Following on Brad Jacobson’s investigative expose last month at RAW STORY concerning GOP operative turned EAC commissioner turned FEC commissioner Caroline Hunter, Velvet Revolution.us (VR) has filed a complaint [DOC] with the DC Court of Appeals asking for her disbarment based on the purposely misleading statements she offered under oath in a federal court hearing concerning allegations of voter suppression by the RNC in Ohio in the final days of the 2004 election. RAW’s Muriel Kane provides details here…
And in other accountability news, VR’s StopTheChamber.com campaign called yesterday for the arrest of Massey Energy CEO and U.S. Chamber of Commerce Director Don Blankenship for being “criminally culpable as any mass murderer,” following the deaths of 29 miners at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia last week. RAW’s Daniel Tencer covers that story here…
[Full Disclosure: The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder of VelvetRevolution.us]
The heat is just beginning to build for Blankenship, and hopefully it will continue, as it should have long ago but for the millions he has spent to date to avoid virtually any and all such accountability. His ability to do so, using the abusive power of the U.S. Chamber to help in that effort, needs to end…
A group of Massey shareholders have also called for accountability for Blankenship this week by calling on the corporation’s board to fire him. The group cites the “tragic consequence of the board’s failure to challenge Chairman and CEO Blankenship’s confrontational approach to regulatory compliance.” The shareholder group describes a “callous disregard for the safety of its employees” as a “failure both of risk management and effective board oversight.”
As we note in today’s Green News Report, Massey was found to be in violation of federal safety regulations thousands of times over the last several years, and found new ways to challenge and forestall fines and the closure of dangerous mines. All the while Blankenship has shown an extraordinary disgregard for such regulations, having said at an anti-union Labor Day rally last year [video at right]:
As I commented in our radio report today, if, as the Supreme Court has decided, corporations are “people,” then those people who head those corporations ought to be held fully accountable for what their corporations do. I would argue that such accountability should include charges of murder and/or manslaughter where appropriate.
You can sign onto and support VR’s StopTheChamber.com here…
From a strictly legal standpoint, I think any effort to prosecute Blankenship for “murder” would be a stretch due to issues involving intent. However, there are certainly cases, at least in CA, which would suggest that prosecutors could make out a viable case to try the man for involuntary manslaughter.
In the case of Caroline Hunter, the ideologue so directly connected with both the Karl Rove/AG “voter fraud” US Atty firing scandal and past illegal GOP voter caging, having read the 11/1/04 decision of Senior U.S. District Court Judge Dickenson R. DeBevoise in which he said that her deficient “information and belief” affidavit was “belied” by the email evidence presented in court, the questions that arise are not why she should be subjected to state bar discipline, but how the Obama administration could leave her in a position to have any influence whatsoever on the conduct of federal elections and why she has not already been disbarred.
Accountability? How ’bout self-preservation of our constitutional democracy — or what’s left of it.