Posted on 03/02/2006 11:29:07 AM PST by soccer_maniac
WASHINGTON - How it happened or who's responsible is a mystery eight years after the fact. But what may have been a simple error — or perhaps something more ominous — has given a multimillion-dollar windfall to a group of oil and gas companies and could cost the government billions of dollars more in the years to come.
The Interior Department disclosed Wednesday that a provision was mysteriously deleted from hundreds of federal drilling leases in the late 1990s that would have required producers to pay royalties, once prices reached a certain level, on oil or gas taken from deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Oh too bad for you. Seems your idols were caught with their hand in the cookie jar and Freepers are not falling for your attempt to change the topic. Guess you will just have to sit there and take your lumps poor Wolfie.
Here's an idea: agree to restore the royalties, retroactively, or we double them going forward, or when it comes time for renewal, whichever is earlier.
Now, you have been here long enough to know that I do NOT understand business/economics; but I'll take your word that that is a good idea......LOL.
Let the oil and gas companies keep the money. They don't confiscate my wages or bother me much at all in my daily routine.
They'll probably use the money to reward their investors, pay their employees and find more oil.
Midnight basketball and public television be damned.
The government takes every penny from taxpayers that it can politically manage to. The amount is not governed by how much it thinks it needs (which is quite limitless), but by how much it thinks it can get without having the next election tip tax-and-spend legislators out of the majority.
The people who will be really pissed are the Congresscritters who didn't get to use this money as pork to retain their status as royalty.
Undoubtedly. There's more pork in oil than oil in pork.
I thought we were told what 'great & qualified' people the Clintons appointed. /sarcasm
Man Democrats are stupid. On the Yahoo News thread all the Dims are screaming "Republician Congress". What a bunch of morons. The Executive Branch, NOT Congress, runs the Department of Interior.
Is that where Henry Cisneros is from?
this is just more taxes that cause rises in the price of gasoline.
That was my first thought as well. GOOD. Companies keep more of their own money. How is that a bad thing?
This money did not come from the companies, it came from their customers. Cooperations just pass on the costs of taxes and regulation. The guy on the bottom ALWAYS pays for EVERYTHING.
One of Secretary Babbitt's most controversial moves was his apparent assault on the Boy Scouts of America. Shortly after joining the Clinton Administration, Secretary Babbitt reinstated a National Park Service order prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in the Service's Western Region. Under the order, the Boy Scouts of America -- which does not permit avowed homosexuals to serve as troop leaders -- could have been barred from volunteering in the National Parks.
Babbitt on tolerance...
"We must identify our enemies and drive them into oblivion."
-Bruce Babbitt in his introduction to the League of Conservation Voters' 1991 Environmental Scorecard
"[Judicial restraint is] a miserly and constricted assessment of the highest law of the land. You can't read the Constitution like a rule book."
-Bruce Babbitt quoted by the Arizona Republic, July 8, 1987
******
Before leaving the Department of Interior, Babbitt promised that he wouldn't cash in on his years of government service by becoming a high-priced DC lawyer. Then he promptly took a job with Latham and Watkins, a big Washington law firm whose clients include some of the roughest environmental pillagers in the business.
Among Babbitt's present clients are two of the biggest developers on The California coast: Washington Mutual, developers of the Ahmanson Ranch in Ventura County and the Hearst ranch at San Simeon below Big Sur.
Headwaters Forest bailout, where corporate raider Charles Hurwitz ran off with more than $480 million for land that an Interior Department land appraiser concluded had a market value of less than $100 million.
http://tinyurl.com/kd3by
Babbitt hails from a wealthy ranching family and there has never been a day when he has not been serving the interests of big landowners, mining companies, utilities and real estate czars.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Babbitt graduated from the University of Notre Dame, and attended the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in England on a Marshall Scholarship, and then received his law degree at Harvard Law School.
In 1994, Babbitt was very seriously considered by President Clinton to replace retiring United States Supreme Court Justice Byron White. Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg instead. Clinton again considered Babbitt for the high court in 1994 when Harry Blackmun announced his retirement. Babbitt was passed over again, this time in favor of Stephen Breyer.
Babbitt's brother, Paul Babbitt, was an unsuccessful candidate for the United States House of Representatives in 2004.
Bruce Babbitt, cheap crook
Posted: October 19, 1999
snip
Prosecutor Carol Elder Bruce was investigating allegations that Babbitt lied to Congress in his explanation as to why the Interior Department in 1995 rejected a permit for a proposed casino by three Wisconsin Indian tribes. Supporters of the casino charged that the decision was influenced by promises of campaign contributions to the Democratic Party by rival tribes opposed to the permit.
snip
Babbitt Bros. Trading Co., his family's business, acquired properties for the purpose of including them in a land swap that would keep the Canyon Forest Project moving forward. Such land swaps involving government property are supposed to be of roughly equal value. Ahhh, but when you've got a family member heading the Interior Department sometimes you get a break.
In this case, the federal property in question was appraised at just under $19,853 per acre -- even though land in the same area, yet farther from the Grand Canyon entrance, was appraised in 1995 at more than $1.1 million per acre, according to Investor's Business Daily.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=14834
Good gad.
and Sylvia V. Baca, British Petroleum America, Inc., Washington, D.C., former Assistant Secretary of the Interior also testified.
Gee, wonder how she ended up there...?
Babbitt also helped lock up the largest CLEAN BURNING COAL deposit in exchange for campaign contributions from Clinton's COMMUNIST Chinese 'friends'.
President Bill Clinton and Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt used the president's Antiquities Act authority to establish the 1.7-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in south-central Utah in a controversial 1996 decision.
Hillary Clinton and 'her husband; MUST NEVER be allowed to get close to the White house again, EVER!
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