Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill who wrote (25539)	8/31/2001 2:26:15 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 82486

Turn On the Lights By E. J. Dionne Jr. Friday, August 31, 2001; Page A23 Why is it that the so-called liberal media and Democrats in the Senate don't seem to care how President Bush's energy plan came to be? Why aren't they demanding that Vice President Cheney make public exactly whom he consulted in creating this pro-industry proposal? Why is it that a powerful story on how corporations influenced Bush's energy plan could appear on the front page of Sunday's Los Angeles Times and get virtually no attention elsewhere? There's no cable media buzz, little outrage and, so far, little media follow-up. If the media are liberal, then media liberals must be a terribly cautious bunch. Conservatives, to their credit, would never let a liberal administration get away with the sort of stonewalling Bush and Cheney have engaged in on the energy task force. The 3,000-word Times story by Judy Pasternak is a rare exception to the cave-in. Pasternak found that "many of the executives at the White House meetings" on energy "were generous donors to the Republican Party, and some of their key lobbyists were freshly hired from the Bush presidential campaign." Pasternak goes on to describe a who's who of Republican lobbyists, large energy companies and trade groups that successfully influenced the Cheney report. Among the companies that would benefit from the administration's suggestions were Halliburton, the firm Cheney ran from 1995 to 2000, and several electricity producers represented by former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour. The final report also "called for additional coal production, and five days later the world's largest coal company, Peabody Energy, issued a public stock offering, raising about $60 million more than expected," Pasternak reported. She added: "While Peabody was preparing to go public, its chief executive and vice president participated in a March 1 meeting with Cheney." We're a free country, so of course private companies have every right to speak out in defense of their own interests and to seek friendly government policies. But Republicans have done a land-office business for years attacking Democrats as the party of "special interests." In this telling, "interests" are "special" and somehow suspect only if they involve environmentalists, unions, minorities, feminists and others who can be characterized as "liberals." Corporate interests, on the other hand, are deemed as having a natural right to influence government policies. Here is a case where the "special interests" that support the administration stand to gain billions of dollars from policies the president is proposing. Why shouldn't the administration give a full public accounting of whom it consulted and why it made decisions that helped these participants? Pasternak's article makes a telling point. The vice president has insisted that making public the process around the energy bill would get in the way of the candor needed in internal policy discussions. But Cheney had no reluctance to hold a news conference with "producers of power from the sun, wind and geothermal heat" -- forms of energy production popular with environmentalists -- immediately after the task force heard from them. Cheney, in other words, has already given up the principle of confidentiality. He did so when it suited the administration's public relations purposes. But he insists on confidentiality for corporate participants, also presumably for PR reasons. The Times story prompted yet another letter to Cheney from Democratic Rep. John Dingell of Michigan and Henry Waxman of California, both of whom have spent months pressing the vice president for information on his task force. Their efforts have led to a fight between Cheney and the General Accounting Office, which thinks Congress has a right to basic information on how the energy panel carried out its work. Writing to Cheney on Wednesday, Dingell and Waxman said the news report suggested that "special interests not only received unique access to the energy task force, they also wielded extraordinary influence in shaping the final energy policy." The Democrats added: "Without question, these are exactly the types of issues that deserve public and congressional scrutiny." You wonder why Senate Democrats don't suggest to the administration that it needs to be more forthcoming on the task force if it wants its energy bill to come to the Senate floor. But open government shouldn't be a partisan issue. All branches of the free press -- whatever their political tilt -- should be defending the public's right to know how the executive branch of our government arrived at a policy that clearly (and perhaps even necessarily) benefits some interests over others. If the administration truly believes in the policy it's touting, it should have no qualms about telling the public, in detail, how that policy was made. © 2001 The Washington Post Company washingtonpost.com