BP: Class All the Way

As you recall, BP was responsible for a tiny little oil spill in 2010 called the Deepwater Horizon disaster. This only crushed tourism to New Orleans for several months, made people afraid to eat Gulf Coast seafood, and reminded Americans for weeks of their reliance upon dirty energy (which they promptly forgot as soon as it wasn’t a story anymore). Not surprisingly, BP had to pay some damages for its actions. It settled a class action lawsuit for $4 billion. Now, as Michael Hiltzik reports, the company is bitter and angry and lashing out at people it doesn’t want to pay:

But in recent months BP has mounted a frontal assault on the settlement. The firm has placed full page ads in major newspapers, ridiculing supposedly fraudulent claims blithely paid by the settlement administrator, Louisiana lawyer Patrick Juneau — including $8 million to “celebrity chef” Emeril Lagasse.

Last week BP turned up the heat by sponsoring the daily Playbook web page and email blast aimed at Washington opinion makers, among many other people, by the Politico news website. Each day’s Playbook message from BP pinpoints a different, ostensibly absurd case with the tag line, “Would you pay these claims?” Sample: a $173,000 award to an “adult escort service.” (What, an escort service can’t be harmed by a fall-off in tourism?)

But that’s just the PR side of things. The company also has mounted an intensive legal attack on Juneau in federal court in Louisiana. It has obtained a restraining order preventing further payments for the moment and is seeking a permanent injunction so that the policies governing the settlement awards can be recrafted.

Nice. But I suppose this shouldn’t surprise us, not in a nation where corporations take greater control by the day, where the sheer whiff of responsibility to the public is something to be fought off like their corporate future depended upon it.

So far the courts are having none of it. And it’s unclear what the heck BP hopes to get out of it, since it is reminding everyone of their misdeeds. It agreed to the settlement. And no politician is going to defend BP here. It seems like a very bad corporate strategy, as Hiltzik points out.