Tony Hayward Gets His Life Back

It appears that BP has figured out that Tony Blair’s liability to their bottom line goes far, far beyond his million-pound-a-year salary.

This is one of those moments where most of the reasonable world is sitting here going DUH! Hayward has been a leading candidate for a Marie Antoinette Award since the Deepwater Horizon blowout in April.

The Marie Antoinette Award is a big slice of cake ingested directly through the esophagus, because the mouth is no longer connected to the stomach. There are no excuses for tone-deaf pronouncements about getting one’s life back; the “little people”; a billion gallons of crude cut loose in the Gulf of Mexico not being that big a deal.

Revelations of dead porpoises, sea turtles burned alive, cleanup workers without access to safety equipment, and Corexit causing rectal bleeding were similarly unconstructive. At the moment, the only thing Republicans and Democrats agree on is that they hate BP.

For a lot of people, the dead sea critters were the deal breaker. Porpoises and Sea Turtles are extremely sympathetic. If someone had any sense, someone would have accentuated something positive like dead jellyfish. Nobody likes jellyfish. They sting and appear to serve no great purpose.

Nope. Pictures of Flipper lying dead on the beach were what came out. That is the moment when one needs to wave a white flag, shut the hell up, and stop making things worse.

Tony Hayward did not have that kind of sense. He got a wild hair to go yachting off England, in a nice, clean ocean. This was after he told the press he “wanted his life back.” He is lucky he does not have to ask for his HEAD back.

The sad part is that the majority of the people who are going to get hurt are not BP executives. They are for the most part pensioners in the UK and the US who trusted their retirement to British Petroleum. Their stock takes it in the tuchas, but Tony Hayward and his cronies won’t lose a farthing.

This is a short lesson in crisis management for the incoming executive at BP. Let’s use the recent disaster as a template of what to do.

Upon hearing of a major screw-up which includes eleven dead, PICK UP A BLOODY PHONE and contact the media in the nearest large city. Once WWL and WDSU in New Orleans have been assuaged, move to step two.

Step two is to at least LOOK accountable. You call Richard Branson and bring a significant number of staff from London on a chartered airliner straight into Louis Armstrong International. You have 48 hours to get your happy ass on the ground at the disaster site.

Step three is obvious. You need two dozen truckloads of Dawn dishwashing detergent rolling to Grand Isle within 72 hours. And a bunch of toothbrushes. Spend an hour every morning on the beach with a coffee can, a toothbrush, and some dish soap.

This does not mean that your life will not suck until you get the blowout capped, but you will continue to have a life once people have forgotten about your indiscretion. It also assures that your company is not on the verge of getting shut down or nationalized in the country where it is operating. It also means that the investors whose interests you are in charge of protecting do not get wiped out.

Finally, should you find yourself in front of investigators, particularly a political body, remember that YOU ARE NOT A VICTIM. There is nothing you can do to appear sympathetic. You have just been caught with your knickers down. This is not a shakedown when you are being held accountable for your own mess.

If someone should attempt to make you out to be the victim, make it clear that you are responsible for a giant problem, and you do not see where living up to your responsibilities makes you a victim.

At this point, you and your dealers are back on the path to profitability.

One hopes that Mr Hayward will enjoy Russia as much as Czar Nicholas.

In 1917.

Fw: American Management Style

This is quite worthy, and beautifully stated.

----Forwarded Message----
From: professor0400@yahoo.com
To: professor0400@yahoo.com
Sent: Mon Jul 5th, 2010 1:19 PM EDT
Subject: Fw: American Management Style

For the past four years, and even before the 2008 elections, I used
slides in my presentations that basically said, "Who would want to be elected
president in 2008?" The conditions were such that failure was the only
option.

