June 17, 2010

• Day 60 A.O. (After Oil Spill), more on BP, and the Myth of CEO Omnipotence

  One of the most ridiculous arguments I’ve heard regarding the BP Oilspill is the whole question of whether we should feel sorry for CEO Tony Hayward. Related pointless questions include questions about whether Hayward handled the public relations well, whether Hayward treated safety seriously enough, whether Hayward made too many gaffs, whether Hayward is being unfairly scapegoated, whether Hayward is too arrogant, and of course whether Hayward will keep his job after all of this is over.

  Let me say unequivocally to all of this… WHO CARES!

  We have this delusional fixation about CEOs. It’s as if we think they have the power to wave magic wands and change the whole course of a company in an instance and so if anything goes wrong it must be cuz they are evil beasts secretly wanting the evil things to occur.   We focus on CEO’s as if everything that happens in a corporation depends on and revolves around the CEO.

  But it’s not the case. CEO’s are not omnipotent. Indeed I would say CEO’s don’t matter. So when I blame BP for their arrogance and incompetence,  let me be clear I’m blaming BP.  I’m not blaming whoever happens to be the CEO right now or whoever happened to be the CEO before. Likewise, I’m not blaming the random worker who might have made a random mistake that ultimately caused the explosion. In both cases these are just pieces. They’re tiny little cogs in the gears.  The real problem is the beast itself. A corporation that is structured from the ground up to take risks for profits and to care only about profits above all else.

  Replace Tony Hayward with anyone else and I can bet you the results would have been almost identical. The person who is able to get that job has to be someone who shares the values that BP espouses. That is devotion to the company’s bottom line first and the safety and security of the peoples and environments their activities effect a distant second.

  That’s why we see all the money spent to avoid negative press. That’s not any particular evil person’s decision. That’s because BP is a corporation. And like all corporations, like the entire corporate culture, it thinks that it both can and should control people’s opinions by controlling what story results they get in Google searches and what dead animals they see on the beach.

  It’s not even really BP. BP might be a particularly atrocious company by any measure looking through their history but the other oil companies are by and large not much better if at all. All five of the other major oil companies testified before congress that they didn’t have the capacity to cope with a major oil spill like the kind BP faced if it had happened to them.  That’s a vast understatement I’m sure. I’m guessing barely any of them even bothered to do anything more than the bare minimum they are required to by law. That’s how they work.

  Modern corporations are fundamentally a bad design.  They encourage immorality and recklessness by their very nature. They externalize costs to maximize profits.

  If you create systems that encourages people to behave in bad ways, we shouldn’t be surprised when the people within those systems behave in bad ways. 

  Just as we shouldn’t be surprised when newscasters sacrifice journalistic ethics for access or when politicians lie to curry votes or when people in living in inner cities commit crimes in order to prove themselves.

  It’s the system stupid.

  That doesn’t mean people don’t have personal responsibility for their actions. Of course they do. Just as we didn’t allow the criminals during the Nuremberg trials to claim “following orders” as a defense from their culpability for genocide, so too when all is said and done with the heads of corporations and all the management have to face the consequences of their actions which might mean the loss of a job or the end of their entire life’s work or even universal condemnation.

  No. I’m arguing that often our focus on the individuals is a way to avoid asking ourselves the deeper questions. It IS scapegoating but not to protect any particular politician. In a way we scapegoat our entire way of life by saying “See all we have to do is get rid of Tony Hayward and people like him and then everything will be just fine!”

  But that’s not true and deep down we know it’s not true. Tony Hayward is irrelevant. He’s a distraction. When you combine:
  1. A top down totalitarian profit focused cost externalizing corporate regime
  2. A lobbying dependent, fundraiser focused, corporate captured government that believes that the only good regulation is NO regulation
  and
  3. A society and an economy that is dependent upon and addicted to dirty, dangerous, and destructive energy sources

  You will eventually get tragic outcomes.  And until we change at least one of these and preferably ALL three we’re still going to have a society extremely at risk of disaster after disaster after disaster.

  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

  According to the news a lot of people in Britain are also complaining that the US is being too anti-Brittish in their response to the BP tragedy.   This I think is absurd. I can guarantee you that this scale of a disaster would have provoked equivalent outrage no matter what company was responsible for it. American or otherwise. Though we should be happy it is a British company and not like say an Iranian company…. then there would probably be war.

  The idea that Obama is doing something wrong by referencing BP as British Petroleum is an arguable point. It’s probably deliberate but probably has more to do with catering to generic nationalism then any particular beef with Britain.

  Three other important facts need to be said about this whole Britain versus America dialogue that is emerging in the media. First the idea that this such a harsh attack on BP is sort of belied by the simple fact that BP is almost as much of an American company as it is a British company.  43% of BP shares are owned by American citizens.

  Secondly, it should be noted that Britain has in the past been brutally aggressive in attacking American behaviors even in their parliament. During the financial crises there were many who were quick to blame American banks in particular for the crises. And there are plenty who attack the US for going into Iraq.  And that’s perfectly reasonable to me. Those things really ARE our fault.  But it’s ridiculous to whine at us about those things and THEN come back and whine that we are being too tough on you for an oil spill that is wrecking our coast and has almost NO impact on you whatsoever.

  Thirdly the idea that the American Congress was too mean to poor Tony Hayward when questioning him today because they interupted him too much and made him admit to things and that they were that way to him because he was British is just too ridiculously laughable. Only someone who hasn’t seen our Congress in action could ever think that. That’s how Congress works when questioning people. It’s impolite. It’s often childish. It’s rarely fair. But yeah every time I turn on CNN and watch our Congress in action I cringe and wonder how we ended up with so many McCarthyites in our branches of government. Trust me, it’s not Britain specific.

