I was just reading over at ABC The Blotter that the Department of Energy has lost 308,000 barrels of oil that was designated for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. How does this happen? Or is it like Empywheel writes and just Dick stealing from the US taxpayer again to give to his oil buddies?
How do you not notice when 308,000 barrels of oil go missing?
That's the question government auditors were asking after they looked into the Department of Energy's management of oil received for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a critical program to assure energy stability in the U.S. in case of an oil crisis.
According to the audit (PDF) done by Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman of the DOE, 28%, or 308,000 barrels of oil, did not match the amount to be shipped the Interior's Department of Mineral's Management Services during a four month period in Fiscal Year 2005.
Remember the Mineral's Management Service? This is the Department of Interior agency that is tasked with making sure when oil companies drill on US or Native American lands they get a return on the oil taken out of their land. Their scam went like this:
The oil companies would cheat and tell the government they drilled less oil than they had.
When such fraud was identified, DOI would order its auditors to overlook the cheating.
The byzantine rules governing royalties would make it hard to collect the money you and I are owed.
So DOI started a new program. We'd let someone drill oil, and in exchange, the oil company would put a similar amount of oil into the strategic reserve. But when the strategic reserve filled up, the government started using brokers to sell our oil.
It turns out that Susan Wooldridge and Steven Griles had some close ties (as in, sharing a house) to one of the companies bidding to be that broker company, and that that company got to sell our oil even though another broker was willing to charge a higher rate (and therefore pay taxpayers more money). So basically, these two lovebirds accepted a bribe and sold our oil to the lowest bidder.
The underlying story is that the Bush-Cheney DOI has made it very easy for their donors to get oil from US lands at cut-rate prices. And that is what this super-secret subcommittee is supposed to fix.
To offset this fraud the Royalty Policy Committee was formed to:
-The extent to which existing procedures and processes for reporting and accounting for federal and Indian mineral revenues are sufficient to ensure that the Minerals Management Service receives the correct amount.
-The audit, compliance and enforcement procedures and processes of the Minerals Management Service to determine if they are adequate to ensure that mineral companies are complying with existing statutes, lease terms, and regulations as they pertain to payment of royalties.
-The operations of the Royalty in Kind program to ensure that adequate policies, procedures and controls are in place to ensure that decisions to take federal oil and gas royalties in kind result in net benefits to the American people.
But unfortunately, this committee likes to meet in secret like they did in June of last year:
The Royalty Management Subcommittee's first meeting, held today in Washington, DC, will be closed to the public. It is certainly perfectly legal under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) for a Subcommittee to have private meetings. However, it is also not the preferable way for a Subcommittee to operate, particularly when dealing with an issue of great interest to the public and the Congress, as is the case here. In addition, Subcommittees are not to be used as a venue for preventing public insight into deliberations.
So, what keeps tricky Dick up at night? According to a November article in Fortune Magazine the prospect of something disrupting the oil market causes Dick to lose sleep.
"Clearly the world depends on a global supply of oil, and that will continue to be true for some considerable period of time. Efforts to shut down the flow of oil could conceivably have a significant impact."
So when the 2008 budget was coming together which has a goal of balancing the budget in five years (hahahahaha) Dick pushed for a $947 million dollar line item to speed up the production of crude into the Texas and Louisiana salt caverns housing the nations Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
The budget guys pushed back: Can't we wait until crude prices level off? No, the word came back from Cheney, this was urgent. That was all it took. "He doesn't weigh in on a ton of issues," said a person close to those negotiations. "But when he does . . ."
When he does, the Vice President tends to get his way. "He's an extremely effective bureaucratic operator," says Peter Wehner, formerly Bush's director of strategic initiatives.
I would think that the complete government waste this administration has engaged in would be enough to impeach, not to mention the numerous war crimes and obstruction of justice charges, but congress will not comply. I also wonder why this story is only mentioned in ABC News The Blotter and no other news source has picked it up? I guess I know the answer and it's the same reason why in nyceve's diary testimony on the corruption of the health insurance industry never saw the light of the media. The media is a corporation concerned with profit and they're not going to report on stories that actually educate the public and could garner them potential and costly lawsuits.
So, tricky Dick expands the oil give away to his corporate buddies, stealing right in front of us and the US taxpayer continues to foot the bill.