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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (47195)	1/29/2002 3:33:13 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

'Keep public business public' Denver Post.com Editorial Tuesday, January 29, 2002 - In secret, the Bush administration tried to re-write the nation's energy policies. Among the Bush team's original proposals: Moving oil rigs into national monuments. Weakening guidelines that protect the environment during oil drilling and coal mining on public lands. Slashing money for alternative energy research. Giving electric companies a federal right to build power lines on private property over the landowners' objections. Every proposal dealt with a federal action, so should have been open to public comment. But for months, Vice President Dick Cheney obdurately has clung to the fiction that who he talked to in preparing the massive federal policy revisions isn't the public's business. This week, he forced the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, into the uncomfortable position of likely having to sue the executive branch to make the information public. Cheney was excoriated for his closed-door crafting of the Bush energy policy shortly after he announced the plan in May - and long before the Enron pot got shoved onto the front burner of public policy in October. The administration's close ties to the bankrupt Texas energy company only have fueled the criticisms. For example, in January 2001, Bush refused to help California solve its energy crisis, a crisis that, not coincidentally, came about partly because California had embraced the very kind of deregulation that Enron had sought. In March, Bush pushed to allow oil rigs into national monuments and scuttle environmental rules about mining on public lands. Both issues were of intense interest to Colorado and the West, and both got shot down when Congress got wind of them. Then in August, the Department of Energy held just two days of hearings on major proposals to subsidize and benefit energy companies. True public input was systematically excluded, by the very short notice that the meeting would be held, restrictions on who was allowed to speak (the speakers' list consisted almost exclusively of energy company executives), and rules limiting written public comment to answering a narrow list of industry-friendly questions. In nearly every instance, the Bush administration attempted to implement enormous changes through a series of sometimes obscure federal rules, guidelines, budget priorities and other executive actions. Yet Cheney claims that executive privilege should shield him from telling the public whose advice he solicited in writing the energy policy and what part of his plans would have benefited which political interests. The public's interest will be gravely harmed if the courts uphold Cheney's position. On other issues in the future, voters may never learn who has their elected leaders' ear - a prospect that could damage the very idea of transparency in government, and of public policy being made in public. Cheney should be reminded that openness in a democratic government is, after all, far more than a personal virtue. denverpost.com