Shocker, right?
[Excerpt]
Experts: BP disaster spilling the equivalent of two Exxon Valdezes a week.
Based on “sophisticated scientific analysis of seafloor video made available Wednesday,” Steve Wereley, an associate professor at Purdue University, told NPR the actual spill rate of the BP oil disaster is about 3 million gallons a day — 15 times the official guess of BP and the federal government. Another scientific expert, Eugene Chiang, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, calculated the rate of flow to be between 840,000 and four million gallons a day. . .
Read more at: Think Progress
On the issue of what the BP execs knew about the blow out preventers, a little different perspective.
ReplyDeleteA corporation is a legal fiction entity. In doing business, the goal of that entity is to generate profits and try to stay afloat. Every decision is made in an effort to maximize profits, and is theoretically an educated guess. However, the reality is that some of the guesses are going to be wrong.
An entity does not have a mind or a conscience similar to that of a human. Even though humans run corporations, corporations are separate and apart from humans, somewhere between a human and an inanimate object.
Whereas a human will occasionally make a judgment call against his or her personal interest in pursuit of other goals, rarely will an entity do so because it is not really its money. It is the money or interests of others, the shareholders at risk, not the decision makers. It makes for a different dynamic.
As a result, fines, penalties, and lawsuits have to be figured into the economic mix as necessary evils. An entity will try to minimize them, or delay them if possible, but they know that they are always just around the corner. It's the nature of dealing with an entity when you're engaged, and then walking away from it and trying to live a human life. A human being does not generally approach life in this fashion.
Corporations are not human. They can't be. It's an inherent conflict of interest.
Good point on the differences between corporations and people. It's a pity that the Supreme Court didn't see one when they granted corporations "personhood."
ReplyDeleteAnother distinction is that corporations are immortal, as long as they continue to generate profits. I think a corporate death penalty is in order for corporations who create huge disasters that kill 11 people and ruin the economy and ecology of an entire gulf coast.