Amid falling poll numbers and a bleak economy, Obama decided to pull back on one major new proposed regulation—but only because he didn’t want to take on the political fight at that moment. In September 2011, he ordered EPA administrator Jackson to withdraw the new proposed “ozone rule,” which, according to Republican senator Jim Inhofe, would have destroyed seven million jobs. Jackson was reportedly so furious at Obama’s request that she considered resigning. Sadly, she stayed to hyper-regulate another day.
Obama has been methodically destroying the traditional energy industry as he goes, in order to smash the existing structure and replace it with the kooks’ “green dream” (in which Gore appears on a polar bear, wearing only his Florida recount beard). As Senator James Inhofe put it, “All of this killing of our energy supply is not by accident. It’s on purpose.”
At the same time, Obama launched a broadside against another key part of the U.S. energy sector: the oil and natural gas industry. After the cap and trade bill failed, Obama stated a willingness to approve some limited oil exploration. In March 2010, he announced some half-measures that would allow drilling along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the north coast of Alaska, but he continued to prohibit exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and Bristol Bay. He also indicated that he’d allow large tracts in the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska—nearly 130 million acres—to be eligible for exploration and drilling after extensive studies, which meant they’d be ready for exploration on the twelfth of Never.
Just weeks later, on April 20, 2010, a wellhead blowout occurred on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which was operating on the British Petroleum Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico. The initial explosion killed eleven workers and injured seventeen others, and millions of barrels of crude oil began flowing into the waters. It became the largest accidental oceanic spill in history. And it also became a perfect metaphor for the Obama presidency: an uncontrollable poison spewing into a pristine environment unless mankind could stop it. Meanwhile, as the cloud of petroleum endangered new species, our fearless leader was focused on another animal: a Beatle, in fact. Obama took an entire evening in June 2010 to honor Sir Paul McCartney with the Gershwin Prize while the pop icon serenaded Obama in the White House as the Gulf Coast drowned in black death.
Obama, the supposed Competence Man, was caught flat-footed by the disaster. The administration claimed to be in charge while also insisting that BP take the lead. It was slow to move federal resources such as oil-absorbing booms and sand berms to deal with the leak. It was also slow to coordinate efforts among the impacted states; other Big Oil companies, who had offered equipment, manpower, and expertise; and foreign countries, such as Saudi Arabia, which had also offered technology and information it had developed as a result of spills in that other gulf. Ultimately, some foreign nations, such as Norway, the Netherlands, and Canada, did send ships with skimming and other cleanup capabilities. Meanwhile, Obama blew a gasket of frustration because his usual management style of ordering everyone around—Congress, BP, the media, the American people—wasn’t working this time. “Plug the damn hole!” he snapped.
The BP oil leak did give Obama the ideal pretext to halt permits for offshore drilling. The Interior Department’s permitting review recommended a moratorium and implied that that recommendation had been peer-reviewed by a panel of drilling experts it had consulted during the review. Those experts then went public, saying that in fact they had neither been consulted on the moratorium recommendation nor agreed to it. Interior secretary Ken Salazar went ahead with the moratorium order covering all drilling in depths of 500 feet or more, leading some deepwater drilling companies to file lawsuits against the government.
On June 22, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman issued an injunction and an order that Interior not enforce the moratorium because he found it, in the standard legal term, “arbitrary and capricious.” The department stopped enforcement, until Salazar said publicly that he intended to reimpose the moratorium, and all drilling permits were again halted. Interior appealed Feldman’s injunction to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and in July lost that appeal.
Four days later, the department issued a new moratorium nearly identical to the first. In October, Interior ostensibly lifted the moratorium but no new deepwater drilling permits were issued for months, and subsequent permits were slow-walked. That same month, an Interior Department inspector general’s report showed that the original review had been manipulated to mislead the public. In February 2011, a furious Judge Feldman found Obama’s Interior Department in civil contempt for violating his original order dissolving the administration’s offshore drilling moratorium—and the mainstream media all but ignored the story. They also largely ignored the fact that many Gulf-state Democrats like Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu opposed the moratorium. In Louisiana alone, more than 320,000 folks depend on the oil and gas industry for work. At least ten oil rigs pulled up stakes from the Gulf and moved to more lucrative areas off the coasts of South America and Africa, costing even more jobs. In 2011, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform reported that Obama’s systematic blocking of domestic energy production in the Gulf has led to the loss of over $9 billion in capital investment in 2011 alone and tens of thousands of jobs.
In the spring of 2011, Obama’s EPA went a step further and forced Shell Oil to shut down its massive exploration project in the Arctic Ocean. Shell had spent five years and $4 billion ($2.2 billion in leases alone to the federal government) to develop the area for domestic drilling. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there are 27 billion barrels of oil in the Arctic Ocean, which Obama’s EPA put off-limits. I hope the Russians enjoy!
In late 2009 the Export-Import Bank approved a $2 billion loan to Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of a huge offshore discovery near Rio de Janeiro. One of Petrobras’s key investors? Kook billionaire and Obama supporter George Soros. It turns out that Obama loves oil exploration and drilling in other countries, just not here at home, where it could create American jobs and lower gas prices.
