Category Archives: BP Chairman Svanberg

Ten Questions related to BP Oil Spill and Wealth

This is going to be one of my briefer posts. It is also one of the least finished. It sticks with simply asking some large questions that are not easily answered. That is because I want to focus on Carl-Henric Svanberg’s BP’s generous response to us “small people” for whom they have given up one year of dividends and also setting up a special fund for victim compensation.  

The fact that BP has placed twenty billion dollars into a victim’s compensation escrow account is certainly a very good thing. We are mostly pleased by that development and I think that Ken Feinberg enjoys a fairly high level of goodwill and respect here. So let us be clear about the fact that the money helps.  This is without regard to whether or not it is enough money.

1. Louisiana, most of all and other Gulf Coast states  have developed a system of leases, licenses, seasons, turtle excluders, pollution control and cultural traditions which has maintained a highly productive seafood industry while preserving the resources that are the basis of fisheries far from here from which we receive little money. We internalize the cost of responsibility and now have been agin greatly assaulted by obvious deluded idiots in the larger world.  Will there be a fiscal response to this set of financial obligations and their effects?

2. American policy of sending everyone into unstable industries and cheapened college educations is clearly moronic. We have maintained a whole class of high paying and decent skilled careers of the type this society hates. Now this sector is again assaulted and the whole infrastructure will tend to tear it apart if nothing is done. Will there be sector support?

3. BP is clearly run by people whose social skills are just above those of a gorilla troop. Will there be an effort by skilled people to work within the complex and enduring social fabric of our coast?

4. When food production is affected in any big way more food is taken from the poor in the world economy by a long string of events. Will anyone  actually care about the misery that may be suffered as far away a s rural China or Ecuador?

5. Will the natural resources management  professions be given social support in this context or will money men and politicians make all the policy decisions?

6. Will the utter cluelessness of policy regarding Louisiana’s unique wetlands in the federal government be really examined?

7. Will the pelicans of the next five generations get health support under Obamacare? Will there be funds to study wildlife survival and reproduction over years?

8.  Will the realities of seafood processing piece work be understood by anybody? Or will all decisions be made by people who think food comes from stores in plastic sheathing?

9. Will    there be any effort to clear the backlog of coastal restoration projects which will have to compete with the aftermath of this disaster for various resources?

10. Will someone give these BP executives a chance to meet with all the small people here who love their big strong protectors from across the Atlantic so very much?

BP Oil Spill and My Personal Journey as of my 46th Birthday

I am turning 46 years old this Tuesday. It will be the first birthday I have spent obsessing about an oil spill. Of course it may happen that this is not how I  spend this birthday but it will certainly be the closest I have come to spending a birthday that way. I say that having spent a great deal of time thinking about oil spills compared to the average human on the planet. But I don’t think I have ever seen a greeting card which says “On the Occasion of your Birthday Marred and Affected by an Oil Spill.” I often spend the time before a birthday reviewing the good and the bad things about life and thinking a bit about the future. This is a birthday in which that will happen but so will the continuing process of thinking about the oil spill, it is odd really. In a world of odd things and a life that has been exposed to those odd things it is still an odd way to spend a birthday.   

For me this oil spill is a sort of final catastrophe in a life in which bad memories are very numerous indeed. Yet as hot as it may get on a Louisiana summer and as much as I may not like the broiling heat that often marks the coming of my birthday– I have had good memories too and some have even happened on my birthday. I do not think there could be a lot of happiness on my birthday this year even without the spill. However, the spill certainly does not add gaiety. My maternal grandmother died last year on my birthday and this will be the first anniversary of her death. If one were to bet it would seem likely that it would be the last anniversary of her death as well as the first such anniversary that her widower, my maternal grandfather will be around for as well as being my birthday. That is not an altogether cheery milestone.  The blasting oil is just something that overshadows all the good personal reasons to be miserable that day. That is the thing about a disaster like this.  One already had enough problems without it in most cases. Life was hellish enough for many people before the Titanic hit the iceberg, the Union Carbide plant exploded in Bhopal, engineer in Long Island decided that texting and driving a train while intoxicated went well together.  I am ready to mark the day that is the anniversary of my birth. However, there is an added shadow to it.

