NEW ORLEANS -- Nearly 20 months after its massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill – and just as the nation focuses on New Orleans, host of the BCS title game – BP is pushing a slick nationwide public relations campaign to persuade Americans that the Gulf region has recovered.
BP PLC's rosy picture of the Gulf, complete with sparkling beaches, booming businesses, smiling fishermen and waters bursting with seafood, seems a bit too rosy to many people who live there. Even if the British oil giant's campaign helps promote the Gulf as a place where Americans should have no fear to visit and spend their money, some dismiss it as "BP propaganda."
It is crucial to keep in mind just how strongly Mayor Mitch Landrieu and the plutocrats who run the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau have encouraged BP to engage in this deceitful propaganda campaign solely for the short sighted short term benefit of their tourism-dependent business interests.
But the ad campaign rings hollow to many folks here.
"They talk about areas being all open. There are areas that are still closed," said A.C. Cooper, a shrimp fisherman in Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana. He listed some bays and fishing spots that he says the state still has closed due to oil contamination. "It's bogus, it's not the truth."
He added that last fall's shrimp harvest was dismal. "The numbers on our shrimp are way down," he said. "They (BP) make it sound like they're doing a lot, but they're not doing much to help the fishermen out ... I got good fishermen struggling to pay their bills right now."
The head of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, a commercial shrimpers group, called it "BP propaganda."
"When you have a lot of money, you can pretty much get any point across," Clint Guidry complained. "It's kind of like indoctrination."
Instead of demanding that BP be held accountable for and made to pay for what will be decades of mitigation of the full extent of the damage it has done, our elected representatives and unelected business leaders have settled for this series of bribes and lies in order that they may reap the short term benefit of a phony recovery.
But then, as Ray Nagin once told us, even during phony recoveries, there is money to be made so long as you know who to ask.
The company is paying chefs Emeril Lagasse and John Besh to promote Gulf seafood.
It's what we call bucking the trend.
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