This week, the Big Five oil companies announced their first quarter profits, which, with oil well over $100 per barrel, came to more than $30 billion. Exxon alone registered nearly $11 billion in profits, a 69 percent increase over their first quarter profit a year ago. And if history is any example, these profits — gained at the expense of American consumers, from prices that are helping to slow the American economy — are going to go straight towards enriching oil executives.

As a new report from Citizens for Tax Justice shows, Big Oil, between 2005 and 2010, spent the vast majority of its net profits boosting dividends and purchasing its own stock — actions that largely help line CEOs’ pockets:

Among the largest five oil companies, less than 10 percent of after-tax profits went to exploration for new oil fields during the 2005-2009 period. Meanwhile, the percentage of net profits used to pay dividends and buy back stock was 58 percent in 2005, 73 percent in 2006, 72 percent in 2007, 71 percent in 2008 and 89 percent in 2009. These figures are high in comparison to other industries.

For 2010, it makes sense to focus on four of the largest oil companies, leaving out BP because of its disastrous problems during the year. In 2010, these four companies spent 60 percent of their profits on dividends and stock repurchases, and just 18 percent on exploration. In other words, the companies spent 3.3 times as much on dividends and stock buybacks as they did on exploration in 2010.

In 2008, when oil companies were making sky-high profits, they invested very little of that in alternative energy. In fact, “a CAP analysis of their investments reveals that the big five oil companies invested just 4 percent of their total 2008 profits in renewable and alternative energy ventures.” Exxon made $45 billion in profits that year, and will come close to that record if high oil prices persist.

At the same time, the oil companies — along with their Republican allies in Congress — are vigorously opposing yet another attempt by President Obama and Congressional Democrats to cut the almost $4 billion in subsidies that are spent on oil companies each year. “Over the last week as earnings season has approached, the Democratic Party leadership again talked about removing what they call $4 billion in oil industry subsidies,” wrote ExxonMobil’s vice president for public and government affairs Ken Cohen on Exxon’s blog. “The simple truth is that these are legitimate tax provisions to keep U.S. industry internationally competitive — to keep jobs from being exported to other countries.” But as these companies have shown, huge profits just get plowed into more accumulation of wealth for oil CEOs.

ThinkProgress filed this report from Burlington, Wisconsin.

Yesterday, during a town hall in Waterford, WI, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said that he supported eliminating the $4 billion in federal subsidies to oil companies, telling a constituent, “Sure….I agree.” But at a town hall this morning in Burlington, Wisconsin, Paul seemed to backpedal on his support when another constituent asked him about getting rid of the federal handout. Ryan admitted that the oil lobbyists secured the handouts, but then talked about ending “corporate welfare” in general, without specifically mentioning the oil dollars:

Q: I’m concerned, not so much about tax cuts on big corporations, but about the subsidies on the oil companies. And the gentleman over there pointed out all of their incredible profit that they have had and they’re still getting subsidies. Can you explain why that is?

RYAN: Because they successfully lobbied it to get it in the law. I didn’t get through all of what this budget does, there is a lot of things we propose to cut from spending in here. One of the first things we propose to do is to cut all of the corporate welfare. There is corporate welfare to agrobusinesses, there is corporate welfare to energy sectors, there is corporate welfare to the financial services sector…But there is a lot of corporate welfare on the spending side as well. And the biggest areas are in the financial services, agriculture and in energy. And we say clear out all that stuff.

Watch it:

After ThinkProgress reported on Ryan’s more direct endorsement of ending the subsidies yesterday, spokesperson Conor Sweeney told The Hill that Ryan’s budget “obviously” ends tax breaks for big oil companies, yet mysteriously also said Ryan has “made clear we are not for raising taxes.” Ryan has voted twice recently to preseve subsidies to oil companies.

