A Corporate Death Penalty?

[The above photo is of the crude oil flowing straight into the Gulf of Mexico as a result of BP's inability to shut if off. It's from a terrific set of photos that The Boston Globe has here. And when I say "terrific," I mean the  Merriam-Webster definition number 1: very bad: frightening.]

Corporate Death Penalty

That phrase just popped into my head as I thought about the BP oil spill.

If we assume that this spill is or will be the worst ever, and we assume that BP chose not to employ existing technology to outfit this oil platform with a remote or automatic shut-off--such technology exists and is in use in Norway, what should be the consequences for BP? (For the sake of this thought experiment, I'll ignore that federal regulation or oversight seems to have allowed a platform like this to exist without such a mechanism, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of dead, oil-choked fish.)

I mean, we know what the consequences will be: BP will spend a significant but not crippling amount of money paying for the cleanup, and their liability for damage caused to property, etc. is limited by statute (though I reserve the right to follow up on that statutory limitation, as the NYT article seems to have been written in haste). So they'll pay up and move on, and like Exxon with its Valdez spill before them, they will no doubt return to making the kick-ass mega-profits that come with being in the oil biz. Profits to the tune of $163 billion last decade, and $5.6 in the first quarter of 2010 already.

So yeah, the consequences will be business as usual. But I ask you to take a moment and think about what the consequences could be or should be.

Can anybody really disagree with the notion that "you fucked up so badly we will not allow you to engage in that activity ever again and, by terminating your shit, we hope this will serve as a warning to the rest of you knuckleheads that if you similarly fuck up we will terminate you, too"?

To me, the flip side of that is "you can screw up to an unimaginable degree (and we'll all agree it was 'unforeseeable') but if you can pay for some of the shit that goes wrong, you can keep on truckin'."

I can recall off the top of my head a commercial death penalty of sorts, but of course it happened to an individual: a client of the first law firm I worked for was banned by the Federal Trade Commission from telemarketing. Ostensibly because he was a reprehensible scumbag who didn't give a shit about who he hurt when he broke the law. Of course if he had been raking in billions, I'm sure the outcome would have been very different.

Let's face it, corporations get away with shit that a person never could. But it's not just because of the money--rich people get away with shit all the time. My point is that they are conceptually immune from the type of punishment we bestow on individuals, namely, imprisonment and death.

And on that cheery note, the good news is that BP has commandeered 1/3 of the world supply of chemicals used to disperse spilled oil and is unleashing that shit into the Gulf, too. If the thunder don't getcha then the lightning will.