When we last left Bobby Jindal, oil-addicted governor of BP-ravaged Louisiana, he was demanding more deepwater drilling ASAP. Former dirty energy lobbyist Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MI) also demanded renewed drilling before the cause of disaster was found.
The White House has now responded, as HuffPost reports:
LONDON””As the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico entered its eighth week Wednesday, fears continued to grow that the massive flow of bullshit still gushing from the headquarters of oil giant BP could prove catastrophic if nothing is done to contain it.
The toxic bullshit, which began to spew from the mouths of BP executives shortly after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in April, has completely devastated the Gulf region, delaying cleanup efforts, affecting thousands of jobs, and endangering the lives of all nearby wildlife.
Dense streams of shit are expected to continue spreading throughout the region and the entire United States.
America’s Finest News Source has more on this fast-breaking story:
As oil keeps pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, oil giant BP continues to see its reputation dragged further and further through the muck. Across the Gulf Coast, anti-BP signs and calls for help are popping up. On Friday, people gathered at BP’s DC headquarters to protest the corporation and present a “prison jumpsuit” to CEO Tony Hayward. While no one came down to accept the gift, ThinkProgress was covering the event and saw several BP employees watching from the safety of their 7th floor offices.
Protests at the local level — even ones that are nothing more than symbolic in nature — are also picking up. The Brevard County Manatees, the minor league Class-A Advanced Florida State League affiliate of the Milwaukee Brewers, has officially changed the name of “batting practice” — known as “BP” for short — to “hitting rehearsal.” “We hope to send a message to the community that we are definitely worried with the pollution that is in the waters off the Gulf Coast and its potential impact on the beaches here in Brevard County,” said the team’s general manager.
Yesterday in Pensacola, FL — which is on the Gulf Coast close to the Alabama border and now has tar balls washing up on its beaches — about 30 protesters gathered outside of a local BP gas station for a two-hour demonstration, with signs and bumper stickers reading, “Boycott BP,” “BP Lies Pensacola Dies,” and Wake Up and Smell the Oil.” Some other protests at BP stations around the country:
– On May 30, more than 200 protesters “swarmed Jackson Square” in New Orleans to vent their frustration at BP, where speakers “lashed out” at the “slow effort to keep oil from hitting Louisiana’s coastline.” Many posters had “scathing messages” including “BP = $ over people” and “refuse to be LOSEiana anymore.”
– Over Memorial Day weekend, hundreds of protesters “covered in ‘oil’ or dressed like sea creatures” flocked to a New York City BP station to rally against the oil spill and “to keep motorists from filling up.” Protesters chanted “BP your heart is black, you can have your oil back.”
– On June 3, middle-school students from Illinois valley spent the day “on a stretch of public sidewalk” outside a BP station “shouting facts about the disaster” and chanting “agree with me, don’t buy from BP.”
– Fifteen students in St. Cloud, MN “circled in front” of a BP gas station on Friday holding “painted signs” to show that “young people are doing something and they have a voice.”
– Over Memorial Day weekend, more than 20 protesters demonstrated outside a local convenience store in Charlottesville, VA. One protester urged the need for clean energy sources with “a placard touting fuel from hemp.”
– Protests have also gone viral. Over 330,000 members have joined the Boycott BP Facebook group. Twitter’s BP Boycott has over 2,500 followers.
Many business owners are worried that these boycotts and protests may hurt their profits while not affecting the parent company. The vast majority of the 10,000 BP stations in the country and independently owned and operated.
While the company isn’t publicly addressing the boycott efforts, they may still end up affecting how BP operates. Consumers also boycotted Exxon stations after the 1989 spill in Alaska, and while the company ignored it publicly, Exxon has now “reduced its dependence on consumer sales, and the company is much more dependent on business-to-business sales than it was 20 years ago.” Eighty-one percent of Americans disapprove of BP’s response to the spill, and 64 percent believe the government should pursue criminal charges against those involved.
Despite efforts to torpedo health care reform last year, health insurers are now promising to work alongside federal and state regulators to implement the new reform law and hold off efforts by progressives to re-introduce the public option or single-payer proposals. Speaking at the CIAB’s 9th Annual Employee Benefits Leadership Forum last week, Mike Tuffin, executive VP of AHIP, implied that the industry was very happy with the final version of the bill:
“Health care reform is not over. This is the only the end of the beginning,” Mr. Tuffin said. “Whether we like it or not, the bill was passed. Now we must be reliable and effective implementation partners. We need to stay engaged. The single-payer and public-option supporters have not given up,” he warned.
