Okay America, So Why Is BP Different from Union Carbide?

 

A second, and very different version (with co-writer Michael Economides this one) of the story in the previous post. This - as titled above - published at Energy Tribune.com

Here's a taster (for those that an extra click (above) is just a click too far:

Even before Wednesday’s White House summit with BP executives, BP directors had taken the decision not to pay out shareholder dividends this year and to put in $20 billion to a compensation fund. In the light of the president eliciting a prior commitment from BP to apparently unlimited liability, the Daily Mail declared the TV address a “day of BP-bashing” by a president who “bullied the firm into capitulation.” Even the strongly leftwing Guardian saw BP’s $20 billion compensation fund as Obama’s “pound of flesh.”

The Daily Telegraph saw the TV speech through the eyes of “83,000 Twitter and Facebook comments made during and after the speech”. The Telegraph headline claimed users were “not impressed” in the aftermath of the address.

Speaking the day after President Obama’s speech, Prime Minister David Cameron made it clear that BP should not be exposed to a string of lawsuits from individuals and from the states and, in effect, to “unlimited damages.” Cameron said, “BP is an important company. It is an important company for people’s pensions, it employs thousands of people in the UK and it pays a lot of tax.” He could easily have added, “It is important for Americans, too,” given that 40% of BP shareholders live in the US.

But perhaps the most telling press reference was in the UK’s The Week magazine (June 19, 2010) which alluded to an Indian press article (in The Outlook, New Delhi) demanding: “How dare the Americans bleat about BP?” Both articles focused on the moral outrage still being felt by the people of Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India, 26 years after the Bhopal chemical disaster. In particular, the abject failure of fire-breathing US politicians and press moralists to feel a similar outrage over their plight as perpetrated by a US company on their soil; a humanitarian scale way beyond that being experienced in the Gulf of Mexico.