The Deepwater Horizon Disaster Will Have Consequences For Centuries. We have to Consider What We Have to Do to Stop This

It makes you want to string the bastards up, doesn't it

The Obama administration released a report earlier this month claiming that 75% of the estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil released in to the gulf after BP's Deepwater Horizon spill has been cleaned up.  New findings from a group of scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution claims that  79% of the oil may still be in the gulf.  Seventy five percent is gone, seventy nine percent is still there.  With such disparity no wonder the American people are confused and feel alienated, and that there is no trust in society's institutions; politicians, bankers, CEO's and unfortunately, Labor leaders.

For months I couldn't watch the television whenever the images of the spill came up.  I was filled with anger on the one hand at the loss of life and ecological damage, and sadness on the other.  I just couldn't get out of my mind the real effect that the spill was having on the environment, on this beautiful body of water and the life within it.  Then there were the deaths when the rig sank and the loss of jobs and livelihoods in the gulf states whose fisheries industry employed some 200,000 people in 2008.  We are always taught that the experts know best, that we have to listen to them and here, two sets of "experts" have such diverse and divergent estimates as those above.  I have no "official" status, I am not an environmental scientist, marine biologist or any other ist.  But I know this much; you can't pour that much toxic substance in to a body of water like this and not have severe consequences that will last for centuries. We can only guess what those consequences might be.

The new findings certainly seem to be more accurate to me and are absent the direct political motivation that the Obama administration has for issuing a glowing report.  After all, the government agency, the Minerals Management Service that was supposed to regulate deep water drilling, failed to do so and its head was removed by Obama for "lax oversight of drilling and cozy ties with industry."

The WHOI claims that oil is already settling on the sea floor in the spawning ground of many types of fish.  The Gulf of Mexico is a major spawning ground for the Bluefin Tuna and the effects of the spill on these fish will only be determined over time. The study showed evidence of a massive plume of oil, what is described by the Wall Street Journal as resembling "A mist of trace chemicals largely invisible to the eye, rather than a river of oil."  Some of the chemicals we are talking about here are, benzene, toluene, xylene, and other petroleum compounds. The length of this plume is staggering: It extends 115,000 feet in length from the Deepwater Horizon rig, is 6,550 feet wide and 650 feet high.  This oil spill is a catastrophe of epic proportions.

Throughout all this it is evident that this disaster, like Katrina, is a result of the system in which we live.  It is not the simply the fault of the woman that was removed from the MSS. It is not even the individual fault of the millionaires that run these businesses, thugs that they are. They bear responsibility no doubt and are criminally responsible, but we cannot buy their argument that these catastrophe's are the result of bad individuals or "evil doers" to use Bush's ridiculous term. It is less to do with human failure than system failure, for the system in which we live and our role in that system determines our actions. This is what happens when the production of an important human resource (energy) is in the hands of a small group of people whose sole motivation for their activity is profit. They are happy for us to accept that individuals or a few bad apples are responsible for society's ills. That way, they just replace one bad apple with another.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster, like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a product of capitalism, of an economic system where the means of producing the necessities of life are in private hands and production is for private gain.  It's that simple.  And in that regard, we are faced with a group of individuals, the capitalist class, who will defend the system it governs with ruthless abandon.  And in the course of its pursuit for profits, the environment in which we live is yet another victim.

The answer to all this is a democratic socialist system, the collective ownership of society's productive forces and the collective determination of what we produce and how.  The productive forces need new managers. They tell me this is impossible, utopian, but I don't believe them. They told me that the oil was cleaned up too.