How the cruise ship lobby could help BP dodge liability for workers killed on the Deepwater rig.
Chris and his father Keith have pleaded with Congress to fix the law so that any employer can be held accountable for negligence—regardless of whether an employee dies on land or at sea. Last week, Senate Judiciary chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced legislation that would do just that.
But Leahy's bill faces an ugly political fight. And giant oil corporations—the most obvious potential opponents of such legislation—may not even have to flex their lobbying muscle. There’s another powerful industry with an interest in doing BP's dirty work to preserve the status quo. That would be cruise line operators—and when it comes to Beltway battles, the cruise lobby is no Love Boat.
Just ask Son Michael Pham, the vice president of the International Cruise Victims Association. In 2005, his parents went on a Caribbean cruise and never came back. Carnival Cruise Line, one of the world’s largest cruise operators, never offered any explanation for what had happened, and has refused to discuss the incident with Pham and his family since then. That was how Pham discovered the horrible divide in the way the law treats people killed through negligence at sea. "We couldn't take legal action to get justice," he says. Long before the BP explosion, his group was lobbying Congress for DOHSA (Death on the High Seas Act of 1920 - G) to be overhauled.
Finally, in 2009, the cruise ship victims succeeded in getting legislation introduced with help from Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) that would have updated DOHSA in just the way Leahy has proposed. That change would have allowed families of cruise ship victims to sue for non-economic damages—a huge deal for cruise-goers, because so many are retired and have no salaries that would provide the basis of a legal award under the current law. It also would have saved the Jones family a trip to Washington to plead their case on behalf of Gordon’s widow and children.
But the cruise industry spent $2.2 million fighting these changes. The Carnival cruise line company alone has donated more than $400,000 since 2007 to members of Congress from both parties, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The offending provision was eventually removed from the cruise-ship safety bill.
If there are loopholes BP thinks it can wriggle out through, they'll damn sure try it.
Related:
Facing South
BP hires company to handle oil spill claims whose goal is "reducing payouts" for clients
Fuckin' weasels. Go read.
No comments:
Post a Comment