The 'war on terror' and the war for resources

The unfolding disaster at the In Amenas gas facility in Algeria, alongside the Anglo-French military adventure in neighbouring Mali, reveal once more the futility of the “war on terror” and with it the West’s total inability to chart an alternative path.

One gruesome result is that workers from around the world have been placed in the firing line at the BP-run plant, caught between the jihadists led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar and an Algerian regime that in practice is impervious to human life.

Negotiations were ruled out and helicopter gunships blasted away indiscriminately. Requests from prime minister Cameron to be informed before military action was taken were treated with disdain.

Since the military annulled the Islamists’ victory in the Algerian elections in 1992, over 250,000 people are thought to have perished in subsequent terror and counter-terror operations. Belmokhtar, Algerian-born, himself returned from fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan – no doubt with US backing – to take up arms against his country’s regime.

Naturally, Algiers learned from its old colonial master, France. In the post-war period, the French military and police conducted a vicious and sinister war against the national liberation movement. This colonial “legacy” found its echoes in the conduct of Algerian governments after independence was achieved in 1962.

A half a century later and François Holland, the Socialist Party president of France, recently visited Algeria, made a half-baked apology for his country’s history and got what he wanted – deals to exploit the country’s vast gas and oil reserves and support for his war in Mali.

France’s foreign minister has announced that Algeria has allowed French fighter planes to overfly the country en route to bombing Malian rebels across the border.

As to Mali, you’ve probably guessed the country has mineral wealth that has to be  protected/exploited. This time it’s gold and oil. So no way are the major powers going to let a bunch of jihadists take control, even if they are Malians. Self-determination? Out of the question.

Belmokhtar’s is only one of many jihadist groups involved in cross-border actions in the region. Their presence is testimony of the attraction of terrorism to a generation dispossessed economically and, just as importantly, politically.

The major capitalist powers were always content to play along with authoritarian secular regimes in Algeria, Syria, Egypt and Iraq as well as the oppressive autocracies of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. The legitimate claims of the Palestinians were essentially ignored. Defence of energy supplies and strategic allies like Israel have always trumped human rights and political freedom. 

As a result, the West has, not surprisingly, come to be seen by new generations of Muslims as a bearer of bad news in every respect. The invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq, with all their horrific consequences, only served to confirm this viewpoint.

The globalised capitalist system in truth has nothing to offer – either to its own citizens, who are increasingly impoverished as a result of the economic crisis – or to people in the Muslim world.

Democracy? Ah yes. The kind of “democracy” which produces gross inequality, mass unemployment and a loss of political rights as the corporations and banks call the tune? Culture? What the ruling elites mean by this is turning every country into a market-driven, consumer society fuelled by gross advertising (and debt). 

The fact remains that present capitalist society cannot propose a progressive secular alternative to those attracted to the jihad. In any case, the “war on terror”, because it has no end in sight, is a convenient sideshow for Washington, London and Paris at times of social unrest.

So when the political class sheds tears over the deaths of hostages, they are surely of the crocodile variety.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Menace of deep water Shetland oil project

Environmental organisations have joined forces to plead with environment secretary Chris Huhne not to give BP the chance to repeat the oil giant’s disastrous mistakes, by allowing expansion in deep water west of Shetland, in the sea area known as North Uist.

The oil-leaking corporate giant BP has just got permission from the UK for a £4.5bn expansion of drilling in the Clair field west of Shetland. But the North Uist project is in far deeper water.

And we know all about BP and risky drilling. The US government has just served them, and their partners, formal notice of 15 safety violations leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last year that could mean fines of up to £45m. You win some, you lose some - that's the oil business.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Friends of the Earth have warned that a spill in North Uist would ruin one of the UK's most environmentally sensitive areas.

The Deepwater Horizon well was 1,500 feet down - the North Uist wells could be 4,000 feet. The company's “safety plan” for North Uist admits any leak could be the biggest ever, pouring 75,000 barrels into the North Sea for 140 days. That is more than double the rate during Deepwater Horizon disaster.

But BP says we should not worry because whilst legally they must model the worst-case scenario “the reality is the chances of a spill are very unlikely”. That surely has to be taken with a pinch of salt.

"It would be utterly reckless for Chris Huhne to approve this plan as if the Deepwater Horizon disaster never happened," said John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK.

"Instead of chasing the last drops of oil from one of our country's most sensitive and important natural environments, ministers should be developing a comprehensive plan to get us off the oil hook."

But that is not going to happen. Prime Minister David Cameron was cock-a-hoop about the Clair development, because, he claims, it will provide a “massive boost for jobs and growth”. Growth at any price is the Coalition's holy grail, as the economy stagnates and unemployment soars.

Development west of Shetland will bring almost £10 billion of new project investment by BP and its partners into the UK continental shelf over the next five years - and of course massive profits. The claim is that there will be 3,000 new jobs building platforms and 3,000 operational jobs from Clair alone.

By permitting high-risk projects like North Uist, the “free money” pumped into the UK economy since the oil started flowing in the 1980s, can be dragged out a bit longer.

The fact is that capitalist governments will permit any kind of growth, because the plans and projects of the corporations are the only economic plans they have. The Coalition has a destructive deficit reduction plan for the public sector, but absolutely no positive plans for the future of the economy.

Even in the face of a crisis in the biosphere that threatens the chain of life (including human beings) energy planning, if you can dignify it with that term, will be left in the hands of corporate cowboys.

