[lbo-talk] Lucy Kellaway on Hating BP

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Tue Jun 22 20:48:53 PDT 2010


Thanks God she hasn't noted that a far wider swath of people hate/fear government much more than they used to and doubt/fear science much more than they used to... now, let's see, hate companies and don't trust markets, hate politics and don't trust governments, and are skeptical about science and don't trust technology... and DESPISE science-based, expert-led policy programs that might negatively affect markets!... Its enough to make you wonder if the center can hold, if grand narratives of scientific, political and economic progress are dying or dead, or, uh-oh, sounds like the era and and a variety of places some folks have described as post-modern if you ask me, or should I have just gone with Beck and risk society? No, I am not a fan of strong statements about post-modernity or risk society (and I apologize ahead of time, but after the fact, for bringing them up) but they point to real phenomena and relations however uneven and contradictory their expressions.

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 7:07 PM, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:


>
> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9c732c98-7b01-11df-8935-00144feabdc0.html
>
> June 18 2010
> Financial Times
>
> BP is the company we all love to hate
> By Lucy Kellaway
>
> Last week I was making polite conversation with a neighbour when, apropos
> of nothing much, she said: "I really do hate BP."
>
> This woman is British, middle aged, middle class and, as far as I know, has
> no firm views on anything apart, perhaps, from whether her son's physics
> teacher is up to scratch. But she, like lots of perfectly normal people,
> seems to have got herself covered by the slick of corporate hatred that is
> spreading even further and more uncontrollably than the slick of oil. It's
> not just Americans or lefties or environmentalists who now hate BP.
> Everyone else seems to as well.
>
> Compare this to how we responded to the biggest corporate catastrophe of
> all time, the gas leak at Bhopal in which thousands of people died. We were
> horrified. We wanted lessons to be learnt and compensation to be paid. But
> I don't remember us all hating Union Carbide with quite the same vindictive
> intensity with which we now hate BP. If you type "I hate Union Carbide"
> into Google you get five matches. Do the same with BP and you get 37,400.
>
> You could say this was because Bhopal happened 25 years ago on the other
> side of the world and Union Carbide doesn't sell products that slosh about
> in the tank of your car. But I think there's something else going on too:
> hating companies and the people who lead them has become a new global
> pastime.
>
> When I was a teenager, hating companies was a much milder affair. This
> wasn't because we felt more warmly towards business back then: on the
> contrary, in Britain the educated classes regarded all commerce with
> snobbish disdain. In particular, we despised advertising because we thought
> it was brainwashing. We also hated tobacco companies because their
> shareholders were making a killing selling things that killed their
> customers. We didn't care for bankers because they were parasites and
> usurers. And we didn't like oil companies because of the sneaky way that
> they always pushed up petrol prices when crude prices went up and then
> seemed to push them up again when crude prices went down.
>
> Beyond that, there were a few individual companies that we singled out for
> special hatred. We hated Barclays and Shell because they did business in
> apartheid South Africa. Later, we hated Nike and Gap for not doing the
> right thing by their sweatshop workers. But we didn't hate them very hard
> or very consistently; it was a fragmented and feeble effort when set against
> the universal, concerted loathing that has been inspired by BP.
>
> Where does all this hatred come from? Business doesn't seem to be much more
> hateful or management more incompetent than it was 20, 50 or 100 years ago.
> In fact, business mainly is more decent and managers less amateurish and
> hopeless than they used to be. Instead, I can think of four other things
> that have changed in the past few years that explain why nice women such as
> my neighbour are striking out on a crusade of anti-corporate hatred.
>
> The first is the emotional hangover of the credit crunch. Our hatred of
> bankers was wild and uncontrolled and we had never felt anything like it
> before towards men in suits. Dick Fuld and Fred Goodwin inspired hatred on
> a scale normally only achieved by an Idi Amin or Osama bin Laden. So much
> hating has got us into the hating habit.
>
> The second cause is executive pay. We already resent how much top people
> pay themselves, so when people who earn too much show that they are not only
> incompetent but also insensitive and tactless, our resentment spills over
> into hatred.
>
> The third reason is more subtle, and stems from the great personification
> of business. In the past decade or so, companies have put a great deal of
> effort into creating an image for themselves supported by a whole load of
> values. The more successful they are in creating such a personality, the
> more there is to love -- and hate. The most successful companies in the US
> -- Microsoft and Walmart -- are loved and hated in equal measure.
>
> And finally, there is the internet, with its power to turn personal emotion
> into a global epidemic overnight. Hating companies is now fun, easy and
> varied. There are so many different ways of doing it. You can hate BP on
> Twitter, Facebook and, most rewardingly of all, on YouTube. If you haven't
> already watched the BP Spills Coffee video, in which a group of executives
> panic when a Styrofoam cup is overturned during a meeting, do so right now.
> It will make you laugh -- and make you hate BP a bit more than you did
> already.
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>

-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319



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