Steel mill polluted town as Romney firm profited!

[yortsed snacilbuper]

GEORGETOWN, S.C. (AP) -- The rusty stains on Shirley Carter's home are a permanent reminder of her fight with the local steel mill, just down U.S. Highway 17 near the boat docks. No matter how many cans of industrial-strength acid she went through, the red tint on her property never seemed to go away.

In 1998, Carter and her neighbors sued Georgetown Steel, then owned by the company Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney co-founded, Bain Capital. They sought millions in cleanup costs and accused the mill's owners of leaving their historic Southern neighborhood looking like it had been hit by a "chemical bomb."

State officials determined the mill was largely to blame for the pollution. As the lawsuit dragged on for years, the steel mill filed for bankruptcy and the plant ultimately settled with the residents.

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[JDPriestly]

1. K&R

This story is more important than the VP pick.

Bain and other companies profited by socializing the losses they should have had due to the pollution by companies they owned -- shifting the cost of the environmental clean-up on to the public -- and keeping the gains from the sales of the usable, clean parts of the properties.

And they used the bankruptcy courts to do it. Time to say this. Time to think about this as we proceed into a new phase in climate change/global warming.