Gulf coast oil spill

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by gvidas

And, at the same time, there seems to me to be a (bipartisan) trend towards moral outrage coming to outweigh logical, direct interpretations of law:

Political posturing in an effort to gain favor for the next election.

tea partiers and ecoterrorists have similar trajectories, in a way.

Not even close, apples and oranges.

So it's social and cultural consequences, maybe, that I'm after. After the Exxon Valdez adventure, the initial punitive damages were set at one years' profit. That didn't stick, but it raises the question: what sort of ecological disaster is significant enough to put a multinational corporation on the scale of BP or Exxon out of business? How do you begin to draw that line?

You can't and will not be able to put a large multi-national out of business. If it is destruction of the company you are after it is not going to happen, the best you could hope for is that it would be swallowed up, in business terms, by another company, and business would go on as usual. But is that the goal? Is that the end we want? No. I don't think so.