking for work altogether. As the economy recovers, though, those folks will re-enter the official jobless pool, hiking the unemployment rate even as businesses are hiring. The Post provides more detail:

The number of people looking for jobs rose by more than 200,000 last month compared with February, according to the Economic Policy Institute — and that’s a good sign, economists say. It means that Americans are seeing more jobs being created and that they’re optimistic about their prospects.

But the supply of new jobs — 162,000 in March, the biggest monthly increase in three years — will accommodate only a fraction of the unemployed. Some economists say the jobless rate will not recede to pre-recession levels near 5 percent for four more years.

If anything, this is reminder that the official jobless rate is always misleading — and that lawmakers (not to mention journalists) would do better to recognize the broader numbers when tackling the topic.

If it seems that news reporters are relying more and more on unnamed government sources in their story-telling, it’s because we are.

Much of that is our own fault. In the ever-quickening race to scoop others, the information or the quote often trumps the insistence on identifying its source. In other words, voices in the White House and Congress are often allowed to remain anonymous because reporters decreasingly push them to go on the record. But there also seem to be more and more instances of government officials demanding anonymity as a blanket policy, even in cases when the information being relayed isn’t at all sensitive or controversial.

Yesterday’s press call on the EPA’s new mountaintop mining guidelines offers an illustrative case.

Featured in that conversation was EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, who spoke 100 percent on the record. But reporters were also told at the outset that other agency experts were also on hand, and that they were to be cited only as “senior EPA officials.”

“Your participation in this call means that you’ve agreed to these terms,” an EPA spokeswoman said.

But those terms didn’t sit so well with Ken Ward Jr., the long-time coal industry reporter at The Charleston Gazette, who asked pointedly, “Why won’t you allow your staff to also speak on the record?”

The response from EPA spokeswoman Adora Andy won’t do much to excite those who thought the Obama administration would usher in a new era of White House transparency after eight years of reticence and veiled sourcing under the Bush administration.

“We have very little precious time with the administrator today,” Andy said, “and we’re going to continue having her answer questions about mountaintop mining, on the record.”

Which, of course, acted only to reintroduce the question.

Republicans today have been quick to use the Dept. of Labor’s new employment numbers as evidence that the Democrats’ efforts to stimulate the economy over the last year have failed.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), for example, issued a statement arguing that no long-term recovery can happen until “Washington stops actively impeding economic growth.” And Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), who heads the Republican Study Committee, said “we have still yet to see the robust private sector job creation the Obama administration promised would come from its $862 billion failed stimulus.”

It’s a curious tactic, considering that (1) the economy created 162,000 jobs last month — 114,000 when census hiring is excluded; (2) that the “failed stimulus” included more than $300 billion in tax cuts for businesses and individuals, which is the same strategy that GOP leaders have argued would most effectively grow the economy; and (3) that 162,000 is quite an improvement above the 700,000+ jobs that were being shed each month when Obama moved into the White House.

Case in point: this graph from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

First it was Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) urging an outright ban on mountaintop mining in lieu of new EPA restrictions. And now Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) is echoing that message, issuing a statement that calls on Congress to take up legislation that would prohibit companies from dumping mine waste in streams altogether.

The [EPA’s] guidance for approving mining permits, based on these new scientific studies, will help control the damage caused by mountaintop removal mining. But the science shows us that if we are to truly protect our mountains, streams and the people who depend on them, we must bring the practice of mountaintop removal mining to an end.

Last year, Alexander and Cardin introduced legislation that would classify mining debris as a pollutant, which would force coal companies to truck their mining waste to off-site dumping grounds — something the industry claims would make mountaintop removal economically unfeasible (which, of course, is the whole point of the bill).

Last June, Cardin staged a hearing on the issue, the first of its kind in nearly a decade. At the time, the Maryland Democrat vowed to hold another, though none has yet been planned. The offices of both Cardin and Alexander are closed today for the Easter holiday.

Environmentalists might be applauding the Obama administration’s new restrictions on mountaintop coal mining as the most significant step the government has ever taken to rein in the practice. But don’t tell that to Sen. Lamar Alexander. The Tennessee Republican is calling for a full ban (not just tighter limits) on the dumping of mining waste into Appalachian streams — a prohibition that Tennessee has had on the books for years.

Conveniently, Alexander has a bill that would do just that. The legislation, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), would redefine mining waste as a pollutant, thus barring companies from dumping debris into valleys below their mountaintop projects. The idea is that if it becomes too expensive to truck the debris off-site, then companies will stop blowing up mountains altogether.

“The new EPA guidelines are useful in stopping some inappropriate coal mining in Appalachia but Congress still needs to pass the Cardin-Alexander legislation that would effectively end mountaintop removal mining,” Alexander said in a statement issued Thursday. “By mountaintop removal, we mean blowing the tops off of mountains and dumping the waste in streams.”

Such statements put Alexander at odds with a number of Appalachian lawmakers, who view any new environmental protections in coal country as a threat to jobs in the region. But there’s good reason why Alexander has adopted his position. Tennessee is home to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, by far the most visited national park in the country. Last year, nearly 9.5 million people visited the Great Smoky, compared to 4.3 million visitors to the Grand Canyon, which ranks second.

Considering those tourism numbers, Tennessee’s lawmakers have no interest in wrecking the same mountains that are drawing those people in. Indeed, they’ve discovered a way to create sustainable local jobs without poisoning their waters and communities.

“Coal is an essential part of our energy future,” Alexander said, ”but it is not necessary to destroy our mountaintops in order to have enough coal to meet our needs.”

The Department of Labor this morning released its much-anticipated employment numbers for March, indicating that the economy created 162,000 new jobs last month, but the nation’s unemployment rate remained 9.7 percent.

Some economists see the figures as the first clear sign that the economy is on the rebound. “Unlike previous months in which payroll gains were limited to the health and education sectors and to temporary help agencies, the latest report suggests that job gains are now more broadly distributed across the private economy,” Gary Burtless, formerly with the Labor Department and now at the Brookings Institution, said in a statement today. “In March there were small gains in manufacturing, construction, and many service-producing industries.”

Democrats, though, are being cautious not to overhype the figures. Certainly the creation of 162,000 jobs is an improvement on the 700,000-per-month job losses that were the trend a year ago. But there are signs in today’s report that a long road remains for the millions of Americans struggling to find work. Indeed, the number of long-term unemployed — those out of work for more than 27 weeks — jumped by 414,000 in March, to 6.5 million. That means that more than 44 percent of all jobless Americans have been out of work for more than half a year — a statistic that’s alarming to advocates for the unemployed.

“The long slog of looking for work and surviving on jobless benefits is going to continue for millions of Americans,” Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, said in a statement today. ”It’s Congress’ job now to take effective and aggressive steps to create jobs and extend unemployment through the end of the year, so that the economy can get back on its feet.”

The deadline to file for the next tier of unemployment benefits arrives next Monday, during a week when Congress is on recess. NELP estimates that the deadline will cause as many as 212,000 unemployed workers will lose their benefits in that week alone.

Update: Analysts at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal policy shop, point out that roughly 48,000 of these jobs are temporary positions created by the federal government to manage this year’s Census survey.

“Excluding Census hiring, state and local government shed 9,000 jobs, while the private sector added 123,000 jobs,” wrote EPI economist Heidi Shierholz. “Some of these gains were likely an upward correction to the winter-storm-dampened February payrolls, but the trend since January is positive, with the private sector adding an average of 65,500 jobs per month over the last two months.”

Those private sector figures are much more optimistic than those issued just a few days ago by other surveyers, who reported that the private employers shed 23,000 jobs last month.