Pity the poor global oil corporation

IT'S THE world's fourth-largest corporation. Its total sales each year are larger than the gross domestic product of four-fifths of the world's countries. It employs an army of lobbyists and a fleet of public relations firms. It's had governments overthrown.

But the global energy conglomerate BP is pretending that it's a helpless victim of big, bad bullies who are unfairly manufacturing the public outrage over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Not even the American corporate media is gullible enough to fully buy that one--but you'll nevertheless find the claim that the oil giant is being "picked on" reported with a straight face, alongside right-wing blowhards charging that President Barack Obama was acting "undignified" when he sharpened his criticisms of BP.

Not surprisingly, indignation at BP's supposedly harsh treatment is loudest in Britain, where the company--formerly known as British Petroleum--is based, and where it is a pillar of the business establishment.

Lord Tebbit--once a Tory minister in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's cabinet during the era when the formerly state-run British Petroleum was privatized--worked himself into a high state of both agitation and alliteration at what he called "a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan, political, presidential petulance."

But BP has its American defenders, too. Tea party favorite Rand Paul, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Kentucky, took time off from defending his opposition to federal civil rights laws to complain: "What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP.' I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business."

Then there's Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York City. "The guy that runs BP didn't exactly go down there and blow up the well," Bloomberg said last week on his radio show. "And what's more, if we want them to fix it, and they're the only ones with the expertise, I think I might wait to assign blame."

This isn't a shock coming Bloomberg, though. After all, he defended pharmaceutical companies and their CEOs during the debate on health care reform legislation--insisting that they "don't make a lot of money."

Has your blood pressure reached the same rate as that oil belching out of the Gulf floor yet?

IT TAKES a lot of imagination to visualize BP as the scrawny kid being "picked on" in the corner of the playground.

BP is a global behemoth with operations that reach into one in every six countries on earth. It is one of the so-called "supermajors"--the six non-state-owned international energy companies with a grip on every aspect of the oil and natural gas industry, from drilling and exploration, to refining, to sales to consumers behind a variety of brands.

As of a week ago, BP claimed it had spent about $1.25 billion on costs associated with the Gulf spill, or about $27 million a day since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded. That might sound like a lot, but it's not if you're an oil giant. In the first three months of this year, BP's daily earnings were $93 million--three-and-a-half times more just in profits than it was spending to stop the disaster.

The spending on the Gulf disaster is a drop in the bucket to one of the world's richest companies. As of March 31, according to corporate statements, BP had $6.8 billion in cash and cash equivalents available. BP's total operating revenues last year--with the world recession at a low point--were just shy of a quarter-trillion dollars.

It's true that BP is now taking a huge hit on the stock market--the price of its shares has dropped by more than half since the disaster. And the U.S. government seems certain to hold BP responsible for much larger sums than it's spent so far.

But BP has no one to blame but itself for any of this.

Internal memos published by the New York Times show that the corporation's own engineers and executives had serious concerns about the Deepwater Horizon rig for more than a year, but the well was kept in operation. "The documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of 'well control,'" the Times reported. "And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer"--exactly what failed in the April 20 explosion.

Meanwhile, according to testimony before Congress by the rig's chief mechanic, managers on the drilling platform had a bitter dispute with company executives that ended with a BP official declaring, "This is how it's going to be." That ultimatum led to heavy drilling fluid being removed from the well and replaced with lighter weight seawater--the last fail-safe mechanism against an explosion other than the suspect blowout preventer.

Once the catastrophe was underway, BP did everything it could to minimize what was happening. The company originally said about 1,000 barrels of oil a day was leaking from the well, and later insisted on an estimate of 5,000 barrels a day that the government and media used for weeks.

Now, even the official government estimate of the oil flow is five to six times greater, and independent scientists say it was obvious from the start that the disaster was much worse than BP let on. An engineering professor who analyzed the underwater video of the leak put the flow into the gulf at 56,000 to 84,000 barrels a day--meaning that a spill the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster may have been taking place every two-and-a-half days since the disaster began.

So it's a little hard to sympathize with poor little BP--or, for that matter, to accept Bloomberg's claim that corporate officials "didn't exactly go down there and blow up the well." Maybe not, but they created a disaster waiting to happen in the Gulf of Mexico--and when that disaster did happen, they did everything they could to obscure how much damage they'd done.

