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	Workers Vanguard No. 961	2 July 2010

Big Oil, White House—Partners in Crime

Gulf Coast Disaster: Capitalist Profit Drive Kills

Eleven oil workers died a horrible death on April 20 when the British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. The workers were not represented by a union; their safety in this dangerous job was in the hands of a corporation notorious for cutting corners to save money. As media reports and eyewitness accounts from survivors have made clear, a crucial piece of safety equipment, the blowout preventer, was malfunctioning. Oil worker Tyrone Benton, one of the survivors, told the BBC’s Panorama program that he had spotted a leak and that BP and the rig’s owner, Transocean, were informed. But as AOL News (21 June) put it, “repairing the control pod would have meant stopping drilling work on the rig, which was costing BP $500,000 a day to operate.”

Since April 20, two cleanup workers have died. One of them, despondent over the destruction to his livelihood, committed suicide. The death toll will climb. Cleanup workers are being exposed to deadly chemicals, including an oil dispersant so toxic it’s been banned in Europe. The disaster is ruining the lives of countless working men and women—longtime black and white residents, Native Americans, immigrant Vietnamese fishermen—whose way of life is sinking in the oil-filled waters and wetlands of the Gulf, where beaches are covered with filthy oil globs (“tarballs”).

Many of those involved in the cleanup effort, which includes prison convict labor, are getting sick. At least eleven have been hospitalized with symptoms related to exposure to inhaled irritants. Respirators have not been issued. BP at first threatened to fire cleanup workers who brought their own, including those involved in burning off oil or working near areas where toxic dispersants are being used. BP also initially gagged cleanup workers through contracts barring them from talking to the media. Earlier, Transocean workers on the rig had to sign forms asserting that they did not witness the explosion—the one they just survived.

The Gulf Coast disaster is enormous, incalculable. It is ravaging a region that continues to reel from Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath—a man-made disaster that exposed the venality, class arrogance and utter contempt of the capitalist rulers for black, poor and working people. Today, oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 60,000 to upward of 100,000 barrels a day. Even if the plan for drilling a relief well is successful, it won’t be ready until the end of August at the earliest. Marine life has been devastated, imperiling some of the richest fisheries in the world. The Gulf Coast disaster has long since surpassed the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska’s coast, the effects of which continue to be felt, both in terms of a ruined fishing industry and in illnesses suffered by cleanup workers and local residents.

Save a million dollars or so, kill eleven workers: such is the deadly math of the oil barons and the government that serves their interests. It’s not a matter of this or that “energy policy,” or who is running the regulatory agencies, all of which are totally interpenetrated with the corporations. Under Barack Obama as under George W. Bush and their predecessors, whether Democratic or Republican, the government exists to serve the interests of the tiny class of capitalists who derive their obscene wealth from exploiting labor. At the heart of the Gulf Coast disaster is the naked drive for profit that drives the irrational capitalist system.

Criminality Upon Criminality

As Rolling Stone (24 June) documented in its article “The Spill, the Scandal and the President”:

“BP shaved $500,000 off its overhead by deploying a blowout preventer without a remote-control trigger—a fail-safe measure required in many countries but not mandated by MMS [Minerals Management Service], thanks to intense industry lobbying. It opted to use cheap, single-walled piping for the well, and installed only six of the 21 cement spacers recommended by its contractor, Halliburton—decisions that significantly increased the risk of a severe explosion. It also skimped on critical testing that could have shown whether explosive gas was getting into the system as it was being cemented, and began removing mud that protected the well before it was sealed with cement plugs.”

As the New York Times (21 June) documented in depth, to save money BP directed Transocean to remove a layer of redundancy from the blowout preventer and replace one of its secondary rams with a “test ram” that would reduce the time it took to conduct certain well tests. That preventer was supposedly the last line of defense, “but the line did not hold.”

On April 2, Obama declared that oil rigs “don’t cause spills.” Eighteen days later, the Deepwater Horizon went up in flames. Since the spill, Obama has worked overtime to protect BP, even as he prattled on about looking for “whose ass to kick.”

In fact, the Obama administration stands out for its special relationship with BP, which donated more to his 2008 election campaign than to the McCain-Palin ticket. The administration purveyed ludicrously low estimates of the oil spilled and intimidated government scientists who pointed to higher numbers. Obama’s vaunted $20 billion escrow fund to be paid by BP over the next four years is a drop in the bucket compared to the actual cost of the devastation. More to the point, the fund is designed to help protect BP from potentially losing hundreds of billions in lawsuits.