The National Labor Relations Board last week filed a complaint against the airplane manufacturer Boeing, noting that, according to public pronouncements by the company’s officials, the construction of a new plant in South Carolina was intended as retribution against workers in Washington who have engaged in a pair of strikes over the last six years. One senior Boeing official, for instance, said during an interview, “The overriding factor [in moving to South Carolina] was not the business climate. And it was not the wages we’re paying today. It was that we cannot afford to have a work stoppage, you know, every three years.”

Under national labor law, retaliating against workers for striking is illegal union-busting, but several Republican lawmakers have attacked the NLRB and the Obama administration for initiating the complaint. “This is nothing more than a political favor for the unions who are supporting President Obama’s re-election campaign,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). “The Obama administration is now dictating where companies are allowed to create new jobs,” wrote former Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN).

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) took to the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page today to decry the NLRB’s decision, saying that it circumvents capitalism and falsely claiming that the NLRB “wants Boeing to produce the planes only in Washington state“:

In choosing to manufacture in my state, Boeing was exercising its right as a free enterprise in a free nation to conduct business wherever it believed would best serve both the bottom line and the employees of its company. This is not a novel or complicated idea. It’s called capitalism. [...]

That is apparently too much for President Obama and his union-beholden appointees at the National Labor Relations Board, who have asked the courts to intervene and force Boeing to stop production in South Carolina. The NLRB wants Boeing to produce the planes only in Washington state, where its workers must belong to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.

As the Washington Post’s Steve Pearlstein wrote, “given the public statements of Boeing officials, there is nothing radical about the NLRB’s decision”; the NLRB is simply trying to enforce worker protections that are already law. And, contrary to Haley’s pronouncement, the NLRB made clear that “The complaint does not seek closure of the South Carolina facility, nor does it prohibit Boeing from assembling planes there.”

Haley also neglects to mention that South Carolina gave Boeing nearly $1 billion to open its plant in South Carolina (even as Boeing systemically dodges taxes). Nor is this Haley’s first foray into union-busting; she named a union-busting attorney to head South Carolina’s Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation for the express purpose of preventing unions from trying to unionize Boeing’s South Carolina plant. Boeing donated to both Haley’s election campaign and her inaugural gala.

The laws that the NLRB is seeking to enforce are necessary to ensure that corporations can’t threaten to move production and fire workers who exercise their right to organize. Haley’s view — and that of the rest of the Republicans attacking Obama and the NLRB — is that corporations should be allowed to ignore the law and workers’ rights if it will increase their profits.

Oil giant Exxon-Mobil today announced that it made almost $11 billion in profits through the first three months of this year, a nearly 70 percent increase in its first quarter profit from last year. Democrats in Congress have, for years, been trying to cut the nearly $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies that go to oil companies every year, and cited today’s profits as one more justification for removing this taxpayer-funded largesse.

“We have to take away the subsidies for these five major oil companies,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). “There’s no need for these subsidies. The companies have broken records [with their] profits.” Exxon-Mobil’s vice president for public and government affairs Ken Cohen responded today by whining that cutting oil company subsidies amounts to a tax increase:

“Over the last week as earnings season has approached, the Democratic Party leadership again talked about removing what they call $4 billion in oil industry subsidies,” [ExxonMobil’s vice president for public and government affairs Ken] Cohen said. “But what they really mean is that they want to increase our taxes by taking away long-standing deductions for our industry while leaving these same deductions in place for other sectors of the economy.”

Exxon, of course, paid absolutely nothing into the Federal Treasury in 2009, while still receiving these subsidies. And the rest of Exxon’s Big Oil brethren, while not doing quite as well, all made billions off of the rising price of oil. In fact, the five biggest oil companies — Exxon, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and BP — made a combined $32.7 billion in the last three months:

At the same time that sky-high oil prices are helping Big Oil make a killing, they are slowing an already sluggish economic recovery. Gross Domestic Product grew at a paltry 1.8 percent last quarter, and rising gas prices “have nearly neutralized the 2011 payroll tax cuts that were intended as a stimulus.”

