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Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil and Gas Drilling for First Time; That is Not a Misprint
Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil and Gas Drilling for First Time; That is Not a Misprint
By Dave Lefcourt | OpEd News
Just because you're smarter, more erudite and articulate than "Dubya" if your policies are essentially unchanged from his, that is not "change", it is just new "packaging" of the same damaged goods.
Obama must be calculating that his "constituency" has nowhere else to go, believing they certainly won't embrace Republicans (or the "tea baggers") so he feels he can do as he pleases and embrace right wing ideas like increased offshore drilling and nobody on the left will notice or just ignore it.
Americans have to wake up (and go beyond the rants of the screaming wack jobs on the right). We're at the 11th hour and the clock is ticking. Our two party system is dysfunctional and broken and there is little difference between them. The people are being stiffed as neither party acts in its interests. Both parties are beholden to their corporate backers and our office holders are mostly sycophants and dutiful water carriers doing their bidding.
And that includes the current occupant in the White House.
The headline read, "Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil Drilling for First Time"[1]
After a stunned double take (and hardly believing what one was reading ), there it was, Obama is going to "open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time."[2]
George W. (oops!), Barack Obama is going to do EXACTLY what his predecessor vowed to do!
That it was (and is) completely unnecessary and will do nothing to seriously reduce our dependence on foreign oil or make us any closer to reaching energy independence apparently was lost on the "current occupant" in the White House. Read more.
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May as well get the ball rolling. He is showing his true bought-and-paid-for-politician self as I, personally, knew he would before the election. "W" lives!
Florida should come to expect the same kind of oily experience found along the Texas coastline. We all think of the Exxon Valdez, when seeing oil littered on the coastlines of our pristine environment, but there are many examples along the Texas coastline that occur and offer glimpse of what it will be like on your beaches if this continued irresponsible drilling in our local water ways.
As a kid, I remember always getting this tar on me, and inside mom's car. We were never told where this stuff came from, but it was always present somewhere along the beach. Not until recently, was I am to be on a plane flying over the nearby Gulf of Mexico, what I saw was utter surprise. This large body of water is littered with oil derricks, and boats serving them; the sheer quantity. Looking back now, it is no wonder there was so much pollution along the beaches that I grew with, fishing with my grandparents in the surf. It is a shame, these beaches had names like Crystal Beach, implying that there was a day that the area was spectacular. Now, it is hit or miss with globs of tar getting between your toes as you walk down the beach, or play in the sand. So watch out Florida, protect your coastlines; impeach your representatives; and train your children to replace, and repel these irresponsible policy makers we call public servants. Our coastlines are the canary in the coal mine; when they get sick, so do we.
January 5, 2000
18-Month Investigation
Today we released the results of an 18-month investigation of the major
presidential candidates in the 2000 election with a particular focus on
their personal and campaign ties to various economic interests with
business before the government. The Buying of the President 2000
published by Avon, has been produced by 24 researchers, writers and
editors at the Center for Public Integrity. The team gathered and
analyzed tens of thousands of pages of government data and interviewed
hundreds of people. As in our 1996 book, we prepared top-ten career
patrons lists for every one of the major presidential candidates. These
are the top donors to each candidate throughout their political
careers. But for the first time, we also include lengthy chapters about
the major political parties and their top 50 patrons since 1991.
What did we find?
Each of the leading presidential candidates in the 2000 election has
done public policy favors for his campaign contributors. Every major
White House contender who has held past elective office has career
patrons or long-time financial sponsors who have underwritten his
political career. And every major aspirant has used his government
position to help those patrons.
This mutually beneficial relationship between a politician and his
patrons is seldom acknowledged or discussed publicly. Indeed, none of
the current presidential candidates would agree to be interviewed for
The Buying of the President 2000. Yet these relationships between
candidates and their sponsors can reveal a more accurate picture of the
practical logistics and accommodations of achieving power in today's
electoral process. It is a vision that extends beyond common political
rhetoric.
For example, in the Democratic Party, Vice President Al Gore has a
long-time relationship with Occidental Petroleum that has been
enormously beneficial to the company. Occidental's late chairman, the
controversial Armand Hammer, liked to say that he had Gore's father,
Senator Albert Gore, Senior, quote, "in my back pocket", unquote. When
the elder Gore left the Senate in 1970, Hammer hired him for $500,000 a
year. Personally and professionally the vice president has profited
from Occidental largess. To this day he still draws $20,000 a year from
a land deal in Tennessee brokered between his father and Hammer. The
total amount is more than $300,000. The personal relationship between
young Gore and Hammer was very close throughout the 1980's, including
trips on Hammer's private jet and constant campaign contributions.
For most of the 20th century, oil companies have tried unsuccessfully
to obtain control of two oil fields owned and operated by the federal
government: the Teapot Dome field in Casper, Wyoming, and the Elk Hills
field in Bakersfield, California. Despite his public reputation as a
staunch environmentalist, Gore recommended that the president approve
giving oil companies access to this publicly owned land. It is land
that the U.S. Navy has held as emergency reserves since 1912. In
October, 1997, the Energy Department announced that the government
would sell 47,000 acres of the Elk Hills reserve to Occidental.
Largest Privatization in U.S. history
It was the largest privatization of federal property in U.S. history,
one that tripled Occidental's U.S. oil reserves overnight. Although the
Energy Department was required to assess the likely environmental
consequences of the proposed sale, it didn't. Instead it hired a
private company, ICF Kaiser International, Incorporated, to complete
the assessment. The general chairman of Gore's presidential campaign,
Tony Coelho, sat on the board of directors.
The very same day the Elk Hills sale was announced, Gore delivered a
speech to the White House Conference on Climate Change on the
"terrifying prospect" of global warming, a problem he blamed on the
unchecked use of fossil fuels such as oil. He said, quoting, "If we
ignore the scientific warnings and continue stubbornly on our current
course, we better begin to prepare what we would like to say to our
children and grandchildren. They might fairly ask, if you knew all
that, why didn't you do something about it?"
Texas Governor George W. Bush, as we all know, has shattered all
previous fund raising standards for presidential candidates. In the
first four months of his campaign, he took in $37 million, or $310,748
a day. He was able to accomplish this, in part, by inheriting his
father's national network of financial supporters, going back more than
a quarter century.