Tag: BP

Company Store

BP is housing hundreds of oil-spill clean-up workers on the Louisiana coast in “flotels” – 40-foot-long corrugated steel boxes that contain dormitory style beds

I hope they’re deducting a generous room and board allowance from what is inevitably temporary and benefits-free pay, which, of course arrives in the form of scrip. Spendable at company stores everywhere! Ask your employer about scrip!

You suck 16Bbl, and what do you get? Why, it’s great, and great looking and can be towed to an oil spill near you. Who says they’re not innovating?

Towering Inferno

Deepwater Horizon officially an Irwin Allen film, at least according to these excerpts from Mother Jones; all they need is a bit of stage direction:

FADE IN: INT CONTROL ROOM

on the morning of the day that the rig exploded [Installation manager Jimmy] Harrell had a “skirmish” over drilling procedures during a meeting with BP’s “company man,” well site leader Robert Kaluza. “I remember the company man saying this is how it’s going to be,” [Douglas Brown, the chief mechanic on the Deepwater Horizon] told the panel. As Harrell was leaving the meeting, according to Brown, “He pretty much grumbled, ‘I guess that’s what we have those pincers for,’” referring to the blowout preventer on the sea floor that is supposed to be the last resort to prevent a leak in the event of an emergency. The blowout preventer failed following the explosion on the rig, causing the massive spill.

INT: CONTROL ROOM; fire is plainly visible outside the windows. EXT. commotion is heard throughout. Jimmy Harrell, a top employee of rig owner Transocean, speaks to HOUSTON via SATELLITE PHONE

HARRELL: Are you fucking happy? Are you fucking happy? The rig’s on fire! I told you this was gonna happen.

I’m not trying to say that the spill is George Bush’s fault, just like the hurricane itself was not George Bush’s fault. But the mentality that government not only can’t successfully regulate business but has no place attempting to do so, that corporate insiders know better than experts, and that people can deal with disasters on their own is a conservative one.

The problem is that conservative failures spawn more conservatives: When conservatives cripple government, and then government fails, people believe government is incapable.

Ali Frick (who is subbing for Matt Yglesias). I’d add: Which is exactly what the conservatives actively wrecking the government want to happen.