Yesterday’s news that BP will plead guilty to one of the largest criminal penalties in history had environmentalists quite pleased. After all, the 2010 BP oil spill was one of the worst environmental catastrophes in history.
The $4 billion in penalties are supposed to be a marker, an indication that the kind of shortcuts and willful negligence that apparently led to the spill will not be tolerated.
So why is Robert Reich unhappy? Yes, he is
appalled by the carelessness and indifference of the BP executives responsible for the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 people April 20, 2010, and unleashed the worst oil spill in American history.
And yet, he says,
it defies logic to make BP itself the criminal. Corporations aren’t people. They can’t know right from wrong. They’re incapable of criminal intent. They have no brains. They’re legal fictions — pieces of paper filed away in a vault in some bank.
Reich, however, is not shilling for BP. He’s not asking that they be let off the hook, only that we realize that
Punishing corporations as a whole almost always ends up harming innocent people – especially employees who lose their jobs because the corporation has to trim costs, and retirees whose savings shrink because their shares in the corporation lose value.
And that it is the men at the top who should be facing criminal proceedings. As things stand, three high-level employees — but not those at the very top, the men who created an environment in which the only question was how much money could be earned, all else be damned — are facing charges.
That, says Reich, is “loony.”
(T)he people responsible for BP’s deaths and oil spill weren’t BP’s rank-and-file employees or its shareholders. They were the executives who turned a blind eye to safety while in pursuit of their own rising stock options, and who conspired with oil-services giant Halliburton to cut corners on deep water drilling when they knew damn well they were taking risks for the sake of fatter profits.
They’re the ones who should be punished. Failure to punish them simply invites more of the same kind of criminal negligence by executives more interested in lining their pockets than protecting their workers and the environment. (Today brought another tragedy in the Gulf when an oil rig exploded off Louisiana — killing at least two workers and sending four others to hospitals Friday; two others were believed to be missing.)
But the Justice Department’s criminal settlement with BP gives these top executives a free pass — allowing the public to believe justice has been done.
The men being charged, Reich says, are just “the schleps who got caught up in the mess” and the Justice Department’s “$4 billion criminal settlement with BP isn’t big enough to affect the oil giant” in any meaningful way.
So, what is Reich arguing for? The stripping of “personhood” from corporations.
Holding corporations criminally liable reinforces the same fallacy that gave us Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in which five justices decided corporations are people under the First Amendment and therefore can spend unlimited amounts on an election.
Take that away and the bogus immunity that corporate officers are given by virtue of what Reich calls “legal fictions — pieces of paper filed away in a vault in some bank” — falls apart and we can go after the real culprits.
Hank Kalet 