This guy and his company are unbelievable. Excerpt:

BP officials on Saturday scrambled yet again to respond to another public relations challenge when their embattled chief executive, Tony Hayward, spent the day off the coast of England watching his yacht compete in one of the world’s largest races.

More:

On Saturday, Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, called Mr. Hayward’s yacht outing the “height of arrogance,” in an interview with Fox News.

“I can tell you that yacht ought to be here skimming and cleaning up a lot of the oil,” Mr. Shelby said. “He ought to be down here seeing what is really going on. Not in a cocoon somewhere.”

And:

Hayward had already angered many in the U.S. when he was quoted in the Times of London as suggesting that Americans were particularly likely to file bogus claims for compensation from the spill. He later shocked Louisiana residents by telling them that no one wanted to resolve the crisis as badly as he did because “I’d like my life back.”
Ronnie Kennier, a 49-year-old oysterman from Empire, La., said Hayward’s day among the sailboats showed once again just how out of touch BP executives are with the financial and emotional suffering along the Gulf.
“He wanted to get his life back,” Kennier said. “I guess he got it.”

Yet one fine day, in a fit of euphoria, after he had picked up the telephone and taken an order for zero-coupon bonds that had brought him a $50,000 commission, just like that, this very phrase had bubbled up in his brain. On Wall Street, he and a few others … had become precisely that … Masters of the Universe. There was … no limit whatsoever. — Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities.

A friend from New Orleans came by to visit this morning and told me that the sense of depression and futility is strong in the city. “It’s not like Katrina, when you could at least do something — rebuild a house, something,” she said. “Here, there’s nothing you can do, and that’s hitting people hard.”
Oh, and guess what? The relief well they’re drilling now — the last hope to stop the oil hemorrhage — is not guaranteed to work. If it doesn’t, the hole will gush oil into the Gulf for two to four more years before it’s depleted. Bad luck for Tony! There’ll be no yachting in the Gulf of Mexico after that.