Barry Smitherman was elected to replace Elizabeth Jones as chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission.
When I heard the news a line from an old Herman’s Hermits song popped into my head: “Second verse, same as the first.”
Here are some folks who support Smitherman: Americans for Prosperity Applauds Texas Railroad Commissioner Barry Smitherman
Here is some information about those folks: “Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is a group fronting special interests started by oil billionaire David Koch and Richard Fink (a member of the board of directors of Koch Industries).”
Here is why they like him: “‘Smitherman joins more than 575 bipartisan lawmakers and candidateson the federal, state and local levels pledging to “oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue.’” Source
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WAJ–who cares who is the head of the RRC. The RRC is not there to help the ordinary citizens–it’s there as a taxpayer funder mouth piece and operations organ for O&G and that’s all.
So tired of taxpayer money on governmental waste and corruption.
We have Americans fer Prosperity here in Arkansas fighting against us raising our gas severance tax to be in line with other states.
You really have to hand it to them though for convincing taxpayers to pick up the tab for their cost of doing business and getting them to believe its in their best interest to do it.
We need to get some health information from Arkansas and put it together like we did for Flowback.
Barry Smitherman’s Truthiness Problem on the Keystone Pipeline
http://www.texasobserver.org/forrestforthetrees/barry-smithermans-truthiness-problem-on-the-keystone-pipeline
Smitherman is just another Industry Cheerleader. Unfortunately for all Texans, he’s a cheerleader that’s not only largely funded by Industry, We The People pay his salary. The Texas Railroad Commission is the most corrupt and useless government organization we’ve ever seen, and they go well out of their way to prove that on a daily basis. All one needs to do is look at the last 5 years of complaints and match that to the number of enforcement actions. At least 95% of the time, the ruling is “No Violations Found”. That, my friends, is evidence of a corrupt organization.