Boycott BP! Boycott BP! Boycott BP! (and hurt small businesses instead)

The execs at Goldman-Sachs must be the only people in America hoping that oil will keep pouring from the BP Macondo well off Louisiana indefinitely. After all, up until April 2010, the billionaires on Wall Street were the most detested people in the country for the lavish bonuses they gave themselves just a year after contributing heavily to the destruction of the US economy, not to mention unemployment approaching 10%.

All that’s changed now: the most hated company in the USA is now BP. Big Oil (or as they call it in Texas, “the awl bidness”) has never been a public favorite. Maybe it’s because few (if any) other industries post the price of their products on every street corner; a product that most people buy as regularly as any heroin addict buys that nickel bag. Maybe it’s that so many people are just a little ashamed of their gasoline addiction… Or maybe it’s just that so many people don’t really understand the oil business.

That last is probably why almost every time an oil company incurs public ire, somebody decides it’s time to boycott their brand of gasoline. The cries of “Boycott!” rang out in 1989 after the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince WIlliam Sound, Alaska. When gasoline prices topped $4.00 per gallon in 2008, the same folks suggested that we all “boycott big oil." Presumably everyone would buy gas from “little oil” – whoever that is - instead.