The only way to protect the environment is to remove this unelected power from determining the future of energy production and instead take all energy resources into common ownership, to use them carefully, safely and with an entirely different set of priorities than raw profit.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Jailed for protesting against Big Oil

An oil contracts auction is so important, so very essential to the continuing smooth functioning of the world's most profitable industry, that it must be protected from any kind of disruption or underhand dealing, even to the extent of jail sentences.

At least that is the case if you are an opponent of the United States' "drill, baby, drill' policies. In 2008, in its dying days, the Bush administration had a last hurrah for their friends in the oil industry. They held an auction of drilling rights, many of them on protected land, and protesters were outside the federal building in Salt Lake City.

Tim DeChristopher, then a 27-year-old economics graduate, decided to go into the auction and make a speech denouncing it. But he was mistaken for a bidder and given a paddle "Bidder 70" - and so he bid.

DeChristopher was charged with two criminal offences, tried and has now been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. This is in spite of the fact that the Obama administration later overruled most of the contracts sold in the auction. Only two of the parcels of land DeChristopher bid for can be legally sold, and with the help of supporters he recently offered to pay the $166,000. But the government refused to accept the money, and the plots will now be auctioned again.

But oil contract auctions are less sacrosanct when the global oil corporations themselves are making the bids. They can rob a whole country blind and get away with it, as the following story illustrates.

In 2009, Iraq auctioned off two oilfields, representing 60% of the country's oil deposits, and awarded a 20-year operating contract to BP and its partner company CNPC. The contracting process was “the most transparent ever”, according to the Iraqi oil minister but many commentators couldn't see how the figures stacked up to be profitable and many companies didn't bid.

But after being awarded the contract, it appears BP/CNPC was able to secretly renegotiate the terms, achieving more profit at the expense of the Iraqi government and people. A report from Platform, based on leaked documents, shows that all the major risks have now been transferred from BP/CNPC on to the Iraqi taxpayer.

If any constraints are placed on production, because of an OPEC decision for example, or because infrastructure isn't completed, the Iraqi government will pay BP/CNPC as much for not producing oil as to produce it. In the published contract these risks were to be shared.

A key anti-corruption clause has also changed. In the published contract, Iraqi government officials would have to approve any spending over $50 million. In the secret contract, the figure has risen to $100m, undermining the Iraqi's chance of getting value for money.

And finally BP/CNPC are not to be held liable for any geological damage to Iraq’s oil reservoirs as a result of producing oil too quickly or inefficiently. Given BP's record in the Gulf of Mexico and at its operating plant in Texas, the Iraqis must be crazy to accept this clause.

But BP/CNPC will get away with it, just as they have got away with recklessly damaging the environment, the livelihoods of thousands of people and the health of their own employees in incident after incident. No BP executive has been charged with a criminal offence, none of their board members will spend two minutes in jail, never mind two years.

The US government wants DeChristopher to be made an example of, and in a memo to the court stated: “To be sure, a federal prison term here will deter others from entering a path of criminal behaviour.”

But in his address to the court De Christopher said the opposite is the case: "The closer we get to that point where it’s too late, the less people have to lose by fighting back. The power of the Justice Department is based on its ability to take things away from people. The more that people feel that they have nothing to lose, the more that power begins to shrivel."

Penny Cole

Environment editor

The real price of cost cutting

A scientific report on last year’s ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption in Iceland shows that air traffic controllers were right to close European airspace despite loud protests from airline leaders.

Already in a deep crisis, and facing further losses due to the temporary safety shutdown, Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary, BA chief executive Willie Walsh and boss of Virgin Richard Branson lashed out at the civil aviation authority.

Their bluster revealed much about the dangerous thought processes of the leaders of capitalist enterprises conditioned by the competitive chase for profit-driven ‘economic efficiency’.

Blinded by the bottom-line, O'Leary said at the time that "there was no ash cloud. It was mythical. It's become evident the airspace closure was completely unnecessary... none of us could see a bloody thing." He added: "Some idiot in a basement in the Met Office in London spills coffee over the map of Europe and produces a big black cloud." Walsh portrayed the closure as a "gross over-reaction to a very minor risk" and Branson described the final set of closures as "beyond a joke".

Now, the study by Sigurdur Gislason and colleagues at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik shows the extent of their foolishness. "The particles of explosive ash that reached Europe in the jet stream were especially sharp and abrasive over their entire size range," the scientists say in their study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The very sharp, hard particles put aircraft at risk from abrasion on windows and body and from melting in jet engines," the scientists said. "Concerns for air transport were well grounded."

The scientists found that even after the particles had been mixed continually in water for two weeks, they retained their ability to be dangerous to exposed aircraft surfaces. If the authorities had given in to the airlines’ leaders’ ferocious assault, serious structural damage to aircraft could have occurred if passenger planes had continued to fly.

Tests on the ash revealed that it contained minute particles of glass so sharp and abrasive they could have damaged the exposed surfaces of any aircraft, including the engines and cockpit windows.

The consequences could have been far worse than that for the British Airways 747 which suffered potentially catastrophic damage when it flew through an ash cloud from the 1982 eruption of Mount Galunggung in Indonesia. All four of its engines failed as a result of melted ash on the aircraft's turbine blades, but the pilot managed to restart three of them after descending.

In this case disaster was averted. But the same has not been true for the Mexican Gulf or Japan where bottom-line competitive pressures overrode safety concerns.
BP is trying to pass the responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion to Transocean Ltd, the owner of the rig, and to Halliburton who built it.

At the heart of the failure was the decision to reduce by three quarters the number of concrete collars engineers said were needed to stabilise the drill.
Transocean just gave its top executives bonuses for achieving what it described as the “best year in safety performance in our company’s history”.

