The Chairman and Chief Executive Office of Murray Energy, Robert E. Murphy became notorious during the presidential campaign by allegedly forcing workers to go to a Romney rally. Now, Murray has responded to President Obama’s re-election with a prayer and dozens of layoffs.
The Ohio CEO declared that the reelection would continue a “war on coal” and announced a time for prayer and firings — proclaiming “Lord, please forgive me and anyone with me in Murray Energy Corp. for the decisions that we are now forced to make to preserve the very existence of any of the enterprises that you have helped us build.” It appears that he “did not build that” alone, to use an Obama phrase.
Murray then broke away from a request for the grace of God to laid off 54 people at American Coal, one of his subsidiary companies, and 102 at Utah American Energy.
You may recall Murray from the August 2007 mine collapse where six miners were trapped at the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah.
Later, the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) hit the mine with its highest penalty for coal mine safety violations, $1.85 million. Murray would ultimately lobby heavily against new procedures needed to avoid such deaths in the future.
The employees this week were able to walk out of Murray’s company — a certain improvement. However, before being kicked out, the employees were given Murray’s prayer as solace on their way out the door:
Dear Lord:
The American people have made their choice. They have decided that America must change its course, away from the principals of our Founders. And, away from the idea of individual freedom and individual responsibility. Away from capitalism, economic responsibility, and personal acceptance.
We are a Country in favor of redistribution, national weakness and reduced standard of living and lower and lower levels of personal freedom.
My regret, Lord, is that our young people, including those in my own family, never will know what America was like or might have been. They will pay the price in their reduced standard of living and, most especially, reduced freedom.
The takers outvoted the producers. In response to this, I have turned to my Bible and in II Peter, Chapter 1, verses 4-9 it says, “To faith we are to add goodness; to goodness, knowledge; to knowledge, self control; to self control, perseverance; to perseverance, godliness; to godliness, kindness; to brotherly kindness, love.”
Lord, please forgive me and anyone with me in Murray Energy Corp. for the decisions that we are now forced to make to preserve the very existence of any of the enterprises that you have helped us build. We ask for your guidance in this drastic time with the drastic decisions that will be made to have any hope of our survival as an American business enterprise.
Amen.
Of course, he could not fire the “young people” in his “own family.” This is a familiar lament among some Romney supporters, including one at a Romney fundraiser at the Hamptons who stated:
“I don’t think the common person is getting it. Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.
“We’ve got the message,” she added. “But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”
He is also not alone in threatening or actually firing people if Obama won. Indeed, a Utah CEO fired over 100 people and blamed it on Obama’s reelection. However, Murray does this all with a bit more religious fervor.
Source: Washington Post
Nick, I won’t say Obama not knowing anything until two days ago is what I would have expected. But, what’s the motivation to lie about it? In other words, so what if he did know about this investigation a while back? It’s not like Petraeus is intimately connected to Obama and him resigning because of it somehow hurts either Obama or Democrats politically. I’ve always seen Petraeus as being hero worshiped by the right and talked about as a possible Republican presidential candidate, although if this had come out months ago I fail to see how it would have hurt Republican either.
Looks like I must thank FP Passport for the Broadwell transcript—the video later.
On one item I wish she had directly addressed in a judgemental mode, and not as a information source.
The presence of a CIA annex, even if missioned for militia capture missions, should be better lead, and is certainly capable of materially adding to the defencse of the consulate compound.
Calling for a Delta Force for help screams for serious critque—at exactly which weak point I am not certain:
leadership, scenario planning, resourcing, simple lack of guts, failure-avoidance culture, etc.
My dislike for the ineffectualness of the CIA deepens.
Nick S,
It suits me fine and even others here, no names.
Because——-no President has had control of the CIA since before JFK and even there I would not venture to
name the President who could have controlled them.
The same is basically true for the FBI since Hoover’s time and even since his death.
One good reason is that in both these cases, their own chiefs have not had control, not even Hoover or H W Bush.
An OT is that this is true for most bureaucratic federal institutions of any size. They each see to their own interests and livelihood.
Thanks to our informers, and thanks for the caveats mentioned, I guess to suggest caution for concealed bias.
Do we need a name for all this? All these seemingly independent organizations which have definitely concealed inter-relations and agendas????
