I hear Obama is planning some stronger regulations on oil drilling. I want some stronger regulations, too. I wonder if his list of is the same as mine. His is probably more polished. Mine is just a list of discussion points at this point, and needs more thought. But let's just compare, shall we?
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From the creation of any spill that spreads to a surface area of greater than 25 square miles or that takes more than one month to resolve, 100% of corporate net profits shall be forfeited on an ongoing basis by the offending company until such time as the problem is resolved. Further, individual monetary and stock bonuses shall not be earned, accrued, or paid during such an interval.
Rationale: It will require funds to resolve the many problems that come from these situations. However, more importantly, there should be zero question that the fiduciary duty of the officers of the company is to resolve the problem, all other priorities secondary. By making profit and dividends unavailable to stockholders during the time of a problem, there won't be any question that the attention of the officers is on solving the problem rather than feathering their own nest. I hear oil companies have been making billions in profits. That's great. We could use that. Of course, if they want to be careful enough that these things just never happen, that's ok, too.
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As a safeguard, any ocean-based oil well shall be equipped with an explosive device that, if detonated, will close the well. Annual certification of the efficacy of such a device shall be the responsibility of the US Government.
Rationale: If you can't build in an effective way to shut the device down, you shouldn't be starting it up. We can't afford another of these things. If we get out of this one without losing the ecosystem of the entire Caribbean, we'll be doing well.
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All lobbying activities related to oil drilling that involve any federal employee must be videotaped (yes, with audio) and made accessible to the general public on the web in a well-advertised location within 24 hours of occurring and maintained readily available for a period of at least five calendar years. If a public record cannot be made, the activity is illegal and any participant is subject to a mandatory penalty of 5 years in prison.
Rationale: We need full transparency on how this matter is handled now and in the future. The government has no interest in secrecy when addressing policy matters. If companies want to engage in secret discussions, they can leave the government out of it.
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Crimes such as fraud, bribery, or other activities that attempt to circumvent regulations related to the safety of oil drilling or oil transport shall carry a mandatory sentence of life in prison with no parole.
Rationale: These are not so-called “white collar” crimes to be shrugged away. These issues matter, and violations must not be tolerated.
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Gross negligence leading to the creation of a large scale spill of oil, creating a long-term negative effect on the environment, shall be deemed a crime of the most serious nature, a crime against humanity, carrying a mandatory penalty of life in prison without parole.
Rationale: This is the environment we're talking about. It keeps us all alive. We aren't taking very good care of the environment these days anyway. We don't need these extra problems. We need a strong incentive for people to not want to be negligent. An affordable fine paid out of the corporate till is not that. People have to feel that their entire future depends on not making a mistake here.
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Notwithstanding the ordinary limits on liability that would apply to a corporation or LLC, the officers of any oil company shall be personally both civilly and criminally liable in the case of any negligence that leads to the consequential deaths of any person.
Rationale: If the officers have a personal stake in the game, they're going to think twice about putting others in danger. Right now, corporate officers have a fiduciary duty to ignore all concerns other than making a profit for stockholders.
Yeah, that's probably the kind of thing Obama is going to announce.
I feel better already.
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RomanticPoetess
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Stinky Septic Fakes.
They are worst than sewers.
They have polecat ring shirt.
They can't fix clog commode.
If a dryer fuse blows call 911!
What scum worthless looters!
They call Wrath God to forgive!
No. Nature will Be Vengeful too!
`
I think of Diane Wilson the Shrimper. Diane was raising AWARENESS in the eighties. She is a fourth generation fisherwoman. Read `
AN UNREASONABLE WOMAN? A truestory ref Shrimpers,
POLITICOS, Wall Street Lobby, POLLUTERS, and the Non-Monitored EPA who are in CAHOOTS with CORRUPT LAWYERS.
`
pause.
It's unbelievable. I got a letter from the Chief Scientist at the EPA during Clinton/Gore. As a layman I was outraged ref `SLUDGE DOMPED on farm field. The POLLUTERS are MOB CRITTERS. They kill air, sky, and darken Everything. They write fancy "statistical analysis reports" and ifyou tell the White House?
They audit you.
Read:`
Not In M Backyard.SLUGE KILL CHILDREN and RUINS ONCE FERTLE FARM FIELDS.
`
O, and how about Mountain Removal? Interview the coal industry victims? They ignore truth.
FOOLS. Remember Imortality.
Read Blaise Pascal Pascal`Wager?
