Bloomberg Defends Fellow Rich White Man; Tony Hayward

The NY Times wrote today about an interesting relationship that came to surface. Apparently, the only person to understand the plight of Tony Hayward is none other than the billionaire Mayor of New York City. On his weekly radio address, which is far removed from Roosevelt’s fireside chats, he took the side of another very, very rich man.

“Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg defended Mr. Hayward on Friday, saying that the public should not rush to fault BP executives for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

“The guy that runs BP didn’t exactly go down there and blow up the well,” Mr. Bloomberg said during his weekly radio segment with WOR-AM’s John Gambling.”

Is Bloomberg so out of touch that he believes defending the man who runs the company that is dumping 30,000 barrels of oil in the Gulf per day is a reasonable response? Or is he simply assuring Wall Street that if he was President, BP would never get attacked?  Yes, Mr. Bloomberg, Hayward did not blow up the well, but he sure as hell did not take any of the proper actions to prevent it from happening. He was hired to implement stricter safety controls, but in 2009 OSHA cited BP for more than 87 million dollars worth of violations. Nathan Yau, writes, “Between June 2007 and February 2010, there were 761 egregious citations issued in total. All but one of them were issued to BP. In the same time period, 69 of the 91 willful citations also belonged to BP.”  For BP, this was merely the price of doing business. In 2009, they made 42 billion dollars in profit.

Maybe, the whole idea of having rich politicians is not the greatest of ideas. Too bad Republican voters in California did not get the message. On Tuesday, Meg Whitman became the Republican nominee for Governor, and pledged to  spend 150 million dollars of her own money on the race. Also, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina, won the primary in the Senator’s race. Do voters think these politicians can take the elevator down from their 30th story penthouses and slash the deficit? Gail Collins, in an editorial this week, thinks otherwise:

“The people of California may be hoping that if she wins, she’ll just pay off their deficit. As a resident of New York City, which has had a billionaire chief executive for some time, I would like to say: Don’t hold your breath.”

Hayward, who only wishes he could return to the life he had before April 20th, will thank Bloomberg later with maxed out campaign contributions, and bundles of cash for whatever PAC Bloomberg chooses. Who will the average citizen get to thank this November with their votes? Hopefully, none of these millionaire candidates.