www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12124...

Thought an article from the BBC, although based on American findings might be interesting.

From the article :

The BBC's Iain Mackenzie said the report is "incredibly critical" of all of the companies involved.

The companies involved in the BP oil spill had made decisions to cut costs and save time that contributed to the disaster, a US panel has found.

In a 48-page report, the presidential commission wrote that the failures were "systemic" and likely to recur without industry and government reform.

But it said BP did not have adequate controls in place to ensure safety.

The April blast aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 people and caused one of the worst oil spills in history.

The Macondo well, about a mile under the sea's surface, eventually leaked millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, damaging hundreds of miles of coastline before it was capped in July.

If corporations are "persons", there's a bunch of persons who need to go to jail.

Jan 6, 2011 -- 8:50AM, Christianlib wrote:

If corporations are "persons", there's a bunch of persons who need to go to jail.

There's no "if," and you're right---but corporations, themselves, cannot go to jail.  The board members can and should, but likely won't: money speaks with an eloquence that Shakespeare could only envy.  But this is yet another reason why i think that a large body of American law needs to be corrected; corporations are NOT persons, they are business tools, fictional conveniences, THINGS.  Why should fictional things have rights ab initio?  What's next?  The fiction section of the library?

With goodwill to all the People-

Hatman

Jan 6, 2011 -- 9:09AM, Christianlib wrote:

That's what I was getting at, Hat. Obviously, a "corporation" can't be sent to jail.  But those who make the decisions, and those who knowingly profit from the malfeasance can and should.

I had an idea about this, the corporations under the law are people today and have the rights of people. and a person you can charge with a crime.

If you saw everyone that worked for the corporation as being a tiny part of that person, then everyone in the corporation could be fined or imprisoned, say the bourd is the head, the management are the hands arms and legs, the rest of the work force were the body. You prosicute the whole body but the parts most responsible take the greatests punishment.

So the body and uninvolved legs and arms spend one day in prison, the arms or legs involved, 3 years maybe, and the head 10 years.

Ofcourse it would depend on how many years the body gets in prison, if a corporation was given 500 year sentence and all the body workers did a day each, that could knock off a lot of years depending on number of workers.