In sometimes spirited publicly-noticed hearings, the otherwise purposely mundane business of oil leasing in federal areas of the Gulf of Mexico takes place. I attended one such meeting in Reagan’s second term and was last to speak. Almost everyone else had gone home except the oil company lobbyists, some of whom I knew from my first real job after interning at James Watt’s Interior Department. I incidentally demonstrated my conversion experience to the good side by making the dramatic gesture of filing with the committee of bored federal employees my cherished dogeared paperback copy of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (mobile.nytimes.com/...).
I could not, and still can't, disconnect the Interior Department’s role in the horrific crimes against Native Peoples from the seemingly routine bureaucratic processing of environmental crime paperwork. (When Deepwater Horizon happened many years later, I had a chance to cash in helping with damage claims but did not want to spend my limited spare time doing anything other than volunteering to empower people to minimize the then ongoing injuries to the Gulf shoreline, but that's another story.)
The oil lease committee members took the book as if it were covered in eel slime. It sure would have been good to speak to the real decisionmakers, in places like Irving and Houston, and give them a piece of my mind. To this day I wonder if I should have kept the book, which had such a profound influence on me, given the utter futility of my gesture. Perhaps this story is itself another futile gesture, but times indeed may be a changing.
When the former top executive of the world’s largest non-state oil company manages our foreign policy, a friend of Russia’s aim to convert the Artic into a giant refinery, while climate change is so pivotal to humanity's future, will oil companies finally be questioned in a more comprehensive fashion than when a bland committee meets, stuff blows up and catches fire, or even a pipeline is built beneath sacred lands? Are we too busy looking at Donald Trump’s latest debasement to look to the really serious crimes he or, if impeached, his replacement is going to facilitate through transnational traitors like Wayne Tracker. I now am much more sure than when I gave my book away that we can't farm out mass democratic responsibility to confront them with their crimes in the making and that direct actions of conscience are our moral duty.
I do like it when an occasional government official does something sharp and jagged to the dishonest rich and powerful with her or his legal or legislative power, power I'll never have. Some confrontational Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders actions and speeches come to mind. (That's not generally been Hillary Clinton’s style, but I do give her much credit for her courageous early effort to bring health care to every American.) And this:
NEW YORK — "Wayne Tracker" cannot be forced to testify under oath. He does not exist.
But the man who used the "Tracker" alias, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, can be questioned — and is increasingly expected to be — as New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman expands his sweeping probe into whether Tillerson's former employer, ExxonMobil, misled investors about the impact of climate change.
Schneiderman's office considers the nation's chief diplomat a central figure in a case that pits the ambitious Democrat against a Texas energy giant and has divided attorneys general nationwide. Republican state prosecutors from South Carolina to Utah, like Exxon's high-profile legal team, accuse the New York attorney general of abusing the power of his office to score political points with his liberal base on a politically explosive issue.
(mobile.nytimes.com/...)
But where should that line of questioning end? And I know we should not be solely delegating our mass political-economic conscience to the New York attorney general. I'm not particularly concerned about the return on shareholder investment in transnational oil companies. Shouldn't we as united people who care deeply about humanity's future also be asking penetrating questions of our own, and sitting down in Congressional offices until we get answers—and deep policy changes that match our deep concerns?
In order to formulate those needed policies, we first may need to formulate questions that our society does not educate us to ask. Complacency about the injustice right before our eyes is reinforced by our "look out for number one" capitalist triumphalist culture. It's even less culturally natural to take action about something occurring hundreds or even thousands miles away. In some respects we are all Native Peoples now, forgotten unless we are in the way of a resource grabber showing up with a fraudulent piece of paper.
Here are some questions that occur to me:
Are oil companies only stealing from us through multi-faceted negative environmental externalities? Aren't they also stealing from us in more direct, Teapot Dome-style ways? Does the mainstream financial press when discussing oil investment issues often go along with economic analysis worthy of a former Texas governor with brainy glasses, straw for brains, and no heart?
If nations in the Middle East can develop and reap their own "sovereign wealth", why can't the U.S.? If we are not to have a federally-owned oil operation, because that would be un-American, how are the royalty terms set on federal offshore oil leases anyway? Do we get top dollar or chump change, which we turn around and give back to the oil companies through the tax code?
