I grew up on the next big mountain east of Montcoal, West Virginia. One of my earliest memories is the smell of water dripping on carbide in the miner's lamp my dad wore around his safety helmet and the brilliant white light it produced. I remember, too, the restless unease my mother felt each night until he came home from his shift, his hands and face blackened by coal dust that never came off no matter how many times he washed with the big green bar of Lava scouring soap.

It was dirty, brutal and dangerous work and I was overjoyed, as was my mother, when Dad landed a job with the Chesapeake & Ohio railroad and left the mines behind for good. Many of my relatives were not so lucky.

I remembered all this while watching the faces of the families of the nearly 30 miners who died at the Upper Big Branch mine at Montcoal on Monday (I think we have to assume that those still missing are dead). These men were not simply victims of an industrial "accident" or an act of God. They were killed by the reckless indifference of a greedy and callous mine owner named Don Blankenship, who is the principal owner of Massey Energy, and--you will not be surprised to learn--a big financial supporter of the Tea Party and the rabidly rightous U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Blankenship is one of those Wall Street Journal editorial page capitalists who believes that any amount of regulation and unionization is the first step to a Communist state, that all corporate taxes are evil, and that the safety of his workers is far less important than the "competitiveness of American industry," which is code for God wants me to squeeze every last dime out this endlessly raped land and its beaten down people.   We wouldn't want to have a dead miner gap with China, now would we?

According to federal records, the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration cited Upper Big Branch for 1,342 safety violations from 2005 through Monday, proposing $1.89 million in fines, yet the mine was still able to continue operating. Massey is one of the nation's biggest offenders.

What will happen now? If past is prologue, the answer is "nothing." The dead miners families will get a little insurance money, a few months will go by and only the people of Montcoal will remember the tragedy. Until, the inevitable next one. The coal industry owns West Virginia, every graceful mountaintop, every steep hollar, every politician of both parties in the state house and in Washington. The next time a governor wants something like, say, an annual football game between the two state universities, Marshall and West Virginia, he will go to his friends in the coal industry who will cough up some money for the "Friends of Coal Bowl." I use that as an example because Joe Manchin already did it. The only West Virginia governor who actually tried to stand up to the coal industry--a guy named William C. Marland--fell off the face of the earth after his term in office and was rediscovered 30 years later driving a cab in Chicago.

Don Blankenship will continue to literally wrap himself in the American flag and spend millions of dollars buying political favors instead of safety equipment for his mines. He will challenge every citation, drag his feet on paying fines, ignore regulations, fight unionization tooth and nail. He will continue to pour money into fake-patriotic organizations like the Tea Party and charlatans like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck who are paid millions by huge corporations to confuse white working class Americans about who it is that is really fucking them over.

The miners at Upper Big Branch were murdered. Don Blankenship is guilty of, at minimum, negligent homicide. The fact that he will remain free to kill again tells you everything you need to know about the corruption at the heart of American politics.