ThinkProgress filed this report from Wisconsin.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) agreed to end subsidies to oil companies during a town hall in Waterford, Wisconsin, this morning, eliciting great applause from an overflow crowd in a very conservative section of his district. “We also want to get rid of corporate welfare,” Ryan insisted. “So we propose to repeal all that”:

Q: The subsidy for the oil companies that the federal government gives. They’ve gotta stop.

RYAN: Sure.

Q: End the oil company subsidies…

RYAN: I agree.

Q: …and you will gain a lot of that money in the red back.

Watch it:

But Ryan voted twice this year to actually extend subsidies to oil companies, once on a motion to recommit on a shorter-term continuing resolution and again when he supported an amendment to the initial House CR. The Ryan budget, meanwhile, doesn’t specifically target oil subsidies, but only generally promises to end “corporate welfare.”

Earlier this week, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) also indirectly endorsed ending subsidies to the oil industry, before walking back his support.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission — which oversees the nation’s commodities markets — announced yesterday that it is going to allow for an additional month of comments on the rules governing derivatives that it is implementing under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. According to Dodd-Frank, the CFTC is supposed to have finished implementing a new regulation regime for derivatives by July, but CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler has already said that the deadline will be missed.

House Republicans been pushing for the CFTC to delay derivatives reform for months, claiming that the rules were being implemented without enough input from businesses and the financial sector. So has this delay assuaged their concern? As the Wall Street Journal noted, it certainly hasn’t:

Republican Rep. Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, which oversees the CFTC, said the agency’s decision to extend the comment period wasn’t enough to address his concerns.

“To expect that market participants can comment on dozens of complex regulations and their cumulative impact on the marketplace meaningfully in 30 days is consistent with the process we’ve seen at the CFTC, a bare minimum and check-the-box approach. We owe more diligence to the economy,” he said in a statement.

Derivatives, remember, were the financial instruments that brought down, among others, the insurance giant AIG (necessitating a government rescue). The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission reported that derivatives were “at the center of the storm” during the financial crisis.

Despite the role these instruments (and the huge financial firms that used them) played in bringing the economy to the brink, Republicans have been attempting to slow-walk derivatives reform for months, both legislatively and by denying the CFTC funding to implement Dodd-Frank. House Republicans earlier this month introduced a bill to delay derivatives reform for 18 months.

But as CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said yesterday, “dangers” still exist in the derivatives market. “There are dangers out there in the OTC world that we need to get a handle on. There are some that want to run out the clock. Many of these people are people who opposed [Dodd-Frank] to begin with want to run out the clock until the next election. Maybe consumers won’t be as hot on reform then,” Chilton said.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke today held the first press conference in the history of his position. Going into the conference, a number of people said that they’d like Bernanke to address whether the Fed could do more to reduce the country’s unemployment rate, which stands at an unacceptably high 8.8 percent.

The Fed’s own projections don’t have unemployment falling below five percent for five or six years and the Fed’s QE2 program, which was meant to juice the economy, has been a disappointment. So Bernanke was asked by the New York Times’ Binyamin Applebaum whether the Fed could be doing more to boost employment in the face of such dire projections.

But instead of answering the question, Bernanke simply explained the steps that the Fed has already taken to alleviate unemployment. His non-answer came even though he acknowledged earlier in the conference that the labor market in in bad shape and that the country has a “very, very deep hole” to dig out of in terms of job creation:

The pace of improvement is still quite slow and we are digging ourselves out of a very, very deep hole. We are still something like 7 million plus jobs below where we were before the crisis. And so clearly, the fact that we’re moving in the right direction, even though that’s encouraging, doesn’t mean that the labor market is in good shape. Obviously it’s not.

Watch it:

As the New York Times’ David Leonhardt wrote today, the Fed absolutely has options that it could employ to reduce unemployment:

It could announce that it would keep its benchmark rate at zero for a few years, which would probably hold down long-term rates. It could say that it was comfortable with higher inflation for a limited period of time, given how low inflation has been since 2007 and how high unemployment is. Above all, Mr. Bernanke could make clear that he considers years of widespread unemployment to be unacceptable.

