Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Labels: drill here drill now, Newt Gingrich, offshore drilling, stupid people, the party of Big Oil

(WaPo Capitol Briefing) On Tuesday, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) issued a release commending McCain for his call [for the House to come back into session and vote to drill, drill, DRILL...!], trashing Barack Obama and adding: "While Democrats left town for a month-long break, House Republicans have stayed behind and continued to demand a vote on the American Energy Act, which will help lower energy prices and liberate America from its dependence on foreign oil."

Boehner was around for the start of the fake House session Friday but then left town and hasn't been back since. Even former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) showed up today to rally with his GOP comrades, but the current party leader was nowhere to be seen.

So where is the Boehner?

... His office says he's been in Ohio raising money for his political action committee, the Freedom Project, and that he should be back in D.C. later this week. He's also doing 18 events in August for GOP candidates across the country.

But Boehner also has found time to squeeze in a couple rounds of golf. Scores reported by Boehner himself to a United States Golf Association site show that he posted an 85 sometime this week at his home course, Wetherington Golf & Country Club in West Chester, Ohio. Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said he wasn't exactly sure of the details of Boehner's 18 holes, but that he felt confident that "if he did play at home, it was over the weekend."

And The Sleuth passes along a tip that Boehner was spotted yesterday at the lovely Muirfield Village Golf Club in Dublin, Ohio. Muirfield was designed by Jack Nicklaus and is the home of the Golden Bear's annual memorial tournament. Here's a nice shot of Boehner and Nicklaus together at the 2005 tournament.

Um...

As for McCain, it would be a big deal indeed if Congress came back into session for an energy vote and the Arizonan actually showed up. This Friday will mark the four-month anniversary of the last time McCain actually cast a vote in the Senate. Since April 8, he's missed 103 consecutive floor votes, including several on energy-related issues. That's a remarkable streak, even for a presidential candidate. McCain is like the anti-Cal Ripken.

Labels: golf, House of Representatives, John Boehner, Republicans, the party of Big Oil

American Solutions for Winning the Future is a new, non-partisan organization built around three goals: to defend America and our allies abroad and defeat our enemies, to strengthen and revitalize America’s core values, and to move government into the 21st Century. The General Chairman is former Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Our mission is to become the leading grassroots movement to recruit, educate, and empower citizen activists and elected officials to develop solutions to transform all levels of government.

... The American people are tired of Red vs. Blue partisan bickering and want to create a Red, White, and Blue country. American Solutions is designed to rise above traditional gridlocked partisanship, to provide real, significant solutions to the most important issues facing our country. Yet, the current political governmental system has four major flaws which block it from developing the kind of solutions we need.

First, it is dominated by daily headlines, a focus on the negative, fights rather than discussions, and sound bites and commercials so short they can't communicate anything complex or positive.

Second, the old system simply does not have the ideas and techniques for being successful. Today's politicians are trapped in old ideas, old interest groups, and old bureaucracies that simply do not have the tools for solving America's problems.

Third, consultants dominate the current system, and they are essentially technicians with very limited knowledge of fundamental issues and historic lessons. So they tend to reduce the system to clever commercials and fancy fundraising gimmicks.

Fourth, the current system focuses on the Oval Office, yet there are 513,000 elected officials in America, from school board to city council to county commission to state legislature. Real solutions have to move through all these offices, not merely the White House.

I just came back from the Capitol, where Moveon volunteers and conservative movement group staffers were holding competing rallies around oil leasing (the full flickr set is here). Patrick Ruffini, one of the smartest consultants on the right, thinks this marks a turning point for the right. For the first time, he says, Moveon has mobilizes against "the House Republicans and the rightosphere".

The problem with this formulation is that the people that I spoke from Moveon came because they were volunteers, whereas the people from the pro-drilling groups were paid staffers from groups like the National Taxpayers Union and Dick Armey's FreedomWorks. I spent some time arguing with a nice young man from FreedomWorks about oil companies (though I'll spare you the video), and he was a law student who did economic policy for the group. These two groups are by and large funded by large companies, and they were formed by recognized conservative movement elites who came to power in the 1980s.