Cost-cutting by Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), the largest private producer of electricity in the world, was sanctioned by a corrupt and bureaucratic regulatory system. Maintenance programmes were side-stepped for years.

Tepco’s Fukushima nuclear reactor site was destroyed by a once in a hundred years earthquake and the tsunami it triggered, irradiating the people of Japan once again. These three events shed a blinding light on the dangers of allowing the world’s productive capacity to remain in capitalist ownership.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

A disaster waiting to happen

The Deepwater Horizon disaster was foreseeable and preventable and was a result of systemic failures in the oil and gas industry, according to the White House enquiry into last year’s oil spill.

In a report which is a model of clarity, the panel notes that for the past 20 years, the oil and gas industry moved into ever deeper and riskier areas of the Gulf of Mexico. This generated huge revenues for corporations and for the federal Treasury.

But during the same period there was growing complacency and absence of regulation, which ended with the death of 11 oil workers and the destruction of eco-systems, livelihoods and the health of unknown numbers of people in states and countries bordering the Gulf.

There were errors and misjudgements by all three major oil companies involved – BP, Halliburton, and Transocean. They failed to properly interpret warning signals; to see flaws in their own testing processes and pushed ahead with untested last-minute design changes.

Deepwater happened, the report says, because the US government let it happen. The Department of Interior Minerals Management Service both regulated the industry and collected tax revenue. Only income tax delivers more cash to the US government, and revenue collection consistently “trumped safety in the Department’s priorities”.

Science was virtually shut out of regulation and decision-making. This was also the case in March 2010, when President Obama agreed to expand drilling in the Atlantic and eastern Gulf.

While Democrats want to implement the report’s recommendations, the Republican majority are determined to prevent any limits on the US oil and gas industry.

And at a recent closed-door meeting, right-wing billionaire activists Charles and David Koch brought the oil and gas industry together to plan a full-on campaign against improved environmental regulation.

BP is still failing on the safety front. An improvement order was issued by the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) after incidents in the North Sea. On the Shiehallion oil platform for example, BP left corroded equipment in place until it ‘failed catastrophically’.

So 10 months on from the disaster, how are those affected faring.

BP reported a loss for 2010 but will resume paying out dividends at 4.34p per share. It is on course to return to profit, after signing a deal with the Russian state oil firm, Rosneft to drill in the Arctic.

Halliburton, doubled its profits in the last quarter of 2010, and Transocean, is still active in the Gulf and in many other emerging areas. Reporting on their activities this year, CEO Steve Newman said they were expecting demand for deepwater, ultra-deepwater and ‘hostile environment’ drilling to go on growing.

The US Government agencies (Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and Obama have declared the Gulf of Mexico, its waters, beaches, and seafood, safe and open to the public.

But residents of the Gulf states are facing a different future. Widespread health problems are reported, including children covered with lesions and people with very high levels of deadly ethyl benzene in people’s bodies.

States close to the disaster are also amongst those where unemployment is continuing to rise, at a time when the Republicans passed laws immediately on being elected to Congress that cut taxes for the rich whilst placing a new time limit on unemployment benefit.

For capitalism, the drive for profits will always trump environmental concerns and governments are only concerned with ‘growth’. Only a transformation of ownership and control of the oil industry can prevent another Deepwater Horizon, which could easily be in the North Sea where deepwater drilling is powering ahead. In May 2010, gas entered a well being drilled by the Norwegian state oil company and according to the Petroleum Safety Authority, only luck prevented the incident evolving into a disaster.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

“A system-wide” problem indeed

In the end, of course, it was a question of saving time and, above all, money. Even the official report into the BP gulf oil disaster has been compelled to come to this conclusion.

On April 20, 2010, the disaster killed 11 workers, seriously injured many others, and spewed over four million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for nearly three months, creating the largest oil spill ever in American waters.

President Obama set up a commission to investigate the causes. The first part of its report published today acknowledges: “Whether purposeful or not, many of the decisions that BP, Halliburton, and Transocean made that increased the risk of the Macondo blowout clearly saved those companies significant time (and money).”

Although this conclusion is somewhat buried amidst lots of talk about “management failure” in terms of bad communications and so on – it is inescapably the overriding cause of the disaster.

The panel found that mistakes and "failures to appreciate risk" compromised safeguards "until the blow-out was inevitable and, at the very end, uncontrollable". BP's "fundamental mistake", the panel wrote, was failing to exercise proper caution over the job of sealing the well with cement.

"Based on evidence currently available, there is nothing to suggest that BP's engineering team conducted a formal, disciplined analysis of the combined impact of these risk factors on the prospects for a successful cement job," the report reads.

The report lists a host of engineering mistakes and management failures. These include flawed procedures for securing the well and an ineffective response to the blowout once it began.

What the report also reveals is a cosy relationship between government regulators and the oil industry. The agency responsible was understaffed and didn't have the inspectors and technical analysts “who were up to the task fully."

Commission co-chair William K. Reilly said the inquiry had asked whether it was a case of a single company, BP, that “blundered with fatal consequences”, or a more “pervasive problem of a complacent industry”, adding: “I reluctantly conclude we have a system-wide problem.”

Bob Graham, former Florida governor and a co-chairman of the commission, said the findings showed the blow-out was in fact avoidable. "This disaster likely would not have happened had the companies involved been guided by an unrelenting commitment to safety first," he said.

But even he must know that the oil corporations – like any other capitalist business – are guided first and foremost by a commitment to shareholders, to the bottom line, to returns on capital invested. To profit.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Corporations make oil a dirty business

Russia and Norway have signed a deal carving up the Arctic Ocean bed, opening the way for a new oil boom. All of this will is certain to lead to more spills, pollution and the further destruction of marine and coastal environments.