Take Foreign Policy, which I believe is the press/PR
organ for a conservative organization claiming to have the good of the nation as its goal.
That is just one of many organizations, from the flimsiet of fronts with emotionally appealing names, to hidden ones without known names.
An example would be the 143(?) member private empire discussed in the recent days.
My purpose, to fight the enemy, you must know him in all measures possible. How can we do this?
Surely as battle is certain there must be foundations, university institutes, etc who have analyzed the combatants on both sides, written studies, books, etc.
These works hopefully are available to us.
Are they?
And what nmee shall we use for the paraply which those of us believe is the central control function to convert the age of nation states to the age of commercial empires which has nullified the nation states’ sovereignity.
A name might help us keep concentrated on the concept that it IS controlled to a large degree, and it is money which rules, not the people. And that this is a real conspiracy.
Some of their meetings are declared but still secret in content, where some meetings function as contact points giving possibility of cooperation between parts that don’t usually do so.
Seeing the trees instead of the forest hampers us.
“What did Obama know and when did he know it.” The WH claims Obama knew NOTHING until 2 days after the election. If possible, take your partisan hats off for a moment and ask yourself if that passes the smell test.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/11/12/why-did-paula-broadwell-think-the-cia-had-taken-prisoners-in-benghazi/?hpid=z1
Why did Paula Broadwell think the CIA had taken prisoners in Benghazi?
Posted by Max Fisher on November 12, 2012 at 11:28 am
“I could be missing other possible scenarios, but all of these further raise the concern that, even if Petraeus did not allow classified intelligence to be compromised, his relationship with Broadwell may have heightened that very serious risk.
The full story of Broadwell’s access to Petraeus’s world at the CIA is still not clear, but it appears to have been intimate, perhaps problematically so. The Wall Street Journal now reports that FBI investigators found classified documents on her computer. That Petraeus’s relationship may have jeopardized sensitive intelligence would seem to remain the strongest case for his resignation.”
I hadn’t seen the Mayer link. Thanks, again, Elaine M.
November 11, 2012
A Petraeus Puzzle: Were Politics Involved?
Posted by Jane Mayer
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/11/david-petraeus-paula-broadwell-were-politics-involved.html
Excerpt:
According to the Times, approximately two weeks ago, F.B.I. investigators confronted Petraeus personally about the matter. After talking to him, they were satisfied that there were no breaches of national security or other crimes involved. It was then, the Times reports, that Petraeus certainly became aware of the investigation, if he had not known of it before. Interestingly, he did not offer his resignation at once, raising the question of whether he would have resigned at all if he hadn’t been asked to when the issue was about to become public. With the election two weeks away, and the C.I.A.’s potential intelligence failures in the fatal ambush of American’s diplomats in Libya a campaign issue, Petraeus surely recognized that if he resigned, the scandal would shake the Obama Administration, perhaps giving more fodder to its Republican critics in what appeared to be an extremely close election.
The Times uses the word “murky” to describe what happened next, and there are many puzzling aspects. But according to the Times, at the end of October, a week or so after the F.B.I. investigators confronted Petraeus, an unidentified F.B.I. employee took the matter into his own hands. Evidently without authorization, he went to the Republicans in Congress. First he informed a Republican congressman, Dave Reichert of Washington state. According to the Times, Reichert advised this F.B.I. employee to go to the Republican leadership in the House. The F.B.I. employee then told what he knew about the investigation to Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader. Cantor released a statement to the Times confirming that he had spoken to the F.B.I. informant, whom his staff described as a “whistleblower.” Cantor said, “I was contacted by an F.B.I. employee who was concerned that sensitive, classified information might have been compromised.” But what, exactly, was this F.B.I. employee trying to expose? Was he blowing the whistle on his bosses? If so, why? Was he dissatisfied with their apparent exoneration of Petraeus? Given that this drama was playing out in the final days of a very heated Presidential campaign, and he was taking a potentially scandalous story to the Republican leadership in Congress, was there a political motive?
According to the Times, Cantor said he took the information, and “made certain that director Mueller”—that is Robert Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I.—“was aware of these serious allegations, and the potential risk to our national security.” This is a strange way to explain his contact with the F.B.I. on this matter, because it is almost inconceivable that director Mueller was not already aware that the bureau he runs had examined the e-mail account of the director of the C.I.A., and, further, confronted him in person. Such a meeting between the bureau and head of the C.I.A. would have been extraordinary, and it is fairly unthinkable that Mueller wouldn’t have been consulted. So what information was Cantor conveying when he got in touch with Mueller?
