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The six Utah coal miners still remain trapped after the Crandall Canyon mine collapse 22 days ago. And the three men who died trying to rescue the six miners are just being laid to rest. But owner Robert Murray was ready to move on—and make money.

After disappearing from the public for a few days last week, Murray was back, not to offer reassurances to the families of the trapped miners or expressions of regret for the length of time their loved ones have been buried, not to give condolences to the families of the deceased rescue workers or to proffer other basic civilities, but to assert that it’s time to start mining other sections of the mine. After all, what’s a few lost miners when there’s more profit to be made?

Even officials at the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) could not contain their outrage over Murray’s comments.

“We were shocked that the subject was even brought up,” a spokesman for the agency said late Tuesday. “MSHA remains 100 percent focused on the rescue effort.”

And this response to Murray’s remarks from Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, as noted by Square State:

“That’s totally unacceptable. There will not be business as usual until there is closure.”

Following the outcry from federal officials, state lawmakers and family members, Murray now says the mine never will reopen.

But greed at the expense of all else, including workers’ safety and even lives, has been a hallmark of Murray’s career (see here and here). (And when he does spend money, he tends to fund the worst of the worst Republican campaigns.) As safety advocate Ellen Smith noted, at Murray’s Powhatan No. 6 mine in Ohio, Murray was

in big arguments with the Mine Safety and Health Administration officials over problems they had there, over citations he got, over the fact that they wanted to close down a longwall section to make the mine safer. And we have meeting notes where he was screaming, “You’re costing me $15,000 an hour! I’m losing tens of millions of dollars!”

Murray’s egregious behavior makes him an easy target. But he’s the open sore on an internally rotting body whose smell is apparent, but whose source is less so.

The corpse of Bush America.

Just this week, we’ve seen a dirty laundry list of greed at work:

  • Bush happily stomps on the health of America’s children, unilaterally declaring restrictions on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) because he sees momentum building in Congress to expand the hugely successful program. (Scarecrow did a great job on the issue here.) Why would Bush want to expand a program that enabled 2 million more low-income children to have health insurance between 1998 and 2005, when he could reassure his big insurance backers he would never endanger their massive profits?
  • Two firefighters die battling a blaze at the abandoned Deutsche Bank building in New York City over the weekend, a blaze labor and community activists say didn’t have to happen. According to Newsday, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which owns the building, employed subcontractor John Galt Corp. to dismantle the building, a move community activists opposed because of John Galt’s numerous city and federal violations. A crucial pipe had been taken apart before the fire, leaving the firefighters without water.

    “Firefighters were sent into a death trap,” said Steve Cassidy, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association.

  • The AFL-CIO community affiliate Working America awarded the grand prize in its My Bad Boss Contest to Pete, whose employer, an Illinois tyrant, threw away the paperwork and forms Pete filed, leaving him without paid leave or disability benefits for those days. Pete, the father of three small children, has a rare form of cancer and needed paid leave to help pay his family’s bills. Pete received the most votes from visitors to the contest, beating out several runners-up, including a waitress whose boss hired her stalker and another worker whose boss didn’t tell him his pregnant wife had called, bleeding and needing to go to the hospital—because he wanted him to keep working.

    Greed, bleeding through the sick body with the unhaloed smirk of “Greed is good,”
    Gordon Gekko hovering above. And how appropriate that subcontractor John Galt bears the same name as the Ayn Rand anti-hero in Atlas Shrugged, who remains in the background until the novel ends, when he makes his appearance and the system collapses. Leaving bumper stickers asking to this day, Who is John Galt?—and Rand’s followers to declare Galt “the perfect man.” According to the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health ( NYCOSH), John Galt (the company) planned to ignore major aspects of the Ground Zero cleanup plan approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Dave Newman, director of NYCOSH’s World Trade Center Project, says that rather than meet the challenges, Galt’s employer, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.,

    acts as if they don’t exist, hiring firms without experience, altering plans without official approval, and showing contempt for the community of residents and workers who will be at risk if something goes wrong.”

    Something is deeply wrong with America today, asserts AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. Writing on Huffington Post, Sweeney says:

    Working men and women have lost their value to the people who have been running this country for too long. Ruthless CEOs wring working people dry, and the neocon ideologues in the White House help them.

    Our wages are stagnant, our benefits are disappearing, the middle class is shrinking and, for the first time, there’s a good chance our children will not be better off than our generation. We’re the most productive workers in the world, but we have to work more hours, more jobs and send more family members into the workforce just to keep up.

    The heroes who rushed to Ground Zero to save lives and who dug and sweated and struggled for months after Sept. 11, 2001, are suffering today from neglect and indifference. Neglect and indifference left thousands stranded on rooftops and in a dark convention center after Hurricane Katrina. Neglect, and indifference meant deplorable conditions for veterans recovering at Walter Reed.

    As on Firedoglake, our commentors at the AFL-CIO Now blog often hit home with their remarks. Writes Catbear955 in response to the possibility the Utah miners never will be found:

    Corporate greed is corporate greed—the human cost doesn’t matter. The families pay the price. God bless the miners and their families; Lord have mercy on those murderers who sent the miners into harm’s way for a dollar.

    Mercy from the Lord and a commitment from us lesser beings to heal the wretched body Bush and his followers have bequeathed us.

Related posts:

  1. FDL Book Salon Welcomes Jonathan Tasini, “The Audacity of Greed: Free Markets, Corporate Thieves and the Looting of America”
  2. Mopping Up Corporate Greed
  3. Blue America Launches New TV Initiative in Arkansas — And We Need You
  4. Mourning and Organizing in the Wake of Tiller’s Murder
  5. Health Care: Pete King is Out of Touch with Long Island, New York, and America