What do BP and Barack Obama have in common?
You would think from the White House puffery that President Obama harbors long standing resentments toward BP. But the truth is that BP is a corporation that some time ago decided to throw in with political "progressives" and "green" policies. In the U.S. it has tended to support liberals in election campaigns--including Barack Obama.
The real story apparently is well known in Britain, where former Thatcher strategist Norman Tebbit remains bristly, humorous and apt as a commentator. He has a regular blog for the London Telegraph, making the point today that BP ran off some of its cautious, old-time engineers and other experts in recent years, the kind of people who might have prevented the egregious Gulf spill.
"The facts are clear enough," writes Lord Tebbit. "Under the leadership of Lord Browne, BP not only contracted out the management of those nasty dirty jobs like drilling for oil and refining it, it progressively got rid of anyone who knew any thing about such old-fashioned activities. The New, Modern, Green, Progressive, BP made excellent profits, but failed to heed the failures in parts of its business for which it was still responsible but had discarded the skills to manage."
We need some American media to take us inside the real BP.
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