As the B in BP stands for British, it doesn't look good that one of our companies are so inept at their job that it has ended up polluting thousands of miles of Americas coastline with oil.
It looks even worse when the boss comes up with the insensitive line ' I want my life back' when he is being interviewed for American television. I dare say the 11 people killed on the rig have more of a claim to wanting their lives back then you Mr Hayward.
There was a great interview on the television this evening where some BP wonk was saying what a public relations disaster this had been for BP in America and it wasn't enough to say sorry to Americans, you have to apologise to them in a certain way for them to accept it.
I'm not really sure what that certain way is and he didn't elaborate so we are left to wonder just how do you say sorry to Americans for what BP has done?
In Britain the wrongdoer has to either resign or be forced out to appease us but i don't know if the Americans go for that approach.
Personally i would go for the 'hands up, no excuses, we screwed up' angle which may garnish a small amount of sympathy or even the heartfelt 'We promise to do everything humanly possible to put this right' and maybe throw in a small tear wipe at the end.
I imagine what he meant was BP will hand over billions of dollars to clean up its mess, keep it's head down and hope it's all forgotten while Tony Hayward gets his life back again.
3 comments:
i live about 200 miles from the texas coast. seems the bad suff missed us. since it is only a 3 hour drive we go to the gulf many times a year to fish, dive, beach. the gulf is nice and will be nice again one day not so far away.
i worked for haliburton '78 to '82 and in '79 PEMEX had a well head break. we covered it with "el sombrero", so it can be done... maybe we got lucky.
anyway, it is not necessarily BP's fault. when you have hundreds of wells eventually one is gonna go bad on you. kinda makes you worry about thousands of nuclear warheads...
one thing that bothers me is that BP seems (we don't know) to only work on one solution at a time. so there is a week or longer between each try. they could have started working 4 or 5 of these simultaneously and then there would be a day between each try (not that it matters since nothing works). another thing that bugs me is that they don't try anything twice. we tried, it failed, lets do the next thing...
in defense of BP, Obama and crew are telling us that "the gomerment" is in charge. oh yeah? then does that mean all these failures are on "the gommerments" shoulders... hmmmm.
q
I have seen people sticking the boot into Obama and wondered why he is getting it in the neck. It isn't as if he had anything to do with it.
I wouldn't personalise the blame and lay it all at Obama's door... however, this whole travesty is absolutely-and-100% a failure of government.
As a massive multi-national corporation, BP is merely doing what all massive multi-national corporations do, every day (i.e. making as much money for their owners as possible while simultaneously getting the rest of us to pay for as many of their externalities as they can get away with).
You might as well chuck a fox into a hen-house and then blame the fox after all the chooks get killed.
A huge mess like the current spill is a natural and predictable outcome of lax governance, conducted by successive administrations who seem content to play ball with the (understandable) desire of corporations to privatise profits and socialise losses.
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