Paul Krugman added that “[Bernanke's] own theories — and for that matter the doctrine endorsed by the Fed itself — says that the central bank should be doing much more quantitative easing, not stopping with the US still facing high unemployment and the unemployed themselves increasingly desperate.” Peterson Institute economist and former Federal Reserve staffer Joe Gagnon has released a plan calling for $2 trillion more in Fed easing to boost the economy.

The Washington Post reported today that the Treasury Department is already juggling money around federal accounts in case Congress fails to raise the nation’s debt ceiling before it is reached in a matter of weeks. Allowing the U.S. to hit its legal borrowing limit would cause widespread economic pain, but Republicans have been demanding various concessions in return for their vote to raise it.

At the same time, however, GOP leaders fully acknowledge that the debt ceiling has to be raised. “”We’ll have to find a way to help educate members and help people understand the serious problem that would exist if we didn’t do it,” said Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) called failing to raise the debt ceiling “unworkable.” But both Boehner and Ryan have then attemped to extract concessions in return for doing what they’ve already admitted they must do in any case.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) joined this group today, first proclaiming that everybody “agrees that we’ve got to pay our bills,” before threatening not to raise the debt ceiling:

First of all, Joe, you know, America pays its bills. I think everybody sort of agrees that we’ve got to pay our bills, but I don’t think that that comes at the exclusion of trying to fix the problem here. We are in a debt crisis, I think the markets, global investors, the American people are expecting us to deliver on our commitment that we’re going to change the spending crisis in Washington. So together with that debt limit vote has to be some real reforms. And I mean real.

Watch it:

But unless the debt ceiling is raised, America will fail to pay some bills. Treasury can, for a limited amount of time, ensure that interest payments on the debt are made, thus avoiding traditional default, but those payments would come at the expense of other promised payments, as the government could only spend whatever tax revenue comes in month to month. Inevitably, some obligations would not be met.

Everyone from banking executives to the GOP’s favorite economic validator have said that the debt ceiling has to be raised in order to avoid a slew of negative economic consequences. But Republicans are continuing to play chicken with the country’s creditworthiness.

Earlier this month, the White House floated the possibility of an executive order to require “companies seeking government contracts” to disclose contributions to groups that air political ads. And a few days ago, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) filed a lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission to demand rules mandating donor disclosure.

The move by the White House has been met with a fierce denunciation by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which ran one of the largest ad campaigns using secret corporate money in the midterm election last year. In an interview with the New York Times, Chamber executive Bruce Josten compared President Obama to Muammar Qaddafi, claiming that the Chamber will fight the order with the same resolve as military leaders currently bombing Libya:

The lobbyist, R. Bruce Josten, said in an interview that the powerful business bloc “is not going to tolerate” what it saw as a “backdoor attempt” by the White House to silence private-sector opponents by disclosing their political spending.

“We will fight it through all available means,” Mr. Josten said. In a reference to the White House’s battle to depose Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, he said, “To quote what they say every day on Libya, all options are on the table.”

The Chamber’s threat is not idle talk. As ThinkProgress exclusively reported, the Chamber’s lawyers recently met with a group of military contractors to devise a potentially illegal plot to sabotage liberal critics, including Change to Win, Chamber Watch, MoveOn.org, and even ThinkProgress. The plan included an effort to use fake online identities to hack computers and submit false documents to progressive groups in a bid to discredit the Chamber’s perceived political opponents.

Moreover, the White House’s disclosure rule threatens the entire existence of the Chamber. This is because the Chamber only exists to hide the identity of corporations seeking to fight nasty political battles without having their name or brand exposed. As the Wall Street Journal noted, the Chamber’s “most striking innovation has been to offer individual companies and industries the chance to use the chamber as a means of anonymously pursuing their own political ends.” The Chamber’s members include defense contractors, bailed out banks, and other donors likely to be affected by the government contractor campaign disclosure rule.