In fact, the entire drill drill drill campaign originated with Newt Gingrich, hardly the kind of leadership you'd expect from a real grassroots uprising. His group, American Solutions for Winning the Future, got a large grant from Peabody Coal at about the same time this campaign started, and is backed by the same crew of billionaires helping Freedom's Watch. Contrast this to Moveon, which was founded by Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, or Dailykos, led by Markos Moulitsas-Zuniga, or even Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie of the New Right in the 1970s. These leaders came from the grassroots, and elevated a previously unorganized constituency into a powerful new voice. The Drill Drill Drill campaign has simply helped an existing powerful voice - the oil lobby - keep winning, the way it did earlier this year when it killed the Energy Bill in the Senate (with the help of John McCain and Mary Landrieu).

Now, this is not to say that the Drill, Drill, Drill campaign isn't popular. It is. But it is not some movement breakthrough on the right; new political movements are not populated entirely with paid staffers, funded by the extraordinarily wealthy winners of a society, and led by old over the hill political leaders. What is actually going on here is that the 1970s conservative movement is still around and still dominant. Right-wing billionaires are still funding Newt Gingrich, who is still dictating our agenda just as he did in the late 1970s to the mid-1990s. Conservative 'populism' in DC is still the same old Brooks Brothers Riot we saw in 2000, ie. paid staffers masquerading as grassroots.

• Thomas A. Saunders III ($200,000)—Saunders is a Trustee of the Heritage Foundation, a think tank devoted to free enterprise, limited government and individual freedom. Exxon Mobil is one of the Foundation’s biggest donors.

• Dan W. Evins ($100,000)—Evins was originally an oil jobber for Shell before starting the Cracker Barrel chain of restaurants.

• Michael G. Berolzheimer ($70,000)—The Berolzheimer Family began California Cedar Products in the 1920’s. CCP now produces Duraflame logs which are made by mixing saw dust with petroleum byproducts.

• Dave K. Rensin ($50,000)—Rensin is a software engineer for Reality Mobile, LLC. Reality Vision, a product of Reality Mobil, is currently being marketed to numerous industries including oil and gas production and refinement, as well as companies specializing in pipeline maintenance.

• Morton Fleischer ($25,000)—Fleischer is the Co-founder and Chairman of Spirit Finance. Fleisher is also a board member for Flying J, Inc., a chain of highway rest stops and gas stations. Fleisher also founded Franchise Finance Corporation of America which provided $15 million in capital for the merger of Miltenberger Oil Company and Jump Oil in 1999.

• Donald M. Wilkinson ($25,000)—Wilkinson is the Chairman and CIO of Wilkinson O’Grady & Co., the 15th largest investment company in the United States. They invest in numerous companies including National Oilwell Varco, Imperial Oil, Suncor Energy, EOG Resources, Schlumberger, Transocean, BHP Billiton, Apache Corporation, and XTO Energy.

• Edmund N. Carpenter II ($10,400)—Carpenter is now a retired attorney and past president of the Delaware State Bar Association. In 1977, he represented Texaco in a case involving a crash with the Texaco Caribbean and the Paracas, a Peruvian vessel.

• Clark Wamberg, LLC ($10,000)—Clark Wamberg, LLC is a consulting firm comprised of many different small businesses. One of these businesses is Federal Policy Group. In the first half of 2007, Federal Policy Group was paid $120,000 by Hess petroleum to lobby the federal government. Other clients of Federal Policy Group include GE and Teco Energy.

• Jack Caveney ($10,000)—Caveney works for Panduit, a provider of network and electrical solutions to a variety of markets including the oil, gas, and petrochemical market. Panduit strives to find solutions to problems with offshore platforms, refineries, and floating production storage-offloading (FPSO).

• Lewis Lehrman ($10,000)—Lehrman was one of the original investors in George W. Bush’s oil business, Arbusto Energy.

• Foam Fabricators, Inc. ($5,000)—Foam Fabricators, Inc., a state-of-the-art molding and fabricating plant, provides a variety of industries with economical and efficient shape molded and fabricated foam products, packaging and components. These products are made from expanded polystyrene manufactured primarily from petroleum.

• William T. Wolf ($4,000)—Wolf is employed by Allied Capital. In 2003, Allied Capital invested $18.4 million into Geotrace Technologies--a leading provider of subsurface imaging solutions and sophisticated reservoir analysis for the oil and gas industry worldwide.

• Kathleen Huff ($2,500)—Huff is employed by the Navteq Corporation. Navteq’s customers include Statoil, one of Scandinavia’s leading suppliers of fuel oil and gasoline.

