Is It Time For Corporate Criminals To Face The Death Penalty For Their Crimes?

By Darryl Mason


Source

How many Americans in Louisiana and Alabama would oppose the introduction of a death penalty for those found responsible for multi-billion dollar corporate negligence?

Raw Story :

President Barack Obama on Tuesday vowed to hold the culprits of the US oil disaster legally accountable, and promised to change the law if necessary to prevent history from repeating itself.

Terming the massive spill the "greatest environmental disaster of its kind in our history," Obama said the US government had an "obligation" to find out what caused the explosion of the BP operated Deepwater Horizon rig in April.

He raised the prospect of court action against those responsible for the spill, as Attorney General Eric Holder visited the Gulf to assess legal options.

"If the laws on our books are insufficient to prevent such a spill, the laws must change."

Change them to include, if a death penalty is going too far, a public flogging, preferably live to air on CNN. It's the only way they'll learn to be responsible, and value something more than profits.

The UK Guardian :

BP has now lost £44bn of its value since 20 April, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded.

City experts believe the combination of the continuing leak and the prospect of huge future legal costs and political damage in the US could be disastrous for the company.

Dougie Youngson, oil analyst at Arbuthnot, said: "This situation has now gone far beyond concerns of BP's chief executive Tony Hayward being fired, or shareholder dividend payouts being cut – it's got the real smell of death. This could break BP."

BP's going to try again with the undersea robots. If the robots succeed in cutting off the monumental flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico (and soon the Florida Keys), President Barack Obama should give the robots fucking medals on the White House lawn. We are now relying on robots to stop what humans cannot.

BP has reportedly poured some $1 billion into fixing the worst environmental disaster in American history, and what could soon enough become a world emergency. Estimates on how much the undersea oil gusher could cost BP in liabilities, and further attempts to shut off the gusher, are already reaching $12 billion.

The Guardian reports BP has already been hit with more than 30,000 claims for compensation :

....mostly from businesses in the US states of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida, which involve loss of earnings or bereavement suffered by families of the 11 workers killed when the rig caught fire.

BP vice president of deepwater developments David Eyten, in 2005 :

“IF we’ve learned anything so far about the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, it is that it contains surprises. And that means an operator needs depth — depth in terms of resources and expertise — to create the capability to respond to the unexpected. ”

And yet, even though it was his job, BP didn't "create the capability" needed to even get close to dealing with the oil gusher now threatening, and already destroying, hundreds of kilometres of American coastline, killing birds, dolphins, turtles, marshlands and tens of thousands of American jobs.

BP began a deepwater drilling operation knowing they would not be able to adequately deal with a massive spill more than 5000 feet down in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

BP has purposely underestimated the size of the oil gusher, or gushers (some oil industry experts claim there is another gusher a few miles away from the main site), for weeks, fearing, and trying to delay, what is now happening to their share price.

The New York Times :

As BP struggled last week to stanch the flow of spewing oil at the Deepwater Horizon rig, it has become clear that the pressure to dig deeper and faster from what Mr. Eyton then called a “frontier province” of oil exploration has in some ways outpaced the knowledge about how to do that safely. (And there is still the question of whether BP used all the tools and safety mechanisms available.)

Americans have long had an unswerving belief that technology will save us — it is the cavalry coming over the hill, just as we are about to lose the battle. And yet, as Americans watched scientists struggle to plug the undersea well over the past month, it became apparent that our great belief in technology was perhaps misplaced.

“Americans have a lot of faith that over the long run technology will solve everything, a sense that somehow we’re going to find a way to fix it,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Henry Rollins :

As thousands of gallons of crude oil spew out from the ocean floor, there seem to be two sets of facts, both of them bad. There’s the set that British Petroleum gives us and then there’s the other set that occurs to you when you do the math, look at the oil-covered birds, consider ocean currents, hurricanes, the fragility of any aquatic ecosystem, and the true horror of what the short- and long-term effects will be. The more you think about it, the worse it gets. You don’t need to be a scientist or scholar to get your head around what this oil spill will mean for the planet.

....I don’t know how much worse it has to get. Oh wait, it got that worse since I started writing this sentence. This is the only planet you will ever live on.

From The Boston Globe's The Big Picture :


Oil covered dragonfly, cropped from a photo by Gerald Herbert


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