Kicking The Can

I think it was two months ago that Joe Biden first came up with the fact that his administration needed to get involved with the pending rail strike in this country that effected some 12 different unions. I remember him saying that he was set to help both sides come to an amicable agreement. We’re two months down the road, and there are still differences. Big differences. In fact, the Biden administration has admitted that they can’t solve the impass. So what’s Joe to do?

Kick the can to Congress and tell them it’s their problem now!

This is just like Biden. If you look over the last two years of his presidency, he has time and time again taken the real heavy lifting topics, like the rail strike, and kicked it to someone else so he wouldn’t do the lifting. After all, the guy is 80 years old now! He could easily throw out his back.

He first kicked a can K-baby Harris’ way on the southern border crisis. Of course, she’s been trying to find someone to kick the can to ever since. He kicked a can to Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg on the supply chain problem, which got in the way of Buttigieg’s personal vacation time and family leave time. Very little has been done there. He’s kicked a can to Europe when it came to the climate. Oh, I know he talks a good game, but he doesn’t follow through with it, allowing Chevron, as I said yesterday, to drill for oil in Venezuela. And it goes on and on. The man wants to be Teflon coated, but he’s not.

Biden originally said he was going to tackle this problem. Oops. Or did he. Well, he did, and according to his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre said time and time again that Biden was “personally involved” in the negotiations. That came as a surprise to Biden, who over the Thanksgiving weekend, while vacationing in Nantucket, said he had not personally gotten involved in the dispute at that point. Someone is missing some facts somewhere!

Now, Biden is kicking the can on the potential for a rail strike to Congress, telling a lame-duck session of the Legislative Body to come up with a solution. It’s not like they don’t already have enough on their plate with the budget running out on December 16th, and the debt ceiling about to be breached. And now Congress needs to act quickly to get this done by December 9th. And actually sooner because the rail lines will stop hauling hazardous material on December 5th. Of course, Congress is expected to start voting on this as early as today.

This is the latest example of the leadership style of a weak president. Are you telling me that someone like an Abraham Lincoln or a George Washington, or even an FDR would sit around and complain about not being able to get a deal on a rail strike and then kick it to Congress to do with less than a week to do it in? Biden’s had two months and couldn’t make progress. What makes anyone with a sense of honesty in their soul feel that Congress, that monolith body that takes forever to decide what to order for lunch can do in five days? Especially do so in a fair manner whereby both management and the unions get a fair shake. It’s upset the unions, and they aren’t sure they are going to be able to go along with it.

If the GOP isn’t busy already making commercials for 2024 highlighting the foolishness of this president, they are doomed to lose yet another election to the Democrats. If you’re telling me that the Republicans cannot find someone, ANYONE to defeat Joe Biden after the miserable two years he’s had and the mistakes he’s made, then we deserve to be a socialist country. Hell, you or I could run for president and defeat Joe Biden. I think the only person that says he’s a Republican that probably could and would lose to Biden is Donald Trump. But that’s the topic for yet another blog.

Both Republicans and Democrats on the Hill say that they can come together to solve this problem. And the problem is, is it going to be something that the unions and management will both agree to? Now to be sure, Congress can and has done this before. In fact, back in 1991, Congress voted to have union workers end a strike that had started just hours before and get back to work. So, this is nothing new for folks on the Hill. The problem for Biden is what that’s going to look like to the union heads, and will he still be the most union-friendly president in history? I think not.

Carry on world…you’re dismissed!

Venezuela Can, US Cannot!

So, let me understand if I get the picture coming out of Joe Biden these days. It’s fine and OK if Chevron can go to Venezuela to drill for oil, but here in the US, there’s (and I’m quoting Biden here) “No more drilling!” Is that right?

I know Biden is this climate change geek that thinks that everything has to be electric without realizing how electricity in this country is actually created. I realize that Biden has a love affair with the electric vehicles and wants to see the US do away with fossil fuels as soon as possible. But please, someone tell me that he’s not stupid enough to think that it’s absolutely OK if a country other than the US creates what in his mind is pollution that destroys the entire planet, and it’s still not OK for the US to do likewise. Is that just about the gist of it?

For those of you that are still in your Thanksgiving haze, Joe Biden’s administration has worked out a deal with Nicolas Maduro, the dictator in Venezuela. Basically speaking, it gives Chevron the ability to drill for oil in Venezuela (which has a ton of it just like the US), and then load that oil on tankers and ship it to the US for refining. But it’s not OK for the US to drill for oil in this country.

Now, the administration says that there are like 9,000 open drilling permits that are out there and are currently being unused. John Kirby, the NSC Coordinator for Strategic Communications, called on the oil companies in this country to get those permits and start drilling! That’s a huge turn-about from Biden’s call on November 7th, when he spouted, “No more drilling!”. Ah, but what Kirby doesn’t tell you is the real story.

See, drilling permits aren’t oil permits. Drilling permits could be issued for your backyard. That doesn’t mean geologists have been over to your house and have determined that there is oil there. In fact, a lot of the 9,000 permits are in fact dry. Geologists from the various oil companies have indeed looked at the areas of the permit and decided it’s not worth drilling there. Drilling permits are the first step in finding oil. Then geologists have to determine if oil actually exists under the ground. Then they have to build the actual oil drilling rig. Then they have to add in the entire above ground infrastructure. They have to build the pads the oil rigs sit on. They have to build the roads leading up to rig because they don’t use ATV’s to carry the oil out of there! That process can take years. Then they can finally drill. Then comes the cementing and the testing. Then the well is completed and pumped. And then the fracking starts. Finally, there’s the well abandonment and land restoring to get the land back to the way it was before they started drilling. It’s a whole process. John Kirby, as smart as he thinks he is, obviously doesn’t know two cents about oil well drilling. I don’t either and I know enough to realize that I just said is the process!

So, we have a situation where Joe Biden goes off to Saudi Arabia, hat in hand, and begs the Saudi’s to drill for more oil. They refuse for the very simple reason that they are already at like 96% capacity. They can’t drill for more oil. Biden, or more probably, his staff realizes they just can’t shut off oil. It wouldn’t be prudent. So, now they need to find more oil to bridge the gap. They don’t want to drill here. They don’t want Canadian oil because then they’d probably lose the argument for stopping the Keystone XL Pipeline. So, they go to Venezuela. And the reasons are funny really.

The reason the administration goes to Venezuela and tells Nicolas Maduro that they are going to lift some sanctions on his country is because Venezuela owes Chevron some money. Well, more than some money. Many many monies. I think it’s in the hundreds of millions, but don’t quote me. And the Biden folks think that squares things. But doesn’t it still do damage to the environment? I mean, if it hurts the earth, it hurts the earth, right? So what if it’s in Venezuela or the US?

Biden’s problem here is he has to come clean and explain the reason. It was about oil, whether he likes it or not. Biden does not care about whether an oil company is owed money from a foreign government because he wants to shut down the oil companies. So, he has to come up with a reason, and that reason is as flimsy as a well-used paper straw. There are 9,000 drilling permits sitting there in DC waiting to be bid on. And he thinks no one knows that’s not going to solve the problem.

And now you know better!

Carry on world…you’re dismissed!