Bankruptcy law and the system which condones it

To say that I am opposed to the interests of Business and Industry is to phrase it lightly, that I'm in the favor of equality and justice would be to phrase it better. One mustn't look hard into the corporate world to find corruption and deception in action, to find rules that favor the interests of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the rest. Corruption is everywhere though in many cases what should be constituted as illegal is in fact legal on the books, and few places is this more apparent than in the world of bankruptcy.

I've been devoting a lot of my time recently to studying the W.R. Grace-Libby, Montana story, and the ways that the executives at W.R. Grace were able to divest their holdings into the pockets of shareholders and smaller companies they spun themselves off into is absolutely appalling. The year W.R. Grace declared bankruptcy Grace CEO Paul Norris earn $3.4 million. Before that Grace spun their assets off into two subsidiaries: the National Medical Care company and Cryovac, freeing themselves of assets that would be seized in the event of an expansive lawsuit, should they be found guilty. Thus what was left of Grace from the billions earned off the health of those miners amounted to a pittance to help clean up the town and aid the health of the victims they effectively assaulted. And then there's the millions bled to the shareholders, who put their own financial interests above the very families and town they used to profit off of, who as victims are the ones in real need of financial dividends.

These executives deserved to be jailed and all their assets sold to cover the destruction they wrought. The shareholders should be forced to repay what they bled, and if it means garnishing their assets then so be it. Don't forget W.R. Grace and all those involved at the management level knew exactly what they were doing and intentionally, deceptively exposed their workers and their workers' families to what they knew was a deadly substance, and there is a paper trail a mile long to confirm this, which is quite blatant throughout in how they went about discussing what they knew and what they could do to circumvent the law. My point is this is absurd! This company has ruined so many lives, brought billions of dollars in damage to a town they profited handsomely off of and their response has been to take the money and run. But to blame the company is shortsighted, it's the system which has allowed them to get away with this. If we lived in any type of a just society, bad businesses like this would be driven out of existence and the employees would be criminally held liable for intentionally disregarding public welfare in favor of profit, but here in the United States the accepted practice heralded by the elite is to do whatever is possible to keep such businesses in operation because they are capable of generating large amounts of cash. Thus money reigns supreme, which ultimately is the cause of our problems. The only solution is to completely overhaul the system through a more liberal economic stance. We'd have a little less money but a whole lot more.