The Minerals Management Service—now renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement—supposedly regulates the oil industry for the Department of the Interior. The MMS provides a literal definition to being in bed with one’s adversary (as in sex and cocaine parties for executives). Two months after Obama took office, the agency dutifully approved BP’s application for its Deepwater Horizon well, a work of fiction that promised, among other things, to protect such animals as walruses, sea otters and sea lions. Needless to say, such cold-water mammals do not exist in the semitropical Gulf.

White House residents change, but not the role of the government and its agencies. The Rolling Stone exposé quoted a representative of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which represents federal whistle blowers: “Employees describe being in Interior—not just MMS, but the other agencies—as the third Bush term.”

BP—with its track record of workers maimed and killed through cost-cutting and ruthless speedup and its CEO Tony Hayward, a study in capitalist swinemanship—is easy to hate. A 2005 explosion at a BP refinery in Texas killed 15 workers and injured 170, while in November 2009 a pipeline at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, ruptured. But BP is no exception to the functioning of this industry—whether the owners are American, British or anything else. In the eyes of the capitalist cutthroats, fatalities in the dangerous extractive industries are just so much collateral damage. On April 2, less than three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, five workers were killed in an explosion at Tesoro’s oil refinery plant in Anacortes, Washington. Three days later, 29 miners died in an explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in Raleigh County, West Virginia.

The destruction wrought by oil and mining companies spans the globe. A big difference between the explosion in the Gulf of Mexico and other disasters is that this one hit right off the U.S. coastline. In Nigeria’s Niger River delta, some 1.5 million tons of oil—50 times the pollution unleashed by the Exxon Valdez disaster—has been spilled over the last half century. Oil companies in the region, including U.S.-owned Chevron and ExxonMobil, are protected by government and private troops who not only wage war against rebels but also mete out repression against residents seeking redress for the oil giants’ ravages. A New York Times (16 June) article reported: “The oil pours out nearly every week, and some swamps are long since lifeless. Perhaps no place on earth has been as battered by oil, experts say, leaving residents here astonished at the nonstop attention paid to the gusher half a world away in the Gulf of Mexico.” The article quoted a Nigerian official who said, “Whatever cry we cry is not heard outside of here.”

Industrial murder and environmental devastation are endemic to the workings of the capitalist system. Only when the working class rips industry from the hands of the capitalists and establishes a planned socialist economy on a world scale will the enormous resources of the planet be put to use for all of humanity. When the workers rule, technology and productive resources will be expanded to overcome scarcity and provide a decent life for all. The fight for a socialist future requires forging revolutionary workers parties that will lead all the exploited and oppressed in proletarian revolution.

Labor: Organize the Oil Industry!

Across the U.S., an estimated 177 workers on average die every day from work-related causes. As we noted following the Upper Big Branch mine explosion, outfits like the Mine Safety and Health Administration “do not exist to protect workers. While occasionally giving the employers a slap on the wrist, they serve to breed faith in the agencies of the ruling class as a substitute for union struggle” (“Industrial Murder in West Virginia,” WV No. 957, 23 April).

The trade unions are the only effective safeguard working people have against the rapaciousness of the capitalist bosses. It is necessary to fight for the union organization of the oil industry, for union safety committees able to shut down production at any point. This is a question of life and death for oil and gas workers, who between 2002 and 2007 suffered a work fatality rate that was seven times the average for all occupations.

Organizing the oil extraction industry will be no easy task. The bosses, backed by the capitalist state, are hell-bent on keeping the industry union-free. Large numbers of oil workers used to be represented by the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union, which in 2005 became part of the United Steelworkers union (USW). Today, a June 15 AFL-CIO posting on the Gulf disaster admits, “offshore exploration, production and service industry in the Gulf of Mexico, to the best of our knowledge, is 100 percent nonunion.”

This is a striking indictment of the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, which has overseen a massive decline in union membership throughout industry over the last several decades. The union tops’ class collaboration is exemplified by their loyalty to the Democratic Party and their reliance on the state agencies of the class enemy. Instead of initiating a drive to organize non-union oil workers in the wake of the Gulf Coast disaster, the USW bureaucracy begged for greater government oversight—i.e., leave the lives of workers in the hands of the bosses’ political representatives.

There must be a fight for a new labor leadership, one based on a program of class struggle and political independence from the capitalist political parties and state agencies. Crucial to this perspective is the struggle against the flag-waving of the labor tops, who preach the lie of a unity of interests between American workers and “their own” exploiters, poisoning the potential for international labor solidarity. Typical is the June 15 AFL-CIO statement, which complains that the oil industry is “increasingly foreign.”

