For the first ten days, the big media kept quiet about the facts. Now, when the spill has become the worst ecological crisis in history, the atrocity that capitalist businessmen and the United States political regime committed has begun to come out.
As the liberal Democratic daily Los Angeles Times tells it, the imperialist British Petroleum company entrusted the construction of the oil well to the infamous US firm Halliburton. Its CEO, the same businessman and Bush administration official, Dick Cheney in person, was the one who signed the report to the Senate about the ecological guarantees of the drilling project in the Gulf of Mexico (to some 1,500 meters deep), a practice considered “dangerous” and severely prohibited in almost the whole world, including the US, where it was necessary for the Senate to change a law. A real political lobby, a big shady deal, to favor capitalists.
It seems like a joke in poor taste. Halliburton is the company that, one day before the bombings in Iraq, was entrusted with the reconstruction of Iraq by Bush’s administration…. The height of cynicism was reached by the pathetic Wall Street Journal; 20 days after the tragedy, that financial daily, referring to the New York Stock Exchange, noted the growth in sales of plastic barriers to protect the Louisiana coast. These businessmen make “big deals” selling funeral caskets in the middle of a war. A sure thing!
It is still impossible to foresee the consequences that this disaster, more destructive than Chernobyl, will bring. It seems like something out of a movie from Hollywood, where the fashion is prophesying the “end of the world.”
The oil spill is out of control. Every day, 5 million liters of crude are being spilled. Twenty-eight days have already passed since it began, and they still don’t know how to curb the spill. It is not superfluous to say that the entire working class and all the poor people of the region will be those most affected by this disaster, just as they were in the New Orleans floods.
Obama’s administration is paralyzed. The very complicity of the Democrats in creating “good conditions for BP’s and Halliburton’s deals” made them want to silence the affair in the press and now to do nothing to get “to the bottom of the matter.” What is needed is decisive action to curb the spill and prevent the consequences. However, the administration is hoping “and praying” that the oil well will run out. Nor is the company collaborating, saying that because of the crisis, it has no funds to investigate how to put the lid on the spill. All the attempts have failed. Now they don’t know what to do.
It seems unbelievable, but they are allowing the destruction of an entire ocean to continue at the hands of the capitalists. The Gulf of Mexico and 40% of the fresh water reserves of the United States are endangered.
As the hours and the days pass without a solution, this environmental crisis is becoming a big political crisis for Obama’s administration, next to the economic crisis, that has the country in recession, where those who experience the worst are the workers, more than thirty million of whom have lost their jobs, if we count the undocumented immigrants, who are an essential part of the US labor structure and who are fighting in the streets against racist deportations. Obama’s administration has kept none of its promises. The workers and the people of the United States have to hit the streets to confront the capitalist crisis.
