The Foxes Minding The Henhouse
The lobbyists pop into government jobs, thanks to the Bush administration, to continue their work handing out the environment, etc., to big business, complains a New York Times editorial:
It is no surprise that Philip Cooney, who resigned last week as chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, will soon take a job at Exxon Mobil. His yeoman work in fighting against limits on greenhouse gas emissions, first as a lawyer for the oil industry's main lobbying group and then at the White House, where he sanitized reports to play down the link between emissions and global warming, clearly earned the reward of a cushy job with Exxon, a leading opponent of emissions curbs. Yet it is surely a cause for dismay that the Bush administration has seen fit to embed so many former lobbyists in key policy or regulatory jobs where they can carry out their industry's agenda from within....A slightly different, but equally worrisome, kind of conflict emerged last week when the Justice Department prematurely scuttled much of its own case in a civil racketeering trial against the tobacco industry. The late-stage decision to reduce the money demanded of the industry from an expected $130 billion to a mere $10 billion was made by Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum Jr. over the strenuous objections of the career lawyers running the case.
McCallum, a close friend of Bush from their days at Yale, had not been a tobacco lobbyist, but he was a partner in a law firm that did legal work for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, and his own legal work included medical malpractice defense. The career lawyers complained in a memo that McCallum had made a preliminary decision without even reviewing their evidence. They suggested that the department's cave-in stemmed from "sticker shock" over the amount the industry might have to pay.
The "revolving door" in which people shuttle back and forth between jobs in government and industry is a sad fixture of Washington life. There are rules, albeit weak ones, that seek to limit what government officials can do when they first return to the private sector. But the public has little protection against the machinations of lobbyists who are invited into government and given the levers of power. In an administration that saw fit to put Vice President Dick Cheney, a former oil industry executive, in charge of drafting its closed-door energy policy, there is little prospect for reining in the special interests. The public will be the loser.
(IS the loser.)
Besides, trusting Big Dick Cheney is like trusting Dollar Bill Clinton. "I never inhaled!" "The insurgecy is in its last throes!" I mean, how'd we get to this????
Mad Hungarian at June 20, 2005 5:18 AM
Odd that you should mention them together. Nobody seems to have complained when Haliburton was getting big deals with the Clinton Administration's help. It's not a new company!
Radwaste at June 20, 2005 3:39 PM
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