  Yeah Americans are going to be angry. But honestly with the exception of the very rare utterance of “British Petroleum” I’ve seen very little to suggest that the American people are blaming Britain for this crises in any way shape or form. If people in Britain think that we are I can only imagine they just aren’t getting the same news sources we are getting here in the US.  I would suspect that the news they are getting must be very biased and considering how awful news is here in the States that’s really saying something. Really blame here is focused on two main culprits. The company BP, and the US Government. As it should be.

  *   *   *    *   *   *   *   *   *   *

  Next I want to talk quickly about this idea floating about that those stupid boycotters and protesters are only hurting poor Mom and Pop owners of gas stations and it’s totally unfair.

  Yeah on one level it’s true. I heard on the news that only 100 of the 700 “BP” branded Gas Stations are actually owned by BP (I’m not sure if that was US-wide or just in the South). And yeah I’d agree as a pragmatic matter if users know they should definitely target their boycotts on the things that hurt BP the most like the other oil based products they sell.

  But on another level I have to say Who Cares? 

  I mean it sometimes seems like we Americans have this weird notion of protest that says when we protest we should never ever hurt anyone.  So we have to tiptoe around our protests and not do anything controversial and be sure to only march along the permitted streets and only on weekends so nobody has to miss school or work and don’t bring any kids along and etc etc etc.

  Of course the history of effective protest is quite different. It’s the ones that BREAK the rules that have the biggest impact. It’s the ones that create a crises that have the best impact and even better if you can create such a crises without causing any physical harm to anyone causing your protesters to look utterly reasonable.

  But NOBODY said your protests can’t hurt anyone economically. Nobody said there can’t be economic collatoral damage too.

  When the protesters in Birmingham Alabama were fighting for civil rights they basically shut that entire city down with their protests.  Was there collatoral damage in that? Of course! Lots of people who probably weren’t racist and probably didn’t even support segregation probably were significantly hurt by the constant disruption to their business. Police officers were undoubtedly negatively impacted even when they were just doing their jobs. Did that fact stop the protesters from marching? Did it stop the sit ins? No! Because the people protesting new that what they were fighting for was more important.  If people had a problem with what was happening then they knew what they had to do to stop it. They simply had to give minorities equal rights.

  These non BP-owned “BP” stations face a similar condition. If they are upset about their loss of business and the unfair hardships they are facing it’s clear who is to blame. It’s BP. What’s keeping them from changing their gas stations and relabel them as non-BP and ensuring that they have no connection to BP whatsoever if they want to avoid being caught in BP’s dark umbrella? If they want to get this to stop they need to work with the protesters and the boycotters to get BP to do the right thing.

  It’s sad I admit for innocent people to be caught in the crossfire of this conflict. And I do feel sorry for them. But overall the core injustice here is that there is an oil company that treated the Gulf of Mexico like its own personal playground and the results were atrocious.

  *   *   *   *    *    *   *   *   *

  Lastly on the oil spill I want to note that, although this might just and most likely is just silly rumors but the news coming out of Russia on the Oil Spill here in the States is just out of this world.  There is a world of difference between the worst case scenarios they are talking about and the worst case scenarios we are talking about here in the States.  I read an article where they were saying things like if the Americans aren’t able to plug the leak we can basically kiss the Atlantic Ocean Goodbye.

  The stories I read said that this information was coming from Russian Scientists who BP called upon early on because they have an advanced kind of submersible technology and that those Scientists saw a massive leak in the ocean’s floor that dwarfed the one we are seeing on television and several other smaller fractures.  And they were arguing that we need to nuke the entire area in order to have any hope of sealing the many ruptures. They claimed that the US had forced them to remain silent about what they saw.

  It was hopefully just a couple of crazy stories I read and has no real impact on what’s really happening and indeed I don’t trust the Russian press a whole lot especially when it comes to reporting something that’s happening a half a world away. And just as we have a long history of misrepresenting Russia to build up anti-Russian sentiment, Russia also has a long history of misrepresenting the US to build up anti-American sentiment. So yeah it should definitely be taken with a grain of salt.

  I couldn’t find either of the articles just now after a cursory search and I foolishly didn’t save them, but if I do I’ll be sure to link them here.

  But it would be sort of explicative if this were true and we are not only not getting the full story but not even getting a fraction of the correct estimates? That might explain why the government isn’t really trying that hard to prevent the oil from reaching the shore but just want to make a show of trying to prevent it. Maybe they know it is impossible.

  Of course the real reason I doubt this story is that if it were true I suspect we’d have other separate independently verifiable estimates of oil spill size that were vastly out of line with the official estimates that might hint at it. Something like various scientific institutions would be studying satellite data and sounding the sirens of alarm and the news media would be eating it up.   Generally I don’t think there are big far reaching conspiracies that are so powerful that they can cover stuff like that up.

  But if it does turn out to be true, or in the future we mess up and make the oil spill hit the true worse case scenario of a total blow out of the entire reservoir, or if we are just never able to seal the damn hole and it keeps getting worse and worse,  I want to take note that I was the first to say we may be living in a new era of mankind such that we might end up measuring time using the point of the oilspill as a pivot point.  We should start measuring time in days and years after oil spill.

  Today I believe is Day 60 A.O.

  • 3:19 pm
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