Year 3, Month 1, Day 2: And They DEFINITELY Shouldn’t Be Allowed To Get Married!

Looks like some underlings are gonna feel some heat:

U.S. prosecutors are preparing what would be the first criminal charges against BP PLC employees stemming from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident, which killed 11 workers and caused the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, said people familiar with the matter.

Prosecutors are focused on several Houston-based engineers and at least one of their supervisors at the British oil company, though the breadth of the investigation isn’t known. The prosecutors assert the employees may have provided false information to regulators about the risks associated with the Gulf of Mexico well while its drilling was in progress, these people said.

As the bumper sticker says, I’ll believe corporations are people when I see Texas execute one. Sent December 29:

Now that the Citizens United decision has helped establish corporate personhood as part of America’s legal fabric, we should all be asking questions about what happens when corporations break the law. Given the conservative/libertarian mantra of “individual responsibility,” one would expect “persons” like British Petroleum to be held fully responsible for their misdeeds.

An individual who, through gross incompetence, destroyed vast swaths of ocean habitat, killed thousands upon thousands of living things, and wiped out local economies would be rightly treated as a criminal. The available evidence suggests that BP’s malfeasance extends all the way up the corporate ladder, with safety and environmental concerns systemically neglected in an all-consuming rush for greater profits.

What BP did to the Gulf of Mexico, the fossil fuel industry as a whole is doing to Earth’s atmosphere. It is time for these corporate “persons” to be indicted and tried for their criminally negligent behavior.

Warren Senders