How many times can a corporation break the law and continue to exist? The Massey Energy case.... [View All]

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from YES! Magazine:



Dear Big Coal: You're Not Above the Law
How many times can a corporation break the law and continue to exist? Inside the fight to revoke Massey Energy's corporate charter.

by Sarah van Gelder
posted Sep 20, 2011


A majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices and some politicians like to refer to corporations as “persons.” Few actual people, though, could get away with years of lawless behavior resulting in injuries and deaths, and the destruction of entire communities and ways of life. To do that takes the protection of a corporate charter and a legal and regulatory system that has succumbed to concentrated money and power.

On Friday, two public interest groups asked the attorney general of Delaware to revoke the charter of Massey Energy, a company they call a criminal enterprise.

“Massey Energy operates outside the law,” says Lorelei Scarbro, who lives a few miles from the West Virginia's Upper Big Branch mine, which is owned and operated by Massey Energy. Scarbro traveled to Delaware to speak in support of revoking the Massey charter. “The people of Appalachia are collateral damage; they believe it's okay to wipe out a whole culture.”

An April 2010 disaster at the Upper Big Branch mine claimed the lives of 29 coal miners. The accident investigation, commissioned by West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, pins the blame for the disaster squarely on Massey’s “total and catastrophic systemic failures … in the context of a culture in which wrongdoing became acceptable, where deviation became the norm.” ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/sarah-van-gelder/dear-big-coal-youre-not-above-the-law