Arianna Huffington: The West Virginia Mining Disaster and the Financial Crisis Have the Same Root Cause

Arianna Huffington: The West Virginia Mining Disaster and the Financial Crisis Have the Same Root Cause

Officials say it's too soon to pinpoint the exact cause of the tragic explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that took the lives of 29 miners, but we certainly know enough to identify the root cause. It's the same cause that led to the 2007 Crandall Canyon mine disaster in Utah that killed six miners and three rescue workers. It's the same cause that led to the 2006 Sago mine disaster in West Virginia that killed 12 miners. And it's also the same cause that led to the Lehman Brothers disaster, the Citigroup disaster, the bursting of the housing bubble, and the implosion of our financial system: a badly broken regulatory system.

The loss of life at Upper Big Branch happened in one horrific instant. The economic collapse has not killed people, but it has gradually destroyed millions of lives. Both calamities occurred because elected officials who should have been creating a regulatory system that protects working families instead created a system that protects the corporations it was meant to watch over.

Just look at the ways in which the New York Times describes the regulatory agency that so atrociously failed the Upper Big Branch miners:

• The agency "remains fundamentally weak in several areas, and it does not always use the powers it has."
• "The fines it levies are relatively small, and many go uncollected for years."
• "It lacks subpoena power, a basic investigatory tool."
• "Its investigators are not technically law enforcement officers."
• "Its criminal sanctions are weak."
• "Fines remain so low that they are mere rounding errors on the bottom lines" of the companies being regulated.
• It shows a "reluctance to flex all of its powers."

Sound familiar? Most of these conditions were the same ones that led to the housing bubble, credit default swaps, toxic derivatives -- and, by extension, the bank bailout, long-term unemployment with no end in sight, and the rapid acceleration of the decline of America's middle class.

The "fundamentally weak" state of America's watchdogs is the deliberate end product of massive amounts of corporate lobbying. In the case of the mining industry, the amount spent by mine owners on lobbyists intent on weakening regulations and widening loopholes hasskyrocketed from under $2.5 million in 2003 to $14 million today, with predictable results: profits up; dead miners up. ...