Questions about the legality of the Chamber’s own campaign contributors linger. Last year, we broke the story that the Chamber actively solicited dozens of donations from foreign corporations from India, Bahrain, and other countries. The money, according to documents we unearthed, were deposited in the same legal entity the Chamber later used to pay for political attack ads, mostly against Democrats. The Chamber admitted to the direct foreign donations, but never proved that the money was properly segregated from domestic money. The Federal Election Commission did nothing to look into the matter.

Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) last night opened a “fiscal session” of the Louisiana legislature with an address on the state’s finances and how to approach the $1.6 billion hole in its budget. During the speech, Jindal vowed to veto any tax increases, saying, “Tax increases kill jobs. Tax increases kill opportunities. Tax increases hurt economic development. Tax increases hurt our ability to attract new businesses into Louisiana.”

But as the Advocate noted, “the only real tax hike proposed thus far filed is an increase in the state tobacco tax”:

House Bill 63 by state Rep. Harold Ritchie would increase the 36-cent state sales tax on a pack of cigarettes by 70 cents. The state’s tobacco tax is among the lowest in the nation.

In the past, Jindal has explicitly voiced opposition to raising the cigarette tax, even though Louisiana’s cigarette tax is the second lowest in the country, after Virginia. According to the Louisiana Budget Project, the proposed increase in the cigarette tax would raise about $200 million, while also lowering health care costs. It would also provide almost twice the savings of Jindal’s proposal to raise tuition and fees for Louisiana’s college students:

Tucked in the pages of the $24.9 billion spending plan are provisions for spending more than $98 million that Jindal hopes the state’s colleges will get through tuition hikes on students. Separate legislation would need to be passed to enact the cost increases…The increases would come on top of increased costs for students already set to take effect this fall and more increases for at least four additional years, under legislation passed last year.

In the last two years, Louisiana has cut $315 million from higher education, even as it charged students more for tuition.

Louisiana’s current tax code is a mess, with 441 different exemptions that cost the state $7 billion per year, several times the size of its current budget shortfall. One exemption alone — allowing residents to deduct the amount they paid in federal taxes from their state tax bill — costs the state $643 million per year while overwhelmingly aiding the richest Louisianians. But Jindal has ruled tax increases off the table, deciding that the more prudent course is to force students to cover the cost of the state’s budget woes.

For several days, the midwest and southern U.S. have been pounded by deadly storms, which have brought tornadoes and widespread flooding. Today, a levee in Poplar Bluffs, Missouri, failed in at least four locations, which is “expected to send flood waters from the Black River racing into a populated but rural area of Butler County.” It is currently unclear how many people will be affected by the flooding, but the threat of the levee failing at another location prompted the evacuation of 1,000 people.

The levee’s failure is a tragic reminder of the sorry state of America’s infrastructure. This particular levee failed a federal inspection in 2008, receiving an “unacceptable” rating from the U.S. Army Corps. of Engineers. In the U.S. patchwork levee system, many local communities are responsible for levee upkeep, and this particular community couldn’t afford the cost.

According to the Army Corps of Engineers, nearly ten percent of the levees in the country are expected to fail during a flood event. The Civil Corps. of Engineers gave the U.S. levee system a D- grade in 2009, and estimated that it would take a $50 billion investment to get those levees into adequate shape:

During the past 50 years there has been tremendous development on lands protected by levees. Coupled with the fact that many levees have not been well maintained, this burgeoning growth has put people and infrastructure at risk—the perceived safety provided by levees has inadvertently increased flood risks by attracting development to the floodplain. Continued population growth and economic development behind levees is considered by many to be the dominant factor in the national flood risk equation, outpacing the effects of increased chance of flood occurrence and the degradation of levee condition.

