The one ace President Obama had in his pocket walking into yesterday’s meeting with BP executives was that BP could not afford more horrible publicity. It wasn’t the law; it wasn’t regulatory power. It was the people.
With the announcement of the $20 billion dollar escrow account, with no anticipation that $20 billion is the limit to pay for claims from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the US and BP have come to initial terms on damages for the destruction caused by the Deepwater Horizon explosion in April. Furthermore, BP’s shareholders are to forego dividends that were to be paid out this year in order to help pay into this escrow account for the costs of the disaster, and a separate fund of $100 million dollars has been set aside to benefit unemployed oil workers laid off due to the government-imposed six month moratorium on drilling in the Gulf.
Given the devastation and the loss of life in the Gulf of Mexico, this sounds like ruthlessly cold comfort. But the captains of industry in the board rooms of BP and in multinational corporations everywhere are not sympathetic to dolphins, fish and working class people who live near or rely on the shore for their livelihoods. True to form, corporations, their shareholders and executives stay wedded to the bottom line, regardless of which country’s resources they’ve fucked up, whose lives are lost, and how much damage control they have to pay for. For what its worth, to them $2.1 billion is not too big a price if they can just make the problem go away, as long as there’s money to pay it.