Out of Sight, Under Fire Over Leases

Boy, another mis-managed dept. let corporate America bilk the taxpayers and once again we hear nothing about it on the news.
BB

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Published: January 16, 2007
WASHINGTON, Jan. 15 — Johnnie M. Burton, who runs the Interior Department’s troubled program to collect royalties on oil and gas pumped on public lands, is under attack and out of sight.

As director of the Minerals Management Service, Ms. Burton has faced widespread complaints from Congress for months that her agency is mismanaged, unaccountable and on the verge of losing billions of dollars owed by oil and gas companies that drill in the Gulf of Mexico.

On Thursday, the Interior Department’s inspector general is expected to tell the Senate Energy Committee that Ms. Burton either ignored or remained unacceptably blind to a leasing blunder that will, if left unchanged, let oil companies escape as much as $10 billion in royalties over the next five years.

Arnold-Care Is A Bad Deal

Rose Ann DeMoro
January 16, 2007



Rose Ann DeMoro is executive director of the California Nurses Association .

Sparked by the embarrassment of nearly 47 million uninsured Americans and, more notably, the growing agony of even large business that are staggering under intolerable premium costs, our long national health care scandal is finally beginning to prod our political leaders into action.

Unfortunately, many of the proposals being promoted with such fanfare may well exacerbate the crisis and simply prolong the disgrace.

The latest example comes from California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has pledged to achieve “universal” coverage for all the state’s residents with a smorgasbord of every scheme floating around the national policy debate—with the exception of the only one that would actually work: some form of a national health care program or single-payer system, the course taken by every other industrialized country.

How To De-Fund The Escalation

Gareth Porter is a historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam was published in June 2005. During the Vietnam War, Porter was a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Vietnamese history and politics who debunked the Nixon administration's "bloodbath" argument in a series of articles and monographs.

Democratic congressional leaders have thus far been unable to decide what to do about a president and vice-president who have openly announced their intention to defy the electorate. While the last election rejected our current foreign military adventure, Congress has stopped far short of acting on that sentiment, allowing the Bush administration to continue indefinitely and to even escalate the war. Comments from some Democratic leaders reveal a misunderstanding of the power Congress has in the present situation.

The Democrats have gravitated toward a nonbinding resolution that would do nothing to force George W. Bush to bring the troops home. The Democratic haziness about the options available to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq is exemplified by presidential candidate Joe Biden’s comment last week that Congress can do nothing to stop the war, because, “It's unconstitutional to say, you can go, but we're going to micromanage.”

The Democrats’ real problem appears to be political rather than constitutional: They have convinced themselves that they cannot cut off funds without being accused of failing to keep faith with U.S. troops in Iraq.

It Can Happen Here

By Ari Paul
For Chris Hedges, the American Christian Right is worse than you might think

Chris Hedges isn’t afraid to use the “f” word. In his new book, American Fascists, the veteran war correspondent and student of the Bible sounds an alarm exposing what the Christian right can do to America.
Hedges is the son of a late Presbyterian minister who fought for civil rights in a small upstate New York town. Before becoming a reporter, Hedges was on his way to become a minister himself. Fueled by a yearning to confront totalitarianism, Hedges went to El Salvador to cover the conflict there, which later sent him on a career covering war for The New York Times and other news outlets in Iraq, Sudan, Palestine, the Balkans and India. Now settled in the United States, he ended his two decade long wartime tenure with the book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.

New Orleans — Still Under Water

The White House knew [the levees broke] because the Army Corps of Engineers sent them photographs. Again, I want to emphasize that the White House had the photographs of the levees breaking, and didn’t tell state and local officials who had stopped the evacuation because the hurricane missed New Orleans. Everyone thought they dodged a bullet, but the White House didn’t tell anybody the levees broke and were drowning the city. — Greg Palast

WAIST DEEP IN THE BIG MUDDY

by Greg Palast

George W. Bush has an urge to surge. Like every junkie, he asks for just one more fix: let him inject just 21,000 more troops and that will win the war.

Been there. Done that. In 1965, Tom Paxton sang,

Lyndon Johnson told the nation
Have no fear of escalation.
I am trying everyone to please.
Though it isn’t really war,
We’re sending 50,000 more
To help save Vietnam from the Vietnamese.

Four decades later, Bush is asking us to save Iraq from the Iraqis.

There’s always a problem with giving a junkie another fix. It can only make things worse. Our maximum leader says that unless he gets to mainline another 21,000 troops, “Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons,” and terrorists “would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people.”