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Old 06-18-2010, 03:31 AM   #433 (permalink)
roachboy
 
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Location: essex ma
i find this to be an interesting side-bar:

Quote:
Bypassing BP stations won't KO oil giant
Oil's complex route to gas tanks makes it hard to pinpoint target; boycott felt mostly by independent owners

By Gregory Karp, Chicago Tribune

9:08 PM CDT, June 17, 2010


Maybe nothing could feel more satisfying to outraged Americans than watching BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward squirm in front of Thursday's congressional committee — except driving past a BP service station as a personal protest and filling up elsewhere.

But boycotting BP gas stations does not hurt the oil company's coffers much, at least directly. BP doesn't even own the 11,000 BP-branded stations in the United States. The company started getting out of the retail gas-selling business a couple years ago. In fact, all big oil companies did because it wasn't profitable enough.

And because oil is a globally traded commodity, there is no easy way to confirm which exploration company is responsible for that tank of gas you just bought, regardless of what the signage over the pump says.

So, whose bottom line are you hurting with your personal BP boycott? BP gets a little from being a franchise owner, although a BP spokesman would not say how much. Largely, it's independent service station owners who suffer.

If sales volume drops and BP gets stuck with unpurchased gasoline, it can quickly and easily wholesale the excess to stations that sell gas without a brand name, experts said.

Still, consumer-advocacy group Public Citizen has called for a boycott of BP and launched an online petition. A Facebook protest page has more than 600,000 supportive "fans," and some BP stations report that business has slowed.

Vincent Hailey, 52, from Hanover Park, hasn't consciously boycotted BP stations, but he said he feels good about bypassing them.

"I know you're really hurting the independent station owners more than you're hurting BP, but if enough of those individually owned companies begin to hurt, and perhaps switch affiliations, BP will feel it," said Hailey, as he filled up Thursday afternoon at a Shell station in Schaumburg. "It feels like I'm doing a little bit of something. Maybe it's not much, but I feel better about it."

The "mob mentality" forming against BP station owners is frightening, said Paul Fiore, executive vice president of the Service Station Dealers of America and Allied Trades.

He said some BP station owners claim business is down 20 percent recently. "It's a totally misguided attempt by frustrated people," said Fiore, adding that he sympathizes with consumers who want to vote with their dollars. "They are not going to harm BP, I guarantee you."

Not necessarily, said Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen. The point of the BP boycott, as with many boycotts, is not to hurt sales in the short term but to harm the company's image.

BP spent hundreds of millions of dollars advertising itself as "Beyond Petroleum," an environmentally friendly oil company. "That is a value the company thought would provide it with returns — preferential government access, positive community and consumer perception of the company.

"That's what folks don't understand about a boycott campaign. The target here is the image of the company," Slocum said.

While business is off about 10 percent at the BP station in Deerfield, pumps were packed during the noon hour Thursday, and things could be worse, according to Azim Sozer, who manages the gas and mini-convenience store at the corner of Waukegan and Lake Cook roads.

"It's not hurting that much. We can handle it," Sozer said. "A couple of customers have complained, but most are very nice. They are aware that it has nothing to do with us."

The station is about halfway through a 20-year contract to buy gas from BP, so changing affiliations isn't an option.

Regular customer Dan Bogdan, 53, of Northbrook, rejected the premise of a boycott and hasn't stopped filling up his Nissan Maxima at the Deerfield BP station.

"It's an accident. It could have happened to anybody," he said. "I want them to fix the problem, I want our government to be more proactive, but I don't see any reason to boycott."

Driven by proximity to her Deerfield home and accumulated gas rebates on her BP credit card, Linda Elinoff, 55, was nonetheless feeling guilty as she pumped nearly $70 of premium gas into her BMW SUV Thursday morning at the BP station on Deerfield Road in Highland Park.

"It's horrible what's happening. I can't believe I'm doing this," she said. But then she added: "The guy who owns the station isn't BP. If I boycott, I'm not hurting BP, I'm hurting him. If I knew that it was definitely impacting BP, I would stop buying their gas."