American companies are second to none in injuring and killing workers. A list of refinery fires and fatalities for 2009 and 2010 in the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees newsletter (Spring 2010) includes a veritable who’s who in the oil industry, with such U.S. companies as ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Shell (U.S. subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell) and Chevron as well as BP and others. The newsletter detailed 40 deaths and injuries in the petroleum industry in April alone. Three workers were injured in a fire at ExxonMobil’s Baton Rouge, Louisiana, refinery on April 14. On April 19, the day before the BP rig exploded, a contractor died in a crane accident at a Motiva Enterprises refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. On April 29, two workers and a supervisor were injured in a fire at Valero Energy Corp.’s Memphis refinery.

It was, in fact, a U.S. company that perpetrated the world’s worst industrial catastrophe. In the early hours of 3 December 1984, Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, began to leak methyl isocyanate gas and other toxic chemicals. Nearly 600,000 people were exposed, resulting in the deaths of some 15,000 human beings. The U.S. has since ignored demands that Warren Anderson, the head of Union Carbide at the time, be extradited to India.

Expropriate Big Oil! For an International Planned Socialist Economy!

The devastation in the Gulf of Mexico, the Niger Delta and elsewhere is but a piece of the picture of plunder carried out by Big Oil, which has controlled the economic fate of entire nations. It was to save Anglo-Iranian, a prior incarnation of BP, that the CIA and British imperialists overthrew the nationalist regime of Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran in 1953 after he nationalized the company’s holding in that country. (The company’s name changed the year after.) In his classic 1916 work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin explained:

“Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and of monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom. Whatever the political system the result of these tendencies is everywhere reaction and an extreme intensification of antagonisms in this field.”

In thrall to the “democratic” political system of American capitalist rule, the reformist left responded to the disaster in the Gulf with a new round of pleas to the Obama government. In a June 14 online statement, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) credited the Obama White House for the $20 billion escrow fund, calling this ploy “a dramatic shift in their policy towards BP” and claiming that this was the result of “mass grassroots organizing” like the PSL’s “Seize BP” campaign. Warning that this “does not mean the Obama administration is firmly against BP,” the PSL aims to stiffen the administration’s resolve through the pressure tactic of an “independent body” to control the fund “run by representatives of the fishers, shrimpers, crabbers, unions, small business people and workers in the tourism and recreation industry, local elected officials, clergy, as well as independent scientists and environmentalists.”

For its part, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) published a lengthy online piece titled “The Making of an Eco-Catastrophe” (25 June) that criticized Obama’s “concessions to the right” on oil drilling. The article concluded that the only way such concessions will stop “is if a grassroots movement puts more pressure” on Obama “from the left.” Echoing petty-bourgeois environmentalists, the article demands “an immediate halt to all deep-water drilling” and a plan to “phase out offshore drilling altogether.” The ISO calls for Congress to pass “a comprehensive energy bill,” offering advice to the capitalist rulers on how they can rearrange tax policies in favor of “green” jobs and other liberal causes.

Through their insipid pleadings, the PSL, ISO et al. promote the illusion that bourgeois—i.e., Democratic—politicians can be pressured to represent the interests of working people and the oppressed. These reformists see their role as tinkering with the machinery of the capitalist state. They appeal to the government that, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained in the Communist Manifesto, serves as “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” All the reformist chatter about “pressure” and “people’s committees” is an obstacle to the necessary struggle for a socialist revolution that expropriates Big Oil and all the means of production.

In the wake of the Gulf disaster, many liberals and environmentalists have renewed calls to slash oil production in favor of “renewable energy.” We wrote in “The World Oil Racket” (WV No. 535, 27 September 1991) that it is commonly assumed that the boards of directors of, say, Greenpeace, and of Exxon are fundamentally antagonistic to each other. Yet each in its own way propagates the false notion that consumption is outgrowing oil supplies. Ecology activists use this argument to push a utopian program of economic conservation and primitivism; the heirs of Rockefeller use it to justify extortionate prices and the imperialist rape of impoverished oil-producing countries.

The fact is that fossil fuels are necessary for any modern civilization. Criminal disregard for human life and ecological devastation stem from a social system in which production is based on profit rather than human need. As we stated in “The World Oil Racket”:

“The ecology activists are right in one important respect: the massive burning of hydrocarbons—whether oil or coal—is in the long term bad for the earth’s atmosphere. The answer, however, is not to save oil by cutting the living standards of North American and European working people. A planned socialist economy would carry out the scientific research required to develop safer, more efficient sources of energy (including nuclear and solar energy). But there is one absolutely necessary precondition for an energy-efficient future. The heirs of Rockefeller and sheiks of Araby must be swept into the dustbin of history.”