Tag: Jeff Sessions

Is this why Biden isn’t refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?!

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

[2017] Trump’s Budget Delivers Big Oil’s Wish: Reducing Strategic Petroleum Reserve

While most observers believe the budget will not pass through Congress in its current form, budgets depict an administration’s priorities and vision for the country. Some within the oil industry have lobbied for years to drain the SPR, created in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis.

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Exxon, as well as the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), have long lobbied for a drawdown of SPR‘s supply, according to lobbying disclosure records reviewed by DeSmog. They supported two key bills, proposed but never passed by Congress: H.R. 4136 in 2012 and S. 1231 in 2015.

H.R. 4136, lobbied for by Exxon, API, and IPAA**, says that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve can only be tapped if more federally owned public lands and waters were leased to the oil and gas industry. S. 1231, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Modernization Act of 2015, called for a Department of Energy study of the SPR “to determine options available for [its] continued operation,” to be completed 180 days after the bill’s passage.

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“[T]he SPR is unnecessary in the first place. Private inventories and reserves are abundant, and open markets will respond more efficiently to supply shocks than federally controlled government stockpiles,” wrote Loris, who began his career as an associate for the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. “Congress should authorize the Department of Energy to sell the entire inventory, using the revenues solely for deficit reduction.”

[2020] Republicans blasting China forget that the GOP enabled Beijing’s rise

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

As a deadly pandemic wreaks havoc in an election year, Republicans are leveling relentless attacks against China. To be sure, Beijing’s initial response to the coronavirus outbreak was littered with errors, egregious injustices and conspiracy-mongering.

Republicans blasting China forget that the GOP enabled Beijing’s rise

Related:

What Republicans did 15 years ago to help create Donald Trump today

Urged on by their presidential standard-bearer, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, and by nearly all of the business lobbyists who represented the core of the party’s donor class, three-quarters of House Republicans voted to extend the status of permanent normal trade relations to China. They were more than enough, when added to a minority of Democrats, to secure passage of a bill that would sail through the Senate and be signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

Pro-Trump Conspiracy-Monger “QAnon” Calls for Regime Change in Iran

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Pro-Trump Conspiracy-Monger “QAnon” Calls for Regime Change in Iran

Trump’s decision to assume the mantle of George W. Bush should have angered his base, as his promises to “drain the swamp” of the nation’s capital ring ever-hollow amid the ascension of the worst of Washington’s cesspool to powerful positions in the Trump administration. However, such anger among Trump’s base has failed to materialize en masse. Instead, the anger has largely been diverted and redirected, thanks to an internet phenomenon known simply as “QAnon.”