Stating The Obvious
Robert Peston, BBC business editor writes Hayward’s departure: ‘Not if, but when’.
Tony is toast, which is probably why he decided to see how his offshore racing yacht was doing. He paid the entry fees for the “JP Morgan Asset Management Round The Island Race” and Cork Week in Ireland, so he might as well see how his boat and his son do.
In discovering the Irish entry, I also discovered that most Farr 52 yachts have single syllable names beginning with “B” – it is apparently the “style”. Just because you paid over a quarter million dollars for a boat, you shouldn’t think that you have the right to name it anything you want.
The short version is that BP is keeping Tony around until this mess is resolved, so the board can blame him for everything and “fix it” by replacing him, just like they did with Lord Browne the last time BP got a lot of people killed and polluted a large area. It’s probably in their policies and procedures manual.
Oh, yes, Robert Peston is obviously anti-British. He refers to BP as a UK corporation in his article. He probably thinks he works for the British Broadcasting Corporation instead of the BBC, even though there is a BBC America and the BBC broadcasts in languages other than English. 😈
8 comments
British may be in the name but it is just another greedy transnational in my view. It deserves the pillorying it is getting
Let me assure you that, most definitely, it is the corporation that is the object of the anger. I have no idea what the Tories are on about, on the Gulf we know who the enemy is, and unless BP gets nationalized, it is a corporation, not a country.
Actually, people are angrier than normal at BP because they have been running a marketing campaign for years about how “green” they were, and how much they were involved in alternative energy. That was when they dumped the shield and went with the green and yellow sunflower.
Citgo is a totally different case. Citgo is owned by Venezuela, so if they messed up, it would be the government of Venezuela. The same with Pemex and Mexico.
When your mayor started making noise, I was going to suggest that he come over and clean my beach, but then I remembered that Boris has a problem cleaning waterways, so it is just as well he doesn’t.
Oh, I forgot, we have Republican politicians who are complaining about the anti-British rhetoric, too. Actually they don’t like it when you get mad at corporations, so the “anti-British” claim is a proxy for what they really don’t like – attacks on their campaign contributors.
It’s probably in their policies and procedures manual.
Loved that one. 🙂 In addition to their policies and procedures manual, check out the following Wall Street Journal article about Planet BP, their in-house corporate magazine (not sure whether this one will make you laugh or want to pick up weapons):
In-house corporate magazines are supposed to make the company look good, but The Wall Street Journal is asking whether Planet BP, the oil company’s organ, is smoking something:
[I]n Planet BP — a BP online, in-house magazine — a “BP reporter” dispatched to Louisiana managed to paint an even rosier picture of the disaster. “There is no reason to hate BP,” one local seafood entrepreneur is quoted as saying, as the region relies on the oil industry for work.
Indeed, the April 20 spill on the Deepwater Horizon is being reinvented in Planet BP as a strike of luck.
“Much of the region’s [nonfishing boat] businesses — particularly the hotels — have been prospering because so many people have come here from BP and other oil emergency response teams,” another report says. Indeed, one tourist official in a local town makes it clear that “BP has always been a very great partner of ours here…We have always valued the business that BP sent us.”
Fortunately the articles — on which BP declined to comment — don’t go as far as praising that new treat: seasonal shrimps in (crude) oil.
Mr. Duff, what you are slow on is the fact that people don’t automatically accept new branding attempts by corporations. If the Tories want to associate themselves with BP in the minds of Gulf Coast residents, it’s their choice, not ours. Frankly, we think they’re being silly.
The Churchill bust was on loan to the US, and was returned. Exactly how is that construed as being anti-British? Are you saying that people who return things that have been borrowed are insulting the owners?
As long as Britain doesn’t agree to settle the matter on a football pitch, Argentina has no chance of doing anything regarding the Falklands. Obama is following the lead of his hero, Reagan, and doing nothing. What are you worrying about, this time you have two Princes who fly military helicopters, not just one?
I congratulate BP on discovering that there are businesses in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas who are dependent on the oil industry, Juanita. I noticed that there is no mention of talking to people in Alabama and Florida about oil companies.
That’s why they appealed the moratorium in a Louisiana Federal Court, the judge was probably tied to the oil business.
For some people their money is all that matters, they don’t care about the future or other people.
According to the NPR broadcast I heard this morning, that moratorium appeal was brought by “Gulf Coast residents who are concerned about their livelihoods”. I suppose that’s probably accurate, more or less, anyway…
Some days it’s hard to know who to root against, though. The other night, I went Googling for blogs connected with the Panama City area. Just to see who’s around, you know? After wading through page after page of nothing but real estate agents, I retired from the field, overcome by depression.
The lead plaintiff was an oil services company. There are Gulf Coast residents who have lost jobs because of the moratorium, but they aren’t filing law suits. The judge who made the decision has oil investments, including Transocean, the Swiss corporations that owns the remnants of the Deepwater Horizon that lays in pieces on the bottom of the Gulf [well, those parts that aren’t washing up on our beaches].
You are right about the blogs. There are a few environmental blogs out of Apalachicola, but everything around Bay County and Panama City is rightwing Republican, and there are only a couple. St Joe Paper and Tyndall seem to provide all of the jobs, directly or indirectly. There is blank space for the center and left side of politics from Destin east to Tampa Bay.
You could be the first. Both Blogger and WordPress offer free site space. Go for it to fill the gap.
[[Note: I edited the comment after reading my notes.]]