This expose is long but worth reading. It should make you angry and sad.
Take the Keystone XL pipeline, for instance. Suddenly, last year Republicans all agreed that this pipeline just had to be built for the sake of U.S. jobs and "energy independence." But would they have been so excited if their GOP Congressional puppet masters had told them that it was meant to pipe Canadian oil to a Saudi refinery to sell on the world market? The Saudi-backed American Petroleum Institute (API) was mum on those details when it aired pro-pipeline TV ads and attacked unsympathetic Democrats.
Thanks to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, foreign companies like Aramco from Saudi Arabia can influence U.S. public opinion and elections, spending undisclosed $ millions. "We gotta keep our corporate logo out of the bull's-eye," explained one GOP lobbyist. Don't forget the country's flag.
Thank God (and Dubya) for free -- and very secret -- speech!
Now we all know MMGW isn't real, and even if it is real it's only GW, not man-made, and all those climate scientists at dozens of universities and agencies are in a global conspiracy to milk research money; meanwhile, the poor oil/coal/gas companies and CO2-belching corporations can't spare their pocket change to fight these powerful nerds, but anyway...
Yeah, right! Spiders!? And pikas!? What the hell is a pika? Who cares? Give us a break, scientists!
The real problem is getting people moving again. And since cash-strapped Americans spend more money on transportation than food, we need to bring back cheap gasoline, damn the CO2. Wait!... Michelle Bachmann to the rescue! If we elect her, she promised to bring gas down to $2 a gallon. She didn't tell us how in the world she'd do it, but who cares? We need answers, not solutions!
What's that you say? This is like Nixon's "secret plan" to end the war? Oh, don't be so skeptical. That is, when it concerns MMGW, be skeptical, be cynical, but when it comes to the bright future of cheap and plentiful fossil fuels -- burn, baby burn!
According to the analysis by de Blasio's office, ExxonMobil, Bank of America, General Electric (GE), Chevron and Boeing had combined profits of $77.16 billion in 2010 but paid $0 in current federal income taxes in 2009. [...] At the same time, these companies gave a combined $7.86 million in political contributions during the 2010 election cycle -- a 7 percent jump over their 2008 political spending.
This is like the flip side of that conservative caveat which says that the day when the citizens of a democracy realize they can vote themselves a trough to feed from, that democracy is dead. Except that hasn't happened yet in any democracy, unless you want to argue that "citizens" includes only soldiers and senior citizens. Indeed, America's spending problem is really an old people and guns problem: Defense, Medicare and Social Security.
In fact, in a bought-and-paid-for political representative democracy like ours, this flip side is a much greater danger, since folks on "welfare" either don't vote or can't afford big political contributions.
Namely, that danger is that corporations, realizing they can lobby themselves nearly unlimited tax breaks, incentives, and subsidies from the public trough that only their shareholders' heirs will have to pay for partially while current shareholders enjoy the benefits completely, and further realizing that they can spread the cost of all their economic externalities and fuck-ups to you and me and perpetuity (Exhibit A: Wall Street bailouts. Exhibit B: BP oil spill) -- anywhere but to their income statements -- and in return throw back a pittance of the proceeds to politicians' campaigns and families, thereby bankrupt our treasury and pillage our public goods.
See, you can't fool the free market. And the free market says it's just not profitable for Big Oil companies to go after U.S. oil and pay all those darn taxes. If they didn't get approximately $4 billion annually in tax subsidies and credits, well, they just couldn't afford to hire Americans to get at all that hard-to-get oil. They'd pack up and go someplace else. Because, you know, there's oil in abundance everywhere and they're really just doing us a favor by extracting our oil and employing our workers. We should be thanking them!
"Jack N. Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, warns that any cut in subsidies will cost jobs.
"'These companies evaluate costs, risks and opportunities across the globe,' he said. 'So if the U.S. makes changes in the tax code that discourage drilling in gulf waters, they will go elsewhere and take their jobs with them.'"
