Screwing The Working Man: Part Infinity

This Is Capitalism Now: How a Coal Company Bilked 20,000 Workers Out of Health Benefits - Matthew O'Brien - The Atlantic:

...Well, guess what. Patriot went bust. And now, as the Wall Street Journal reports, a bankruptcy judge has ruled that it can discharge its $1.6 billion of union healthcare obligations and replace it with ... a $300 million trust, "tens of millions" more in revenue sharing, and 35 percent of the stock of the new Patriot Coal. Not much. Now, it's not completely clear if Peabody deliberately designed Patriot to fail -- that got a "maybe" or "maybe not" from the judge -- as Temple University business professor Bruce Rader has argued. But it is clear that Peabody dumped the legacy liabilities and assets it didn't want in Patriot, which, being generous, added several degrees of difficulty to it being a going concern...