Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

Archives for June 2010

By

Costner’s centrifuges and private enterprise vs government bureaucracy

I don’t care what Costner’s politics are. The guy has proven that he’s acting out of conviction, and gets the job done.

Kevin Costner spent 15 years and $20 million to bring about effective oil spill cleanup technology. The device produced by this research was patented in 1993.

What happened was that

although the machines are quite effective, they can still leave trace amounts of oil in the treated water that exceeds current environmental regulations. Because of that regulatory hurdle, he said, he had great difficulty getting oil industry giants interested without first having the approval of the federal government.

BP has been testing the machine with trial runs and has now ordered 32 centrifuges to aid the Gulf oil cleanup. A few are already getting the job done and the rest will be in within 60 days.

Now contemplate that timeline.

The reason the machines were not in service prior to the spill is that,

though wildly effective, the trace amounts of oil left in the water processed by Costner’s invention exceed federal regulations. In other words, better the water stay 100% contaminated than give the okay to an amazing idea that doesn’t turn it into Perrier

Now, 60+ days into the spill we come to the realization that private enterprise creates a privately-funded, privately-researched technology that yes, gets the work done. And government is right there taking on a role as an obstacle to progress.

John Nolte:

Yes, just another example of an obscenely arrogant system populated by obscenely arrogant bureaucrats willing — at the expense of the people they are charged with protecting — to kill the good in pursuit of the perfect. But when your agenda involves destroying the oil industry it only makes sense that the last thing you want is a device that takes away a crisis you don’t want to waste.

And these are the same people who were just put in charge of our health care.

God help us.

Amen.

21219
Share

By

The first “oilcane”?

Doug Ross contemplates the possibility of the next disaster:
What the Obama administration has wrought: the world’s first “Oilcane”

Art Horn, writing at OilPrice.com, describes the catastrophic potential of an oil-infused hurricane in the Gulf. Consider the series of missteps by the White House that has led up to this point, wherein the entire Gulf waits on pins and needles for the impending “Oilcane”:

• The “Obama administration knew about Deepwater Horizon[‘s] 35,000-foot well bore, green-lighted [it] and fast-tracked the project”…

• Disregarded and underestimated the impact of the tragic explosion and spill for over a month…

• As of last week, had deployed only 20 of 2,000 skimmer (clean-up) vessels…

• Fought Louisiana’s use of sand berms to prevent damage to the Gulf coast tidal region…

• Forced Louisiana to stop using 16 barges that were sucking up thousands of gallons of oil daily out of the Gulf…

• Refused to waive the Jones Act, which prevented foreign vessels and crews from cleaning up the Gulf, even though “American shippers who generally support the ban said they wouldn’t object to lifting it to fight the spill”…

Go read the rest.

21215
Share

By

The hope and change double punch

Business’s Buyer’s Remorse
For cooperating with the White House, member companies of the Business Roundtable gets socked with higher taxes and more regulations.

To listen to President Barack Obama, corporate America is a juggernaut, a force of calculating capitalists who ceaselessly plot against his national reforms. To listen to Ivan Seidenberg is to wish the president were even a little right.

Mr. Seidenberg, officially Verizon’s CEO, moonlights as chairman of the influential Business Roundtable, the “association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies.” That would be the same Business Roundtable that woke up this past month to discover the White House has been playing it for a patsy. It turns out that actively supporting a pro-tax, pro-regulation Democratic majority on issues like health care doesn’t really get you anything save more taxes and more regulation.

This has clearly come as a shock to the Business Roundtable, as Mr. Seidenberg made clear this week with his newsy and newfound criticism of the White House. The chairman revealed in a speech to the Economic Club of Washington that he’d become “somewhat troubled” by a “disconnect between Washington and the business community.” Here he and his fellow CEOs had “worked closely with policy makers”—they’d even pushed ObamaCare. And yet! “We see a host of laws, regulations and policies being enacted that impose a government prescription” on private actors. Truth was, Washington had created a downright “hostile environment” for job creation!

Well, you vote into office a socialist-in-chief, and you live to regret it.

