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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (32250)	6/23/2010 10:53:03 PM
From: GROUND ZERO™	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

The labor department is now going to help the illegals get fair wages... what the hell is wrong with these people in Washington? November can't get here fast enough, don't those idiots get it yet? We have to treat non citizens as if they were American citizens? This is the snow ball effect brought on by the civil rights movement. While legal Americans are struggling to feed their families and pay their bills, they are just handing out money and assistance left and right to these illegals??? Can someone tell me how you can drive a Cadillac and still qualify for food stamps and State medical assistance for your kids????? Everyone keeps talking about punishing companies that hire illegals, so now the government is saying not only do people have to hire them they have to give them fair payment and benefits too. foxnews.com GZ

To: longnshort who wrote (32250)	6/24/2010 3:13:54 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 103300

How Limiting Oil Company Liability Causes Spills Robert de Neufville June 19, 2010, 5:46 PM bigthink.com On Thursday, Republicans blocked an attempt to lift the liability cap for oil companies for the fourth time. Although BP has agreed to establish a $20 billion fund to pay for damages caused by the Deepwater Horizon spill and has promised to pay “all legitimate claims,” under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 oil company liability for spills is capped at relatively miniscule $75 million. Republicans agree that the current cap is too low, but argue that removing the cap completely would make it too expensive for most companies to drill. But Democrats want to remove the cap entirely and make oil companies liable for the complete costs of any spill, on the grounds that companies that can’t afford to pay for insurance shouldn’t be drilling in the first place. “If you or I caused an accident, we would be responsible for all the damages,” Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, said recently. “There would be no caps in that case, and there should be no caps in this case.” Bringing the liability cap issue up over and over again, of course, is a transparent political stunt. Democrats want to make sure everyone knows Republicans oppose removing the cap. They want people to perceive the Republicans as caring more about oil companies than about the people whose lives were hurt by the oil spill. That case is particularly easy to make after Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward on Thursday that the White House had pressured BP to set up the $20 billion fund, calling it a “shakedown” (Barton retracted his remarks after the Republican leadership threatened to remove him from his ranking seat on the Energy and Commerce Committee). If the Democrats are using popular anger with BP to score political points, there is nevertheless a serious political issue here. BP is a fabulously wealthy company, of course, which reported $16.6 billion in profits last year—almost three times what Google made. And it’s responsible for one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. It certainly seems reasonable to ask it to pay for a large part of the costs of the clean up. But, as Daniel Indiviglio argued in The Atlantic this week, the real issue is that the low liability cap may be partly to blame for the accident. While people tend to underestimate the risk of unusual accidents like this one, BP would almost certainly not have been as negligent or as poorly prepared for a spill if it had been legally required to pay the complete costs of the clean up. Oil companies had little incentive to be appropriately careful. As Michael Greenstone says, the cap inevitably distorts the way companies evaluate their risk. Locations where damages from a spill may be costly—for example, places near coasts or in sensitive environmental areas—seem more attractive for drilling with the cap than if firms actually were responsible for all damages. By limiting oil company liability, we effectively provided oil companies with enormous amounts of free insurance, allowing them to play with house money—that is, with public money.