He hits the nail on the head when he speaks about how corporate CEO pay has impacted how safe these companies are for the general public and their own workers.
One example I will give is BP in the refinery end. They promote their mid-level managers every 1-3 years based on how profitable they are in the units they are over in the plant. If you get your promotion to run three units (parts of the plant that handle specific processes) and your units all need new piping because the old pipe has become too thin, if you replace the pipe you will not be profitable and will be demoted or worse. If you patch them and try to make it until the next promotion you may reap a big reward or kill hundreds or thousands of people, but that is what they do. The CEO works the same way, if he cuts spending, maintenance and staffing he can reap huge bonuses, but runs a big risk. Since he will only be there 3-5 years he will not be the one to fix everything wrong in the refineries and still make his big money!
In the BP Texas City, Texas explosion in 2005, that refinery was making $1,000,000,000 a year in PROFIT, yet they were cutting back on toilet paper and how often they mowed the grass to save money! They refused for years to install a flare for this one dangerous unit that made high octane gasoline, even though they kept admitting in internal documents that they needed to. The cost would have been 2 million dollars, but as my boss told Ed Bradley who was doing his last 60 minutes story, "BP had a choice, they could make a billion in profit, or nine hundred and ninety eight million, they chose to make a billion!" So they killed 15 workers and injured 6,000 instead!
So many companies are cutting corners, doing business through shell companies that they can fold up if they get hit with a big judgment, and paying money to hordes of Lobbyists to pass more and more tort reform. They have caps on damages to take away the ability for trial lawyers to take expensive cases, leaving victims with no way to find an attorney (especially medical malpractice cases). They also fund huge campaign donations to judges and justices to purchase them.
I hope people will start to wake up to the fact that it is next to impossible to obtain justice in this day and age from a large multi-national corporation due to the power they weld. BP went to the Texas legislature after the 2005, explosion litigation was over and had them pass a law extending workers compensation protection of a contractor to cover the premises (refinery) owner so that if this explosion happened today they couldn't even be sued!
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