Here you can look at Private Sector Losses vs. Public Sector Gains

Since the beginning of the recession (roughly January 2008), some 7.9 million jobs were lost in the private sector while 590,000 jobs were gained in the public one. And since the passage of the stimulus bill (February 2009), over 2.6 million private jobs were lost, but the government workforce grew by 400,000.

Live and learn, live and learn.

UPDATE
Mom, When I Grow Up I Really Want to Be A Bureaucrat

21211
Share

By

How about, Sayonara, Citgo?

After nationalizing the Helmerich and Payne oil rigs, Venezuela Defends Plans To Nationalize Helmerich’s Idled Rigs

Venezuela, facing criticism over its plan to nationalize 11 idled rigs owned by Helmerich & Payne Inc. (HP), said Friday the Tulsa-based company was the only one of 33 oil services companies that refused to renegotiate rates starting in early 2009, when oil prices were falling.

“Despite meetings with representatives and directors of H&P for nearly a year, it wasn’t possible to reach an agreement due to the inflexible position of the said company,” according to a statement from state oil firm Petroleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA.

Of the 32 companies that PDVSA successfully renegotiated terms with, 14 of them were local firms and 18 were foreign, PDVSA said.

Venezuela’s government, led by socialist President Hugo Chavez, this week announced plans take over the Helmerich rigs, and said that as soon as it does it will start using them to pump oil.

The rigs in question have been sidelined for more than a year. Helmerich turned them off because PDVSA owes it some $43 million for work the Oklahoma firm already performed. Helmerich says it wants to be paid first before turning them back on because it doesn’t aim to work for free.

Helmerich is also awaiting resolution of currency exchange issues with PDVSA, some which are related to the country’s January devaluation of the bolivar.

The U.S. State Department entered the fray Thursday, calling on Venezuela’s government to compensate U.S.-based drilling companies if it decides to nationalize rigs owned by them.

“We would just call on them to–if they did make such a move–to compensate the owners of those wells,” said State Department spokesman Mark Toner during a press briefing.

Of course, the PDVSA statement blamed “the empire::

“PDVSA categorically rejects the statements made by spokespeople of the U.S. empire,” PDVSA said. “It is trying once again to complicate relations with our partners.”

In this case, should “the empire” strike back? Gustavo Coronel explains the case for ending business with CITGO:

PDVSA has moved to expropriate eleven drilling rigs from this company in Venezuela, following a strategy that I consider suicidal. The strategy is as follows: when PDVSA owes contractors money that cannot pay, or does not wish to pay for whatever reason, then it simply expropriates the assets of the company, in order to delay payment indefinitely. This has been the case with companies expropriated in the past and seems to be the case with H&P.

But that was then and this is now. The move by PDVSA finds Venezuela in a weak position vis- a- vis the United States. Venezuela is no longer as important a supplier of oil to the United States as it was only ten years ago. Currently Venezuelan imports into the United States are barely at the million barrels per day level, a drop of some 300,000 barrels per day since Chavez came into power. More significant is the fact that gasoline exports from Venezuela to the U.S. have practically disappeared. The 2009 report on Petroleos de Venezuela shows that during last year it only exported some 99,000 barrels of gasoline per day. Even assuming that all of these barrels went to the United States, this would represent a drop of some 75 percent as compared to only a few years ago.

In fact, the volumes of Venezuelan oil coming into the U.S. could rather easily be replaced by modest increases of imports from the other top 15 suppliers of oil to this country, mostly from Canada, Saudi Arabia, Angola and Russia. This could be done at minimal disruption of the U.S. market, if Venezuelan aggressive actions against U.S. company assets continue or if Venezuela is designed as a new member of the group of rogue states that support international terrorism.

Of course, that would assume that the Obama administration has grown a pair.

21207
Share

By

I guess that’s why they call them the Bleus

World Cup failure adds to France’s pain, and check out the slideshow:

First, some government ministers were caught playing fast and loose with taxpayer money and influence peddling. Then the French soccer team proved better at bickering than scoring at the World Cup tournament in South Africa. And perhaps worst of all for this leisure-minded country, President Nicolas Sarkozy vowed to make workers stay on the job longer before retirement.

It was in this depressed and increasingly sour political atmosphere that hundreds of thousands of striking workers took to the streets in nationwide protests Thursday to complain of government callousness and decry Sarkozy’s plans to push back the retirement age from 60 to 62.

