Video: The wages of a permitorium are ... no wages

The Heritage Foundation gives us this three-minute look at the effects of the “permitorium” in the Gulf on drilling, talking with the owner and employees of R and D Enterprises on the anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout.  The Obama administration has done everything it can do to stall new drilling in the Gulf, which has the region’s economy reeling.  Leslie Bertucci tells Heritage that Hurricane Katrina destroyed the economy through force majeure, but the permitorium is doing exactly the same through deliberate and intentional action by Washington:

Leslie Bertucci, a native of New Orleans and the owner of the oilfield equipment company R and D Enterprises, isn’t shy about sharing her views:

“My message for President Obama is that I would love for him to come to R and D Enterprises in Harvey, La., and meet us and see us and talk to our employees and get a real, true understanding of the reality of what is really happening because of this moratorium that shouldn’t be in place in the first place,” Bertucci says.

For this hard-working mother of six — who, with her husband, built her business from its start in a spare bedroom of her home to the industrial campus it is today — says the drilling moratorium has caused her company’s revenue stream to all but dry up. R and D Enterprises supplies equipment to transport chemicals to and from deepwater oil rigs. When those rigs aren’t allowed to drill, R and D’s equipment sits idle.

The best course forward is clear: The Obama Administration needs to resume the usual rate of permitting in both deep and shallow water to reinvigorate the Gulf, recover lost government revenue, decrease dependence on foreign oil, create jobs, and prevent even higher gas prices in the future. No policy can reverse last year’s spill — but better energy policy could ease the burden that the Administration itself imposed on the Gulf.

For an administration that claims to be all about job creation, their track record in the Gulf speaks to the exact opposite.  Like the EPA ignoring regulatory impact on jobs while promulgating its global-warming regime, Obama’s social and environmental agenda trumps jobs the economy every time, which is one reason that we’re stagnating economically while gas prices skyrocket.