Sucks to be you, lady:
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.
In the end, Bain walked away with more than $30 million in profits. Carter got $800.
“That wasn’t even enough to paint the house,” said Carter, who is a Romney supporter this election.
As a presidential candidate, Romney has pledged to roll back environmental regulations as a way to spur growth. Under President Barack Obama, he recently quipped, “a regulator would have shut down the Wright Brothers for their ‘dust pollution.'”
But the story of Georgetown Steel shows how Romney’s company thrived under conditions that largely allowed the emissions to continue for years, leaving locals to clean up the mess after Bain left town.
You’ll get no sympathy from me, lady. First, you aren’t a billionaire, so it’s your fault for being lazy and not being able to buy elections for candidates that would do your bidding. Second, if you didn’t want chemical stains on your house (not to mention your lungs), you shouldn’t have built it where Mitt Romney could make a profit decades later. What were you thinking?
In all seriousness, I love the symmetry between this story and the Romney/Ryan plan- millions for the ultra-rich and a warm bucket of spit for everyone else, just like the Ryan plan. I wonder if America is stupid enough to elect these two.
(via)