U.S. needs three-strikes law
for habitual corporate offenders

From the late 1970′s through the ’90′s, numerous states passed three-strikes and habitual-criminal laws as a means of protecting the public from the “two-inch-thick police record” set.

Those laws targeted both violent offenders and lesser criminals for whom repeated short-time jail and prison sentences provided no deterrence against committing future crimes – incorrigibles with no moral compass, no sense of right and wrong, no scruples and no conscience.

Generally considered effective in protecting the public, those laws made judges consider a criminal’s history and mandated long prison sentences meant not to rehabilitate but to remove incorrigibles from society for a long time, period.

Considering the damage done to innocent people, smaller businesses and the environment by some big corporations that qualify as incorrigibles, we see a need for another such crackdown.

BP America provides a good example of an incorrigible big corporation, based on its rotten record.

Follow that link to read more about BP’s deadly 2005 safety lapse:

In March 2005, a massive explosion ripped through a tower at BP’s refinery in Texas City, Texas, killing 15 workers and injuring 170 others. Investigators later determined that the company had ignored its own protocols on operating the tower, which was filled with gasoline, and that a warning system had been disabled.The company pleaded guilty to federal felony charges and was fined more than $50 million by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

A year later, it came to light that BP had fouled of the delicate Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, Permafrost with a pipeline oil leak that went unchecked for years because of cutting corners and utter lack of care.

There’s more, but the pattern is clear. This company doesn’t give a happy damn about its workers, the public, the environment or anything but making as much money as it can, any way it can. Very much like a street punk with no conscience and no self-control.

A strong habitual-offender case can be made against Halliburton subsidiary KBR, whose corporate-crime rap sheet includes killing several U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The troops were electrocuted in shower rooms in Iraq that had been improperly wired by KBR workers and subcontractors. While that was KBR’s most spectacular wrongdoing, its rap sheet goes on and on.

Then there’s Blackwater, now renamed Xe.

Congress should develop a law requiring the Justice Department, EPA and other agencies to identify habitual corporate offenders. That law should then provide legal means for shutting down and dismantling those corporations, or at least banishing them from operating in the U.S.

Congress, despite all the money BP America has pumped its way, should do that for the same reason states enacted three-strikes and habitual-offender laws.

And since the Supreme Court, in its egregious Citizens United decision, deemed corporations to be persons, the court should sustain the new law as it has sustained the states’ laws.