A Response to Florida Today

Gang it is working. Florida Today just ran a piece about how my local area BPs are experiencing a 30 percent drop in revenue. There is an active group of people here. But we face a lot of hostility from local business people, who react to activism the way a vampire does to sunlight.

Our weak-willed, caving cowardly news organ, Florida Today, is sure to provide a fig leaf of nonsense to cover up for BigGovCorp whenever it can, like it did today. I have mailed all their editors this response which they will file in the circular locator. Great thing about the internet is, I don't need them anymore. You can see my response anyway.

Remember: THIS....IS.....WORKING! Keep it up!

Regarding "BP Station Owners plead for some understanding" Florida Today, Business 8-C, July 10, 2010:

The journalistic special relativity with which Florida Today takes on the BP boycott is amusing but not surprising. We recall the Northrop-Boeing tanker-gate debacle.

Mom and Pop retailer, aka, BP’s human shields have to show between $700,000 and $1 million in ready cash depending on locale, to even be considered for a franchise. Not any mom and pop I know. These poor mom and pops likely live in Lansing Island. Cry for me Argentina: not.

Not that Mr. Price’s story thought to mention the actual economic means of “mom and pop,” what sort of poor, struggling merchants they are. Not that he thought to ask, even though it’s all over the Internet already. Or perhaps was it that an editor didn’t think this level of detail made harmonious music of the “mom and pop” lullaby.

Alright then, once again. Let’s for the sake of argument, believe FT, the latest in a long line of newsLITE™ providers, to refry this corporate hash.

The argument is that somehow, BP isn’t harmed in the least by the boycott, children. This is because BP makes no money whatsoever having its sign up above these stores. Not one dime.

We can suppose that, even in the harsh real word of facts, where these contracts with BP stipulate that mommy and daddy grocer get 5 percent of the royalties on gas sales, in our bedtime story spoon-fed by FT the other 95 percent of the money for those sales, simply evaporates? Is that it?

Certainly BP who only are in business out of the goodness of their hearts, don’t receive a dime. The money, is it donated by BP to the nuns and orphans program? Or sometimes to the charity that protects walruses ever so infrequently injured by BP’s operations in the Gulf of Mexico?

Listen, using FT fairy tale logic, lunch-counter sit-ins in Alabama should not have taken place. Why? Mom and Pop racist restaurateurs, we wouldn’t want to hurt them, would we? The Nuremberg trials needlessly interrupted German business, and makers of Zyclon-B were just trying to earn a buck and should have been permitted to ply their trade, right? Yes, poor mutter und vader, Zyclon B manufacturer. Poor them!

BP makes hardly anything off of fuel stations? What about the interest on their gas cards? No? Nothing? Nicht? Nada?

BP do make something off mom and pop and we all know it, so stop shilling. They do make something. They charge royalty fees, and interest and all sorts of other goodies all across this land. And perhaps this brings up the actual reason for the boycott: Because it is working!

1. The point is to force the retailers to switch suppliers. THAT hurts BP! BIGTIME. And it is happening in Michigan and elsewhere where PEOPLE ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT THE FUTURE.

2. The point is also to get the retailers to turn right around and bill the company for the losses they have experienced, and THAT hurts BP. And this is happening!

3. The point might be to get the retailers to sue the parent company – why not, they have perhaps the clearest case of anyone!, and THAT hurts BP. If a pension fund can sue BP for what happened and the lost stock value, as it did in New York, why can’t the retailers? Hell, why wouldn’t they?

Did Mom and Pop ask for this? No. Are they to blame? No.

Can they get their money back from the oil giant? Yes they can, unlike many a struggling fisherman in the Gulf these days. Unlike many a hotelier, or a waiter or waitress, or someone who merely made the mistake of investing in BP day before the collapse.

Boycotters aren’t villains they are liberators of mom and pop from a company that is going down of its own actions!

And our government is not going to hold this company accountable. The government is going to make sure that we are short-changed. That is clear now. Why? Because BP is still the largest single provider of petrol for our ongoing war efforts. Many Dr. Strangeloves in the Pentagon will ride that puppy right into the ground, our own laws be damned.

We should force our defense department to quit the contract with BP for their numerous violations. You can't be a government contractor AND be in violation of federal laws. That’s the way the laws are currently written!

But crickets will chirp in cowardly newsrooms all across the country, on that little ditty. The editors, publishers, producers, and so on, all controlled by Big Energy and Big War will hear a train whistle at a distance of 20 miles – “hold that thought, can you hear that? Excuse me, I must check on that sound!” - before they will be able to focus in on this very salient point, that our own federal guidelines are being ignored with every violation, every dead turtle, every oiled bird, every discarded safety protocol.

Now the civic angle. What is it the paper is telling us, and why? How strange and unseemly is it for Florida Today to be openly begging customers not to exercise their right to choose the company they want to purchase from for any reason. People need to be writing down somewhere those that are on the wrong side of history. Because this paper seems to be on that page, over and over again.

I want to boycott I want to protest, and I should, we all should. BP is ruining the environment, disrupting turtle habitat and all those other things you people write about when it’s easy, when it’s a happy little evergreen story with no meat, bite or taste. Now is the time to get behind the environment, not when another entity wants to create a tax shelter, or official wants a photo op. Now!

I like boycotting. I like protesting BP. It makes me feel like I am doing something to hurt a foreign enemy, a great evil. It makes me feel like an American citizen which is what large corporations, Gannett for instance, are growing so intolerant of; the fact we are waking up to the realization that we are not drones in a corporate machine, we are all not coworkers in USA GovCorp., but citizens of the United States of America, and we don’t have to take this crap. In fact, it is our duty to fight it, to speak out, to boycott.

The arrogance BP continues to show, has metastasized into outright evil, an evil which is choking this country of ours. It is now directing our foreign policy, it is adopting and/or controlling our police powers, it is controlling our media - Gannet for instance, as evidenced by this unbalanced article. It has bribed our officials, and has met every standard of tyranny.

I want this thing dead, deceased, kaput, no more so it cannot do precisely what it is doing. So its demise provides a warning to others in the same business, so we gain some control over our lives, and so we can all clean up our act and move on.

Sorry to you, newspaper, your editors, your corporate handlers, to you, the gas station owners. I am sorry some of us have had enough and are now behaving like American citizens. Sorry, you have a problem with that...........NNNNAAAAAHT!