 The thing with BP
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Jun. 20th, 2010 @ 01:21 pm 
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So, as my bloodless brother Chas pointed out yesterday, most folks realise that boycotting BP petrol stations doesn't hurt BP so much as hurt the independent operators who run the petrol stations.
Nonetheless, when I really needed to get petrol yesterday, I couldn't quite bring myself to stop at BP - even though my four and a half litres (for my 125cc scooter and its tiny tank) isn't exactly going to register.
We all have our quirks.
This does, however, bring me to a topic I've been meaning to post about: the oil spill, the "White House shakedown", and why Obama, for all the ways he's not doing entirely well at living up to all his promises, is still the best US president in my lifetime.
See, the thing that brought arguably the greatest ecological catastrophe in human history into being was that BP executives figured that it was going to be more profitable to cut corners on safety and let risks go.
The reason this was so is that there's a long history, in most countries, of letting corporate misbehaviour go with never more than a slap on the wrist, maybe a fine that is, to them, trivial.
When this happened, BP needed to pay. Not just to punish BP, but to establish a precedent that if an oil company screws up, like BP did, then it will, in fact, cost them more than being careful would have - preferably, far more.
I was surprised, and curiously relieved when I heard that BP were going to be hit this hard. It's not just going to cut into their profits, they aren't going to have profits this year. Their stock price has tumbled, their shareholders are probably pissed, and all this could have been prevented.
Hopefully, that's incentive for all the companies who drill for oil to take an immediate and thorough look at their own safety procedures, because they don't want to be in the position BP are in right now. I can't see where Obama made any concessions to BP in that meeting - they're paying twenty billion dollars, and they also have to pay for the cleanup, and that sum is not capped, and does not cover any liability for civil actions by affected parties.
As far as I can see, any bargaining that the White House may have offered, a sop to "negotiation" rather than "telling them how it is going to be" seems to have been along the lines of "and we won't have you arrested for manslaughter and every other crime we can attach to you" or maybe just "and we won't have you killed".
But that, you see, is why that Republican congressman doesn't like that this happened. He's in the pocket of the oil companies, and the thing with it is that this precedent *is* going to cut - marginally, and appropriately - into oil company profits, because it just got too expensive to be careless.
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and we won't have you arrested for manslaughter and every other crime we can attach to you" or maybe just
See, there's a part of me that just wants every person in a position of authority at that company to be prosecuted within an inch or their lives on every charge that's even remotely applicable, as well as be bankrupted by having to pay every cent they own to clean up the Gulf, but that's my anger talking (Because OMG, look at what they did to us! And they killed eleven people in the process, just to save money, and broke laws to do it). Making them give up all profits for this year is a good start, and tar and feathering them would be extremely appropriate (since tar=oil), but not actually about justice.
Though the part where Great Britain is all "but it will hurt our economy to actually punish them for all the regulations they broke! Wah, wah, why are you being so *mean* to BP?" makes me :/ . I want to snarl back that our coastline will take way longer to fix than their economy will, and so suck it up, because holding them accountable so that this doesn't happen again is important. And so is punishing them, because they actually killed people with their greed and laziness.
What I don't get is why the Republican politicians who are pro-drilling aren't focusing on everything BP did wrong as hard as they can, and calling the loudest for their heads. Because the explosion and the oil spill did not have to happen. If they'd followed the rules and hadn't been cutting corners left and right, it wouldn't have. If they want to convince the public that off-shore drilling is still sound in basic principle, they should be first in line baying for BP's blood and trying to focus everyone's attention on everything they did wrong (with the implication that if companies are following the rules, everything will be totally safe, and dolphins and rainbows will frolic around the drilling rigs, etc.)
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| From: | ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) sami |
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| Date: |
June 21st, 2010 10:06 am (UTC) |
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In fairness, most people in Britain aren't in favour of defending BP. (And it's an open question whether the Gulf coast or the British economy will recover first - Britain are actually in a worse position than Greece right now, economically speaking.) There's something else, as well as the people who were killed outright - a lot of people could well be dying by inches from this. As my friend Sheri pointed out on my LJ crosspost, a lot of working folk are quite possibly going to suffer. Her husband has worked on oil rigs all his life, and his pension plan is pretty much built of oil company shares. Until a few years ago, they were BP shares. It's entirely possible that a lot of BP employees are now faced with poverty if and when they retire.
Some things that hurt our economy:
Deciding not to bother regulating bankers, because we've got a massive financial services sector, what could possibly go wrong? That's not solely down to the previous government, because it goes back further than that.
Going all-out for deficit reduction when the supposed recovery is far from secure, and public sector spending is the most win-win way of boosting an economy available. That's Cameron's fault. His cabal say the deficit creates problems in getting/keeping investment from the Holy Market, but that's actually a lie; that so-British running-ourselves-down thing is what market analysts don't like.
Having bailed out banks, not taking the opportunity of public ownership to impose democratic control, for the sake of ethics and in order to prevent them doing the next stupid thing. (Both governments are guilty.)
Failing to throw the book at companies that screw up big-time doesn't help the economy; it disadvantages enterprises that do the right thing.
*is slightly nervous of what they're going to do to my benefits in tomorrow's Budget*
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