CAPAF’s Christy Goldfuss in a WonkRoom cross-post.
For the seventh time in a row, Chairman Doc Hastings (R-WA) of the House Natural Resources Committee held a hearing where he pushed for more domestic production of oil and gas, a proposal known to benefit Big Oil with little impact on gas prices. His colleague on the Committee, Rep. Jeff Landry (R-LA), whose largest single industry contributor is oil and gas, took the opportunity at the hearing to defend the profits of Big Oil.
He and other Republicans argued that the profit margin for major oil companies is commensurate with other industries. But in 2010, Exxon Mobil had $30.9 billion, Shell had $18.28 billion, and Chevron had $19.29 in profits. Bill Graves from the American Trucking Association had to “agree to disagree” with that reasoning.
Big Oil also was defended by the Republican majority witness from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Karen Alderman Harbert. When Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM) asked whether Harbert supported the billions of taxpayer subsidies that go to Big Oil, she refused to give a yes or no answer. She instead tried to squeeze in a pitch for why Big Oil subsidies are necessary, even with billions in profits. She feels that denying those subsidies would be unfairly, “singling out the oil and gas industry and penalizing it.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce also supports oil speculators, by pushing to repeal the new authority that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has to police speculation under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. The Democratic minority invited witness from the Gasoline & Automotive Service Dealers of America, Inc., noted that “the fastest way to $6 a gallon is to cut the funding to the CFTC.”
To sum up, the House Natural Resources Committee is doing a great job defending Big Oil with hearings on issues that benefit Big Oil, with Republican members that ask questions and make statements in defense of Big Oil, and the Republican invited witnesses that support Big Oil.
– Christy Goldfuss, Public Lands Project Director at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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And people keep telling me that my electric car doesn’t make sense because it costs too much. If that’s the price to avoid being BFFs with Exxon, Chevron, & BP, then I say so be it!
As more and more electrics appear on the roads, those drivers are going to start asking, “Why the F am I paying taxes that go to subsidize big, vastly profitable oil companies when I’m not even using their expensive, dirty, polluting product?”
OMG. What have we become, Nigeria or Venezuela?
‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’. The US experience in plutocracy (after all the Founding Fathers were the richest men in the colonies) has just about run its course. The utter inability of the system to produce men and women of moral or intellectual distinction to fill the highest posts in politics, the media and business, ensures that the unfolding collapse will be inescapable. When invariably negative experience only stimulates yet more determined efforts to continue down the same path, to neo-feudal social relations, global ecological collapse and endless war, you know the ‘End Times’ are upon us. And when you become aware that many of the demented fools who rule over this necropolis of waking nightmares actually fervently wish to cause these eschatological horrors to be unleashed, out of a perverted and sinister religious mania, then you can finally begin to comprehend just how dire is our predicament.
That is why GOP stands for Global Oil Party.
They are immoral plutocrats who are treasonous traitors (and traders) of ecological collapse, famine and disease. Not to mention the subsidized leverage of enabled national bankruptcy.
The other part of the duopoly is not very much better. One part rearranges deck chairs on the starboard side and the other on the port side of the USS Titanic Plutocracy. This time however, total public debt is globalized and much will never be “repaid.” People will starve instead, thanks to that “stinking cesspool of graft and corruption.” Meaning at this stage, not only the congress, but the entire construct of western corporate-fascist “capitalist economics.”