Enter
dose of unwanted misery to a lot
of hard-working people.
Of course, it’s an entirely different matter if I were to say ...
poison the entire Gulf of Mexico through my negligence. Or,
say, destroy the global economy,
through actions that only in the
most charitable terms could be
called “negligent.” For that sort
of destruction, the wheels of justice grind much slower and with a
greater degree of indifference.
I guess the difference between
getting brought to justice and getting away with it entirely boils
down to whether you were willing
to dream big. A question, then:
Were the folks at Freedom Industries dreaming in sufficiently large
terms when th ey allowed their
uninspected chemical storage
tanks to poison the West Virginia
water supply? Looks like we are
going to find out.
The big news this week in
l’affaire Freedom Industries is that
the polluter has filed for Chapter
11 bankruptcy. You wouldn’t be
faulted if, at first blush, the receipt of that news tweaked your
schadenfreude gland just a little
bit. After all, bankruptcy is bad,
right? It’s preferable not to be in
bankruptcy, one imagines. And to
LOOKING FORWARD
IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON
02.02.14
a certain extent, that is true, so
for a second, you feel like maybe
Freedom Industries is getting some
dose of just desserts, having to file
for bankruptcy protection.
But the operative word here,
of course, is “protection,” and as
it turns out, Freedom Industries
needs a lot of it. According to the
Charleston Gazette, which broke
the news on Jan. 18, the company
“owes $3.6 million to its top 20
For a second, you
feel like maybe Freedom
Industries is getting
some dose of just
desserts, having to file for
bankruptcy protection.”
unsecured creditors,” as well as
“$2.4 million in unpaid taxes to
the Internal Revenue Service,”
dating back to 2000. (The IRS
has multiple liens on Freedom
Industries property as a result.)
Bankruptcy protection halts the
process of payback to creditors —
which include you and me, per the
IRS. As Bloomberg Businessweek’s
Paul M. Barrett — who has done
all sorts of spadework on Freedom
Industries — reports, it’s now up