Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
BP: Billionaire Polluter
Less than a week after British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and unleashing what could be the worst industrial environmental disaster in U.S. history, the company announced more than $6 billion in profits for the first quarter of 2010, more than doubling profits from the same period the year before. Oil industry analyst Antonia Juhasz notes: "BP is one of the most powerful corporations operating in the United States. Its 2009 revenues of $327 billion are enough to rank BP as the third-largest corporation in the country. It spends aggressively to influence U.S. policy and regulatory oversight." The power and wealth that BP and other oil giants wield are almost without parallel in the world, and pose a threat to the lives of workers, to the environment and to our prospects for democracy.
Sixty years ago, BP was called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. (AIOC). A popular, progressive, elected Iranian government had asked the AIOC, a largely British-owned monopoly, to share more of its profits from Iranian oil with the people of Iran. The AIOC refused, so Iran nationalized its oil industry. That didn't sit well with the U.S., so the CIA organized a coup d'é tat against Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. After he was deposed, the AIOC, renamed British Petroleum, got a large part of its monopoly back, and the Iranians got the brutal Shah of Iran imposed upon them, planting the seeds of the 1979 Iranian revolution, the subsequent hostage crisis and the political turmoil that besets Iran to this day.
In 2000, British Petroleum rebranded itself as BP, adopting a flowery green-and-yellow logo, and began besieging the U.S. public with an advertising campaign claiming it was moving "beyond petroleum." BP's aggressive growth, outrageous profit and track record of petroleum-related disasters paint a much different picture, however. In 2005, BP's Texas City refinery exploded, killing 15 people and injuring 170. In 2006, a BP pipeline in Alaska leaked 200,000 gallons of crude oil, causing what the Environmental Protection Agency calls "the largest spill that ever occurred on the [Alaskan] North Slope." BP was fined $60 million for the two disasters. Then, in 2009, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined BP an additional $87 million for the refinery blast. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis said: "BP has allowed hundreds of potential hazards to continue unabated. ... Workplace safety is more than a slogan. It's the law." BP responded by formally contesting all of OSHA's charges.
President Barack Obama said of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, "Let me be clear: BP is responsible for this leak; BP will be paying the bill." Riki Ott is not so sure. She is a marine toxicologist and former "fisherma'am" from Alaska, and was one of the first people to respond to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil disaster. Exxon deployed an army of lawyers to delay and defeat the legal claims of the people who were physically and/or financially harmed by the Valdez spill. "What we know is that the industry does everything it can to limit its liability," she told me.
The (Mobile, Ala.) Press-Register reported that Alabama Attorney General Troy King told BP to "stop circulating settlement agreements among coastal Alabamians." Apparently, BP was requiring owners of fishing boats seeking work mitigating the spill to waive any and all rights to sue BP in the future. Despite a BP spokesperson's pledge that the waivers would not be enforced, the news report stated, "King said late Sunday that he was still concerned that people would lose their right to sue by accepting settlements from BP of up to $5,000."
Even if BP doesn't trick victims into signing away the right to sue, the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, while requiring polluters to pay the actual hard costs of the cleanup, caps the additional financial liability of a spill at just $75 million. Given that millions of people will be impacted by the spill, by the loss of fisheries and tourism, and by the cascade of impacts on related industries, $75 million is small change.
That is why Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., introduced a bill to raise the economic-damages liability cap to $10 billion, calling the bill the Big Oil Bailout Prevention Act. Riki Ott is touring New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, educating people about the toxic effects of the spill, and helping them prepare for the long fight ahead to hold BP accountable.
BP will surely continue its dirty practices, fighting accountability in the courts, in the press and on the oil-drenched beaches. BP: be prepared.Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
- Posted in
35 Comments so far
Show AllAll those fines paid out by BP - nothing more than the cost of doing business. The shareholders couldn't care less. Pay the fine and work forward to the next disaster.
Judging from the amount of BP's "campaign contributions" to Obama we can be assured that billions of US taxpayers' dollars will be squandered on the BP cleanup and political theatre that will surround it for several decades.
Get your hands around your ankles once again US taxpayers !
So f'n true. And then there's no $ for schools, health care, etc. Nor any money or will to triple the size of the EPA and our other watchdog agencies. So soft are the Repugs and Dems on corporate crime! The third party we dream of would have a field day on this.
The liability for BP tops off at $75 million while their profits rise into the billions. The insane law says the corporation is a person. Well if it's a person, the dvd The Corporation asks, what kind of person? It is easily concluded that the kind of person is a sociopath (or psychopath). They operate on a costs/benefits short term profits analysis. They are robots programmed to make profits. They don't wish to harm people, animals, plants, the air, the land, or the waters. They just don't give sh**!
