Jim Hightower

"Tony Two-step" is too much, isn't he? Tony Hayward, I mean, the slick CEO of BP who keeps trying to dance his way around the public's fury over the oily mess he and other top executives have made.

"What the hell did we do to deserve this?" Hayward asked shortly after his faulty well exploded in April. Excuse us, Tony, but you're not the victim here – and this disaster is not the work of fate. Rather, the deadly gusher in the Gulf is a direct product of your reckless pursuit of profits. You waltzed around environmental protections, deliberately avoided installing relatively cheap safety equipment, and cavalierly lied about the likelihood of disaster and your ability to cope with it.

"It wasn't our accident," the CEO later declared, as oil was spreading. Wow, Tony, in one four-word sentence, you told two lies. First, BP owns the well, and it is your mess. Second, the mess was not an "accident," but the inevitable result of hubris and greed flowing straight from BP's executive suite.

"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean," Hayward told the media, trying to sidestep the fact that BP's mess was fast becoming America's worst oil calamity. Indeed, Tony coolly explained that the amount of oil spewing from the well "is tiny in relation to the total water volume." This flabbergasting comment came only two weeks before it was revealed that the amount of gushing oil was 19 times more than BP had been claiming.

Eleven oil workers are dead, thousands of Gulf Coast people had had their livelihoods devastated, and unfathomable damage is being done to the Gulf ecology, yet this guy is still dancing around – and still drawing his $5-million-a-year paycheck. If you'd like to send a message to Tony, consider joining the grassroots boycott being organized at www.beyondbp.org.