The latest campaign finance reports, from OpenSecrets.org, show Sen. John McCain closing in on the defunct Rudy Giuliani as Big Oil's bet in the presidential race. Oil money these days is as nasty as tobacco money, and all the candidates ought to be refusing it. The last round of campaign finance lawmaking curbed direct corporate spending on candidates, but who in this room thinks that strangled oil's influence in Washington?

 

 

I hope the nay-sayers who insist that stopping the taxpayer-funded flow of oil into the federal Strategic Petroleum Reserve won't drop prices were watching today. On news that U.S. petroleum supplies went up 200,000 barrels, the price of oil dropped by up to $2.24 a barrel. So... If President Bush stopped putting 70,000 barrels of oil a day into the reserve, that would add 490,000 barrels a week to the market. Oil goes down, gasoline goes down, right? Only if refiners don't play games.

 Oh, man, I wish I had a share of Exxon. The shareholder meeting May 30 is going to be a show. A group of big institutional investors, mostly public pension funds, has filed notice that it will formally campaign to oust board member Michael Boskin. The investors say he refused repetedly to even meet with them about developing a corporate climate change policy. How dumb can a company get, refusing to sit and talk with its biggest investors?

 

What the Senate did today isn't huge, and isn't quite finished, but a 97-1 vote in favor of stopping White House oil purchases for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a landmark. The vote cracks the gridlock that has blocked effective Senate actions against the oil price crisis. It holds out the possibility of a shift to doing the peoples' business rather than scoring partisan points. Capping the reserve would also save taxpayers $6 million to $7 million a day that's now going straight to oil company pockets. Hooray on that.

 

OilWatchdog has offered plenty of reasons that suspending the federal gasoline tax would end up as a bad joke on consumers and the economy. Here are some fresh ones, from Jonathan Alter at Newsweek--including carnage on our potholed roads.

It's a flat-out lie when oil companies say they're only making an "average" percentage of profit compared to other companies. Furthermore, journalists shouldn't be taking the oil industry's figures at face value. That's the conclusion of a well-explained report in Nieman Watchdog on how oil companies get away with describing their profit as a percentage of revenue when issuing a press release, then use the accurate "return on capital" figure when talking with investors.

Big Oil's Sinkhole: (editorial cartoon by Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle)

State universities and community colleges got an invitation last week to join California's stem cell research program.

A committee overseeing the $3 billion program voted on Tuesday to appropriate $18 million to train...

 

...And See If It Sticks. That appears to be where government stands on quelling oil and gasoline prices. Congress is now proposing bucketsful of legislation and other actions in a pre-election panic. Some of it is on target and some is just pander, either populist or corporate. Let's sort it out: the Bad, the Ineffective, the Actually Helpful

Consumer Watchdog has protested strings-attached grants from Big Oil to universities, but the oil companies are just following the path of Big Pharma. Here, from the Century Foundation's Maggie Mahar and Niko Karvounis, is a concise history of legislation that opened the classroom door to drug companies--and even let cosmetic giant Shiseido control research agendas at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital.  

When the federal government passes a law but has no cops to enforce it, the crooks hold a "get out of jail free" card. That's the unfortunate effect of a sweeping and successful effort by drug and insurance companies to have federal law "preempt" state enforcement. A spate of stories today (LA Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times) on new federal rules against insurance company abuses of Medicare recipients drives home the point.

I'm not the only one skeptical of outgoing Speaker Núñez's reform credentials. A Merc...

Our legal team was in San Francisco this week fighting another unjustified insurance rate hike - this time a 6% earthquake insurance rate increase...

A national lawsuit over water pollution from a gasoline additive was more than half-settled yesterday when four of the five major oil comanies agreed to pay $423 million in cleanup and other costs. Chevron, Shell, BP, Conoco and several smaller companies did what's right, and will escape years more of litigation costs. Exxon, which can no doubt afford to litigate until the world ends, was the only major holdout.

Oil prices are in Alice in Wonderland territory. Today's new futures-market record, above $122 a barrel, occurred despite a substantial rise in both crude oil stocks and gasoline stocks in the U.S., as reported by the federal Energy Information Administration. In any vaguely normal market, both of those events would drive down oil prices. But today, the speculators just shrugged, said "what the heck," and kept the upward spike going. Pardon my suspicious mind, but I connect it to "predictions" of $150 or even $200 a barrel crude oil.

Here's what the Capitol Alert reported outgoing Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez said at his last press conference yesterday.

San Ramon-based Chevron said it expects to spend the money over a...

Politicians are dying to get at more of Big Oil's billions, but analysts are torn about what that will do to prices or future energy sources.

NEW YORK, NY -- Politicians are eyeing oil profits like a fat...

WASHINGTON, DC -- At a Shell gas station in Washington, Rocky Twyman and an unusual group of activists were mad as hell about soaring fuel prices.

"Last week,...

Stability could be fleeting, analyst says, as California average pauses at $3.92.

The surge in gasoline prices has stopped for now. The grumbling hasn't.

As the average price in California...

Here's a perfect example of why a non-medical company with no relationship to the patient should never be allowed access to patient information without permission first - as a ...