The United States Geological Survey last year estimated there could be 90 billion barrels of oil and 50 trillion cubic metres of gas across the Arctic and the oil corporations are itching to get their hands on it.

Companies like Exxon, Chevron and Shell, are queuing up for permission from Greenland – part of Denmark – to begin drilling in some of the most precious eco-systems on the planet. Gas is already being tapped there.

New North Sea fields, west of the Shetland Islands, are also set to be drilled. One of the firms involved is BP and MPs listened open-mouthed as outgoing CEO Tony Hayward told them not to worry – his firm is safe. The Energy and Climate Change Select Committee were questioning him not only about the Gulf Oil spill, but also about the fact that BP’s Magnus North Sea oil platform has failed three oil spill preparedness inspections since 2006.

Even small fields that in the past would not be worth drilling are now yielding profits. Some unique environments are under threat as a result. The Australian company ADX is drilling in the strait between Sicily and Tunisia. They got the go-ahead even though the area is a priority conservation area, with tuna, swordfish, sharks and turtles breeding, and coral gardens with thousands of species.

The island of Panteleria, soon to be declared a marine reserve, is just 13 miles from the rig and would be engulfed with oil in case of a big spill. But the Italian government is keen to expand oil production in their part of the Mediterranean.

In reality, spills are not occasional accidents, but part and parcel of the oil production process. Safety and environmental concerns are never allowed to interfere with the bottom line.

While 10 million litres of oil as day was pouring in the Gulf of Mexico from Deepwater Horizon, monitors discovered there were also continuous leaks from old abandoned wells nearby.

In Venezuela, oil is spreading across Lake Maracaibo, polluting wetlands and mangroves. Fishermen say their nets are coated, and that wildlife is dying.

In the Niger Delta, there are an average 1,598 breaks or leaks in the pipelines each year. Oil has saturated the world’s third-largest wetland, destroying farmland and fishing. But Shell has abandoned Ogoniland to its fate – they are off to the Arctic to get their hands on more easy money.

The side effects of cleaning up spills can be equally as dangerous, with little investment in research and no clear idea of the long-term effects of spraying millions of gallons of dispersants into the sea.

The last major advance in safety was after the fire on the Piper Alpha platform in 1988. But it emerged recently that lies were told about what happened to toxic chemicals stored on the rig for use in the production process. At the time it was claimed these had gone up in smoke – but now it is clear that they went into the water and have destroyed a wide area of marine life.

Humanity needs oil – it is crucial for our survival – but the reckless extraction of oil for burning must be halted. It must husbanded for essential uses. And you could say it is almost a sacred duty to extract it with extreme care and to the highest standards, when it is found in such precious places. There will be times when it should just be left where it is. The first step to achieving this approach is to remove the whole process from the control of corporations who place profit above all other considerations, as the calamity in the Gulf shows.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Well they cut everything because why not

The post of poet laureate, at least in Britain, is sometimes a source of derision, as she or he is expected to compose verses in praise of the establishment. But the latest recipient of this honour in the United States may be one to break this mould.

In the US, perhaps somewhat curiously, the laureate is officially known as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress has seen fit to appoint an outsider, W.S.Merwin, as the latest incumbent for the job.

W.S.Merwin, appointed in July, was a strong critic of the Vietnam war and is today well-known for his strong ecological stance. Along with others like beat poet Gary Snyder, he has expanded and transformed nature poetry to confront ecological devastation and, as Synder has noted, search for “wildness wherever one can find it. Not just in wilderness areas, but everywhere human beings let go of the controls.”

Despite receiving a long string of accolades over the years, he has been criticised for having a strong political agenda in his work. Merwin, who is 82, has a string of prizes going back to the age of 16 when he received a scholarship to Princeton. Following a recommendation from poet Ezra Pound, he learned to translate from Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Russian and Sanskrit plus and other languages.

His 2009 collection The Shadow of Sirius, published by Copper Canyon Press, has been described as “almost hypnotic, like waves washing a beach”. It draws on his deep feeling for human beings as part of nature.

He is part of a generation of truly great and highly political American poets who include Adrienne Rich, Ruth Stone, John Ashberry, Robert Bly, and the late James Wright and Frank O’Hara. On the whole, they have not shirked from open criticism and defiance of the establishment. Merwin donated his first Pulitzer Prize money to anti Vietnam war activists in 1970.

He rejected the blandishments of US academe and moved to France in the 1950s. Today he lives in on the second-largest Hawaiian island of Maui where he has created the Merwin Conservancy. With his wife Paula Schwartz, he planted some 700 species of palm trees on what was an empty stretch of pineapple plantation which they work on every day in an effort to keep rare species from extinction .

According to Los Angeles Times reporter Dean Kuipers, Merwin jots down his poetry whilst working in the streambed of his mango trees. “I’ve never believed that the imagination, the thing that made poems, is separate from the rest of life at all. It’s a part of it. But we have a tradition as a society that is saying that the rest of life is there purely for us to exploit it without any concern about the consequences of it. It’s very short-term and in my view it’s suicidal.”

Merwin’s approach to the world around us in sharp contrast to that of the corporations, like BP, who published its report into the Gulf of Mexico oil spill which took place in April.

This is all the more vital in the light of yesterday’s publication of BP’s Accident Investigation Report. It is an unedifying spectacle of recrimination between BP and the string of companies responsible for the biggest oil spill of all time. BP is desperate to defend itself against accusations that it bears the main responsibility for the loss of life and vast ecological damage caused by the explosion and leakage. The report is being criticised as a damage-limitation exercise by trying to share the blame with Halliburton for their cement work and rig-operator Transocean.

