Palin Touts ‘Flawed’ Pipeline Process As ‘Free Market Competition’»

[maddezmom]

Palin Touts ‘Flawed’ Pipeline Process As ‘Free Market Competition’»
This morning, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) delivered her second policy speech of the entire campaign, on energy — a fitting topic, considering Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) considers her to be America’s foremost energy expert. Along with praising coal and expanded drilling, Palin touted her own experience in achieving “progress” on a natural gas pipeline in Alaska, claiming she “introduced” “free-market competition” to Big Oil:

should have been competing to invest in a new means of delivering their product to market. They should have been competing for the right to tap into the hungry markets, flowing our resources into those hungry markets, and instead they wanted a higher and higher price than any fair competition would yield. So they wouldn’t build the line. <…>

So we introduced, when I got elected, we introduced the big oil companies and their lobbyists to a concept of something that evidently they had forgotten, and that’s free-market competition. They had a monopoly previously on power and resources, and we broke it.

Watch it:



Hardly using a free market approach, Palin’s “flawed bidding process” actually “narrowed the field to a company with ties to her administration,” according to an AP investigation:

Despite Palin’s boast of a smart and fair bidding process, the AP found that her team crafted terms that favored only a few independent pipeline companies and ultimately benefited the winner, TransCanada Corp. <…>

more:http://thinkprogress.org/2008/10/29/palin-pipeline/

[Rosa Luxemburg]

1. someone probably told her to say that