And, while we’re asking hard, holistic questions:
Aren't those oil companies and their friends in transnational industrial agriculture also causing us to kill ourselves and our lands through their prescribed diets and cancer-causing herbicides anyway? Aren't they also smothering our political system with oleaginous lobbyists and campaign donations? If in modern America consumers, many increasingly overweight, are already "eating oil” (www.resilience.org/...), shouldn't we at least want to not give away "the farm" where the oil comes from? Are we not buying to overeat what we've already given away to grow what we will then buy to overeat?
Shouldn't the oil companies, if they're even allowed to exist, justly be paying a lot more, if only to offset some of the harm they cause? If the connection between oil and food means we are expected to be stupidly eating in a way that is bad for us, must we be this stupid? Shouldn't oil companies at the very least be paying dearly for the privilege of aiding and abetting food companies to kill us?
And isn't the anticipated green eyeshade scrutinizing of aid to farmers, not to mention desperate food stamp recipients, under the next Farm Bill not a time for reassessing the coddling of ExxonMobil and the like? Why are already poor people always shamed and asked to further tighten their belts while oil company "returns on investment” are pillars of society, more sacrosanct than the local country church used to be to farming families. Why do the poor need to give up their food stamps, bus service, and health care, and live in cars or on the streets, while also being expected to do their part of eating like factory farm animals for the benefit of the alias-using, science-denying, climate-destroying Rex Tillersons of our world? Why are drugs now the backbone of the urban and rural economy for a large, unhealthy segment of the working class and the mercenaries who chase them around like chickens in a … poultry plant?
Is this democracy or a post-modern capitalist version of Animal Farm, where we are the animals, and the oil and industrial ag company executives, and their pals in the private for-profit prison and financial industries, are the authors of their own unseen deus ex machina, laughing all the way to happy endings of stock options, golden parachutes and Swiss bank accounts? Are input costs something farmers are supposed to be hyper-conscious about but not Americans in general, who unwittingly experience the true costs of an unsustainable, profligate, highly integrated oil and gas-based energy and industrial food system?
To begin to deeply question is also potentially to begin to understand. Strange scales may fall from our eyes, realizations of commonality that we never had before. Many of us, of all sorts of different subcultures, desperately need work. Farms used to be the place most of us found work. Now we are mostly valued as consumers, potential mercenaries, or inmates. Maybe we should be focused as a society on ensuring that the “right to work” is not cryptic code for union-busting and is instead part of a decent panoply of political-economic rights for every person.
But “we" can't afford it, Wayne Tracker will say, at least when he's not under oath.
The normal metamorphosis of language is to extend useful phrases to analogous topics, at least until the phrases become so timeworn that they are abandoned altogether. An old but still useful saying is that one shouldn't “give away the farm.” The idea is that farms are, or at least at one time were, special places that shouldn't be undervalued or recklessly given away.
Certainly advocates of capitalism profess to like the diligent, “businesslike", quaint "penny-pinching” implications of this notion. Only stupid people discount, much less have a firesale of, “the farm” unless they have no sensible alternative.
What does it mean to "give away the farm" in business terms?
Best Answer
It means you are giving away everything without receiving anything (or enough) in return.
Answers
Not true. Giving away the farm is a southern term more widely used everywhere now. It's when everything is going. Either being sold, or auctioned off or the like. Most often on a cheaper side, as in. "you better get down there and get your drinks, they are giving away the farm!."
just what it says, give away what makes you money.
Say a customer comes in and you own a pizza shop. They are not happy w/ the pizza they got. So in turn you say... keep that pizza, I'll make you another one the right way and here is a coupon for 2 free ones at a later date.
That is giving the farm away. You gave more than you had too. All you had to do was fix the one pizza, not give away 2 more. Now you have 1 wasted pizza, 1 free pizza and 2 more free pizzas to give out. What money did you make?
None... cause you gave away the farm.
It means that one person has given a really good deal to the other person. Giving away the farm means one person made a really great deal and the other person made a really bad deal (possible to the point it is unfair).
When someone says, "Don't give away the farm" they basically mean don't be stupid and do something that wasn't required or asked for. Don't give more than you have to. Hope that helps.
As a rural southern resident with an avocation in soil science, I sometimes research and write on resource issues pertaining to American agriculture. The need for holistic shaping of the upcoming Farm Bill is near and dear to my heart. I try to think outside narrow dimensions of thought without forgetting historical and political-economic context, in order that we as a society not continue to give away the farm as we have done for generations.
