Feel the Heat
The rapid demise of the president's popularity and power has not escaped his attention, nor will it be tolerated by his team trained in hardball Chicago politics. It's one thing to foul up the Gulf of Mexico. It's another to threaten those who control the world's most valuable political franchise. But that's exactly what BP's arrogance and incompetence did.
The president doesn't need to cast off his corporate-friendly cloak to know what to do here. At the very least, BP must appear to go down. In reality, an ever more demanding public wants revenge, not just for BP's crimes, but for the collective looting of the Treasury by Wall Street and the big banks.
BP and it's senior management are useful scapegoats to mollify public discontent and satisfy the cries for justice, no matter how loosely related to that aim BP's punishment might be. Their stock is down, they face the loss of $20 billion to start, and the damage to their already poor reputation could make room for gains by U.S. oil giants. There is little love for BP among that group as evidenced by the scathing findings on BP's Texas explosion. The report was produced by a team headed by James Baker.
The public needs a villain. Since no one in power will take on the real villains, crony capitalism and Wall Street fraud, BP will have to do.
It should get ugly very soon. But BP will lose. They have to. There are much more important issues, however.
How much longer will the citizens of the United States have to tolerate a political system that is rigged to make winners of losers, install followers posing as leaders, and transfer wealth from nearly everyone to the those very few in gated communities. There's never a spill of any kind there that isn't cleaned up promptly.
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