In BP's case they were given a waiver which allowed them to operate without government oversight. And then they refused to spend half a million on a system that might have prevented the catastrophe. Why? Because it would have cut into their quarterly profits.
BP is owned by the super-intelligent rich nobility of England.
Empire USA is ownership controlled by the rich nobility of Europe.
Planet earth is an intelligence dictatorship ruled by white Europeans.
In the grand scheme of things, the purpose
of this world is to prove the harm in it.
"...the purpose of this world is to prove the harm in it."
the redundancy of your liturgy is tiresome. JMO.
The purpose of this world is this world. Anything beyond that is conjecture.
So what's new? As usual, a Mega-Corporation will probably not have to be accountable for its eco-pollution/destruction! Such is a Corporatocracy!!!
Yes, just hit 'em with more fines and cleanup costs. It's working already--at the BP station down the street, the price at the pumps shot up 15 cents per gallon overnight.
Somebody needs to do time. When they're chained together swinging picks and shovels fixing the roads, now that's something that can't be passed along to the consumer or taxpayer.
BP: Butt Plug
BP: Bought Politician
BP: Big Pain... in the ass, both of those reverse acronyms.
It's a big oily mess. I'm not talking about the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf. I'm talking about how crude petro-dollars greasing the governmental skids have gunked up and smothered the life out of any policies that would actually provide our people and our planet with a sustainable future.
"Let me be clear: BP is responsible for this leak; BP will be paying the bill."
Every time a president says "let me be clear," you know he's about to tell another trademark lie.
Correct. Government will once again meddle for another corporate giant, this time BP. All it has to do is rob some tax dollars and use it to bailout BP. BP "pays" some of it and suddenly they're paroled.
I laughed so loud the librarian sh'shed me. Sad, but true.
"(T)he 1990 Oil Pollution Act, while requiring polluters to pay the actual hard costs of the cleanup, caps the additional financial liability of a spill at just $75 million."
I don't know exactly what "actual hard costs" are, but I'm wondering why there are caps on the amount of financial liability these polluters incur. I've never heard of any caps placed on the profits these parasites take.
"I've never heard of any caps placed on the profits these parasites take."
Point very well taken.
The bottom line is, despite what that phrase is commonly taken to mean, it's time to stop burning dead animals and plants to produce electricity. The practice is simply primitive, barbaric in fact.
Yeah- me too. when i heard about raising the cap, i was like cap? what for? you pay for the damage you do, right? so if you raise it to 10 billion, it's still wrong. as Tom says, there are no caps on their profits.
the bill for this disaster is gonna be huge. to bad. they still gotta pay it.
Sure Amy, BP is a billionaire polluter. However, are we car drivers totally blameless; we who insist on the availability of oceans of cheap gasoline ergo cheap food (I include myself in this class)? Are we users of computers totally blameless when we allow that about 1/3rd of every barrel of crude and lots of natural gas must be used for the production of plastics(I include myself in this class)?
Am I a parasite on the oil companies? Or is it the other way around? Or is our relationship sort of symbiotic: I need them and they need me?
Is it truly possible that a world of several billion persons that relies on cars, trucks, airplanes, freighters, and mountains of plastics can function without hydrocarbons from some source? And if the answer is no (are you sure that it is yes?), what should the source of hydrocarbons be?
These will remain to be issues for rational discussion after the Gulf of Mexico is clean again many years hence and no amount of hysteria today will make them go away.
We could use hemp and algae for making the perfectly environmentally friendly plastic replacements and fuel for driving.
Do you wear a hair shirt, and wake yourself regularly during the night to flagellate yourself?
Regardless of all the harm using fossil fuels does, this was just absolute stupidity, pure and simple. Well, perhaps not so pure.
False economy hardly describes it. A blowout protecter (I have seen this mentioned elsewhere), which perhaps may not have worked perfectly (we don't know, because it didn't have one), would have cost $500,000. Even if they don't give a shit about the environment, which quite clearly they do not, losing 5,000 barrels of oil a day, at $50 a barrel, is $250,000 a day. (These are just back of an envelope calculations, so don't get picky.)
The least BP can do is reduce the CEO's remuneration this year by half a million. I realise this may lower his total package to less than a billion, but these are tough times, so he'll just have to tighten his belt a notch, like the rest of us.
The CEOs should be all put in prison after being dunked in barrels of crude oil...any body got A match.....
