Blood on His Hands

President Obama spread the blame for the mine disaster in West Virginia that killed 29 miners. He noted that there were failures by the mining company, the government's mine regulators, and in the mine safety laws themselves. While there is certainly truth in this, I hold the mining company and its CEO, Don Blankenship, principally to blame. He had a more responsibility for the safety of the people who work for his company that is independent of, and goes beyond, what the law and the regulators may do, or not do. In fact, there was a pattern of resistance, obstructionism and sheer negligence on the part of the Massey mine company with over 1,300 safety violations since 2005, including two on the day of the disaster. Many of these were disputed and appealed by the company in a systematic pattern of foot-dragging.

Had Blankenship and the company taken responsibility for ensuring the safety of the miners instead of spending their time and money fighting the regulators, then readily available means could have been used to prevent the tragedy. Don Blankenship has blood on his hands. He is a poster boy for the kind of business ethic, all too common these days, that undermines our biosocial contract. In a very real sense, it is subversive.

A Moral Outrage

By any standard of decency, and a sense of social responsibility for the victims of this recession,the idea that American businesses would be doing everything they can to prevent the payment of unemployment benefits to their laid off "surplus" workers represent a moral outrage. To make matters worse, there are firms like Talx Corporation that specialize in helping businesses to contest unemployment claims. If ever there were in our society a deserving "no-fault" need that we should all be collectively responsible for meeting, surely tthe basic needs of the unemployed ought to be our highest priority. As I argue in The Fair Society, this is our "prime directive." And any business owner that doesn't get it is a moral eunuch. He/she should be fined for negligent selfishness.

A "Sociopathic" System?

An outside commentator on the PBS evening news last night described as "sociopathic" a banking system that allowed some hedge fund managers to take home personal incomes exceeding $1 billion each for their winning "bets" last year that the government would bail out the Wall Street banks. Economist John Maynard Keynes aptly called it "casino capitalism."

Meanwhile, some nine million Americans were losing their jobs and many more lost their life-savings in the economic meltdown of 2009. Talk about unfairness. We should reinstate an aggressive "excess profits tax" like the one used in World War Two to help finance the war effort. This time, the extra taxes could be used to finance an indefinite extension of unemployment benefits for the victims of Wall Street's predatory excesses. Call it social justice.