Other Interesting Finds

• Sheldon Adelson ($4,597,632)—Adelson, of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, is the founder of Freedom’s Watch, a right-wing lobbying group which advocates to continue the war in Iraq and many other mainstream conservative ideas. [More on Sheldon and other bigwig donors from ThinkProgress.)

• Terry J. Kohler ($50,200)—Kohler, of Windway Capital, is a contributor to GOPAC, Gingrich’s PAC.

• Robert W. Johnson IV ($50,000)—Johnson is the owner of the New York Jets and big time Bush supporter. [Sidebar: He's the Johnson of the family that founded Johnson & Johnson]

• Stanley Gaines ($25,000)—Gaines is on the Board of International Coal Group, Inc.

• Frederick C. Palmer ($25,000)—Palmer is the Vice President of Government Relations at Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private sector coal company. Palmer is responsible for advancing state and federal policies related to the production and use of coal.

• Howard H. Callaway ($10,000)—Callaway was the Chairman of GOPAC from 1987-1993.

• Mel Sembler ($10,000)—Sembler was the former Ambassador to Italy and a founding donor for Freedom’s Watch. He also helped to finance the 2000 Florida recount battle between Bush and Gore.

• Tucker Anderson ($10,000)—Anderson is on the GOPAC Board.

• Frederic V. Malek ($5,000)—Malek, of Thayer Capital Partners was co-owner of the Texas Rangers with President Bush.

• Melvyn J. Estrin ($5,000)—Estrin serves on the Board of Directors of the Washington Gas & Light Company. He is also the director of WGL Holdings, Inc., a public utility holding company serving the D.C. metropolitan region.

In most industries, when the main component (crude oil) of a product (gasoline) skyrockets in price, those higher costs eat into profit margins. But not the oil industry because ExxonMobil and the other major oil companies operate as a type of monopoly, with massive oil production, refining and retail marketing operations.

It isn't just Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah who gets rich when a barrel of oil hovers at $60/barrel; it's ExxonMobil and the other oil companies, since collectively the five largest oil companies produce 10 million barrels of oil a day - more than Saudi Arabia's 9 million barrels of oil a day. And much of the oil ExxonMobil et al is producing is coming from land owned by U.S. taxpayers (more than one-third of the oil and natural gas America produces every day comes from federal land). It only costs a company like ExxonMobil about $10 to produce a barrel of oil, but they're selling it to Americans for close to $60/barrel - a huge windfall profit.

The oil companies' windfall profits don't end there. Because the largest five oil companies also own half of America's oil refining capacity, they're more easily able to manipulate markets. The Federal Trade Commission confirmed this when it investigated the industry in 2001 and concluded that U.S. oil companies "withheld or delayed shipping additional supply in the face of a price spike" and that one oil company executive "made clear that he would rather sell less gasoline and earn a higher margin on each gallon sold than sell more gasoline and earn a lower margin. Another employee of this firm raised concerns about oversupplying the market and thereby reducing the high market prices."

The proof of these uncompetitive markets stemming from recent mergers is in the numbers. As late as 1999, U.S. oil companies made 22.8 cents for every gallon of gasoline they refined. By the summer of 2005, they made 99 cents on every gallon.

(July 17) Today, Congressman Wexler voted for the Drill Act, which would bring 10.6 billion barrels of oil immediately to American consumers by requiring oil companies to being producing oil from acres of land already leased. The legislation would have allowed other companies to take over these leases if the oil company currently in possession failed to begin oil production.

The Drill Act would have also required the Administration to oversee the construction of a pipeline from these Alaskan reserves for the transport of oil and gas to the lower 48 states. The pipeline project would have created an estimated 10,000 new jobs. In addition, the legislation banned the export of this American-made energy, reserving resources for here at home. Unfortunately, House Republicans blocked the Drill Act, which required a two-thirds vote of support in order to pass."Oil companies are actively holding 10.6 billion barrels of oil hostage from the American people and this legislation would have required them to begin production immediately,” said Congressman Wexler. “While House Republicans claim they want to increase domestic supply of oil and gas to the market, by blocking this legislation they took a hard stand against the development of our domestic resources.

Labels: Big Oil, Newt Gingrich, offshore drilling, Republicans, right wingers, the party of Big Oil