How it happened: John McCain's Flip-flop on Offshore Drilling

From ProgressiveAccountability.org:

John McCain Gives Working Families the Finger

By Joel Wendland

Yesterday John McCain held a town hall meeting at Worth & Co. in Bucks County, PA. The Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry has investigated that company for intentionally refusing to pay workers the minimum wage. Pennsylvania officials say the company underpaid workers by more than $140,000. There is no doubt that McCain's actions yesterday were a deliberate statement on how he feels about working people and their rights.

Here's a brief run-down on McCain's record on working-class issues – just in case you're still in the dark:

helped block minimum wage hike in 2005

voted to filibuster minimum wage hike in 2007

compared unions to monopolies

voted to block the Employee Free Choice Act in 2007, allowing workers to form unions

opposed the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2008, which would have made it easier for women workers to sue for equal pay

McCain also failed to show up to vote last week on a measure that would have extended unemployment benefits for workers.

But McCain did pander to Big Oil on offshore drilling, and promised the most profitable companies in the country billions in new tax cuts.

By contrast, Obama backs the Fair Pay Act, for equal pay for women, would sign the Employee Free Choice Act, has proposed indexing the minimum wage to inflation, and would appoint NLRB members who would protect workers rights, wages, health and safety and so on.

John McCain favors free trade at all costs, especially to the rights of working people and the environment. He told Midwest workers that he has given up on bringing back manufacturing jobs and that more jobs would be lost under his administration.

Obama believes environmental protections and workers rights (to join unions, health and safety protections, and basic wage rights) should be central features of any international trade agreement. He voted against CAFTA and opposed the Colombia Free Trade Agreement for those reasons.

Trade is a key workers' rights issue, because if agreements prioritize trade over workers and the environment, those agreements will make it cheaper for companies to super-exploit workers and the environment in other countries, causing job losses here and the drive to bottom everywhere.

If workers are protected in all countries, however, companies have no reason to go.

On creating new jobs, McCain has offered contradictory and incoherent plans on the most important new areas staked out for job growth: green energy and green jobs.

While he is offering prizes to the biggest polluters and proposes to tie the economy forever to oil with new plans to drill offshore and in protected Arctic regions, Obama plans real investments in research and development of renewable energy alternatives, green infrastructure growth, and alternative energies.

Though John McCain has tried to lie about and hide his support for privatizing Social Security and his plans to slash Social Security and Medicare benefits, Obama opposes privatization and has offered plans to improve the financial security of the program by raising the income cap on the Social Security payroll tax to ensure that the very wealthiest Americans pay their fair share into the system.

The list on the clear and meaningful differences on working-class issues between McCain and Obama is much longer, but you get the idea.

Working people simply can't afford the risk of John McCain in the White House. In fact, we can't afford not spending every effort to work for his defeat, on ensuring an Obama victory, and on strengthening pro-worker Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress.

Tell Congress: No offshore drilling

From TrueMajority.org:

It's time to state the obvious: Off-shore drilling is not a serious idea to reform our energy policy. The Government's own Energy Information Administration points out that this oil won't be available for decades and the total quantity is an "insignificant" drop in the bucket on the world oil market.

The only groups that benefit from McCain's offshore drilling idea are big oil companies like Exxon-Mobil which are already making record profits. So why does John McCain like this cockeyed idea? Maybe because, as the Wall Street Journal reports, "McCain does lead all other senators, and all others who ran for president, in contributions from the oil and gas industry..."

But how much does YOUR Senator get from oil and gas? Whose side will they vote on if offshore drilling comes up for a vote?

Find out about your Reps. and Take Action

Bush's "Energy Policy": Bring Big Texas Oil to the Arctic

by Norman Markowitz

There are a few truisms, the first spanning all history, the second history in the capitalist mode of production. The first is that reactionaries learn nothing and forget nothing and continue to do the same thing over and over again, blaming each failure on internal or external scapegoats or specific mistakes in implementation. The second is that capitalists will seize upon any crisis or disaster of their making to profit from that disaster, even if it means making the situation worse for the people and in the long run, even for them (since their long-run is inevitably short-run profit).

George Bush reflected both truisms today when he called for an end to a congressional ban on off shore oil drilling and an opening of part of the Arctic National Wild Life Preserve for oil drilling. Bush said that this was lower gas prices and protect "national security." He, the great scientist, proclaimed that" scientists have developed innovative techniques to reach arctic preserve oil with virtually no impact on the land or local wildlife." He blamed the Democrats for opposing the policy in the past and helping to create the present gas crisis. The Democrats responded quite rightly that Bush was offering no solution to the energy crisis and pandering to Big Oil, which has been first and foremost in his political machinations throughout his career.

But more is really needed. First, one should remind Bush and the Democrats for that matter that battles over off shore drilling were fought and lost in the past even before the modern environmental movement pushed back some of the worst predators. Seizing control of public lands to exploit them, both by legal and illegal means, has been a consistent theme since the rise of U.S. industrial capitalism, whether it was franchises to loot Indian reservations, phony land claims by a syndicate headed by Meyer Guggenheim and J.P. Morgan to control coal lands in Alaska (which led to the famous Ballinger-Pinchot scandal in the Taft Administration) to bribes to lease oil lands to oil companies in the Harding administration(the Teapot Dome scandal) to many others. The oil depletion allowance, giving oil companies a huge tax windfall for digging up and using more and more oil, a non renewable resource, has been a scandal for generations and a source, analysts abroad contend, of a "national energy policy" that provides a big disincentive for energy conservation and efficiency (progressives even before the contemporary environmental movement condemned it as a massive subsidy to oil companies that gave them super profits and heightened inequality).

But Bush doesn't know and doesn't care. He doesn't know the meaning of the word conservation. His attitude toward the environment isn't any different than Ronald Reagan's, who as governor of California allegedly said "when you've seen one Redwood you've seen them all," and as president of the U.S. junked the Carter administration conservation and alternative energy policies and went all out for deregulation and subsidies for Big Oil (and of course a foreign policy of disrupting the OPEC oil cartel by backing Saddam Hussein's Iraqi dictatorship in its war against Iran). Reagan also with strong support from the auto companies encouraged minivans which later became SUVs as he pushed "free market" aka subisidize and bail out capitalism as the way to create a limitless supply for a limitless demand.

Once the oil is gone, it will be gone. It has been and will continue to be infinitely more expensive to repair the damage done to the environment by corporate predators than any "trickle down" gains that have been made in jobs and prices by those predators policies. Even if one supports developing oil resources in the Arctic Wildlife preserve, no one who is not a propagandist for the administration and/or the oil companies would say that such developing could seriously produce major new sources of oil to deal with the present crisis, given the existing system, for a long time. As for Bush's comment that scientists have developed technologies that can develop oil with no ecological damage, from my understanding (and I am no scientist but neither is Bush) this is not only very wrong but a little bit like tobacco companies in the pre-1960s period citing "studies" for medical researchers they bought that smoking represented no serious health risks.

McCain announced his support for Bush and Senator Obama announced his clear opposition. Unlike Bush and McCain, Obama has come forward with serious suggestions for a national energy policy. Now would be a good time to bring them forward.