Give Oil Spill Proceeds to the Gulf Coast States
Posted by dpolitico on June 7, 2010 · View Comments
**UPDATE***
Greater legal minds than my own (doesn’t take much) have offered an even better solution: forfeiture. Under the criminal statutes the United States Government can seize all profits from criminal activity. The term “profits” can encompass quite a large swath. Therefore, if they do charge BP with a crime, they can seize all the profits from the spill as forfeiture for the victims. Duh. And I thought I wasn’t sleeping through law school….
**ORIGINAL POST****
BP is getting a little bit happier these days since they’ve managed to siphon off about 11,000 barrels of oil from the spill onto a tanker ship. Projections are, once they got another ship down there (God knows why they didn’t have another ship standing by) they’ll start raking in about 20,000 barrels of oil a day. Given that the current price of oil is $71.33, BP, in just seven days, will have about $9,344,230 worth of oil on their hands. So, has any one asked what BP plans to do with all those barrels of oil? Sell it?
President Obama keeps saying BP is going to clean up the mess it made and pay for it. Sounds like they’ll have quite a lot of money on their hands to help with the cleanup. We now know, thanks to the United States Supreme Court, that all those barrels of oil can be taken by the federal government. In Kelo v. City of New London, Connecticut the Supreme Court abrogated the rights of private businesses to not be condemned by ruling the government can take private property in furtherance of economic development so long as it serves some kind of public purpose. I’d say, condemning the well and taking all the profits from the spill in order to create a stimulus package for the gulf coast states’ economies serves the public purpose. You have to do some legal limbo, but the United States Attorney in Louisiana could file condemnation proceedings tomorrow and sort it out later.
Of course, in a normal circumstance, BP would expect to be compensated for losing all that money. Surely, haha, they would see the public relations folly of trying to ask for their money back. If they do want it back, however, I’ll bet there’s case law out there that says we don’t have to compensate them. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And no, it doesn’t set a dangerous precedent as to other private property owners as this is an “extraordinary and unforeseen occasion.”
It’s a win win solution. Unless you’re BP. And if you are, who cares what you think?