Insurers have signed on to a 50-state campaign called Enroll America, organized by consumer advocate Ron Pollack of Families USA. The campaign will encourage Americans to comply with the individual health insurance mandate by January 1, 2014 by making it easy for those who already qualify for Medicaid or private insurance subsidies to sign up. “It will raise money to hire local staffs, which will push state governments to create user-friendly enrollment systems. The goal is to allow people to sign up when they see a doctor or apply for other benefits, with simple applications printed in multiple languages.” To be sure, insurers’ efforts to implement reform are guided by self-interest. The industry stands to make millions from the mandate and is already encouraging HHS to adopt fairly loose regulations of its businesses.
Regulators and politicians certainly shouldn’t fold to industry demands or abandon their efforts at securing progressive legislation, but one can’t deny the fact that in implementing reform, insurers can provide critical technical expertise or that their participation in enrollment efforts will only improve implementation. As Jon Kingsdale, the director of the Commonwealth Connector Authority, has observed, “Brow-beating various industries may be good partisan politics, but the Health Connector has worked diligently at creating solid, long-term working relationships.” Those same partnerships will be essential if the health implementation effort is to succeed.
Of course, if insurers are truly interested in dissuading Congress form adopting reforms like the public option or national rate review, they would stop imposing headline grabbing premium increases and paying outrageous CEO bonuses and salaries. Efforts to milk the old system for all its worth could build public (and Senate) support for tougher reforms.
In an appearance this morning on MSNBC, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the vice-chairman of the Senate Democratic Caucus, treated legislation to fight global warming as an afterthought to an energy-only bill. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) have painstakingly crafted a comprehensive climate policy bill, the American Power Act, that would build upon the legislation passed last year by the House of Representatives. Also last year, Sen. Jeff Bingaman’s (D-NM) energy committee passed a limited package which Center for American Progress president John Podesta described as “weak, toothless, and unacceptable.” Sitting with the Morning Joe anchors, Schumer praised the building codes in the Bingaman bill. He said that Kerry’s “thing” would be offered as an amendment to Bingaman’s “good, strong energy bill”:
In the bill that Jeff Bingaman has proposed, which is the base energy bill upon which Kerry is going to try to add his thing, we have those codes nationally. Will it immediately have an effect in the first year? No. But in ten or 15 years it will do a huge amount.
In this bill is something — it’s a little controversial: much more ability to do nuclear energy. If we standardize it and apply the same rules we talked about with oil, that you know, you got to be real careful because if you screw up, you’re going to pay the price — but do it! And people want to take that, that endeavor, they should. It’s going to be a good strong energy bill and I think it’s been given new life.
Now what do you do about, uh, climate change? Now Kerry has a proposal that has pretty broad support, it has the environmental groups, the energy companies, et cetera. And of course, the extreme people at each side say it’s not good enough. But he’s done a damn good job. He’s in my opinion going to get a chance to offer that amendment and we’ll see if it has the votes.
Watch it:
Evidently, Schumer is skeptical of President Barack Obama’s commitment that although “the votes may not be there right now” for a comprehensive bill like Kerry-Lieberman that puts a price on carbon, “I intend to find them in the coming months.”
Honestly, with natural gas wells and pipelines exploding and killing people, with the BP oil gusher continuing to spew uncontrollably into the gulf, with tornadoes ravaging the country as the globe reaches record temperatures, I just don’t have the energy to deal with Schumer equating people concerned by billion-dollar giveaways to the fossil and nuclear industries with people who deny the existence of science as the “the extreme people at each side.”
,Schumer’s spokesman walked back his remarks later in the day. Schumer spokesman Brian Fallon said in an e-mail to National Journal:
To the senator’s knowledge, no decisions have been made yet on the floor strategy for legislation addressing the nation’s urgent energy challenges, nor is it his decision to make. The senator speculated on one procedural option, but make no mistake: He believes climate change legislation is vital to our nation’s energy security and looks forward to voting for it.
Kerry and Schumer “will meet later this week to talk about a possible strategy for moving a broad climate and energy plan.”
During an interview today with FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe on ABC’s Top Line, host Karen Travers noted that the cover of his upcoming book — Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto — says “lower taxes plus less government equals more freedom.” Travers then asked, “How does that less government sentiment square with this massive government effort down there in the Gulf to contain the spill?”
In response, Kibbe was able to kill two birds with one stone: deflect criticism from BP and his own personal philosophy by saying that he expects government to act “when there is a natural disaster”:
KIBBE: Well I think if you look at what’s happened down there, it’s a sad story of government incompetence as well as negligence on the part of BP. And I think what you have to look at is when there is a natural disaster like this we do expect our government to do some things and to do them well. And the whole point of limited government is you want the government to be competent at those few things that we need it to do and this is an example where the government was asleep at the switch and there’s a series of regulations that led to deep drilling as opposed to more economical and safer options.