Projected federal spending on levees in the next five years is expected to be just $1.13 billion, leaving a $48.87 billion shortfall in needed funding. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “there are 881 counties — or 28 percent of all counties in the United States — that contain levees or other kinds of flood control and protection systems.” More than half of the U.S. population resides in those counties.

Overall, the U.S. has about $2.2 trillion in unaddressed infrastructure needs. The Congressional Progressive Caucus budget that was released earlier this month includes $30 billion “as start-up costs for a national infrastructure bank that would leverage private financing to help rebuild America’s public capital stock,” and budgets for $1.2 trillion in public investment over the next five years.

Earlier this year, Sens. Bob Corker (R-TN) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) released a bill called the CAP act, which would prevent the government from spending more than 20.6 percent of GDP in any given year (unless the cap is waived by a supermajority vote in Congress). As I laid out at the time, actually adhering to this cap would require huge cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and would keep federal spending below where it was during the Reagan administration, even though there are now tens of millions more seniors reliant on Social Security and Medicare than there were in the 1980′s.

Today, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) announced his support for the CAP act, but at the same time said that he wants to protect Social Security and Medicare:

“Today, I will be announcing my support for two proposals that I believe provide a good starting point and framework from which we can move forward,” he will say, according to excerpts released by his office. “But let me be also clear — one of my top priorities will be to make sure that whatever final debt fix emerges, it will keep our promises to our seniors by protecting Social Security and Medicare. I believe we can do this and cut our debt and deficits over time.”

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, here’s the effect of the CAP act on Social Security and Medicare:

In dollar terms, mandatory programs would be cut by nearly $630 billion in 2021. Social Security would be cut by $237 billion, Medicare by $161 billion, and Medicaid by $105 billion. As noted earlier, from 2013 through 2021, the cumulative cuts would total about $1.3 trillion in Social Security, $856 billion in Medicare, and $547 billion in Medicaid. If, instead of following the Corker-McCaskill formula for automatic cuts, all programs were cut by the same percentage, then all programs would be cut 14 percent in 2021 — or one of every seven dollars. Over the 2013-2021 period, the cuts would total $904 billion in Social Security, $602 billion in Medicare, and $386 billion in Medicaid.

As the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein put it, the CAP act is “arguably the most radically conservative reform that could be made to the federal budget. More extreme, by far, than Paul Ryan’s plan.” Yet, lawmakers think that they can enact it while simultaneously protecting the largest, most important federal programs. Corker announced yesterday that he wants to attach the CAP act to legislation that would raise the nation’s debt ceiling.

In February, while attending the Tea Party Patriot Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, I came across the grand opening of a new front group called “Dodd Frank Exposed.” Two staffers for the new group were eagerly shaking hands of Tea Party activists while asking them to fill out a survey about their perception of the Dodd Frank Wall Street reform law passed last year.

On a television set up at the booth, a video played on loop claiming Wall Street reform is an “unconstitutional takeover of the U.S. economy.” The video, set to scary attack ad music, argued that Tea Party activists should be as angry at financial reform as they were against President Obama’s health reforms:

NARRATOR: From the same people who brought you Obamacare comes a controversial sequal: Dodd Frank. Last year, President Obama and the Democrat-run Congress rushed through the sweeping overhaul of healthcare amounting to the unconstitutional power grab followed quickly by Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform And Consumer Protection Act. Just like Obamacare it created a massive, unconstitutional regulatory bureaucracy. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a runaway regulatory machine completely unaccountable to the president, the Congress, and the courts.

Watch it:

I spoke briefly to a young staffer for the group, who told me that the entire law had to be repealed. “All of it?” I asked. “Anything to stop the bleeding,” she replied. According to the survey results posted on the Dodd Frank Exposed website, Tea Party Patriots by a wide margin agreed: repeal the financial reform law.

Who is behind Dodd Frank Exposed? Although the organization is ostensibly hosted by the “Judicial Crisis Network” — a group that has no actual registration or office — Dodd Frank Exposed is actually run by two veteran astroturf lobbyists, Gary Marx and Robert Bork Jr. Marx is a vice president at Ralph Reed’s lobbying firm Century Strategies. Bork runs his own public relations company called the Bork Communication Group.

