BP: Too Big To Drill?

Oil company BP has been in the news ever since the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and started a massive oil spill that has yet to be stopped.

A new group called Seize BP organized protests around the country on May 12 and is collecting signatures on this online petition:

"The government of the United States must seize BP and freeze its assets, and place those funds in trust to begin providing immediate relief to the working people throughout the Gulf states whose jobs, communities, homes and businesses are being harmed or destroyed by the criminally negligent actions of the CEO, Board of Directors and senior management of BP."

The last time a government attempted to seize BP, that government was overthrown and replaced with an autocrat who was less of a threat to BP's profits. At that time, BP was known by its former name, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the British government increasingly relied on its steady supply of oil from Iran, profitably supplied by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The Iranian people, however, were increasingly unhappy with the terms of this arrangement. AIOC underpaid its Iranian oil workers and denied them positions in management. The royalties paid to the Iranian government were a lower percentage of revenues than that of many other oil producers, and it was eventually discovered that AIOC used a false second set of books to hide their true revenues, and thus the true amount of royalties owed, from the government of Iran.

The secular, democratically-elected government of Iran, led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized the assets of AIOC and created the National Iranian Oil Company. AIOC and its British patrons were not happy, and began to plan a change in government, along with the U.S. government. In 1953, the CIA organized Operation Ajax which resulted in a coup d'etat against Mossadegh and the return of the Shah of Iran to his throne, where he ruled until the 1979 revolution. The National Iranian Oil Company was converted into a multi-corporation consortium, mainly controlled by AIOC and five U.S. companies. In 1954 AIOC changed its name to British Petroleum, perhaps to distance itself in the public mind from this episode.

British Petroleum was also the primary oil company behind the construction of the Alaska Pipeline in the mid-1970s. Although Exxon (now Exxon Mobil) is largely blamed for the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, the pipeline's owner and operator, Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, shares the blame by not being properly prepared to respond to and clean up the spill once it happened, making the environmental damage far worse than it should have been. British Petroleum (renamed yet again to "BP" in 2001) is the largest shareholder in Alyeska.

In 2006, a section of BP's pipes in Alaska developed holes due to corrosion and created a large oil spill near Prudhoe Bay. BP pleaded guilty to violations of federal law and was fined $20 million.

If BP were a person (and 5/9 of the Supreme Court would argue that it is, according to their Citizens United v. FEC ruling), this type of sociopathic behavior would lead to jail time. In the case of a corporation like BP, shouldn't we at least take away its right to continue doing business?