if only they had that for the deepwater horizon spill.

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Any movie that has Deepwater Horizon in the title and is not a documentary about corporate corruption, neglect, greed and massive environmental damage seems embarrassing. The whole idea seems distasteful and kinda turns my stomach.

There are approximately 343,423,668,428,484,681,262 gallons of water in the ocean. The BP Deepwater Horizon dumped around 210,000,000 million of gallons of oil into the Gulf.

Insignificant? Acceptable? You do the math.

>> ^blankfist:

It would be very hard for businesses to get as large as corporations do today without the unfair support of government. This means more competition, and logically as a result more small businesses would sprout up, and therefore more jobs could be created.

I think taking away the liability limits ultimately raises the barrier for creating a new business, since it increases the potential downside risk of any new investment, and worse, makes predicting the worst case scenario nigh impossible.

The knock on effects of that would be that investors would be more reluctant to invest, meaning that interest rates would go up, and the tolerance for risk would go down.

In some sense I think we'd see companies that are larger, but also "flatter" in a sense. I'm thinking more McDonalds, Best Buy, and Amazon, and a lot less heavy industry with big, expensive, dangerous, illiquid capital investment.

I sorta say "so what, it's more fair, and restrains corporations' flagrant disregard for safety and the environment".

However, for people who want to see a bazillion small businesses, I think you want the limited liabilities there to help people simplify their risk assessments.
>> ^blankfist:

I don't see why we'd need regulatory requirements or unionization. Most of the responsibility would be held at the top levels, such as CEOs or COOs or supervisors or whomever. And this can all be decided by some form of conflict resolution whether that be the courts or arbitration.

Well, courts are guided by law in those sorts of determinations, arbitration is more guided by the relative strength of the bargaining positions of the participants (i.e. little people get reliably crushed).

Which is to say, we'd need to set some sort of standard on how accountability works, or it'll only be the guy following orders who gets the short end of the stick.

>> ^blankfist:
But my point was that people couldn't escape liability just because they're employed. If your boss told you to murder someone, for instance, you know that to be wrong and would hopefully not follow through. But if you did murder someone, obviously you'd be held accountable, right? kind of the same idea. Maybe not exactly, but it's close enough.

For something as serious and obvious as murder, sure.

But say my boss tells me not to order the scheduled maintenance for critical safety equipment because "it's not in the budget"? If things go wrong later, am I to be held responsible because my idiot boss didn't budget for proper maintenance? Do I really need to constantly present my boss with waivers from legal liability for every decision I think has a potential risk? Can he fire me for demanding them too often?

>> ^blankfist:
If a business spilled oil like BP did, then all the parties involved would be liable within reason. If you were hired to clean the toilets on the rig, then you're probably not going to be responsible in any direct or indirect way. But if you are hired as a professional to do a specific job like supervising the boom or drilling or whatever, and that contributed somehow to the spill, then you're probably going to inherit some substantial responsibility. And I think that's more than fair.


I agree with that, but in my experience as a technical professional, I have to say that unsafe shit is almost exclusively something that happens when management refuses to pony up the cash to do things the right way.

But let's look at the other side of the coin. For the sake of argument, let's pretend management didn't do anything obviously wrong on Deepwater Horizon, and it was just some guy out on the rig who just made a stupid mistake and caused the whole thing to happen.

Should that guy bear all of the financial liability alone, while the CEO's, shareholders, and the company itself are held blameless?

I say even in that case, the blame needs to go upward -- management hired the guy, and someone higher up approved the process that was susceptible to massive damage coming from one guy's human error. They're the ones who put the oil rig in his hands, they're the ones responsible for the damage he did with it.

@blankfist I guess that's true, thread hijacking is the natural state of all threads here it seems.

I do think that ultimately we see more eye to eye than it looks like to most observers, and while we do have some pretty deep disagreements about fundamentals, there's probably a broad legislative agenda you and I could endorse that the mainstream parties would never go for.

That said, there's a lot of details to work out with what the right way to deal with accountability for corporations really is.

For example, who should individually be held responsible for the Deepwater Horizon incident? Who should have to pay for the damages? If that person can't afford to actually pay the damages, should the corporation's finances cover the shortfall?

I think I'm torn between saying that the CEO needs to be held responsible, and the shareholders need to be held responsible. Maybe the criminal charges hit the CEO, and the monetary compensation hits the shareholders?

