The Unsettlement

Madame:

I see you have left it to the readers to imagine just what kind of diagram would be drawn “depicting” sex scandals. :)

BP.  Ah yes, I have SUCH a shortage of things to analyze! :)

Of course, the settlement is better than nothing, and an improvement from previous administrations.  Does it affect the corporation BP much?  Not significantly.  It certainly doesn’t affect the finances of those who made decisions at the executive and board levels.

Even if shareholders and their board of directors somehow wanted to hold management accountable, things are usually stretched out so long that the perpetrators are not even around much anymore, having been given golden parachutes.

Yes, some low and mid-level people (who appear quite guilty, to be sure) were served up by their corporate masters.  The true individual culprits were not held accountable, especially those who fostered the corporate culture of criminal, arrogant disregard for safety or considerations for workers.

When it’s an out of court settlement, a corporation can usually deduct it from their income.  They thus make sure the country’s and world’s taxpayers share in the bill for their criminality.  And even the “settlement” will be stretched out over many years, with excess assets (BP has many) sold off to make the payments and not dent even a quarter’s profits (of which the settlement does not even equal).   And laws are in the works saying individuals cannot sue oil companies, but must sue the state.

A telling reminder happened recently.  Another offshore rig caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico.  Yes, BP didn’t own it, and it wasn’t nearly as serious.  Yet, how many eagerly nodded their heads during the campaign season when Romney blasted the Obama administration for not allowing more offshore drilling?  And a “free” market needs no laws or regulators?  Would a football game work without rules or referees?

How EASY it is to get us off-focus on how polluting, enslaving, impoverishing, and climate changing, fossil fuel addiction is.  We need to be moving like a sprinter toward a truly energy independent, clean, carbon-neutral goal, and yet here we are crawling on the ground like a baby—and most babies don’t crawl fast and are easily diverted.