The capstone to Obama’s assault on the oil and gas industry came in late 2011 when his administration refused to grant permission to TransCanada to build the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have put tens of thousands of Americans to work immediately and facilitated the domestic movement of crude from a central storage hub in Oklahoma to large refineries on the Gulf Coast. Once Obama’s decision was made public, the company fled into the arms of the Chinese, to whom they will sell the oil and who will export it in tankers. Without the pipeline extension, our own oil imports will necessarily increase, which means more price volatility, more dependency, more tankers coming into U.S. waters, and the likelihood of a greater environmental impact because pipelines are the most efficient and cleanest way to transport big volumes of oil.
Big Oil is, of course, one of the ol’ reliable bogeymen for the leftists, who, when they’re not blocking exploration, drilling, and pipelines, seek to stick it to the major oil companies through higher taxes while undermining their entire industry. The reality is that the oil and gas industry paid more taxes in 2010 than any other industry. It pays an effective tax rate of 41.1 percent, compared with 26.5 percent for the rest of the Standard & Poor’s Industrials. Furthermore, the “subsidies for Big Oil” about which the Left is always screaming aren’t subsidies at all. Some of the things the Left incorrectly terms “subsidies” for Big Oil include the ability to recover some exploration and manufacturing costs; Big Oil can recoup some of those costs but at a lower rate than most other eligible companies. There are other deductions from which Big Oil is blocked altogether, such as the percentage depletion deduction.
The federal government does, in fact, issue actual subsidies to things like ethanol, solar and wind energy projects (hello, Solyndra), and other wasteful items and programs as a way to take care of political constituencies and for
ideological reasons. These subsidies generally support industries that probably could not survive in the open market. They should be eliminated. But to suggest that Big Oil is somehow receiving special treatment for using tax credits available to them—the way every other industry does—is dishonest.
For the leftists, their adventures in remaking the energy sector are driven by two main goals. The first is to prop up “alternative energies” out of a desire to move the country toward “clean energy” and away from foreign dependency. These good intentions are shared by many conservatives and others, but the leftists’ full-frontal assault on our domestic energy producers as well as their economic engineering in energy warps the noble mission of getting us to cleaner domestic production.
The other part of the Left’s mission is more sinister. It’s to redistribute wealth—in this case, profits from Big Oil—and plow it into those alternative energies, which can only meet a tiny fraction of the energy demand in America. But the kooks want their money and they’ll whip the market into submission to get it—even if it means much higher gas prices.
The irony is that the Left loves accusing the Right of wanting to take America backward. Yet they spend so much of their time focused on crushing the industries that are responsible for our own Industrial Revolution. The leftist obsession with windmills and waterwheels is a surefire way to bring America back to the days of Little House on the Prairie. Ask yourself: Would the landing craft on D-day have worked without fossil fuels? Would Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong have been able to plant the American flag on the moon without fossil fuels? Would the police, firefighters, and rescue workers on 9/11 have been able to get to the scene and help the victims without fossil fuels?
Obama knows perfectly well how a properly regulated free market works. He just rejects it. He actually wants you to believe that being unemployed and getting paid for even more months to sit on your ass are boons to the American economy. The more chaos in the economy, the more customers the leftists have for all of their beloved redistributionist programs. Under their direction, the old Depression-era line, “Brother, can you spare a dime?” has now become, “Uncle Sam, cough up a bigger unemployment/food stamp/Medicare/Medicaid payment!” As a practical matter, then, Obama and the kooks need the economy down, unemployment up, and growth weak to keep their redistributionist gravy train rolling.
The leftists also knew they couldn’t just rely on the beauty of their neo-socialist ideas to power their “fundamental transformation” of America. They also needed some muscle. Cue the unions.
Labor Pains II: Public Parts
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President Obama! This is your army! We are ready to march! Let’s take these son of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong!
—Jimmy Hoffa, general president, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, September 5, 2011
In the mid-1990s, the Whole Foods supermarket franchise was under constant attack by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. Speaking to a reporter, Whole Foods’ CEO, John Mackey, let loose with a particularly colorful description of the union damaging his business: “The union is like having herpes. It doesn’t kill you, but it’s unpleasant and inconvenient, and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover.”
Thug tactics? No problem. Economic extortion? Yes, we can. Arm twisting? All in a day’s work. But being compared to a case of herpes? Over the line! The union protested, picketed, and boycotted (more than usual) after Mackey’s comment, but ultimately neither the UFCW nor any other union could stem the decades-long move away from unions in the private sector.
In response, the kooks have worked relentlessly to alter the balance between the private and government sectors by rapidly growing government, its unions, and its unions’ funds and power. They became huge and fearsome. Not even a bad case of herpes could stop them. But to tell you the truth, having herpes seems like a better deal than waking up every day and having to look to Obama, Reid, and Pelosi for leadership.