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

^Us per usual, JesusFreak is clueless. Had safety valve regulations been in place - as is the case in many other countries - the BP oil disaster would have been averted.
Enlighten yourself here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575212031
417936798.html
"U.S. regulators don't mandate use of the remote-control device on offshore rigs, and the Deepwater Horizon, hired by oil giant BP PLC, didn't have one. With the remote control, a crew can attempt to trigger an underwater valve that shuts down the well even if the oil rig itself is damaged or evacuated."
Pro tip: If you accuse others of stupidity, you should be careful to not pair the charge with obviously stupid commentary of your own.


You mean the regulatory body in charge of regulating it wasn't regulating it well enough? How is that any different? If only government could solve problems with hindsight, we would be set! Pro tip, if you make a point, actually make one.


PS. Are those laws even in place yet? Also, "PAGE UNAVAILABLE". I will have to take your word on the government being inept.

^Us per usual, JesusFreak is clueless. Had safety valve regulations been in place - as is the case in many other countries - the BP oil disaster would have been averted.

Enlighten yourself here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575212031417936798.html

"U.S. regulators don't mandate use of the remote-control device on offshore rigs, and the Deepwater Horizon, hired by oil giant BP PLC, didn't have one. With the remote control, a crew can attempt to trigger an underwater valve that shuts down the well even if the oil rig itself is damaged or evacuated."

Pro tip: If you wish to accuse others of stupidity, you should be careful to not pair the charge with obviously stupid commentary of your own.

Tags for this video have been changed from '60 minutes, australia, bp, oil, gulf, drill, deepwater' to '60 minutes, australia, bp, oil, gulf, drill, deepwater horizons' - edited by jwray

I had to downvote this because of your fucking stupid video comment.

Not only is BP no longer a british company (since long before the spill), but i'd like to point out that the deepwater horizon rig was owned by transocean LEASED to BP. That means that probably the only thing on that rig that had an affiliation to BP was some stickers, a few posters and 2 blokes in a suit who said "send the oil rigs over there."

Briefly check who transocean are and you'll find that though its offices move from time to time to take advantage of tax, it's historically an american company, merged with other companies (some of them yet again US based) buti'll stop short of being as ignorant as you and suggest it may have international shareholders too, and as far as i'm concerned the accident was 60% their fault and 40% BP's stupid fault for not fixing and properly equipping the shit-shoddy equipment they leased.

A friend of mine from arkansas insisted to me when the accident happened that he had some insider info having worked in the business, and when i said i was pretty ashamed an ex-british company could get so crap, he said, "You're pretty naive, that whole damn rig was run by americans and staffed by americans."

Sorry if this was an unecessarily aggressive response to a joke, but i'm pretty sick of hearing that sort of thing. If anyone thinks that the entire crew of people working on that rig were a bunch of careless limeys, the same careless limeys who are failing to do a proper clean up, you need to look a lot closer to home.

Edit:
Bit more to add, a US based company attended the rig to fix a fault and were asked a few questions about the incident as well as cameron international (US based) who made the equipment which failed.

>> ^volumptuous:
If he had his way, through massive deregulation, the Deepwater Horizon spill would be just a drop in the bucket.

Correct. The size of the oil spill would be the size of a drop in a bucket, because they wouldn't have a ridiculous 75 million dollar liability limit, and that kind of deregulation would make companies like BP very careful.

Ron Paul : Leader of the Unhinged Opposition.

If he had his way, through massive deregulation, the Deepwater Horizon spill would be just a drop in the bucket.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'The Young Turks, Oil Spill' to 'The Young Turks, Oil Spill, gulf, deepwater horizon, haley barbour' - edited by kronosposeidon

I am genuinely disgusted by this man, if you can call him that. I did some simple Googling, and I found this list of funds that he's received from lobbyists:

Oil & Gas $1,448,380
Electric Utilities $1,361,985
Health Professionals $1,102,804
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products $797,738
Lawyers/Law Firms $556,415
TV/Movies/Music $503,349
Automotive $330,350
Chemical & Related Manufacturing $323,940
Lobbyists $323,000
Telephone Utilities $300,420
Insurance $282,199
Misc Manufacturing & Distributing $259,490
Real Estate $240,450
Retail Sales $237,130
Hospitals/Nursing Homes $227,384
Retired $227,272
Securities & Investment $224,208
Defense Aerospace $220,550
Commercial Banks $214,810
Computers/Internet $204,474

Also, from Wikipedia:

"During his political career, the industries that have been Barton's largest contributors were oil and gas ($1.4 million donated), electric utilities ($1.3 million) and health professionals ($1.1 million)[33] He is ranked first among members of the House of Representatives for the most contributions received from the oil and gas industry, and number five among all members of Congress. His largest corporate contributor, Anadarko Petroleum, owns a 25 percent share in the Macondo Prospect, the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.[34]"

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