An epic portrait of one community’s long-time battle to take on Massey Energy lawlessness and their Big Coal sycophants in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia, The Last Mountain just might be one of the most timely and game-changing films in years. Beautifully filmed, at once provocative and disquieting, The Last Mountain wonderfully captures the inspiring resistance and indefatigable campaigns of coal mining families — and their outside supporters — to stand up and defend their land and lives.

Massey CEO Don Blankenship is back in the news again, and so are the Senators from West Virginia. One still trying to make money and keep unions out of mines, the other fighting for better mine safety regulations. I’ll let you guess who’s who.

Don Blankenship: proof positive that some sort of rigorous psychological profiling and the presence of a conscience should be mandatory before hiring a candidate to run the joint.

There seemed to be an otherworldly presence in the hearing room Tuesday when a Congressional committee began formal consideration of new coal mine safety legislation.

On February 13, 2010, the management at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine ordered an electrician to disable a methane alarm that kept going off, according to NPR. This is the equivalent of being annoyed that your fire alarm is going off, so you turn it off; then your house burns down and kills you and almost everyone inside.

It appears as though Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, in whose coal mine 29 people died earlier this year in an entirely preventable disaster, has been booted from the Board of Directors of the US Chamber of Commerce.

As recently as June 29, Massey was listed as a member of the Chamber’s Board. But now, his name doesn’t appear on the list of current board members, and his specific profile page has been deleted from the website.

This takes some stones. Massey Energy, whose mine explosion in West Virginia in April killed 29 people, has decided to sue the Mine Safety and Health Administration, along with three of its regulators, over MSHA’s denial of Massey’s preferred mine ventilation plans.

Massey’s lawsuit says that federal law didn’t allow the company to challenge MSHA’s requirements, saying such a restriction “violated its constitutional rights,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

It’s criminal investigation week! Not only is the DOJ investigating Goldman Sachs, but the FBI has launched a bribery investigation into Massey Energy, the owner of the Upper Big Branch Mine and a company that regularly condones what amounts to serial murder by negligence.

When President Obama eulogized the 29 dead miners of the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion this weekend, he noted that no one should “put their lives at risk by simply showing up to work.” Unfortunately, it’s not just miners who fear for their lives while making a paycheck; deaths on the job are unfortunately entirely too common. In its annual report on worker deaths, the AFL-CIO found that 5,214 workers died on the job in 2008. That’s 14 people a day.

The Mine Safety & Health Act is not to blame for the 29 deaths at Massey Coal. The real problems are much deeper.