Don't forget the Exxon Valdez

From Coastal First Nations. It could have done without the music but it's the sort of history that we are supposed to forget.

                                                                     *********

24 years later and this still gives us a sinking feeling. This is the actual radio call from the Exxon Valdez to Coast Guard, reporting the oil spill.

Released on the 24th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, this two-minute video reminds us of the dangers and costs that oil tankers and pipelines pose to our coastal waters. Produced by the Coastal First Nations (http://www.coastalfirstnations.ca), the video opens with Exxon Valdez Captain Joe Hazelwood's radio call to Coast Guard, accompanied by The Sound of Silence, by Simon and Garfunkel. It concludes with a simple message: "Don't be silent. Vote for an oil-free coast."

Paul Simon's music label granted the rights to use the song for a small honorarium after the Coastal First Nations wrote to him personally, telling him about the Great Bear Rainforest and the danger that oil tankers pose to the coastal communities that live here. Please share far and wide!

Read More

Immigration: Obama goes where the imbecile Bush feared to tread

by Richard Mellor

When Clinton signed the North American Free Trade agreement (NAFTA) it had a number of consequences.  It sped up the export of US jobs as US manufacturers shifted production south of the border to take advantage of cheaper labor power.  By 2010, more than 500,000 US jobs were displaced according to the Economic Policy Institute. This also had the effect of lowering wages in the US as NAFTA never contained provisions that protected Mexican workers from super exploitation and US firms demanded concessions to compete.  The threat of moving was used more and more as a form of economic terrorism to force US workers to accept concessions.

NAFTA threw Millions of Mexican subsistence farmers off their land; destroyed their way of life as there was no way these small farmers producing corn could compete with US agribusiness which is highly mechanized by comparison and which by 2002 was subsidized to the tune of 40% of net farm income.

Having no means of subsistence, many of these landless Mexican peasants headed north.  As I have said many times before, the relationship between the global power and its southern neighbor reminds me very much of that between England and Ireland which supplied the colonial power with a steady supply of cheap labor and cheap food.

By 2007 more than 850,000 people were caught trying to cross in to the US illegally through our southern border. You cannot stop people trying to feed themselves and their families. The politics and economic behind it all is hidden.  The role of US imperialism in that part of the world, an area the US capitalist class considers their “back yard” is unknown to most Americans; the invasions, government coups, assassinations of opponents to the US multinational corporations that have plundered the region's resources, poisoned its environment and exploited its workers, we don’t hear too much about that.

As was the case with the Irish in Britain, these southern immigrants come under assault in all sorts of ways.  They are firstly raped, robbed and beaten by those they pay to transport them here. They have been murdered by their guides or US border agents as has been the case on more than one occasion.  If they find work here, their undocumented status makes them most vulnerable to all sorts of exploitation by landlords and employers. They are blamed in the media for the taking of jobs “real” Americans could fill and as a burden on the taxpayer.

In bad economic times they are the perfect scapegoat, they are poor, foreigners, a different nationality and more often than not, although not exclusively, a different color; a perfect part of a divide and rule strategy.

Responding to this xenophobic warfare, Republicans pushed the imbecile Bush to do more.  By 2007 they demanded that he “deploy four drones” along the border, build 105 radar and camera towers and increase the number of border agents to 20,000 while building more fencing.

Where Bush failed though, Obama has not feared to tread.  In his first term the Obama administration spent $73 billion on immigration enforcement. Presently the US has 120 drones scouting the border, has installed 670 miles of fencing, erected 300 towers and beefed up the border agents to 21,394, 18,500 of them on the US Mexican border according to Bloomberg Business Week.  The results have been favorable as immigration agents deported close to 1.5 million undocumented workers in the past four years. The reduction in border crossing most experts agree is also due to the crash as fewer jobs were available and many immigrants returned home.

As I pointed out in a previous blog, for workers it is in our economic and class interests to oppose these measures and the racist and xenophobic attacks on undocumented workers. There was a headline in my local paper a few weeks ago about Latino’s being the most populous ethnic group in the state before too long. “The Latinos are coming, my god, the Latinos are coming.”  But which Latinos? I would argue as a worker it is “our” Latinos, people from the same class background as the vast majority of us, wage earners-----workers.  The 11million or so undocumented workers already in the US pay their dues and have paid them a thousand times over.  They work in the worst jobs for the lowest pay and face savage discrimination at times.  They are the butt of racist jokes and are denied basic human services by politicians who are millionaires ( and billionaires) and who whip up this climate of fear in order to divide us and drive all workers to conditions that prevailed before the rise of the CIO in the 1930’s and the civil rights movement that followed.

I don’t intend to beat a dead horse but to side with the anti-immigrant crowd on this issue is disastrous. We cannot escape the effects of having a 2000 mile border with a low waged economy and super exploited workers. For workers not to have an independent position on this issue means the bosses win all round.  Leaving aside the $73 billion of our money being spent on militarizing US society which will be used against US workers as we resist the destruction of our living standards in the future (drones will be used against us and so will the border guards to break strikes and protests against austerity), having cheaper labor just across the border also weakens us in other ways.  As I wrote some time ago in a piece I distributed at work:

“But even if these workers and peasants don't come here to the US, staying in their home countries will have basically the same effect. It will increase the supply of Labor, further driving down wages (Labor’s price) and increasing the rate at which capital invests since there would be even greater profits to be made there. Obviously this would mean further job losses here in the U.S. Thus, we cannot escape the affects of the conditions of those workers and peasants, no matter if they come here or stay in their home countries. The only real difference is that if they come here, the effects of this forced competition are more visible to us.”

