Thom Hartmann: Give BP the Death Penalty!!

What does it take for a foreign corporation to get the corporate death penalty in America? That's a question we need to ask ourselves, after news broke yesterday of BP's legal settlement over its Gulf oil spill disaster in 2010. Eleven workers were killed when their oil rig exploded, and for three months five million barrels of toxic crude gushed in the Gulf of Mexico, as BP, which never made contingency plans for this sort of obvious crisis, tried to find a way to plug the hole. That oil killed marine life, blanketed coastlines, and put Gulf Coast small businesses out of business. To this day, we still don't know the long term effects of this catastrophe on the ecosystem or our food chain, which is now contaminated with eyeless shrimp, clawless crabs, and other oil mutated aquatic freak shows, not to mention the human cancers that will show up in future decades. Now, the foreign corporation responsible for all this, BP, will just cut a small check, and then go back to business as usual, punching holes in the Gulf. It pled guilty to 14 felony and misdemeanor charges, and agreed to pay a $4.5 billion fine, the largest criminal fine in our nation's history. But for a corporation that just announced it earned $5.4 billion in three months, BP knows it got off easy. The organization Public Citizen notes, "Claims arising from the Gulf disaster, which killed 11 workers and did untold damage, put the company's liability at a maximum of $51.5 billion." That's more than ten times what BP will end up paying to settle. As part of the settlement, the government still reserves the right to charge two BP employees for manslaughter. It will likely be two low level workers, who'll have to take the fall for an entire corporation, and industry, that repeatedly ignored regulations and cut safety corners, just to maximize their quarterly profits. Because of our two tiered justice system, rarely do corporate suits go to jail. Altogether, this settlement will do very little to change the corrupt scam oil barons are running on the American people. As spokesperson for Public Citizen said: "We're stunned. This settlement is pathetic. The point of the criminal justice system is twofold: to punish and to deter. This does neither." In a tragic irony that proves Public Citizen's point, news broke on Friday of another oil-rig exploding off the coast of Louisiana. Early reports indicate two workers are dead, and another two workers are missing. Perhaps if our criminal justice system had taken swifter action against BP and followed through by banning the company from doing business in the United States, the entire industry might shape up, and maybe,just maybe, a group of oilmen in Louisiana would still be alive today. Our nation has a long history with the corporate death penalty. Beginning in the early 1800's, laws were passed in several states to make it easier for legislators to revoke corporate charters if businesses are operating against the public's interest, and this routinely happened. In Ohio,, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania, banks were shut down for being "financially unsound." In New York and Massachusetts, corporations that ran the turnpikes were given a corporate death sentence for not keeping the roads in good repair. By 1825, 20 states had amended their constitutions to make it easier for the state to "revoke, alter, or annul" corporate charters whenever a corporation, "may be injurious to citizens of the community." In just one year, 1832, the state of Pennsylvania sentenced ten corporations to death, revoking their charters for "operating contrary to the public interest."