In the world of professional wrestling, kayfabe is the illusion of events and personalities within the industry as being “real.”  In other words, the portrayal of professional wrestling as being genuine or not fake. 

President Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) and BP agreed Wednesday on a $20 billion fund to compensate victims of the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  

Additionally, the giant British company’s chairman apologized to Americans for the worst spill in U.S. history.  According to chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg. BP is suspending its dividends to shareholders to help pay for the costs.

 Obama announced the agreement after a four-hour meeting with BP officials, in which he was described as “darting in and out of the room”.  (Receiving instructions from the Puppetmaster, Scooter?).  He also said the company had agreed to set up a separate $100 million fund to benefit oil rig workers laid off as a result of his six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling.

BP (British Petroleum) brought its top brass, and brought along a very special legal counsel, a top Clinton administration Justice Department official, Jamie Gorelick, whose name was floated as a possible attorney general pick for Obama. 

Obama was supposed to spend 20 minutes in the meeting.   He entered the room with a large “posse”:  Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and her coordinator for claims oversight, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, and senior advisor Valerie Jarrett.

Obama said:

The structure we are establishing today is an important step toward making the people of the Gulf Coast whole again, but it will not turn things around overnight.

Outside the White House, Svanberg announced the dividend suspension and expressed sorrow for victims of the spill. “This tragic accident … should have never happened,” he said, and he also used the occasion to “apologize to the American people.”

Obama said the independent fund will be directed by lawyer Kenneth Feinberg, who oversaw payments to families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. There will be a three-member panel to adjudicate claims that are turned down.

Per Scooter:

This is about accountability. At the end of the day, that’s what every American wants and expects.

The people of the Gulf have my commitment that BP will meet its obligations to them.  This $20 billion amount will provide substantial assurance that the claims people and businesses have will be honored.”

BP will pay $5 billion a year over the next four years to set up the $20 billion fund.

Speaking of “caps”, let’s explore the unmentioned topic of the majority of Scooter’s speech last night, cap and trade and the object of his ire, BP. 

BP was one of the founders of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a lobby dedicated to passing a cap-and-trade bill.  BP is the nation’s largest producer of natural gas.  They saw the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow with the upcoming climate legislation, but first they had to persuade Congress to subsidize coal-fired power plants that switched to gas.

In February, BP quit USCAP abruptly, claiming that they could lobby more effectively on their own than by staying in a coalition that was increasingly controlled by power companies. They did very well in the House’s climate bill, while natural gas producers suffered.

Just two months later, BP endorsed Kerry’s Senate climate bill, which was hardly a capitalist concoction. One provision BP backed to the hilt, according to Congressional Quarterly and other media reports, was a higher gas tax. The money would be used for building more highways, thus leading to more driving and more gasoline consumption.

Also in the Green Energy Universe, BP has lobbied for and made a profit from subsidies for biofuels and solar energy, two products that cannot break even without government support.  Lobbying records show BP backing solar subsidies including federal funding for solar research.  The U.S. Export-Import Bank, a federal agency, is currently financially backing a BP solar energy project in Argentina.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank has also put up taxpayer cash to finance construction of the 1,094-mile Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline carrying oil from the Caspian Sea to Ceyhan, Turkey, again, turning BP a tidy profit.

Lobbying records also record BP lobbying on Obama’s stimulus bill and Bush’s Wall Street bailout.

BP employs more Democratic lobbyists than Republicans, like the Podesta Group, co-founded by John Podesta, Obama’s transition director and confidant.  You may have heard of him.  Podesta runs The Center for American Progress, a George Soros-funded Liberal Think Tank.  

 Other BP employees on K Street include Michael Berman, a former top aide to Vice President Walter Mondale; Steven Champlin, former executive director of the House Democratic Caucus; and Matthew LaRocco, who worked in Bill Clinton’s Interior Department and whose father was a Democratic congressman.

 The political shenanigans run even deeper, and greasier,  than that.

 From my blog, Do as I Say.  Not as I Do.:

In case you are tempted to buy Scooter’s phony outrage at BP and its’ gulf oil spill, here’s a story that he does not want you to know.   Most of you know that BP was a significant contributor to the record $750-million war chest of Barack Obama’s 2007-08 campaign.

Now, details have surfaced of a BP connection to Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago mayoral wannabe, current Obama chief of staff, ex-representative, ex-Clinton money man, ex-Windy City political machine go-fer and shower stalker.

Shortly after Obama’s coronation,  word got out that, as a House member, Emanuel had lived the last five years rent-free in a D.C. apartment of Democratic colleague Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and her husband, Stanley Greenberg.  This raised a few eyebrows.

Greenberg’s consulting firm just happened to be one of the designers of BP’s  rebranding into a green petroleum company, down to green signs and the slogan “Beyond Petroleum.”

Two things are unfailingly true about this administration: 

1)  There are several self-serving politicians and huge corporations chomping at the bit to make big time money from the scam known as cap and trade.  

2)  Scooter is more than happy to reward his friends and investors (like Mr. Soros), even if he has to make one of them a phony scapegoat along the way. 

Sources:  washingtonexaminer.com, yahoo.com, politico.com