Who do we blame for the Great Depression? Most kids of our
generation learned that it was that mean old Herbert Hoover who was elected in
November 1928 and took office in March, 1929. The stock market crashed in
October 1929 and the Great Depression began. Now Hooverdid a lousy
job of trying to help the nation dig out from the stock market crash and his
policies only made things worse so he still deserves the condemnations of
history, but he didn't create the original catastrophe. That was Calvin
Coolidge and the GOP-business dominated interests of the "roarin' twenties."
How does history treat "Silent Cal?" Not as badly as it should. The last time
the richest 5% of Americans earned 90% of the national income was in the late
1920's… until now, when the same conditions prevail. The last time the stock
market went virtually unfettered and banks and other institutions could put
together and market any kind of financial deals they wanted was during the mid
to late 1920's… until now. The last time the nation left its natural resources
unprotected from unlimited exploitation was during the late 1920's to early
1930's… until now. Then we had a dust bowl and agricultural collapse. Now we
have the Gulf polluted and the fishing industry virtually
destroyed. Déjà vu all over again? (Quoting Yogi Berra)

Just as in the early 1930's, a GOP-controlled legislature refused
to take the hard steps necessary to reverse the nation's economic downslide.
Just as in the 1930's, a GOP-minority blocked via the filibuster many of the
changes proposed by Rooseveltto bring the
nation out of the depression. Just as the country had started to recover, in
1935-36, policies that had encouraged development, jobs and infrastructure,
were thrown into reverse because the "country couldn't afford the debt" … and
as a result, the nation suffered a "double-dip" depression that lasted 4 more
years. Look familiar? The same conditions prevail today. Déjà vu
all over again?

Today's budget woes, (deficits running around 15% of GDP, are of
concern, but still pale to other war-time periods in modern American
history. Look at the WWI and WWII periods when the budget deficits were
2-3 times current rates. We have fought America's longest war
and unlike any other wartime period, how have we been paying for Bush's wars?
In other wars, presidents and Congress called for tax increases to pay for what
had to be done. As Americans always do, we grouched and complained, but
we realized that some sacrifice had to be made. But for Bush's war, what
did we do? We've cut taxes to their lowest rates since the early 1980's
and drove up spending. The richest 1% of Americans pay taxes at a lower
rate than the middle 20%. GOP filibustering means that hedge fund
managers (the same guys that drove the economic collapse in the first place)
pay 10% of their multi-million dollar incomes in taxes while an American family
with an $80-100,000 annual income will pay on average 22-26%. Why should
anyone who makes their living from "investing" pay less taxes on that income
than others who make their livings teaching school or managing a small
business? Yet that is the result of the current filibuster and the
trade-offs required to get even a minimum of sense back into regulating
financial markets.

For the first time since the late 1920's, just before the nation
fell into a Great Depression, American workers earn less than 250 times the
senior managers of the companies they work for. As recently as 1980, this
ration was less than 10:1. All the conditions are there for economic disaster,
so the need for some deficit spending, even serious deficit spending is
evident.

But, the argument goes, our children and grandchildren will have to
pay for it all? Well as John Boehner, the GOP House leader said last
week, we could just raise Social Security retirement to 70 and unemployed
people could just take lesser paying jobs. This when a still uncontrolled
Wall Street is paying gazillion dollar bonuses and corporate farmers are
getting annual multi-million dollar allotments from the government. (Like
that farmer in Missouriwho posted a
billboard condemning the unemployed as just being lazy and Obama as a
socialist, too many Americans are looking for the easy answers without the
sacrifice. That farmer, we learned had been paid over $3 million in the last
few years not to grow anything.) Try to change the farm support program
and see if you can get re-elected.

We can eliminate the deficits in less than 5 years if we just go
back to the same tax rates that we had at the END of the Reagan years as president
in 1989. But can we raise taxes? Americans, among all the
industrialized nations of the world, pay the lowest tax rates… and yet we
complain. We'll we are getting what we pay for, bad schools, poor health care
(37th in the world), a collapsing infrastructure of roads, sewers,
water systems, bridges… you name it. In Arizona, the state has
closed half its state parks because it refuses to raise taxes. After all
the rich have their country clubs, they don't need to pay for parks by parting
with less than 1/4 of 1% of their incomes.

