Day 100: The Fall Guy That Isn't Enough For Me. How About You?

Day 100

Tony Hayward, Outgoing BP CEO

recipient of a $18M Million Severance

Somehow, Tony Hayward being the BP Fall Guy (to the tune of a reported $18M severance package that includes $1.6M up front as a year's salary, a full pension and reportedly still contesting some 2M shares and various stock options) isn't quite enough for me. On the heels of revelations that BP is the single largest supplier of US Defense Department fuel, that BP has deliberately altered photos dealing with its responses to the Gulf oil leak and on its website, now BP is allowing Hayward to snub the Senate Committee looking into various allegations about the spill. But I guess BP isn't really worried about pissing off Congress. Now pissing off the Defense Department, that might be a concern, but not Congress! Their lobbyists will have those defense contracts under control at the congressional level. And I'm sure you don't have to take my word for that. Just listen to your gut on that one. As long as DOD continues to want BP fuel they are doing just fine with the US Government.

July 27, 2010 Photo Credit: Alastair Grant-AP

A Greenpeace activist puts up a banner as a group blocks off a BP fuel station in protest as the company's board announces its annual results in London.  (Text copyright The Washington Post reproduced for Educational Purposes under Fair Use)

Where is responsibility, you may ask? When CEOs run companies into the ground, irreparably damage the world and livelihoods around them, we kiss them and give them $18M to go away? How many times have we seen the same thing, these huge payoffs to failed executives?

I want to be a corporate CEO. And you do too, no doubt. How much will they pay us to destroy the world, one gushing leak at a time?

Watch out Siberia. Here he comes.

Watch out Gulf of Mexico. Oh... wait a minute. 

It's probably too late for you.

Let's hope it isn't too late for these little guys.

July 26, 2010 Photo Credit: Pat Sullivan-AP

A volunteer holds a Kemp's ridley turtle hatchling before releasing it into the Gulf of Mexico at Padre Island National Seashore in Texas. Hundreds of endangered baby sea turtles embarked on a new life Monday with federal biologists hoping that by the time the tiny critters get as far east as the BP spill, the toxic oil will largely be gone. (Text copyright The Washington Post reproduced for Educational Purposes under Fair Use)

© Bright Nepenthe, 2010