As everybody (except maybe Sue, who’s out on the prairie somewhere, attempting to acquire news via telegraph and a crystal radio set) heard yesterday, BP said it would set up an escrow account to be managed by a neutral party in order to satisfy ‘legitimate’ claims resulting from its little oil mishap in the Gulf of Mexico. They expect to eventually build the fund up to $20 billion over the next 3½ years, and they aren’t considering it a cap on their liability. They’re also going to set up a separate fund of $100 million to help out the oil workers affected by the 6-month pseudo moratorium on offshore oil drilling. Call me crazy, but I think this is a good thing. A really good thing, and I credit Obama with getting BP to commit to it (assuming there isn’t some scam in there somewhere that I can’t see). It doesn’t fix things, it doesn’t bring back all the dead sea critters (with many more to come), and it doesn’t do anything to get us off fossil fuels, but hopefully the “small people” will actually get some help out of all this. They sure as hell need a break.

And, yes, BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg said

“I care about the small people. I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are greedy companies or don’t care, but that is not the case at BP. We care about the small people.”

That, of course, has professionally offended people all kinds of pissed off. You know what? Go ahead and be pissed off at the cutting of corners to maximize profits at the expense of safety (not looking so cost-effective now, is it?), and be pissed off at the oil-coated sea turtles and dying pelicans, and the wetlands that won’t return in our lifetime, but to be pissed because some Swedish guy said “small people”? Give me a break.

Go give a press conference in Swedish, and let me know how you made out.

By the way, you know what turns the “small people” into “big people”? Unions, that’s what. That’s why we need them, that’s why they’re good for the country, and that’s why Blanche Lincoln and her anti-union cronies should go f*ck themselves. But I digress…

Not everybody likes the $20 billion escrow account, of course. The knee-jerk conservatives that were crying about Obama not doing anything are now crapping themselves in a fit of fake outrage over what they’re calling a “Chicago Style Shakedown”.

I suppose we should all be used to their hypocrisy by now, but it sure would be nice if somebody would stand up and tell them to just STFU. And you know what? I say it’s high time for a Chicago-style shakedown of the insurance industry, big pharma, Wall Street, and the military-industrial complex, too. Just for starters. These f*ckers have been shaking down us small people for an awfully long time, and I’d be more than happy to get some pay-back. So bring it on, you ignorant, corrupt, amoral konservative korporatist kocksuckers.

And of course Michelle Bachmann had to chime in, calling this a “redistribution of wealth.”

The Minnesota Independent reports that Bachmann spoke Tuesday to the Heritage Foundation, and badmouthed the idea. “The president just called for creating a fund that would be administered by outsiders, which would be more of a redistribution-of-wealth fund,” said Bachmann. “And now it appears like we’ll be looking at one more gateway for more government control, more money to government.”

Also, David Weigel reports that Bachmann also said: “They have to lift the liability cap. But if I was the head of BP, I would let the signal get out there — ‘We’re not going to be chumps, and we’re not going to be fleeced.’ And they shouldn’t be. They shouldn’t have to be fleeced and make chumps to have to pay for perpetual unemployment and all the rest — they’ve got to be legitimate claims.”

Because, of course, “those people” down there just want to collect welfare and unemployment, and honorable corporations can’t trust them – or that you-know-what in the White House – to do the right thing.

Michelle, honey, if it wasn’t for the chumps of Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District, you wouldn’t be in office, now would you?

Oh well, time for this chump to head out amongst the small people and seize the day.