In the rogues' gallery of corporate executive deceit, one brazen standout among many was the 1994 simultaneous appearance of seven tobacco firm CEOs before a congressional committee, each swearing under oath that smoking is not addictive. Worse, the estimated 400,000 deaths attributed to smoking each year didn't rattle their consciences.
Then and there, the U.S. political and criminal justice systems could've/should've embarked on enforcing unambiguous laws that provide prosecution and prison terms for executives willfully making decisions that injure or kill, or deprive consumers of their livelihoods and property.
Instead, Big Tobacco brass walked away from the hearings unscathed and into comfortable retirement, immunized by years of kingly political campaign donations to politicians, lobbyists' arm twisting and the notorious argument that, after all, cigarettes are a legal product, even if they do kill and maim thousands of smokers.
Now, nearly two decades later, comparable, crippling, callous corporate decisions have inflicted new disasters on the U.S. government and public with astronomical direct and indirect costs that will be paid for decades to come.
Claiming everything was legal, even if it amounted to cheating the government and public out of billions of dollars, Wall Street concocted schemes that led to hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts, not to mention lost homes, lost jobs and lost careers.
Topping this conduct is the Big Oil biggie, BP, whose Deepwater Horizon oil rig has spilled millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, plus taking the lives of 11 workers. Evidence is emerging that impatient BP executives pressured workers to bypass safety, ignore drilling malfunctions and speed up production to avoid expenses. BP's safety breaches at other operations are infamous.
Add to contemporary corporate culpability Massey Energy, whose latest outrage is 29 miners' deaths and whose lawlessness is legion—in 2009, 10 of its 35 mines had 2,400 safety violations—and whose braggart CEO is notorious for manipulating politicians to ignore Massey Energy's appalling, unsafe mines.
Rather than once again falling for double-talk, the Obama administration should rigorously search federal statutes for ways to prosecute executives responsible for defiant disregard for the safety and well-being of workers as well as for investors and taxpayers. Throw in cozy government regulators who failed to enforce laws.
Prison time for a few multi-millionaire executives and government regulators would have a profoundly curative effect on the behavior of others who consider betraying the public trust a mere cost of being profitable.
