Coal mining fatalities had been declining since 1926: yes, the last time mine safety was this bad the Charleston was all the rage. Then, in 2006, the most coalminers died than had in any one year in a decade. We're up to the largest percentage increase in 107 years.
Why? How? By formula. They use corporate contributions to weaken government regulations, and to help cripple unions. They wage fierce anti-union jihads to keep workers and their advocates powerless. They violate even existing anemic safety rules, while pushing the mineral seams beyond all earthly limits to squeeze forth just a teensy bit more precious profit.
Then they call the result a "mine accident."
As Perlstein points out again and again (among ever more others in the emerging peer-to-peer democracy of people powered open network politics) this isn't an accident at all, just like the lethal free for all "free-market paradise" of Baghdad Year Zero isn't an accident, just like the unholy hell of crony-capitalist post-Katrina "reconstruction" isn't an accident, just like unprecedented unaccountable mercenary armies at home and abroad aren't an accident, just like bridge collapses and exploding sewers in cities and states helmed by anti-tax mayors and governors aren't an accident, just like e-coli in vegetables, lethal pet food, tainted meat in canned chili "regulated" by anti-regulation corporate insiders finds its way to store shelves only to be suddenly hysterically recalled as they kill and kill and kill isn't an accident. This is just what happens when the dumb destructive bad ideas and smug self-congratulatory apologias for incumbent privilege and confiscatory wealth concentration that consitute market fundamentalist faith bear their ugly idiotic utterly predictable and catastrophic fruit in the real world.
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