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Bryson to Head Commerce Department?
By Kennedy Maize
Washington, D.C., May 31, 2011 — By the time you read this, the event may have already happened. The Washington rumor mill is rumbling loudly that President Obama will name John Bryson, former California electric company executive, to be commerce secretary, replacing Gary Locke, who will be named U.S. ambassador to China. Locke, former Democratic governor of Washington, replaces Jon Huntsman, a Republican former Utah governor and possible GOP presidential candidate, in Beijing.
Fox News this morning reported the rumors, citing an unnamed White House official. A similarly anonymous official confirmed the story to Politico, with the announcement scheduled for this afternoon.
The appointment makes sense, given Bryson’s background. Former chairman and chief executive officer of Edison International, parent of Southern California Edison, Bryson, 67, retired from the giant energy company in 2008, joining takeover specialists KKR as a senior specialist. He took the top job at Edison in 1990 after joining SCE’s staff in 1984. He won an internal competition with Mike Peevey, now head of the California Public Utilities Commission, to succeed the legendary Howard Allen at SCE.
Bryson, a lawyer, served as CPUC chairman from 1979 to 1982. Upon graduating from Yale Law School in 1970, he joined a group of other recent Yale law graduates to found the Natural Resources Defense Council, which became one of the nation’s leading environmental groups. The other NRDC founders included John Adams, Gus Speth (head of the White House council on environmental quality in the Carter administration), Edward Strohbehn, Angus Macbeth and Dick Ayres.
The Commerce Department has long been a destination for politically-minded business executives, although the Obama administration originally looked for politicians to fill the job. The administration’s first choice for the job was former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who withdrew during a flap over his use of patronage during his gubernatorial term. Locke, who has made little impact in the job, was a natural for the China slot, given his Chinese-American background. According several press accounts, Eric Schmidt of Google was Obama’s first choice to succeed Locke.
Bryson would become the second high-level energy executive to be tapped for a key Obama post. Earlier, the president name GE CEO Jeff Immelt to lead a panel of outside advisors on economic recovery issues.
The job of commerce secretary requires Senate approval.
Update 3:30 p.m. EST: President Obama made it official this afternoon, naming Bryson as his choice for the commerce department cabinet slot. “John will be an important part of my economic team,” the president said in a written statement, “working with the business community, fostering growth, and helping open up new markets abroad to promote jobs and opportunities here at home,”
Bin Laden Buffoonery from Bill Richardson
By Kennedy Maize
Washington, D.C., May 8, 2011 — Anyone who has followed energy politics in the U.S. for the past 15 years or so knows that Bill Richardson is a buffoon. Back in August 2003, following the mammoth Northeast blackout, Richardson famously said, “We are a major superpower with a third-world electrical grid.”
Richardson was the last of Bill Clinton’s three energy secretaries, each less memorable than the immediate predecessor; he should have known that a key characteristic of third-world countries is that they generally don’t have a grid. Indeed, Richardson has had life experience with third-world countries that don’t have a grid, having been Kim Jong Il’s wing man from time to time.
Richardson’s latest bit of buffoonery is his comment, reported recently in Politico, linking the U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden to his wished-for revival of global warming legislation in Washington by Barak Obama. Politico reported: “‘My hope is that from this success in the foreign policy arena two days ago, that he will be emboldened to take once again to the Congress legislation — not just to increase a renewable energy standard — but climate change legislation that this country and the world need,’ Richardson said Tuesday at a Climate Leadership Gala hosted by the Earth Day Network in Washington.”
This head-scratching statement prompted the EnergyFairness.org blog to award the former New Mexico governor, where he was serving during the 2003 blackout, a spot “at the top of the list for the Non Sequitur of the Year award, if there is one.” (Richardson has also won the John Belushi Look-Alike contest more times than John Belushi.)
About the only thing Osama and cap-and-trade have in common is that both are indisputably dead, although the corpse of the legislation is more visible, having never been buried at sea. Its stinking remains are palpable in the halls of the U.S. Senate. That Richardson was somehow able to contrive a linkage between the two cadavers boggles this mind.
Fortunately for us all, given this penchant for nonsense, Richardson has never held a job of consequence where he could do any significant damage to the nation: mediocre college-level baseball pitcher, member of Congress, U.N. ambassador, energy secretary, New Mexico governor, failed Commerce secretary nominee in the Obama administration.
For my New Mexico readers – and there may be one – the proof that the job of governor is of little significance is that Richardson’s predecessor was Gary Johnson, now campaigning for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination on a platform of legalizing pot. If Gary Johnson walked into a room wearing a name tag that says, “Hi, I’m Gary Johnson,” no one in the room, stoned or sober, would recognize him. If Richardson walked into the room, the reaction would be, “My God, I thought John Belushi was dead.”
Richardson’s career as energy secretary is (barely) memorable for his less-than-deft handling of the bogus espionage case of Wen Ho Lee. Richardson, who should have known better, publicly fingered Lee, a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist born in Taiwan, as a spy for China. The charge was accompanied by an absence of convincing evidence.
