 Out-of-work fishers on the Gulf Coast |
Speaking of the 200,000 gallons of oil (or more) gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, destroying the U.S. coast line and with it tens of thousands of jobs, President Obama told the people of the region, “Your government will do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to stop this crisis.” Obama said, “We’re dealing with a massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster.”
“Your government?” Really? Was it not the U.S. government that gave British Petroleum (BP) the right to make billions of dollars by conducting ultra-hazardous oil drilling a mile deep into the ocean floor without having to provide back-up plans for a potential catastrophe?
While Michael Steele became somewhat famous for his disgusting “Drill Baby Drill” chant at the Republican National Convention in 2008, the Democratic Party is just as much in the back pocket of Big Oil and the billionaires.
Speaking 18 days before the explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama reassured the people about his decision to pick up where Bush left off by allowing vast off-shore oil drilling.
He stated, “I don’t agree with the notion that we shouldn’t do anything [allow offshore drilling]. It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.”
This is not “our government.” It is the government of the corporate and banking capitalists. Both the Republicans and Democrats are the servants of capitalist interests.
British Petroleum made $163 billion in profits from 2001-09 and $5.6 billion in the first quarter of 2010. Its record profits come from the permission granted by the government to carry out deep offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
BP is also attracting new investors because the corporation just obtained virtual control of the huge Rumaila oil field in Iraq, again thanks to the intervention of the U.S. government’s military forces. The Iraqi constitution during the Saddam Hussein era forbade western oil companies like BP from owning Iraq’s oil.
Not only does “our government” hand over vast natural resources to the oil corporations, it also protects them in case anything goes wrong.
In 1990 Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act. The legislation actually limits and caps the damages that have to be paid by the oil companies. Even when their offshore facilities cause catastrophic disaster, they are only obligated to pay out a measly $75 million in addition to removal costs.
The $75 million limitation on liability would encompass damages from individuals for loss of livelihood and income; the increased costs of government services that states would have to pay out to residents; the loss of subsistence of natural resources; damages to wildlife, public and private property, shorelines and beaches; and all other conceivable forms of damage and harm to people beyond containment and removal of oil from water or shorelines.
The estimated cost of the Gulf of Mexico disaster is already estimated at about $14 billion. That number will grow rapidly.
If this was a government “of, by and for the people,” BP’s assets would be seized and distributed to provide relief to the working people throughout the Gulf states whose jobs, livelihoods and homes have been harmed by this latest assault from Corporate America.
