Explosion in San Bruno CA: The Free Market at Work

The Center of the Blast

The gas pipe that ruptured in San Bruno California has so far claimed four lives, four are missing and others are in critical condition in local hospitals. The blast was devastating destroying 37 homes. I was stunned as I watched the scene on the local news, a whole area just flattened. The first thing that came to mind was that this is what people in Iraq go through almost every day.

The incident also brings to the forefront again the issue of the infrastructure of US society. The roads, bridges, dams levees, gas pipelines and other social structure that allow a society to function efficiently and safely. Spending money on infrastructure is not a real priority for the capitalist class other than it enables the capitalist system to function. Infrastructure is important in the sense that it facilitates the extraction of surplus value. In order for profit to me made, and US capitalists to compete with their global rivals, they have to have efficient roads, rail transport and other means of transportation. Workers must get to the workplace.

US infrastructure is crumbling. It has been referred to by politicians and economists alike as the US’s “Third Deficit”. Bridges have collapsed, as have dams and levees. The damage done by Katrina was due in part to the failure of the levees and the little attention paid to maintaining and improving them. All these disasters resulting in the death of workers, Katrina, the BP spill, the explosions at energy facilities and mining accidents; all were avoidable.

The California Public Utilities Commission is directing Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) to check all it’s pipes for leaks, especially high pressure lines, and to “Detail how much it has spent to replace pipelines and ensure their safety since 2005.” (1) This is standard procedure, the government agencies that claim to exist to protect the public and regulate industry are simply toothless front organizations, aimed at giving the impression they exist on our behalf. In all of these tragedies, workers die and then we hear that there was this failing or that failing and that the company was cited many times for violations etc.

San Bruno: This is What Baghdad is Like

California’s Lt. Gov., filling in for Schwarzenegger, (Is he off making a movie with lots of explosions in it?) “Commends” the commission for taking this action after a neighborhood is destroyed, these are “the necessary steps to ensure the safety of Californians statewide.” He adds. Maldonado is seeking re-election in November so him and big business politicians like him will be very vocal about this issue after the fact.

US infrastructure has been denied funds for so long that billions of dollars are needed to bring roads, bridges, sewers, railways, and other infrastructure up to code. How much water is wasted nationally? How much sewage leaks in to the soil of America? Where will the next dam break occur? The San Bruno gas pipe was 62 years old and like much of the infrastructure in the US, a product of another era. The $80.5 billion earmarked for roads, bridges, and waterways by Obama’s stimulus package and another $72.5 billion for transportation in the 2010 budget, is nowhere near enough. The American Society of Civil Engineers says that the amount needed to repair the system is close to $2.2 trillion.

Where will this money come from? The total U.S. taxes collected by the federal government in 2008 were about $2.5 trillion. The US national debt is over $13 trillion. The federal deficit for the year ending Sept. 30 is $1.17 trillion. And by some estimates expected to climb to $1.47 trillion by the end of the year.

It is not that the money is not there. But the numerous predatory wars the US is waging around the world on behalf of the corporations have to be paid for. The 700 or so bases the US government has constructed or is constructing have to be paid for. Much of the increase in spending came about through the two bills congress approved in 2008, a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry begun under Bush and the Obama administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus package and who knows where that went?

The response to the gas explosion in San Bruno California is no different from all the other preventable disasters. As one letter to the editor in San Francisco Chronicle pointed out, PG&E had $40 million to spend supporting prop 16 on the June Ballot but can’t fix its infrastructure.

Throughout these disasters we hear the same old thing. It’s a bad apple at the top. It’s worker error or they occur because of “stupid” decisions or because humans are simply “greedy” The Chronicle even wasted print space publishing a letter claiming the California disaster is “god speaking.” There’s a reason they would bother to publish such nonsense but that’s for another time.

Spending on infrastructure is costly; it is money out. But nations with capitalist economies must compete to survive and in order to do that are forced to spend money on roads, rails waterways and other structures that enable goods to flow freely and efficiently. The tracks that trains run on, the freeways that trucks drive on, these were crucial, and mostly public, expenditures necessary for US capitalism to compete on the world market and for profit to flow in to the pockets of the industrialists.

The US is bogged down in wars it cannot win. It is encircling the globe in the frantic struggle between nations to control the resources of the world. It is important for us to grasp that the private sector is bankrupt, not financially but ideologically. It cannot provide the basic necessities of life for the majority of the world’s people including more and more in the US, the belly of the beast. Capitalism, while it doesn’t simply disappear; will re-emerge after this historic crisis but not in the same form, it cannot bring back the good old days. The era of the American Dream, and the conditions that created are over.

It is important for us to recognize that these social crisis are not natural disasters, they are the by-products of the market. The big business politicians in Washington, Democrats and Republicans, while differing to an extent on the role of government in the marketplace, all agree that the market must be allowed to run its course, the market is supreme.

The destruction of a city in Louisiana, a neighborhood in California, and a country in the Middle East is what we get when the market runs its course. It is what we get when the running of society is in the hands of a few thousand individuals.

1 SF Chronicle 09-13-10