The day before my birthday is always Flag Day. It almost always look at the United States of America  in relation to my birthday. While there are some good and noble things in this horrific uncontrolled gusher event which relate to the nation of the Star Spangled Banner, there is more horrible damage that hits at the core of needed and already endangered things. All in all this is much more of a blemish on that flag under which relatives and ancestors of mine have fought and died than it is a credit to it. Some things are just plain bad — this is one of those things. My relationship with the United States of America was already complicated and problematic. I felt no real need for another reason to be pessimistic about my homeland’s future and depressed about its present.

This is also a birthday which fall near Fathers Day. I have no children. One of my grandfathers is dead and I am estranged from my former father-in-law.  So while I always honor my dad’s day and will recognize my remaining grandfather it is a holiday that has in some ways shrunk for me over the decades. I will not go into all the reasons why. But obviously when I was newly married it would have had different associations than it does now that I am long divorced.  I do have some godchildren who often recognize the day with a card. But just as we extend holidays to godfathers and grandfathers  in this region so some of us thin of patrimony a word related to father — pater being Latin for “father” and the root of the word patrimony. The wetlands are a great part of our patrimony in Louisiana. It is something I have shared with my father and which he shared with his father and which I shared directly and alone with his father and with him and his father. I taught one of my god-daughters, my niece Anika, to fish on Grand Isle where the oil is fouling so much right now.  My father and I have plenty of reasons for our relationship not to be all joy and happiness, but the oil spill doesn’t help to brighten the occasion of Fathers Day.

So while I may end up finding some happy times on my birthday and would not have had a perfect birthday anyway the oil spill certainly does not help to make this a happier passing of the year. I think that in a small way this is an example of how the spill plays out for many other in a region already pushed and squeezed by bad economic, bad governance and bad business management. The spill just adds much more to the stress of many others than it does to me. 

Today President Obama will be back on the Gulf Coast and on my birthday tomorrow will address the nation on the Gulf of Mexico Spill of 2010. I am not saying that his address is less pertinent than the one I am linking to here. In fact the following can be criticized for not giving prominent billing to the British Petroleum Spill. The speech is long and not entirely on point but it is by Prince Charles of the House of Windsor/Battenberg who is  Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall. He has a long history of speaking and doing this to address human relations with the environment. He has no overt power to dictate national policy. I think he is a man worth listening to as we sound out this crisis.        

htttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBoG7QUfq9s&playnext_from=TL&videos=6O6ffFm63Vg

So I am going to be turning 46. It will be a memorable year. But I wish it would be memorable for other reasons. Probably some others nearer the water share my birthday and are having the same thoughts in more dramatic terms.

We’ll See if BP’s Viking Shows His Horns

President Barack Hussein Obama will be meeting with : BP Plc chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg to discuss this Oil SPill crisis. Obama will be able to talk about his Nobel Prize and discuss this new disaster. I would have the readership look at my posts relating to this topic in a different context. I will see what the Swede who is at the helm of a major telecommunications entity in Scandinavia and the Nobel Peace Prize Winner can do to work things out.  For me so much of the situation is so very bad. I see so much about how our whole society and government and our world are functioning in the details of this crisis.   

https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/the-nobel-prize-and-western-civilization/

One thing I have not done is to give specific directions about how to handle this disaster. That is because to a remarkable degree I have struggled long and hard around the world to end up a nobody and nobodies cannot give directions in the real world. In the hell that is much of my life I can only look on at all that goes forward. I am willing to take up arms one day and die in some absurdly unwinnable cause but until I do that I will mostly be carping from the sidelines. It sort of underlines the despairing hellish quality of my situation. 

