Why Executives Need To Be Prosecuted For Corporate Crime
BP at first blamed it on “operator error.” John Browne, who was then its chief executive — and the man most responsible for creating BP’s culture of putting profits over safety — insisted that the accident, like all the other BP accidents, was just a matter of being unlucky. Lots of people knew better, including a handful of federal investigators who had been tracking the company for years.
Yet, in the end, BP wound up paying $2.1 billion — most of it to compensate victims — and agreed to a felony conviction. These punishments did nothing to change the company. Barely a year later, a BP-owned pipeline in Alaska ruptured, causing a serious oil spill. After that one, BP agreed to plead to a misdemeanor and paid a fine. Lustgarten found government documents suggesting that a number of BP executives were investigated by prosecutors. But nothing ever came of those investigations.
I have argued in the past, mainly in the context of the financial crisis, that the country has been poorly served by the Justice Department’s unwillingness to hold to account big shots like Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide, whose companies’ illegal practices helped lead us to the brink of financial apocalypse. It has sent a terrible message that there are two kinds of justice: one for the rich and powerful, and another for everybody else.
But there is another reason corporate executives need to be prosecuted when corporate crimes take place. It sends a signal to every other executive about what is — and is not — acceptable behavior. The threat of prison can change a culture faster and more effectively than even the heftiest fine. If, after the Texas City explosion, one BP executive or more had been prosecuted, it seems to me quite likely that the Deepwater Horizon accident would never have happened. A prison sentence would have done the thing that all those fines never did: force the company to begin paying attention to safety.
Prison is what makes the difference. Otherwise, it’s only money.
I think we should be able to prosecute Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld for war crimes, since we KNOW that they were told in advance that torture was illegal. How about that?
The obvious fatal flaw in the logic of this editorial is that it presumes that the executives of a corporation have direct control over the actions of each and every one of the thousands of employees the company has. An expansion of that fatally flawed logic would have us impeaching President Obama for the recent illegal acts of the Secret Service and the members of the armed services. It makes for a nice "progressive" anti-corporation rant, but as with the vast majority of "progressive" thoughts, it lacks intelligent reasoning to support it.
PrintSmith wrote: The obvious fatal flaw in the logic of this editorial is that it presumes that the executives of a corporation have direct control over the actions of each and every one of the thousands of employees the company has. An expansion of that fatally flawed logic would have us impeaching President Obama for the recent illegal acts of the Secret Service and the members of the armed services. It makes for a nice "progressive" anti-corporation rant, but as with the vast majority of "progressive" thoughts, it lacks intelligent reasoning to support it.
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The left is angry because they are now being judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
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