I was just the keynote speaker at the Martinsburg Chocolate Fest & Book Faire in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. I talked about my 2013 book, The Price of Justice: A True Story of Greed and Corruption in Coal Country. Since the villain in my book, Don Blankenship, the former head of Massey Energy, has just been sentenced to a year in prison, I felt a certain vindication. I told in stark terms how Blankenship and the coal industry in general have decimated the mountain state.
These aren't things that are talked about openly in coal country, and I could see an anxious look in some of those who had come to the dinner. When I finished, there was generous applause, but no questions. Afterwards, several people came up to me and said it was all so painfully true that they had nothing to ask.
I went down to West Virginia 45 years ago and worked in a coal mine. When I'd walk out with my buddies after the shift and saw the line of cars full of coal that we had mined, I felt good. I knew indisputably I had done something of value. Without coal there would have been no industrial civilization, and the world would be a different place.
Billions of dollars of coal have been clawed out of the Appalachian hills, but little of this has stayed in the hands of those who mined this fortune. You may argue that this is little more than the natural inequality of life, but was it in the bargain that the hills would be denuded, the mountains leveled, young people decimated by drugs, and the southern half of the state emptied out, a sad repository of those too sick or old to get out? Driving on those winding mountain roads now it's like being in the frontier regions of Pakistan, a place where nobody of good sense would even go.
The coal barons and the lawyers who did their bidding got the rules changed so the coal companies have not had to establish separate funds to reclaim the land after the end of their operations. Now that so many of the major companies are in bankruptcy, it's unlikely the land will be reclaimed unless the federal government spends the billions and billions of dollars. So in all likelihood a decimated, depopulated region will be the living legacy of the wildly irresponsible coal industry.
The coal industry and their Republican allies have conned the people of the state into believing that there is a war on coal. These self-styled "Friends of Coal" blame President Obama and the Democrats for regulations that suffocate the industry. They never talk how after over a hundred years, the easy seams have all been mined out and Appalachian coal must compete with cheap natural gas and cheaper western coal.
Blankenship was the loudest spokesmen for the industry and its "war on coal" malarkey before the former CEO of Massey Industry was convicted after the death of 29 miners in one of the Massey mines. His most prominent successor in speaking this fraudulent line is Jim Justice, an anti-union coal operator with a long list of safety violations in his operations. Justice is running for governor.
One of the other candidates is Booth Goodwin, the former US Attorney who brought Blankenship to justice. Putting a coal baron in prison is something that no one had ever done in coal country, but with diligence and principal Goodwin succeeded. From what he's been saying, he may well be the leader West Virginia needs, a principled politician prepared to look straight forward at a future where the economy is no longer dominated by coal.
In one of the more bizarre acts, the United Mine Workers led by Cecil Roberts has endorsed Justice for governor. At this point the UMW is largely an organization of retirees and disabled, and Roberts just may be the worst union leader in half a century. The endorsement is just another step for the UMW down the road to total irrelevancy.
At the dinner, I also talked about Justice Brent Benjamin of the West Virginia Supreme Court. In The Price of Justice, I told how Blankenship's company drove a small coal company into bankruptcy. When the owner won a $50 million civil suit verdict against Massey Energy, Blankenship vowed he would not pay a cent. He spent $3 million electing Benjamin as the swing vote on the court. The new justice refused to recuse himself and was a key vote in the court turning back the $50 million judgment. The case finally reached the United States Supreme Court, where in an historic opinion, the court ruled 5-4 that Benjamin had to recuse himself. The case is notorious and has brought national shame on the West Virginia Supreme Court, but Benjamin is running for reelection this spring.
But if my dinner in Martinsburg is any indication, the people of West Virginia are waking up. They are appalled at Benjamin and Roberts, and they know the state needs new leadership. Sometimes it is only out of the most despairing times that good things start to happen. It may just be one of those times in West Virginia.