Work Actions

Forget about Wall Street—there’s a new villain in town.  Big Oil is, at the moment, the dark lord of corporate greed and evil, and, not surprisingly, it’s starting to take center stage both in political campaigns and Washington politicking.

Here are six examples of oil creep:

1. Take his job and shove him: Louisiana Rep. Charlie Melancon (D) has the distinction of being the first member of Congress to call for BP CEO Tony Hayward to be fired. Melancon says he was particularly offended by Hayward’s quip, “I’d like my life back.”  Bgive Crist a leg up over Rubio.

Does the Senate climate bill tie the EPA’s hands? You increasingly hear from progressives that the American Power Act—the energy and climate bill introduced by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Ct.)—“guts” the Clean Air Act. Some groups have put this critique at the center of a campaign to improve the bill. If blog comments and email chatter are any indication, lots of grassroots greens have adopted it as a red line—reason to oppose the bill entirely.

Special envoy Todd Stern said a better model was the “bottom-up architecture” proposed by Australia during last year’s Copenhagen summit, in which each nation submits details of its own actions to the United Nations.