The so-called "private" food-producing lands of rural America are, as a matter of morality and common sense, vested with the public trust. They accordingly should be managed for the common benefit of all, including in relation to our critical ground water supplies and downstream water bodies.
I get that and devote a lot of my aging brain cells to figuring out how to restore what Marx correctly saw as the metabolic rift between the countryside and the cities. It is startling to me, however, when I see the haste to which we the people give away "the farm" to oil companies in the undoubtedly common property that is the Gulf of Mexico (as well as on federal uplands).
But don't let us on the left deceive ourselves that these are not desperate times even for many in some ways rational people on the other side of the Trump political divide. Divide-and-rule requires us each to have a high tolerance for others’ pain, in other words, to reject empathy. Let's not do that on the left.
Let's honestly look at the capitalist structure that produces so much stress and suffering and not just at the cultural superstructure that nurtures bigotry and xenophobia in many of the same people that prop up that structure. Just because some of them are overt mercenaries or worse doesn't mean we should or can afford to dehumanize them as a whole, tempting as it sometimes is. Our call is ever as workers of the world to unite.
Here are some of the rank-and-file struggling Republican "energy voters" I happen to know: (a) friends from Louisiana who are often unemployed oil company engineers, and whose children are going to LSU to become still more would-be employed engineers for lack of any other more sensible career path; (b) friends from West Virginia who are retired former coal miners and smelter workers watching their children and grandchildren waste their lives using opiates; and (c) a friend from Idaho whose only child went to technical college in Montana and then to work as an environmental engineer in North Dakota, with whom I haven't communicated much the last few years. I didn't have the heart to message him asking if she got laid off when the bottom fell out. Perhaps she's one of the lucky ones, since according to Fox Business we are "Back to Rockin' the Bakken: Jobs Returning to America's Oil Patch.” (www.google.com/...)
They need jobs, and the oil companies and their captive politicians demand governmental sweetheart deals sold on the hope of driving up jobs. Surely we as engaged Americans on the left can acknowledge their need for jobs without failing to acknowledge the ugly reality of the sweetheart deals and look for other, better, less planet-destroying, more soulful alternatives. Surely we can ask ourselves if this is the best way to run a country, many of us clawing in desperation for a tiny sliver of one unsustainable transnational pie or another.
Even if one believes in capitalism as the best alternative among economic systems, which I don't, the level of ineptness and duplicity of its most shameless proponents can be astounding. Just a week ago we learned about Say’s Law from the Trump energy braintrust:
Energy Secretary Rick Perry confused the relationship between the fundamental forces in an economy while extolling the Trump administration's embrace of the coal industry, economists said.
"Here's a little economics lesson: supply and demand. You put the supply out there and the demand will follow," he said Thursday, according to Standard & Poor's Taylor Kuykendall.
(www.google.com/...)
Some on the right acknowledged the inanity:
"It's an old assertion named Say's Law and it's wrong. It's that simple," said Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank. "Supply does not automatically create its own demand."
"There are two separate entities that have their own determinants and then they interact to deliver prices," he added.
Wow, if only farmers too passed Say’s Law they'd never lack good commodity prices!
But seriously folks, speaking of farmers, if we are going to lay the groundwork for a sensible discussion of farm policy, we simply must be willing to have a sensible conversation about energy policy. Like an undisciplined slobbery Mississippi Leg Hound, it gives us climate change whether we like it or not. Farmers will increasingly pay the price for this inconvenient truth even if they too are Trump voters.
A holistic conversation about energy policy, as a precondition for a holistic farm policy, requires that we look at the specifics of at least three regimes directly under the purview of the federal government. If we can get our government to act democratically, it will need to change direction from giving away the energy farm to responsible energy stewardship through dramatic revisions to:
1. federal oil company leasing policy:
Currently, the federal government charges a royalty of only 12.5 percent on oil and gas extracted from public land. This rate has not been updated since 1920; since then, technological advances and changing markets have made oil and gas extraction more efficient and much more lucrative. In 2014, the big five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, and Shell—made $90 billion in profits.
In response to changing market dynamics and to better reflect modern drilling practices, state and private landowners have updated their royalty rates. Texas charges a 25 percent royalty for leases on the state’s university and school lands—state land set aside to financially support these state institutions –while New Mexico and North Dakota charge 18.75 percent for oil and gas production on public lands. Many western states, including Wyoming, Utah, Montana, and Colorado, charge a 16.67 percent royalty rate on state-owned leases. A CAP review found that private landowners are also charging higher royalty rates than the federal government. For example, lease documents in Texas and Louisiana show private landowners charging oil and gas companies a 25 percent royalty on resources extracted from their land.
