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

[marmar]

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

[riverbendviewgal]

1. Time for justice

Well, since corporations are people I would like to see an execution of Massey Energy. They are very, very guilty and there is solid proof, not just hearsay....There are countless real witnesses and victims that are not backing down from what they have seen and what has been done to them.

Troy Davis was executed on far skimpier evidence.

[WhiteTara]

2. Welll, then Massey Energy should be put to death for its

crimes.

If Troy Davis can be executed, then Massey Energy should be put to death as well. Dismantled and its corp officers jailed. Coal is dead. Long live coal.

[dbackjon]

3. Why just jail them. Execute them as well, since they are murderers

[WhiteTara]

6. In China, that's exactly what they do.

And if found guilty by a jury of their peers (how the hell does that work in this case?) Execs would be tried as accessories to murder and being found guilty by association (as in the Troy Davis case) they would then be executed?

[benld74]

4. The opposite of 'How many licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop'

[elleng]

5. If they're in West Virginia? Forever.

:thumbsdown: