Headlines You Should Know!: Offshore Drilling and The Great Prevaricator!

Today's Feature Story:
The Three Biggest Myths the Bush Administration Wants You to Believe About Offshore Drilling
By Faiz Shakir, The Progress Report - Alternet

Conservatives are preying on concern over gas prices by propagating false myths that drilling for oil off our coasts will lower the cost of gas.

This story was written by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Ali Frick, Benjamin Armbruster, and Brad Johnson.

Yesterday, citing the "squeeze of rising prices at the pump," President Bush rescinded the presidential moratorium on offshore drilling.

The moratorium on lease sales in the Outer Continental Shelf was established in 1990 by his father, George H.W. Bush, in response to the devastating Exxon Valdez oil spill and extended by President Clinton.

Bush's action pressures Congress to follow him in "capitulation to the oil companies" by lifting their moratorium, which must be renewed annually. In response, Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) said at a press conference that Bush "is invoking the specter of another WMD: wells of mass deception."

At the Huffington Post, activist Martin Bosworth wrote, "Americans are smarter than we are often given credit for, and many of us do realize that destroying precious environmental resources and wildlife reserves to allow more domestic drilling is a psychological panacea -- a placebo to make us feel like 'something is being done.'"

However, polls show increasing support for expanded offshore drilling. Conservatives are preying on Americans' concern overskyrocketing gas prices by propagating false myths that drilling for oil off our coasts will allow us to "pay less" at the pump, that it's "environmentally safe," and that drilling is already underway by communist China.

Because "only real beneficiaries will be the oil companies that are trying to lock up every last acre of public land," their political allies must resort to selling falsehoods.

MYTH #1 -- 'DRILL HERE, DRILL NOW, PAY LESS'

Newt Gingrich's 527 organization, American Solutions, is promoting a "Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less" campaign, collecting over one million signatures on its petition to Congress to act immediately to lower gasoline prices" by authorizing the exploration of proven energy reserves" off our coasts.

American Solutions is funded by right-wing Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who wants Americans to place another bad bet on oil drilling. As the Energy Information Administration (EIA) has explained, "access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030."

But because United States demand for oil far outstrips production -- we consume 25 percent of the world's supply but have two percent of the proven reserves -- further exploitation of domestic resources will not have a long-term impact either. After 2030, the EIA found, "any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant."

There are numerous ways to immediately affect prices, from use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to improved oversight of the oil markets. Over the long term, we must fight global warming and break our addiction to oil through modern technology like plug-in hybrids and smart growth planning.

MYTH #2 -- CHINA ON OUR COASTS

Conservatives from Rudy Giuliani to Dick Cheney have repeatedly claimed that the United States needs to start drilling for off-shore oil because China is taking "American oil" off the coast of Cuba, just "60 miles off the coast of Florida."

Cheney exhorted, "Even the communistshave figured out that a good answer to high prices is more supply." That same day, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) wrote that Castro was allowing drilling "45 miles from the Florida keys."

Rep. George Radanovich (R-CA) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) have also raised the specter of Chinese drilling just off U.S. shores. However, this modern invocation of the Red Scare the claim is completely false.

As Cheney was forced to acknowledge, "no Chinese firm is drilling" off Cuba's coast. Talking Points Memo has recorded the large number of conservatives hyping the false story.The Washington Post's Ben Pershing said the China/Cuba oil drilling claim is the "myth that keeps on giving," calling it "just too juicy not to repeat."

MYTH #3 -- 'NOT A DROP WAS SPILLED'

Offshore drilling advocates know that the specter of oil-slicked beaches would doom their campaign, so they are desperate to wish its environmental impact away.

Yesterday, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) claimed "not a drop of oil was spilled during Katrina or Rita." This myth has been told again and again by the likes ofGov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA), Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, Mike Huckabee, George Will, and Bill O'Reilly.

There were, in fact, major onshore and offshore spills due to the hurricanes. According to the official Minerals Management Service report, the hurricanes caused 124 offshore spills for a total of 743,700 gallons, six spilling 42,000 gallons or more.

The largest of these spills dropped 152,250 gallons, well over the 100,000 gallon threshhold considered a "major spill." In addition, the hurricanes caused disastrous spills onshore throughout southeast Louisiana and the rest of the Gulf Coast as tanks, pipelines, refineries and other industrial facilities were destroyed, for a total of 595 different oil spills.

The nine million gallons reported spilled were comparable with the Exxon Valdez's 10.8 million gallons, but unlike the Exxon Valdez, they were distributed throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, and other Gulf Coast states, many in residential areas.

The Great Prevaricator Remembered II: With Reagan Policies, Seldom Has So Much Harm Been Done To So Many By So Few (Plus Swipes At Phil Gramm)By MANIFESTO JOE - Beggars Can Be Choosers

With news of a Bush/Treasury/Federal Reserve bailout of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, I'd say it's unofficially official: Reaganomics, and the 30-year era of helter-skelter deregulation that came with it, is at long last dying for good.

