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Workers Vanguard No. 961

2 July 2010
The closing date for news in this issue is 29 June 2010

Workers Vanguard skips alternate issues in June, July and August. Our next issue will be dated July 30.

 

Workers Vanguard

Big Oil, White House—Partners in Crime

Gulf Coast Disaster: Capitalist Profit Drive Kills

Eleven oil workers died a horrible death on April 20 when the British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. The workers were not represented by a union; their safety in this dangerous job was in the hands of a corporation notorious for cutting corners to save money. As media reports and eyewitness accounts from survivors have made clear, a crucial piece of safety equipment, the blowout preventer, was malfunctioning. Oil worker Tyrone Benton, one of the survivors, told the BBC’s Panorama program that he had spotted a leak and that BP and the rig’s owner, Transocean, were informed. But as AOL News (21 June) put it, “repairing the control pod would have meant stopping drilling work on the rig, which was costing BP $500,000 a day to operate.”

Since April 20, two cleanup workers have died. One of them, despondent over the destruction to his livelihood, committed suicide. The death toll will climb. Cleanup workers are being exposed to deadly chemicals, including an oil dispersant so toxic it’s been banned in Europe. The disaster is ruining the lives of countless working men and women—longtime black and white residents, Native Americans, immigrant Vietnamese fishermen—whose way of life is sinking in the oil-filled waters and wetlands of the Gulf, where beaches are covered with filthy oil globs (“tarballs”).

Many of those involved in the cleanup effort, which includes prison convict labor, are getting sick. At least eleven have been hospitalized with symptoms related to exposure to inhaled irritants. Respirators have not been issued. BP at first threatened to fire cleanup workers who brought their own, including those involved in burning off oil or working near areas where toxic dispersants are being used. BP also initially gagged cleanup workers through contracts barring them from talking to the media. Earlier, Transocean workers on the rig had to sign forms asserting that they did not witness the explosion—the one they just survived.

The Gulf Coast disaster is enormous, incalculable. It is ravaging a region that continues to reel from Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath—a man-made disaster that exposed the venality, class arrogance and utter contempt of the capitalist rulers for black, poor and working people. Today, oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 60,000 to upward of 100,000 barrels a day. Even if the plan for drilling a relief well is successful, it won’t be ready until the end of August at the earliest. Marine life has been devastated, imperiling some of the richest fisheries in the world. The Gulf Coast disaster has long since surpassed the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska’s coast, the effects of which continue to be felt, both in terms of a ruined fishing industry and in illnesses suffered by cleanup workers and local residents. (read on)

Statement of the International Executive Committee of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)

Repudiating Our Position on Haiti Earthquake
A Capitulation to U.S. Imperialism

(Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano)

 

Latest Postings

· Australasian Spartacist No. 209

· Spartakist Nr. 184

· Workers Vanguard No. 961

· Spartacist Canada No. 165

· Le Bolchévik nº 192

· Precz z antykomunistycznym prawem w Polsce!

· Ripudiamo la nostra posizione sul terremoto ad Haiti
  Una capitolazione all’imperialismo Usa

· Κάτω το «Πρόγραμμα Σταθερότητας» της
  Κυβέρνησης του ΠΑΣΟΚ!

· Nous répudions notre position sur le tremblement de terre en Haïti
  Une capitulation devant l’impérialisme US

· Zurückweisung unserer Position zum Erdbeben in Haiti
  Eine Kapitulation vor dem US-Imperialismus

· Repudiando nuestra posición sobre el terremoto de Haití:
  Una capitulación al imperialismo de EE.UU.

· Repudiating Our Position on Haiti Earthquake
  A Capitulation to U.S. Imperialism

· Workers Hammer No. 210

· Spartacist (edición en español) Número 36

· Spartacist South Africa No. 5

· Spartacist (deutsche Ausgabe) Nummer 27

· ¡Defender al SME! ¡Movilizar la fuerza de la clase obrera!

· Spartaco n. 71

· Spartacist English edition No. 61

· China's "Market Reforms": A Trotskyist Analysis
  (from Chinese-Language Pamphlet No. 8)

· The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women
  (from Chinese-Language Pamphlet No. 8)

· Espartaco No. 29

· Spartacist Japan supplement: Counterrevolutionary riots in Tibet

· Spartacist Japan supplement: Abolish the Death Penalty!

· Spartacist Japan supplement: Defend North Korea!

· Zionist Bloodbath in Gaza (arabic)

· Spartacist (édition francaise) numéro 38

· The Logan Dossier (introductory section)

· Why We Fought to Defend the Soviet Union
  (Russian-language Byulleten' Spartakovtsev, Supplement No. 20)

· Deklarasyon ng mga Prinsipyo at Ilang Elemento ng Programa

About the ICL

V.I. LeninLeon TrotskyThe International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is a proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist tendency committed to the task of building Leninist parties as national sections of a democratic-centralist international. Our aim is the achievement of new October Revolutions—nothing else, nothing other, nothing less. The ICL bases itself on Marxist historical, dialectical materialism and seeks in particular to carry forward the international working-class perspectives of Marxism developed in the theory and practice of the Bolshevik leaders V. I. Lenin and L. D. Trotsky and embodied in the decisions of the first four Congresses of the Communist International as well as key documents of the Fourth International such as the Transitional Program (1938) and "War and the Fourth International" (1934). We also look to James P. Cannon, a leader of the early American Communist Party who was won to Trotskyism and went on to become a principal founder of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), working in close collaboration with Leon Trotsky. The origins of the ICL are in the Spartacist League/U.S., which began as the Revolutionary Tendency in the SWP and was bureaucratically expelled in 1963. Our ICL "Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program" was modeled on the Declaration of Principles adopted at the 1966 founding conference of the SL/U.S.

Adopted at the Third International Conference of the ICL in early 1998, the declaration presently exists in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, German, Russian, Polish, Italian, Turkish, Indonesian, Greek and Tagalog. In this post-Soviet period, marked by a deep regression of proletarian consciousness, we continue to be guided by Trotsky's statement that "the task of the vanguard is above all not to let itself be carried along by the backward flow; it must swim against the current." Reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution!