 Shrimper Al Barthelemy in the Louisiana wetlands. |
For nearly two months the oil has been gushing into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of nearly 100,000 barrels a day–that’s 4.2 million gallons.
Under the direction of the White House policy, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, has insisted that the capitalists running BP were in charge of the clean-up, in charge of paying the claims for damages, in charge of everything related the disaster.
Everyone knows now that BP falsified data to prove that its deepwater wells were safe. They lied about the amount of oil that was gushing into the Gulf. They lied about their intention to pay everyone who had seen their jobs, livelihoods and communities destroyed.
So why would the White House and Pentagon authorities endlessly defer to BP? Admiral Stevens summed it up perfectly: “BP owns the means of production.” He repeated the phrase almost every time he appeared on television.
The “people” get to elect politicians every four years but these elected officials and their unelected counter-parts in uniform bow before those who “own the means of production.”
Given his proclivity to cite BP’s ownership of the “means of production” one might think that Admiral Stevens had been reading Karl Marx. But we doubt it.
Marx called for liberating the “means of production” from being the private property of capitalist investors and the banks. Public rather than private ownership of the means of production was, according to Marx, the only basis for creating a truly democratic system to decide what should be produced, how much to produce, where to produce and how that which is produced should be used to meet society’s complicated social, economic and environmental needs.
To liberate the means of production from the death grip of profit maximizers like BP and the other corporations will take a social revolution. In the meantime we have to fight these capitalist predators tooth-and-nail to defend the people and their ability to survive.
For six weeks the Obama administration just said ‘No’ to the growing nationwide chorus of public opinion demanding that the government seize BP’s assets in an amount commensurate with the damage caused by their criminal negligence. He said ‘No’ to the proposal that the funds be placed into a trust that could quickly and easily pay for damages and compensation now and into the future as more damages accrue.
Now the White House has just announced a dramatic shift in their policy towards BP, demanding that company put its own assets into escrow for the payment of compensation or the White House would invoke its own legal authority to take those assets for that purpose.
The change in policy is a credit to initiatives by the outraged people in the state of Florida and Louisiana who are now demanding the creation of a $7.5 billion escrow fund from BP’s assets to pay claims in their state. And Obama is feeling the heat from the rest of the country. The nationwide mass organizing like the Seize BP campaign has organized demonstrations, rallies, press conferences and banner drops, collected tens of thousands more petitions. This is the kind of mass grassroots organizing that can, as it already has, shift the political climate in a way no politician can fail to ignore.
That does not mean the Obama administration is firmly against BP and now standing with the people. Far from it. The Administration is, in fact, caught between their loyalty to the corporate capitalists and the rising tide of public anger against BP and government collusion. As the Seize BP campaign argued, the two central issues on the table now are: “(1) the size or amount of the escrow fund taken from BP’s assets (the real costs are likely to be in the tens of billions of dollars) and (2) that the ‘real people’ of the affected communities, and not corporate and banking representatives or Wall Street lawyers, be selected to be the trustees of the fund.”
It is imperative that the independent body that controls any fund be 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.
While putting BP’s billions under the control of a “people’s trustees” might seem far-fetched, the same thing was said about the “Seize BP” campaign just a few weeks ago. History has shown time and again that mass struggle, led by dedicated activists with focused demands, can indeed force the capitalist government to enact concessions that previously seemed “extreme.”
The PSL has proudly taken part in the Seize BP campaign. While we build a movement that aims for the complete replacement of capitalism, we engage directly in the battles to win immediate relief for the working class.
