THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Thom Hartman and Sam Sacks, writing in Truthout, call for a proper penalty for BP for failure to operate in the public interest.

Eleven workers were killed when their oil rig exploded, and for three months five million barrels of toxic crude gushed in the Gulf of Mexico as BP, which never made contingency plans for this sort of obvious crisis, tried to find a way to plug the hole. That oil killed marine life, blanketed coastlines, and put Gulf Coast small businesses out of business. To this day, we still don't know the long-term effects of this catastrophe on the ecosystem or our food chain, which is now contaminated with eyeless shrimp, clawless crabs, and other oil-mutated aquatic freak shows. Not to mention the human cancers that will show up in future decades.

Now, the foreign corporation responsible for all of this, BP, will just cut a small check, and then go back to business as usual, punching holes in the Gulf. It pled guilty to 14 felony and misdemeanor charges and agreed to pay a $4.5 billion fine – the largest criminal fine in our nation's history. But for a corporation that just announced it earned $5.4 billion in three months, BP knows it got off easy.

The organization Public Citizen notes, "Claims arising from the Gulf disaster, which killed 11 workers and did untold damage, put the company's liability at a minimum of $51.5 billion." That's more than ten-times what BP will end up paying to settle.

As part of the settlement, the government still reserves the right to charge two BP employees for manslaughter. It will likely be two low-level workers who'll have to take the fall for an entire corporation – and industry – that repeatedly ignored regulations and cut safety corners, just to maximize their quarterly profits. Because of our two-tiered justice system, rarely do corporate suits go to jail.

And they are only looking at BP's Gulf Spill. If you add in BP's prior atrocious safety record of operation, it only gets worse.