Thursday, November 15, 2012

"Corporations Are People", But You Can't Send Them to Prison

If you could send a corporation to prison, BP would be doing a lot of hard time.
BP will plead guilty to manslaughter charges stemming from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and agreed to pay $4.5 billion in government penalties, Attorney General Eric Holder announced Thursday.

Of the penalties, $4 billion will resolve criminal charges. An additional $525 million will be paid to resolve claims brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission that BP lied to investors by understating the amount of oil flowing into the Gulf.
Three BP execs are also being charged with felonies ranging from manslaughter to concealing evidence and lying to the Feds.

3 comments:

  1. If a human 'person' kills 11 people, that person fries. If a corporate 'person' does the same, they only get fined. Somehow this seems unequal under the law, unless some 'people' are more equal than others under the law...

    ReplyDelete
  2. A more appropriate punishment for a corporation would be to apply a prison sentence, just like for a person, but during the sentence, all profits go to charities. ALL profits. Dividends suspended. Stock trading frozen. Executive pay is cut down to the average salary for all employees.

    Will the company survive the sentence? Who knows? Some prisoners die in prison, so, maybe the company dies. The assets taken by the government.

    Harsh? That's the point!

    ReplyDelete
  3. +1 on Nangle- I LIKE that idea!

    ReplyDelete

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