With Alabama Power’s Chief Executive Officer Mark Crosswhite under fire for his steadfast support of his former employer, the embattled law firm Balch & Bingham, the Culture of Hate surrounding Alabama Power is indeed raising distress and concern inside the utility, according to our sources.

Southern Company, Alabama Power’s parent company, has been under intense scrutiny for the billion-dollar cost overruns at the Vogtle Nuclear Plant in Georgia and the Kemper Natural Gas Plant debacle in Mississippi.

Now comes Alabama Power and the Culture of Hate:

• The “staged arrest” of a Balch competitor was done by a cop who is the son of a now-retired Alabama Power executive.  The cop son posted a vulgar social media post asserting Muslims were goat fornicators.
• Jeffrey H. Wood, the former lobbyist for Alabama Power who was recently ousted from the U.S. Department of Justice, had his fingerprints all over the effort to suppress African-Americans from having their toxic and contaminated property tested by the EPA.
• Handing out free coats to poor Black children to discourage EPA testing was one of the abhorrent acts spearheaded by Balch & Bingham’s convicted partner and criminal felon Joel I. Gilbert. Gilbert had interacted with Alabama Power and its lobbyists, according to trial evidence.
• And allegations of discrimination against Muslims by Southern Company and its subsidiaries are not new. In 2012, Southern Nuclear, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Southern Company was sued for Civil Rights Violations by a former senior engineer, a Muslim, who had worked at Southern Nuclear for 19 years. The matter, eventually settled out of court, was of course defended on behalf of Southern Nuclear by Balch & Bingham.

Balch & Bingham does not deserve a helping hand from Crosswhite or the publicly-traded utility, Southern Company.

So what is best for the shareholders?

The end of the long-standing relationship with Balch & Bingham or an unexpected but needed management change.