Republicans in disarray.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said today he opposes lifting a ban on new oil drilling in coastal waters, breaking with President Bush and Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

He called California’s coastline “an international treasure” that must be protected by a federal oil-drilling moratorium that has been in place for 27 years.

“We’re serious about that, and we’re not going to change that,” he told reporters and business executives at BIO International, an annual biotechnology industry conference in San Diego.

Schwarzenegger, who has endorsed McCain’s presidential bid, said the federal offshore drilling ban was not to blame for soaring gas prices. In a statement issued earlier in the day, the governor said technological innovations and expanded fuel choices for consumers ultimately will lead the way to reduced fuel costs.

“We are in this situation because of our dependence on traditional petroleum-based oil,” Schwarzenegger said in the statement, which referred only to Bush’s call for lifting the ban and did not mention McCain.

He missed mass transit and smarter, more dense development, but in the main Arnold is right.  Sen. Feinstein and Speaker Bass are quoted in the article as well dismissing the notion of offshore development as a stunt.  GOP wingnut-in-charge Dave Cogdill, on the other hand, has a catch phrase:

“Personally, yes, I believe we need to be drilling in our own reserves,” Sen. Dave Cogdill, R-Modesto, said today during a news conference related to the state budget. “We need to use the resources available to us in this country.”

He said it would reduce the country’s dependence on foreign oil and would help drive down the cost of gasoline.

“So I am a very strong supporter, as I think most of my caucus is, in the catch phase ‘Drill here, drill now, pay less,'” Cogdill said. “It’s certainly a better energy policy relating to the needs of the citizens of the United States.”

Except there’s little to drill, the oil companies don’t want to do any drilling but want the reserves to line their pockets, and the structural problem with a carbon-based economy lingers.

So the real slogan is, “Drill here. Drill now. Run out sooner.  Get no benefits for 10 years.”

So as expected, Assembly Republicans killed a bill that would bring California in line with every other oil-extracting state and charge obscenely rich oil companies for taking our natural resources out of the ground.

With gasoline prices soaring, legislation to slap the oil industry with higher taxes died in the Assembly late Wednesday in the latest party-line battle over the state’s beleaguered budget.

Republicans killed the two-pronged oil tax proposed by Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, which they considered a threat to the state’s economy as well as political gamesmanship meant more for public relations than problem solving.

In turn, Núñez said at a news conference before the vote that the GOP could not continue to push “knee-jerk, no-tax rhetoric” without coming to grips with its effect on schools and other public services.

Speaker Núñez is in a tough spot, faced with a recalcitrant Yacht & Oil Party who is wedded to failed ideology.  The best he can do is to continue to offer these proposals, argue forcefully for them, and hold the opposition accountable for their votes in November.  On a blogger conference call earlier today, the Speaker talked about PTA members from red districts coming to the Capitol to protest these extreme education cuts.  The Yacht & Oil Party will absolutely face a backlash if they keep this up.  Democrats are making the differences clear, and that’s the best we can hope for at the moment.

Another thing – what exactly is up with this argument from the Yacht & Oil Party that the Speaker timed his proposal to coincide with layoff notices from school districts?  I didn’t realize that POLITICS was out of bounds in the political arena.  Of course it coincided; the only way you get people in this state to pay attention to what’s happening in Sacramento is by taking advantage of opportunities to show the stark philosophical differences.  Saying that “you’re not allowed to tell people the consequences of our policies” is a loser argument for a loser party.

The idea that California is now immune to any pushback from the fossil fuel industry because we’re so enlightened about global warming and determined to do something about it should take a hit with this story, published by McClatchy, about Occidental Petroleum trying to pull a Daniel Plainview and dig up a national monument.

A subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum has notified the Bureau of Land Management that it would like to explore for oil in a central California national monument.

John Dearing, a BLM spokesman, said the agency can do nothing to stop Vintage Production from testing for oil under the Carrizo Plain National Monument in eastern San Luis Obispo County because the company has owned the mineral rights there since before President Bill Clinton created the monument in 2001.

“Because this is a national monument, there will be environmental concerns that will have to be strongly looked at,” Dearing said. “But they have a right to access.”

This is in almost precisely the region described in P.T. Anderson’s Oscar-nominated epic.  The oil company bought up the rights and is now asserting the ability to drill despite the landmark status.

Oh by the way, this area is home to the largest concentration of endangered species anywhere in the country.

There is no cone of invincibility around California.  As sure as the coal industry has wormed its way into sponsoring every Presidential debate on CNN and blanketing states like Ohio with messaging that “coal is good for America,” the oil industry will continue to drill in the name of “keeping us off foreign oil” and “securing our energy future.”  There are battles ahead and there shouldn’t be any resting upon laurels.

Some of these items may have been covered here, some not, but I didn’t get to post a lot throughout the week, so here’s some fresh meat (apologies to CMR) for those interested in Golden State politics:

• Last week the LAT reported on the rise of private prisons as an answer to crises like the overcrowding situation in California.  Of course, the last private prison in the state I can remember, the city lockup in Seal Beach, had to be closed down because it WASN’T MAKING ENOUGH MONEY. 

• Meanwhile, Robert Sillen, who’s overseeing the prison health care system after a federal judge threw it into receivership, got a somewhat favorable writeup in the New York Times.  Sillen is going a little outside the boundaries of his mandate to improve the facilities for prisoners, including going outside state budget requirements.  He also spoke a little truth:

Mr. Sillen says California politicians are reaping what they have sown. He attributed the state’s prison problems to tough-on-crime lawmakers who made political hay out of sentencing laws that filled the state prisons without expanding either the facilities or their services.