One obvious point of the call would have been to inform the F.B.I. director that Republicans on the Hill knew about Petraeus’s vulnerability, and also about the investigation. If the F.B.I. had ever entertained hopes of keeping it secret, the odds of doing so were fast diminishing. The same message would have become clear to Petraeus, who was due to testify in front of a House panel next week.
If Cantor spoke with Mueller on Halloween, as the Times chronology suggests, what happened between then and November 6th, which is when the F.B.I. reportedly informed James Clapper Jr., the Director of National Intelligence, about Petraeus’s extra-marital affair? The internal pressure must have been enormous on Petraeus during this period. Perhaps he tried to outlast the election in order to shelter Obama from the fallout of his own personal foibles. Perhaps the F.B.I. director, Mueller, who has a reputation for integrity, tried to keep the scandal from political exploitation by keeping it under wraps until Election Day. Cantor, too, appears to have kept quiet, despite the political advantage his party might have gained from going public. Why? It is possible that, because the investigation had national-security implications, those in the know needed to tread carefully for legal reasons.
Thanks for the FP link, Elaine M. (I saw the story earlier, but was wary of the source.)
” Broadwell, who attended the university’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, spoke at length of her career ambitions.
“My longterm goal had always been to become national security advisor,” she said.
That’s probably not going to happen now.” (Foreign Policy link, above)
Did Petraeus mistress reveal new Benghazi details?
Posted By Blake Hounshell
Sunday, November 11, 2012 – 9:56 PM
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/11/11/did_petraeus_mistress_reveal_new_benghazi_details
“Juan Cole: Real Petraeus Failure Was Counterinsurgency in Iraq, Afghanistan”
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/12/juan_cole_real_petraeus_failure_was
“CIA director David Petraeus has resigned following revelations of an extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, a married U.S. Army reservist. “This personal issue that cropped up that ruined his career at the end, I think, is very much a minor thing … compared to his big exploits in Iraq and Afghanistan,” says historian Juan Cole, who responds to the surprise departure of the former head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Petraeus retired from 37 years in the military to head the CIA last year. Over the weekend, new revelations suggested Broadwell had sent harassing emails to Jill Kelley, a 37-year-old from Florida and a family friend of Petraeus and his wife, Holly. The FBI launched an inquiry after Kelley said she had received vicious emails from the CIA director’s biographer. Its investigation revealed the affair and led agents to believe Broadwell or someone close to her had sought access to his email. On Sunday, Democracy Now! spoke to Cole about the significance of Petraeus’s resignation and about Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani activist who was shot in the head by a Taliban militant for demanding the right of girls’ education. Cole is professor of history at the University of Michigan, and his most recent book is “Engaging the Muslim World.” [includes rush transcript]”
JUAN COLE: … And the Project for the New American Century simply wouldn’t come to terms with that reality. And so, in many ways, General Petraeus’s career got ruined twice.
AMY GOODMAN: And what do you mean, Project for a New American Century, PNAC? Explain what that is.
JUAN COLE: Well, the Project for the New American Century was thought up by the neoconservative movement in the late 1990s. They felt that the Soviet Union had fallen, the U.S. was now the sole superpower, what the French call a “hyperpower,” and that it could act with impunity. So if it wanted to invade and occupy Iraq and reformulate Iraq and put a government in and exploit Iraq’s natural resources, like the petroleum, that it could do so without opposition.
And while it is true that, you know, Russia and China didn’t interfere with the United States going into Iraq in that way, the Iraqi people did. The Iraqi people were educated, mobilized. You know, Iraq had had a big pharmaceutical and other industries, petrochemicals. They were wired. They were—they were educated, then networked. And they inflicted damage on the U.S. military all along the way, and it came both from Sunnis and from Shiites. Many Iraqis simply never accepted the idea of a foreign occupation of their country, and it failed.