For the marchers, the stakes are high. Many workers have come to regard retiring at 60 as an inalienable guarantee of well-being since the benefit was added to France’s social protection system 27 years ago under President François Mitterrand and his Socialist Party. But the protests had a broader political theme, reflecting outrage over mini-scandals that have raised questions about the judgment of some of Sarkozy’s ministers in a time of scarcity and debt.

For instance, one junior minister charged taxpayers $15,000 for fancy Cuban cigars. Revelations of such peccadilloes have embarrassed Sarkozy as he repeatedly calls on the French to make sacrifices to overcome the global economic crisis and reduce his government’s ballooning deficit.

“The ministers are the ones who should be working more,” read a banner carried by protesters in Lyon, one of more than 100 communities in which demonstrators marched.

In addition, the country has sunk into a spell of national blues after the ridicule heaped on its backbiting soccer team. The team’s antics at the World Cup were treated back home as an affront to national honor; a front-page editorial in the influential Le Monde newspaper compared it to the country’s collapse in the face of German occupation troops in 1940.

“You have tarnished the image of France,” Health and Sports Minister Roselyne Bachelot said she told the disgraced players during a den-mother moment in the locker room Tuesday, shortly before they were eliminated from competition by a loss to South Africa.

Ah, the ignominy.

But don’t laugh too hard. The Dems are getting their way, and we’re well on our way to becoming the next France.

Sing it, Elton!

21203
Share

By

Card check lives?

Sure looks like it:
Card-check lives: ‘A lot of things can happen in a lame-duck session’ (emphasis added)

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, is so determined to reward Democrats’ labor union donors that he is now openly discussing the possibility of passing pro-union legislation after voters have already rendered a verdict on the union-friendly 111th Congress.

“A lot of things can happen in a lame-duck session,” he told The Hill today.

Even if voters remove Democrats from power in the November elections, their new choices for Congress will not be seated until January. This leaves nearly two months for the exiting Congress — commonly referred to as a “lame duck” Congress — to enact unpopular laws that might have otherwise cost them more seats in the preceding election.

One such law is the so-called “card-check” bill, which takes away employees’ right to vote secretly against unionizing and skews the balance in favor of labor unions during negotiations with newly unionized employers. Labor unions see the bill as essential in saving their many under-funded multi-employer pension plans. The bill’s binding arbitration provision could force many employers to enter the unions’ underfunded pension plans, taking away their employees’ opportunity to contribute to tax-deferred 401(k) retirement plans.

And they can do it. too.

21185
Share

By

Hamas founder’s son decries Islamic ‘god of hate’

Hamas founder’s son decries Islamic ‘god of hate’

The son of one of the founders of Hamas is turning his back not only on the organization that now controls Gaza, but the religion that so animates the followers of the group his father helped create.

Speaking on Wednesday night to the Endowment for Middle East Truth, a pro-Israel organization that focuses on radical Islam in education and media, Mosab Hassan Yousef said, “The god of Islam is the god of hate.”

Mr. Yousef’s father, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, is a leading imam within Hamas, a group that seeks to impose Islamic law throughout the territory it considers Palestine, land that also encompasses the modern state of Israel.

The younger Mr. Yousef came to the United States in 2007, but only sought publicity after the publication of his memoir, “The Son of Hamas,” this year.

His book details the harrowing story of his recruitment by Israel’s Shin Bet, the country’s domestic intelligence and security service. At the dinner, the man who recruited and mentored Mr. Yousef when the Imam’s son was undercover for Israel, revealed his identity to the public for the first time.

About the existence of Israel,

He also said that the greatest problem facing his fellow Palestinians was the religion of Islam.

“They want to destroy Israel while they worship the God that is really their enemy every day,” he said. “There is no denying that they are worshiping their greatest enemy every day while they are looking for enemies.”

He continued, “What would happen if Israel just disappeared from the map? There is no Israel anymore. Would there be peace in the Middle East? Palestinians would kill each other, I guarantee you.”

This guy either has cajones [sic] of Titanium, and/or he’s crazy like a fox and willing to sacrifice his life to prove the point.

21183
Share