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