Every time a bunch of congressmen get some capitalist “villains” in their cross-hairs – whether they’re bankers from Wall Street or carmakers from Detroit or most recently Tony Hayward from BP — and take shots at them for hours on end on national television, I wind up rooting for the “bad guy.”
It’s not that I think the money boys from Wall Street are saints, or the guys who run the car companies in Detroit are so wonderful, or that BP should be nominated for a Nobel Prize. It’s just that I have a hard time listening to a bunch of sanctimonious, windbag politicians who couldn’t run a lemonade stand put on their populist tinfoil hats and treat the poor bastards worse than they would treat Osama bin Laden if he showed up at one of their sub-committee hearings.
I watched the BP hearings and am wondering if I’m the only one who feels sorry for Tony Hayward. Look, if it turns out that what happened in the Gulf was more than a terrible accident, if it turns out that BP was cutting corners to increase profits, then it’s fine with me if the government brings criminal charges against anyone and everyone who was responsible. It just irks me to watch a parade of nitwits who live in glass houses throw boulders at the guy.
One of my fantasies is to see the tables turned on those politicians who treat CEOs like war criminals. Imagine if we could grill them they way they grill everyone else.
US: Congressman Waxman, is it true that you voted YES on Bill XYZ, a bill that ultimately cost American taxpayers $20 billion dollars when you told them it would cost $20 MILLION?
WAXMAN: It was George Bush’s fault.
US: Do the honorable thing, Congressman: RESIGN!
US: Is it true, Senator Reid, that you voted for numerous laws that cost us billions of dollars knowing full well we didn’t have that kind of money to spend?
REID: It was George Bush’s fault.
US: The Capitol Police are coming down the aisle to take you to Andrews Air Force Base for a flight to Syria where you will be undergo further – let’s call it – questioning.
US: And is it true, Congressman Rangel, that you – and the other bozos that somehow keep getting elected – have spent this country so far into a hole that we may never get out?
RANGEL: Are you asking me that because I’m black?
US: No, we’re asking you that because you were the head of the powerful Ways and Means committee until you resigned under pressure because of your tax problems.
RANGEL: It’s George Bush’s fault.
US: Senator Boxer, How in the world could you get us $12 trillion dollars in debt and make us so dependent on the Chinese government to buy our bonds in order to finance your reckless spending?
BOXER: It was George Bush’s fault.
US: Two words, Senator: Carly Fiorina.
US: Congressman Frank, would you resign here and now to make amends for your role in the financial meltdown – a meltdown that almost plunged this nation into a second Great Depression?
FRANK: It was Bill O’Reilly’s fault.
I don’t care if Bill O’Reilly grills these pinheads or if Chris Wallace or David Gregory or Candy Crowley subjects them to tough questions. I just can’t take it when the very people who have left us on the brink of financial disaster thanks to their reckless spending, go on national TV and pretend to be holier than everybody else.
Sorry, but I like the guy who runs BP more than I like any of the clowns who knocked him around the ring for six hours — even though I don’t care if he gets fired for what his company did. I just hope the voters come to their senses this November and fire the mob that is demanding his head.
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Bernard:
This guy says we’re right in feeling sorry for Tony Hayward.
BP Spill is undeclared TVA-style initiative
July 27, 2010 Winsip Custer, CPW News Service
Following Connecticut Representative Edward Markey’s announcement on July 26, 2010 that the entire Gulf of Mexico is now a “bowl of toxic materials” the path is set for the creation of a new undeclared Tennessee Valley Authority-style initiative that will provide a new and unprecedented partnership between oil companies and the government in the war on OPEC energy dependence while curtailing global warming.
The $500 million dollar grant to USC’s Energy Biosciences Institute, the brainchild of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, coupled with gifts for algae research from some of America’s largest venture capital firms and DARPA given to the Scripps Institute in San Diego, pave the way for the shift from fossil fuels to bio-based energy sources.
“It’s been tough on the population of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida…and on the dolphins, pelicans and Kemps Ridley and other turtle species and wildlife of the Gulf and perhaps it would have been more humane to announce the plan long ago before flooding the region with oil, but how else were we going to get a deep pocketed foreign oil company to pay for the massive conversion?” said BP’s new CEO, Robert Dudley, as his words were recorded by this reporter while sitting outside his bedroom window. Dudley, a graduate in chemistry from the University of Illinois, is an alumni of one of the three institutions joint-venturing in the University of California’s Energy Bioscience Institute project: UC Berkley, Lawrence Berkley National Laboratories and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Dudley, who like BP’s “golden diviner” and key to BP’s massive investments in the deep water leases off New Orleans… geologist Jack E Golden now with Cobalt Energy and the Carlyle Group, came to BP from one of the Rockefeller “baby Standards” created by the break up of Standard Oil Company….Amoco. Dudley is believed to bring credibility and empathy to the disillusioned population of the Gulf region. “I may have been born in Queens, NY,” said Dudley. “But I grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. These new bio-fuel workers will thank us in the long run and the nation should thank us too….the conversion to a new bio-fuel economy is well under way and paid for in large part by a foreign money pool. All’s well that ends well,” my British colleagues are always fond of saying. And all those fishing Cajun’s can’t really like gutting fish and shucking oysters.”
Chicagoan and Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel who has been under fire for his rent- free use of a BP owned Washington townhouse, said “this has all been a wonderful lesson in how our international business connections can be exploited for the benefit of a better planet.”
BP’s former CEO, Tony Hayward when asked about his take on his new assignment said while boarding a flight to Moscow….”I’m a (expletive deleted) amateur compared to these (expletive deleted) Americans. And I’m surely not going to use Halliburton on any of my wells in Siberia!”