In both cases, making war and mining coal, important people in a hurry for results economize on their human capital. In both cases, it means empty places at the table and holes in small communities where each absence hurts badly and healing is slow.

In each case, they say the disasters will lead to improvements, that investigations will reveal the need for more protection, more attention to safety, stricter enforcement of regulations. They always say that. Sometimes it happens and sometimes not. And still, generation after generation, West Virginians go down in the mines and march off to war.

Maybe one reason why things change so slowly -- if at all -- is that those people need the rest of us to keep their bosses honest, and the rest of us have short attention spans. When they die needlessly, our sorrow is real -- but after a few weeks or a few months, with other demands on our concern, we turn back to our daily lives.

We forget to hold accountable the politicians who deplete the regulatory agencies that are supposed to enforce the rules. As the tragedies fade into the past, our compassion falters. It gets easier to mark the ones who keep making noise as bleeding-heart loonies.

Actually the "rest of us" wouldn't need to "keep their bosses honest" if there were no bosses, in particular bosses with interests different from the workers. The capitalist forces which underly the continuing war drive are precisely the same ones which underly the "need" to cut costs in the mines, maximizing profits. Yes, the government under Bush has been cutting back on mine safety efforts and exacerbating the problem. But we wouldn't even need mine safety inspectors if the mines were run by, and in the interests of, the workers, and not the mine owners. There would, of course, be people concerned with mine safety, but they would be the workers themselves, or particular workers designated for that task, not some outside watchdog who has to try to mitigate the worst aspects of the exploitation of the workers.

Republicans and Democrats alike think that what's good for the company is good for the worker. Along with what has been happening recently in the mines, today brings us another illustration of the fallacy of that idea:

Ford announces it's cutting 30,000 jobs and closing 14 plants, and "Wall Street" rejoices.