It doesn’t seem possible that there could be a corporate honcho anywhere on this globe who’s more clueless and self-absorbed than that gang of banksters on Wall Street. But then comes Tony Hayward to astonish us.
He’s the dapper British chap who is chief executive of BP, the oil giant that owns the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil well that’s making such a mess in the Gulf. On May 14, with his company’s blown-out well still barfing massive amounts of crude and gas from four miles deep under the seabed, and with the billowing slick oozing toward the shores of four states, Tony opened his mouth and spurted out a stunner. The boss of the world’s largest oil corporation insisted that the blotch spreading from Louisiana to Florida is really not that big of a deal, for it is “relatively tiny.”
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Tiny, Tony? Yes, Hayward explained: “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersants we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”
Wow, what an insight! No wonder BP paid this guy $4,595,453.31 last year.
But Tony is full of insights. Just four days later, as the oil was reaching into Louisiana marshes and ebbing toward the Gulf current that could sweep it around Florida and up our East Coast, BP’s boss let go with another one: “The environmental impact of this disaster,” he chirped, “has been very modest.” Hayward even went on to forecast a rosy future: “Everything we can see at the moment suggest that the over all environmental impact of this will be very, very modest.”
My goodness, don’t they have muzzles in England? Tony is gushing nonsense faster than his catastrophic well is gushing toxics into our environment. To connect with reality and with action you can take, go to Friends of the Earth: www.foe.org.
Rachael Madow Clip Hayward Interview with Sky News, May 18, 2010.
“Tony Hayward, BP CEO: Gulf Oil Spill ‘Relatively Tiny, Huffington Post, May 14, 2010.
“BP boss admits job on the line over Gulf oil spill,” www.guardian.co.uk, May 14, 2010.
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