The Government should immediately seize all of BP’s assets and set in motion its orderly liquidation. This doesn’t mean operations stop, merely that the company will be slowly spun apart at government profit. The shareholders are totally wiped out. A trust fund should be set up to permanently fund coastal restoration.
Where there is evidence that executives were directly implicated in criminal negligence, they should be placed under indictment.
A question our times poses is, what has more legal authority: private corporations or the public welfare as entrusted to the government? Obviously the former can only exist through the order created by the latter. Where this principle is forgotten, corporations inevitably seek to co-opt and buy out sectors of public governance. The greatest profit would be achieved if the corporation could nullify all government restraint. Essentially, corporations tend naturally towards organized theft or public looting. This behavior leads to a gang-warfare mentality that is fatal to the stability of the corporation itself.
What, you say, my proposal is ludicrous, politically impossible, impractical? It wouldn’t be easy, of course, but it is the only conceivable way the gulf coast can be “made whole” in the parlance of the president and the CEO. I have to suppress a black smile whenever I hear such phrases. In these cases, governments and corporations profit from the unquestioned orthodoxy of our culture, which absolutely banishes the thought that catastrophe can strike in our lives at any time. People, the damage from this corporate disaster is incalculable. It’s literally beyond human reckoning.
The alternative to receivership is clear: a paltry pay-out, swift return to oil business as usual, cushy retirements or new jobs for the executives, decades of legal wrangling dominated by the patience and money of BP, and of course an unending spectacle of depressing political clowning from the corporate crack-whores sprinkled across government. Frontline type programs will roll out for years about the unreported and unmitigated destruction of the environment, about which BP will never do anything at all. So don’t tell me BP will pay every penny. Don’t ask me to believe that bullshit.
If such receivership is not legally possible at this time, put a bill before congress making it legal for the purpose of literally protecting the homeland!!! Dare the republicans to vote against it. The public supports this!
