Jamie Court and Judy Dugan of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights pen an extremely troubling piece today about Big Oil, particularly Chevron, outright buying our government and its leaders. This is not limited to Republicans, but certainly the Governor is the biggest recipient of this largesse.
Take Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who once claimed that he was so rich he did not need anyone else's money - and who isn't running for another office. Yet as gasoline prices were breaking last year's record of $3.38 a gallon, Schwarzenegger collected a $100,000 check May 1 from Chevron, the West's largest refiner. The company certainly had the cash on hand. Just three days earlier, it reported a $4.7-billion first-quarter profit, up 18% over the same period last year.
The contribution brought Schwarzenegger's take from Chevron to $665,000 (making it his 15th largest donor) since 2003, and his total political tribute from the energy industry is now $4 million. According to a recent Schwarzenegger fundraising solicitation, Chevron's $100,000 buys the company special briefings with the governor, something that beleaguered motorists aren't getting.
In all, oil companies delivered $90 MILLION dollars to political campaigns and parties in 2006, and while a lot of that went to block the corporate tax-for-alternative energy Prop. 87, plenty was spread around to political leaders and parties. And that seed money ensures that there is no investigation into practices like this (over):
Like power plant owners during California's 2001 electricity crisis, refiners such as Chevron have discovered that they can make more money by producing less gasoline. So they do. They have, over more than 20 years, deliberately reduced their capacity until they can barely meet California's needs under the best of circumstances. Industry spokesmen defend this as efficiency. But there is no slack in the production system, which shorts the market and raises prices.
Any planned or unplanned refinery outage, pipeline break or power failure causes prices to jump.
Take the case of a possum and a raccoon that, in March, bit through power substation lines feeding two refineries in the South Bay. The critters expired, but the outage caused a 7-cent jump in local wholesale gasoline prices. The cost of refining gasoline is stable over time, so these price spikes equal pure profit for Chevron and Co [...]
Chevron refined 22% less oil in the U.S. during the first quarter of this year than in the same quarter of 2006 because of longer "planned maintenance" downtime and accidents. Yet its total profit on U.S. refining increased 66%. Making less gasoline, it made much more money.
Last week, the CDP took $50,000 from Chevron. Court and Dugan also detail a junket that Schwarzenegger chief of staff Susan Kennedy took with Speaker Fabian Nuñez in Rio, a 12-day conference paid for by Chevron and other oil interests.
During the 12-day conference, Chevron's lobbyist got an entire day on the official agenda, which the public knows about only because of our Public Records Act request. Nuñez, who last year was highly critical of oil companies, seems to have nothing to say this year.
The FTCR have a long track record detailing this kind of takeover of our government. And we all know about the inordinate power that corporate interests have in Sacramento. This editorial makes it plain, and it's really shocking to see it so starkly.
