ProgressOhio

“We have never confronted a case as extreme as this before.”

• U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens on Massey and CEO Don L. Blankenship’s behavior

E. Gordon Gee is caught between stock losses and the loss of his moral reputation. And when you’re the head of Ohio’s most prominent institution – your moral image is Ohio’s image.

Recently, students, as well as ProgressOhio members, have called on Gee to resign from the board of Massey Energy where he is a director charged with overseeing safety, public policy and, most galling, environmental issues.

For his services, he receives nearly $200,000 in annual compensation from Massey. He’s been on the board for just under a decade and has managed to stockpile quite a few shares in the company. However, since last June, when Gee’s stock would have been worth in excess of $2.6 million, Massey’s shares have plunged almost 90%. Is this why Gee won’t resign from the Massey Board, despite a company and a chief executive who have:

• denied the existence of global warming, saying, amongst other things, if “CO2 emissions are going to kill polar bears, it’s gonna happen.”
• faced billions of dollars in EPA fines
• a case before the U.S. Supreme Court over buying a justice at a state supreme court.
• cited environmental awards that are created by the industry for the industry.
• threatened to shoot a reporter and assaults a cameraman
• had documented worker deaths, including one in which Gee narrowly missed being deposed.
• a documented history of labor strife and union-busting.
• had a major Jesuit university divest their company’s stock because they found it too unethical.
• fought in court for their ‘right’ to build a coal silo with-in three hundred feet of an elementary school.

With all this, it is easy to lose sight that this company’s business is mountain top removal mining, where whole Appalachian mountaintops are de-capped and tossed into valleys and streams.

It is hard to imagine that Gee - who is entrusted with the largest university in the country, the largest Ohio governmental bureaucracy (outside of Ted Strickland) and the largest endowment of job creation money in Ohio’s stimulus package – would serve on the board of a mountain top removal company. Gee was also recently appointed as co-chair of a group committed to reduce American energy dependence, which sparked this latest round of controversy.

It truly defies belief that he serves on Massey’s board, an ethically bankrupt corporation, whose name would be spoken in the same breath as Enron and Halliburton, if it operated anywhere outside of Appalachia.

Is he stubbornly loyal to company’s violent, ill-tempered CEO or is he waiting for his holdings to increase? Whatever the reason, all of Ohio pays the price.

This week Gee broke his silence and carefully coiffed image – OSU has over 40 public relations staff -- telling the OSU-run student newspaper The Lantern:

"It would be very easy for me to get off the company, because I really don't need to do that, but the other side of it, the reason I've continued to serve, is the fact that I believe very strongly in environmental issues, and it's better to be inside the tent making a difference than it is outside complaining."

Gee said that Massey has one of the best environmental records in the country and has won many environmental awards. In January, however, Massey paid a $20 million civil penalty to resolve Clean Water Act violations at coal mines in West Virginia and Kentucky, the largest civil penalty in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s history, according to the EPA web site.

"Coal is a difficult business," Gee said. "There are huge safety problems, there are huge environmental problems, and yet it represents 60 percent of the energy in this country, it's the only self-sustaining energy course that we have right now. So we need to get it right, or else we need to shut off the lights."

Gee said that Massey has obeyed federal legislation, EPA regulations and federal court judgments.

"All three have been done, and Massey has always proven that it has had a sustainable record in that regard," he said.

Shame on Gordon Gee. He knows better, especially after he was nearly deposed at a wrongful death lawsuit that happened during his tenure on the Massey board.

This week Ohio learned that OSU censored and then disabled comments on its Facebook page after a grad student posted a question about Massey and Gee’s involvement. Also, ProgressOhio is investigating through our provider a sudden rise in bounced emails to osu.edu. All of which makes the “Pravda-like” break from silence with the Lantern eerily similar to cold war-era, state-run press relations.

What it shows is that in the Shadows of Bricker Hall – OSU’s Administration Building – is a high level indifference to the university’s status as a public institution, Gordon Gee’s role as a public servant, and a higher education commitment to open debate over ethics and environmental policy.

Which is why we decided to take an in-depth look at Massey Energy and explain just why this isn’t just an issue of green politics – this is about power run amok on the part of Massey’s Blankenship and on the part of Gee’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge behavior that even U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens last month expressed disdain for.

#1 Gee says that Massey has one of the best environmental records in the country.

