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" For just the right combination of reckless corporate malfeasance and abject corporate scarpering, encouraged by what some people like to call a &amp;quot;business-friendly&amp;quot; deregulated environment, you really can&amp;#039;t beat the former Freedom Industries, which poisoned the water for most of West Virginia and then, when the heat rose, declared bankruptcy and beat feet. Butch Cassidy had Hole In The Wall. Bernard Cardinal Law has his sinecure at the Basilica of Our Lady of the Unindicted in Rome. Freedom Industries has Chapter 11. We now know who owns Freedom Industries, which was identified on Jan. 9 as the company leaking a hazardous coal-processing chemical into the Elk River in Charleston. The lucky winner is J. Clifford Forrest, a Pennsylvania coal magnate. Forrest acquired Freedom only weeks before the spill that cut off water to 300,000 people and shut down businesses in nine counties. Talk about buyer&amp;#039;s remorse! Not that Forrest has stepped forward to deal with the mess. Connecting the dots took some detective work. Freedom&amp;#039;s Chapter 11 documents identify its sole owner as Chemstream Holdings. The Pennsylvania company is headquartered in Kittanning, near Pittsburgh, at the same street address as Clifford&amp;#039;s Rosebud Mining. Rosebud claims to be the third-largest coal producer in Pennsylvania and the 21st-largest in the U.S. Freedom&amp;#039;s filings also show that entities called VF Funding and Mountaineer Funding are seeking to lend as much as $5 million to keep Freedom Industries operating during its reorganization. Mountaineer Funding was incorporated just this past Friday in West Virginia; its sole &amp;quot;member&amp;quot; is Forrest. In other words, he&amp;#039;s seeking bankruptcy-court permission to lend millions to his besieged new acquisition. Perhaps in an attempt to make some purchases at his local Bullshit Alibis &amp;#039;R Us outlet. The company&amp;#039;s bankruptcy attorneys, led by Mark Freedlander of the Pittsburgh office of McGuire Woods, used Chapter 11 to float a theory designed to ease Freedom&amp;#039;s liability: &amp;quot;It is presently hypothesized that a local water line break [caused] the ground beneath a storage tank at the Charleston facility to freeze in the extraordinary frigid temperatures in the days immediately preceding&amp;quot; what Freedlander delicately termed &amp;quot;the incident.&amp;quot; Freedom further hypothesized that &amp;quot;the hole in the affected storage tank&amp;quot; was caused by &amp;quot;an object piercing upwards through the base&amp;quot; of the tank. It seems the idea is that water turning to ice expanded, pushing that mystery &amp;quot;object&amp;quot; through the floor of the tank. Hard to say if the court will buy that. Shouldn&amp;#039;t steel tanks containing dangerous chemicals be able to withstand the consequences of winter weather?  No, because the tank was reinforced by The Market, which is a magical force field that defies both conventional engineering and the weather, and which does so because freedom, silly boy. And, of course, as Freedom hides quivering in its law books, its gifts to West Virginia keep on giving. Good thing there&amp;#039;s a strong Democrat representing West Virginia in the U.S. Senate. He plans to reinforce the tanks with a double layer of sturdy, copper-plated banality. But in Washington on Wednesday, among friends at an event sponsored by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, West Virginia&amp;#039;s junior senator and former governor, Joe Manchin III, was preaching a familiar gospel of an industry under siege by overzealous regulators. &amp;quot;You feel like everyone&amp;#039;s turned against you,&amp;quot; he said. He assured his audience that he would continue to fight back against proposed new Environmental Protection Agency regulations on coal, quoting the state motto in Latin: &amp;quot;Montani semper liberi&amp;quot; - &amp;quot;Mountaineers are always free.&amp;quot; In an interview the next day, he expounded on the theme. &amp;quot;Coal and chemicals inevitably bring risk - but that doesn&amp;#039;t mean they should be shut down,&amp;quot; Mr. Manchin said. &amp;quot;Cicero says, &amp;#039;To err is human.&amp;#039; But you&amp;#039;re going to stop living because you&amp;#039;re afraid of making a mistake?&amp;quot; No, sooner or later, some of Manchin&amp;#039;s constituents are going to stop living -- again! -- because the predatory corporate class of the United States doesn&amp;#039;t care if they live or die. I presume this will bother Joe Manchin some, although the jury may be out on that one. He can console the survivors that Mountaineers Are Always Free, even when someone kills them. Especially then. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a26940/west-virginia-water-company-declares-bankruptcy-012014/>