Like millions of others, I was mildly offended when BP’s Swedish Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg insisted that he and his company care about “the small people.”  Americans bristled at the term.  It sounded demeaning, implying that we U.S. citizens are little and weak, not like ’the big people’ who run BP. 

     But as I thought about Svanberg’s gaffe, I realized that his term for us Americans is spot on.  We are ’the small people.’  Even though we number more than 300 million, and even though we have a federal agency tasked with making big oil companies conduct their operations safely, we are the ones bearing the pain of damage that grows daily as oil continues to gush into the Gulf, out of control.  We ’small people’ are paying because the ‘big people’ at BP used their might to make sure the Mining and Minerals Service did not interfere with BP’s cheating on safety or with its failure to prepare for a possible accident. 

     BP’s CEO Tony Hayward promised that BP would ‘make things right.’  But the ’small people’ of the Gulf coast know he can’t.  They know that the damage is too great, that their means of livelihood–fishing, shrimping, tourism–at least for the foresseable future.   The $20 billion President Obama wrung out of the company to compensate Gulf coast victims is tiny, compared to the suffering being endured by so many in the Gulf region.

     While BP is losing lots of money–in payments to victims, in trying to clean up the disaster it has caused, and in plummeting stock prices–the corporation’s giant size protects it from the kinds of costs we ’small people’ must pay for much smaller crimes.  Any one of us ’small people’ who kills another person faces life in prison or even execution.  But ‘big people’ who run corporations like BP never face execution.  And prison sentences are almost as rare.  Despite the 11 human deaths BP caused when the Gulf rig exploded, it is unlikely that those deaths will cost BP anything more than money.

     Unfortunately, there is nothing unique about BP.  The tragic deaths of 29 Massey coal miners in West Virginia recently, and the irresponsible behavior of giant financial institutions that brought us to the brink of Depression, were caused by the greed of ‘big people,’ unchecked by the federal agencies charged with their oversight.

     Yes, Svanberg was right.  We are ‘the small people.’  And we’ll remain small and weak, suffering what we must at the hands of giant corporations, for the foreseeable future.  

     But I do believe we can change the current great imbalance of power.  We the people need to take our democracy back.  We desperately need campaign finance reform, so that we can minimize the influence of Big Corporate Money on Congress, on the White House, and on our regulatory agencies.–April Moore

 

  

This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 9:08 am and is filed under Celebrating our beautiful Earth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.