Too Slick To Jail 
 

 This OP-ED appeared originally in: CommPro.Biz

So let’s get this straight: energy giant BP pleads guilty to a flock of charges and faces the largest criminal fines ever levied, fines overshadowed by massive civil penalties and more fines. And the only people facing charges are four way-down-the-pecking-order guys? And that’s it? The $4.5 billion in fines is pocket change when viewed against BP’s 2011 profits of $25.7 billion (that’s about $3 million an hour). How about the executives at the top who pushed those below for more and more? Folks like whiner-in-chief Tony “I'd like my life back” Hayward, BP CEO for the three years leading up to the disaster. Why isn’t Hayward being charged with manslaughter?

Instead, the two top guys on the BP rig face manslaughter charges for the eleven people killed in the blast. Another executive is charged with obstruction. He is alleged to have lied about the amount of oil spewing into the Gulf. One relatively low-level engineer was arrested earlier, charged with deleting hundreds of texts from his smartphone that indicated a much higher flow of crude oil into the Gulf than the numbers the bigwigs were feeding the media.

Tony Hayward and other carpetlanders created a “Profits First” culture that led to corner cutting and the disaster. Tony got a golden parachute. He got his life back. There’s no way the families of the eleven workers can get their “lives back.” One family member observed that he never got so much as an apology. That during a Congressional hearing BP executives seated close by never even looked him in the eye, let alone expressed sorrow for his loss. That would suggest that the only loss they are sorry for is the cash.

The Supreme Court declared that corporations are people with the benefits we all enjoy. The BP situation exposes a massive problem with that decision. How do we punish corporate “citizens” whose reckless actions result in the death of flesh and blood citizens? Imposing fines hardly seems sufficient. But how do you jail these corporate citizens? Going after a few minor players is a joke. Even sentencing the CEO to jail –culpable as they might be– doesn’t fill the bill; they rarely deserve all the blame. There’s the Board of Directors; aren’t they responsible for policy? Lots of luck trotting them all off to the slammer. We don’t see an answer.

After all, we haven’t been able to bring the individuals responsible for the collapse of the world economy to justice. The banksters we bailed out are living high. They have proven too big to jail. It shouldn’t surprise us then that the true architects of the disaster in the Gulf are too slick to jail.