Big Oil's Congressional Lackey Jeff Flake: Guilty of Criminal Neglect in Causing the Gulf Oil Spill

In his few public statements on the horrendous environmental disaster and human tragedy of the Gulf oil spill, Arizona's Sixth Congressional District's weaselly Rep. Jeff Flake has said nothing but place the blame elsewhere - mostly on the Obama administration.

This is typical of Flake, a fanatic laissez-faire corporate lackey whose million-dollar-plus campaign warchest has made him so invincible politically that he exudes arrogance on an hourly basis. The thousands upon thousands of dollars he has taken in from oil companies and related corporate PACs, combined with his outdated, unshaken faith in a dead ideology he gives more allegiance to than he does to his East Valley constituents, led to Flake's role in causing the BP oil spill.

In 2005, despite unfairly high oil prices and declarations from President Bush that no more incentives were needed to encourage more offshore drilling, Jeff Flake strongly supported reducing the cut of proceeds government could collect on oil and gas drilling in deep waters. (In this, of course, Flake added to the federal budget deficit he hypocritically claims to be so concerned about - at least when he's near a reporter or TV camera.)

At the same time that Jeff Flake called for new drilling incentives that even President Bush said were unnecessary, he fought to gut government oversight - in his crazy belief that no government is always better than any government. Seven times since his arrival in Congress in January 2003, Jeff Flake voted to reduce regulatory staffing levels by more than 15 percent - despite more complex deep-water operations and concerns voiced by the Interior Department.

It's not as if Jeff Flake didn't know the risks he was taking with people's lives and livelihoods and the Gulf ecosystem. Congress's own research arm repeatedly cited a 2004 Coast Guard study find that its "oil spill response personnel did not appear to have even a basic knowledge of the equipment required to support salvage or spill clean-up operations."

Nevertheless, Jeff Flake repeatedly - deliberately - failed to act to ensure adequate oversight of offshore drilling operations.

He cannot escape blame for this disaster. Yes, BP certainly was reckless, greedy and negligent, but the company couldn't have done it without the complicity of its congressional cheerleader Jeff Flake.

Now Congress needs to immediately pass legislation to direct all future royalties to the Treasury Department, thereby reducing the incentives for a venal career politician like Jeff Flake to use new proceeds as a piggy bank.

Also, Congress needs to mandate that in the future, any legislative action leading to an increase in oil production also creates a concomitant increase in regulatory oversight.

If he were a real man, Jeff Flake would step forward and admit his own role in undermining offshore safety and encouraging risky drilling - and then do something as a congressman to make sure disasters like the Gulf oil spill don't happen again.

Jeff Flake: Out of step. Out of control. Out of his fucking mind.

Corporate Lackey Congressman & Oily Politician Jeff Flake: Another GO(B)P Apologist for British Petroleum

It's interesting that with all the Republican members of Congress condemning Texas Rep. Joe Barton for his apology to British Petroleum for the U.S. government "shakedown" (haha), there's been only silence from Arizona's laissez-faire fanatic Rep. Jeff Flake, who's never voted once to help the needy but who's voted over 75 times for tax breaks for corporations like BP, which he shakes down to fill his bloated campaign coffers. As Blog for Arizona points out, Jeff Flake is a member of the Republican Study Committee which, even before Joe Barton's comment, also apologized to BP as it called the escrow account "Chicago-style shakedown politics."

That's because extremist Jeff Flake agrees with Barton's lunatic misguided groveling. He's never seen anything government can do right, and he's never seen anything a domestic or foreign corporation can do wrong - even when its gross negligence or willful misconduct (attested to by its own corporate partners) creates an unprecedented disaster with unparalleled suffering, like the one BP's oil spill has caused in the Gulf. Jeff Flake would prefer to keep his fellow long-serving lackeys of the oil industry in charge of the corrupt and incompetent Minerals Management Service. (See the Rolling Stone exposé of Bush and Obama administration misfeasance.)

Rep. Jeff Flake was shrewd enough to make his apology to British Petroleum in private. Until we hear otherwise, we'll assume that this corporate lackey congressman agrees that BP is the real victim in all of this. Check out his record as a Big Oil lackey on energy issues.

Jeff Flake. Out of touch. Out of control. Maybe even out of his mind.

When it comes to foreign corporations like BP, Jeff Flake is one oily ("excessively servile or obsequious") guy.

But this politician's fat-cat-backed career trajectory is running out of gas.

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For an intelligent non-corporate perspective on the issue, far removed from that of the fanatic Flake, check out this blog post, "Oil Spills and Real Change," by our friend Rev. Billy,

last year's Green Party candidate for New York City Mayor.