No, it's not dead yet. I think terminal brain cancer is a certain diagnosis. Yet Reaganomics lingers, having been reanimated repeatedly from the dead. But I don't think another long-term resurrection is possible.

And as the details of a massive bailout emerge, the person who comes to my mind is that turkey-necked geezer who presided over the first "great" round of deregulation during the '80s -- The Great Prevaricator himself, Ronald Reagan.

Reagan survives largely just in right-wing mythology. But some of his soldiers, who helped him construct this sturdy economic Trojan horse, are still with us. Despite a rebuke over a recent gaffe, former GOP Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, deregulator extraordinaire, is still John McCain's economic adviser.

Gramm, a Texas Aggie economist (Know how to spoil an Aggie party? Flush the punchbowl), earned his bars in the "conservative" movement as one of The Fibber's hardiest point men. He started in the House as a major architect of the 1981 tax cuts that, first, handed a bonanza to the wealthiest Americans. Then, those cuts plunged the federal budget so deeply into the red that piecemeal tax increases had to be sneaked past the public for many years thereafter to slow the hemorrhaging.

He was also a player in the '80s deregulation of savings and loans, which ultimately opened them up to full-scale looting. It took years, and many, many billions from the taxpayers, to clean up that mess. (Sound familiar now? To paraphrase the poet Santayana, our leaders did not remember the past, and we are ALL condemned to repeat it.)

Near the end of his venal "service" in the Senate, Gramm was a towering figure in the second "great" wave of deregulation. This from Wikipedia:

Later in his Senate career, Gramm spearheaded efforts to pass banking reform laws, including the landmark Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, which modernized Depression-era laws separating banking, insurance and brokerage activities. Between 1995 and 2000 Gramm, who was the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, received $1,000,914 in campaign contributions from the Securities & Investment industry.

Here, "modernize" means that the bill Gramm co-sponsored repealed certain New Deal-era regulations of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had helped keep those pillars of high finance separate, and hence relatively honest and solvent, since the '30s.

Not content with leaving only this much damage imminent, Gramm helped pull off a major deregulatory coup the following year. More from Wikipedia:

Gramm was one of five co-sponsors of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which critics blame for permitting the Enron scandal to occur. At the time, Gramm's wife was on Enron's board of directors.

A big part of the CFMA was what became known as the "Enron Loophole." Again, Wikipedia:

The CFMA has received criticism for the so-called "Enron Loophole," 7 U.S.C. §2(h)(3) and (g), which exempts most over-the-counter energy trades and trading on electronic energy commodity markets. The "loophole" was drafted by Enron Lobbyists working with senator Phil Gramm seeking a deregulated atmosphere for their new experiment, "Enron On-line." ...

The legislation was passed by the Republican controlled Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton [ouch --MJ] in December 2000 to allow for the creation, for U.S. exchanges, of a new kind of derivative security, the single-stock future. An attempt to reverse this policy was vetoed by President Bush in 2008. Several Democratic Legislators introduced legislation to close the loophole from 2000-2006, but were unsuccessful due to Republican control of the House and Senate.

So, in the ensuing years, Phil acquired a succession of nicknames, including "Enron Phil" for the CFMA, and recently "Foreclosure Phil" for his banking "modernization."

For more on the extent of the profound injuries that then-Sen. Phil Gramm personally inflicted on America, click here for a Joe Conason article in Salon.

But enough with beating up on a now-obvious sleazebag operative like Gramm. Let's go back a generation, and longer, to that moth-eaten spirit ultimately behind the Enron accounting scandal, and behind what is becoming known as the Panic of 2008. It's that mythical right-wing figure, the man Gore Vidal once perceptively described as "grandmotherly": Reagan.

The Sixties spawned a unique cast of characters who lingered and did their dance macabre across our collective unconscious, on their way to oblivion. The same seems to be happening with the malefactors of the Eighties, the Armani-clad hooligans of the Reagan era.

They seem determined not to go away completely, at least not right away. But I foresee a day when they will be like withered cranks at small-town school board meetings, voted out of office but showing up in enfeebled bids to harass those who replaced them. An effectively permanent death seems at hand.

Going back to the Fannie Mae/Freddy Mac bailout -- and perhaps forward toward many more -- here are a couple of especially significant quotes from The New York Times on this story:

The companies, known as government-sponsored enterprises, or G.S.E.'s, touch nearly half of the nation's mortgages by either owning or guaranteeing them, and the debt securities they issue to finance their operations are widely owned by foreign governments, pension funds, mutual funds, big companies and other large institutional investors.

G.S.E. debt is held by financial institutions around the world, Mr. (Treasury Secretary Henry) Paulson said in his statement. Its continued strength is important to maintaining confidence and stability in our financial system and our financial markets. Therefore we must take steps to address the current situation as we move to a stronger regulatory structure.

"... a stronger regulatory structure"? This from a Bush Cabinet member?

R.I.P., Ronnie Reagan. (And Phil Gramm?)

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.