No, we will not raise our taxes a couple of percentage points, we
will continue to wallow and accelerate our status as just another banana
republic, with India, China and Brazil simply shaking the dust from their boots
on us. Thank you GOP, de-regulation and tax cuts have trickled down so
well.

________________________________
The New Busy is not the too busy. Combine all your e-mail accounts with Hotmail. Get busy.

The Tea Party vs. The Constitution

It looks like the valiant opposition over in the Tea Party wing of conservatism had a pretty rotten night on June 8.   They managed to get one candidate on the general ballot, Sharron Angle, in the Nevada Senate race.  Otherwise, they went 0-for-Tuesday.

The problem that the Tea Party has is that, despite proclamations that they love the Constitution, Tea Party activists don’t really seem to like it much.

Oh, they love the second and tenth amendments, but the Tea Party does not seem to have much love for the other 25 amendments. The right wing hates the ninth amendment outright, and none of them seem to understand the third.  Apparently the whole Founding Fathers respect thing has no traction.

The First Amendment is great when conservatives want to protect the Fox Opinion channel.  Who among the Tea Party would accept First Amendment protection for a broadcast network showing The People vs. Larry Flynt, uncut?  Yet bigoted, racist, seditious, and even treasonous are okay. 

If enough people want to watch an uncut movie about a pornographer on broadcast television, then conservatives are welcome to change the channel, or go read a book.

Special disdain exists for the Fourth through Eighth amendments among the fringe elements of conservative thought.  These are areas which may be considered among the greatest controls on the power of governmental intrusion which can be found in American jurisprudence.  One would think that people who style themselves libertarian would be in favor of this.

Except that conservatives want exception for certain crimes from these protections.   What happens if a quasi-Christian group is accused of planning an attack upon civilians?  There was an outcry from conservatives about David Koresh at Waco in 1993.  Coincidentally the outcry came under a Democratic administration which realized that terrorism does not stop at the boundaries of radical Islamic faith. 

The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, could at any point decide that it will be the instrument of Divine vengeance against homosexuals.  Let’s hold Fred Phelps without trial and subject him to extraordinary rendition, deny him a jury, and tap his phones.  While we’re at it, a couple of those self-styled Minuteman vigilantes can go, too.  Vigilantism is terrorism’s developmentally disabled sibling.

This primer comes to the point of the 13th through 15^th Amendments.  If there is a batch of amendments which hacks the Tea Party off worse than this one, please let us know.  These are the amendments which ban slavery, assure that anyone, no matter how not white they may be, can be citizens, and allow all citizens to vote.

Amazingly, the Constitution explicitly defines what “Real Americans” are in the 14^th Amendment, and how they are to be treated.  Oh snap, there is nothing about race, gender, ancestry, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or political beliefs.  No wonder Tea Partiers dislike the 14^th Amendment.

As a remedy for the Reconstruction amendments, conservatives led the call for restrictive immigration laws.  In times of relative economic prosperity, they saw the need for an expendable, inexpensive labor source.  An individual with no rights is better than a slave, which obligates the owner to the cost of maintaining his property.  That individual can be worked to death, and who is going to organize or demand treatment which might cut a businesses profit margin?

Businesses are also able to defer the costs of these employees well-being to the taxpayer.  Then if things go to hell, send the undocumented back, and get off scot-free.   Call this de facto amnesty for flaunting labor, safety, wage, and tax laws.  If no amnesty for the undocumented, no amnesty should be countenanced for the individuals and businesses that employed them, either.  The businesses made out like bandits.

Of course, there is no love whatsoever for the 16^th Amendment, which allows Congress to levy taxes based upon income.  Progressives aren’t particularly fond of it either, but it is the best of a bad set of options.  Otherwise, any other scheme would be a nanosecond from instituting a New Feudalism.  

