Big Coal's Leash on Lil' Guv Beshear
Big Coal has owned Kentucky's politicians for more than a century, and everybody knows it. Big Coal doesn't even have to say "jump!" because whoever is governor already knows how high. Hardly anybody even bothers to object, much less fight it.
Except Ron Mills, who is either the bravest man in the Commonwealth, or the dumbest.
John Cheves at the Herald:
A judge on Tuesday postponed, for the third time, a trial that centers on the extent of the coal industry's political influence in Gov. Steve Beshear's administration.
A wrongful termination lawsuit filed by Ron Mills, who was fired in 2009 as Beshear's director of mine permits, was scheduled to start trial Monday in Franklin Circuit Court.
SNIP
In his suit, Mills says he was fired by Energy and Environment Secretary Len Peters because he refused to sign five illegal mine permits sought by Alliance Coal of Tulsa, Okla., covering 55,000 acres in Western Kentucky.Mills probably is the first state employee to be fired for refusing to break the law at Big Coal's bidding, but not because he's the first to be ordered to do so. He's just the first to refuse. For decades, everybody else has just swallowed their ethics, signed the papers and cashed their paychecks.
Back in the Brown administration in the early '80s, the state's strip mine inspectors cursed a blue streak when Brown appointees returned six-figure performance bonds to coal operators who claimed to have "reclaimed" mine sites that they had actually left bare and sterile as moonscapes. Those sites later became "abandoned" mine sites and burdens on the taxpayer while the coal operators skated with their profits.
But those inspectors kept their complaints in house. Ron Mills went public after he was fired. The Beshear administration has been fighting this one tooth and nail for three years, and it will do whatever it takes to stop Ron Mills.
Because Kentucky politicians do what Big Coal orders them to do. Always.
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