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BP CEO's Yacht Outing Infuriates Gulf Residents
EMPIRE, La. - It could have been a turnaround week in BP's campaign to convince the public that it's doing everything possible to contain the damage from the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
Boats await the 5 a.m. start of the JP Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race, with 'Bob' – the yacht owned by BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward – at left. The fact that Mr. Hayward attended a yacht race during the Gulf oil spill crisis has angered people along the Gulf Coast.
Chris Ison/AP The company pledged to set aside $20 billion to help spill victims, and the containment system at the site of the crippled well was capturing or burning increasing amounts of oil.
Instead, the company faced renewed anger Saturday after reports that chief executive Tony Hayward had jetted back to England to attend an exclusive yachting competition.
Hayward took Saturday off to see his 52-foot yacht "Bob" compete in a race around the Isle of Wight off southern England. It was a good day for sailing - breezy and about 68 degrees - but anger simmered on the steamy Gulf Coast, where crude oil is still gushing from a blown-out well.
"Man, that ain't right. None of us can even go out fishing, and he's at the yacht races," said Bobby Pitre, 33, who runs a tattoo shop in Larose, La. "I wish we could get a day off from the oil, too."
BP spokespeople rushed to defend Hayward, who has drawn biting criticism as the public face of BP PLC's halting efforts to stop the spill.
Company spokesman Robert Wine said the break is the first for Hayward since the Deepwater Horizon rig that BP was leasing exploded April 20, killing 11 workers and setting off the undersea gusher.
"He's spending a few hours with his family at a weekend. I'm sure that everyone would understand that," Wine said.
He noted Hayward is a well known as a fan of the J.P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race, one of the world's largest, which attracts more than 1,700 boats and 16,000 sailors as famous yachtsmen compete with wealthy amateurs in a 50-nautical mile course.
"Bob" finished fourth in its group. It was not clear whether Hayward took part in the race or attended as a spectator. The boat, made 10 years ago by the Annapolis, Md.-based boatbuilder Farr Yacht Design, lists for nearly $700,000.
Hayward had already angered many in the U.S. when he was quoted in the Times of London as suggesting that Americans were particularly likely to file bogus claims for compensation from the spill. He later shocked Louisiana residents by telling them that no one wanted to resolve the crisis as badly as he did because "I'd like my life back."
Ronnie Kennier, a 49-year-old oysterman from Empire, La., said Hayward's day among the sailboats showed once again just how out of touch BP executives are with the suffering along the Gulf.
"He wanted to get his life back," Kennier said. "I guess he got it."
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden enjoyed a round of golf Saturday near Washington, something they've done on other weekends since the spill and a fact not lost on users of social networking sites.
Twitter feeds compared Obama and Biden's golfing to Hayward's yachting, lumping them together as diversions of privileged people who should be paying more attention to the spill.
"Our government, the executives at BP, it looks like they decide to worry about it later," said Capt. Dwayne Price, a charter fisherman in Grand Isle, La.
White House officials have struggled to counter criticism of Obama's handling of the disaster. An Associated Press-GfK poll released Tuesday showed 52 percent now disapprove of Obama's handling of the spill, up significantly from last month.
About 50 miles off Louisiana's coast, a newly expanded containment system is capturing or incinerating more than 1 million gallons of oil daily, the first time it has approached its peak capacity, according to the Coast Guard. BP hopes that by late June it will keep nearly 90 percent of the flow from the broken pipe from hitting the ocean.
More than 120 million gallons have leaked already, according to the most pessimistic federal daily flow rate estimates. Oil has been washing up from Louisiana to Florida, killing birds and fish, coating marshes and wetlands and covering pristine beaches with tar balls and oily debris.
A pair of relief wells considered the best chance at a permanent fix won't be completed until August.
BP has put many idled commercial fishermen to work on the cleanup. But not everyone.
Sai Stiffler spent Saturday repairing his shrimp boat at Delta Marina in Empire, La., on a hot and muggy day. He signed up for BP's "vessel of opportunity" program but hasn't been hired, and he was not pleased that Obama was playing golf and BP's CEO was at a yacht race while his life is on hold.