How is the possible, given that in December, Massey’s CEO and Board Chair Don Blankenship flatly stated he does not believe climate change exists. [video]

He went on; attacking Nobel Prize winner Al Gore by saying Gore was “totally wrong”, what he does is “nonsense” and encouraged business leaders to attack global warming, but not in “articulated, educated ways the American public doesn’t get.” [video]

If Al Gore is “totally wrong”, did Gee approve of the thousands of free tickets given to Ohio State students for Gore’s recent global warming speech on campus? How can Gee work shoulder-to-shoulder with a man who is set on undermining the work that many of Gee’s professors are doing on climate change?

#2 Gee said that Massey obeys federal legislation and EPA.

In fact, Massey had so many violations of the Clean Water Act, they were facing an incomprehensible $2.4 billion dollars in fines. There were so many violations, that even though they were able to settle for less than 1% of that, it was still the largest Clean Water Act fine in history.

Gee can’t possibly claim ignorance of this and Massey’s innumerable other environmental violations. As part of the committee he serves on, he’s tasked with making a quarterly report on Massey’s heinous environmental practices.

#3 Gee says that Massey obeys court judgments.

This is laughable for many reasons. At this very moment, the U.S. Supreme Court is deliberating over a case where Massey is accused of subverting the right to a fair trial. Massey’s CEO spent $3 million on a single state supreme court election. The candidate he was backing won, and then failed to recuse himself from a case where he cast the deciding vote to throw out a $50 million judgment against Massey. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens said, “We have never confronted a case as extreme as this before.”

Massey’s CEO was also caught vacationing with a second justice from the five person West Virginia Supreme Court, while they were petitioning the court to hear a case. This justice has also failed to recuse himself from cases involving Massey.

In a separate incident, a judge found that a Massey employee, sitting on a state review board, acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner by voting to reduce a Massey safety violation fine from $100,000 to $10,000.

#4 Gee states Massey has won many environmental awards.

Gee says, "Massey over the last several years has won almost every environmental award in the country." [video]

Massey’s own website lists only four environmental awards. These awards weren’t from, say, the Sierra Club or a respected community group. Three of Massey’s four environmental awards were presented at the 35th Annual West Virginia Coal Association’s Mining Symposium. Massey was one of 18 different West Virginia mining organizations recognized for their ‘environmental’ work that evening.

Their website and press release even misidentifies one of the awards as being from the “American Society of Foresters.” The group in question is actually the “West Virginia Division of the Allegheny Society of American Foresters” and the “prestigious” Woodlands Award merits only a single passing reference on the group’s website.

The only other award Massey mentions is from the obscure Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. However, the office has given out over 200 environmental awards to mining companies and Massey appears to have only won once.

However, the most damning indictment of Gee’s ‘award defense’ is Massey’s own environmental recognition program. The inaugural winner of the “Green Miner Award” for “best environmental performance” in 2004 was Massey’s Sidney Coal subsidiary. In February of 2004, a $40 million lawsuit filed against Sidney Coal for engaging in nearly 2,000 days worth of water pollution by routinely dumping black sludge into local rivers. In July of 2004, a chemical spill by Sidney Coal resulted in a massive kill-off of fish for miles, which it then illegally failed to report.

That this Orwellian greenwashing could happen during Gee’s tenure there is bad enough. That he would glowingly cite Massey’s environmental award record is laughable.

Massey’s CEO, Don Blankenship, is an “Affront to Common Decency”

What type of company has Gordon Gee been keeping? Let’s take a closer look at Don Blankenship, Massey’s CEO and the chair of the board that Gee serves on.

#5 Blankenship has been a violent opponent of free speech and press.

Last year Blankenship was caught on tape threatening to shoot a reporter from ABC News before assaulting him [video].

Also last year, he criticized the religious beliefs of a major newspaper editor and said the paper’s staff was “clearly of the far-left communist persuasion” before comparing them all to Osama bin Laden. This isn’t just your typical, talk radio hyperbole – watch the shocking footage and you’ll see he is dead serious [video].

#6 Blankenship’s treatment of workers “reminiscent of slavery”

That quote isn’t from a disgruntled worker. Last year, a West Virginia Supreme Court Justice wrote in an opinion that Don Blankenship’s conduct towards his maid was “reminiscent of slavery and is an affront to common decency.” He was accused of physically abusing her. The stress finally got so bad she checked herself into the hospital "because she thought she was having a heart attack.” The final straw came when Blankenship tasked her with watching his “German police attack dog.”

