The Obama adminsitration is in full propaganda mode in an effort to declare an end to the Gulf oil disaster. The way is being prepared for the oil industry in the Gulf to return to business as usual, while working people, whose livelihoods were stripped away by the Deepwater Horizon disaster, will be left to fend for themselves.

The administration is promoting claims that most of the oil erupting from the leak has either been contained or evaporated, with only a quarter posing a continued threat to the region.

The claim, advanced in a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and promoted by the National Incident Command in the Gulf, is simply the latest in a long record of lies and falsifications. From the beginning, the policy of both BP and the Obama administration has been to cover up the true size and scope of the oil spill. It was NOAA which provided the claim in the days immediately following the April 20 blowout that only 5,000 barrels per day were spilling into the Gulf, and continued to drastically underestimate the size of the spill throughout the crisis.

A report released by the Illinois Department of Human Services on Tuesday revealed that over 785,000 Illinois households—more than 1,630,000 individuals—throughout the state receive food stamps through a program known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The total represents a nearly 12 percent increase from June 2009, and state officials expect those numbers to increase steadily over the next year, according to an August 3 report in the Chicago Tribune. The data also reflects a national trend, as recent Department of Agriculture reports indicate that national levels of food stamp assistance are at an all time high, exceeding over 40 million Americans.

Nearly every county in Illinois saw a sharp increase in food stamp use over the last year. According to the IDHS’ Bureau of Research and Analysis, the southern counties of Saline, Williamson and Jackson saw their usage increase by 13.2 percent, 10.1 percent and 7.9 percent respectively. The hardest hit counties were to the north and west of Chicago, according to IDHS Director Jennifer Hrycyna.

In line with new numbers presented by the National Incident Command in the Gulf of Mexico, claiming the majority of oil from BP’s Macondo well has either been contained or destroyed, BP is drawing down cleanup and recovery efforts in the region.

As the World Socialist Web Site noted yesterday (See “Scientists criticize White House minimization of Gulf disaster”), independent scientists have challenged the NIC’s claims.

On Friday, there were 31,000 BP workers in the Gulf, compared to 48,000 during the height of recovery operations. In a statement last week, CEO Bob Dudley announced, “It’s not too soon for a scaleback,” adding, “you probably don’t need to see people in hazmat suits on the beach” in areas where there is no oil.

In Louisiana, Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser has spoken out publicly against the premature reduction in cleanup forces. “We know there’s a lot of oil out there,” he told the press, “It’s going to continue to come ashore, and we’re going to hold their feet to the fire to make sure they’re there until all the oil is gone out of the Gulf of Mexico before we pull all of the assets out of our parish.”

Scientists have criticized the White House’s bid to minimize the extent of the Gulf oil disaster and declare it “close to an end,” as President Barack Obama put it on Wednesday.

The National Incident Command (NIC) on Wednesday released a three-page document entitled “BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Budget: What Happened to the Oil?” that indicates that most of the oil from the gusher has vanished from the Gulf, and what remains is largely harmless.

According to the NIC report, one-fourth of all oil from the spill was captured or burned by BP, another quarter has been dissolved or evaporated through natural processes, and another fourth has been broken into small particles, which White House spokesmen declared to be of low enough toxicity to pose little threat. The remaining fourth has sunk into sediment and washed into the seashore.

Predictably, the report was seized upon by the media to promote the illusion that the worst oil spill in world history has been blown out of proportion, and that the Gulf of Mexico will recover very rapidly.

The Obama administration on Wednesday stepped up its efforts to declare the Gulf oil catastrophe at an end.

The public relations campaign, which is based on little scientific evidence, aims to bury the ongoing disaster in advance of the midterm elections, protect BP from further financial damages, and accelerate deep-sea oil drilling operations under the same environment of total deregulation that led to the April 20 blowout at the Deepwater Horizon rig.

In the morning, the Obama administration’s National Incident Command issued a three-page report, "BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Budget: What Happened to the Oil?," that all but declared the blowout to be an insignificant event.

Hours later BP claimed success in its latest effort to seal the Macondo well. The “static kill” process of pumping heavy mud into the well’s blowout preventer worked, BP declared, paving the way for the completion of two relief wells later this month. It is impossible to independently verify BP’s claims.

Later in the day, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulators, appearing before a Congressional hearing, gave an ex post facto clean bill of health to the spill response’s heavy use of the chemical dispersant Corexit 9500, which is known to be highly toxic.