"Right now is no time for that," Stiffler said. "I don't think they know how bad people are hurting. They make a lot of promises but that's it."
36 Comments so far
Show AllOn the other hand, at least he was out of the way. It's not like he has any skills or abilities that really matter. For all we know, when he's not openly yachting, he's whoring with the MMS.
Drop ship this f-cking capitalist pig into one of the Louisiana Bayou towns with a sign on his head saying: CEO of BP. Let the bloodletting begin! You know damn well his life goes on as usual; contrast that with the destroyed lives of those who depend on the Gulf of their livelihoods. I say drop ship!
Hayward on the ocean, Obama on the links.
Since AFAIK neither of them plays the fiddle, there must have been a terrible argument over who got to hire Elton John for musical accompaniment.
Well said!
Did anyone really expect him to spend the weekend wandering around his mansion, weeping for the "poor little people" in the Gulf region?
I for one don't expect Tony Hayward to do any one thing. However, the expression of anger and resentment is valid given such a brazen in your face display of arrogance. I've never understood the rhetorical impetus behind the whole "are you surprised" meme.
It is like when someone's house gets set on fire by an arsonist, and someone walks up to the person who owns the house, and says to them while it is burning "what did you expect, a world without arsonists?".
Three Neros, playing in perfect disharmony
A catastrophic event handled by petty minds--this is not good.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Tony Hayward is the sort of King John's aristocrat whose head they occasionally used to perforate with a crossbow bolt in the first Dark Ages.
... And may yet again.
Hayward's a real prize.
Next thing you know, we'll be reading this: "... when informed that local cleanup crews lacked sufficient equipment to contain and control the oil geyser, Hayward replied, 'If they have no booms, let them use cake.'"
The moral is that feet soaked in ill-gotten oil and placed in one's mouth are apt to wedge in one's esophagus.
Now we get mad at Hayward. The time to get mad is when private oil companies assume they have the right to expropriate public resources for private gain. All of the rest of corporate misbehavior including its outrageous sense of entitlement follows as a consequence of this. But it seems like very few of us get mad at the operating premise, only the inevitable consequence. We want to think that we are capitalists too. And never would we even entertain the thought of defending "socialism." Be a good capitalist Tony, just don't remind us what a miserable excuse for a human being you are when you are doing it.
The US mainstream media, as usual act as great echo chambers for BP and the rest of the power elites of all the hierarchies. This is so predictable as it has been for mainstream media since they came into being in hierarchies.
Since the beginning of hierarchies, those who wrote the "histories" of their times "learned" how to lie for those in power in all the hierarchies whether they werre absolute monarchies, oligarchies, or some other kind of malarky.
In pre literate and pre hierarchal societies as Karl Mark pointed out, people were early day "communist" societies or egalitarian, caring, and sharing societies with no power elites. Damn they don't know how lucky they were.
But all progressives including Marxists actually want a return to traditional values of such egalitarian, caring, and sharing to true traditional family values of real families, extended ones, not the economic contrivance and economic invention now known as the nuclear family. Like a lot of other things nuclear, it turned out to be up to no good, at least not for the people.
10,000 years is too long. Common Dreams and others do invite me as well as first rate Marxist analysts to write about it-- thanks.
AD
The US mainstream media, as usual act as great echo chambers for BP and the rest of the power elites of all the hierarchies. This is so predictable as it has been for mainstream media since they came into being in hierarchies.
Since the beginning of hierarchies, those who wrote the "histories" of their times "learned" how to lie for those in power in all the hierarchies whether they werre absolute monarchies, oligarchies, or some other kind of malarky.
In pre literate and pre hierarchal societies as Karl Mark pointed out, people were early day "communist" societies or egalitarian, caring, and sharing societies with no power elites. Damn they don't know how lucky they were.
But all progressives including Marxists actually want a return to traditional values of such egalitarian, caring, and sharing to true traditional family values of real families, extended ones, not the economic contrivance and economic invention now known as the nuclear family. Like a lot of other things nuclear, it turned out to be up to no good, at least not for the people.
