The lamestream media has finally caught on to the Mother Jones story about how British Petroleum is controlling — as in blocking — American press access to the mess these swine have made in in the Gulf of Mexico.
Speaking to The Washington Post, an unidentified turd-bag from BP — who remains nameless for no reason which I can comprehend — spake thusly:
“With regards to media, we follow an incident command system, a tried-and-true way of responding to crises. You have public information officers and you have a joint information center that includes the responsible party, BP, as well as government agencies who have involvement and oversight for this spill, the Coast Guard being the federal on-scene coordinator. We have state people, NOAA, representatives from Transocean [the company that owned the rig that created the spill]. We’ve had MMS. What we do is use information that comes in through our operations and create, if you will, the message to share.”
Uh huh. Well, fuck you, Captain Invisible. Journalism is not what is “shared” by criminals and the police, it is what is uncovered by a free press, which seems to be a little off the back here. I think a few journos need to get up in the grill of a few of BP’s hired goons, get arrested, and start writing some interesting stories from the Louisiana lockup.
But that’s just me. I write about bike stuff.
Mad Blog Media 
Was this an America turd, or British turd? Because a free press in one country is not the same as a free press in the other. Damn American sensibilities and no Page 3 girls!!!
I think BP stands for BUTT PLUGS. Just my 2 cents.
Yeah, it’s sad, but what else did you expect? They just hired Dick Cheney’s press secretary to be their new head PR flack…
@BPGlobalPR on Twitter is pretty scathingly funny. Somebody took some of the better lines and made them into mock billboards…
The muckraking newshawk bizness ain’t what it used to be, for sure…
Business as usual for the ex-Bush/Cheney crew. Hollywood couldn’t write a better script. No one would believe it.
Boz, this is “business as usual” for any corporation. Lie, cheat, steal, it’s all “ethical” in the world of corporate business.
To be completely depressed, and to feel that no matter how cynical you’ve been it ain’t been cynical enough, might I suggest visiting the website for PR Watch (http://www.prwatch.org/). Or, alternatively, if you want more background try reading one of books by Sheldon and Rampton that describe how the PR business tries and succeeds at fooling all of us. “Toxic Sludge Is Good For You” was particularly eye opening for me.
Just another example of looking at the small picture — these guys, already raking in BILLIONS of dollars/euros, continue to do things on the cheap. When it inevitably goes to hell, all the dough they “saved” by cutting corners and bribing officials is gone in the massive expense in fixing the mess along with the horrible PR and tanking stock prices. But big business never seems to learn about long-term success, it’s just “how rich can we get and how fast?” But it’s nice to see some of Darth Cheney’s friends get their tits in the wringer for a change instead of the eight long years where those guys were kings (unless they went hunting with ol’ Dick of course!)of the world. What’ll happen next? BP will just change their name to something else and hope the world forgets about this mess eventually.
“BP will just change their name to something else and hope the world forgets about this mess eventually.”
And they will. Sometimes they don’t even need to change their name.
For example, can you name the company that was in charge of having emergency oil spill equipment on hand and ready to go in Prince William Sound (but didn’t) when the Exxon Valdez went aground? Answer: BP.
The only reason we remember that Exxon was at fault for the Exxon Valdez disaster was because they put their name on the fucking boat. Tip for all the oil companies out there: given that your tankers can run aground, in the interest of good PR: don’t put your name on the fucking boat!
In a way, this drilling disaster is the best thing that could have happened to humanity, although it sure does suck to be an animal. No one pays attention to the slow degradation of the environment as we pave and crap up the landscape, or to the centuries-slow progress of anthropogenically induced climate change. We pay attention to Rod Serling like stories and this one is a doozey: drill a hole in the earth, have the drill ship blow up, and have a wounded Gaia belch forth her innards uncontrollably, poisoning the Gulf (and potentially, parts of the Atlantic Ocean) in one big science-fiction gulp. Rod could not have written a better story than this one.
The League of American Bicyclists held the 2010 Rally in Albuquerque this past weekend. Amidst the rides and beer, there was the more sombre moment of giving the eulogy for Gail Ryba, who was posthumously awarded the League’s Phyllis Harmon Award for Outstanding Volunteerism. I counted Gail as a good friend as well as fellow advocate, and giving that eulogy was hard. Amidst the tribute to Gail, I spun the yarn about the faux Rod Serling episode above.
Gail’s work as the President of the Bicycle Coalition of New Mexico was but a small part of her full time paying job as a super-advocate and policy planner for sustainable living. A Ph.D. in Chemistry from Caltech and several years as a fuel cell researcher at Sandia National Lab turbocharged her thinking. She was also the Exec. Director for the NM Coalition for Clean and Affordable Energy and headed up the Rio Grande Chapter of the Sierra Club of New Mexico. Gail quit her paying job at Sandia about a decade ago so she could put all her considerable talents into making the world a better place.
Gail would tell us that there is nothing too surprising about this BP mess and we might as well own up to our role in the problem along with the fully culpable assholes at Buggered Petroleum. We want our gas and we want it cheap. We the People believe all the crap about overregulation, privatization, and getting government out of the way of the private sector. Shit, only two years into Obama’s term, the right is again growing like gangbusters. Shit, they don’t even notice that the dead pelicans have come home to roost.
I’ve been saying for a while we’ve been heading to a new “Guilded Age.” We are in it now. The neocon fascists have achieved their stated aim.
History has a way of swinging back and forth from one group having sway in a society to another but don’t use that as an excuse for not doing anything to push the pendulum back. If some of you out there want to hold these corporate jerks responsible, you’ve got to get elected then not get corrupted. And that’s just the first step.
There’s something to be said for shitting in your own back yard. When you walk halfway into the woods to shit, you forget it’s there. When you can see it from your back window, makes you want to do something about it.
Getting our oil from halfway around the world gave us the mistaken impression that there was no cost. We’ve trashed the Middle East and much of Africa, but how many of us have ever seen it, or care? It’s like overfishing in the Northern Atlantic … the pond down the street still looks the same and the bass are still biting, so why do I care about a bunch of Norwegian fisherman?
If everyone had a rig in their front yard and had to wade through the spilled Texas tea to get to their car, we’d have moved on to cold fusion decades ago.
Unfortunately, we can’t get people to even switch to fission and fusion is still a work in progress. We could run cars on electric with fuel cells or batteries if there was an abundance of electricity but to do that without oil and coal would require a combination of solar, wind, and nuclear. But there is this fear of a massive meltdown and given what is happening in the Gulf, who can blame the public for doubting our ability to run these enterprises when the CEO is primarily interested in feathering his own nest and someone forgot to watch the store.
This is the oil industry version of a Three Mile Island or maybe a Chernobyl if you count up the dead birds and fish. There is no free lunch when it comes to feeding our energy addiction. I am pessimistic about the future.