All power to those who provide a different vision of human existence than that of the current economic and political system. Let’s hope that Merwin doesn’t pull his punches in his period as Poet Laureate!

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Plans to bail-out BP

Contingency plans for a possible collapse of BP are reportedly being drawn up in Whitehall as the oil corporation’s crisis continues in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe. If the Coalition had to take the company over, it would blow the governments budget-reduction plans apart.

BP accounts for £1 in every £7 paid out to British pension schemes in dividends. The value of the company is uncertain following the largest offshore oil spill in history, which has wrecked ecosystems and affected jobs in US five states. And the thinking is that the Coalition could not allow BP to be broken up or fall into entirely foreign ownership if it meant that pension schemes would suffer.

BP’s management is apparently touring the Middle East looking for governments willing to put up some defensive cash to protect the company against takeover bids from its bigger competitors Royal Dutch Shell, and Exxon Mobil. You can be sure that more than one of Cameron and Clegg’s people are in there batting for BP.

On Fortune magazine’s list of the world’s largest corporations BP ranks fourth, behind WalMart. The company reported profits of US$21.2 billion on its revenue of US$367 billion last year. So the US$20 billion it has so far been obliged to set aside for the costs of the oil spill wipes out last year’s profit.

What happens to BP affects the entire global economy, and not just in terms of its revenue and profits. BP’s product is as important to capitalist production as its profits. The entire system is fuelled and lubricated by oil. This is why proposals to cap the leak altogether fall on deaf ears. Stopping the flow of oil isn’t on the agenda.

Despite the rampant destruction, all of the oil producers are intent on drilling deeper, overcoming all obstacles. It didn’t take long for the corporations to get the US Federal court to overrule Barack Obama’s six-month moratorium on all pending, current or approved drilling plans for new deepwater wells.

BP’s shares have been on the rise again after the price dropped by more than a half since the oil began leaking into the ocean, for three reasons. Firstly, the company declared it wouldn’t be issuing shares to raise capital, which would have diluted the share value even further; secondly, the relief well drilling which, it is hoped, will at least help to stop the leak in August is ahead of schedule; and thirdly, they have just begun deploying a new “super-skimmer”, a third vessel at the leak site that is hoped to nearly double BP's capacity to 53,000 barrels of the leaked oil a day from around 25,000. But rough seas are hampering efforts to finish the job, and more hurricanes are threatening as the effect of climate change induced by the burning of that same oil bites.

Rather than cap the leak BP must scoop up as much as it can. Oil corporations are the most powerful organisations in the world. So last month’s call from General Electric and Microsoft for the US government to more than triple its spending on clean energy research and development has little impact.

If the rest of BP, already 60% per cent owned by non-UK investors were to fall into foreign hands, the British government’s emergency budget will become irrelevant. There’s every chance that Cameron and Clegg will be forced to follow New Labour’s solution to the bankruptcy of the banks and take BP into state ownership.

At this rate, the state will soon control the commanding heights of the capitalist economy! So much for the virtues of private ownership. It’s not at all indispensable. What remains is the issue of the state itself. A corporate state that functions on behalf of a bankrupt capitalist system serves only narrow interests and we should work to replace it with a network of democratic People’s Assemblies. Then we would see some progress.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Oil spill goes global

Estimates of the quantity of oil gushing into waters of the Gulf of Mexico continue to increase. BP’S own guess was originally as low as 1,000-5,000. Then the original 5,000 barrels a day grew to 60,000.

Now, more than two weeks into the capping operation, around 45,000 barrels are still poisoning the seas, destroying wildlife and wrecking livelihoods – and there is no prospect of stopping the flow. It is on track to become the worst oil spill since the first Gulf War in 1991, which spilt around six million barrels.

This worsening catastrophe does not just symbolise the intertwined ecological, economic, social and political consequences of capitalist production and distribution. It is at the centre of the universal crisis that is now changing the way of life of every person on the planet. The explosion was by no means an unforeseeable accident. The drive for growth to sustain profits produced a global economy lubricated by increasing amounts of credit and debt and fuelled by oil. As the oil became harder to extract, costs escalated, profits were hit and corners cut.

During the Congressional hearing of the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, in the US House of Representatives yesterday, Chair Ed Markey dismantled attempts by the other oil companies to isolate BP. He and other House Democrats ripped into the chiefs of oil companies for filing bogus oil-safety reports before drilling new deep-sea wells, saying they are no better prepared for an offshore disaster than BP. Congressional investigators found that all five of the nation’s major oil firms filed virtually the same safety report prior to drilling new wells - right down to citing a long-dead expert who could be called in the event of an emergency.

The economic consequences are resounding around the world. The highly lucrative local fishing industry has been closed down. Tourism is melting away. BP’s market value has declined by more than 40% since the Horizon drilling rig blew up. The value of pension funds dependent on BP’s profits is dropping like a stone. The mess on Florida’s beaches is heating up the campaign to seize BP’s assets and there are indications that the global corporation is exploring ways to protect its US operation through bankruptcy proceedings.

President Obama’s speech last night, broadcast from the Oval Office, was largely about the need to wean the US off of its addiction to oil. His attempt to divert attention from his inability to do anything effective about the spill not only failed to convince anyone but, according to many commentators, actually worsened the political crisis. As the Financial Times put it ‘And there was something in it to frustrate or antagonise virtually every stakeholder who was listening.’

