Help Us Save the Gulf!

[Monkey Riding Dragon]

The entire corporate and political establishment is manifestly unwilling and unable to save the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, they are suppressing information, preventing scientific investigation and study of the facts, and suppressing local people's efforts to take the initiative in responding to this crisis. This is NOT acceptable! And we WON'T accept it!

The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA has organized an Emergency Summit that will be held tomorrow at 10 AM at the following location: (http://www.revcom.us/a/204/summit-en.html)


First Unitarian Universalist Church Sanctuary
5212 South Claiborne Avenue, New Orleans, LAThis summit will bring together scientists, engineers, local fishers, and broader volunteers (including activists, youth, etc.), to jointly study and sum up the situation accurately and develop a people's response to this crisis. You need to be there! If it's at all possible, please be in attendance or at least make your way to the area and get in contact with the RCP for info on what you can be doing to participate in this effort as it gets underway. If you can attend the summit, please bring all your thoughts on this situation and ideas on how to respond to it with you.

Here are the draft demands that have been drawn up:


Draft Demands:

1) Stop oil drilling in the Gulf.

2) The government and entire oil industry must allocate all necessary resources to stop the spill and clean up the devastation. Full support, including by compensation, must be given to efforts by people to save the Gulf.

3) No punishment to those taking independent initiative; no gag orders on people hired, contracted, or who volunteer.

4) Full mobilization of scientists and engineers. Release scientific and technical data to the public; no more lying and covering up. Full and open scientific evaluation of emergency measures like the use of dispersants. Fund all necessary scientific and medical research.

5) Full compensation for all losing livelihood and income from the disaster.

6) Provide necessary medical services to those suffering health effects of the spill. Protect the health of and provide necessary equipment for everyone involved in clean up operations. Full disclosure of medical and scientific studies about the effects of the oil disaster.No other party is leading the way in responding to the Gulf crisis in this sort of way.

Here are some additional commentaries on the situation and the plans by RCP economist and speaker Raymond Lotta:

How this is a capitalist oil spill.
(http://www.revcom.us/a/204/capital_personified-en.html)Why the people must take this kind of action. (http://www.revcom.us/a/204/oil_catastrophe-en.html)

[Saorsa]

See, If I lived in the States I'd be keen as to attend a meeting like this. I think it's an excellent idea. But the way the RCP phrases all its propaganda and even the announcement of a meeting like this is so over the top and bizarre sounding that I probably wouldn't go just because the cu... er, party organising this event sounds so bizarre.

[redwinter]

Check out the official website: http://www.gulfemergencysummit.org/

You can now watch a video of the event online on that website...very recommended

[The Vegan Marxist]

I'm definitely all for this meeting, despite my difference in opinion with RCP, but I've gotta ask. What are we to do with the oil rig workers if all the oil rigs were brought down? Is there any way of helping them move along without the workers suffering from such?

[redwinter]

@ The Vegan Marxist: There are plenty of jobs that need to be eliminated (check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States_by_sector)...in a socialist society you wouldn't need for example 14 million retail workers to run these tens of thousands of stores for everything imaginable, or 6 million people workin in the financial sector to do speculation and day trading for big capital. In a planned socialist economy, we could actually do things like put people to work doing things that society needs (growing food, 24/7 child care, health care, urban redevelopment, whatever). And of course we would not be relying on international exploitation of the third world, but actually producing surplus and working harder to pay reparations to the rest of the world from a country like the US or other first-world imperialist nations..

But in an immediate, practical sense: the capitalists could stave off an even greater increase in unemployment due to shutting down oil rigs by...sending the workers to clean up the Gulf? It's been said this will take decades, so they should be pretty secure jobs. Another great idea might be to get them to start installing alternative energy generators (solar panels, windpower, etc) to replace the oil for energy needs, or to help research ways to save energy costs.

At the same time we shouldn't limit ourselves, as others have, to merely the question of "nationalization" of BP. These demands by the Gulf Emergency Summit are much broader and help raise the question in people's minds of the illegitimacy of the capitalist-imperialist *system* itself, not merely getting the US government (not the best people to have running things, you'd think, especially for revolutionary-minded people) to take over an individual company.

