No, we are not returning to @BPGlobalPR and its efforts to keep the BP/Deepwater Horizon/Haliburton disaster at the forefront of our minds and our punchlines. BP is doing a fair job on its own. Most recently, The Wall Street Journal got hold of the BP’s own internal newsletter “Planet BP” and its efforts to spin the spill as something of a lifeline for the non-fishing sector of the economy: “Much of the region’s [nonfishing boat] businesses — particularly the hotels — have been prospering because so many people have come here from BP and other oil emergency response teams,” another report says. Indeed, one tourist official in a local town makes it clear that “BP has always been a very great partner of ours here…We have always valued the business that BP sent us.” So far so good for them…
Nevertheless, shares of BP have dropped below $30 for the first time since the mid 1990s on fears that the company will continue to hemorrhage funds in the corporation’s ongoing political battle with the Obama Administration. The corporation also has put Bob Dudley, one of its highest-ranking American officers, in charge of the PR effort in the hopes of muffling the outcry against CEO Tony Hayward (last seen enjoying afternoons at the races). Mr. Dudley served as the BP point man in its struggles against Putin’s Russian government in the mid-2000s. The Obama Administration should seem like AA baseball in comparison.
If the work on the gulf shows any improvement, Mr. Dudley will likely want to work some magic to give BP credit, letting go of the last five weeks of problems, underestimations, and clumsy pronouncements from Hayward. But as the WSJ’s “The Source” also points out: “The company’s average production of 2.5 million barrels a day in liquids, would make it third in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries if it were a government. Its sales and other operating revenues stood at $239.3 billion in 2009 — larger that the gross domestic product of Nigeria. And BP only has 80,000 mouths to feed.” The wealth gets spread only a bit more thickly among the BP elite than the oil sludge among the gulf waters.
