Column: The Exide fiasco shows how companies get away with poisoning the environment
Executives and investors of Exide Technologies, the firm that has owned a spectacularly polluting battery recycling plant in Vernon, Calif., should be bowing down to the American regulatory and legal systems right about now.
That's because those system have been doing them favors throughout the decades in which the company contaminated its site and the surrounding working-class neighborhoods with lead.
Despite issuing dozens of citations for breaking environmental rules, California regulators never managed to shut the plant down.
The federal government finally extracted an agreement from Exide to close the plant in 2015, but issued merely a wrist-slap punishment for the company's repeated violations of environmental law.
And now comes the biggest insult of all: A federal judge overseeing Exide's latest bankruptcy case - its third since 2002 - has cleared the company to permanently walk away from the Vernon plant and its environmental obligations.
The outcome means California taxpayers