In his response to BP’s testimony, Ed Markey eloquently expressed the contradiction at the heart of the crisis: “BP is more concerned about minimising its ‘liability’ for the costs of the clean-up than for the ‘livability of the Gulf’ ”.

But the US Congress is no more able to act to stop the destructive actions of global corporations like BP than it is to regulate the financial institutions that arrogantly straddle the world.

The moment has arrived for a new kind of politics and a new kind of democracy based upon collective stewardship of the planet we depend upon. Now is the time for a qualitative change in our relationship with nature. Let’s begin the job of reconstructing democracy from the bottom up through the building of an international network of People’s Assemblies.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

They have lost control

The trouble with conspiracy theories is the impression given that “they” – bankers, politicians, the military etc – are always in control of events and will thus determine their outcomes to suit themselves. How wrong-headed and disarming this approach is.

Take the United States. Is President Obama in command of the environmental and economic disaster resulting from the BP oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico? Clearly not. The White House can’t even find out how much oil is actually leaking from the ruptured well a mile below the surface.

What about the economy then? Obama’s government has spent countless billions of dollars trying to stimulate the economy, to no avail. Over 84,000 public sector jobs alone have been lost this year and unemployment overall is 10% and rising.

Now Obama insists another $50 billion is needed to save the jobs of thousands of teachers, fire fighters and police officers. Even fellow Democrats are expected to join Republicans to block the plans in Congress. The ability of a powerful government like America’s to determine the course of the economic crisis is patently absent. Not much control there then.

In Britain, you couldn’t say that the Lib-Dem coalition is “in control”. Its very formation was hardly a planned event but the result of circumstances beyond Clegg and Cameron’s control. We are talking about two things here – the result of the general election and the impact of the global financial crisis on Britain.

To appear to be in control, both coalition parties have had to marginalise their own rank and file and claim to be ruling in the “national interest” to save Britain from state bankruptcy. The coalition could flounder over the scale and impact of the spending cuts that are being prepared or as a result of any number of external events.

Surely someone out there must be in “control”, you would think? If it’s not the state and politicians, it’s got to be the bankers and the heads of the handful of transnational corporations that are the dominant forces in the global economy? They only wish they were, especially the CEO and chairman of BP!

The bankers thought they had command as they built the most far-reaching financial empire the world has ever seen. Ultimately, the line between reality and fantasy became so blurred that they lost what little control they possessed. It all went belly up in 2008 as fiction overwhelmed fact. With a huge overhang of debt still waiting to be accounted for, nothing will persuade the bankers to start lending again.

Now people say that financial markets are “in control”. But a market like this one is not some defined group of men and women sitting in known locations who can be told what to do or who will act in a rational way. Financial markets are greater than the sum of their many, many parts. That’s what makes them so unpredictable, prone to herd instinct and fear, rumour and gossip.

The essence of the capitalist beast in times of crisis like these is that far from being in control, there are many indications that it is actually out of control. Global warming, for example, is proceeding without any apparent political capacity to halt it. Recession is turning to slump and spending cuts will only make that more certain.

We shouldn’t conclude, however, that it is impossible to have a rational politics and economics in place of the chaos and turmoil that is global capitalism. For that to happen, we just need to exert out own potential power in new, democratic ways, putting the present elites out to grass.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

The case for seizing BP

The crashing sound that is the price of BP shares falling through the floor highlights not only the environmental consequences of deep water drilling for oil but also the fatal dependency on stock markets when it comes to workers’ pensions.

At the time of writing, the company’s market value was down by one third since the Horizon Deepwater drilling rig operated by Swiss corporation Transocean, exploded six weeks ago, killing 11 workers, and started pouring oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

This huge and sudden decline in its value and the growing uncertainty over the fate of BP places the pensions of millions in jeopardy. The company paid £6.6 billion in dividends last year – equal to £1 in every £7 paid out by all the companies in the FTSE 100 – and is a major holding in most pension funds. Most private pensions in the UK are dependent on investment funds managed by companies which are major shareholders in BP, previously the UK’s most valuable company.

The oil spill disaster is an open and shut case for abolishing the unsustainable nature of capitalist ownership and production for profit. Even former US Secretary of Labour Robert Reich has called for the US government to take the company into a “temporary receivership.”

Seize BP launches a nationwide campaign of protests in cities across the US from tomorrow. It is a part of the Answer coalition which consists of hundreds of organisations and prominent individuals and scores of campaigning centres in cities and towns across the US.

The national steering committee represents major national organisations that have campaigned against US intervention in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Asia, as well as for social and economic justice for working and poor people in America itself. Seize BP says:

There must be remediation and compensation for all damages flowing from BP’s oil spill, including all losses to people, economy and otherwise. It should not be up to BP to decide if and when to dole out compensation.

BP reaped $5.6 billion of profits in the first quarter of 2010 and $17 billion in 2009. This is money made from BP’s aggressive push into ultra-hazardous deep water offshore drilling that has taken the lives of 11 workers in the recent explosion, and caused human misery and environmental wreckage that will persist for years to come. These huge sums are pure profit — what remains after all accounting manoeuvres and payments of the massive salaries and luxurious perks to executives.

Here, BP has committed acts causing devastation that threatens the spoliation and poisoning of the shorelands, wildlife, human health and economy of no less than the five states that have frontal coastline on the Gulf of Mexico: Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Worst case scenarios would pollute and destroy the frontal coastlines of states up the Atlantic seaboard.

