But as rt notes, with a company headquartered here I'd be far more inclined to say the government should just put them out of business entirely; obviously, the US government has no more power or right to do that to BP than they do to Toyota, than Afghanistan does to Boeing (note: I'm not drawing ANY moral parallels here, just citing examples to illustrate the logic. ) The worst our government can do is revoke their right to operate here, but I'm not really arguing for that anymore than for shutting down Exxon entirely; I just want a helluva lot more oversight and regulation (not to mention accountability. ) I'm still appalled that Exxon fought the Valdez judgment all the way to the SCOTUS (and spent ten years doing it) before finally accepting liability simply because they'd run out of higher courts from whom to beg the verdict they preferred. Petroleum is a very high stakes game in a variety of ways, and thus one of the last places that we should allow most regulations to be self imposed.