25 April 2006 - 2:12pm
Bush fights gas prices with smoke and monoxide
Just to make sure he hasn't done gone grown a conscience by announcing an effort to look into possible price gouging by the multinational oil companies, President Bush has called for a retreat from clean air:
WASHINGTON - President Bush on Tuesday ordered a temporary suspension of environmental rules for gasoline, making it easier for refiners to meet demand and possibly dampen prices at the pump.
Let our children choke and chug down toxic drinking water.
...New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez proposed a 60-day suspension of the gasoline tax, saying the money could be recovered by repealing tax breaks for energy companies. He scoffed at Bush's call to curb tax breaks for the oil companies.
"What we're left wondering today is why it took five years" for Bush to support tax increases on the energy industry, Menendez said.
Bush, in his speech, urged Congress to revoke about $2 billion in tax breaks over 10 years that Congress approved and he signed into law to encourage exploration. "Taxpayers don't need to be paying for certain of these expenses on behalf of the energy companies," Bush said.
He also urged lawmakers to expand tax breaks for the purchase of fuel-efficient hybrid automobiles.
Just the kind of thing that Bush -- and every Republican since Reagan -- has opposed: tax breaks for alternative energy. In fact, gutting tax breaks for alternative energy was one of the first things Reagan did when he got into the White House.
So what gives now? Could it be -- gasp! -- security? Bush was emphatic:
Mr. Bush alluded to the issue in his speech today, saying for the first time that some countries play on what he termed America's "addiction" to oil, and he said "that reduces our influence" in the world.
Now, 33 years after the first oil crisis and coming up on 5 years since 9/11, Bush and the Republicans finally realize this?
Of course it doesn't help when the mainstream media play along:
Over the longer term, Mr. Bush said he was asking Congress to repeat $2 billion in tax breaks put into last year's energy bill, which he signed, for industry research in new drilling technologies. Those breaks are spread out over 10 years, and they were pushed by the former Republican leader in the House, Tom Delay, who has since resigned.
Yeah. Bush had nothing to do with that big energy corporate giveaway. Right. Sell us something else, guys -- maybe a paean to WMD in Iraq.
media girl also blogs at other places.
Similar entries
- Bush: "I'm shocked - SHOCKED! - the oil industry might be rigging gas prices!"
- Now that the Democrats lead Congress, now what?
- Rep. Tom Lantos challenges President Bush's habit of ignoring law
- Let's call it the Pottery Barn rule on the home front
- Bush flops on budget, sets agenda for next president (again)
store
Buy stuff here.
Comments
is a fun hobby, but it won't get anything done since they're not the problem. They have to buy their crude oil on the open market and pay whatever the asking price is, tack on a percentage of the wholesale gasoline price, sell that to the distributor who tacks on their own percentage, then sell that to the gas station who tacks on their own percentage.
If you want gas prices to come down, you need to do two things: restrengthen the dollar so the exchange rate works in your favor for imports; and bomb China back into the Neolithic, since their industrial blossoming of the last decade has swallowed up the "excess" capacity of the crude oil producers.
...but the oil business is not the free market you have been led to believe -- not when you have an oligopoly run by multinational corporations with little fealty to American interests and concerns. It may seem ideal to bring out Adam Smith and von Clausewitz and appeal to free markets and imperialist notions of entitlement as answers to our predicament, but what you suggest won't do anything but put the economy at risk by increasing the trade deficit -- or tossing the global market into a war-ridden dark ages.
The industry has let us down by operating at the edge of catastrophe in terms of refining capacity. But they haven't let themselves down. Just look at their profit reports and executive pay. The men in suits certainly take good care of themselves.
Meanwhile the Republicans have let us down by torpedoing any and all efforts to develop alternative energy. From Reagan on, if not before, they've been so much in the pockets of Big Oil that that, under their rule, we've cut welfare for the poor in favor of welfare for the multinationals. Bush's band-aid solutions now don't mean much, because we've already blown what had been growing budget surpluses on a war of choice, stupidly planned, that has left us weaker militarily and at odds with much of the world when, not five years ago, people everywhere were saying, "We're all Americans."
Spare me the tears for the oil companies. They're already laughing all the way to the Cayman Islands.
I said it was open, to whoever has the biggest wad of cash.
My "fuck-the-world" proposals would do exactly that, and it's approximately what Alan Greenspan did to backburn the 'Asian flu' in 1997 (which not coincidentally brought us historically cheap gas for a year or so).
It's not the Republicans' job (nor the Democrats) to promote "alternative" energy (whatever that alternative happens to be). Whenever petroleum gets to be more expensive than other energy sources, we'll start using those other sources instead. It's all out there, just waiting for the monetary balance to shift in its favor. Patience, and the desire for efficiency, will settle these things.
...so that we could sit back and say it's not the job of our political leaders to lead.