"Small people"

After BP's Svanberg's meeting at the White House, he said: "President Obama made clear that he is frustrated because he cares about the small people. And we care about the small people."

Svanberg is Swedish so of course he thinks in feudal terms as do all Europeans. So does Obama - as do all socialists. So I'm not surprised.

What does surprise me is how many Republicans seem to defend big business with knee-jerk predictability. Big businesses are not necessarily bad but neither are they necessarily good or honestly interested in the free-market. In fact big business has often colluded with socialist governments. The phenomenon even has a name. It's called Fascism and it's still alive and well in the European Union.

But some conservatives know this.

Daniel Foster at The Corner on the 20 billion dollar deal Obama struck with BP:

Don't be surprised if you now see Obama and the Democrats ease up a little on the "BP is the devil" bit. The administration needs BP to sign on to its energy agenda — just like it needed Goldman to check-off on fin-reg and AHIP to green light the ACA, and for similar reasons. The fact is that cap-and-trade was BP's idea (seriously, it was) and that big, entrenched energy companies stand to benefit most from carbon taxes.

Besides, BP and the Democrats have the same publicist! Stan Greenberg's consultancy Greenberg Quinlan Rosner is the go-to PR outfit for any Democrat who matters, and was a driving force behind the superficial reinvention of British Petroleum as "Beyond Petroleum" in the early part of the decade.

The perfidy of this campaign is the subject of my homepage piece today:

Nobody has better exploited the iconography of shallow environmentalism than British Petroleum, which — with a big assist from the same political spin-masters that brought you the Democratic party — has spent vast sums over the past decade trying to convince the credulous that it is something, anything, other than what it has always been: a tremendously successful for-profit petroleum company.

Now let me bring it all back home: Greenberg, who advises both BP and the Democrats (and who, incidentally, put up Rahm Emanuel in his D.C. apartment for five years, rent free) also advised the Democrats to sell cap and trade as a "green jobs bill."

Doug Ross:

BP's top outside counsel appears to be none other than Jamie Gorelick, the world-renowned Mistress of Disaster.

You know, the former Clinton crony responsible for building the wall between the intelligence community and law enforcement that helped lead to 9/11. Oh, and after that success, Gorelick landed at Fannie Mae. There, she helped orchestrate all sorts of interesting accounting practices while pulling down $26 million, leaving just before the entire place imploded.

Now that I think about it, hiring Gorelick may have been a good move by BP. Usually when The Mistress of Disaster's involved, it's the American people who have to absorb the trillion-dollar hit.

I'm a capitalist pig but big businesses often do not have a free-market agenda. After all it was European aristocrats who invented socialism to keep the "small people" from rioting. Big businesses and socialists also prefer that the middle-class (especially small businessmen) not be too uppity. That's why their servants, the MSM, disparage the Tea Party movement. To them, we're all just "small people."