it happens via brain proximity osmosis. last week sabanfan was within a few hundred yards of my house. i didnt tlk to him because i am anti-social, but i hit him with brainwaves nonetheless.
Actually there is good points in all this. It would be ludicrous to turn a blind eye to big business and not at least keep them honest by investigating any reasonable charges of price gouging or fraud, profitering, etc.. After all big business is run by men and greed is something that will drive men to do very bad things. For the greater good of all the people, they should be at least made to follow the laws. Should it be illegal to profit? well certainly not, this is what our country is based on and no laws should impede business to the point it can't exist. this would hurt people and gas prices even worse. But yes, you should keep an eye on ANY large corporation. this is nothing new.
Something of interest is that the Incident in Texas you referred to had been part of the recent BP buy out of Amoco. The pipeling in question was part of the ARCO buy out. Not defending just pointing out how easy it is to get the rap for other peoples actions.
When you buy out a company you do due diligence to gain comfort with the soundness of the mergees operations. When you assume ownership of an entity you take over all its assets and liabilities. You also become liable for any environmental accidents that may have occurred prior to your purchase. If BP's due diligence process did not turn up this stuff they can only blame themselves.
If you don't know wht really happened in Texas city you never will. Yep and sometimes it means changing attitudes or the employees you just bought. THey have never passsed blame. The only reason I pointed this out is because bp didn't and by reading some of these post you would think BP is out there John Wayneing everything.
That's yes and no. The lawyers tend to work out these details. It is not uncommon for some or all liability to remain with the past owner. However for mergers (as most of the big oil companies have done recently), there generally is no one to retain the liability and it is absorbed by the merger. If there are enough assets to warrant a merger, then generally speaking, the liabilities are small enough to absorb. While BP threw out what appear to be staggering estimates on repair/replacement costs, they are small in the grand scheme when compared to recent profits. Not to worry, the bean counters will offset this one time maintenance loss in Alaska retroactively and reduce profits (and taxes). There is plenty of cash in BP to take care of their problem. Of course, the estimate to repair/replace does not include lost revenue during the outage.