I also know that Sweden is in many ways a great country and for those who wish to see what it has to say for itself one can look at their own writers. Here is a list of Swedish newspapers:

http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/sweden.htm

Here is a link to an article in a major Stockholm paper which has a fabricated picture of Obama poking his finger at Svanberg. This was the most noticeable coverage of the spill. Although the picture is labeled as a montage it does uphold the proud piratical Viking heritage somehow.  Svanberg comes in as a true son of Trondheim bringing death, ruin and destruction. However aside from the ways in which we are the innocents being hurt I would remind the horned hammer worshippers that this is Louisiana of the cannibal Attakapas and this is Louisiana of the first Sicilian Mafia in the New World. This is the Louisiana that gave birth to much the leadership of the Black Panthers who followed in the tradition of the Louisiana Native Guard  of Afircan-American Creoles who proudly fought for the Confederacy and their right to enslave Black people and then sold out the Confederates and made a seperate peace in war for the Union and the freedmen. This is the Barataria Bay  he is polluting  from which Jean Lafitte came to help slaughter British regulars leading a force largely made up of Louisiana Islenos, Acadians, Germans, Spaniards and Blacks as well as immigrants. This is the Louisiana of the Knights of the White Camellia and the White Leagues and the large scale lynchings of white Europeans as well as African-Americans. This is the Louisiana of the Acadians and their ridelles, Comites de Vigilance and rumored  groups like the Loups Garous. This is the adoptive home of Zachary Taylor– our only US President whose nickname was a nomme de guerre, “Old Rough and Ready”. This is where Pierre Gustave T. Beauregard was born and reared and lived, he was the man who would first follow his Confederate moral convictions by firing shots in anger on the flag he had long loved. He had of course grown up among not only old Creole families but also among families of both Bourbon and Napoleonic aristocrats who fled France when their governments were deemed criminal. This is the Louisiana that was the principal home of Judah P. Benjamin who was the openly Jewish Secretary of State for the Confederacy in a largely antsemitic World. This is the the Louisiana of the Machinist who kept the Confederate raider running which circumnavigated the world and fired the true Confederate forces last shot in anger. This is the Louisiana that produced the tactical boats some claimed made the Second World War winnable and the boating culture that created that weapon is whom they have most offended.  Among the newest comers. many of the seafood community are Vietnamese and very few people as a group are harder working and better Catholics (with a little Buddhism here and there) and they have just elected a fine law-abiding man as a Congressman. However, this is a country where royalism is the uniquely ilegal political position. The community from Vietnam has among them the Nguyens many of him have dozens of kings in their direct central ancestral line who ruled by honor, sword, courage and divine right in a country with few natural resources surrounded by powerful competitors. They have learned to take a lot of grief — I am not sure they ever learned to love it.  Louisiana values do not include keeping the rules when the rules are twisted and corrupt and creat only injustice and ruin. Consistently Louisiana has stood against the world-wide tide of idiotic horror and tyranny which BP so perfectly exemplifies in this instance. If not a drop of oil hit our shores and not amn had died they have apparently done us all so much harm. Standards were always too low. But reams of evidence indicate they have tried to lower them. Louisiana is a place where stands are sometimes made that the world remembers.

Frankly, as Svanberg condescends to leave Sweden to come to the New World he will be briefed. But I am not sure the Swedes  will ever understand us.  They will not believe a very racially and culturally diverse group can be all that tough (if it was the einners would not be so tolerant to keep the others around. They will not believe that the  New World can have a colony in which the people are so rooted. We are in many ways their total opposites there in the Fjords. So if Svanberg chooses to find a high path I hope he will find those here who will walk with him on it. If he chooses to wake ancestral hell-fires on these shores he may find there is enough hell fire here to match even the gruesome legacy of Trondheim.  

It will not be easy for us. But if he chooses to lead us into hell he may find there are some of us who have been there before. I hope that none of this is relevant in any way.