Lee was indicted, jailed in solitary confinement for nine months, and ultimately released on time served with an apology from the court after admitting guilt on a single charge of mishandling classified information. Lee sued the government and won a $1.6 million settlement from the government and five media companies (which used anonymous sources – most likely including Richardson – to attack Lee). He also got an apology from Bill Clinton. Lee’s treatment by Richardson and the Clinton administration also drew a rebuke from U.S. District Court Judge James A. Parker, who originally ordered Lee jailed pending trial. A contrite Parker said the administration “caused embarrassment by the way this case began and was handled.” He added that the officials “have embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it.” Nice work, Mr. Secretary.
The Tired Obama Attack on Gasoline Prices
By Kennedy Maize
Washington, D.C., May 2, 2011 – The Obama administration’s response to current high gasoline prices is so 1970s…or 1980s…or 1990s…or 2000s. Been there, done that, dead end.
Washington seems to be perfumed with a silliness pheromone that gets loosed in the Nation’s Capital whenever gasoline prices go up. As pump prices climb, every administration going back to Nixon, and every Congress cheerleading or booing from the sidelines, resorts to the same tired ploy. We’ll have an investigation, we’ll get to the bottom of this, we’ll find the miscreants and punish them severely.
Only there aren’t any miscreants, just oil companies passing on prices over which they have no control. In fact, no indictable or renounceable people or institutions have any control over oil prices, and that includes our favorite bugbear, OPEC. Prices are set at computer consoles and on trading floors by so many different actors with so many different ideas about the future that making any sense out of it results in only one thing: a consensus commodity price with which we all must live.
The alternative to this chaotic, volatile oil market is far worse: rationing, either de jure or de facto. We’ve had both – outright rationing by law during World War II, which few are old enough to remember, and rationing by bureaucrats tinkering with markets, which characterized the 1970s and early 1980s. While few remember ration coupons (and I certainly don’t), many more of us (count me in this cohort) remember gasoline lines and odd-even days for buying gas.
Some of us probably even recall the breathless but false accounts in the press – fed by ignorant or venal politicians, most of them members of my Democratic Party – of oil tankers parked just over the horizon, waiting for prices to rise before they pull into dock to unload their crude. To spread the partisan blame around, it was the Republicans and the Ford administration who were too cowed by politics to remove Nixon’s disastrous price controls on crude oil. Those contributed mightily to the gasoline price hikes and gas line that first OPEC and then the fall of the Shah of Iran brought about.
Of course, the cynical among us, and the experienced, know what’s going on here. The idea is to entertain the great unwashed American voters with the flash and dazzle of a good sideshow, while the people in power, who are in truth powerless, sneak out the back, Jack. Make a new plan, Stan. There must be 50 ways to fool the voters.
So Obama has launched another investigation as gasoline prices pierce the somehow magical pump-price ceiling, now standing at $4/gallon. He joins every predecessor in the modern White House, including that scion of the oil patch George W. Bush. Don’t expect any deviation from the politics of blame assignment and ducking from the current crew.
On a related note, many Democrats in Congress and some in the administration are also outraged, outraged, I tell you, about soaring oil company profits. It’s just “obscene” that oil companies make money when people buy their products. That towering profile of political courage, James Earl Carter, gave us the “windfall profits tax.” That worked, didn’t it?
I have no fondness for oil companies, but it doesn’t surprise me, and it shouldn’t surprise you, when they make more money when the price of oil goes up. Remember – see above – they don’t control the price of oil. It is completely unreasonable to expect oil companies to refuse to pass on price increases to their customers, as some of the congressional commentary suggests should be proper behavior. The managers of oil companies, like those of other publicly-traded businesses, have obligations to their shareholders.
More to the point, reducing the cash Exxon-Mobil stashes away under the mattress after costs would not lower gasoline prices to you or me by even a penny.
You may have noticed that many of those solons who seek to force oil companies to disgorge profits are the same folks who decry carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, notably gasoline. How would they reduce CO2 emission from cars and trucks while seizing oil profits? Simple. They would replace oil profits with gasoline taxes, while keeping prices the same and relying on you to shift to other ways to move from place to place. Carbon dioxide emissions would go down. But wouldn’t that be the same as an increase in the pump price, just with the results flowing into a different bank account? You are demonstrating wisdom, grasshopper.
The idea is to lower what oil companies can charge you, increase the tax that government will take from you, and keep prices you pay about the same. So, instead of oil company shareholders getting the benefit of higher oil prices, the government will reap the windfall and spend it wisely on such things as windmills, fast trains, and wars all over the Middle East.
Then the oil companies won’t have money to look for more of those nasty fossil fuels – and prices will go even higher yielding more tax revenues — and all will be well in the wacky world of Washington. Gosh, it looks just like Carter’s windfall profits tax, doesn’t it? Maybe you should consider shifting your investments out of oil company stock.