The campaigns to boycott BP as a result of the oil spill are simply a misdirected revenge effort that will do more harm than good.
The vast majority of the people affected as a result of the boycott, stockholders including pension funds , franchise owners and BP employees are simply not responsible for the damage.
If we want to see the best possible cleanup of this spill, we should allow BP to pull in the revenue to pay for it. What if they go bankrupt. Who is going to pay then ?
Aftter that, with a thorough investigation we should go after those individuals who are directly responsible for the leak as well as they delays in the cleanup.
I mostly agree with this, except that I don’t think BP’s stockholders (both individual and organizational) would be especially hurt by a boycott of the stations–that isn, no more than they already have been by the falling stock price. The persons who’ll get hit by a boycott of the stations are the franchise owners and their employees.
That’s the problem with boycotts in general. To the extent they have an effect, it’s usually on people who are at the low end of the corporate food chain. There is an argument that stockholders have some responsibility and that hitting them in the wallet will convince them to stand up to the company’s leadership and demand changes. But BP stock is down about 50 percent since this whole thing started, so I’m not sure how much more damage a boycott could do.
Anyhow, this anti-BP hysteria being whipped up by that cretin Obama is really starting to piss me off. He may think it’s playing well to his base of anti-corporate types, but it’ll come back to haunt him, mark my words.
P.S. BP simply won’t go bankrupt. At absolute best you can seize all its US assets while it tells you lot to fuck off and stops doing all the good it’s doing at the moment, which is waaaaaaay above the legal minimum. Assuming Cameron has the sense to stick up for British interests, anyway.
Agree the boycott is stupid, in that it hurts station employees that had little to do with the spill far more then it hurts BP as a company, and so is not a good way to register your distaste of how they’ve handled the spill. The courts are a far better mechanism for holding them responsible, as you say. Especially since as I understand it, service stations are a pretty minor part of oil companies bottom line, to the point that a lot of Big Oil companies have been selling them off recently.
Disagree with much of the rest of your OP though:
I don’t think there’s much risk of this since a) BP doesn’t pull much money in from its service stations b) BP’s profits are huge, its unlikely that even if this puts a dent in those profits the combined effect of paying for the spill and the boycott will put them under and c) they have many billions of dollars of assets that the gov’t could go after to recover the cost of the spill if they go bankrupt and d) if they do go under and turn out not to have the assets to cover the damages, the gov’t would likely pay out of the fund created after the Exxon Valdez spill and funded by taxes on oil companies, so the damages would still be ultimately paid for by the industry as a whole, if not specifically BP.
I’ve been driving past the BP near my house to gas up elsewhere for weeks now. I don’t care if it doesn’t do any good. I’m not giving those pricks any of my money.
BP sells through franchisees who have paid money for the signage and have a long-term contract. You will hurt BP a little, but you will hurt the guy who owns the gas station a lot more. Odds are, he can’t get out of the franchise contract easily.
This bears no resemblance to reality. He is not whipping up hysteria against BP. The public, rightly, is furious at BP. Obama’s been hands off to the point where a lot of people feel he’s going easy on them.
OTOH, House Minority Leader John Boehner, does appear to bepushing for a taxpayer bailout of BP, even though it’s a foreign corporation.
I think that’s going a bit too far in the direction opposite a BP boycott.
I’m with Dio here. Fuck them, and fuck everything with their name on it, no matter how big or small a cut they give to the corporation.
The BP brand ought to be devalued, forever and in all contexts.
If this also hurts smaller businesses who had little or no influence, let them (and others) learn the lesson–there’s risks in hitching your wagon to a corporation you can’t steer.
FWIW, last week I noticed BP gas stations were a dime cheaper than others nearby, but they weren’t getting visible business because of it. This week everybody’s prices are down.
That appears also to be a bit of mis-characterization of Boehner’s comments, and at a minimun “Headline Fail”. BP doesn’t need a bail out, it will generate positive cashflow greater than $20 billion in 2010. It has already made payments in excess of $300 million to various gulf states. BP has said many times, it will pay for the clean up.
The problem is, BP the oil producer sells their product to many different service stations. And BP the service station buys their product from a number of different suppliers. So by boycotting BP stations but buying your gas elsewhere, you are still buying from the oil producer.
Go get furious at the American contractors, such as Haliburton, whose fault it was.
It hasn’t gone unnoticed here that your administration constantly refers to it as British Petroleum, a name it hasn’t been trading under for over a decade.
American companies have shit all over this planet on a scale that no one can even slightly live up to. And then they piss off. BP are doing everything they can here.
There is absolutely no way that you can avoid giving BP money. Additionally, if you have a diversified stock portfolio, directly or indirectly, you are also a shareholder in them. Any tardtacular fines of the typical US “regulatory” approach (do fuck all most of the time, then make massive examples out of companies basically randomly… very much like your approach to criminals, in fact) will come out of your pocket.
You can avoid giving BP your money, or at least some of your money - stop or severely curtail your consumption of petroleum-based products. Boycotting a BP station and going across the street to buy your gas isn’t going to make any difference at all.
Halliburton isn’t exactly popular here either, but this isn’t any one company’s fault. BP cut corners all over the place and has a horrible safety record. Are you seeing this as some kind of national pride thing?
I’m sure they are. It would have been great if they’d made the same effort before the huge environmental disaster because that might’ve prevented it from happening.
Yes, but not as British national pride thing. What I’m seeing is an American national pride thing. Essentially an attempt to disown all responsibility.