The Chris Moeller Archives

Too big to clean

President Obama is demanding that BP set up an individual account to pay out damage claims to Gulf of Mexico residents and businesses impacted by the oil spill, and tensions are up between the United States and Great Britain over Obama's rhetoric in reference to the oil spill and the company that was called "British Petroleum" until recent years.

Many Britons, and some Americans too, own stock and pensions in BP, and now British Prime Minister David Cameron, as well as Obama, are feeling political pressure to help protect BP's stock price. The two political leaders talked by phone Saturday in a conversation during which Cameron is thought to have asked Obama to tone down his comments in regards to BP and their responsibility in the cleanup of the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Obama had said that BP should withhold its quarterly dividend and suggested that he would have fired BP's CEO.

Obama's responsibility to BP stockholders is on the leading edge of nil. He's accountable to the American people, as I think he realizes. Guess what. Investors-- and employees-- take inherent risks when they buy stock or choose to associate themselves with companies that trade publicly. Many of the companies prove to be corrupt and/or serially criminal. Sometimes it blows up. Shit happens. Or slick happens, in this case. BP is a transnational corporation, unrestrained by national borders and many regulations, devoid of any authentic sense of public responsibility. Yet as soon as it hits the fan, they're British again, asking for the political protection of the leaders and the people of Great Britain. Turns out the economic system on that side of the pond is exactly like ours-- socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.

What has the United States already done for BP, incidentally? Well, in addition to turning over to them our national resources for pennies on the dollar for more than half a century, how about our overthrowing a democratically-elected government in Iran in 1953 so that BP could even exist in the first place?

That's right. Before BP was "BP" or "British Petroleum," they were the "Anglo-Iranian Oil Company." They were a nationalized oil company based in Iran, but they weren't nationalized by the Iranians, they were nationalized by the British colonialists and the Royal Navy. A problem arises in 1951 when the people of Iran elect Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh, a secular-minded, European-educated lawyer, as their Prime Minister, and he plans to nationalize the oil fields of Iran for Iran, eliminating Britain's #1 foreign investment by doing so. Enter the United States Central Intelligence Agency, which stages a successful coup of Mosaddegh. The shah is installed as dictator, Iran's political development is retarded for six decades and counting, and the incident comes to serve as Chapter One to a metaphorical book entitled "Why They Hate Us."

So Gulf Coast residents, take heart: Anglo-Iranian Oil Company/British Petroleum/BP has fucked you over for good in the process of extracting your economic lifeblood and laying waste to your living environment. But you're not the first.

posted by CM @ 7:26 PM