Thomas Frank: The Old "Widows and Orphans" Defense
[Thomas Frank is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.]
The great oil spill may have caused the American right to suspend momentarily its fight for drilling, but now opinion leaders in Britain are rallying to the defense of oil giant BP as it squirms under the heel of big government.
While American pundits demand that President Obama must do more, their British counterparts shriek that he has already gone much too far.
Among the first to denounce was Lord Norman Tebbit, a former Employment Secretary in Margaret Thatcher's government, who wrote that Mr. Obama's tepid remarks on BP were "a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan political presidential petulance against a multinational company."...
All of this is merely a spittle-flecked variation on the old "widows and orphans" defense, in which some corporate titan demands that his operations be left unscrutinized, unregulated, and above all uncriticized out of concern for his defenseless shareholders. It was a Wall Street commonplace at one time: Flipping through Matthew Josephson's 1934 book "The Robber Barons," I was able to find an incident in which even the rapacious Jay Gould summoned up "widows and orphans" to humanize one of his maneuvers with the Union Pacific Railroad.
Mr. Josephson, the historian, simply laughed this off. In 1934 everyone knew that corporations were not charitable organizations....
Read entire article at WSJ
The great oil spill may have caused the American right to suspend momentarily its fight for drilling, but now opinion leaders in Britain are rallying to the defense of oil giant BP as it squirms under the heel of big government.
While American pundits demand that President Obama must do more, their British counterparts shriek that he has already gone much too far.
Among the first to denounce was Lord Norman Tebbit, a former Employment Secretary in Margaret Thatcher's government, who wrote that Mr. Obama's tepid remarks on BP were "a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan political presidential petulance against a multinational company."...
All of this is merely a spittle-flecked variation on the old "widows and orphans" defense, in which some corporate titan demands that his operations be left unscrutinized, unregulated, and above all uncriticized out of concern for his defenseless shareholders. It was a Wall Street commonplace at one time: Flipping through Matthew Josephson's 1934 book "The Robber Barons," I was able to find an incident in which even the rapacious Jay Gould summoned up "widows and orphans" to humanize one of his maneuvers with the Union Pacific Railroad.
Mr. Josephson, the historian, simply laughed this off. In 1934 everyone knew that corporations were not charitable organizations....