Friday, April 29, 2011

As the price of gas moves toward $4 a gallon and oil company profits soar, US House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) declared that Big Oil should pay its fair share of taxes and the industry’s lucrative federal subsidiaries should be reviewed. That was Monday of this week. By Thursday, he was in retreat and echoing the industry line that the solution is more subsidized oil production. Perhaps he looked at his campaign account; he is the top recipient of the $285,500 dumped into federal campaigns by the five biggest oil companies in the first quarter of 2011. The irrational $4 billion annual subsidy for Big Oil is made possible because of our irrational political system. The blog entry in Politico begins with a parallel description of the increased “investment” that high-tech companies are making in lobbying and other political spending. “Corporate tax is not about millions. It’s about billions and trillions and when you’re talking about that kind of money, you now have the CFO and CEO’s attention,” said Ralph Hellmann, senior VP of government relations for the Information Technology Industry Council. “The companies’ headquarters are seeing that these issues have real bottom-line impact to their company and they’re going to make investments in Washington to help them get the best outcome.” Conservative bloggers and the mainstream media are afraid to report what honest business leaders say is a matter of fact: US politics, financed by private money, is a pay-to-play enterprise.