I go off with calm-anger. Great read.
I'll reread slowly. Greed. Pit of Vipers.
Same-same. Once they croak? Oy, O my.
Why wonder what is a bad sin? O, pork?
Bacon? Lord. O, lard. Grand theft crime?
O, and maybe the NSA has adultery tapes?
O, what goes once the White Crook Croaks?
Maybe post-die, they fall in love with Pedro?
They get a tattoo signed by modern Beelzebub?
Thanks for the post. Mercy if I go-off. Woe, Oy!
Maybe they can be Baptist? Dunk in Dead Seas!
Maybe we get to see melodramatic panic attack!
If your negligence results in death(s) the corporation is subject to the "corporate death penalty." The corporation is decertified and its assets are used to satisfy any resultant claims. If it is a foreign corporation, its US assets are seized and sold and its officers may not work for any corporation that functions within the US for a period of say 20 years.
I'm every bit as hopeful as you Kent that my ideas will be adopted.
"Limited" used because they forgot to add the un prefix to the term.
In legal terms - light a fire under the officer's asses and you won't have fires in the middle of the Gulf. The safety redundancies would be redundantly redundant.
Den dey won' do dat...as my Gulf Coast buddy would say...
Which would leave the US where? Impoverished and permanently crippled? Nope, back in our old position as THE beacon of freedom and opportunity for a crippled planet.
It would start a domino effect of revolutionary change for the entire world.
Oh, for the light of change.
Anything less than dissolving them is merely masking the problem, not solving it.
RATED
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Lefty, the problem is indeed not that they are bad ideas but that the people who would have to vote are probably ethically compromised. Alas.
Anna, as with the financial problems, they really just didn't see this issue as likely and figured it was worth the risk. Did you see the reports the other day about the argument that went on earlier that day? This is likely the result of a very specific decision, much like the O-ring disaster of the Challenger accident. A bargaining on the part of management for speed over safety. That's the thing I would like to see someone pay for, in order to set an example, or else serious regulations put in place saying the next guy will pay so it never happens twice. As the Bush quote goes, “Fool me once...” (ok, the Bush quote goes off track after that, but there's another, older version of it that's relevant here.)
Tim, that's an interesting one. I think the primary issue is that it disproporitionately penalizes the corporation for the acts of an individual. I don't have a problem with a corporation getting a big penalty but I want it to be in response to something the corporation is responsible for fixing. If a rogue individual as CEO does something bad, sometimes a corporation might not be at fault, and that's why I want the show-through to the liability of individuals.
Paul, yes, I mostly agree with you. The whole issue is, as they say, “skin in the game.” I thought I'd hide this one in there in case they want to give me just 1/6 of what I'm asking for and it's just this one. Heh.
Saturn, yes, deadly serious. I think you're right—it would be funny if not so serious. Amazing to think these things have been allowed to be the norm.
Vonnia, you touch on an important point. So often when people consider a hypothetical change, they assume the rest of the system would not change, rather than thinking out the system after it really absorbed the change and all its consequences. I'm of the mind to believe that business will continue under almost any well-described and universally applied set of principles, so I tend to ignore any claim that a particular political change will make business impossible. I think what we should do is set the rules for business in a way we can live with them, and in this case I mean “live” quite literally since the ecosystem is threatened. Business will accommodate.
Birdog
Birdog
Oahusurfer, I think getting investigations to get to the root of something is tough. Maybe if this is big enough to have a thorough investigation, some of what you say will come out, but it will be buried in a mire of other facts. I doubt it will be clear. And as to this being the end of “fossil fuel earth-rape” as you call it, while I don't doubt your kind wishes for the ecology, I do doubt both the public's and the government's wisdom in this area. I more imagine they'll up the budget for green paint and windmills (to tilt at) and then it will be business as usual.
nanatehay, I fear you're right. In case you couldn't tell from the tone of the closing of this, I'm less than certain my ideas will actually be what Obama rolls out. Then again, if ever there was a time to try...
Berdina, glad you like the transparency idea. I think a lot of people would like that for a lot of reasons. (Oh, and it's ok to comment without reading comments—whatever works. Sometimes redundancy of expression is good.)
My general meta-rule on matters like this is that it's fine to separate responsibility only insofar as you really own that responsibility, and that when you don't, the responsibility should go back. The problem is that groups isolate themselves ostensibly for the reason that they can't do their correct function without autonomy, and then once the rule exists it is used for other purposes.