The Project for a New American Century formulated as a proposition that the U.S. could be an empire on the old British model, that you could bring back the age of empire in that way. That crashed and burned, and it crashed and burned because people in the Global South are now mobilized, both politically and socially. And it was the lack of mobilization in the old 19th century empires, when people were in three—300 people in a village, and they weren’t literate, and they weren’t connected with each other—OK, then maybe the British Empire could exist. But that’s not the situation anymore. And what I’m saying is that Petraeus was sent to these countries by the Project from a New American Century. It was the big neoconservative thinkers who thought up these kinds of wars and these kinds of projects for occupation and reformulation of entire countries. And they are anachronistic. You can’t do this anymore. The age of the British Empire had passed.
AMY GOODMAN: And you’re saying that the Project for a New American Century persisted under President Obama; he didn’t change it.
JUAN COLE: Well, I’m saying that, in some ways, the Afghanistan troop escalation or surge was one last iteration of some of that project to try to formulate Afghanistan in a way favorable to the United States before we then left.
And again, I should be clear, I don’t think that that’s what President Obama wanted. He went to the Pentagon and asked, “Give me three plans,” you know, an ambitious one, a less ambitious one and a minimal one. And they stonewalled him for nine months. And he was in a position where people in Washington were saying, “Well, what are you going to do? You’re president now. You need a plan.” And he went back to the Pentagon and said, “Well, where’s the plan?” And they said, “Well, we’ve got one for you, but the others are going to take a while.” So they kind of boxed him in to this troop surge.
AMY GOODMAN: And Petraeus’s role in that?
JUAN COLE: Petraeus was the one who boxed him in. So, Petraeus got what he wanted. But in my view, he got a failed policy.
Well, I usually support women in principle, but obviously all individuals don’t get a pass.
The former(?) mistress is clearly in the photo inappropriately dressed, she revels in and markets blatantly her sex appeal, her husband is a foil for her fun and games, and Mrs. Petraeus is obviously resigned to the burdens of being an army wife.
Compare her frontal stance and the former mistress profiling of boobs.
Don’t know why either Petraeus or Broadwell bothered to act. Broadwell is not so bright if she got suckered into replying at all, much less with threatanting letters.
Unless the former mistress threatened to expose them.
It is a LARGE security breach but did not have to become public in a CIA handling. But there are always the yellow press to turn to.
Did I do military officers wives, occasionally and only when visiting fleet bases, not on my home base. There, the CG’s daughter and other single ladies sufficed for my needs.
Andy Borowitz @BorowitzReport
I don’t often buy into right-wing conspiracy theories, but clearly Petraeus started an affair last year to avoid testifying about Benghazi.
(Quientessential) The New York Post has field day (=on the scandal):
http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/new-york-post-on-petraeus-the-spy-who-shagged-me
Who thought it was going to be a slow post-election news week?
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ap-source-target-emails-petraeus-paramour-state-department-military-liaison-article-1.1200299 Here is a picture of the latest one. Just like in the other picture of Ms. Broadwell and Petreaus, the wife is in the picture.
Elaine, I hear she is younger and has a better workout tape. 😉
More grist from Buzzfeed;
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/the-sins-of-general-david-petraeus
Gene,
From ABC News:
Jill Kelley, Friend of David Petraeus, Received Harassing Emails That Launched FBI Probe
By LUIS MARTINEZ, PIERRE THOMAS, Z. BYRON WOLF, and MARTHA RADDATZ
Nov. 11, 2012
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/petraeus-told-friends-affair-paula-broadwell-began-left/story?id=17693092
Excerpt:
The Florida woman who received harassing emails from Paula Broadwell, spurring an FBI probe that ultimately uncovered the Gen. David Petraeus’ extramarital affair with his biographer and led to his resignation as director of the CIA, has been identified as Jill Kelley, a local concerned citizen who volunteers to help the military.
“We and our family have been friends with Gen. Petraeus and his family for over five years. We respect his and his family’s privacy and want the same for us and our three children,” Kelley said in a statement.
WaPo and AP are reporting the identity and relationship of woman threatened:
Jill Kelley works as a State Department military liaison.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/11/paula-broadwell-emails-david-petraeus-state-department_n_2114319.html
Elaine, Patreus knew he was busted 3 weeks before the election. I take back my “honorable” comment on him. He should have resigned immediately. I surmise the Chicago gang had something to say about that. It comes back to the stinky timing. No October surprise. Horseshit.