Plastic is made out of oil...any kind of oil. There is corn based plastic now. And...hey...anybody besides me remember when plastic was uncommon? Bottles were made of glass, radios were made of wood or metal. As for transportation...check out the rail and bus systems of Europe. They make the need for individual transportation moot.
Which, of course, absolves you of all responsibility for jacking up the corn price in Mexico to a nasty level.
The solution to global oil pollution is to nationalize the oil industry.
The drive for maximize profits from oil is the root cause for all the wars in the Middle East.
Global warming has been caused by pollution from carbon emissions (oil, automotive, coal, etc.etc.).
Corporate capitalism, the oil industry, has become so powerful with massive profits, it can buy politicians, mass media, and overthrow governments in pursuit of oil profits. Thus Mossedegh in Iran, Chavez in Venezuela, etc.
In fact, the ENTIRE ENERGY INDUSTRY SHOULD BE SOCIALIZED (Nationalized, turned into a public utility, profits used to create new non-polluting technologies.) That is: oil, coal, gas, nuclear, electrical, etc. should all be taken out of hands of profiteering gangster capitalists.
This is the first major step towards a transition from a capitalist economy to a global socialist economy that is operated in the economic interest of the vast majority of humanity.
Read daily the World Socialist Web Site: http://www.wsws.org
Jerry Wells, you are so right. The only solution is to nationalize ALL the big corps. One small thing we can all do is buy Dawn Dish detergent, $1.00 will be given to the wildlife fund to clean up the birds and turtles. Etc. It's not expensive and something everybody can do. This volcano of oil will reach land soon enough, and Dawn is what they use for the birds cleanup. Several of my friends and I have already signed up for the training required to help clean up the wildlife. I live in Fl. and expect to be called up soon. Support groups that will be doing the clean up. Lost my job, so may as well do something useful while we can. Peace.
BP = Bursting Petroleum.
WE are all not to blame for this. Blaming accomplishes nothing.
WE rely on govt. officials, who in turn rely on industry to make safe choices. Obviously, this doesn't work.
Years ago as a child, I used aerosol CFC-based deodorant to address my aromatic armpits. Once I learned about CFC's, I switched to Roll-on, but not everyone else did....UNTIL CFC-based aerosols were removed from the market of choices and the public was forced to make non-aerosol choices.
We are born into a society that relies on gas-powered vehicles. That is reality. When a child grows up and starts working, his/her only job might be far enough away from home that they require gas-powered transportation. Blaming him/her, or ourselves for that matter does not accomplish anything.
Anger - is a great emotion when it is channeled into constructive action. Instead of complaining or blaming which won't change anything, we are all better served by channeling our energy toward positive and productive outcomes like solar and wind, and empowering others to do the same.
Watch the movie: "Who Killed the Electric Car" and tell me who's to blame for this kind of idiocy...Chevron bought the battery plant and patent from A little old couple from Michigan who developed something union carbide, Ray-O-Vac or any number of big Industy Corporations failed at...The oil companys and the California clean air board along with General motors destroyed the idea and all of the cars were crushed..It was called the EV-1...Check it out...Pure futility.....
Drill Baby Drill:
http://www.markfiore.com/drill_baby_drill_0
I suggest a tax on corporate profit, so that anything over 1 million is taxed at 80 percent. Also change federal and state / provincial legislation to strip corporations of their person-hood, limit campaign contribution to zero, and make all senior executives and board members criminally liable for any corporate crimes, subject to stiff fines and jail terms. I and most others I talk with about how corporate behavior has evolved are fed up with the lack of legislated morality.
Very well said, Tom Joad - where is the cap on profit? Why should there be a cap on liability? Because the 'morality' of these things is the morality of thieves, pimps and murderers.
There does need to be a very extensive ramping up of research and application of alternative enegy technologies, but remember that the BPs, the Exxons, the Shells, et. al., along with their political pimps, which quite likely includes Obama, will work their tails to the bone to obstruct alternatives. Should they continue with the bullshit p.r. they put out about working on alternatives, they're lying through their teeth.
Now, WHEN (there is no 'if') Obama fucks us all up the ass on this liability bit, and lets BP off the hook long before the FULL BILL, INCLUDING ALL CLEANUP COSTS, PUNITIVE DAMAGES AND LAWSUITS, ETC., ETC. are paid, just who is going to call it for what it is? When are Americans, as well as any citizens of the same planet that the toilet bowl of the Gulf of Mexico is on, and especially what's left of the goddamn press, going to drop the polite shit, the politically correct shit, the smiling, deferential reverence for the fucking farce known as the 'American Presidency' and for the president, and DEMAND THAT THE RIGHT THING BE DONE??? I'll tell you when. Fucking never. Because there is no polite or even lawful way to express the demand and have it complied with. Never mind voting. Just stop with that shit right now.
