Yet another Gulf oil spill. Who is paying for reperations? Where is the polluter going in this?%
Good question... I don't know. What should happen is them having to pay for it. One law that I miss here in the United States is something called the Corporate Death Penalty aka Judicial Dissolution in that if a corporation did something to harm the environment, harm consumers, violate the law etc. the state that they were chartered in had the right, obligation and sometimes even mandate to literally shut them down and cancel charter, sell off their assets, and blow away their patents and trademarks etc. The Corporate Death Penalty/Judicial Dissolution was actually routine in the 1800. If the corporation were chartered domestically by a state, they would be shut down and if a corporation were foreign, they would be banned/barred from doing business in the United States. Though I wasn't alive back then, I miss it... I bring this up because ideally, that is what the consequences should be here.
Here is a great article from Thom Hartmann on the corporate death penalty. I wholeheartedly agree with everything in this article.
It’s Time to Bring Back the Corporate Death Penalty
When big companies engage in criminal harm to the public, they deserve serious punishment.
“The prevalence of the corporation in America has led men of this generation to act, at times, as if the privilege of doing business in corporate form were inherent in the citizen, and has led them to accept the evils attendant upon the free and unrestricted use of the corporate mechanism as if these evils were the inescapable price of civilized life, and, hence to be borne with resignation.
“Throughout the greater part of our history, a different view prevailed.
“Although the value of this instrumentality in commerce and industry was fully recognized, incorporation for business was commonly denied long after it had been freely granted for religious, educational, and charitable purposes.
“It was denied because of fear. Fear of encroachment upon the liberties and opportunities of the individual. Fear of the subjection of labor to capital. Fear of monopoly. Fear that the absorption of capital by corporations, and their perpetual life, might bring evils similar to those which attended mortmain [immortality]. There was a sense of some insidious menace inherent in large aggregations of capital, particularly when held by corporations.”
—U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, 1933 dissent in Liggett v. Lee
The good citizens of California have been wondering out loud who killed 86 of their citizens in the Camp Fire, along with dozens of other Californians over the years in other fires. Now both federal and state prosecutors are focusing on a likely suspect: Pacific Gas and Electric.
California’s largest private, for-profit corporate utility appears to have killed a number of people over the years, in many cases because of negligence apparently prompted by a desire to jack up corporate profits.
As a corporation, they play by different rules than you or I."
Opinion | It’s Time to Bring Back the Corporate Death Penalty
And here is a video where Thom discusses this;