“Libertarian” Tea Partiers espouse the virtues of the “Fair Tax” scheme, a consumption tax.  Does anyone think that the affluent would not defer purchases until absolutely necessary, slowing the economy to a crawl and devastating the middle and lower classes?

The rest of the Constitution, aside from Prohibition, deals with who can vote for President (women, 18-year-olds, the District of Columbia, people not paying poll taxes), some restrictions on who gets elected (direct election of Senators, establishment of electing the President and Vice President together, when the Presidential term starts, how long and under what conditions one can be President), judicial obligations to citizens, and Congressional pay.

It is all important, but pretty dry stuff. 

The next time a Tea Partier wishes to regale a progressive with his knowledge of what is and is not constitutional; ask him or her about the 23^rd Amendment.  It’s the one which allows DC to vote for President, and it does NOT start off with “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

The Road Trip

Mrs. Wandering Gentile and I are known for taking road trips.  Seldom are they successful.  In fact, our road trips only seem to lack the presence of Fred and Ethel Mertz for inclusion in an I Love Lucy rerun.

Case in point, a few years ago, I booked a suite online at a hotel in Atlantic City.  Better, it was near Atlantic City.   Actually, it was in Camden, but five blocks from a bus line to Absecon, where I could switch buses and get to Atlantic City. 

On top of this, I had erred gravely on the date of Easter.  I hadn’t been to church in a while, and many parishes frown upon loaded semis in unreinforced parking lots.   So we missed the holiday by, uh, it doesn’t matter.  We missed the holiday, and I will not live it down at any point in the next three eternities.

When we got to Camden, the room was not so much a suite as it was a barracks.  There were three narrow beds in a row.  A black-and-white analog television was bolted to the wall.  I feared that our wake up call would be from a burly gentleman with a crew cut and tan clothes who would refer to us as “maggots.”

So we took a bus to Absecon, and found a nice, albeit retro, suite at Patel’s Motel.  It rained all weekend, but was two whole degrees warmer at 58 Fahrenheit than Easter weekend.   This required the purchase of copious quantities of shoes.

Our luck in Florida has scarcely been better.  Just before the recent unpleasantness, I found lodging in the kind of establishment which one normally finds in the pages of Conde Nast with a boatload of little symbols next to its name.  They were remodeling, and bonus, they were a mile from the nearest Lone Star Burger.

Then I got the brilliant idea to go out in the sun.  People who observe Mrs. Wandering Gentile, the Hijastras, and me together are prone to observe the three pretty ladies and, “…damn, Casper sure got FAT!”

I spent two months with my legs in the same peculiar shade of orange as John Boehner’s face.  And I learned that an extremely bad sunburn itches.  It itches A LOT.  I remembered to cover my coconut and arms, but I had NEVER had sunburn on my legs in 40 years of living.

I don’t ever want the second one.  From now on I wear a burqa to the beach.

This year, we had an abbreviated visit to Florida.  I went, in my burqa, reading British tabloids and periodically retiring to the mini mart for frozen beverage treats.  We found a pleasant room in a chain hotel, and I even got my trip to Lone Star Burger.

Mrs. Wandering Gentile was not as enthusiastic about us returning to Lone Star Burger for dinner.  She wanted chicken, and half a mile before we got to Lone Star Burger, there was an Admiral Squibby’s Connecticut Chicken.   I would not have chosen Admiral Squibby’s, being that we have one so close to home their grease spatters our back patio.

Mrs. Wandering Gentile, the Hijastras (Jasmine and Sasha), and I were to split 16 pieces of Hartford Hot chicken, two pints of El Morro Style black beans and rice,  four Big River sodas, and four Adirondack Apple pies.

As Mrs. Wandering Gentile and I were filling our sodas at the fountain, there came an unholy roar from the dining area.  The suction pulled my Red Sox cap straight off my burqa.

We entered to find Sasha, the younger, but physically more imposing of the two sisters hunkered in the corner in a Jet Li pose, defending a Hartford Hot drumstick.

