Political Influence of Oil Company Donations

What's more, as Ben Armbruster noted, even conservatives seem to think Palin is on the wrong track with this one. Ed Morrissey warned Republicans not to "overplay their hand on this issue."

In the last 20 years, BP has given 71 percent of its money to Republicans, and 29 percent to Democrats. (Not counting soft money contributions during the 20-year horizon. If soft money is counted, BP, for instance, gave more than $100,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.) One could also point out that of the top 30 recipients of BP money over this time period, 26 are Republican and only four are Democrats.
Source

Ten senior Hess Corporation executives and/or members of the Hess family each gave $28,500 to the joint RNC-McCain fundraising committee, just days after McCain reversed himself to favor offshore drilling, according to Federal Election Commission reports.

Nine of these contributions, seven from Hess executives and two from members of the Hess family, came on the same day, June 24th, the records show. The total collected in the wake of McCain's reversal for the fund, called McCain Victory 2008, from Hess execs and family is $285,000.
Source

It was Cheney's energy task force - the secretive one that he wouldn't say much about publicly - that decided that the switches (acoustic triggers), which cost $500,000, were too much a burden on the industry.

Regulators in two major oil-producing countries, Norway and Brazil, in effect require them. Norway has had acoustic triggers on almost every offshore rig since 1993.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/michaeltomasky/2010/may/03/usa-dickcheney

For eight years, George Bush's presidency infected the oil industry's oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly contributed to the gulf catastrophe.
Source

This is the story of rampant deregulation in a never-ending ode to Profit as King, as propagated by the Bush/Cheney administration across all sectors of our economy, which didn’t end with Wall Street or mortgage lending or Enron. Indeed, the deregulation scandals extend now to off-shore drilling in the form of the missing Valve, a remote shut-off device called an acoustic switch.
Source