[Monkey Riding Dragon]

I'll add a comment to that. You see a lot of these "Seize BP!" signs for example, but who are they (the people who put up these signs) talking to? The government or the people? We have to draw out distinctions between the enemy and the people in everything we do! It shouldn't be our aim to empower the U.S. government, but to empower the people the U.S. government oppresses.

[praxis1966]

It just goes to show you how frackin' clueless the RCP actually is. There's no saving the Gulf of Mexico at this point as the damage caused will probably take at least a half century to repair, assuming of course that it ever does recover given the fact that Prince William Sound still hasn't recovered from a finitely sized light oil surface spill as opposed to the ongoing heavy oil spillage already exponentially larger. Saying 'Save the Gulf' is alot of bullshit posturing in the same way it would be if someone suddenly started shouting 'Save Chernobyl.'

I'm from Panama City, FL and I still have a ton of family and friends who live there and depend on the Gulf for their livelihoods. At this point, a good number of them have been reduced to simply trying to pick up the pieces since that's all that's left to be done, and all the hard talk and empty rhetoric in the world on the part of the RCP isn't going to make a damned bit of difference.

[The Vegan Marxist]

It just goes to show you how frackin' clueless the RCP actually is. There's no saving the Gulf of Mexico at this point as the damage caused will probably take at least a half century to repair, assuming of course that it ever does recover given the fact that Prince William Sound still hasn't recovered from a finitely sized light oil surface spill as opposed to the ongoing heavy oil spillage already exponentially larger. Saying 'Save the Gulf' is alot of bullshit posturing in the same way it would be if someone suddenly started shouting 'Save Chernobyl.'

I'm from Panama City, FL and I still have a ton of family and friends who live there and depend on the Gulf for their livelihoods. At this point, a good number of them have been reduced to simply trying to pick up the pieces since that's all that's left to be done, and all the hard talk and empty rhetoric in the world on the part of the RCP isn't going to make a damned bit of difference.

We can still campaign to start raising our voices against those soley responsible for said disaster - Tony Hayward for example.

[praxis1966]

We can still campaign to start raising our voices against those soley responsible for said disaster - Tony Hayward for example.

There are already plenty of people doing that, which is why this strikes me nothing more than a bunch of crass opportunism. The RCP in this case are just as bad as the Democrats; talks, meetings, pamphlets, lists of demands, coming on RevLeft to pat themselves on the back, saying, "Yippee! Look at me! Look what we did! We sat around and wasted a whole lot of time and money talking and pamphleteering instead of actually doing the obvious: helping! Aren't we great?!"

If anyone expects me to thank them for this nonsense they're fresh out of fucking luck. Show me a pictures of a couple of dozen people in RCP t-shirts holding oily pelicans and I'll reconsider. Scratch that, don't, because that'll just strike me as another attempt at scoring political brownie points. Real revolutionaries would take whatever resources they had, buy a bunch of respirators and waders, and just go down there and help clean shit up. And they definitely wouldn't spend a whole lot of time trying to make sure they were given proper credit for it. Either way, don't expect my congratulations because the RCP does a fine job of congratulating themselves. They don't need my help with that.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Well regardless of disagreements with the politics and methods of the RCP, I think that organizing people around all the anger that the spill has caused is good even though, yes, it can not save anything at this point. If I lived in that area, I would definitely want to be doing something.

Like the early months of the economic crisis, the Democrats and Republicans are totally incapable of giving a satisfactory answer or taking action that workers in the US want to see. The Republicans won't be able to shake the "Drill Baby Drill" mantra and are generally seen as in the pocket of big oil after George W. Bush and Obama announced he wanted to open MORE drilling just a few weeks before this disaster. And of course, neither party actually wants to take on business on this or admit that regulation is a joke.

So there is a huge vacuum of public anger about this right now and this experience, day after day on the news, goes against all the mainstream "common sense" arguments about the US and capitalism. Can you really say that government REGULATION is the problem, not corporate greed after this? Well, if the economic crisis is any example, you can - eventually - if the right is organized and there is a political vacuum. So I think US comrades should be taking this issue up right now and trying to give an explanation of this that makes sense and exposes how the capitalist system works. The fact that many people see BP as having Marie-Antoinette like hubris in the face of this disaster and what people see as Obama's timidity to actually take the company to task is a huge opening to show the connection of the government and business to people - even when the government is run by the party that claims to oppose special oil interests in favor of "green energy".

