Bad Deeds for 6-23-2008

Energy Speculators Trading on “Dark Markets” – One of the biggest factors in high oil prices, according to many experts, is that investors, such as hedge funds and investment bankers, can use loopholes in commodities law to manipulate the market and drive crude oil, heating oil, gasoline and diesel fuel prices to new heights. Loopholes exist that allow energy trading on completely “dark” exchanges. For example, the “Foreign Markets Loophole” allows American energy commodities to be traded overseas – exempt from U.S. oversight. These so-called “Dark Markets” – commodities markets that are not policed by U.S. authorities provide for an open the door to manipulation, even outright control of the markets.

 

Texas Republicans Try to Sell Dumb Ideas at Closed Store – Michael Burgess (R-TX 26), Joe Barton (R-TX 6), Kay Granger (R-TX 12), and Pete Sessions (R-TX 32) showed up at a closed Tom Thumb grocery store in Arlington to demagogue to the media about their sophomoric ideas about economics. According to them, all we have to do is “start drilling” and prices will “drop overnight”. These “representatives” hide from their constituents and conduct this dog and pony show in a closed grocery store where the public can’t get in there and ask about things like:

• The Enron Loophole causing massive unregulated speculation and inflating prices.
• Speculators paying a lower tax rate than people who work for a living.
• $14,000,000,000 (14 billion) in Republican corporate welfare and tax breaks to Big Oil that haven’t gotten us anywhere.
• Record low values of the dollar due to a $9,000,000,000,000 national debt and record budget deficits and trade deficits run up during the Bush administration.

 

Lie by Lie: The Mother Jones Iraq War Timeline – This interactive timeline covers 8/1/90 through 2/14/08. We need to learn from our mistakes. What did our leaders know and when did they know it? What red flags did we miss, and how could we have missed them?

 

Finding of Climate Scientists Were Meddled With by Political Appointees – At NASA, administration-appointed public relations officers “reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science,” a recent agency investigation stated. Climate scientists were not allowed to conduct media interviews without prior approval. NASA Scientist James Hansen had to remove the 2005 temperature data from NASA’s website. Even Hansen’s daily schedule suddenly required prior consent.

 

US Embassy Tried to Cover-up Illegal Chinese Ammunition – The US Embassy in Albania approved an effort to conceal the illegal Chinese origin of ammunition provided to troops in Afghanistan under a Pentagon contract by a just-indicted 22-year-old Florida man, according to an investigation by the House Oversight Committee. “The Oversight Committee has received information that the U.S. Ambassador to Albania held a late-night meeting with the Albanian Defense Minister at which the Ambassador approved removing evidence of the illegal Chinese origins of ammunition being shipped from Albania to Afghanistan by a U.S. contractor,” Waxman wrote. “The Committee has also received information that State Department officials. tried to conceal this information from the Committee.”

 

Neocons Ever-Present and powerful in McCain’s Inner Circle – Neoconservatives, whose thinking has directed Bush’s foreign policy following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, are ever-present and powerful in McCain’s inner circle.

Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s chief foreign policy spokesman, in 2002 founded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which agitated for the US invasion that was launched in 2003. Scheunemann and Robert Kagan, another McCain advisor, head the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, which takes a hawkish line on foreign policy issues.

The range of his advisors’ views on the economy was startling enough to conservative writer Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard that he wrote: “Those people aren’t like each other at all. A couple of them, if you put them in the same room, would set off an intergalactic explosion like the collision of matter and antimatter,” he added

More on McCain and His Neocons

 

McCain and Conservatives Spread Lies About Oil Spills – In the process of spewing talking points on behalf of his show’s sponsor (“The People of America’s Oil and Natural Gas Industry”) , Fox News’ Chris Wallace joins the growing list of conservative dittoheads in the media who have been repeating this same false claim made by McCain last Tuesday about oil spills and Hurricane Katrina:

Obama talks about environmental damage from drilling offshore, but the fact is the moratorium was put into effect in 1981. There’s been a lot of technological advances since then. We had Hurricane Katrina go through the heart of the Gulf of Mexico and ravage these oil rigs and there were almost no oil spills, so what’s he talking about?

As ThinkProgress points out, that’s not true at all.

The truth is that Hurricane Katrina caused oil spillage so significant it was clearly visible from space. It also wreaked environmental havoc near the scale of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

Regards,

Jim