The British government's backing helped boost BP shares, which have been battered this week as the Obama administration ratcheted up criticism of the company over the 53-day-old spill, the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.
Millions of gallons of oil have poured into the Gulf since an April 20 explosion on an offshore rig killed 11 workers and ruptured BP's deep-sea well. U.S. scientists on Thursday doubled their estimate of the amount of oil flowing from the well.(Graphic on spill rate at link.reuters.com/maj68k)
BP is primarily owned by very wealthy individuals. I bet you thought retired encyclopedia salesmen and insurance brokers owned most of that stock. You can look here to get a glimpse of BP’s backbone. A relative few individual shareholders, and some very powerful investment firms own this oil spill perpetrator. For the sake of clarity, looking at just one reveals interesting associations if nothing else. Follow the money.
About 10 percent of BP shares are controlled by the “now” largest investment management firm in the world, BlackRock. That firm held roughly 6 percent until it bought out Barclays, adding another almost 4 percent. But, to drill this “influence well” deeper, we have to look at who runs all these companies. In the case of BlackRock, that would be someone you may have never heard of, one Larry Fink (upper left), arguably the most influential man on Wall Street since the economic flop. Add some more drill pipe, keep drilling, and..
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“BP does not fit Americans’ expectations of how a responsible company should act,” Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who drafted the safety measure, said today in an e-mail. “This provision would ensure that only responsible and safety-minded companies drill in American waters.”
BP “has a flagrant history of taking risks to boost profits that has resulted in deaths of workers, destruction of the environment and economic chaos in local communities,” Miller said in a...