re: #70 celticdragon

Damn.

Damn BP to hell for that.

I have no words…but the folks at Reason Magazine keep telling us that companies can police themselves because they know cutting corners will bring market punishment if something goes boom.

Something did go “boom”, and I want some bastards from BP management brought up on Federal indictments.

Maybe its time for literal torches and pitchforks. The “masters of the Universe” who privatize the profit and dump the disaster costs on everyone else need a fucking lesson.

If the disaster is as bad for the environment as people seem to think, just holding BP responsible and letting the law take its course should be a “market punishment”. How many billions can BP shrug off? I’m not even talking punitive damages. Laying for a company to destroy it is not the proper function of the law. But neither is it part of the law to let them off the hook because the damages are worse than they say they thought might happen. However bad it gets, however much it costs our fishermen and whoever, that’s how much BP pays. Unless they go bankrupt, in which case they just pay everything they have and too bad they didn’t have more.

The next company facing a decision about safety will know that a bet on cutting corners bets the whole company and everyone’s job and all the stockholder equity, all the directors’ bonuses, the works.

Justice, simple justice, is amazingly powerful if there are no get out of jail free cards. We don’t need pitchforks. We don’t need new laws. We just need a court system that can’t be gamed.