The Oil Con Continues

The next step in the energy companies' rape of the American public is just around the corner.  Remember the incessant claims from Republicans and a few corrupt Democrats that the United States was so short of meeting its energy requirements that we needed to do away with regulation after regulation on the oil industry, or face economic disaster here at home?  How could you forget that, since it has been an almost daily fact of our political life for decades now.  So, bit by bit the government, bashed into submission, gave in, and let the oil companies do just about anything they wanted, all with the understanding that this was all about protecting our domestic supply of energy.

Well, folks, the joke is on you.  Now that their billions in campaign donations have assured that they can do whatever they want to extract oil and gas from our land, the energy industry is ready to move on to the next inevitable step in their war of greed:

"The energy industry is pushing to lift government curbs and tap newly accessible reserves to create an unprecedented era of exports. 

Five years ago, the idea of exporting U.S. gas and oil was not only unheard of, but, in the case of most U.S. crude oil, illegal. At that time, the United States was facing a future of dwindling domestic supplies and vulnerability to foreign producers. It was anxiously building facilities to import natural gas, worried about ever-higher prices and building much of its foreign policy on the need to secure energy supplies. 

But U.S. energy production has boomed with the technological revolution of hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, and the ability to tap newly accessible massive reserves...Now, the U.S. energy industry is pushing for a new era of exports. 

The oil and gas industry is pushing the Obama administration and Congress to legalize crude exports and speed up the process of licensing gas export terminals. Industry officials argue that the U.S. is now in a position of economic strength and national security that will be further enhanced by energy exports. Foreign markets for U.S. crude and natural gas will spur additional production, create thousands of new jobs, enable the U.S. to counter hostile foreign energy powers and generate billions of dollars in wealth, according to the American Petroleum Institute. Already, the U.S. is exporting 3 million barrels of gasoline per day."

So now, all of that oil and gas, produced at great environmental expense to the American people, and actually subsidized by them in the name of national economic security, was about nothing but profits for oil billionaires.  We let them produce the oil for our use; now they are going to sell it overseas (also with our collaboration) and leave us to pay the bill.

And what do we get?  "Thousands of new jobs," a pathetic number in an economy that needs millions of them, in return for "billions of dollars of wealth," not one cent of which will go to the American people, an inevitable string of environmental disasters, and not one thing to add to our energy independence- in fact, by allowing these companies to sell their oil and gas overseas, we will be actually damaging our future energy independence, an obvious fact that no one wants to mention.  But we will be generating "billions of dollars of wealth!"

And anyone who has paid any attention to our national political scene knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that the government approval for this gigantic theft is just around the corner, and in this era of Citizens United only its timing is in question.