Bork, the son of famed Reagan Supreme Court nominee, has made a career coordinating front groups on behalf of corporations facing negative scrutiny. In a memo to an association for corporate attorneys, Bork explained that he improves the perception of his corporate clients by using right-wing bloggers and nonprofits to drape an ideological cover over abuses related to environmental crimes or defective consumer products: Read more

President Obama last week announced a task force that will “investigate to see if fraud or manipulation in oil markets is behind the spike in gasoline prices,” which has significantly cleared $4 per gallon in several parts of the country. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) has also raised the notion of a grand jury investigation into oil market speculation.

According to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the government’s commodity markets watchdog — speculative positions in energy are currently at an all-time high and several analysts (including those at Goldman Sachs) have concluded that speculation is pushing up gas prices. Thanks to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that was signed by President Obama in July 2010, the CFTC is allowed to set “position limits” on such speculation, but the final regulations won’t be implemented until early 2012.

But the CFTC could have gotten started on its rulemaking two years earlier were it not for Senate Republicans. In July 2008, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill directing the CFTC to limit speculation in the oil market. However, Senate Republicans filibustered the bill in the Senate, preventing it from ever coming up for a final vote:

Senate Republicans on Friday blocked a vote on legislation to rein in speculation in the energy markets, instead calling for energy votes that would expand domestic petroleum production and more nuclear power development. Democrats, in a 50-43 vote, failed to gain the 60 votes needed to bring the speculation bill forward for consideration on the Senate floor.

Amongst Republicans, only Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Susan Collins (R-ME) voted for the legislation (while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) voted against it as a procedural matter, allowing him to bring the bill up for consideration later). At the time, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that “we don’t have a problem with taking a look at speculation,” but that the GOP would refuse to move forward unless the bill included opening up more federal land for drilling (which would have a negligible effect on gas prices).

Having the CFTC begin in July 2008 the work that it began last July would have brought limits on speculation online this summer, instead of next, if the CFTC were working on the same timetable it is now. Technically, Dodd-Frank called for speculation limits to be in place three months ago, but the CFTC missed its deadline, in part due to conservative opposition to the limits.

Since House Republicans passed House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) radical 2012 budget, several potential Republican presidential contenders for 2012 have been asked whether they are on board with Ryan’s plan to dismantle Medicare and Medicaid while cutting taxes for the richest Americans (and likely increasing them on the middle class).

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich distanced himself from Ryan’s plans for Medicare, while former governor Mitt Romney said he and Ryan “are on the same page.” Former governor Tim Pawlenty refused to get into the details, but congratulated Ryan for “offering real leadership.”

In the Washington Post today, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels (R) — another potential 2012 candidate — offered unabashed praise for the Ryan budget, calling its destruction of Medicare “exactly the right direction to head“:

In the debate between Ryan and Obama, Daniels knows where he stands. He called Ryan’s proposal for ending Medicare’s defined-benefit structure “exactly the right direction to head,” though he says he is open to other serious alternatives. Asked about Ryan’s proposal to convert Medicaid into a block grant with full flexibility for states, he replied, “Bring it on.” He says that means testing should be part of any solution to restructuring Social Security and Medicare.

The Ryan budget would turn Medicare into a privatized voucher system, and according to the Congressional Budget Office would effectively double the amount that seniors pay for health care. Ryan’s plan for Medicaid, meanwhile, would force states to limit benefits and cut many people off from the program entirely. It’s worth remembering that two-thirds of Medicaid beneficiaries are seniors or people with disabilities.

Aside from his affinity for the Ryan budget, Daniels also supports changes to Social Security (which the Ryan budget does not include), and has called for raising the retirement age, which is a highly regressive change. Daniels’ justification for wanting to raise the retirement age is that younger people may someday live to more than 100 years of age.