Victemless Crimes, also known as Consensual Crimes, are any activities which do not physically harm a person or property. There are more than 350,000 people currently in US jails for consensual crimes with an additional 1,500,000 on parole or probation.

Oil spills can pose a serious threat to human health and the environment. According to the EPA, one pint of oil released into the water can spread and cover one acre of water surface area and can seriously damage an aquatic habitat. It can take years for an ecosystem to recover from damage caused by an oil spill. For further information, see http://www.usdoj.gov and http://www.epa.gov.

BP has a history of environmental crimes. The company was convicted of a an environmental felony in 2000 after failing to report Doyon Drilling, a subcontractor,  for dumping hazardous waste onto the Alaska North Slope over a three-year period, according to court documents.

BP pleaded guilty to a federal environmental crime of failing to prevent a 200,000-gallon pipeline spill across a delicate tundra in America’s largest oil field in March 2006. Under the agreement, BP pleaded guilty to one violation of the Clean Water Act, a misdemeanor, and was to pay $20 million in fines for allowing the pipeline to corrode. And though a second pipeline started leaking in August 2006 for the same reason, the company is not being charged for the resulting 1,000-gallon spill because of its willingness to cooperate with the investigation.

For years, the company denied allegations that a culture of cost-cutting was hurting the quality of maintenance on Alaska’s pipelines, but millions of company documents and interviews with scores of employees told a different story.

Prosecutors estimate BP saved $9.6 million by choosing not to regularly clean and inspect the two pipelines over the course of eight years. The estimated savings represented less than half of 1 percent of BP’s adjusted net profit of $22 billion in 2006.

The presiding Judge Ralph Beistline exhorted the company to pay more attention to environmental protection and less to the bottom line.

“I think we need to put a particular emphasis on the need to give high priority to maintenance and maybe a little less priority to profits,” Beistline said. “In this particular case, the need to protect the environment should be our ultimate priority.”

Yet, although BP was ordered to pay $12 million in federal fines, not one employee, contractor or subcontractor did so much as a single day in jail for this environmental rape.

As bad as the Alaskan Oil Spill was, the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico makes it look like a drop of oil in a mud puddle.

Environmental crimes are not victimless crimes. The victims are you, I, our children and countless generations to come who will be deprived of experiencing the once abundant marine life and clean shores. The victims are thousands of fishermen, hotel, restaurant and other tourism related businesses. I could go further and list the retail, export and import related businesses affected by the death of the Gulf, but let’s not go there. You get the picture.  

The reality is, that those responsible for these environmental crimes, such as those who perpetrated or covered up the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, responsible for the death of unmeasuable marine lifeforms and billions of dollars of property damage will probably not spend a single day in jail.

The bottom line is, if we do not, as citizens, demand the heads of these environmental criminals on a platter, similar crimes on our environment will happen again and again and again. Monitary punishment is not enough deterant to disuade these people from committing these atrocities, partially because the perpetrators already have so much money.

The only way to stop this kind of thing from happening, is to send the reponsible parties to prison for an acceptable, fitting timeframe. You may think me as crazy, but considering that this was ecological murder, I strongly recomend LIFE in prison without the posibility of parole.

Are you pissed-off yet? If you want to get really pissed, read The Secret History of America, at AssEtEbooks.com

What pisses you off? Let me know. I want to hear about it.