BARACK OBAMA and his administration certainly recognize the damage that BP's disaster has done to them. With its approval rating dropping into the forties for the first time, the White House is talking tough.

This week, Obama will make another trip to the Gulf--before returning to the White House for a nationally televised speech from the Oval Office and a command meeting with BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg. Obama is said to be insisting that BP suspend dividend payouts to shareholders or spending on spin-management ad campaigns, and instead devote the money to the cleanup and to helping Gulf Coast businesses and working people affected by the disaster.

That's certainly a contrast to the administration's more moderate response early on--not to mention its ill-fated announcement a few weeks before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon that it would open up hundreds of miles of U.S. coastline to offshore drilling.

Still, it's hard to view the administration's complaints about BP as something other than a different kind of public relations campaign.

Millions of people thought Barack Obama's election was, among other things, an eviction notice for the Texas oil and gas interests that seemed to get everything they wanted from the preceding Bush administration. But Obama proved much more accommodating to the industry than most people expected--as the attempt to lift the ban on offshore drilling shows.

And no wonder. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, among the $3.5 million that BP and its employees contributed to federal candidates over the past two decades, the largest total chunk went to none other than Barack Obama--a little over $77,000 during his brief time in the Senate and while running for president.

Meanwhile, there's Obama's Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, now the administration's point man on the oil spill disaster, who told reporters that his job is "to keep the boot on the neck of British Petroleum."

But Salazar's appointment was warmly welcomed by BP and the oil companies a year and a half ago. He was a U.S. senator from Colorado then, and known for his ties to industry. "Oil and mining interests praised Mr. Salazar's performance as a state official and as a senator, saying that he was not doctrinaire about the use of public lands," the New York Times reported at the time.

Predictably, Salazer did little once in office to shift an Interior Department that was notorious for being a rubber stamp for the plans and policies promoted by the energy industry. The scandalous behavior at the department's Minerals Management Service--now the topic of front-page stories--continued unabated under Salazar.

As Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald wrote:

What happened here was obvious: Obama chose one of the most industry-pleasing, industry-subservient Democrats to head the Interior Department, despite what everyone knew about pervasive corruption at that department...And Obama got exactly what was obvious he would get by making that choice.

In fact, so little has changed in Obama's Interior Department that staffers talk about "the third Bush term," according to Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Ruch told a Rolling Stone writer: "They're working for the same managers, who are implementing the same policies. Why would you expect a different result?"

Now, of course, BP is on the hot seat, and there are very few politicians in Washington who aren't demanding that it pay a steep price. It may still. But industrial giants like BP have a record of surviving, even when they're guilty of mass murder.

In the early morning hours of December 3, 1984, large quantities of deadly gases leaked out of a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. Panicked residents woke up with a burning sensation in their lungs, and no idea why--the plant's warning systems were mostly non-functional.

It was the worst industrial accident in history. An estimated 8,000 people died within the first weeks from exposure to the gases or being trampled in the panic. Another 8,000 to 12,000 have died since from diseases and conditions related to the plant leak, and another 100,000 to 200,000 people suffered permanent injuries.

Union Carbide immediately turned to damage control, including claims that sabotage committed by a single employee was responsible for a leak that killed thousands within hours.

The company stonewalled efforts to win justice for the victims. In 1989, it agreed to pay a pittance--$470 million--as a settlement of a civil lawsuit, a small fraction of what the Indian government had demanded. Criminal prosecution of Union Carbide managers was put off for almost a quarter century, until an Indian court ruled this spring that seven former employees should be sentenced to two years' imprisonment and a $2,000 fine.

IF BP and its defenders deserve any hearing at all, it's on this one point alone: BP doesn't operate differently than any major corporation in the U.S. or around the world.

Under capitalism, business owners are driven by competition to put one priority above all others--profits. Every other goal--the health and safety of workers or consumers, protection of the environment, the living standards of employees, the good of society as a whole--come second.

The more profit that can be made, the more ruthless are the capitalists. In the first volume of Capital, Karl Marx quoted from a book by a 19th century British writer to dramatize this dynamic:

With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 percent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 percent certain will produce eagerness; 50 percent, positive audacity; 100 percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 percent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave trade have amply proved all that is here stated.

Oil companies like BP operate on the assumption that any risk to everyone else is worth taking if there's money to be made. Its owners and executives don't waste a moment worrying about the victims of its operations. Neither should the rest of us when a multinational monster like BP finally gets caught.