This article originally provided by The Lexington Herald-Leader

February 4, 2008

$20 million fine is not enough

By Mickey McCoy

A group of well-financed terrorists attack Washington, D.C., and its residents, ruining property, stealing their resources, poisoning their water supply, flooding their landscape and forever altering their way of life and the lives of future generations who may choose to live there. After years of pilfering and leaving a legacy of destruction, these violators are caught and brought to justice.

Their punishment? No trip to Guantanamo Bay. No sentence to federal prison. No restitution that equals or comes close to their theft or the significance of their crimes. Our police and judicial system simply fine them $20 million and turn them loose to attack again.

This crime didn't take place in our nation's capital. The offense wasn't rendered by a terrorist group (at least not one reckoned as such by homeland security). This attack was launched by Massey Energy and, at first glance, the only victims were the hill folk of East Kentucky and Southern West Virginia.

The report of Massey receiving the largest fine ever levied against a coal company for its repeated (4,500 times) violations of the Clean Water Act might strike the non-Appalachian, "head in the sand" news reader as a job well done by the Environmental Protection Agency.

But the crimes against nature and humankind that Massey has committed over the years, while extracting billions of dollars of coal from these hills and crippling the future of this area, far exceed the token fine of $20 million.

Massey has done and continues to do what Massey damn well pleases. Judging from past practice in this mindless national policy of "energy at any cost," I am surprised that a federal agency, especially under the Bush administration, would dare to impose what at first may seem to the casual observer as a stiff fine.

But to those who have suffered from the externalized cost of Massey's mining practices, to those who believe that Appalachia should not be sacrificed for the sheer greedy profit for the few, the assessment against Massey fell terribly short.

Massey has cost the land and its people dearly: poisoned water supplies, increased flooding, the loss of streams and farmland, shattered house foundations, the transformation of our mountain ridges to moonscapes and the clear-cutting of one of the most biologically diverse forests on the planet.

What price do you put on the inability to drink from your water tap without fear of ingesting heavy metals? Name the cost of being able to sleep at night not knowing whether the morning may wake you with a flood of toxic sludge at your doorstep?

Sure, you say, it's bad. Your heart goes out to those who have to suffer from the outlaw industry of King Coal, but really, why should you care? After all, you live in Lexington, Louisville, Cincinnati or, as in the opening fictitious scenario, Washington. It doesn't really concern you or your home.

That's where you are wrong. When a corporation can go into any part of the United States, commit gross violations against its people and its land and receive protection from government agencies that were established to protect that land and its people, it better concern us all.

For who is next? We all live downstream -- realistically and symbolically.

What city or town will be next to suffer from injustices from billion-dollar industries while the government and its police agencies slap wrists for damages that affect an area and its people for generations to come.

Twenty million dollars? It does nothing to deter corporations from destroying a different part of our country. Twenty million dollars? It only proves that Massey Energy is the poster child for American-backed industrial terrorism.

Mickey McCoy, a former mayor of Inez, is a schoolteacher and member of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.