US to underwrite off-shore drilling

I’m sure you remember the fight last year over extending off-shore drilling rights to wean ourselves off of foreign oil. Well, the Obama Administration has decided that they’re going to make loans to a large company so that they can drill for oil off the coast – in Brazil. From the Wall Street Journal;

The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil’s Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a “preliminary commitment” letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas.

I’ve written for years that the key to our own economic well-being as well as our foreign policy independence is finding and processing our own energy resources – so what can the Obama Administration be thinking by helping to develop foreign sources? Millions of jobs would be created if we invested in the construction of refineries and oil fields, instead we continue to be slaves to foreign countries who hold our future in their hands, and we are forced to crawl to tinpot dictators.

Yeah, I blame Republicans, too.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Economy