What an oil spill, not only in the Gulf, but in Washington.
The last month’s disastrous and tragic events have provided a remarkable window into the relationship of the oil corporations to the U.S. government and its environmental policy. On March 31 President Barack Obama announced that his administration would permit oil drilling off the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, reportedly as part of a political strategy to win Republican support for the president’s environmental agenda. Maybe there was also an element of payback in the decision. Two of Obama’s top “bundlers” were oil executives and his presidential campaign received $213,000 from oil companies. Many Obama supporters, even former Vice-President Al Gore’s Repower America, expressed their disappointment and distress at the decision. By wooing the Republicans, Obama was also capitulating to the oil companies who provide so much money to both parties and their candidates. The decision couldn’t have been more badly timed.
Then less than a month later on April 20, an explosion at the BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform killed eleven oil workers, caused a blow out of the well, and a massive oil spill which has still not been brought under control. BP, Transocean, and Haliburton, the three corporations involved, all appeared to have failed to protect the workers and the environment. The initial reports suggest that President George W. Bush’s administration should never have permitted BP to drill that well and that many other permits to drill other wells should never have been given. Obama criticized the oil companies “cozy” relationship with government, lectured the oil companies and their subcontractors on their mutual finger pointing, and announced that he reforming and tightening up government controls on the oil companies. This is of course standard practice in the American government, periods of laissez-faire and corruption alternating with periods of regulation and somewhat less corruption.
No one should take Obama seriously. Oil, big oil, so thick and sticky, will continue to spill into Washington as long as it’s in the hands of the corporations. The resource is both too valuable and too dangerous to be left in private hands. We should demand that these corporations be nationalized, their resources brought under the control of the government. At the same time we have to work to create a government controlled by the American people. Nationalizing oil when the government represents banks, insurance companies and other industries will not solve our problems. We need to rebuild the social movements and give them expression in a political party with an anti-capitalist agenda. We need to stop the oil spill in the Gulf, but just as important, we need to stop the oil spill in Washington.
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