What If BP Were A Human Being?

From AlterNet:

In a century of doing business, BP has been implicated in bribery of public officials, grand theft, fomenting unjust wars, of murder, torture, plunder, environmental destruction, and money laundering in and between scores of countries on every continent except Antarctica. If BP were a person it would be a career criminal, a pathological liar and an international serial killer with a rap sheet several times the size of the Chicago Yellow Pages.

More here.

I've posted on this before, albeit not specifically about BP: even though corporations, a.k.a. "legal persons," have wildly different incentives and motivations from real people, US laws and courts treat corporations in many ways as though they were actually human beings. And I'm not just talking about corporate first amendment "rights." That is, as the above linked article well illustrates, corporations often behave in ways that would horrify us if such actions were performed by individual, living, breathing people.

I mean, if I was personally responsible for BP's latest crime against humanity, I'd be in prison for the rest of my life. I'd lose everything I own. People would try to kill me. But not BP. I'm betting pretty heavily that their executives will see no jail time at all over this. By federal law, their liability is capped at $75 million dollars; relative to their yearly earnings, it might as well be fifty bucks. And, if I were inclined, which I'm not, not really, anyway, to kill somebody over this spill, who do I shoot at? In the end, a corporation is simply an organization. How do you murder an organization?

BP is on everybody's minds right now because the oil giant's crime is leading off the evening news every night. But as a specific case study, it's a damned fine example of the lunacy of allowing "legal persons" nearly the full array of rights that real persons have. Go read the essay. It is, at the very least, eye opening.

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