Think Progress has the video:

And the transcript (emphasis added by Think Progress):

BISHOP: There’s no subsidies for oil companies, oil companies get the same tax breaks that every other business gets. There are no special subsidies or tax breaks for oil companies, period.

CONSTITUENT: Why is that reported in the newspapers and on the–

BISHOP: They liked to spin it that way. Any change in oil companies was to give them the same tax structure as as every other manufacturing business gets. There is nothing that is that special or new or unique for these oil companies. And there are a lot of people who want to throw that spin out there. It’s spin, it’s crap.

Bishop’s claim that all reports of special tax breaks for the oil industry are simply media-generated “crap” runs counter to the fact that the industry pulls in an estimated $4 billion in annual subsidies, which includes, as Think Progress’s Lee Fang reports, oil-specific kickbacks such as “the ‘Intangible Drilling Costs’ tax break ($7.8 billion over ten years); a deduction for ‘tertiary,’ or enhanced oil recovery methods ($67 million over ten years); and the percentage depletion allowance for owners of oil wells ($10 billion over ten years).”

Bishop’s comments come on the heels of presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty’s blasting of President Obama’s proposal to drop the subsidies. Pawlenty inaccurately implied that cutting the tax breaks would result in further gas price increases for consumers. In fact, a 2007 report (PDF) from Congress’s Joint Economic Committee concluded that ditching oil subsidies would have little to no effect on consumer prices.

Florida’s Everglades Forever Act of 1994 drives one of the major environmental cleanup efforts in the state. Everglades Forever implementation so far has cost the state of Florida $1.8 billion. Of that, Florida sugar companies have pledged to contribute $300 million in tax revenue. (The Fanjuls own 40 percent of Florida’s sugar industry, though no hard numbers exist on how much each company has offered to the effort.) Put another way, the industry that is almost entirely responsible for both the historical destruction of the Everglades and continual pollution of the ecosystem thanks to fertilizer runoff is footing less than 20 percent of the bill to clean up the mess.

Meanwhile, the far larger Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) is funded half by the federal government and half by the Florida state government. CERP was originally projected to cost $7.8 billion; official Florida state cost estimates have since ballooned to $13.5 billion, though federal projections put it at just under $20 billion.

The fact that CERP is designed to clean up the mess in the Everglades without special contributions from the industry that largely created it has led some to speculate that the Fanjuls’ political connections played some part in shaping the program. However, the closest thing to a documented connection between the family and the program is the fact that one of CERP’s principal architects was former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.); Flo-Sun was a major contributor to Graham’s campaigns. Flo-Sun also began sending family scion Jose Fanjul, Jr. to Washington as a lobbyist in the late ’90s, but he stopped lobbying on his family’s behalf in 2000, the same year that the CERP went into effect as part of the Water Resources Development Act.

The billions that have been spent and the billions that have yet to be spent are meant to reverse the massive ecological changes that came about when nearly 2 million acres of the Everglades were razed, predominately to make room for sugar development. The money is also used to cut down the concentration of phosphorus that ends up in Florida waterways after being dumped on fields of sugar cane. Phosphorus is a nonrenewable central element in the production of fertilizer and is already in short supply all over the world — it’s also one of the many contributors to record-high food prices.

Meanwhile, Florida Crystals has partnered with both Florida International University and the University of Florida in government-funded, multi-million dollar ethanol research projects. As with the corn industry, clean production of ethanol from sugar cane is thought to be the future of the sugar industry. These programs have generated no publicly available academic research, but studies show (PDF) that the larger University of Florida program has successfully begun generating 2 million gallons of ethanol a year from processed bagasse, a waste byproduct of sugar refining. The taxpayer-funded University of Florida, then, is making progress in seeking new profits for the Fanjuls.

The Fanjul family’s political connections — and, it could be said, the Florida sugar industry’s diminished role in paying for the Everglades reconstruction projects that were crafted in the ’90s — become rather more open when it comes to Alfy Fanjul’s longstanding ties to the Clinton family. The campaign donation records of Alfy Fanjul, a Democrat, show he gave extensively to both the Senate and presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton. He has also given money to the William J. Clinton Foundation, was the co-chair of Bill Clinton’s 1992 Florida campaign and has hosted Clinton fundraisers in the past.

