President Obama has reversed his position (or at least what Progressives thought was Candidate Obama’s position) on offshore drilling. It’s hard to accept that the administration we helped to elect would roll over for the Sarah Palin war cry of “Drill, Baby, drill!” The truth is, as it has always been, that offshore drilling will not provide enough oil to make us energy independent and it will be years before we see any effects of drilling.
Firedoglake has a petition to the President, asking him to change his course.
Yesterday, to the surprise of many, President Obama announced that the United States will begin drilling for oil in the waters off the Atlantic Coast and the Gulf of Mexico.
Offshore drilling was a contentious campaign issue in 2008, and Obama even criticized his opponents for supporting it because, in his words, “it didn’t do much to reduce energy prices.”
Candidate Obama pledged to maintain the moratorium on offshore drilling to protect our coastlines and acknowledged a “bipartisan consensus” that it was bad policy. Now he claims offshore drilling is an integral part of reforming the way we consume energy.
If Obama is serious about addressing our environmental and energy concerns, making us even more dependent on fossil fuels while simultaneously destroying our ecosystem is not the way to go about it.
Join us in telling President Obama: offshore drilling isn’t a solution to our energy and environmental problems.
It’s still bad policy. Haven’t we learned anything from the health care reform battle? Republicans don’t want to play nicely, even if Democrats make concessions, and this is one concession we don’t need to make. Sign the petition today. You may even add a personal note.
I am tired of being the change. Inertia is on the side of the status quo. So, unfortunately, are wealth, power, and influence. And age. The revolutionaries of the sixties became the reactionaries of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Where were the rest of us while our parents and grandparents were hijacking our change? Most were busy squandering our chance, maybe our one chance, to move this country toward the creation of a just society. Too busy, too jaded, too poor, too comfortable, too spoiled, too anesthetized to speak out, we let our hopes for a better future be stamped out by the fearful, the selfish, the angry, and the ignorant.
The death of meaningful health care reform is the first sign that the movement for change has stalled. Too few of us tried to be change for too many.
I started the evening with the intent to post Jane Hamsher’s petition to President Obama, asking him to refuse to sign any health care bill without a strong public option. Here’s the link. Send him a letter. Ask him to start being the change. The rest of us are, as we say here in Arkansas, used up.
President Obama is backing away from a promise he made earlier this year to stick it to off-shore tax evaders. The President is tabling his plan to recover $210 billion by cracking down on the use of tax havens by corporations in the face of strong pressure from business, according to the Wall Street Journal. The administration says it remains committed to closing tax loopholes, but we’ll see. Looks like another point for Corporate America and another loss for Americans. According to a 2008 Senate report, the US loses over a billion dollars a year in tax revenue due to offshore tax abuses. Reaganomics tells us that what’s good for the Big Dogs should be good for us little pups as well, but Reaganomics is nothing more than a Republican fairy tale. (You will note that it was never the downstairs maid that lived “happily ever after.” That state of being was reserved for the Prince and Princess Charming). According to a 2008 Senate report, the US loses over a billion dollars a year in tax revenue due to offshore tax abuses.
Huffington Post has the full story.
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