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The corporate death penalty exists and it is a shame that it is never practiced. See the case of multiple time convicted felon and statistical mass murderer Pf

by rms 16y ago

The corporate death penalty exists and it is a shame that it is never practiced. See the case of multiple time convicted felon and statistical mass murderer Pfizer, where the law mandated a corporate death penalty, but the government hacked around that requirement. http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/02/pfizer.bextra/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/02/pfizer.bextra/index.htm... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer

anigbrowl 16y ago
I agree. BP is not an American company but I think it would be entirely appropriate to rescind their US licenses and freeze any assets possible. On the basis of similar episodes elsewhere it could take several months to bring the spill under control. Economically speaking, this may become as expensive to the US as 9/11.
- rms 16y ago
  Yes, preventing BP from doing business in the USA would be a corporate death penalty.
  - barrkel 16y ago
    No, I don't think it would. It would increase the supply of oil to the rest of the world, and decrease the supply to the US, which would depress prices in the rest of the world and raise them in the US, which in turn would encourage other oil suppliers - other than BP - to sell their oil to the US, rather than outside it. The only way it would really harm BP would be if BP's share of oil production approached the US's proportion of global oil consumption, and even then, its effect would be to raise US oil prices. For similar reasons, the notion of relieving the US from its dependence on foreign oil is similarly meaningless. Oil is fungible, and the price of oil for the man on a US street will still be affected by events in the Middle East, even if not a drop of oil he uses comes from outside his own country.
  - arethuza 16y ago
    Maybe not a death penalty, but a pretty serious wound: BPs total revenues in 2009 were $239 billion - of which about $130 billion was from the USA.
    - jpcx01 16y ago
      So if they stopped selling the oil in the US, there's no other country on earth that would have a use for it? They would maybe take a % hit, however they'd still sell all their oil. Banning them in the US would not cause that $130 billion dollars to just "vanish"
j_baker 16y ago
I'm not sure if I agree with you or not so I'm going to play devil's advocate. Corporations in and of themselves can't make decisions. Plus, if a corporation were to receive the "death penalty" you're suggesting, it could be as bad for us as it is for the company (in terms of lost jobs, competition, etc). Why does the corporation need to be held responsible for something like this? Why not hold the employees behind these incidents accountable?
- nooneelse 16y ago
  Why not hold only the particular neurons responsible for a crime accountable?
  - houseabsolute 16y ago
    If that were possible, I'm sure that's exactly what we would do.
    - nooneelse 16y ago
      If you take a cog out of a machine because it broke (couldn't take the pressure exerted on it or some such) and replace it with a nearly identical one... why think that one will last any better? Corporations intentionally structure themselves with the goal that the people in most roles can be replaceable with minimum impact on the company performance. It is odd to only look at the lower level units that are used to build a system and ignore the possibility of structural, system-level issues or pathologies.
      - houseabsolute 16y ago
        When you open the machine up, you're going to check which parts are causing it to break, not just which parts are broken. You'll fix those parts of the machine as well, to carry on the analogy. Not that any of this is going to happen in real life. But as long as we're speculating . . .
- anigbrowl 16y ago

by rms 16y ago

anigbrowl 16y ago

I agree. BP is not an American company but I think it would be entirely appropriate to rescind their US licenses and freeze any assets possible. On the basis of similar episodes elsewhere it could take several months to bring the spill under control. Economically speaking, this may become as expensive to the US as 9/11.

rms 16y ago
Yes, preventing BP from doing business in the USA would be a corporate death penalty.
- barrkel 16y ago
  No, I don't think it would. It would increase the supply of oil to the rest of the world, and decrease the supply to the US, which would depress prices in the rest of the world and raise them in the US, which in turn would encourage other oil suppliers - other than BP - to sell their oil to the US, rather than outside it. The only way it would really harm BP would be if BP's share of oil production approached the US's proportion of global oil consumption, and even then, its effect would be to raise US oil prices. For similar reasons, the notion of relieving the US from its dependence on foreign oil is similarly meaningless. Oil is fungible, and the price of oil for the man on a US street will still be affected by events in the Middle East, even if not a drop of oil he uses comes from outside his own country.
- arethuza 16y ago
  Maybe not a death penalty, but a pretty serious wound: BPs total revenues in 2009 were $239 billion - of which about $130 billion was from the USA.
  - jpcx01 16y ago
    So if they stopped selling the oil in the US, there's no other country on earth that would have a use for it? They would maybe take a % hit, however they'd still sell all their oil. Banning them in the US would not cause that $130 billion dollars to just "vanish"

j_baker 16y ago

I'm not sure if I agree with you or not so I'm going to play devil's advocate. Corporations in and of themselves can't make decisions. Plus, if a corporation were to receive the "death penalty" you're suggesting, it could be as bad for us as it is for the company (in terms of lost jobs, competition, etc). Why does the corporation need to be held responsible for something like this? Why not hold the employees behind these incidents accountable?

nooneelse 16y ago
Why not hold only the particular neurons responsible for a crime accountable?
- houseabsolute 16y ago
  If that were possible, I'm sure that's exactly what we would do.
  - nooneelse 16y ago
    If you take a cog out of a machine because it broke (couldn't take the pressure exerted on it or some such) and replace it with a nearly identical one... why think that one will last any better? Corporations intentionally structure themselves with the goal that the people in most roles can be replaceable with minimum impact on the company performance. It is odd to only look at the lower level units that are used to build a system and ignore the possibility of structural, system-level issues or pathologies.
    - houseabsolute 16y ago
      When you open the machine up, you're going to check which parts are causing it to break, not just which parts are broken. You'll fix those parts of the machine as well, to carry on the analogy. Not that any of this is going to happen in real life. But as long as we're speculating . . .
anigbrowl 16y ago