Quote:
Originally Posted by SpiritWarrior
Man, they grilled that BP CEO today, anyone watch it? He came off as one of the stupidest people on the planet - one congressman even joked that the only question he answered was whether or not "today is Thursday".
|
To be fair, he's a businessman and not a politician. I don't exect any CEO in these circumstances to be able to deal with our clowngress.
I'm not trying to defend the actions of BP here, I think they fucked up big time. I'm not pleased with the long-term magnitude of this situation. It's really bad. But I think a lot of people are missing the bigger picture. Our wonderful media certainly has done so, but I expected so.
We have a large number of Americans becoming a massively angry force. The entire body of lawmakers and policy deciders of our government are trying to get their 15 minutes of fame by attacking this CEO and feeding on public feeling for their own self-interest. The country is slowly turning this into some sort of political firestorm and having it devolve into partisan politics. It's turning into a giant circus, like every major news story. I'm thoroughly disgusted at what I see transpiring.
While all these shenanigins are going on, here is what I see. I see an oil spill that is foreshadowing of larger, more worrying concerns. BP was certainly cutting corners somewhere, which lead to this mega disaster, or at least that is what I've heard early on when this happened (I don't know if anything has been "proven" yet). Why were they cutting corners? Sure greed and profit had a large role in this. But a lot of profits go back into reinvestments in the company to fund future drilling. Oil extraction isn't as profitable as people think it is, and the margins are getting slimmer and slimmer. Why are they getting slimmer; because we are increasingly relying on deepwater, offshore drilling to get our oil. Why is this so? Is it perhaps because we've used up most of the easy to get oil? Hmm...
This spill is reflective of so many looming problems and societal questions that need to be raised and addressed. Of all the things to be discussing and arguing about, everyone is focused on some of the more trivial (and quite frankly, stupid) aspects.