A Mexican farmer doesn’t leave his family, his children and his country without being forced to either by the gun or through economic terrorism. Neither does an African migrant in Europe. While it isn’t realistic to simply call for the opening of all borders when on one side wages and conditions are higher than the other, as it would simply depress the higher in favor of the lower which would be opposed by higher paid workers and divide the class an alternative is to recognize class solidarity, overcome nationalist sentiment and do what we can to build links with workers south of the border or any workers no matter where they may be, and join with them in raising their wages and standard of living. We must join with them in the struggle against global capital launching a global offensive of our own.  We must build an independent political party of our own that will break the monopoly the two Wall Street parties have over the political process and prevent them from moving production by taking over the industry; the Democrats will never do this.

We only have to think of all the money we spend on defense and militarization of our borders and immigration control and what effect that has.  We can’t as Americans travel in half the countries of the world.  Our standard of living is declining; our jails are the most populated in the world, our health care is dismal; the inequality gap is wider than ever before, and our young people will, if they are lucky enough to have a job, will be able to retire at 80.

We need more allies not enemies; we’ve got plenty of them on Wall Street and in Washington.  We call them, "fellow Americans".

Some reading:

The Myth of Free Trade

Tariffs and Tortillas

Lessons of NAFTA

Hey Look, Somehow the Border Got Secured Businessweek Feb 25, 2013

Read More

Canada's Indigenous movement is Idle No More

Al Jazeera covers Idle No More, the Canadian indigenous movement that is gaining strength. 

"It is important to understand that Canada is currently being governed by a very extremist power .... The reality of Bill C-45, and the complete gutting of 30 years of environmental approvals enforcement and regulatory mechanisms [is that it will] significantly kick open the door for international investment in tar sands, and other unsustainable and harmful and devastating extractive industries, which disproportionately impact our native people and our way of life ... "    - Clayton Thomas-Muller, an indigenous rights activist.

Read More

Speculators, thieves and frackers descend on North Dakota Reservation

Fort Berthold is an Indian Reservation in North Dakota, home to 12,000 people, members of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikari Nation collectively referred to as the Three Affiliated Tribes.  There has been a revolution of sorts on this reservation which was created in 1870, it has oil, and lots of it.The Bakken oilfield includes the Reservation and western North Dakota as well as  Eastern Montana and southern Sasketchewan. It is the largest contiguous oil field discovery in US history according to the  US Geological Survey.

Less than five years ago there were no producing oil wells on Fort Berthold according to Bloomberg Businessweek, today there are 297.  The Bakken has over 7000 producing wells in total.  With such a discovery, the vulture capitalists, speculators, coupon clippers and other social wasters have descended on the region.  But this discovery has also created tremendous problems for these small communities and the Indian people on the Reservation.  Terri Hansen of Indian Country writes:

"It has also brought a huge increase in traffic accidents, while services at the tiny hospital are limited. The industrialization and population boom has strained water supplies, sewage systems, and federal, state and tribal governmental services in the area, as NPR has reported. Exponentially increased amounts of dust drift across deteriorating roadways. Jobs are plentiful and high paying, but there’s housing shortage, and most of what’s there is makeshift. The once quiet one-bar town of Williston has had an influx of prostitutes, while a thinly stretched police force must now regularly quell once nonexistent bar fights, according to the documentary Faces of the Oil Patch."

Fracking which is a method of separating oil from rock by injecting chemicals in to the rock in order to release it has produced numerous complaints of water pollution in the area.  Fracking has been blamed for poisoning water supplies throughout the nation. But the discovery has also set Reservation occupants against each other, those who own land and those that don't.  It is the same old story, one lawsuit tribal members have against the federal government states, "....the misappropriation of land resources belonging to Native Americans.".

Oil drilling has brought in more than $500 million in the last 4 years according to Bloomberg yet the Reservation has no major hospital and the nearest emergency facility is 100 miles away.  In the other small towns outside the reservation the boom has also disrupted everyday life increasing congestion. There is a major housing shortage as the population has grown considerably, and crime and prostitution has risen considerably. The infrastructure of these communities, sewage, water, medical needs, cannot keep pace with the influx of humanity and the changes this brings.

Leaving aside whether oil drilling or fracking should be allowed, what we are witnessing here is a market boom.  The scramble for profits shows no mercy for human communities or the earth that provides us with food and water.  In capitalist society, the natural world, like human beings, is simply something to be exploited, a source of surplus value. The market has its own pace, there is no planning in such ventures. It's not just greed in the abstract, it's the way the capitalist mode of production works. Rational planning of production takes time and the involvement of all concerned, capital detests such barriers.  Like the cattle it takes to market, the quicker they get fat the better no matter what you have to pump in to them.

Here we are talking about the production of energy.  Whether it is the best and most efficient form of energy, or the most efficient form of producing it in harmony with the natural world and human society,  matters not.  What the forces behind the boom seek is surplus value, profits. 

The production of society's energy needs, just like the production of our food, our housing, our necessities of life, cannot be left to their precious market.  What the US government will encourage in Fort Berthold is those among the tribal leadership who support this view and want to profit from it. Tex Hall, the Chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes is also owner of numerous oil industry related businesses and supports drilling; he's an entrepreneur, the epitome of capitalist success.

If you want to know more about what some residents of the Reservation are doing to get their story out and/or would like to contribute to the documentary the woman in the video above is talking about, you can visit this site http://www.indiegogo.com/7-Oil-1

Read More