The New "Malefactors of Great Wealth"

Speaking of class war, it's the reason why BP is going to get away with 11 counts of first-degree, pre-meditated, cold-blooded murder.

Chris Hayes explains why BP is Beyond Punishment:

(T)he public wants to see BP held accountable, and with good reason: early indications are that the company is guilty of a host of mortal sins—from ignoring repeated internal warnings about its safety procedures to harassing workers who raised safety concerns. According to reports from the Guardian and NPR, after the fatal explosion BP sequestered the surviving workers at sea, refusing to let them contact their loved ones, and bullied them into signing forms that indemnified BP for the accident.

After some initial foot-dragging, the Obama administration finally seems to understand that justice demands an aggressive stance. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department is opening a criminal probe into the accident, which claimed the lives of eleven workers; then the White House came out in favor of a bill that would raise the $75 million liability cap on damages from the spill under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. And, of course, President Obama famously told Matt Lauer that he's trying to figure out "whose ass to kick."

That's all well and good. But despite the public outrage at BP and the thirst for justice from the battered residents of the Gulf Coast, there's a decent chance BP will, like Exxon before it, escape fairly unscathed. The reason is the legal and social shift in how we approach punishment for powerful corporations—a shift that contrasts sharply with the trends in punishment for citizens, particularly those without money or power.

SNIP

Aside from the practical consequences of altering the incentive structure, the Exxon case and other statutory caps on liability present a deeper threat to the American moral fabric. Set against the increasingly punitive posture of the state toward its citizens over the past several decades, the arbitrary limits on punishment available to a party like Exxon make a mockery of equal justice under the law. Our criminal justice system is the most punitive of any industrialized democracy. We have 2.3 million people incarcerated, half of them for nonviolent property and drug offenses.

At least two dozen states have three-strikes laws, and in some cases citizens can face life imprisonment for minor nonviolent offenses. In 2003 the Supreme Court upheld a fifty-year sentence for a California man caught stealing videotapes.

And things are even harsher for Americans unlucky enough to need succor from the state to survive, a k a poor people. Just one drug-related felony conviction can get you booted from welfare, or from public housing (though if you own a house, the IRS will still allow you your mortgage-interest deduction). Under federal law, a drug bust disqualifies a college student from all federal student aid. As a result, between 2001 and 2006 almost 200,000 students lost access to aid. The greatest Congressional champion of this unforgiving policy was Mark Souder, the Indiana Republican who resigned after revelations of his affair with a staff member. In his farewell speech, he took solace in the possibility of forgiveness.

A punitive society is not the best kind of society: there's a real virtue in forgiveness, in second chances. But for years we've been applying Rand Paul's "accidents happen" principle to those at the top while heaping blame, scorn and draconian punishment on those at the bottom. Punitive damages are capped for corporations, while punitive policies proliferate for citizens. This tears the social contract apart, and the only way to repair it is to apply the same principles of accountability up and down the social hierarchy. We should start with BP.

Read the whole thing.

Back in the '80s, as Reagan's radicals were creating the corporate plutocracy that plagues us today, occasionally a liberal would complain about the elevation of the rich at the expense of the poor. Broderist pundits would immediately scold them for playing class war.

Molly Ivins used to respond: "Of course it's class war. What do they think the republicans are playing, Mah-Jongg?"