In the Hofstra presidential debate, President Obama said: “when I took office, the price of gasoline was $1.80. Why is that? Because the economy was on the verge of collapse.” Wrong. Prices collapsed because we signaled to the world that we were finally moving forward with developing America’s massive offshore oil and gas resources — and they shot back up when Obama reimposed the offshore ban.
Obama’s ridiculous story that the doubling of gasoline prices under his watch is a result of economic recovery doesn’t fit the facts. According the National Bureau of Economic Research, responsible for officially designating when recessions start, the recession began in December of 2007. The average price for a gallon of gasoline that month, according the Energy Information Administration, was $3.02. The price rose for the next seven months with the country in recession. The price peaked in July of 2008 at $4.06 a gallon, more than half a year into recession, exacerbating economic pain and spurring the national protest movement that gave us “Drill Here, Drill Now” and “Drill, Baby, Drill.”
That July 2008 peak coincided with a critical policy change. On July 14, 2008, President Bush lifted the executive branch moratorium on offshore drilling that his father had put in place. That indicated a consolidation of support for offshore drilling that stalled the run-up in prices at the pump. In the next two months, the average price dropped more than thirty cents to $3.70.
Grassroots activists pressed even harder, demanding that Congress lift the remaining barrier to offshore drilling, the appropriations rider that had been in place since 1981. The pressure on Obama was so intense that he even reversed his opposition, claiming on August 1, 2008, that he would support offshore drilling under some circumstances.
Meanwhile, activists ratcheted up pressure on Congress and the White House, urging Congress to let the ban expire. Facing organized opposition in Congress, a Bush veto threat, and overwhelming public opinion in favor of drilling, Nancy Pelosi caved. After 27 years, the ban on offshore drilling was officially lifted on October 1, 2008.
With the moratorium lifted, markets anticipated future production of the estimated 19.1 billion barrels of oil (equal to 30 years of imports from Saudi Arabia) in the Outer Continental Shelf. Market psychology abruptly reversed, and the price at the pump dropped sharply.
It reached a low of $1.79 in January 2009, the month of Obama’s inauguration. That’s no coincidence.
The first order of business for Ken Salazar, Obama’s new secretary of the Interior, was to stop the pending opening of the former moratorium waters — supposedly temporarily. That announcement was made on February 10, 2009. By April, prices were back over two dollars. By June, when the recession officially ended, the price was $2.63 — up more than 80 cents from when Obama took office while the economy was still in recession.
Prices spiked up again starting in May of 2010, which is when Obama and Salazar imposed an illegal moratorium (literally; Salazar was held in contempt of court because the moratorium was based on a politically corrupted report) in the Gulf of Mexico as an overreaction to the BP spill.
By December of 2010, Obama had fully and permanently reimposed the old moratorium that Bush and Congress had lifted in 2008. So now we’re back where we were in summer of 2008, with prices around four dollars and vast offshore American energy resources locked up by politicians. The facts are clear — the pain at the pump is not, as Obama suggested, a result of a supposedly strong economy. It is a result of his own disastrous policy.
Loading ...
Googling Obama’s Reelection
President Obama’s reelection was a triumph of Big Data, technological innovation, and precision targeting over the usual gravity of an incumbent president with a record of economic failure. This was facilitated by largest data trove in the world, Google, lending talent, expertise, and quite possibly data to the cause. Now, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is being rumored as a potential Commerce Secretary or even Treasury Secretary — the top economic policy position — in Obama’s second term. That’s probably far-fetched, but the close relationship between the administration and Google deserves scrutiny.
Obama reportedly met Google CEO Eric Schmidt for the first time in a 2007 campaign event at Google’s headquarters. That was the event where Obama famously said: “I will take a backseat to no one in my commitment to Net Neutrality.” It was music to Schmidt’s ears because net neutrality regulations were the company’s top rent-seeking priority: a legal guarantee they could continue to consume a massive portion of consumer broadband capacity without being asked to pay for it.
The idea of regulating the Internet was basically dead on arrival in Congress, but Obama’s close friend Julius Genachowski jammed it through on dubious legal grounds on a 3-to-2 party-line vote at the Federal Communications Commission. The order is likely to be struck down in court next year.
Google’s top lobbyist, Andrew McLoughlin, was installed as the top tech policy staffer in the White House, where he proceeded to breach ethics rules by maintaining regular contact with his former Google colleagues and conducting his official business from a Gmail account. Ironically, his misconduct came to light because of one of Google’s many privacy failures, a bug that accidentally revealed private information on Google Buzz.
Schmidt also reportedly pressed the Obama campaign, through economic adviser Jason Furman, to make a major push into green jobs, a sidelight business of Google’s. We know how poorly that turned out, with new bankruptcies and scandals breaking every week or so.
There are other reasons to be wary of Google, which has largely built its business by expropriating other people’s property, monetizing it, and then settling if caught.
It was that way from the beginning, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote: “advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers” — but then proceeded to pilfer patented search ad technology from GoTo. They eventually settled for over $300 million with Yahoo, which had acquired GoTo’s intellectual property.
It was that way when Google tried to scan millions of books without permission from authors and later tried to legitimize this grab after-the-fact by inking a licensing deal with publishers that would automatically sweep in authors. That deal was struck down in court.
It was that way when Google got caught red-handed facilitating the sale on counterfeit pharmaceuticals, not only facilitating the theft of intellectual property but also directly endangering safety by bringing potentially dangerous fake drugs into the country. Google forked over $500 million to the Department of Justice to settle the charges.
Yet the Obama administration embraced Google wholeheartedly, conducting the president’s first video address on YouTube, doing Google+ chats, and tailoring procurement requests towards Google’s cloud-based products.
Unsurprisingly, when the Obama team set out to take on the Herculean task of using data and technology to overcome the president’s economic record, they went to Google. According to BusinessWeek, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina looked to Schmidt as a mentor. Messina explained: “For three hours we sat in a conference room, and he just gave me advice about all the mistakes he’d made, about purchasing supply chains, about HR, about the blocking and tackling of growing fast and making sure you have organizational objectives.”
Schmidt’s role went beyond advice. He acted as a facilitator, connecting Messina with the top talent that became the campaign’s vaunted data team, and led a team of top Silicon valley executives who advised Messina on setting up the campaign’s data infrastructure. On election night, Schmidt was seen smiling in the room with Obama’s data team.
Now Schmidt, the CEO of a company with a record of ruthlessly expropriating what it wants, is in a position to be rewarded even more in Obama’s second term.