Oh, no! Wait! Don't go! Um, here, take all your money back, just please keep on drilling and doing us a favor!
Seriously though, how stupid do these guys think we are? The nerve!
Watch this report as Republican Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, describes how VP Cheney deliberately gutted U.S. environmental regulation and installed industry lobbyists and executives in regulatory agencies. For example, Cheney installed Chris Oynes, a 20-year veteran lobbyist for oil industry, as head of the MMS.
Wilkerson says Cheney recruited about 1,600 political operatives to be civil servants in key regulatory positions; and it will take 2 years for the Obama Administration to root them out.
It was classic "agency capture" or "foxes watching the hen house," as they say.
And of course we know that Cheney's ex-employer Halliburton installed the leaky cement cap on the Deep Horizon well.
Said Wilkerson, "We, Republicans, have stripped government of its ability, of its capacity, to do the kinds of things that it should do, that no one else can do, certainly not someone with a profit motive can do."
The other two parts of this interview have fascinating revelations. Although he criticized Cheney and Dubya, Wilkerson did call Cheney one of the best Secretaries of Defense since that post was created.
Like I've said before, if you're looking for a well funded conspiracy, you need look no further. Follow the money.
Just take a look at all these quacky "experts," think tanks, "institutes," and "research centers" making millions from Big Oil and Coal for their "research," which, by the way, they don't do any of.
BTW, the name of the industry-funded organization "FACES of Coal" is the most unintentionally alarming/funny one I've seen in a while.
A February analysis by HSBC Global Research in Hong Kong projects that nearly 40 percent of China's proposed $586 billion stimulus plan—$221 billion over two years—is going toward public investment in renewable energy, low-carbon vehicles, high-speed rail, an advanced electric grid, efficiency improvements, and other water-treatment and pollution controls. This stimulus is on top of historic levels of government spending and private investment in renewable technology, energy efficiency, and low-carbon growth all across China. The upshot: China, according to a recent analysis, is "the largest alternative energy producer in the world in terms of installed generating capacity."
This massive stimulus plan will spend over 3 percent of China's 2008 gross domestic product annually in 2009 and 2010 on green investments—more than six times America's green stimulus spending as a percentage of our respective economies. This is about $12.6 million every hour over the next two years. In the United States, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act invests $112 billion in comparable green priorities over the next two years, about half as much as China, according to HSBC. This represents less than half of one percent of our 2008 gross domestic product.
[By contrast,] in a series of energy bills in 2001, 2003, and 2005, the Bush administration plowed billions of dollars into dirty energy—oil, coal, and nuclear—while neglecting clean renewable energy industries. The 2001 energy bill gave 80 percent of its value to tax breaks for oil, gas, nuclear, and coal companies. The 2003 energy bill, drafted in secret with Vice President Dick Cheney and members of the oil, gas, coal, and electric industries, gave $23.5 billion to dirty energy and loosened environmental regulations. Finally, while the 2005 bill contained a token level of investment in renewable energy, it also provided even more support for dirty energy, offering $27 billion in subsidies for coal, oil, and nuclear energy.
In 2006, according to the most recent data from the Renewable Energy Policy Network, the United States, the world's largest economy, invested less in new capacity for renewable energy than either the EU-25 or China. In fact, according to the most recent data, the entire United States invests less in renewable energy per year than the country of Germany, which boasts less than one-third the population of the United States and an economy less than one-fourth our size.
The imperative for renewable sources of energy, energy efficiency, and green transportation and power infrastructure is clear. And yet, we continue to neglect these priorities while plowing tens of billions of dollars of subsidies into polluting and wildly profitable oil and gas companies that create far fewer jobs and exacerbate global warming.
President Obama's energy plan would eliminate $30 billion in giveaways to oil and gas companies and make polluting energy companies pay for their global warming pollution in order to invest in renewable energy infrastructure and cut taxes for 95 percent of working American families. This is the way to go.
Thanks to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, foreign companies like Aramco from Saudi Arabia can influence U.S. public opinion and elections, spending undisclosed $ millions. 
