Congress needs to hold companies like Freedom Industries accountable

The recent news that chemical supplier Freedom Industries, responsible for the spill of two toxic chemicals used in coal mining into West Virginia’s Elk River, the water source for more than 300,000 people, has declared bankruptcy is not surprising.

Bankruptcy will guarantee that the costs of cleanup will be borne by the state and federal governments, effectively shifting Freedom Industries’ cost of doing business to the very people they’ve harmed.

What’s more, it guarantees that the victims—the 400 people who’ve gone to the hospital as a result of tainted water, for example, and the many businesses that had to close as a result of the contaminated water—will have little or no financial recourse.

It’s precisely the sort of financial “risk shift” that big business has been doing to the public for the last three decades. The “business-friendly” deregulation that started with the Reagan administration—and has continued throughout successive administrations, whether Republican or Democratic—is detailed in the work of former New York Times economic reporter David Cay Johnston, author of Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill); and Jacob Hacker, who wrote The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care and Retirement and How You Can Fight Back.

This move by Freedom Industries is reminiscent of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy during the Wall Street meltdown: Take your profits, but leave the government to clean up the mess.

Congress needs to act immediately to hold corporations to the same level of accountability as everyone else. If a struggling American can’t discharge the debt incurred to the government in student loans by filing for bankruptcy, then no corporation should be able to do so.