This feature started with a NYT article about risks that BP has been taking for years. There recently was a related NYT article, titled “As Oil Industry Fights a Tax It Reaps Subsidies,” by David Kocieniewski. This hearkens back to when I first started this blog, in late spring of 2008. At the time oil prices were high and captains of the oil industry were testifying to Congress that the solution was for government to let the free market be.
Friends, I have been writing for awhile now how mutually exclusive a free market and a corporate economy are. At the time that these oil executives were whining about the free market I provided a post, called Subsidies for Oil Dummies, that linked to a list of ways in which government essentially commands an advantage for the oil industry. The oil industry, and those think tanks started by oil money, such as The Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, were rank with hypocrisy back then, but it appears from this NYT article that they all are turning over a new leaf.
You see, in doing the NYT article the journalist pursued standard practice of getting comments from the oil industry. Rather than deny the accusations/facts of subsidies presented by the journalist, their basic response was to justify it. Perhaps one agrees with their justifications, perhaps not, yet no one should mistake what they want as anything remotely close to free market principles. What they want, and think they deserve, is government commanded indulgence. I suppose with plenty of think tanks, lobbyists, public relations firms and even corporate-endowed chairs at universities, indulgence is probably what they will continue to get.
Before I close this series there was one justification the oil industry offered that really indicts the American people in general for how we expect to be indulged. More on that next.
Tags: Economic Misinformation, Political Misinformation, Public Interest
