Bush Threatens to Veto Any Legislation That Raises Taxes on Oil Industry

[Purveyor]

Source: Bloomberg News

Oct. 16 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush's advisers will recommend that he veto any energy legislation that raises taxes on the oil industry, the administration said in a letter.

The legislation shouldn't ``raise taxes nor use the tax code to single out specific industries,'' White House National Economic Council Director Allan Hubbard wrote in a letter yesterday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The letter marks the first comprehensive statement of what Bush doesn't want to see in whichever energy bill is sent to his desk for a signature. Measures in both the House and Senate would levy billions of dollars of new taxes on the oil and gas industry to help fund development of renewable energy resources.

Pelosi and other Democratic leaders plan to press forward energy legislation absent formal negotiations with Republicans to resolve differences between bills passed by the House and Senate this summer, her office confirmed last week.

The push for energy legislation comes after average U.S. retail gasoline prices reached an all-time high in May at $3.218 a gallon. Today, New York crude-oil futures climbed to a record at $88 a barrel.



Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=ag5TASwc6720&refer=us

[BOSSHOG]

1. Tax cuts and bombs, the only "solutions" in the gop tool box

[sakabatou]

2. Protect the oil, not the people

:puke:

[rodeodance]

3. gee, you mean that industry that made Billions last year JR??

[soothsayer]

6. RECORD profits for MANY years now

[Bonhomme Richard]

4. UMmmmm His advisers are the oil industry. n/t

[Up2Late]

19. Exactly! I couldn't have said it any better than that! eom.

[zabet]

5. He is supporting his base. n/t

[phantom power]

7. One might think that an opposition party could make use of this....

You know, get on the teevee and make sure Americans know that while they struggle with health insurance, Bush is fighting for tax-breaks for billionaires.

[loves_dulcinea]

14. i nominate this

as post of the month!

[robinlynne]

24. You would think....

[FiveGoodMen]

35. Hey, you're right! All we need now is an opposition party.

Seen any lately? :(

[Heywood J]

38. We have a winner.

Any smart, sane party or individual would hang this around his neck and that of all Republicans. They'd also make sure to link this proposed veto to his veto of S-CHIP. This should be all over the TV, newspapers, magazines, billboards, etc.

How much money can MoveOn.Org pull together on short notice for an ad like Betrayus? Why can't such amounts of money be put to use by some other group?

[gratuitous]

8. Why shouldn't they help pay for their war?

What did ExxonMobil make in profits last year? Nearly $40 billion? And Bush doesn't think they should be helping to pay for all the armaments and blood that fueled their spectacular profits? I wonder why not?

I guess they'll need some extra cash laying around to pay the Boy King when he finally abdicates the mess he's made to his successor.

[rodeodance]

9. A White House list of ``deal-makers and deal-breakers'' will limit bargaining on the combined energ

Bargaining Limited

A White House list of ``deal-makers and deal-breakers'' will limit bargaining on the combined energy bill submitted to the House and Senate for final approval, Kevin Book, senior vice president for energy policy at Friedman Billings Ramsey & Co., wrote in a note to clients yesterday.

``Lawmakers need only 218 House and 60 Senate votes for legislation the White House would willingly sign, but overriding a presidential veto requires a much-less-likely 290 House and 67 Senate votes,'' Book wrote.

Bush opposes provisions that would allow the U.S. to sue members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries for antitrust violations and impose price controls on gasoline during declared energy emergencies, Hubbard wrote. The administration has said that legislation making gasoline price-gouging a federal crime was a de facto price control that would bring back long lines for fuel, ``reminiscent of the 1970s.''

Hubbard said the administration also opposes a federal standard for renewable power supplies and wants a bill that will increase, not reduce, domestic energy production.

Other Recipients

[rodeodance]

10. Pelosi, of California, and other Democrats will ``have to be less adversarial'' to get the legislati

The administration is telling Congress that energy legislation can't be paid for ``all on the back of a single industry,'' said Christine Tezak, a Washington analyst for Stanford Group Co.

Pelosi, of California, and other Democrats will ``have to be less adversarial'' to get the legislation enacted, Tezak said. ``All energy legislation that sits around too long, it starts to stink and it's harder to get through.''

[robinlynne]

25. well, since he's going to veto, we should just give up then. wouldn't want to waste our

time fighting for what's right, or filibustering, or exposing what he's doing,...

[movonne]

11. And they won't discuss impeachment...we will be taken over by the

oil companies and their money..

[Lone_Star_Dem]

12. Will be?

From where I'm sitting it would appear they've had more control than average citizens for quite some time now.

[Ganja Ninja]

13. Let him.

And then let the Republicans block the override vote. It will show people just who the GOP stands with.

[robinlynne]

26. I think he should be forced to veto each important bill at least 10 times before the

real discussion begins.

[bdamomma]

15. maybe he shoots up oil in his veins among all the other drugs

and alcohol he does. what a disgusting man. every dog has its day.

