This is nice, but simply a punishment in dollar signs isn't enough here. Just like with the illegal acts that were made in leading up to the 2008 economic collapse these are situations where certain people should be doing jail time. The biggest issue that we face is the corporate structure. We have laws that protect the people within a corporation from criminal charges. To a degree, these protections are there for good reason, but what we have currently are people that aren't held accountable for intentionally working around or simply breaking the laws intentionally. You can hit a company in the pocket book after the fact, but all that does is create a risk vs reward scenario for the people at the top. If we start putting people in jail over these things we may actually see them happen much less often. When BP is making 3-4 billion dollars per quarter in profit this 18 billion dollar fine is almost pointless. In reality, we have simply taken 1 1/2 to 2 years of profit from them in exchange for them polluting most of the gulf of Mexico. It's time that we change these protectionist laws in favor of the corporate big wigs.