One of the great impediments to the right thing getting done, and for this masterfully political puppet called Obama having his feet held to the fire on this spill, as on so much else, is the goddamn RELIGIOUS nature of the state of apprehension of the American presidency and the political process, to say nothing of the mind-control of the American public, and much of the rest of the 'globalized' world, which makes them sheep in the face of all this corporate, fascist international crime. We are all TAKING THIS SHIT. WHEN WE ARE DONE TAKING IT, ASSUMING WE CAN GET A WHOLE HELL OF A LOT MORE GODDAMN ZOMBIES TO WAKE THE FUCK UP AND GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ANYTHING OTHER THAN THEIR APPETITES AND SELFISHNESS, THEN MAYBE WE CAN CRIPPLE THE BPs, AND FORCE THE OBAMAs TO DO THE RIGHT THING.
Never is the correct answer!!!
You noted the profit margin....However in the past 10 years BP has profitted, roughly 150 BILLION DOLLARS....When you look at their revenue, which is in the TRILLIONS and who knows how much of that is hidden in "Off Shore Accounts".
The Texas refinery accident that caused 15 deaths, if I recall, had one teenager that refused to sign the settlement agreement because she had found out that BP had done a "Cost Effective Study" and decided that it would cost them 1 Billion Dollars to repair the refinery versus a couple of million dollars for each of the surviving families of those workers killed in an accident...Those who agreed to the settlement signed one of those agreements to"KEEP SILENT"....Of course 9/11 families had to sign the same type of agreement to get their settlements and the only woman who refused the settlement and was a 9/11 Truth Activist was killed in one of those strange plane crashes.
BP has a Congress that is in their control. BP has a President that is in their Control. BP knows about the 75 Million Dollar Cap and knows The Supreme Court is with them.
Imagine a Company that has the power to issue via the CIA a Coup Order...Take over a Country (Iran) wth a Puppet Dictator (The Shah) and have their way for over 25 years.....Now, imagine a company (UNOCAL) upset with a country's leadership (The Taliban)for giving THE OIL PIPELINE CONTRACT THROUGH AFGHANISTAN to Bridas Oil of Argentina asking the U.S. Government to "Invade" that country (Afghanistan) and install one of its Directors (Hamid Karzai) as its Prime Minister (Dictator)and occupy that country to protect "THAT OIL PIPELINE".
Those things happen because you have an OFF_BOOK CIA that works in conjunction with the Mossad of Israel, the ISI of Pakistan, and MI6 of England and they are under the control of "The Power Elite".
So, the American People will foot the bill again: Victims of 9/11 Taxpayers pay the bill, Invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan Taxpayers pay the bill, Wall Street Theft Taxpayers pay the bill, 3 Trillion Dollars of missing expenditures in DOD Taxpayers pay the bill, 2.7 Trillion Dollars borrowed from Social Security by U.S. Congresses Taxpayers pay the bill, 12.9 TRILLION DOLLAR NATIONAL DEBT (AND, GROWING) Taxpayers will pay the bill!
I believe that the author has a very critical view of the big oil companies that is somewhat deserving. I find some of the accusations very true and some could be described as being a bit inflammatory. By example, stating the revenue and the profit of a big corporation may sound obnoxious to some readers. In truth, assuming the companies financials are stable and the first quarter’s $6B in earnings can be annualized and compared to 2009 revenue, the company has just over a 7% profit margin. . That does not sound excessive. By nature, the profits of big companies are big and this is shared by the many shareholders. It should also have been noted that oil prices were historically high, something that demand and the oil cartels influence, not BP. It is also important to remember the massive amounts of tax revenue, employment insurance, health insurance and other benefits that are paid to or by the employees and by the big company to the government and other necessary organizations. When companies make profits the government usually doesn’t fair too badly either. Taking such a narrow attack against this company perhaps is naive and deserving of a more appropriate analysis.
It is also unfair to attack the company on employee deaths and the companies attempt to limit liability. Unfortunately all industry suffers its fair share of catastrophic events that end in the loss of human life. No company is immune from this sort of disaster. And all business try to limit their liability through the use of employee training, safety programs and when that fails, defense lawyers and settlement agreements.
