Reply #67: They benefited from the damn logo.

[caseymoz]

That thing was flying above their business bringing them money, or at least, the franchise owners calculated that it would. That's not totally innocent. They also flew that phony green and sunny environmentalist logo above their businesses furthering the corporate propaganda, and they continue to now that it has been proved a sham. All the time, they had room and opportunity and responsibility to find out what kind of company BP was. I mean, the information was out there. If you're going to excuse people from that responsibility now that things have gone badly with their intimate business partner, why not excuse the shareholders too, lots of which are little old ladies who depend on it for their pensions, and really did not make any decisions. Why not the boards of directors as well? I'm certain many of them did not approve of all the corners cut on the Deepwater Horizon.

You're buying into a corporate mindset here: that profits and benefits are privatized while losses or responsibilities are socialized. That person flying that logo is a corporate stooge to some degree or another. Now that his once, profitable partner, whose practices he benefited from, is caught creating an uncontainable catastrophe with those very practices, the corporate stooge has no responsibility?

Strange you say now that you make a point of buying gas at BP because they are friends and neighbors. How serious should I take your point that a boycott is ineffective against BP, then? How can I know if you care that it is effective? How much do you want your friends and neighbors to keep them in business dealing and sending money to a company that's massively slagging the planet and impoverishing hundreds of thousands of people, if not eventually millions?

I don't know how to break this to you: it's not going to be easy to fight this corporate domination of our culture, our politics and our economy. People are going to get hurt, at least economically, but the innocent people are the people along the Gulf, like the ones with the tour boats, not the one who sells gas in BP's name. More actually innocent people will get hurt if we're not willing to assign the responsibility that's actually clearly there, if we would just block out the propaganda and interference and think clearly about it.

If we do not fight this corporate domination, though, this, or something as bad or worse, will happen again. And if we survive this over the long haul, something that's an open question, we won't survive two or three more of these.