Experts believe that crimes have been committed by BP, Transocean and possibly Halliburton in the Gulf of Mexico. Criminal prosecutions could ensue under the Clean Water Act, 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the 1899 Rivers and Harbors Act, which would force escalating fines and blow past the current $75 million liability cap for damages.

But BP wants to consolidate all cases under one judge with a history of ties to the oil industry.

Facing more than 100 lawsuits after its Gulf of Mexico oil spill killed 11 workers and threatened four coastal states, oil giant BP is asking the courts to place every pre-trial issue in the hands of a single federal judge in Houston.

That judge, U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, has traveled the world giving lectures on ethics for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, a professional association and research group that works with BP and other oil companies. The organization pays his travel expenses.

Hughes has also collected royalties from several energy companies, including ConocoPhillips and Devon Energy, from investments in mineral rights, his financial disclosure forms show.

You don’t even have to believe that Hughes is a biased judge (he has ruled for oil companies and against them in the past) to see something very wrong with an oil company trying to choose their own venue for lawsuits against them. What’s sad is that forum shopping of this type is pretty commonplace.

And that’s the larger point. The immense influence of corporate America stands in contrast to the gradual weakening of the state, and a shifting of the balance of power. We see this in oil exploration as surely as we see it in financial regulation, as Bernie Sanders notes. Deregulation led directly to disasters in multiple spheres. EJ Dionne expands upon this today.

So there you have it: “Do something!” citizens shout to a government charged with protecting the environment in and around a Gulf of Mexico that is nobody’s private property. Yet the government, it seems, can’t do much of anything because the means of stopping the flow of oil are entirely in the hands of a private company. BP was trusted to know what it was doing with complicated equipment that, it would appear, it either didn’t understand very well or was willing to use recklessly [...]

“Deregulation” is wonderful until we discover what happens when regulations aren’t issued or enforced. Everyone is a capitalist until a private company blunders. Then everyone starts talking like a socialist, presuming that the government can put things right because they see it as being just as big and powerful as its Tea Party critics claim it is.

But the truth is that we have disempowered government and handed vast responsibilities over to a private sector that will never see protecting the public interest as its primary task. The sludge in the gulf is, finally, the product of our own contradictions.

That this power dynamic is shifting toward corporations in the judicial as well as legislative and executive sphere is truly frightening. It remains to be seen if the disaster in the Gulf will be a wake-up call.