BP chairman reveals the corporate mentality

The comment by BP's Swedish chairman of the board that his company cares about "small people," presumably those along the Gulf Coast who have been most adversely affected by his company's latest oil disaster, encapsulates the attitude of the majority of corporate leaders toward the working people of their communities.

To the corporate managers who have -- especially since the early 1980s and the rise of Reaganesque deregulation -- taken over the U.S. government with their campaign contributions and their massive lobbying efforts, everyone outside their corporate circle are considered "small" or unimportant, if not finally, inhuman.

I suppose that to be considered normal or average or, better yet, tall (read: fully human), one needs to be ranked somewhere in the top 100 of the richest people in the world. But then again we're always reminded that they are doing us a big favor by employing us at the lowest possible wages while they rake in millions a year in salary and bonuses whether they do a goodKK job or not.

This is the kind of situation you get after voting for politicians who have spearheaded globalization: a European defining hard-working Americans pejoratively in the midst of their country's greatest ecological disaster as "small people." This is what you get for voting for politicians like Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes, conservative statesmen who gave over everything they could to their big corporate friends, as they busted up unions and sent most of our manufacturing to nonunion workers abroad: a devastating oil disaster along with a foreigner talking down at us like we are nothing but Oz-like Munchkins.

DENNIS B. LEDDEN
Butler