For those consumers who are used to voting with their dollars by avoiding companies they dislike, that becomes difficult with BP, or any oil company, because of the complex nature of how oil extracted from the earth gets to automobile gas tanks.

Once crude oil is pulled from the ground by BP or any other large integrated oil company, it might go to a BP refinery or be sold on the world crude-oil market, depending on price and how close to a drilling site a BP refinery is, said Jonathan Cogan, a spokesman for the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The quality of the crude is another factor. Different refineries can handle different grades of crude oil.

At the refinery level, BP processes crude oil of its own and from other drilling companies, based on market conditions. BP has five U.S. refineries, including in Whiting, Ind.

If you don't live near those refineries, it becomes less likely that any service station in your area, BP or not, has gasoline refined by BP, Cogan said.

By the time gasoline is dispensed at the pump, it is often a mixture of refiner brands and country origins. This is because gasoline from different refineries is often combined for shipment by pipeline. Service stations in the same region often get their gasoline at the same bulk terminal. Typically the only factor that makes branded gasoline unique is the small amount of additives placed in the final product.

Several years ago, The Tribune was able to trace the lineage of gas transported in one tanker truck to a suburban Chicago station on a particular day. It found the oil came from all over the globe.

The breakdown included:

- Gulf of Mexico crudes: 31 percent

- Texas crudes: 28 percent

- Nigerian crudes: 17 percent

- Arab Light from Saudi Arabia: 10 percent

As for BP's response to the boycotts, it's asking for a chance.

"We do apologize for what's happened so far," BP spokesman Scott Dean said. "And we would hope they don't take out their frustration on some local business people who really have nothing to do with incident other than they market under our brand."
BP boycott: Should you make the decision to boycott BP? - chicagotribune.com

perhaps i move through peculiar circles but i've not encountered much in the way of "mob mentality" here in tiny town or anywhere else directed against bp. that may be because of the location though--the locals i know are deeply connected to the marsh so much of what gets said, beyond the usual stuff about criminal negligence and unbelievably sort-sighted regulations, is routed through a kind of mourning for the coastal regions of the gulf and the wider ecosystems...there's little doubt this is a form of projection, but so is everything else.

that's one of the beauties, i suppose, of living in a society of the spectacle. projections are all there are.

anyway, i haven't heard much about boycotting bp. folk talk about it, but in general they seem to recognize something of the franchise food chain.

i think the boycott is about a desire to do something to injure the bp logo.
i neither support nor oppose it, frankly.
i just find it curious as a kind of effect of repetition on television.

but this raises a more basic question: how is a transnational corporation to be held accountable to local populations in anything like a democratic manner?
simple answer: they aren't accountable.

what are the mechanisms of democratic power? well, in the us model of democracy-lite there are two basic paths: voting--so acting on the one day every 2-to-4 years when you could argue, with some difficulty (information stream problems you see. they matter) that the american polity is free---or organizing into interest groups. a boycott is an interest group, but one that is in this case trying to act against a logo. without the desired effect. unless the desired effect is to generalize brand damage. THAT would hurt.

fact is that transnationals are not accountable.
o sure, a neoliberal could argue from a position on his knees in front of an imaginary ceo that they are "accountable" through "market mechanisms" or "shareholder actions"---and it's the case in a very general sense that pressure=by=proxy can operate through the channels of economic aristocracy, so that the problems encountered by the little people could be relayed to the Sovereign through the mediation of shareholder organization.

but through demand? horseshit. not if you don't accept the conflation of the economic and political. but that's a center of neoliberal dogma. look where that's got us to...

i find it an interesting question: how can localities--which include nation-states--hold transnationals accountable for their actions?
we all know at least something about what happens when such mechanisms do not exist in the petro-capitalist context---the niger river delta.
but here, in the fading empire, homey dont play that---even though there is no coherent mobilizations to bring pressure from outside the state onto bp AND the state....

except a boycott of gas stations.

maybe we've been convinced that we have no power and that's ok so long as nice corporations continue to provide us with the commodities they say we want and shareholders continue to extract value across the process.
what else could anyone want?
accountability?
proactive concern for stakeholder interests?
proactive concern for the environment? (what is the environment anyway? where does it stop and start?)
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