British Petroleum’s (BP) bosses murdered 11 workers and caused untold ecological damage when a BP oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico last month. As usual in industrial disasters, profit-driven cost-cutting proved the immediate cause. Texas A&M drilling expert Gene Beck “said BP’s encasement design called for only partial coverage of casings deep in the well. Cement did not reach the bottom of the next-largest casing in high-pressure areas, a decision Beck called ‘shocking.’” (Los Angeles Times, 5/23)
But the blowout highlights only one of the dangers to our class from the oil barons’ reckless pursuit of maximum profits. The very existence of BP’s Gulf rig stems from U.S. imperialism’s need to control world energy supplies by force in the face of increasing competition. Millions of working-class Iraqis and Afghans have already been killed in the capitalists’ struggle over oil and gas. Expanding offshore drilling, however, signals U.S. rulers’ plans for far deadlier conflicts.
Offshore Drilling Helps Pentagon’s Anti-Iran War Plans
Just three weeks before the BP blast, Obama had announced “the expansion of offshore oil and gas exploration....in the mid- and south-Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.” Obama pointedly chose a military installation, Andrews Air Force Base, for his speech, declaring, “We are going to need vital energy sources to maintain our economic growth and our security....so that we are no longer tethered to the whims of what happens somewhere in the Middle East.”
Obama meant preparing for nuclear-arming Iran’s countering a U.S./Israeli attack by closing off the Straits of Hormuz, the planet’s most important oil chokepoint. Teheran could shut off shipments of millions of barrels of oil should there be a U.S. or Israeli strike at its nuclear program. U.S. bosses must also prepare for the longer-range possibility of Iran’s ally China — its number one oil customer — sending its growing blue-water navy to the Straits to protect its supplies.
Obama’s offshore initiative meshes with arch-imperialist John Kerry’s and Joe Lieberman’s U.S. Senate bill to boost offshore oil, domestic coal and nuclear energy as potential wartime alternatives to Mid-East oil and to build up the U.S. strategic oil reserve. Evidently, war-bent U.S. rulers see 11 oil workers’ deaths in the Gulf; the recent deaths of 29 miners in West Virginia and two more in Kentucky; and a potential replay of the Pennsylvania 3-Mile Island nuclear meltdown — inherent catastrophes under capitalism — all as “acceptable” casualties.
Liberals Rehabilitate Warmaker Halliburton
Obama may indeed make occasional renegade BP (see box) “pay” for the Gulf spill, as he’s promised, by compelling it to follow U.S. imperialism’s war agenda more closely. But BP subcontractor Halliburton, just as guilty of homicide for its flawed cement work, seems to be getting off scot-free on a “just-following-orders” defense. “Halliburton...worked according to BP’s design.” (LA Times article) Besides its oil business, Halliburton builds and services U.S. military bases worldwide. Liberals once loved to attack ex-Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney. Bush’s VP, but with liberal Obama in the White House, criticism of the firm has died down.
The bosses care nothing for workers’ lives or the environment. Exxon Mobil, the top corporate beneficiary of U.S.-led genocide in Iraq, recently had the courts cut 90% of its “punitive damages” for its 1989 Exxon Valdez catastrophe, from $5 billion down to $500 million. Meanwhile, the Rockefeller-controlled company netted the highest profits in capitalism’s history.
As with the Exxon Valdez, there is sure to be a broad and sincere outcry against those responsible for the Gulf spill. But don’t count on Obama to force them to make amends. Only the working class can sufficiently punish the war-making, earth-ravaging billionaires for their crimes. Only communist revolution would make workers’ safety and environment primary in the production for workers’ needs.
Building a mass PLP internationally among especially industrial workers, soldiers and youth in the shops, unions, barracks, schools, churches and the communities, is the only sure road to that future, the ultimate goal of our Party.
BP UNRELIABLE U.S. ALLY
We should expect Obama & Co. to aim both empty rhetorical tirades and real sanctions against BP. The London-based firm has proved an on-again-off-again ally of the U.S. Establishment. Last Fall, in return for staunch U.K. military support, Iraq’s U.S.-controlled puppet government awarded BP rights to the vast Rumalia oil field. But BP, seeking cheap labor, brought in China’s national oil company as a junior partner.
BP is principal operator of the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, Bill Clinton’s pet project, that ships Caspian crude to Europe and the U.S. free of Russian influence. But BP manages Kremlin-controlled oil and gas schemes in Siberia. It also runs Alaska’s oil pipeline, but the Feds shut it down occasionally for “environmental violations,” as in 2006 to punish BP for ceding control of its Russian operations to the Putin regime.
BP’s checkered history and relationship with the U.S. makes it a geopolitical wildcard for Washington. In Iran in 1953, BP’s predecessor, Anglo-Iranian Oil, lost big-time when the CIA installed the pro-Exxon Shah on the throne. It took another big hit in 1956, when Egypt nationalized and closed the Suez Canal, reacting to western interests ending the funding to its Aswan Dam project. This shut BP’s main export route, inducing a British-French-Israeli invasion, but President Eisenhower refused to send U.S. troops to support the invasion or help British and French oil barons.
In turn, BP later concluded relatively friendly mergers with the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil of Ohio and of Indiana. Over the past three decades effective ownership of the firm has passed from private British investors, to the British government, to Kuwait’s emirs, to Goldman Sachs and back to private European-U.S.-U.K. investors.