This news originally provided by The Courier Journal

January 25, 2006

A discredited regime

Enough.

The arrogance with which the Bush administration waves off questions about the protection of America's coal miners has exceeded all bounds of decency.

This week, the man chosen by President Bush and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao to succeed Dave Lauriski as acting head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration -- David Dye -- simply walked out on Sen. Arlen Specter's inquiry into the back-to-back accidents that have taken 14 lives in West Virginia.

Mr. Dye had better things to do than answer to the people's elected representatives.

This typifies the administration's supercilious and dangerous approach to protecting the nation's miners.

Even after the fire that took two lives at Alma No. 1 last week, MSHA continues to defend its decision to make it easier for operators to use conveyor beltways as fresh air intakes.

That practice was once severely circumscribed, because of its potential to spread beltline blazes like this one, block escape routes, draw fire debris and deadly combustion products toward trapped miners and, on a routine basis, expose workers to more of the dust that causes black lung disease.

For 15 years, the industry had pushed MSHA to ignore those risks and ease the rules. The head of MSHA under President Bill Clinton, long-time safety advocate Davitt McAteer, refused.

But in 2004, the Bush-Chao regime gave its coal industry friends and contributors what they wanted, just as the administration made it easier to savage Appalachia with mountaintop removal mines.

Similarly, the administration has stalled deployment of hand-held communication devices that can help locate miners in an emergency, even though Mr. McAteer says the system is "ready to go." This week, the West Virginia legislature agreed with him and acted to require this life-saving technology.

Ms. Chao's husband, U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who represents some 15,000 Kentucky miners and the largest number of coal operations in the nation, has raised not a public peep about the administration's dismal approach to mine safety.

This is not surprising, since he has welcomed hundreds of thousands of dollars in industry contributions to his and other GOP campaigns over the past 15 years, and for a new state Republican Party headquarters and the McConnell Center for Political Leadership at the University of Louisville.

It's too early to establish blame for the deaths of those 14 workers at the Sago and Alma No. 1 mines. But the safety records at both operations were distressing, and distressingly familiar (notwithstanding a national industry spokesman's initial reaction that Sago's record wasn't so bad).

Congress must look beyond the Labor secretary's fatuous, grandiose promise -- to "take the necessary steps to ensure that this never happens again." It must ask why the Bush-Chao team also has:

Appointed industry insiders to oversee the regulation of a largely outlaw industry, which has proven time and again that it is resistant to safety controls. Mr. Lauriski, although arriving from a firm with a good safety record, even favored allowing higher coal dust levels in mines. He eventually left amid concerns about the awarding of questionable contracts. He will be remembered in Kentucky for his efforts to rig the probe of the great Martin County blackwater spill.

Revived industry's favorite dodge: the idea that voluntary "cooperation" between companies and regulators will do what tough enforcement can't -- a fantasy for which miners pay a price in blood.

Squelched the public's opportunity to monitor how federal mine safety laws and regulations are being applied. Most recently, it both reneged on a promise to hold truly public hearings into the Sago disaster and falsely claimed that law required it to have a company representative attend closed-door investigative interviews.

Rep. Henry Waxman of the House Government Reform Committee has called on Ms. Chao to reverse MSHA's 2004 decision to block disclosure of inspectors' notes, warning that imposing such secrecy is "dangerous and unwarranted." But Ms. Chao has done nothing. Neither has her husband, the coal state lawmaker and majority whip of the Senate.

Accepted budgets that barely kept up with inflation and reduced MSHA staff by 183.

Failed to upgrade the mine rescue system that clearly was broken.

Withdrew a Clinton administration plan to protect strip mine workers from the mayhem of haulage accidents.

Oversaw a dramatic decline in large fines for mine safety violations. Yes, there was talk about bigger penalties, but not a push hard enough to pass them. Worse, vast sums of unpaid fines have been allowed to go uncollected.

There's more, but this is enough to explain why David Dye preferred to duck out.