I somewhat think that when someone is given a shield like this, whether it's a corporation for responsibility or a teacher's union or tenure system for maintaining its own theory of which teachers are possible to get rid of, there should always be a way to appeal. In diplomatic immunity, the country can waive it on a per-individual-per-situation basis and allow prosecution of an event to go through. If a public corporation could elect to waive individual immunity, I suspect it would in these cases, since the corporation probably wants nothing to do with it (partly related to Tim's corporate death penalty idea—they'd probably rather break off the sick part of them than remain an entire sick entity and risk someone wanting to disband them all).
If I'm right that the corporation would probably waive the rule, the question is who the rule serves. It doesn't serve the public and it doesn't serve the corporation. It seems to singularly serve the people making bad decisions. I'm sure there's an argument that you couldn't hire people willing to make decisions under those terms. I don't know. There are a lot of hungry people in the world that I bet would disagree. Similar arguments are made that you couldn't hire people to work as CEO's of those companies without exhorbitant bonuses, but I doubt that claim as well. It just sounds like of gratuitously cushy and the sort of thing like the housing market where an “adjustment” is coming.
There is at least 40, possibly 60 years' worth of organizational behavior research showing that large financial rewards to not produce incremental motivation. The "aligning interests" of CEO and shareholders argument is bullpucky; the CEO's *job* is to have those interests aligned. We don't pay an engineer extra to "align their interests with the interests of the employer," we shouldn't pay managers.
And lastly, there's a TED talk by Daniel Pink ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y ) in which he relates research that there's an *inverse* relationship between compensation and creativity in problem solving. Given that, it's even harder to justify CEO pay.
1 - It would be better to have a large base amount, say $50 B, and make it the greater of, just in case the company's was low on profits for a few years. Also, how does it get determined when the problem is resolved?
3 - Videotaping lobbying will just lead to staged conversations while the cameras are on. Then the lobbyist and I head our for some drinks at a noisy bar or dinner at his place where the real business takes place. Sounds unenforceable.
Should these touch sanctions also be applied to nuclear facilities, chemical plants and anywhere else that an industrial accident can have severe consequences?
And to be clear and in the interest of disclosure, I own both BP and Transocean stock. I would be hurt by what I suggest. But there is no other way to both end the actions of this company (while setting an example of them) and keeping those whose choices resulted in these 26 deaths from being in a position to do so again in their lifetimes.
BP is a British company. In Britain they are regulated in ways that would have prevented these deaths. They could have simply followed those more stringent regulations here.
On a tangential note, I dont agree with this being "Obama's Katrina." I am working on a piece calling it "Obama's Chernobyl" as that killed and sickened many more people and continues to do so. So will this "spill."
Abrawang, on point 1 I agree that some “alternative minimum penalty” (to borrow from the metaphor of AMT) might make sense as a modification. On point 3, the point isn't to make it impossible to find loopholes, but to give the public a wedge to drive. Even if there are ways to make it tough, people will learn to lipread, they'll insist on more sensitive microphones, and most importantly they'll catch people at other times skirting rules more blatantly. Not always, but at least so it's not done with impunity.
Karin, I didn't have a specific comment other than to say I share your sadness and surprise, ... or am glad you share mine. I suspect there's a lot of such sadness and surprising springing up all about.
I agree 100% with the misaligned incentives. Incentives are dastardly hard to get right, but I think over time, it's fairly easy to spot when they're clearly wrong. Right now, they're clearly wrong.
In the U.S. it isn't likely to change as long as our courts still insist we manage to short-term shareholder gain. Many Americans are surprised to learn that other countries do not have that requirement, and corporations are considered as having multiple stakeholders. But when you make profit (and more specifically, profit *growth*) the sole legal definition of success, any time profit growth collides with ethics, profit growth will win. After all, unethical behavior isn't necessarily illegal, just unethical.
A great speech on the topic was given by Len Schlesinger, then-COO of Limited Brands, a Fortune 500 company, on the topic of the triple bottom line. He tells a story of a social good issue that arose while he was COO. If you decide to listen, commit to listening for the whole hour. Hearing his side of the issue is really pretty fascinating, and he leads to a rather interesting set of questions about the integrity of the whole corporate system: http://www.steverrobbins.com/r/lenspeech
By the way, Open Salon lets you insert hyperlinks in comments. The interface (or lack thereof) is painful, but I've written down some instructions.