the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Feb 1, 2016
In the face of a dangerous and growing disaster from a catastrophic natural gas leak, residents of Porter Ranch in Los Angeles have been calling on SoCalGas to shut down the storage facility. The company has ignored the pleas so far, saying that the facility provides more than half the natural gas distributed in Southern California, and if they shut down, they will have to increase rates for customers!
SoCalGas is so shameless and brazen because public officials, who have allowed the oil and gas industry to ignore safety rules, continue to protect the interests of SoCalGas. The Democratic Congressman from the area, Brad Sherman, for example, defended the company’s right to run the leaking storage as it sees fit, saying, “They’ve created a facility that is literally too big to fail.”
Heard that one before? These same politicians, Democrat and Republican, told us banks were “too big to fail,” when they handed them billions of dollars to cover for the risky investments the banks had consciously made. And now they are telling us we have to accept being poisoned and put at risk of a bigger disaster because of conscious decisions made by a big, greedy gas company–and others, of course.
In fact, this capitalist system we live under, which allows these greedy capitalists to get “too big” is too dangerous for us to keep in place.