Everything else was gone.  Our order; a table that the manager was pretty sure was there when he got there; and some New Haven Hush Puppies which were not technically ours, because they had been technically paid for by the polite senior Canadian couple at the next table.

As I made things right with the Canadians, I heard Mrs. Wandering Gentile ask the petite Jasmine what she had to say for herself.

“I was hungry.  Can we get ice cream?”

It wasn’t me this time.

Carol, the Illegal Alien

The following includes the real laws as they are enforced.  "Carol" is a composite of several individuals who are detrimentally affected by current immigration legislation.  One hopes that the gentle reader will forgive the use of a composite, being that it protects the identities of more than one decent human being who got screwed over.


Carol is an undocumented immigrant.  She entered the United States legally in 1992 as a 22-year-old student at a major university in the Southeast.  Carol did well in her studies, and married her first husband, a Mathematics major at the same school, in 1993.

At the time they were under the impression that marriage provided automatic permanent residency in the United States.  Carol and her first husband did not file the appropriate paperwork in 1993.  Her student visa expired with her graduation from the university in 1994.

In 1995, Carol and her first husband split, a couple of months before their second anniversary.  She caught him balancing equations with an 18-year-old intern from Tuscaloosa, and neither one had any clothes on.

She continued on a career path at a restaurant chain in a major Sun Belt city.  Carol eventually remarried, to Mike, who hated math, and refused to balance his checkbook.  They have two boys, Dylan and Josh, ages 13 and 10. Carol managed to ascend to the post of district manager with the restaurant chain when complications arose.

In 2007, Carol went to renew her driver's license.  As a result of the Real ID laws passed after 9/11, Carol was asked for more documentation of her residency.  As can be imagined, she didn't have any, or know that she had needed any.

Carol's husband, Mike, was unaware that there was any complication with her residency status in the United States.  Upon discovery of issues with Carol's documentation, they consulted with an attorney about normalizing her status.

Actually, they consulted with more than one.  Several requested fees up front, only to tell them that her case was next to impossible to normalize, once they got a hundred and fifty bucks or so.  A couple made promises that there would be no problem in arranging her documentation, demanding fees in the thousands of dollars beyond the thousands of dollars needed for the appropriate government applications.

Only one such attorney was necessary to break the illusion that he could do any better than the attorney who told them, for free, that there was nothing he could do.

The next year, a participant in E-Verify absorbed Carol's employer.  Carol's 12 years of exemplary work, commendation and competence vaporized overnight.  A large chunk of her family's income vaporized as well. So did their ability to continue to make their mortgage payments, car payments, and provide a better upbringing for their kids.

They are now living in a rented mobile home near Mike's parents.  The kids have been taken out of their quality suburban school district, and now face the free lunch lines and the methamphetamine addiction issues common to rural America.  The boys now exhibit behavior issues due to the upheavals in their lives.

Carol's husband does the best he can, but his job requires frequent travel.  They manage to keep a roof and lights, but her husband has the nagging concern that his telephone will ring with the call that his wife has been removed from their home.  They joke that the employment options which would keep him closer to home involve such a drastic pay cut that he would be forced to sell one of the kids.

A large component of Carol's family no longer resides in her native country.  Some are in Canada, others in Europe.  A few live in the United States, some around the sun belt city where she settled in the nineties.  Some are legal, others not so much.

If Carol is caught without papers, she will be returned to her native country for a minimum of ten years for remaining in the United States for more than 180 days without the appropriate papers.  That means that she faces a minimum of ten years before she can reapply for legal readmission to the United States.

Neither her husband nor her children speak her native language, so relocation is not an option for them.

There are those who want others to conflate the face of undocumented immigration with a tiny subculture of thugs, young men and women of ill will.  But the truth is very different, filled with men and women like Carol and her family.  Before considering the one in a hundred with evil in his heart, the ninety-nine like Carol are deserving of our compassion, our understanding, and our embrace as a nation of immigrants.