Doing Well In Business

If you want to do well in business have a friend in government. Evidently Exxon-Mobil is short of friends.

Unfortunately, Exxon has discovered firsthand what it’s like to deal with what Investors Business Daily calls “regulatory pirates” in the Gulf of Mexico:

ExxonMobil, and its Norwegian partner Statoil made the biggest discovery of all — a field worth a billion barrels of oil — 7,000 feet below sea level in its “Julia” field in 2007.

Exxon tried to keep its discovery secret to keep marauders away. Sadly, the pirates in this instance are U.S. regulators — and their aim is to stop them.

That’s right: Instead of marvel at the continuing treasures of the New World, or hail the human ingenuity that made retrieval of so much oil possible, or simply quantify how this discovery will boost U.S. energy security, Interior Department bureaucrats moved instead to snatch Exxon’s permits and shut the whole thing down.

They may not have paid enough to the right party.

Here is a group that paid plenty and is unhappy with their ROI (yes it is a pun using a foreign language - the nominal meaning is Return On Investment)

Let’s see. Obama has lost Wall Street, the progressive grassroots, and even a few unions. Now it looks like another funding source for his re-election bid might fade as well — high-tech Silicon Valley. Politico reports that the innovation center once celebrated the fact that they had backed a President who uses a Blackberry, but now think he’s just another middle-aged man with some ubiquitous personal technology...

Let us not forget that he is a middle-aged BLACK man. That still counts for something. Not as much as it used to. In any case if you make efforts to strangle the electrical supply - which the boys in the valley totally depend on to make their products and make them useful - people interested generally take notice. Making oil more expensive isn't helping either.

Go to the "paid plenty" article for a multitude of links.