Vice Emperor Creosote sez:

“We’re not full yet.”

When reading this article, it’s helpful to remember that the ball-less, Slavish Deference to this Administration by the press and Congress was not a product of 9/11: It was a pre-existing malignancy that certainly got a massive dose of nutrients on 9/11, but it was always there.

Remember too that United States Energy Policy was handed over like the keys to the national liquor cabinet to Dead-Eye Dick Cheney the day his youthful, feeble-minded ward was sworn into office.

Cheney then proceeded to take every one of his fellow oil execs into a back room, bar the door, and carve up the world’s petroleum future like the Christmas Pig. Of course, this all took place long, long before the invasion of Iraq on trumped up evidence and rumor has it that maps of Iraq and who was gonna get what were a part of that meeting.

Strange how that worked out, eh?

Of course there is no way of knowing the details of what really happened because Dead-Eye stamped the whole thing “Classified” – a move which would have raised a hurricane of newsprint and a rip-tide of ink if it had happened under the Clinton Administration, but barely raised a gentle bunny fart of a breeze in the press when done by the GOP. My oh my how the Republican rage over the horribly, intolerably icky “secrecy” around the Clinton Health Care brainstorming sessions instantly evaporated when it was Cheney lowering the Cone of Silence over his own pet projects.

So last month it was the announcement that Exxon (for example) had fourth quarter net income of $10.7 billion.

That’s “Billion” with a “B”.

10.7 b-b-billion dollars. Net. In one quarter. And, “For the year the company earned net income of $36.1 billion, or $33.9 billion excluding special items. That's up 31 percent from the $25.9 billion it earned on that basis year earlier.”

And now, in a textbook-perfect example of the only thing the GOP agenda has ever really been about – looting and bankrupting the government of the United States and transferring its assets to Republican-friendly private corporations – this story the sheer scope and shamelessness of which almost completely robs me of my words. (emphasis added)

February 14, 2006

U.S. Has Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil Companies

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 — The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.

New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.
…

But what seemed like modest incentives 10 years ago have ballooned to levels that have alarmed even ardent supporters of the oil and gas industry, partly because of added sweeteners approved during the Clinton administration but also because of ambiguities in the law that energy companies have successfully exploited in court.

Short of imposing new taxes on the industry, there may be little Congress can do to reverse its earlier giveaways. The new projections come at a moment when President Bush and Republican leaders are on the defensive about record-high energy prices, soaring profits at major oil companies and big cuts in domestic spending.

Indeed, Mr. Bush and House Republicans are trying to kill a one-year, $5 billion windfall profits tax for oil companies that the Senate passed last fall.

Moreover, the projected largess could be just the start. Last week, Kerr-McGee Exploration and Development, a major industry player, began a brash but utterly serious court challenge that could, if it succeeds, cost the government another $28 billion in royalties over the next five years.
…

"It's one of the greatest train robberies in the history of the world," said Representative George Miller, a California Democrat who has fought royalty concessions on oil and gas for more than a decade. "It's the gift that keeps on giving."
…

Based on the government's assumptions about future prices — that oil will hover at about $50 a barrel and natural gas will average about $7 per thousand cubic feet — the total value of the free oil and gas over the next five years would be about $65 billion and the forgone royalties would total more than $7 billion.
Administration officials say the issue is out of their hands, adding that they opposed provisions in last year's energy bill that added new royalty relief for deep drilling in shallow waters.
…

By contrast, the White House bluntly promised to veto the Senate's $60 billion tax cut bill because it contained a one-year tax of $5 billion on profits of major oil companies. …

"The [Minerals Management Service] only has the authority that Congress gives it," Mr. Hunter said. "The legislation said that royalty relief for these leases is automatic."

If that view prevails, the government said it would lose a total of nearly $35 billion in royalties to taxpayers by 2011 — about the same amount that Mr. Bush is proposing to cut from Medicare, Medicaid and child support enforcement programs over the same period.

Just as another point of reference, $35 Billion is also roughly what the Bush Administration has already pissed away in its failed “Iraqi Reconstruction” debacle, although as always, Cheney’s friends made out like King Rat and His Rodent Posse, armed and footloose in Cheddarvania.

And $35 billion would buy enough body armor to keep every man, woman and mascot in Iraq as safe humanly possible from IED attacks.

Hey, fuck the body armor: $35 billion would buy more than 35,000 “Rhino Runners” The all-but-impervious-to-anything-but-a-tactical-nuke carriers that Rumsfeld and Cheney tool around in when dropping by Baghdad to see how the looting is going, but are far, faaaar too pricey to be letting your average mudfoot sweat up it’s New Carrier Smell.

And even then, you’d have enough left over to the left of the decimal place to make up for the massive fraud that FEMA has let run riot with Katrina relief funds. Fraud that runs "certainly millions of dollars; it could be tens or hundreds of millions of dollars."

Maybe even have enough left to pay for Ted Steven’s “Bridge To Nowhere.”

Funny, I remember when a few million in fraud was enough for the GOP to slate whole programs for demolition: even if they were only doing OK, but not spectacularly, they would scream to bring the hammer down.

Now it’s not millions but tens of billions.

During a time when we will all have to pay dearly and for the rest of our lives for the Republican lies, treachery and the Republican war in Iraq…

With gargantuan Republican deficits looming at us just over the horizon…

With the destruction of a major American city happening on the Republican’s watch, and made vastly worse by the malignant neglect of Republican stooges…

Billions lost through the sheer incompetence of one Republican arm of the government, more billions looted and paid out to Republican cronies by another arm…

all paid for by proposing cuts to the weakest and poorest among us, and fighting their war on the cheap.

Why?

Simple.

Because to be a Republican is to believe that there is literally nothing of higher and purer moral virtue than cutting the taxes of plutocrats.

No greater glory unto God than throwing money at rich people.

That to disinter the bones of Joan of Arc and use her remains, splinters from the True Cross, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to set fire to the Virgin Mary…would be preferable to even incrementally raising the taxes on the richest people in the history of the world to pay for their war, their criminal incompetence, and programs for the poor and the powerless.

And that it if Our Lady got up and ran – hair on fire – through Arlington National Cemetery,

and the White House,

and Walter Reed Hospital,

and the Air and Space Museum,

and the Smithsonian,

and the Library of Congress,

and the National Cathedral,

and the “Falling Waters” Frank Lloyd Wright home,

and Yellowstone National Park,

and a hundred hospices,

and a thousand assisted living facilities

and ten thousand public schools…

…and set each and every one of them ablaze…

…and Republicans were told the only way to save these sacred, irreplaceable treasures was to up the tax rates on the wealthiest 1% of people and corporations…

They would still opt to try to smother the fire with the poor, or beat it out with the Body of Christ, or set up a bucket-brigade to douse it in the Blood of the Lamb -- or just let it all go up in flames -- before they would ever consider discommoding their Overlords by 1%.

‘Cause “We don’t need no taxes, let the motherfucker burn!”

I don’t know what to say, except that if you are a Republican, this was your choice, and now you are each personally complicit in this disaster of a government, because this is exactly what you voted for.

And that if you had an ounce of humanity among you, you should feel nothing but fury and terrible shame that your Party can let the pillaging of our nation by its Plutocrat Masters continue while Katrina survivors are being booted out of their rooms for want of a few bucks, and American soldiers you sent off to fight and die for your lies are maimed and killed for want of proper protection.

But then again, to continue to be a Republican these days, you really have to have had the capacity to feel any shame about anything surgically removed, don’t you? Or to save time, does Cheney just blow it off?

Because in the Age of Dubya, you can either be a Good American, or a Good Republican, but you can no longer be both.