The Overt Sociopath

Commentary By Ron Beasley

As Thom Hartmann pointed out the CEOs of most multi-national corporations are sociopaths.  BP's Tony Hayward does not even trying to hide it.  I discussed Hayward here but Newsweeks' Daniel Gross explains how he's making the Gulf oil-spill disaster even worse.

This hasn't been a good few weeks for Tony Hayward, the chief executive officer of BP. In the weeks since the huge oil spill in the Gulf began, he has struck an occasionally Churchillian tone: "We are going to defend the beaches," he proclaimed. "We will fix this." But the British leader he most calls to mind is Ethelred the Unready.

For CEOs in crisis, the playbook includes a proper appreciation of the gravity of the situation, a sense of calm urgency, and confidence-building rhetoric backed by confidence-building action. So far, Hayward is zero for three. From the outset, there's been a sense that Hayward wasn't quite prepared for this and didn't quite grasp what is at stake. The Wall Street Journal reported that Hayward "admitted that the oil giant had not the technology available to stop the leak. He also said in hindsight, it was 'probably true' that BP should have done more to prepare for such an emergency."

As the spill worsened, Hayward fretted that he and BP were its victims. "What they hell have we done to deserve this?" he reportedly told fellow executives. Of course, Hayward isn't the victim here. The sea life, the sea itself, the employees who died, the fishermen who are losing their livelihoods, the tourism industry, responsible drillers�they're the victims. Hayward should have been asking himself: What they hell did they do to deserve this? And what am I going to do fix it?

Gross tries to convince us that this is the result of Hayward's incompetence.

At other times, Hayward sounds like a Monty Python character, with understatement that would be comic if it weren't so tragic. Here's how he recently explained BP's response: "It was a bit bumpy to get it going. We made a few little mistakes early on." As this Financial Timesarticle noted, Hayward was proud of the containment effort. "Almost nothing has escaped," Hayward said. And here's the best yet, from the Guardian: "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume." Yes, it's just a flesh wound!

Unfortunately for BP, the irregular flow of data is undermining Hayward's case. The New York Times reported on Saturday: "Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide, and 300 feet thick in spots.

He is incompetent in only one respect - he can't hide the fact that he does not care about the environment of the Gulf or the people that depend on it for their way of life. He can't hide the fact that he is a sociopath.  Yes, Hayward will probably lose his job but you can bet he will have a golden parachute and won't have to worry about anything the rest of his life.  The same can't be said for the people of the Gulf.

Tony Hayward is a terrorist and BP is a terrorist organization.  They should keep GITMO open for people like Hayward and BP's assets in the US should be frozen.