OUR VIEW

For anyone paying attention, the recent U.S. court stickup of British Petroleum may turn out to be the excessive penalty straw that breaks the back of U.S. government robber barons.
 

What's been going on during this crew's reign of corporate terror is huge penalties and adverse legal assessments involving billions of dollars.

The list of victims is long and lush. Wrong doings are one thing and they should be punished. But blatant, broad-daylight stickups need to stop. With the latest BP court decision now one of America's staunchest allies--the United Kingdom, home of BP--has jumped into the fray for the second time.

French bank BNP was sentenced earlier this year to pony up $8.9 billion in fines for its corporate transgressions. Though the Justice Department in a phony, clumsy attempt to show impartiality slapped hefty fines on numerous U.S. corporations--mostly big banks--the penalty pendulum has in the view of many swung way too far.

In a recent amicus brief, the UK government said, according to the Financial Times, "It is the first such statement from the UK on BP's dispute over its compensation settlement, although it last year filed a similar amicus brief in an attempt to help lift the ban on the company winning US government contracts." 

Much talk about corporate greed makes the daily rounds of MSM. Not much on the other hand appears about government greed, one of the classic benchmarks of this administration. 

In a not unrelated matter, the current controversy of tax inversions, a legal move that allows U.S. corporations to move their tax domiciles to countries with lower tax rates by acquiring foreign rivals, New York senior Senator Chuck Schumer was quoted by the Times today:  'We need to move quickly and aggressively to curtail inversions and prevent companies from using shady accounting practices to avoid their US tax obligations."   

Schumer is in a rush to push through legislation to block such deals. Keep in mind that the legislation that allows such deals was framed by previous legislators. That should boost your confidence in anything these folks have to say, right or left. It should also force you to protest any rapid, backroom, overnight change of the law without going to the people first.

Notice the use of the word shady and the suggestion that such moves are unpatriotic, classical stuff from these elected, elitist demagogues. The U.S. tax code covers two parameters, evasion and avoidance. Only one of those is illegal. Taking advantage of  loopholes---another abstract terms politicians and MSM love to saddle with a pejorative connotation--is neither unpatriotic nor illegal.

Go to sleep on both of these issues at your own peril.

That's our view. We hope you know yours.