OBAMA’S WAR ON MINING
Commentary by Harold Hough  

"Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."
Future Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, November 2008

            The mining accident at the Upper Big Branch Mine was a tragedy.  And, we do need to use this event as a way to make mining better and safer.  However, using the tragedy for political purposes as the Obama Administration is doing only cheapens those deaths.
Even as Barack Obama visited Beckley, West Virginia to read a eulogy at the memorial service for those who died in the Upper Big Branch Mine accident, his administration was working on declaring war on the industry as a whole.  "If we had our way we'd be mourning the mining industry, not miners," a White House aide told a reporter. "As an environmental issue, we want the majority of these mining related industries just to go away."
So, how is the attack taking place?  Just look at the health care debate and what the administration did to insurance companies.  As the Hill put it, “Barack Obama launched a new populist battle against mining companies, echoing his attacks on major Wall Street banks and other corporate interests he accuses of putting profits ahead of the public interest.  Obama, responding to the West Virginia coal mining accident last week that killed 29 workers, accused the industry of shirking safety rules and using legal loopholes that keep regulators at bay.  It is clear that while there are many responsible companies, far too many mines are not doing enough to protect their workers’ safety.”
“Obviously, they don’t want to appear to be capitalizing on a tragedy, but at the same time it does give them an opportunity to underscore their alliance with everyday Americans against big corporations,” Said Ross Baker an expert on the presidency and a political science professor at Rutgers University.
What the mining industry can expect to see is “Community Organizing, version 2010.”  The White House, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency are already working with radical environmental groups to protest mining methods like  "mountaintop removal mining" in West Virginia.   This allowed the EPA to cite such protests as support for their new rulemaking. In April, the agency imposed rules sharply curtailing that form of surface mining in such states as West Virginia. The rules may end up costing several hundred West Virginia miners their jobs.
Now the Obama Administration is looking for ways to reward those groups they coordinated with. According to sources inside the EPA, the agency is attempting to find ways to get funding to several organizations it worked with on the mountaintop mining and other efforts, including Appalachian Voices and Coal River Mountain Watch. Meanwhile, the administration is attempting to identify ways to fund a much more influential "pass through" organization, the Appalachian Community Fund, an organization run out of Knoxville, Tennessee.
“Appalachian Community Fund is like the ACORN of West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee," says a Commerce Department political employee. "If we can get it just a few hundred thousand dollars, it can organize for us down there in ways to help us politically, and it's done great things for us with the EPA and other entities."
This tragedy overshadows what the industry has done to make mining safe.  85% of American mines lost no worker time to injuries last year.  And, Massey Mining has shown that air tests taken at the beginning of the shift did not show dangerous quantities of explosive gasses before the accident.
MSHA and the mining industry needs to look at this tragedy and see if there is something we can do to make coal mining safer.  However, we shouldn’t allow the government to use this as an excuse to destroy the industry.
Ironically, in his Rose Garden speech, Obama said Massey must be “held accountable for decisions they made.”  The mining industry needs to let Obama know that the voters will hold him accountable for the decisions he made that gutted America’s mining industry.