I believe that the author is correct to state that the 1990 Oil Pollution Act is flawed and outdated given the costs of environmental cleanups 20 years later. Companies should be accountable for the full extent of environmental cleanup and this industry should not receive special treatment. However, there is a reason for this type of cost cap. The off shore oil drilling business is an extremely risky business and the citizens and the US government want to access these national reserves rather than rely even more on Middle East oil. This could be reduced to a national security issue. The cost cap would have been introduced to attract drilling by making the extreme risks tolerable for the oil companies. BP would not be the worst environmental offender in the oil industry and is not the only company receiving this special cap on environmental clean up costs.
Lastly, the oil is drilled in the Gulf of Mexico to satisfy the massive addiction North American consumers have for the product. Nothing was said about this underlying problem that is the reason we have oil companies in the first place. It is not the first time consumers have driven demand of a product that destroys the environment or ecosystems and it is not the last. In the energy business we just need to think back to the virtual destruction of the world’s whale population just prior to the turn of the 19th century and that was just so we could have oil lanterns. We are now just witnessing history repeating itself although the stakes are much higher.
It would be interesting to know if the author, Amy Goodman owns a car, heats a house, uses electricity and buys plastic toys or if she to is a contributor to the consumption problem and believes it is simply her birth right to be part of the destruction of this world. The problem goes far deeper than the unfortunate BP disaster and Goodman’s article could have been far more balanced. Unfortunately that sort of reporting doesn’t sell newspapers.
Another of the "We're all to blame" mob. We're not. This disaster was totally preventable. I don't mean the explosion and the eleven killed -- although probably that too if the truth were known -- I mean the pollution. It was not inevitable. It did not have to happen.
And whether a cost cap on accidents is right or wrong, there are valid arguments on both sides, however it should apply only if you follow the rules. BP clearly was cost cutting and taking chances.
As an employee of BP, I take great umbrage from your comments. The oil business is indeed risky. Who can forget those horrible years before 2000 where our profits were well below 30 billion a year. Those were lean years indeed. Everyone needs to understand, we are too big to fail. While clean up costs will exceed the tens of billions, there is no way on god's green earth that BP should pay for this clean up. We need to socialize risk and make sure our investors see positive return on their investment. We can't have the likes of Warren Buffet lose confidence in our ability to increase shareholder equity. The tax paying public needs to pony up this money, otherwise, BP will not be the stalwart investment opportunity that it is. I could lose my job and investors like Buffet and the myriad of blue haired folks who have been forced to fund 401k pension schemes will suffer greatly.
Goodman does not work for a commercial newspaper, and the commercial newspapers who must attend to sales do not report similarly ----
sadly.
Precisely because industry does involve accidental deaths, BP should have taken reasonable steps to prevent this. The point is not merely that people died, but that people died at a location that had violated regulations hundreds of times in the past year.
The oil industry also involves leaks of oil, and BP could not be bothered to invest in reasonable preventative measures to encircle the spill: see Greg Palast, for example:
pacificfreepress.com/news/1/6142-palast-the-bp-ive-known-too-well.html
Given both of these, BP's extremely high 7% profit is indeed obscene, not only intrinsically, as the symptom of a larger system of inequities, but specifically. BP execs could reasonably know that the investment of a small part of that profit would prevent massive environmental catastrophe, deaths among employees, and eventual sickness and death among human as well as animal populations in the Gulf area.
This is not just obscene; it is murderous. It may indeed involve multiple counts of murder.
In the face of such events, to wonder about whether Goodman owns a car is an oddly trivializing and obstructive fallacy. Of course Goodman uses energy in some form. That is no indication whatsoever of hypocrisy. Anyone who would change anything in any system must do so within the conditions created by that system itself.
Besides, BP would be criminal and Goodman's assessment correct even were Goodman a hypocrite. Even were Sarah Palin to criticize BP's psychopathy in this, the assessment of psychopathy would be equally correct regardless of the depth of Palin's hypocrisy.
I watched some corporate lackey on TV last night demand that governments pay airlines for the losses they incurred by the Iceland ash plumes. The sense of entitlement that these corporate fascists now have is mind boggling. BP will be ringing up billions in profits and you can rest assured that the costs of this disaster will fall into the laps of tax paying working class Americans.
"That is why Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., introduced a bill to raise the economic-damages liability cap to $10 billion"
Come on! I'd have gone for a cap of $750 trillion and then I might have been willing to accept a smaller cap of $75 trillion. BP ought to be liquidated to help ameliorate the damage they have done.
Boycott, baby, boycott. i.e. BP