Home > Uncategorized > WSJ provides great coverage of big jump in BP lobbying focussed on Obama, Dems, but uninterested in Cheney's secret meetings

WSJ provides great coverage of big jump in BP lobbying focussed on Obama, Dems, but uninterested in Cheney's secret meetings

1.  The Wall Street Journal published an interesting piece on May 27 by Elizabeth Williamson on BP’s pro-drilling/damage control lobbying: BP Aims to Avoid Fresh Restrictions on Drilling, but it seemed to me that it too quickly skated past the eight years of the Bush/Cheney administration, which undeniably had an impact on our regulatory structure and ethos.

Curious, I queried the reporter, and we had the following exchange:

from TokyoTom
to [email protected]
date Thu, May 27, 2010 at 4:51 PM
subject BP lobbying
mailed-by gmail.com

 
Thanks for this excellent reporting. When will we finally get coverage of Cheney’s secret meetings?

Tom

 

Williamson, Elizabeth [email protected]
to tokyotom
date Thu, May 27, 2010 at 7:15 PM
subject Re: BP lobbying
mailed-by wsj.com

 

Hi Tom, Thanks for writing. Cheney’s secret meeting–is there another one scheduled? Or you don’t think there’s enough to cover in the current presidency?

Elizabeth Williamson
Reporter
The Wall Street Journal
202 862 6667
Cell: 202 674 2463

from TokyoTom
to “Williamson, Elizabeth” <[email protected]>
date Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 6:44 PM
subject Re: BP lobbying
mailed-by gmail.com

 
Elizabeth, many thanks for your reply.

Surely you’re not uninterested energy policy prior to Obama? That would be like a financial reporter now being uninterested in figuring out why there was a bubble, what went wrong with financial regulation, why even Goldman Sachs needed a bailout, simply because it happened before Obama.

Does superficiality really rule, and is the WSJ simply uninterested in how one White House completely blocked out the press and public from a serious of meetings on energy/climate policy? Say it ain’t so, Elizabeth.

Tom

2.  Not much came of that, besides a few idle suspicions that the Wall Street Journal’s reporting might  and lack thereof might reflect a political and/or statist agenda of one sort or another.  But idle speculation not being my purpose, I noted recently some coverage of the secret Cheney meetings (so secret that the Bush adminstration went to all the way to the Supreme Court) to protect the “Executive Privilege” to hide imoprtant activities from the American people) that I thought I would bring you readers’ attnetion.

I encourage people to take a look at Kate Sheppard’s June 10 article at Mother Jones, Dick Cheney’s Last Laugh; The Deepwater Horizon disaster raises new questions about the Bush administration’s secret energy task force. It looks like the secret task force had a direct impact in regulatroy and legislative actions that affected, among others, approval procedures for offshore drilling activities. But much remains unknown:

Open government advocates say this might be the appropriate time to push for more information about his task force. Mandy Smithberger, an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight, says that it’s “definitely a ripe time” to find out more about what went on in the meetings. “I don’t think you can understand how we got to where we are without looking back,” she says.

“When you have a disaster of this magnitude, it raises the question, if in this whole secretive process, what was discussed, how much did the Bush administration ignore, how much did they allow the oil and gas industry to basically do what they wanted,” says AnneWeismann, chief counsel at Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington. “Secrecy is so pernicious that it can continue to damage even when the administration is not in power.”

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