Corporate America Poisons West Virginia

[marmar]

from In These Times:


Corporate America Poisons West Virginia
How right-wing deregulation led to toxic water for 300,000 people.

BY Leo Gerard, United Steelworkers President


In West Virginia after a cavalier chemical company poisoned the drinking water of 300,000 people, the corporate-hugging, right-wing extremist group Americans for the Prosperous congratulated itself for doling out bottled water one day.

“What better way to help people than to give them water?” said Wendy McCuskey, a member of Americans for the Prosperous (aka Americans for Prosperity).

Well, maybe one better way would be regulating corporations to prevent them from poisoning water in the first place. But Americans for the Prosperous, and the group’s entitled billionaire sponsors, reject regulation. Instead, they believe the wealthy are entitled to operate recklessly and crash Wall Street now and again, operate haphazardly and poison a river or two, sicken and inconvenience non-rich Americans and force local taxpayers to cover the costs of emergency response and cleanup. That’s the way the entitled rich believe it should be. That is the Americans for the Prosperous way.

The company that poisoned the Elk River had escaped government inspection of its aging chemical storage tanks in a regulation-lax state for nearly a quarter century, since the time when the tanks, owned by a different firm, held gasoline. The company is called Freedom Industries—as in free from regulation, free to ooze 7,500 gallons of licorice-smelling, coal processing 4-methylcyclohexane methanol into a West Virginia drinking water supply; free to neglect mentioning the contamination until confronted by state officials; free to allow deterioration of the dike intended to prevent such a spill from splashing into the river; free to file for bankruptcy a week after polluting the river, thus shifting costs onto creditors and those injured. In other words, entitled to make money in any way it pleased and expect taxpayers to suffer the consequences. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/16145/free_from_regulation_corporate_america_poisons_west_virginia/

[McDiggy]

1. Note how they have to say "Right-winged."

There is no real choice in WV. Your choices are right winged Democrats or batshit nutjob Republicans that make Ted Cruz look like Noam Chomsky.

[theHandpuppet]

2. You got that right

It's rather depressing just to vote. I try to make my vote count more at the local level, where I can personally interview the candidates.

[xchrom]

3. du rec.