BP Is a Corporate Criminal
by Jim Hightower
Gosh, how quickly things turn. One day, you’re a strutting peacock — the next day, you’re just another gasping, oil-covered bird.
In early April, BP was strutting about in full corporate splendor, showing off the $9 billion in profits that it had soaked up in just the first three months of this year. It was also basking in a corporate re-imaging campaign, depicting itself as a clean-energy pioneer and declaring that BP now stood for “Beyond Petroleum.”
Since its Gulf of Mexico well blew out on April 20, however, BP has proven to be beyond belief. The wider and deeper that this catastrophe spreads, the more we discover just how oily this giant is.
From the time it was known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and set out to grab and control the rich petroleum reserves owned by what is now Iran, BP has been a recidivist global criminal. In the past three decades, it grew huge by swallowing such competitors as Standard Oil of Ohio, Amoco and Arco. Along the way, it has been implicated in bribery, overthrowing governments, plunder and money laundering, plus having established one of the worst safety and environmental records in an industry that is notoriously reckless on both counts.
And now, its rap sheet grows almost daily. In fact, the Center for Public Integrity has revealed that the oil giant’s current catastrophic mess should come as no surprise, for it has a long and sorry record of causing calamities. In the last three years, the center says, an astonishing “97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors” came at BP facilities. These included 760 violations rated as “egregious” and “willful.” In contrast, the oil company with the second-worst record had only eight such citations.
While its CEO, Tony Hayward, claims that its gulf blowout was simply a tragic accident that no one could’ve foreseen, internal corporate documents reveal that BP itself had been struggling for nearly a year with its inability to get this well under control.
Also, it had been willfully violating its own safety policies and had flat out lied to regulators about its ability to cope with what’s delicately called a major “petroleum release” in the Gulf of Mexico.
“What the hell did we do to deserve this?” Hayward asked shortly after his faulty well exploded. Excuse us, Tony, but you’re not the victim here — and this disaster is not the work of fate. Rather, the deadly gusher in the gulf is a direct product of BP’s reckless pursuit of profits. You waltzed around environmental protections, deliberately avoided installing relatively cheap safety equipment, and cavalierly lied about the likelihood of disaster and your ability to cope with it.
“It wasn’t our accident,” the CEO later declared, as oil was spreading. Wow, Tony, in one four-word sentence, you told two lies. First, BP owns the well, and it is your mess. Second, the mess was not an “accident,” but the inevitable result of hubris and greed flowing straight from BP’s executive suite.
“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean,” Hayward told the media, trying to sidestep the fact that BP’s mess was fast becoming America’s worst oil calamity. Indeed, Tony coolly explained that the amount of oil spewing from the well “is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” This flabbergasting comment came only two weeks before it was revealed that the amount of gushing oil was 19 times more than BP had been claiming.
Eleven oil workers are dead, thousands of Gulf Coast people have had their livelihoods devastated and unfathomable damage is being done to the gulf ecology. Imagine how the authorities would be treating the offender if BP were a person. It would’ve been put behind bars long ago — if not on death row.
© 2010 Creators.com
National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.
I actually listened to President Obama’s speech. He is a good speaker, which no body can deny. I was disappointed because I thought he was white washing the truth and that it will lead to Americans being disappointed. I thought he should have told the truth that we don’t know how to cap the oil, but we are still trying to find someone who knows what to do. I think he should have also said that some science people don’t think the volcano of oil will be stopped by Aug but more like Christmas and some are even saying it might not be able to be stopped at all because the explosion was so bad. I just thought he was being to pollyanna and making it sound like everything is going to be back the way it was. I hope he is right and the science people who are thinking that the volcano of oil will not be stopped by August.
Yes, I think it is important to keep people’s hope alive, but it is also important to be honest. I hope the gulf states can be cleaned up and the government and BP has to make a committment to be there for the long term. I hope they do the right thing as I know people who have lived in S. LA for generations and I want them to receive justice for any lack of income. I don’t want them to suffer as they were kind to me when I needed a helping hand in life. S. LA is a very special place with wonderful people who have a culture that needs to be perserved. I worry that families who have lived there for generations will be forced to move somewhere else in order to make a living and to get away from the toxic stew that the gulf and the wetlands are becoming. I don’t want to see the people who live there jacked up only to be let down and disappointed because come Sept the oil is still coming out like a volcano of destruction.
I know not everyone has a faith that they practice, but it would have been nice if President Obama asked Americans to pray to their higher power that the volcano of oil be stopped. That has to be the number 1 focus right now. We have to multitask because the clean up is important too, but until the volcano is stopped we can’t do the clean up because more oil is spewing out. This is Obama’s 9/11. People like to compare this to Katrina, but I think it is more a 9/11 because it has been 57 days and counting and that volcano of oil is still spewing out its oil to join with the blob of oil already there and causing a terrible death to any animal that has the misfortune to be in its path. If what I am hearing is true that they have no way to stop the oil than we are really going to have a total destruction of the gulf of Mexico and the wetlands. I am praying as a Catholic and I hope other Americans are praying to their higher power. I don’t care if one is Pagan, Christian, Jewish, or Muslim etc; we need to be calling on our higher power to give man the wisdom on how to stop this volcano of oil.
I think it is terrible that some Conservatives like my mother blame Obama for this horrior and not BP who is the one who committed a crime. It is at a point where I can’t even mention his name without her going off the deep end. I think it is sad when the Right Wing are turning this into a political issue and yet we have people from the Left Wing who are using this horror to blame everything on Bush, when Obama has had 2 years to start cleaning MMS up. This is an national problem and should not be used by both conservatives and Progressives to score political points.
I will continue to pray and hope that our prayers as a nation are answered and the volcano of oil will be stopped soon.