POOR OLD BP
Great Britain once was a great country, full of pride and less than 100 years ago the most productive nation on earth. Now reliant upon financial services for 35% of its gross national product, most former industrial cities look almost the same as Detroit excepting the local populations are dominated by new immigrants from the poorest nations on earth. A very smart politician, Enoch Powell, in the sixties predicted Britain’s demise to the letter and because his views were so radical, he was the subject of all sorts of abuse and ridicule for the socialist left. No-one can now deny he was exactly on the money. If we think our manufacturing base has been on the decline in the last twenty-five years, take a trip to England and Scotland and you will see hundreds of Detroits.
Most flag carriers proudly paint their aircraft with national cultural emblems and usually the flag will prominently appear somewhere on the fuselage. Not so with British Airways; ten years ago they decided to take the flag (it didn’t really even resemble the Union Jack) of the tails and paint each aircraft individually in pop art fashion, mainly resembling the colors Willie Mandela, Nelson’s ex Missus, dressed herself up in. They should have renamed the airline as well. Ugandan International would have been appropriate. They started calling themselves BA instead of British Airways and the rest is history. When they directors of BA realized how much damage was done through loss of identity, they reverted back to their old colors and today the airline, just like BP, is also fighting for its very life as its flight attendants are taking them to the cleaners.
BP was once British Petroleum and until Margaret Thatcher’s government was 100% state owned. British Petroleum was a huge company even then but in so many ways because of its heritage it kept its competitors in check. Any dividends declared went straight into the government’s coffers. There were probably thirty large petroleum companies in the eighties all competing for the shrinking resource. The only cowboys in the business were independent “wild catters” based in Houston. Whenever they screwed up and were responsible for blow outs, along came Red Adair and his team to snuff the fires out.
When closet gay, John Brown rose to the top of British Petroleum in the early nineties, he wanted to show off his masculinity (that is until he was outed and ousted by a twenty-five-year old rent boy) by reinventing the darling of the London Stock Exchange. The first thing he did was to give it the generic name BP. He then set about colluding with Shell, Exxon and Chevron and within ten years the big four transformed what was once a very competitive global business into an oligopoly. In the States, BP purchased amongst others, Amoco and Atlantic Richfield with the result BP now controls the vast majority of crude which comes out of the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska. That is why apart from CEO Tony Hayward, every BP official we see on television is American. They either were employees of the old ARCO or Amoco.
As an oligopoly, successive administrations (particularly the Bush/Cheney outfit) have been bought and sold by the oil “magnates” heading the oligopoly. The result is they can do what like, where they like and how they like. The culmination to date of this new order is the disaster in the gulf. Just weeks ago President Obama was proud to declare he was behind more drilling. What a fool he looks now. And what a bunch of idiots BP executives look too. Why? Because of all the changes within BP, the company is totally bereft of either a soul or a conscience. Had BP remained as it was twenty years ago, it would be Amoco (or whoever else might have taken them over) fighting for its life. The oil oligopoly has proven to be bigger than President Obama’s administration and until we re-invoke the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and totally regulate the energy business, this disaster will pale into insignificance to what could take place into the future,
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