#7 Blankenship made his name as a union buster.

During one strike at Massey, the company used “barbed wire, German shepherd dogs, armed guards and video cameras to intimidate miners.” The strike was led by a young union leader named Richard Trumka who this week was announced as the next head of the National AFL-CIO.

To this day, only 170 of Massey’s 5,500 employees have been allowed to unionize.

How Massey Tarnishes OSU’s Image

#8 Massey and Ohio State are both censoring their critcs.

Forget about Facebook. Last month, Massey sought and received a blanket restraining order, covering thousands of peaceful protesters, preventing them from assembling. Many have been arrested for protesting Massey’s latest mountain-top removal project, which will destroy 10 square miles of mountains.

“[F]orests are clear-cut. Holes are drilled to blast apart the rock, and massive machines, some with buckets big enough to hold 24 compact cars, scoop the coal from the exposed seams.” Having destroyed the wildlife habitat on the mountain, they then they dump all rock and dirt into the valley covering up the streams.

The kicker? An AP article identified the mountain as “the perfect place” for a wind farm, which could power 150,000 homes indefinitely. Massey wouldn’t even have to forfeit the coal, they’d just have to mine it without destroying the land.

Gordon Gee’s role on Massey’s environmental and public policy committee is to “make recommendations” about Massey’s programs and strategies. Has Gee recommended Massey invest in wind power at this site? For that matter, can Gee point to a single substantial environmental change that he has brought about at Massey?

#9 Other colleges find much lesser ties to Massey toxic.

In February, the President of Santa Clara University was so appalled upon finding out about Massey’s “widespread damage to the environment”, that he ordered the school to divest its stock in the company for ethical reasons. Gee apparently has no similar concerns, since he owns 28,000 shares of Massey stock. Last summer, Gee’s stock in Massey would have been worth $2.6 million.

#10 Gee is violating the spirit of his board agreement with OSU

When Gee returned to OSU in 2007, the university was concerned with the number of corporate boards he served on. He agreed to cap it at three, unless he received special trustee approval. Gee barely made it a year before he felt compelled join a fourth board.

Massey aside, Gee should abide by the spirit of his agreement and leave one of his boards. Gee, who is by far the highest paid public university president in the country, can certainly afford to.

Why Ohio Needs Gee to Leave Massey

Massey CEO and Chairman Don Blankenship is an outrageous rogue character who has rebuked in the strongest terms by the highest courts in both West Virginia and our nation. This should give Gee pause, particularly since he once worked for former Chief Justice Warren Burger.

It is embarrassing for not only Ohio State but also the State of Ohio that a figure of E. Gordon Gee’s stature is head of the Board’s safety program, given their sordid record in recent years. Just this week a Massey foreman was expected to pleat to safety violations on the same day Gee told another University web-blog that he is staying on Board as long as he can make a difference. Apparently nine years is just not enough time to make that impact?

President Gee asserts that it is better to argue “green” from the inside. Given the chairman’s recent denial of global warming and the denigration of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Al Gore as a “greeniac”, President Gee clearly isn’t making that difference. It is impossible to watch one minute of Don Blankenship’s environmental speech and then take Gee serious when says things like “In 2009, environmentalist is no longer a talking point, it is the economic future.” [video]

Either Gee supports Mr. Blankenship’s rather ugly record as a corporate and public citizen; or he is staying on the board out of personal friendship and loyalty; or personal greed over concerns regarding his declining stock options.

Gee has a place in both the long history of Ohio, Appalachia and higher education. Does he really want his legacy to be defending a company that would fight to the death for their ‘right’ to build a coal silo three hundred feet from an elementary school?

The building in the foreground is an elementary school, the tall white building is a coal silo and the ‘lake’ in the background, that looks like it is about to pour down onto the playground, is actually a toxic bath of coal residue and chemicals….

Gee’s legacy will have a rather morbid asterisk if he doesn’t wake up soon. He should resign from Massey’s board and donate his profits from this most egregious corporation to the environmental causes, he so often espouses.

If he chooses not to, I’d suggest the 40 or so PR folks at OSU come up with another marketing plan.

After all, you can’t hide behavior like this behind a bow-tie forever.

Sign The Petition: Tell Gordon Gee To Resign From Massey Energy's Board Of Directors