What’s more, the royalty rate on federal lands is 50 percent lower than the royalty rate for drilling in federal waters on the Outer Continental Shelf. The administration of former President George W. Bush twice increased the royalty rate for offshore drilling to its current level of 18.75 percent. According to the Center for Western Priorities, if the onshore federal royalty rate were the same as the offshore rate, the U.S. government would collect an additional $730 million every year. A review by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, also found that, when compared to other countries, the royalty rate for drilling on U.S. federal lands is one of the lowest in the world.
(www.americanprogress.org/...)
Actually, 18.75 percent is itself a joke (as the above-quoted Center for American Progress piece goes on to make clear), the result of a George W. Bush scam not unrelated to his Iraq War scam. (The piece also covers other lease terms that need to be strengthened in the public interest.)
The mainstream financial press breathlessly makes much of the supposed value of Mexico privatizing part of its traditionally state-owned oil business, leading by definition to an influx of private investment. It celebrates the good news when a private bet pays off ("Oil Discoveries Suggest Mexico’s Bet to Open Energy Sector Is Paying Off,” mobile.nytimes.com/...)
But assuming, and I don't, this does make sense for the people of Mexico, look at the lease terms and compare them to U.S. lease terms. Note that Mexico is using a lease-specific profit negotiation process, unlike the low, flat, stupid, “give away the farm" royalty rates the U.S. uses. Note also how the much higher royalty rates than in the U.S. are an after-thought in a mainstream financial press that measures success in how much and how quickly privatization occurs.
When Mexican officials first offered terms for the production and profit-sharing agreements of auction in December, they generated little interest from foreign companies, forcing the government to sweeten the financial terms. Some companies have said they worry about provisions that allow the government to cancel contracts in cases of industrial accidents or spills.
***
The biggest companies that qualified to bid in the first auction — Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Total of France — decided not to make any offers. Royal Dutch Shell did not participate, but executives say they are still interested in investing in Mexico.
***
The only two blocks successfully auctioned went to the same low-profile consortium of Sierra Oil and Gas, a Mexican company; Talos Energy, which is based in Houston; and Premier Oil of Britain. In one block, the government will receive 56 percent of operating profits, and in the other block 69 percent. The two blocks contain oil, while others contained natural gas, whose price is extremely low.
(mobile.nytimes.com/...)
2. federal oil company tax policy:
Triumph of the Drill: How Big Oil Clings to Billions in Government Giveaways
Deficit hawks slam them. Execs say they don’t need them. So why does petroleum still get big tax breaks?
***
Over the past century, the federal government has pumped more than $470 billion into the oil and gas industry in the form of generous, never-expiring tax breaks. Once intended to jump-start struggling domestic drillers, these incentives have become a tidy bonus for some of the world’s most profitable companies.
Taxpayers currently subsidize the oil industry by as much as $4.8 billion a year, with about half of that going to the big five oil companies—ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, and ConocoPhillips—which get an average tax break of $3.34 on every barrel of domestic crude they produce. With Washington looking under the couch cushions for sources of new revenue, oil prices topping $100 a barrel, and the world feeling the heat from its dependence on fossil fuels, there’s been a renewed push to close these decades-old loopholes. But history suggests that Big Oil won’t let go of its perks without a brawl.
(www.motherjones.com/...)
See the above-quoted 2014 Mother Jones piece for gory details about oil company deductions, allowances, and write-offs. (The reference to $100/barrel is for now out-of-date but sure to become operative again sooner or later, and, in any event, the itemization of tax giveaways is still accurate.)
3. federal oil company environmental policy:
This is perhaps the favorite of the Wayne Trackers of the world, whose companies pay nothing for producing products that use our atmosphere as an aerobic heat-trapping toilet bowl. Combined with fracking-related ground water pollution, chemical and gas-manufactured nitrate fertilizer leaching, the "nutrient”-overburdened Dead Zone, and the deeply discounted, rig-covered Gulf of Mexico, oil company executives have a lot of explaining of their own to do. Can't have that, say the Republican state attorneys general.
As equal shareholders of the only real corporate body, Planet Earth, let's democratically demand the answers, and the fundamental changes, WE need.