Alfy Fanjul’s Clinton association received outsized attention during the Kenneth Starr investigation of Clinton; Bill Clinton’s breakup speech with Monica Lewinsky was cut short by a phone call from Alfy Fanjul. While White House records don’t document the content of phone calls, Alfy’s call, made on President’s Day in 1996, could very well have been in reference to an announcement that Vice President Gore had made just hours before that he’d be pursuing a tax of a penny per pound on sugar producers. Fanjul could not have been happy about this — as evidenced by the millions spent by the sugar industry (PDF) in pre-election day advertising once the tax was put on the ballot in Florida. Ultimately, Big Sugar ads claiming the tax would be a job killer won out and Florida voters killed the measure. Bill Clinton quietly shelved it on the federal level against Gore’s wishes.

It’s worth noting that the penny-a-pound tax would be just a dent offsetting the 18 cents-per-pound-of-sugar subsidies (PDF) that cane growers like the Fanjuls receive from the federal government. The subsidies are in the form of loans; the cost of repaying them, plus interest, is tacked onto the purchase prices of sugar, which explains why the wholesale and retail prices for sugar in the U.S. have hit more than triple the global average several times over the last twenty years, according to USDA figures. A 2000 Government Accountability Office report concluded that the price markups cost U.S. consumers up to $1.9 billion annually in the 1990s, a figure that doesn’t even account for the fact that the subsidies are paid for with taxpayer money to begin with.

Between 1990 and 2009, U.S. prices for raw sugar averaged out to almost exactly twice the global average: 21.56 cents a pound, as compared to 10.85 cents a pound for the rest of the world. In recent months, however, food shortages, crop failures and the economic growth of sugar-producing countries like India and Brazil have driven global prices up to levels close to the artificially-inflated U.S. prices.

It’s unclear just how Big Sugar in general will be affected by rising global prices, but the Fanjuls are likely to face a windfall, thanks to their refineries in Canada, England, Mexico and Portugal. They also own thousands of acres of sugar farmland in the Dominican Republic. The Fanjuls, along with other sugar barons, were excoriated in the 2007 documentary “The Sugar Babies” for alleged slavery-like practices at their Dominican plantations (PDF). Representatives for Florida Crystals said at the time (PDF) that the documentary highlighted issues that were no longer company policy.

Describing corn ethanol as “a mature technology whose market share is protected,” Bingaman said Congress should scrutinize the subsidy and “weigh all factors, including the credit’s very high cost to taxpayers,” before again extending it.

Ethanol tax credits pay oil refineries to blend gasoline with ethanol. After three decades of subsidies, 10 percent of U.S. gasoline contains ethanol.

The CBO report added economic concerns to mounting environmental and health concerns about ethanol as a fuel additive. The report “provides further evidence that our nation’s biofuels tax incentives might not be appropriately calibrated,” Bingaman said.

The tax credit program already faced new scrutiny in Congress. The House Ways and Means Committee is now debating a 20 percent (nine cents per gallon) cut in the ethanol tax credit, according to The Associated Press.

Bingaman’s support for cuts is a blow to industry’s hopes for the subsidy. A longtime supporter of biofuels, he is chairman of the powerful Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

“According to the Congressional Research Service, the VEETC (ethanol tax credit) will cost the American taxpayer $7.6 billion this year alone,” Bingaman said. “That high price tag makes the VEETC by far our Tax Code’s largest subsidy for renewable energy. And this annual price tag comes on top of the $41.2 billion in current dollars that U.S. taxpayers have already spent since 1980 on tax-based subsidies for ethanol.”

Overall, says the group’s president Gene Karpinski in a press release, “in 2008, Congress went in the wrong direction” — that is, away from reducing our country’s dependence on oil.

This year’s scorecard looks at 11 Senate votes and 13 House votes related to energy and environmental policies. Sixty-seven members of the House received a perfect rating, while 27 senators received a comparable score.  Some 70 members of the House and two senators received a zero rating.

The press release mentions “a vocal minority” in Congress, “led by Minority Leaders Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and John Boehner (R-Oh), [who] used every trick in the book to help their allies in Big Oil and Big Coal.” The League of Conservation Voters says this vocal minority has led to billions of dollars in tax subsidies for oil companies.

Meanwhile, the league praised other Republicans, including Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), for introducing and supporting legislation to fight climate change and improve the environment and public health.

View the complete scorecard.