He has a standard diatribe concerning the criminal justice system that includes issues like the neglect of poor neighborhoods and the lack of alcohol treatment programs.

“I wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for the politics,” Mr. Sillen said. “No one gets elected in Sacramento without a platform that says, ‘Let’s get rid of rapists, pedophiles and murderers.’ “

• Which is why it’s doubtful that two bills soon to be on the Governor’s desk that would create independent sentencing commissions with the ability to modify sentencing laws will be signed.  Schwarzenegger is as wedded to the tough-on-crime myth as his Republican pals, and he thinks that privatization, along with building on credit, is the answer.  None of those measures attacks the problem at the root, however, which is why we’ll be back here in five years.

• I attended the press event where the Speaker announced legislation aimed at stopping oil industry market manipulation on a variety of fronts.  Turns out those bills have been denuded, and I can’t help but wonder if it has anything to do with all that oil money pouring in to the CDP and various legislators, including the Speaker himself.

• Another bill that appears unlikely to be signed by the Governor is Sen. Perata’s bill that would put the occupation of Iraq to a vote in Feburary 2008.  Backers of this bill think they have squeezed Schwarzenegger, and if they jump on the result then maybe they’ll get something out of it, but reasonable people agree that this is a meaningless feel-good measure that would have no impact on actual policy, and the Governor can merely say that those interested in ending the war already have a voice in Washington, call your representatives, etc.

• There is supposedly something in the works on health care reform, another closed-door deal mandated by a forced-bottleneck process that results in a Big 5, Little 116 state government.  I wonder if the 30 million-plus citizens NOT represented by Sens. Perata or Yacht Boy Ackerman, or Asms. Nuñez or Villines, feel valued by such a process.  As for the actual bill, it’s apparently a mix of approving the plan now with the funding (including fee hikes) in a ballot initiative later.

• There’s also a redistricting ballot initiative in the works.  Hey I’ve got an idea, how about we have an election a week and “let the people decide” everything!  Wouldn’t it be so democratic, to run a nation-state based on 30-second television ads?? (also, people redistrict themselves, this measure will end up being FAR less spectacular than everyone believes, and also the political map has changed in 8 years, and the gerrymandering itself is not a good enough reason not to contest everywhere, it’s just a convenient cop-out that allows the CDP to unilaterally disarm.)

I’d better stop writing before I get myself in more trouble…

Jamie Court and Judy Dugan of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights pen an extremely troubling piece today about Big Oil, particularly Chevron, outright buying our government and its leaders.  This is not limited to Republicans, but certainly the Governor is the biggest recipient of this largesse.

Take Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who once claimed that he was so rich he did not need anyone else’s money – and who isn’t running for another office. Yet as gasoline prices were breaking last year’s record of $3.38 a gallon, Schwarzenegger collected a $100,000 check May 1 from Chevron, the West’s largest refiner. The company certainly had the cash on hand. Just three days earlier, it reported a $4.7-billion first-quarter profit, up 18% over the same period last year.

The contribution brought Schwarzenegger’s take from Chevron to $665,000 (making it his 15th largest donor) since 2003, and his total political tribute from the energy industry is now $4 million. According to a recent Schwarzenegger fundraising solicitation, Chevron’s $100,000 buys the company special briefings with the governor, something that beleaguered motorists aren’t getting.

In all, oil companies delivered $90 MILLION dollars to political campaigns and parties in 2006, and while a lot of that went to block the corporate tax-for-alternative energy Prop. 87, plenty was spread around to political leaders and parties.  And that seed money ensures that there is no investigation into practices like this (over):

Like power plant owners during California’s 2001 electricity crisis, refiners such as Chevron have discovered that they can make more money by producing less gasoline. So they do. They have, over more than 20 years, deliberately reduced their capacity until they can barely meet California’s needs under the best of circumstances. Industry spokesmen defend this as efficiency. But there is no slack in the production system, which shorts the market and raises prices.

Any planned or unplanned refinery outage, pipeline break or power failure causes prices to jump.

Take the case of a possum and a raccoon that, in March, bit through power substation lines feeding two refineries in the South Bay. The critters expired, but the outage caused a 7-cent jump in local wholesale gasoline prices. The cost of refining gasoline is stable over time, so these price spikes equal pure profit for Chevron and Co […]

Chevron refined 22% less oil in the U.S. during the first quarter of this year than in the same quarter of 2006 because of longer “planned maintenance” downtime and accidents. Yet its total profit on U.S. refining increased 66%. Making less gasoline, it made much more money.

Last week, the CDP took $50,000 from Chevron.  Court and Dugan also detail a junket that Schwarzenegger chief of staff Susan Kennedy took with Speaker Fabian Nuñez in Rio, a 12-day conference paid for by Chevron and other oil interests.

During the 12-day conference, Chevron’s lobbyist got an entire day on the official agenda, which the public knows about only because of our Public Records Act request. Nuñez, who last year was highly critical of oil companies, seems to have nothing to say this year.

The FTCR have a long track record detailing this kind of takeover of our government.  And we all know about the inordinate power that corporate interests have in Sacramento.  This editorial makes it plain, and it’s really shocking to see it so starkly.