Watch it (starting at 4:00):
Of course, natural disasters are uncontrollable events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Tens of millions of gallons of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico due to an oil company’s negilgence and misconduct does not qualify. In fact, just last year, BP opposed stricter safety and environmental rules proposed by the U.S. Minerals Management Service. A BP executive tried to fight off the new regulations on Capitol Hill, saying that drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) has been shown to be “both safe and protective of the environment.”
Even though Kibbe lobbed the obligatory “negligence” charge at BP, what he didn’t explain is that he might have an interest in deflecting blame away from the oil giant. As ThinkProgress reported last month, FreedomWorks worked with BP to build grassroots support for opening up large sections of both the East and West coasts to new oil drilling. BP listed the group as part its “significant grassroots supporters” on a PowerPoint slide at a presentation by the BP-funded front group “Consumer Energy Alliance” at a conference in 2007.
Walking with spiders:
— Random marriage stats.
— Anti-euro sentiment (rightly) surging in Sweden.
— Chamillionaire on strategic defaults.
— BP warns customers that they alone are responsible for any spills caused at BP stations.
— 13 lobbying firms working to save engine the Pentagon doesn’t want.
The National, “Terrible Love”.
HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan
“We‘re using every avenue to shut the door against discrimination,” said HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan. “Today, we take an important step to insist that those who seek federal funding must demonstrate that they are meeting local and state civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.”
HUD also “intends to propose new regulations that will clarify that the term ‘family’ as used to describe eligible beneficiaries of HUD’s programs include otherwise eligible LGBT individuals and couples.”
Today, more than 20 states, as well as the District of Columbia, offer protection due to sexual orientation. And this is warranted because, as Rea Carey, Executive Director, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund, has pointed out, “studies have documented that when test callers described themselves as gay or lesbian, apartments were more likely to be described as unavailable. Testers who presented as homosexual received fewer call-backs and fewer invitations to pursue the property than their heterosexual counterparts.”
According to a 2007 study by the Michigan Fair Housing Centers, “same-sex couples were shown less desirable properties, were quoted higher rent prices, received less favorable customer service, or encountered outright refusal to sell or rent properties. There were also circumstances during which parties suffered verbal harassment from landlords, realtors, and lenders.”
While HUD’s change is a welcome step, Congress could also be doing more to ensure that fair housing standards extend to LGBT individuals. As Shanna Smith, President of the National Fair Housing Alliance, said, “we must see a serious commitment from Congress and the Administration to enforce the [Fair Housing] Act in a systemic way rather than allowing individual case files to gather dust. Existing laws must be enforced, and they must be strengthened to include sexual orientation, gender identity and source of income.”
As oil from BP’s Deepwater Horizon well makes its way deep into the marshes of the Gulf Coast, and the wildlife toll mounts, the company announced today that cleanup costs have already reached $1.25 billion and are growing quickly. Given this devastation, it’s not surprising that a vast majority of Americans — 72 percent — now have a negative view of the company, a new Rasmussen poll found. However, 22 percent still have a somewhat or very favorable view of the foreign oil giant. EnviroKnow examined the crosstabs from the poll and found that this group of BP supporters is made up disproportionately of conservatives:
On BP favorability, a few key statistics stick out:
* Conservatives are four times more likely to view BP favorably as Liberals are
* Republicans are more than twice as likely to view BP favorably as Democrats are
* Whites are nearly twice as likely to view BP favorably as Blacks are
Given conservatives’ almost religious devotion to offshore drilling, perhaps this is not surprising. While a majority of Americans now believe increased offshore drilling is “too risky,” several Republican leaders have called for an immediate expansion of drilling, even before the investigation of the Deepwater Horizon disaster is complete. Meanwhile, evidence mounts that BP flouted safety regulations before the disaster, and there are legitimate questions about the sincerity of BP’s pledge to pay for all damages from the spill. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, 64 percent of Americans would support a federal decision to pursue criminal charges against the company.
(cc photo by marinephotobank)
We normally talk about clean energy in terms of subsidizing it directly or else charging dirty energy sources so as to remove the unpriced negative externalities. But if you watch congress at all, you’ll notice that current policy actually subsidizes dirty energy in a baffling way. And we’re not alone. Dave Roberts flags a new analysis from the International Energy Agency that pegs global dirty energy subsidies at $550 billion a year:
The Financial Times got a peak at the draft and covers it today, soliciting this absolutely fabulous quote from chief IEA economist Faith Birol: “I see fossil fuel subsidies as the appendicitis of the global energy system, which needs to be removed for a healthy, sustainable development future.” I’m stealing that one.
Not only would removing these subsidies move us closer to the “free market” conservatives are fond of pretending we already have, it would immediately reduce energy use and carbon pollution.
The last point really is telling and important here. I can’t think of a single significant “free market” institution in America that spends nearly as much time and energy on this set of market distortions than they do bashing enviornmentalist proposals. Operationally, conservatism in the United States just isn’t about small government or free markets.
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