Dear George,
Hark! I hear Amerika singing to the melodious troll of wedding bells tribulating in the dawn of a new era. Big Business bedded Big Government and unto them a child was born. And they wrapped the child in whatever and called him W. Some called the child a mutant; in truth, he was another step up the evolutionary ladder.
See all that he has done. Where previous administrations harassed and hectored corporate America, the babe has introduced a new era of “cooperation.” The point man for this effort is the Mine Safety and Health Administration. They have had the wisdom to realize that you cannot pressure mining companies into operating safe mines, so it is better to play touchy-feely with them and hope they get around to correcting hazardous conditions sometime in the near or far future before too many miners die.
This is why the administration has been systematically reducing fines and not bothering to collect the fines they impose. Okay, so they got some bad press when twelve miners died in an unforeseen incident at the Sago Mine in West Virginia. Ironically, this disaster underscored the benefits of your new safety policy. Since 2004, the administration has slapped Sago with 273 safety violations. The top fine they ever paid was $460. This enabled their parent corporation, International Coal Group, to realize a net profit of $100,000,000 last year.
Of course, the fact that the fines were levied does not mean the administration was endangering the mining industry’s profit margin by actually collecting them. It seems a computer glitch is preventing the administration from contacting the Treasury Department, which is responsible for collecting unpaid fines. I assume this means the phone lines are down so they cannot ring up Treasury and give them the information over the phone. I also assume all those uncollected fines means they cannot afford a clerk to walk the files over to Treasury.
The bottom line is that we do not want to make too big a fuss about mine safety because it can disrupt labor relations. Once you start hitting mine owners with big fines, the miners start harboring all sorts of unreasonable expectations about leaving the mines alive at the end of their shift.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
9:56:32 PM 
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