BP’s conduct constitutes an assault on the people and environment of the surrounding region of the Gulf of Mexico. BP’s assets should be immediately seized, and placed in a trust, in amounts proportionate to — and sufficient to fully compensate for — all projected harm from its dangerous and reckless acts in pursuit of super-profits.

The sticking point revolves about who is actually going to seize BP? Obama’s White House is certainly not going to, that’s for sure, however loud and militant the protests and petitions are. Expropriation of BP and other transnational corporations would be a revolutionary act, founded on mass mobilisation and a simultaneous political struggle for power. For the sake of both the environment and people’s pensions, this has to be the way forward.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Science and profit are the wrong mix

Disasters like the Mexican Gulf oil well leak shine a spotlight on capitalism’s everyday disregard for safety and its short-term approach to scientific data and knowledge.

For example, chemicals used to disperse oil pouring into the sea from the exploded Deepwater Horizon platform will do almost as much damage as the oil. Dispersal simply spreads the exposure of marine life to toxic chemicals over a greater period of time.

Riki Ott, a leading toxicologist who has written extensively about the Exxon Valdez oil tanker disaster in 1989, said in an interview: "This dispersed oil is extremely toxic to young life forms [which] are a lot more sensitive to toxic chemicals than adults. What we have in the open Gulf is a continuous exposure.”

The announcement this week of a new “life form” created in a laboratory at the J. Craig Venter Institute is another example. This self-reproducing organism made from “off-the-shelf” genes by a computer, has been labelled “extreme genetic engineering” by the ETC Group, which has been monitoring developments in synthetic biology for the past five years .

Dubbed Synthia, the organism was developed in a joint venture between geneticist Craig Venter and Synthetic Genomics Inc. This profit-driven initiative is targeted for use in agro-fuels, pollution clean-ups and industrial agriculture.

No surprise then to discover that one of Synthetic Genomics key investors is – BP. And the other? Exxon! And the third? The US government.

Jim Thomas of the environmental watchdog ETC Group calls synthetic biology a “high-risk profit-driven field” that threatens existing natural bio-diversity with no benefit to humanity as a whole.

But corporations and their client governments love bio and gene science because they smell profits. Supporters are right at the heart of governments. Steven Chu, Obama’s Energy Secretary, was formerly head of an institute which ran a synthetic genome project funded by – you’ve got it, BP.

There may be enthusiasm, and investment of taxpayers money, but there’s little regulation or oversight. Just as in the existing dirty old oil business, these new “clean” industries are left to chase the money, regardless of safety concerns.

In the UN year of bio-diversity, capitalism is engaged in an orgy of destruction, leading to extinctions on a scale greater than the era of the dinosaurs. And as a recent study in the UK found, the rate of emergence of new species is at a standstill.

But new species created recklessly in the laboratory, are being released into the eco-system with little concern for the impact on other species – including human beings.

In China, the introduction of GM cotton has led to an explosion in pests destroying fruit, vegetable and maize crops grown nearby. The GM cotton has its own insecticide built in, allowing unrelated pests to thrive – so nearby farmers are overwhelmed, and even by spraying can’t get the pests under control.

Such unintended consequences are characteristic of the application of science in the capitalist era. The corporation’s use of scientific knowledge has only one intended consequence – the expansion of profit. Leaving science in the dirty hands of the corporations is a recipe for disaster.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

BP is beyond the pale

The oil corporation BP likes to brand itself as “beyond petroleum”. Beyond the Pale might be more appropriate after the latest of a series of disasters which the company has to take responsibility for.

Four hundred species of sea life, from turtles to shrimp and octopus, plus miles of coastline, ocean and wetland, hundreds of homes, beaches and livelihoods are threatened by a massive oil slick heading towards the Louisiana coast.

A week on from the explosion at the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon rig, which killed eleven workers and fractured underground pipes, the oil is gushing at a rate of 42,000 gallons a day. It could prove to the be the worst oil leak since 1969.

It is only 20 miles from the Mississippi Delta, an area that contains 40 per cent of all the wetlands in the United States. It covers an area of 2,138 square miles. It will arrive sometime on Friday, or sooner, it is said.

Attempts to halt the flow which is 5,000 feet down have failed, and so oil is now being coralled behind floating barriers and set on fire. It could take weeks to find a way of blocking the pipe.

A federal investigation is being launched into this latest disaster involving BP. In 2005, 15 people were killed at a BP oil and gas plant in Texas, and in 2006, BP was responsible for the biggest-ever oil leak in Alaska, damaging wildlife and the fragile eco-system of Prudhoe Bay.

In spite of that, BP was one of the corporations who lobbied successfully against new, fairly modest proposals for safety regulation of off-shore drilling. In September 2009, vice president for Gulf of Mexico production Richard Morrison, wrote: "We are not supportive of the extensive, prescriptive regulations.” He claimed that voluntary codes of practice "have been and continue to be very successful”.

And so it was with this same hopeless system of self-regulation in force that the Obama administration recently issued licences for extensive new oil exploration and pumping in areas formerly off limits for a whole range of safety and environmental reasons, including in the Gulf of Mexico.

Every time a disaster like this takes place, hands are wrung, crocodile tears shed – but then it’s back to business as usual. Because such events are not aberrations – they are the normal working of the profit-driven oil industry which has as its priority to get the stuff out of the ground as quickly as possible, whatever the effects.

The Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea in 1988 remains the biggest ever loss of life in the oil industry, when 167 people died when the rig caught fire. The recommendations of the Cullen Enquiry that followed have never been fully implemented.

As the oil runs out, what is left becomes harder to get at and the pressure for profit forces operators to keep costs low and put safety a long way second. Governments shy away from introducing tough regulations because they live in fear of the global corporations, especially the energy giants like BP.