The BP Gulf disaster is the worst ocean oil spill in world history, according to new data compiled by a team of government-sponsored scientists.

On Monday the National Incident Command’s Flow Rate Technical Group (FRTG) announced that the BP Macondo well blowout dumped between 53,000 barrels (2,226,000 gallons) and 62,000 barrels (over 2,600,000 gallons) of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico during the nearly three months in which the well was out of control.

In all the group estimates 206 million gallons of oil, 4.9 million barrels, gushed into the Gulf, far more than the 3.3 million barrels spilled into the Bay of Campeche in the Ixtoc rig blowout of 1979. It is twenty times the volume of the previous-worst US spill, the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska’s remote Prince William Sound in 1989.

By its own estimate BP captured only 800,000 barrels of this total, around 16 percent. While some of the oil has evaporated or has been broken down by simple organisms, scientists believe that the vast majority of the remaining 4.1 million barrels are lost in the Gulf, either in the slick on its surface, as tiny particles below the surface, settled in the sediment on the seabed, or washed ashore on coastal beaches and marshes.

D’Artagnan Collier, Socialist Equality Party candidate for the Michigan House of Representatives, addressed a meeting of the Committee Against Utility Shutoffs (CAUS) July 29.

A commissioner at the Dexter Avenue Fire Inquiry and founding member of CAUS, Collier is running in the 9th District, which includes much of the west side of Detroit. After a discussion of the political issues arising from the fight against utility shutoffs, the meeting voted unanimously to endorse Collier’s campaign.

Larry Porter, chairman of CAUS, opened the meeting by denouncing the new “energy theft” law just signed by Michigan’s Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm.

“The law criminalizes the poor,” he said, ”making it a felony offense and punishable by up to five years in jail and a $5,000 fine for tampering with or bypassing a gas or electric meter.” The bill also provides penalties as high as 10 years in jail and a $10,000 fine for threatening or assaulting a utility employee.

Porter said, “It is not insignificant that the new law was sponsored by black Democratic state senators from Detroit,” pointing out that both Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly approved it in the state senate and house.

United Auto Workers President Bob King, in a speech to an industry gathering Monday in Traverse City, Michigan, announced that the union was “ready, willing and able to do what it takes” to make the auto firms successful.

The UAW’s new chief, installed at the organization’s convention in June, didn’t care to spell out what he had in mind, except in general terms, but the thrust of his presentation was that the UAW leadership would be open to any “innovative” proposals by the companies as long as the union retained and, if possible, expanded its dues-paying base.

What lie ahead for auto workers if King has his way are poverty wages, a more brutal work place and a return to conditions that haven’t been seen in American industry since the early 1930s. The UAW is offering up auto workers as pure and simple fodder for exploitation.

King began his speech to the Center for Automotive Research conference by noting what an “honor” it was to address “my colleagues in the auto industry,” i.e., the multimillionaire owners of the auto and auto parts companies, and pronouncing himself “deeply grateful to the Obama administration and the American people for saving the American auto industry.”

On July 23, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Board of Education fired 600 educators and staff employees as part of an ongoing, statewide effort to close a massive budget deficit on the backs of state workers across Illinois. It is widely expected that up to 1,400 more CPS teachers and school workers will be laid off within the next two weeks, before the new school year begins.

At $11.5 billion, Illinois currently faces one of the largest state budget deficits in the country. On July 1, Governor Pat Quinn announced budget cuts of $1.4 billion, $241 million of which are to come from state funding for primary and secondary education. Illinois already ranks a dismal 47th in the country in the amount of state money given to school funding and 29 schools are presently on “state financial watch,” at risk of being shut down.

McDowell County, West Virginia’s southernmost county, has seen a dramatic decline in population as a consequence of the collapse of the mining workforce. At its peak, McDowell was home to more than 100,000. Today’s population is a quarter the size; since 2000, it has declined by 18 percent.

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For many years the county was the world’s largest producer of coal, and Welch, the county seat, was christened, “The heart of the nation’s coal bin.” Smelter-bound coal exports fueled the US industrial revolution, the critical steel industry, and the explosive expansion of American capitalism in the 20th century—including providing the energy resources for production of war materiel. McDowell County coal mining and processing sites of the US Steel Corporation were for decades the largest operations of their kind in the world.