Every Stone

A larger narrative on lobbying reform and corporate responsibility has to emerge from this string of recent mining disasters. Corporate influence on public policy has undermined safety standards in multiple industries, and now very publicly in mining. Finally the Senate has declared they’ll hold hearings on the Crandall Canyon Mining Disaster and require co-owners Robert Murray and Richard Stickler to testify. The question is whether the momentum will be sustained — how long will we manage to keep scrutiny of lobbying on the policy agenda?

We have to make the connections — tie disasters to lobbyists’ influence and broader themes of corruption, scrutinize our bidding process for public projects, and review public oversight of the private sector to protect workers.

It’s hard not to see a connection, too, to the dirty bidding process for public projects — think Iraq and Halliburton and, most recently, John Galt, the negligence of which in demolishing the former Deutsche Bank building led to the deaths of two firefighters this past Saturday. Acceptance of the bid by a company with no history of experience in demolition — and plenty of history, through its subcontractors, of questionable activities — was compounded by lax regulation of proceedings on site.

It was the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation that accepted the bid by John Galt:

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation was created in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 by then-Governor Pataki and then-Mayor Giuliani to help plan and coordinate the rebuilding and revitalization of Lower Manhattan, defined as everything south of Houston Street. The LMDC is a joint State-City corporation governed by a 16-member Board of Directors, half appointed by the Governor of New York and half by the Mayor of New York.

A follow-up article exposed the role of the Buildings and Fire Departments in neglecting regular inspections:

Bovis was cited on June 6 for a “large amount of combustible material/debris” accumulating. The subcontractor was cited on Aug. 1 because “burning operations,” were causing sparks to fly; and on Aug. 3 for an expired certificate to “store/use acetylene.”

There’s a two-fold failure of the city and state governments — it’s not just Halliburton and the federal process — in accepting John Galt’s bid and failing to conduct regular inspections or enforce regulations. And now only five days later, two more firefighters have been injured retrieving equipment from the building.

Ironically even as journalists expose more information about the miners and the rescue effort, the depth of the public and private failures that led to the deaths of 6 men, the Bush administration has announced new regulations to allow mountaintop coal mining.

Of course, I’m linking to a Wikipedia article, and we already know that corporations have taken to editing entries liberally. The entry might soon claim that coal mining’s an environmentally friendly as well as a safe enterprise.