The only way to resolve this issue is to recognise that the products of the earth cannot be treated as a free-ride for carpet-bagging capitalists and must be taken into common ownership. The whole decision-making process about what is extracted, what methods are used and for what purpose has to come under social control.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

No arguing with the profit motive

Extreme weather events throughout the world mark the impact of profit-driven capitalist growth on a changing climate brought about by burning fossil fuel. Wildfires are sweeping across swathes of Southern Europe and Canada, Turkey is hit by floods, and mid-summer torrential rain is lashing the UK.

Yet the logic that motivates capitalist producers abounds. As it shuts the only UK wind turbine facility, Danish manufacturer Vestas has issued dismissal notices to 11 of the workers occupying its Isle of Wight factory and is seeking a possession order today. Vestas prefers to concentrate on its cheap labour venture in China competing with local producers in a less regulated economy, while the New Labour government is totally deaf to pleas to nationalise the firm.

Meanwhile BP, the third largest private energy company in the world is forging ahead with its plans to extract more profit from more oil whilst riding out the global economic storms. With the price of oil down to $52 a barrel during the second quarter– less than a half of last year’s price, and a more than 50% drop in profits – BP actually increased production by 4%. No sign of any concessions to the green agenda there.

Between March and June, BP generated $6.8bn of operational cash flow. Against that it spent $5.2bn on capital expenditure and paid out $2.6bn in dividends. That totals a $7.8bn outflow. In other words, after excluding changes in working capital, BP spent $1bn more than it brought in.

With no sign of a recovery in demand, the global squeeze on profits makes the drive to cut costs all the more urgent. BP says it has already reduced its costs by $2bn in the first half compared with the equivalent period of 2008, and hopes to be more than $3bn lower for the year as a whole. How does it do it? 5,000 jobs have already gone and many more are certain to be lost. That’s how capitalism deals with a slump in demand.

Longer term consequences of the impact of oil extraction and the chase for profit can be found in Nigeria where, in the 1950s, BP became the first to bring the black gold to the surface. As one commentator puts it: Nigeria is now “a country whose electricity grid has totally collapsed, whose ruling elites are almost uniformly corrupt and heedless, whose citizens have often appeared to accept that it is their cursed fate to live in such wretchedness, and whose government, with some happy exceptions, is clueless and dysfunctional.”

So where that leave us? We have BP pumping up production – it’s just won a new contract in Iraq – and slashing jobs, while renewable energy production in the shape of Vestas is shutting up shop on the Isle of Wight. There is a logic to all this – it’s the quest for profit, regardless of human and environmental costs. Arguing with the likes of BP and Vestas is a waste of time. Their primary obligations are to shareholders – not communities or the workforce. Replacing shareholders with forms of co-ownership has to become our obligation.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Only so much oil in the ground

Native Americans from the Cree clan will today announce a legal challenge to the Alberta government’s issuing of permits allowing oil corporations to start extracting oil from tar sands in the Beaver Lake area. This highly profitable activity will pollute hunting and fishing lands and destroy protected areas and species. The Co-operative Bank has offered the Cree £50,000 towards their legal costs.

The rush for cheap oil is speeding up everywhere, though the oil price has plummeted. The International Energy Agency explains why: even assuming no growth in demand, an extra 45 million barrels per day of oil production will be needed by 2030 in order to compensate for falling output in ageing oilfields.

But the low price means there is no incentive to explore for underground or undersea deposits. Tar sand doesn’t need to be searched for – you just drag out the oil, devastate the land, and pocket the profits.

The anarchy and injustice of the market is nowhere more clear than in energy. Investment in alternative energy is now at a standstill as the corporations abandon any efforts to reduce carbon emissions. The price of carbon credits has fallen so low, that it is cheaper to go on polluting than to invest in cleaner technologies.

Governments are reducing subsidies for alternative energy and the credit crunch means there loans to alternative energy companies are few and far between. The big energy giants are pulling out of alternatives with the exception of bio-fuels from grain, which are heavily subsidised in the US.

BP is cutting solar cell production in Australia, abandoning all its wind power projects except in the US and scrapping plans for “experimental” carbon capture power stations. It is doing it because its net profit for the last quarter was only $2.605 billion compared to a forecast $2.98 billion. BP is one of the companies involved in the Alberta Basin project.

The oil corporation is also cutting investment in an experimental project to produce oil from jatropha, a hardy plant that can be grown on land unsuitable for food crops. This is just the kind of production that could offer a living to farmers in poor countries in the future – although the model used of growing the plant in India and Africa and then importing it to Mansfield, seems completely crazy.

BP’s partner in the business, D1, has already shut plants in Merseyside and Middlesbrough. They produced bio-diesel from rape seed oil but could not compete with subsidised US bio-diesel. So fuel is being used, and emissions created, to transport supposedly green diesel across the Atlantic ocean.

Now the Mansfield plant faces contraction, and the farmers in India and Africa commissioned to grow 500,000 acres of jatropha will be hit too. And yet, world governments continue to look to this market to deliver consistency of supply AND reduce carbon emissions at the same time. It is the double bind of profit-driven globalisation, which they can see no escape from.

This flawed system is incapable of delivering a just, affordable and sustainable energy supply. We must urgently develop the alternative. Join A World to Win in planning how that can be achieved – start by reading our Action Plan for the Eco-Crisis. And I find it concentrates the mind wonderfully if you have playing in the background the amazing Tower of Power’s prescient 1973 hit "Only so Much Oil in the Ground".

Penny Cole
Environment editor