From the Department of You Couldn’t Make This Up:
Transocean Ltd. gave its top executives bonuses for achieving the “best year in safety performance in our company’s history” – despite the explosion of its oil rig that killed 11 people and spilled 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
It’s truly a pity that the folks who run the Fukushima power plant aren’t Americans. They’d be in line for the biggest safety bonus of all time. After all, as with the Transocean folks, and in the immortal words of Alan Greenspan, with one “notable exception” their plant had a stellar safety record. And they’ve got the Transocean folks beat to a pulp in the competition for the magnitude of the notable exception. Transocean killed a mere 11 people plus a Gulf, while the Fukushima people have a shot at thousands of lives plus a huge swath of an ocean.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the Japanese have learned all of the lessons we here in America have to teach. They might still think that not everything a corporate executive does is tinged with genius. We’ve learned differently here. If you can take down an economy, or a large body of water, you deserve every penny you can steal. If you teach our kids for a living, on the other hand, you’re just scum.
Update: A right wing (this knowledge gained from previous comments from the same source) commentator points out that Transocean is a Swiss company. I invite him to peruse the bios of the management team here. True, some of them are from Socialist Europe, but judging by their educational backgrounds, most of them are true home grown Americans (including the richly compensated Mr. Newman), with a large percentage from Texas, the source of so much that is wrong with this country.
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