10,000 years is too long. Common Dreams and others do invite me as well as first rate Marxist analysts to write about it-- thanks.
AD
What American society needs to understand from this oil "spill' illustrates the fact that corporate group think and its sole pursuit of profits makes corporations stupid and blind.
Tony Haywood was merely blind and stupid to take this yachting vacation. These rogue corporations become incapable of self critique or any diligent moral scrutiny. BP and Tony Haywood are not alone. Think Enron, Wall Street and the military industrial complex. All this is a painful public lesson of such predatory corporations. Corporate power has become a national and world contagion. Their greed is cheered on by Wall Street. This can only be checked with more democracy.
Unfortunately the dynamics of democracy for the common good is a myth in the U.S. It will remain this way until the American people wake up and our churches and our elite universities denounce the dirty rotten system. Our churches and elite universities must begin to teach the essential spiritual aspects of a healthy democracy. When the system collapses, we will then need leaders with a higher social consciousness to pick up the pieces.
BP SILVER LINING
Sadly, it requires calamities such as the BP gusher, and 9/11, to force measures that were so obviously needed beforehand.
This event underscores the crucial need, not only to enforce drilling safety, but to reduce our dangerous fossil fuel dependence through conservation and renewable energy development--which industry has obstructed through decades of lobbying, misinformation, & fabricated science, with help from cooperative administrations, defaulting legislators, and an apathetic populace.
This environmental disaster provides our president with special opportunities to detooth the energy cartels, and forge ahead with these vital reform measures.
If he eludes this mandate, history will judge him harshly.
Oh, History's on 0 like a thousand flies already.
We know he will talk hope and spread lacy rhetoric, then go corporate and pocket the change.
After the letters, after the articles, let us boycott BP. And after BP, the other Petrol Gods and the other transnationals.
Phew.
Connect globally; buy locally -- so close you can watch their labour practices.
Pink blobs.
http://coyotesings.wordpress.com/
A nice little article, and very reflective of our national traditions. Did the Associated Press get bored writing those "Obama anger" stories already?
Gentlemen deserve a little leisure time for sport on a regular basis. Table tennis and air hockey aren't their games. Remember when Bush II told us it was all "hard work" at the White House? We have to believe them. Look at all of the fine results we get with Obama's bold national energy plan of coastal oil drilling, "clean coal" and a revived nuclear industry.
And sure, this is the worst U.S. oil spill disaster. Whether it's a problem depends on your perspective. In the real world of absolute plutocratic rule, you can get shrimp for your shrimp cocktail or your hors d'oeuvres across the world market. It may cost a little more, but it still tastes delicious.
So, chin up!
-TIA
BP's assets must be seized to back all claims and to completely restore the Gulf and any other regions where the oil migrates.
BP holds perhaps 100 billion barrels of proven reserves around the world that could be seized and used as needed.
The $20 billion Obomber plan will never be enough to take care of the problems. It is also scheduled in payments that might never be made if BP declares bankruptcy.
Hayward belongs in a 6'X12' cell for the rest of his life.
4 foot by 4 foot with a hole in the floor for a toilet.
No surprises and folks should not be outraged. When CEOs of the corporate elite get paid millions in salary, millions in bonuses, millions in benefits and stock options a year they have to spend their money in the first place - on planes, yachts and what not.
Ol' Tony Hayward is just one of many.
Just a reminder that the USA the 5 families of the corporate Mafia are in charge. Tony Hayward is a powerful member of the Big Oil family. He is protected by the law and he knows he is beyond reproach, so he can say "F-YOU small people, we don't give a toss about you and neither do your elected officials"
Dear fellow "little people,"
What did you expect? They buy off Congresscritters to pass laws that give them carte blanche to do anything they want. Then, they and their subcontractors put together a deep drilling project following the cheapest method possible, probably play-doh and chicken wire. And then we expect these rich idiots to care about the effect of their criminal actions? Grow up. No matter how you look at it, it's always been a class war. It's just a matter of accepting the truth.