The unions had a tight, unquestioned grasp on power through their corrupt stranglehold on the Democratic Party, particularly at the state level—until a young cheesehead arrived on the scene.
It was a cold day in mid-February 2011 when the leftists watched stunned as the padlock got thrown on the door of one of their favorite redistributionist candy stores. The new Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, proposed a budget repair bill to begin to bring his state’s finances under control. Facing a huge budget deficit, Walker decided to tackle the very source of the fiscal nightmare—and a potentially lethal political third rail: government-sector unions and the state’s unsustainable benefit and pension obligations. In order to close the candy store in which the corrupt unions and Democrats pigged out, Walker needed to eliminate most collective bargaining privileges for state workers—a gutsy move in a state known as the birthplace of both “progressivism” and union collective bargaining in state government.
By restructuring the relationship between government and the government-sector unions, Walker sought to do the one thing that governors of both parties had previously failed to do: protect the taxpayer. In the past, governors had negotiated huge and fiscally unsustainable pension and benefits packages and then would tell everybody the blatant lie that it was all doable. Walker decided to put an end to this nefarious, bankrupting, and vote-buying scheme. The governor was also counting on history: it wasn’t just progressivism that was invented in Wisconsin. It was also the birthplace of the Republican Party.
The centerpiece of the bill was the elimination of most collective bargaining privileges for government workers, except for police and firefighters, whom Walker cited as critical for public safety. For all other government workers, the bill put everything on the table except for wages. It required additional contributions by state and local government workers to their health care plans and pensions, amounting to about an 8 percent decrease in take-home pay. Walker argued that asking employees to pay half the national average for health care benefits was reasonable, given that workers in the private sector must pay far more for their own benefits—which were, in many cases, less lavish than the ones enjoyed by government employees. Unions were barred from seeking pay increases for government workers above the rate of inflation unless approved by the voters. Most devastating to the government unions, the bill directed them to hold annual votes to continue representing government workers and ended their ability to automatically deduct union dues from government workers’ paychecks. The practice of the government essentially wielding its tax power on behalf of the unions made it a tool of those unions. This was an incredibly corrupt arrangement fiercely guarded by the government unions. When Walker moved to end the state’s role in dues collection, the government unions realized they were losing their enforcer. These Wisconsin union shops were being run like Satriale’s Pork Store on The Sopranos. In the past, government protected and even assisted with the thug union enforcement, so if an intransigent Republican politician popped up, he would end up lunch for the union. Troublemakers would be brought in through the back door while gourmet deli meats would go out the front.
The unions predictably went berserk, claiming that Walker sought to bust the unions. Walker calmly explained that during the campaign he said he would use all available means to bring fiscal sanity back and that, contrary to busting the unions, he was making sure that government employees retained protections under the civil service laws. More important, Walker reminded the unions that without the bill, thousands of those same employees would have to be laid off. He was trying to save their jobs, not destroy them.
Walker’s reforms hit at the heart of the perverse love-in enjoyed for decades by Democrats and their union sugar daddies. Democrats funneled ever-increasing amounts of money into the government unions in an endless spiral of wage, benefits, and pension increases. In turn, the unions poured massive amounts of money into Democratic campaign coffers (and a few Republicans’ campaigns too). Meanwhile
, the taxpayer was forced to fork over more and more of his own money to finance this corrupt merry-go-round. But for the Democrats and the government unions, their incestuous relationship needed to be protected at all costs.
Walker promptly put an end to the government union/Democratic hookup, and all Hades broke loose. It looked like the table-throwing episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, minus the leopard coats.
Unions from across the country mobilized thousands of the usual left-wing suspects to storm the state capitol, where they remained camped out for weeks, vandalizing the capitol building, screaming about their comfy “rights,” and comparing Walker to Hitler (sooooo 2004). The Reverend Jesse Jackson alighted on the scene, because what’s a leftist accident scene without their Number One Ambulance Chaser? Michael Moore also descended into Madison for the free corn dogs and to bellow, “America ain’t broke!” Meanwhile, in a scene out of Escape from Alcatraz, all fourteen Democratic state senators took a powder. Knowing that the bill would pass if they stayed since Republicans controlled their chamber, the state Democratic senators tried to deny the governor the vote by fleeing into the neighboring People’s Republic of Illinois. There they checked into a no-tell motel, ordered up pay-per-view, and set about washing their underwear in the motel sink. At one point, a few of them grabbed a bag of pork rinds and a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. Then they got real nutty and threw some pocket change into the vibrating bed.
Meanwhile, as the Wisconsin state senate Democrats made their break for the border, one state assembly Democrat indulged his inner Hugh Grant. During the budget circus, Democratic state representative Gordon Hintz received a municipal citation connected to—wait for it—prostitution. Hintz apparently enjoyed visits to a “massage parlor” that provided happy endings. This was the same Representative Hintz who told a female Republican state representative that she was “(bleeping) dead” for supporting the budget repair bill. I’m surprised Mack Daddy Hintz didn’t try to keep it real by throwing Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin’” on and then attempting to beat the woman with his shoe.
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