Bonus gem

Michael Levi, who writes a great blog on the Council for Foreign Relations, has a must-read post yesterday discussing the new oil industry talking point captured in a NY Times article on energy subsidies. Piloted by our friend Jack Gerard, head of API, it's a direct response to the challenge leveraged on lawmakers by Obama in his SOTU speech last week.
Gerard leads with the patriotic jobs declaration as usual:

"If the president were serious about job creation, he would be working with us to develop American oil and gas by American workers for American consumers."

Yawn. But here's where it gets really awkward:

“The federal government by no stretch of the imagination subsidizes the oil industry. The oil industry subsidizes the federal government at a rate of $95 million a day.”

Wow. As Levi points out, this 'subsidy' is royalties and taxes. By which count, most American authors--well, the successful ones--are also 'subsidizing' the government.

This level of profoundly illogical and misleading arguments leads me to Ken Cohen's latest post on ExxonMobil Perspectives blog which he frames as an opportunity to put the corporations gargantuan earnings in context. Here's his take:

"While much of the coverage focused on the headline earnings of $30 billion, I want to share some other key numbers to help put it in perspective. For example, it cost more than 10 times our earnings – a total of $330 billion – to run our business last year, buying goods and services and employing thousands of people around the world...Here in the United States, our tax expenses were $9.8 billion – nearly two and a half billion dollars more than we made in this country."

If those numbers are actually supposed to mean anything to the average person, we're essentially led to assume that Exxon is going bankrupt in the US because its tax obligations far outweigh its profits. But wait, that's not true.

Ah propaganda, the essence of oil industry communications.