Don't forget BP's other nightmare well, also in the Gulf of Mexico, just farther out. It is called Atlantis, and it, too, has been "kicking" and is barely controlled. That one could very well suffer a well head blowout as well. The clock is ticking on that one. OH, I almost forgot, that one is in ten thousand feet of water.
The residents of the Gulf Coast are disgusted—rightfully—with Obama.
So after all of this, they will express their rebellion by voting for Republicans.
Pissed off at the elites, so vote for more elites?
This worthless lying clown is just another clueless upper class twit ala Monty Python TV skits.
Another, but minor outrage, Microsoft is still bullying after thirty years of their crappy software follies. Now on their new internet search engine, Bing, they decide what large graphic to inflict on you each day. They couldn't just skip all the images and have, gasp, a blank background, now could they? No fun for Microsoft bullies unless they can cram stuff down our throats, I guess. They might make background images optional...
He just doesn't give a chit does he?
Next Tony Wayward will jet to Paris for dinner, and later to Africa for a little big game hunting....
In the old West, the "Wanted, Dead or Alive" posters would already be up with his guilty face on them.
Don't like oily shrimp? Let them eat cake.
I am surprised that Obama wasn't on the yacht with him.
Oil company execs have more than enough of our money to play anywhere in the world that they have not turned into a toxic oil dump , like our gulf waters.
I would not be surprised the IF THE military industrial complex CEOs and the rich bankers of the world were their as well.
After all , all the evil players in greed and war mongering all hang out together.
And the pursuit to control oil in the middle east and South America has caused more death and financial turmoil in the last 25 years than anything elese in human history.
Drill bay drill, sure, that will all make us more safe, its more oil to have and control.
They are the masters and we are dispensable puppets.
They will turn our gulf , and beaches in the gulf into waste lands, but hey, the other 49 states and the rest of the world will get MORE oil.
ITS FOR THE GREATER GOOD.
A MESSAGE TO THE UNITED STAZI OF AMERICA, STOP FOLLOWING INNOCENT AMERICANS AROUND AND START FOLLOWING THE ELITE THAT WANT TO TAKE YOU LAND AND MONEY AND MAKE US ALL POOR.
as Cleanearth (June 20th, 2010 7:53 pm) very succinctly said:
"Don't like oily shrimp? Let them eat cake."
Their sense of entitlement should surprise no one. They try to pretend they have empathy when it is necessary for PR purposes, but honestly they don't have a clue. Some are just more obvious than others.
Like Sparklemahn says, they "...destroyed lives of those who depend on the Gulf for their livelihoods." And I will add politicians can almost nonchalantly start wars the same way BP cut corners, with arrogant certitude. (and no remorse when things go terribly wrong apparently) But that WILLINGNESS to gamble with such precious things as OTHER peoples lives are how they become the "deciders" of disaster/predatory capitalism and politics in the first place (if not just the puppets for the real monsters in power, those for whom no amount of money or power is ever enough)...
Oh, and I don't think it is even really about the games of golf or the yachting competition (the rich do find their relaxation and pleasure differently than the average person...that is par for the course, pun intended) I believe it is what those games represent to the average people who are unable to take their minds off of, let alone time off from, this colossal tragedy. To those people who have the equivalent of a knife in their hearts, it is as if the medical team went for a coffee break (and can be heard laughing and joking from down the hall) while they lie bleeding on the gurney.
It is much safer for everybody to vent their fury on a Brit executive than their own corrupt political system and leadership.
What does it matter that he went yachting. is there anyone who needs to be 'more' convinced that he doesn't give a shit? If so perhaps that person is not paying attention. everybody needs rest and relaxation, even the slimy lying f$%ks that work at BP. A public that needs to be shown ever increasing degrees of greed and cruelty to others and the planet, in order to be convinced that something has gone awry , are part of the problem. We need to see and act on destructive behavior in its seed form, not after years and years of serial abuse to the planet and it's inhabitants.