Moratorium On Gulf Drilling Blocked

U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman granted a preliminary injunction prohibiting the government from enforcing the six month drilling ban in the Gulf. The action was a result of a suit filed by Hornbeck Offshore Services, L.L.C., etal. The White House reported it would appeal the decision to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

A number of elected officials applauded the judge's decision to lift the drilling ban and some urged the President not to appeal the decision. The Times Picayune in its editorial of 6/23 said, The administration's determination to fight the preliminary injunction is disappointing. The same day another full page ad appeared in the TP by BP which has been ongoing.

Hopefully the President will follow through with his appeal and stay on the side of those 11 workers who were killed and the resulting hardships placed on their families. Those elected officials who continue to accept money from oil industry lobbyist during this sad time and continue to blame the President and federal government for the resulting fall out have no character. They continue to be the mouth piece for BP and the oil industry.

Those elected officials and the editors of the TP should be well aware that executives of BP and other oil companies recently testified before congress under oath and said they still did not know what caused the explosion, still don't not know how to timely cap such a blow out and still have no equipment available to timely remove any spilled oil from the waters of the Gulf. And in fact they had no model to test on.

The Times Picayune and elected officials who are against the moratorium should address their rhetoric to the people responsible for the spill to compensate any workers that were harmed. They should think more about the workers killed and their families, that it is over two months since the explosion and the oil industry still has no answers. Louisiana has let the oil industry off the hook with the damage they have done to the wet lands, coastal erosion and the environment and now that industry wants to cut and run with the threat to move their rigs over seas.

I wrote a previous post that when all is said and done with this spill it will be business as usual between the oil industry and elected officials. Money from lobbyist will continue to flow to elected officials and nothing will have been learned. I have seen nothing since the explosion that could lead me to change my mind. Hopefully President Obama will stand tall. He represents the people's last hope in this matter.

Louisiana Governor Jindal, The State Legislature and Balanced/Unbalanced State Budgets

Louisiana is required by law to balance the state budget and every year since Jindal became governor the state has balanced its unbalanced budgets only to become unbalanced again before the fiscal year is over. And the current fiscal year was no exception.

Now Jindal and the legislature has come up with a $26 billion budget for the next fiscal year and he and the legislature already know it will be out of balance and in deficit before the fiscal year is over and in fact many in the legislature has already predicted the deficit will be the larger than in the past.

Once again the state and its people have been high jacked by a republican conservative ideology that gets into the average persons pocket a 100 different ways under the disguise of smaller government. As pointed out by Edward Ashworth, director of the Louisiana Budget Project in a recent comment in the Times Picayune, approximately $7 billion in the states budget is for tax exemptions that don't show up in the states budget and receive almost no scruting. Of course, most people realize those billions of dollars of exemptions go to businesses, the least who need them because the tax code is already stacked in their favor. Those exemptions take revenue from the budget that should be used to improve the quality of life for the people.

The billion dollar surplus that Jindal and the legislature inherited from the previous administration was quickly blown away by a conservative ideology and every year since then deficits have shown up that had to be plugged by cutting the budget. But the $7 billion or so tax exemptions have never been touched. Fiscal conservatives? It does not exist in this administration just like it never existed on the federal level under Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43. Their rhetoric sounds good but their actions and lack of leadership and courage speaks loud and clear.