[AzDar]

16. Protecting his true 'base' : the drills, and the drill-mores.

:puke:

[surfermaw]

17. Is that a suprise

remember elect the oil president, he will take care of the problems we have,he really has, hasn't he.just about brought a recession with the price of energy and his great war.

[truthisfreedom]

18. Doesn't surprise me one bit. The party that harbors the pedophiles, bribe-takers, and gay-bashing

closet queens is the same one that refuses to tax the corporations which are the greatest source of greenhouse gases to supplement the growth of renewable energy that will eliminate our need for illegal wars and dependence on foreign oil.

Complete and total filthy corruption. That's all they stand for.

[Ian David]

20. I have a better idea. Just tax the individual oil executives' personal income.

Identify them by name in the bill, too.

[Up2Late]

21. My Re-written headline: Bush threatens another Veto, says he's not just doing it to be a Dick

Which is exactly why he is doing this, or at least it's ONE of the two reasons. The other, I feel, is to try to hide the fact that had exactly ZERO Vetoes while the Republic Party controlled Congress.:mad:

[Imagevision]

22. Bush/Cheney first and foremost are oilmen, W's just taking care of business like

he is in Iraq, Bush is pretty thrilled at the prospect of actually having the entire military at his disposal to do whatever it takes to secure that oil. Invade a country, kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, hang it's leader, Bush should be on a natural high every day he awakes.

[BrklynLiberal]

23. We must must must get those Repukes out of the White House!!!!

:mad:

War Profiteering

Even before US troops arrived
in Baghdad, looting broke out--in Washington. While Republicans in Congress and their allies in the media yammered about the need to silence dissent and "support the troops," corporations with close ties to the Bush Administration were quietly arranging to ink lucrative contracts that would put them in charge of reconstructing Iraq. Bechtel's contract, worth up to $680 million, to rebuild Iraqi roads, schools, sewers and hospitals drew a lot of media attention, but it was chump change compared with the deal greased through by Vice President Cheney's old oil-services firm, Halliburton. The Army Corps of Engineers told Representative Henry Waxman that a Pentagon contract awarded without competition to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) to fight oilwell fires is worth as much as $7 billion over two years. The Halliburton subsidiary has been authorized to take profits of up to $490 million.

Congress dozes while the treasury is raided. Waxman has done the best job of monitoring the rapidly burgeoning relationship between the federal government run by Dick Cheney and a corporation formerly run by Dick Cheney. He's been asking polite, persistent questions such as, "What is the exact nature of the work that Brown & Root is expected to be asked to perform under the contract?"

But where's the outrage? Where is the leader with the courage to say, as Franklin Roosevelt did during World War II, "I don't want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster"? Democrats in Congress--and Republicans who have not placed their conscience in a blind trust for the duration of the Bush/Cheney years, a group we hope still includes Arizona's John McCain in the Senate and Iowa's Jim Leach in the House--should borrow a page from past wars, when the nation's elected leaders knew what to call businessmen who used hostilities abroad as an excuse to raid the federal treasury. Senator Robert La Follette tagged them as "enemies of democracy in the homeland." During World War II Harry Truman referred to some forms of war profiteering as "treason."
<snip>...

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030512/editors

[robinlynne]

27. So when do we, the dem party, start vetoing bad legislation, and vetoing

war funding?

As in why was there a vote on the eliminate FISA act of august 2007 when we control what gets voted on?
why is there a vote on war funding?

[superconnected]

28. Who's your daddy george...?

Impeach the oil industries minion for treason.

[Doctor Cynic]

29. Veto list so far

Let's see: am I missing anything?

Stem cell research funding
Bill to demand a timeline for Iraq withdrawl
Stem cell funding (again)

And potentially, a bill to raise taxes on people that have collected money using shady dealings.

Anything else?

[Yael]

31. S-CHIP

[Yael]

30. *SCREAM*

Part of me really wants to go google up how much the oil execs are making this year and the other part can't bear to know.

[ironrooster]

32. I agree completely with Bush

Don't tax them - nationalize them!

[progressoid]

33. Good. More ammo for next November.

Lets hope the GOP supports him.

[Supersedeas]

34. Not my buddies, not my cronies dawg....not on my watch

[Bluestar]

36. This is the kind of headline that needs to be used in campaign ads

Most of backwater America has no idea this is going on and the MSM won't tell them. Once they actually realize that their precious little lives are being impacted by Bush directly with record gas prices, they might get the message.

[dansolo]

37. But tax cuts to specific industries are fine

[defendandprotect]

39. The "oil industry" controls our natural resources -- let's take them back!!!

Why do a few private families control our natural resources -- ????

Let's ask Gore . . .


Meanwhile, the oil industry has been responsible for much of the mischief in America and throughout the world.

No difference between ExxonMobil and the Mafia . . .

How about a windfalls profit tax on ExxonMobil for the $36 BILLION they made last year -- ????

[defendandprotect]

40. The Democratic Platform that JFK ran on called for the nationalizing of the oil industry ---