West Virginia chemical spill

No one said self regulate. I said have an insurance company regulate and pay them. This we everyone has a monetary incentive to do their job.

People care about their money don't they? So do insurers. Go work in a restaraunt and see whose inspectors do a more detailed job, insurers or government. It has been the insurers in every restaraunt I worked in. They (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)ed about everything. The state guy just glanced around and was always home by 5.

 

You need a SEPARATE body, totally outside the interests of BOTH sides, who has no interest in the outcomes either way. The 'ones with the money at risk', have an 'interest' in NOT risking their money. Understand? MONEY drives it all, is the point I think you're missing. That's what happened, in large part, to healthcare. The 'providers' of it, overcharged, and did whatever the hell they wanted, and the insurance companies (with the advent of HMO's) came in and 'oversaw' cost excesses, and started to try and control them (since THEY were the ones footing the bill), and then, 'providers' looked for ways around it, (by doing excessive 'tests' that they know insurance companies would pay for), and round and round we go, ending up with the healthcare mess (that Republicans didn't see as a problem), that we have now.

What NEEDS to happen, is BIG MONEY lobbyists need to be out of the picture when it comes to trying to 'influence' government, and government corporate cronies who take (what are essentially payoffs/bribes..like governor Bob Ultrasound did in Virginia) need to go to jail.

None of that really happens though, and hence, our totally whacked out system of corruption, scandal and corporate payoffs that we all suffer from currently.

 

Apparently the guy who just bought the company is a $Billionaire but because of the corporate shell game will get away without liability. The game of private profit at the public expense has gone on far too long. All we need to do is replace LLC incorporation with Unlimited incorporation and the owners and operators of corporations will become extremely interested in reducing the external liabilities their companies face because they will be personally subject to criminal prosecution and economic liability for corporate misdeeds.

In the early years of the republic corporate charters were chartered by state legislatures for limited time specific ventures. Chartered Corporations had unlimited liability. The only limited liability corporations were for ships, which limited investors losses to the value of the ship as a means to encourage trade. Over time the LLC became standard for any single business venture but corporations seeking to operate in more than one business were required to charter as an Unlimited Corporation where shareholders liability was unlimited. If the corporation failed creditors could seek payment from shareholders personal wealth. These days there are no Unlimited corporations. The tiny loophole of the LLC meant to encourage trade in the new republic has become carte blanche for investors to reap profits, rid themselves of liabilities and foist the expense of cleaning up the damage onto the public simply by declaring bankruptcy and walking away.

These are the same people who became so exercised about the "moral hazard" of mortgage borrowers walking away from their underwater mortgages when the entire US housing market went upside down. The Wall Street Journal expressed not a peep of outrage when investors walked away from their $6Billion+ mortgage on the Stuyvesant Village in NYC when that went underwater.

The biggest problem In the US these days is that there is a syndrome of loud media noises that concentrate on failures of government which deflects scrutiny away from the perpetrators, who are often a primary influence in the government's deliberate malfeasance in the first place. In West Virginia there is no questions about the influence of the coal and chemical industries in government regulation and oversight of environmental regulations.

The only question is how they get away with it. The way they do that is through a long running concerted propaganda campaign to instill an existential fear in the populace that regulation of their industries will bring nothing but total economic ruin, that government regulation is an attack on them personally meant to destroy them and their families. It has been highly effective. The coal and chemical industries have been able to destroy and pollute vast swaths of West Virginia with little opposition. The people have put up with it because they are convinced it is the only way to preserve their livelihoods.

Maybe this latest catastrophe will break through the propaganda, but the prospect for that is dubious because an existential threat propaganda campaign run over an extended period is extremely difficult to dislodge.

 

Get away with what? It passed inspection. It was up to code. It is a tank, it was surrounding by concrete like it was supposed to be.

Now - these types of accidents will happen even with a massive regulatory and police state hanging every business owner when a mistake occurs right? Will still happen?

In those cases who would you want in charge of the safety? A government that can't be sued, doesn't pay out, and won't have any changes to staff? That will punish every other business except the one that just one bankrupt?

Or would you want a company with its name at stake competing with others to provide better safety and paying out when mistakes occur?

This wasnt a long propaganda campaign though. This was a tank leak that didnt cost any lives the water is being shut down just in case. Take things in perspective.

 

Alright greed head. No point talking to you, you are full on obsessed.

 

This is an interesting idea. You would still need government to regulate the insurance carriers themselves, but that would at least be efficient.

There is a problem with incentive, though, isn't there? The insurance carrier's incentive isn't minimizing risk, it's minimizing liability.

 

Taxcutter says:
Remember those filthy Warsaw Pact countries?

 

Liability would be minimized through monitoring. Insurers can be regulated to just make sure they have cash on hand. Coverage should be blanket and uncapped.

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You should see what the government does to the Indian river lagoon.

 

The sales agreement required Freedom Industries to commit funds to repair the containment wall around the tanks, it was not up to codes because it was full of holes and they knew it. As far a being up to code, what code is that? Due to regulatory loopholes the EPA had no jurisdiction over those tanks and neither did the state environmental regulators. If you mean the voluntary code of the Chemical Council, Freedom Industries was not a member and never had its operations certified as up to their code.

If the people who own and manage the company have their personal fortunes at risk they will take a lot more care to avoid the chance of a catastrophe that will take away all their money and put them in prison but the reality now is that they can all just walk away and leave the public with the cost of cleaning up the disaster they created.

Or would you want a company that just walks away and changes its name when mistakes occur, which is how it is going to happen with Freedom Industries, which has already made filings to shield the rest of the company and its shareholders from liability by separating that plant from the holding company and filing bankruptcy because its expected liabilities far exceed it insurance, which the insurer is sure to decline to pay due to company negligence.

Just to get things in perspective.
That river flows into the Ohio River, which flows into the Mississippi River. The chemicals that spilled are not benign. New information has come out that PPH and MBTE were also in that tank. These are persistent organic chemicals that are known to be dangerous to humans. They are now polluting water that 100 million people drink from and 10 million farmers use to water their crops.

 

Yeah it was a concrete tank that broke and a concrete wall. Not a propaganda campaign.

The rest is all straw man. Lets go back to the beginning of my argument. Insurance companies with balances on hand to deal with the costs of this thing would pay better then regulators - true or false? Businesses won't keep that kind of cash on hand not is it efficient to do so. Agree?