Citizens Against Taxing Big Oil

One evening I was watching the news minding my own business when I was astonished by what I saw. It was an ad paid for and produced by the American Petroleum Institute or API the main trade association for the oil and natural gas industry. According to the commercial which depicted what appeared to be ordinary Americans upset because the Congress is considering raising the taxes on the industry by 80 billion dollars in the 2011 budget. According to these ordinary Americans raising taxes during a recession on anyone is bad policy. This rationale sounds eerily familiar to the rhetoric being used to justify keeping the Bush tax cuts. It is this type of blatant propaganda that must be exposed for what it is.

What is amazing to me is that we have all read how energy company profits have been at all-time highs for the last decade. Each quarter they set new record highs not just for energy companies but for all corporations. So with all of these record profits you would think that these concerned energy titans would be using that money to research and develop new cleaner energy technologies right? Wrong. Many of these companies are using less than 1% of their income to research new clean energy technologies. Most of them are using these enormous profits to buy back their stock and thus insuring even larger profits in the future. So at the end of this decade of record profits we are to assume that taxing these companies is going to wreck the economy and kill 400,000 jobs?


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So let me get this straight, the people who are being gouged are upset because the people who are gouging them are going to have pay taxes on these record profits and lose some of the subsidies they don’t need in the first place. How stupid do they take us for? I thought the ad about an energy company being in the people business was bad, but this one sets a new low. The thing that troubles me the most about this ad is that the people being interviewed obviously have no clue who the tax would impact. One woman states that some people are barely hanging on so raising taxes would be a burden. I agree if the tax was for ordinary working people but this tax is on an industry where the top 5 companies made over 550 billion dollars under the Bush administration and has not slowed down since. Are we to assume that the oil industry is just barely hanging on? If it weren’t so dishonest it would be almost comical.

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And I really like the quote at the bottom of the article:
The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun. - Ralph Nader

http://mydd.com/users/forgiven/posts/citizens-against-taxing-big-oil


I have seen the commercials this article talks about and each time, I go "REALLY?"

All around us, other towns taxed the oil companies to build air-conditioned schools, great athletic facilities, large libraries, custom buses to haul students to athletic and academic competitions, while our stupid board was afraid that if we taxed them, they'd take their wells and pump them elsewhere.

So we went in schools with no air-conditioning, no library, dirt fields, and parent transport to competitions. That did not end until 1988, when they finally air-conditioned the schools and began upgrading facilities. The last junior high in town will finally get a cafeteria come this fall. Yes, a cafeteria is still considered a luxury by some around here in the year 2011.

Now that production is at 1935 levels, and it's just about too late, the current board has shown some interest in actually working for students.

So the human cost of not taxing the oil companies? A county where 50% of the population over 25 does not have so much as a high school diploma, the highest AIDS rate in the state, the second highest STD rates in the state, the highest teenage unwed mother numbers, an income average that's 60% of the national poverty level, and more, but I'm tired.

I will not cry when the last of these oil bastards is dead and buried. Please let it be soon.

Anyone else wouldn't vote against cutting subsidies unless their brains weren't working correctly.

What you describe is no different than those days of slavery...Grapes of Wrath era.

All the more reason to insist we free ourselves of the need for oil. We'll always need it somewhat, but we CAN cut our usage more than we have.