Thee death penalty is legal and constitutional for human beings, why isn’t it legal for corporations like Exxon Mobil?

Or maybe he was swayed by his neo-con colleagues pro-business bent. After all, big bidness, especially big oil, is having a hard time of it these days. Though it does seem to find enough cash to amply reward its departing CEO’s, failing ones most of all, ensuring that their – and the company’s – failings remain lost in obscurity.

Whatever his rationale, Souter knows that he’s just gutted punitive damages as a deterrent to wrongful, typically corporate, behavior. That will have dangerous, longterm consequences. Couple it with Bush’s across the board gutting of the government’s regulatory efforts – not least by installing top industry lobbyists as putative agency heads and gutting agency budgets (FDA, OSHA, even IRS audit staff) — and it’s big business that’s received an enormous, undeserved windfall.

The Chicago School notion of internalizing costs vs. externalizing them by shifting them to employees, consumers and suppliers – who can do little or nothing to prevent them – has been thrown on its head without a safety mat.

For preventive measures to work, they have to take place before harm occurs, or at least soon after it does, when the realization of the consequences of past bad acts becomes concrete rather than theoretical. Punitive damages elicit preventive measures only when they are hefty relative to the ability of the wrongdoer to pay. For me, that might be a a buck and a half. For ExxonMobil, it’s probably ten-twenty billion, a fraction of a single year’s contemporary profits. Five hundred million won’t make a dent. For this Supreme Court, I guess that’s the point.

George Bush, it seems, has imposed his own morbid fear of accountability on the entire federal government. That doesn’t mean that costs won’t be high. Indeed, they’ll be higher because there’s less incentive to incur a cost you can outsource onto someone else. Nor does it mean those higher costs won’t be paid. They’ll just be paid by you and me.

If we were being logical here, the reasoning presented in the punitive-damages decision would argue against applying capital punishment for a crime that didn’t result in a death, right?

Oh, sorry. We’re talking about Republicans. No logic allowed.

This is an(other) outrage. Look, lotsa states, (regrettably) have placed restrictive caps on punis. If the state hasn’t, courts should almsot always just stay the hell out of that detemination. In my view this is “judicial activism”. No trust of our citizen jurors? They usually get it right. The size of this award, inthe case of Exxon, doesn’t shock my conscience. Not at all.