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Monday’s federal report on gasoline prices is a horror story. The national average price for a gallon of regular spiked seven cents to $3.05 in a week. That’s an all-time record for this time of year–and for no good reason. Yet our federal regulators who could curb speculators are still sitting on their thumbs. I hope it’s uncomfortable.
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Oil refiner Valero, as it pumped $5 million into a California ballot proposition aimed at killing climate change regulation, warned that such regulation would bring an economic Armageddon of lost jobs in refineries and elsewhere,…
Blog Post
We’ve reported about what’s wrong in the secrecy around BP’s payments to Kenneth Feinberg and his law firm, which is doling out compensation for BP’s devastating oil spill in the Gulf. Monday, though, the Center for Justice and Democracy got deep into the guts of the matter.
Blog Post
Late last week, as the presidential oil spill commission’s co-chair and staff blamed BP’s cost-cutting and “failure of management” for the devastating spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP managers claimed that the government estimate…
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The wee island nation of Fiji managed Wednesday to back down a California-owned company and extract a fee of 8 US cents per liter on Fiji Water. The state of California can’t even manage to back down Big Oil and charge a few cents a gallon on oil pumped out of its public lands. Jerry Brown, are you listening?
Blog Post
The deadline for submitting claims to the $20 billion BP oil spill compensation fund is midnight Tuesday. The wrangling over payouts will go on, perhaps for years. Yet the administrator of the fund, Kenneth Feinberg,…
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How could an expert lawyer, after scores of interviews, find no evidence that corporate cost-cutting wasn’t a factor in decisions that led to the BP well explosion? Apparently it wasn’t hard for the corporate attorney heading the federal investigation, whose own history includes representing oil and chemical companies. Yet his bosses see no conflict of interest.
Press Release
Consumer Watchdog NEWS RELEASE Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2010 Contact: Judy Dugan, 213-280-0175; or Jamie Court, 310-392-0075 Washington, D.C. — Consumer Watchdog today called on President Obama to remove the general counsel to the national Oil…
News Clipping
The panel named by President Obama to investigate the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout on Tuesday rejected a call by a consumer activist group for the resignation of its chief counsel, Fred H. Bartlit Jr. The group, Consumer Watchdog, said that the panel should dismiss Mr. Bartlit because his law firm, Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott, once represented Halliburton, one of the companies involved in drilling the BP well.
Blog Post
Monday’s statement by a White House commission was a head-snapper. BP cost-cutting not at fault for the Gulf spill? Say what? But a closer look at the words of the commission’s general counsel says something else: That the commission’s investigation is so constricted it will never point to BP’s ferocious cost-cutting.
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Halliburton is the sloppy contractor with no license, bad B.O. and helpers off the street who use gravel to stretch the cement and pour your driveway without the rebar. Except writ large. And deadly. As…
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The Texas oil money behind Proposition 23 is widely known by now. But there’s been less publicity about Big Oil–specifically Chevron–putting $4 million into passing Propostion 26, according to a nifty interactive chart just released by OilChange International.
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I had lunch in the Chamber of Commerce’s AIG-sponsored “Hall of Flags” today, where BP compensation fund administrator Kenneth Feinberg told the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform that the legal system is working just fine.
