Massey energy

Quite the tweet:

The Green Economy proposals are nothing more than Corporate Welfare

Finally, an honest CEO fighting corporate welfare every chance he gets...

In 2004, Blankenship spent $3.5 million in a bitter campaign to back Brent Benjamin, a controversial nominee to the West Virginia Supreme Court. Blankenship has vowed to endorse at least one more judge to replace justice Warren McGraw who ruled against his company's plans to conduct mountaintop removal mining.

Blankenship's critics accuse him of buying the court seat to secure favorable decisions in cases involving him and his company. In 2005, he advertised heavily to defeat a bond issue in support of an underfunded state employee pension plan. He opposed the reduction of the state sales tax on food from 6 to 5%, instead campaigning for its complete removal. His total personal political spending in 2004 and 2005 was $6 million. [...]

In November 2008, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal of a $77 million case against Massey brought by Harman Mining. The suit alleges contract interference by Massey drove Harman out of business. Wal-Mart, PepsiCo, Intel Corporation, Lockheed Martin, Common Cause and Public Citizen filed briefs in the case urging the Supreme Court to throw out the West Virginia Supreme Court decision in favor of Massey. The corporations contend that Justice Brent Benjamin is biased in the case. On June 8, 2009, The US Supreme Court agreed 5-4, sending the case back to the West Virginia Supreme Court, and forcing Justice Benjamin to recuse himself from the case. The New York Times opined that the case involved "egregious ethical myopia" on the part of Justice Benjamin. [...]

In early 2008, the company agreed to a $20 million settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency‎ (EPA) to resolve thousands of violations of the Clean Water Act for routinely polluting waterways in Kentucky and West Virginia with coal slurry and wastewater. Although this was the largest Clean Water Act settlement, the violations were estimated to have fines on the order of $2.4 billion. Over 700 miles of rivers and streams in the coalfields have been buried by the waste rock left over from mountaintop removal, a method of strip mining coal which requires the blowing up of mountain tops, removing from 500 to 800 feet (240 m) of mountaintop in the process. This method of coal mining has created some of the worst environmental disasters in the Mississippi area in regards to the poisoning of waterways, the flooding of local communities, and the destruction of the biodiversity of the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

In October 2000, a Massey Energy subsidiary in Martin County, Kentucky accidentally released 306 million gallons of coal slurry waste from an impoundment into two mountain streams, Coldwater Creek and Wolf Creek. The Martin County sludge spill was called the worst ever environmental disaster in the southeastern United States by the EPA. The spill smothered all aquatic life in the streams and left residents with contaminated drinking water. Cleanup costs for the spill were approximately $50 million.