Exposing people to radical arguments about this disaster and organizing some people around it are baby-steps towards building a movement that would be able to respond effectively and intervene in a larger public discussion of the source of (profit-made) disasters when something like this happens again in the future - as it inevitably will under capitalism. My guess: Chernobyl US-style 2023.

[Delenda Carthago]

See, If I lived in the States I'd be keen as to attend a meeting like this. I think it's an excellent idea. But the way the RCP phrases all its propaganda and even the announcement of a meeting like this is so over the top and bizarre sounding that I probably wouldn't go just because the cu... er, party organising this event sounds so bizarre.

Last year,where some big fires went out here in Greece,some anarchists organised teams and went there to help.As a result,the riot cops who were there (for some reason) tryed to surround us in order to arrest us and blame us for the fires!

[praxis1966]

Well regardless of disagreements with the politics and methods of the RCP, I think that organizing people around all the anger that the spill has caused is good even though, yes, it can not save anything at this point. If I lived in that area, I would definitely want to be doing something.

Of course you want to be exposing people to radical arguments in this case, but don't you want to be doing that anytime you do anything? Anyway, I personally think that the best way to get people to be receptive of your arguments is to prove to them that you really are for the people. In this case, that would mean actually doing something to help in the cleanup effort. Then, while you're out there scooping up sludge, you can talk to other volunteers about who you are and what you're into. "Each one teach one," as the Panthers used to say. I think people will be alot more receptive if the RCP (or any other leftist organization for that matter) were seen to be putting their money where their mouth is.

But that's not what's going on here. The RCP, for the millionth time, is more concerned with preaching to the choir and winning credit with them than actually doing something to directly positively affect the lives of the people they claim to care about. It's completely disingenuous.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Ok I misunderstood your point as being: "Nothing can be done at this point so radicals can't do anything".

Yeah, if people are in that area, then they should definitely find a concrete way to put their money where their mouth is, as you say. I guess teaming up with other volunteers is a good way to meet and talk with some activists, but aside from that, personally, I wouldn't want to be helping clean up BP's mess and the government's neglect for free.

After Katrina and the Haiti earthquake happened I and a lot of other radicals all over the country helped with food drives as well as putting out the regular revolutionary analysis of why the disaster happened; why the poorest were the most effected and even scapegoated for their own desperation. So I think rather than cleaning beaches, for radicals around the effected areas, there must be a way to actually organize with people being economically hit by the spill, organizing with the clean-up workers getting sick from the toxins in the crude and the de-coagulation chemicals that BP used.

[praxis1966]

Realistically speaking the Gulf is so far gone that at this point that nothing can be done to "save it." That being said, you can't just let the oil sit there, so the logical conclusion is to get out and do something, the operative phrase being do something. I'm sick and tired of groups like the RCP doing nothing but talking under the auspice that they're "organizing." They've been "organizing" for 35 years. It's about time they actually did something.

Anyway, point taken about making BP pay to clean up its own mess. Not that I'm defending them, but they are in the process of hiring people for the cleanup. Trouble is, they're only paying the cleanup workers $8/hr and they're not providing them any safety gear. At the end of the day, though, I think that it's pretty naive to think they're going to foot the entire bill for this thing because there's a $200 million cap on the damages they can be made to pay under current federal law. That means that taxpayers by proxy of the federal government will paying for the rest of it. And, while I will agree that there's something hugely wrong with that, I don't see it changing anytime soon.

Incidentally, I also agree that there needs to be a whole lot of advocacy for the victims of this thing. The trouble with RCP logic is that I'm sure they'll at some point argue that advocacy is what they're doing (ie a whole lot of *****ing and moaning but not actually lifting a finger), but that starts from the mistaken assumption that they should be working for the people as opposed to what they should be doing: working with the people.

[Monkey Riding Dragon]

Just wanted to add that, for those who haven't been keeping up with this, the Emergency Committee to Stop the Gulf Oil Disaster established by the Emergency Summit organized by the Revolutionary Communist Party on June 19th now has a new web site (http://www.stopgulfoildisaster.org/) with regular updates, video, our demands, and various ways in which you can help out. Just wanted to let you all know about that!