Business

Drilling Moratorium Lifted By Upper Court – Good News!

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is great news! Jindal and others were worried that this moratorium would make some companies move elsewhere, thus making this 6-month job killer extend even further.

Sunday by Jindal and state Atty. Gen. James D. “Buddy” Caldwell asserts that the moratorium could convince big oil companies to move their rigs out of the Gulf of Mexico to Brazil or Africa, with “little chance of their immediate return.”

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So here is the story about the moratorium being lifted. Again, great news for our economy.

The Obama administration lost its court bid to maintain a six-month moratorium on offshore deepwater drilling which a federal judge ordered lifted last month.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the government’s emergency request to stay that judge’s order pending appeal.

The motion was denied because the government failed to show “a likelihood of irreparable injury if the stay is not granted,” the appeals panel judges wrote in a 2-1 ruling.

[…]

President Barack Obama acknowledged the moratorium would cause economic harm, but said it was necessary to give investigators adequate time to understand what caused the accident and create new safety regulations.

Oil companies and Louisiana politicians railed against the moratorium, saying it would cause further economic devastation and that rigs and drilling plans should simply be inspected on a case-by-case basis.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal hailed the court’s decision Thursday but expressed concern that the uncertainty has created a “de facto moratorium” which could cost the state 20,000 jobs.

“We absolutely want drilling to be done safely and do not want another spill or one more drop of oil on our coast or in our water, but thousands of Louisianians should not have to lose their jobs because the federal government can’t adequately do its job of ensuring drilling is done safely,” Jindal said in a statement.

“The federal government has an entire agency dedicated to monitoring safe drilling. It shouldn’t take them six months or longer for a new national commission to ensure safety measures are in place and their laws and regulations are being followed.”

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Controlling Big Government AND Big Business – Rich Lowry (realclearpolitics.com)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Limiting Government–And Big Business
By Rich Lowry

The Brits are upset that Pres. Barack Obama has been referring to disgraced oil giant BP as “British Petroleum,” a name it shed long ago.

But what else should Obama call an enormous Britain-based petroleum company? To ask such an innocent question betrays ignorance of the ways of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. The marketing gurus at the firm – led by über Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg – helped conceive and execute one of the most perverse rebrandings of all time for BP.

British? So yesterday. Petroleum? Not very green. A logo of a shield emblazoned with “BP”? Disturbingly martial. In 2000, newly christened BP ditched all these negative associations by adopting the slogan “Beyond Petroleum” and emblazoning itself with a sunflower-like logo that could be mistaken for the symbol of the Green party of Canada.

It worked so brilliantly, a Joe McGinniss of marketing should write a blow-by-blow account – The Selling of BP. Greenberg Quinlan Rosner bragged that its work for BP “included extensive testing of advertising and evaluating the global response toward pioneering positions on the environment, climate change, and energy efficiency.” The case study outlining this extraordinary marketing success has since been removed from the firm’s website. (Greenberg et al. are image-conscious people, after all.)

BP knew how to play the game. It repeated all the environmentally correct platitudes that tickle the fancy of “NGO leaders, journalists, political elites,” in the words of the case study. It supported the fashionable reform of the day, cap-and-trade, knowing that the system would favor the big and connected, like itself. And it showered campaign contributions on the candidate of Hope and Change (its employees gave Obama about twice as much in donations as they did John McCain in 2008).

BP couldn’t have been notionally greener if Al Gore were its CEO. The group chief executive of BP, Lord John Browne, warned of the dangers of hydrocarbons, a little like the city fathers of Newcastle in the 19th century inveighing against coal. In a speech at Stanford in 2007, Browne advocated an “international climate agency” that would entail “a move beyond the limitations of national sovereignty.”

This green one-worldism was awfully rich coming from an executive of an oil company that couldn’t even drill responsibly. Despite all the hokum, BP spent vastly more resources on fossil fuels than green energy. In so doing, it compiled an atrocious safety record that made the poor decision-making that led to the blowout in the Gulf unsurprising to industry insiders.

And now tens of thousands of barrels of petroleum a day are fouling the Gulf, courtesy of the corporation that spent so much convincing people it was “beyond” it.

Rep. Joe Barton’s quickly retracted apology to BP for the administration’s strong-arm tactics was horribly misconceived. Fundamentally, we don’t want a free market and a system of laws to protect corporations, but to protect us from both government and corporations, especially when the two are in league with each other. Corporations like BP tend to be craven, unprincipled, and willing to use government for their own ends – all qualities evident in BP’s spectacular green-marketing campaign.

The bigger and more complex government is, the more incentive corporations have to politicize themselves and get in bed with Washington. If they have resources to do it (not everyone can afford Stan Greenberg), they’ll protect themselves from the worst while disadvantaging their competitors. This accounts for the corporatist paradox of the Obama administration. The president is so arbitrarily anti-business that The Economist dubs him “Vladimir Obama,” yet the same industries he demonizes support key elements of his “reform” agenda.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel argues that Barton’s apology to BP is the sum total of Republican thought on the economy, and that the fall election is a choice between Obama-style hyperactive government or the depredations of the execrable BP. To which the only rational answer can be, “None of the above.”

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.

Hugo Chavez Expanding Power Grab

Published by Papa Giorgio

Chavez is expanding his control of socialism by taking over more private businesses. Maybe Spicoli can get a share in one of these companies.

(Archived at ECONOMICS JUNKIE)

President Hugo Chavez announced Saturday the expropriation of a group of iron, aluminum and transportation companies in Venezuela’s mining region.

Among the expropriated companies is Materiales Siderurgicos, or Matesi, which is the Venezuelan subsidiary of Luxembourg-based steel maker Tenaris SA.

Venezuela’s socialist president said in a televised that his government was going to take over Matesi because “we couldn’t reach an amicable and reasonable settlement with the owners.”

Chavez said production at the company has been paralyzed since midway through last year, when Venezuela’s president announced plans to nationalize it.

Chavez said he was also going to expropriate Venezuelan-owned Orinoco Iron and aluminum-maker Norpro de Venezuela C.A., which is an affiliate of the U.S. company Norpro in association with France’s Saint Gobain, among other companies.

As well, Venezuela will take over transport companies that ship raw materials in areas southeast of Caracas. He did not name the companies.

Since coming to power more than a decade ago, Chavez has nationalized major companies in the electricity, oil, steel and coffee sectors, as well as other private businesses.