Gulf Coast Congressman Taking Cash From Oil Industry During Spill Crisis
Over the weekend, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico took a desperate turn, as oil started washing up on the beaches of four Gulf Coast states while BP failed in its attempt to lower a big box over one part of the oil rupture on the sea floor. The astounding economic and environmental damage caused by the offshore drilling disaster have led some members of Congress to support the No New Drilling Act, a restoration of the generation-long moratorium on the expansion of offshore drilling in American waters.
U.S. Representative Kevin Brady is not one of those members of Congress. Perhaps that’s because Congressman Brady takes more campaign contributions from the oil industry than from any other source.
As part of his habit of taking cash from Big Oil, Kevin Brady will attend an oil and gas breakfast on Wednesday. At first, that probably sounds like nonsense to you. People usually have something like bacon and eggs for breakfast, after all, not oil and gas. The food that Representative Brady will have for breakfast is rather irrelevant to this affair, however.
The breakfast is themed “oil and gas industry” because it’s an open invitation for representatives of the oil and gas industry to trade money for access to Kevin Brady and his staff. An invitation sent out for the party specifically requests that people attending the breakfast bring one or two thousand dollars each for the Congressman.
It takes a special amount of chutzpah for Kevin Brady, because he represents a district right on the Gulf Coast. His 8th district in Texas includes an arm that reaches down to Port Arthur, the site of another oil spill earlier this year.
Given his district’s firsthand experience with oil spill’s, Representative Brady ought to know better than to think that offshore drilling can be safely expanded. Money that Brady has been given from the political action committees of oil companies such as Anadarko Petroleum, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Marathon Oil, Occidental Petroleum and Valero seems to be more compelling to Brady, however, than the rapidly expanding mass of crude oil floating on the waters not far offshore from his home.
Money seems to be more important than the oil polluting the beaches. He should go the beach and clean it for one day, remove the dead birds and so on – maybe he gets a different attidute. But certainly its more comfortable to spend a nice day in a nice hotel with nice food and nice people from the oil industry than sitting on an oily beach.
This entire problem is very disastrous for the environmental life and with the economy in many altered points. This problem should have been prevented but everyone once in a while these accidents happen. These companies should be held accountable for this global catastrophe.