Cheney’s culture of deregulation and corruption

[Dardedar]

Cheney’s culture of deregulation and corruption

How Bush Administration inaction created the BP disaster

June 9, 2010

by CAP’s Joshua Dorner.

Big Oil spent millions of dollars to sweep—and keep—George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the White House. And it got its money’s worth.

The new administration and its staunchly pro-oil congressional allies returned the favor by enacting one of the most pro-oil, anti-environment pieces of legislation in history: the Energy Policy Act of 2005—itself based on the recommendations of Cheney’s secret energy policy task force. The Bush-Cheney administration’s cozy relationship with Big Oil, however, goes much deeper than one law.

A closer look at the culture of deregulation, self-regulation, and corruption ushered in on Cheney’s watch further underscores why the BP oil catastrophe should forever be remembered as Cheney’s Katrina.

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The Bush-Cheney administration made an unprecedented effort from beginning to end to rewrite our nation’s laws and rules to benefit their allies in the oil industry. They installed incompetent or corrupt cronies in important regulatory and oversight positions. And what they could not achieve legally, the administration pursued by other means.

Eight years of Bush and Cheney created an insidious, pervasive rot throughout the government—a rot so severe that it prevented the government from carrying out its most basic functions and, as we have now seen, could not be easily undone by a new administration. The pro-oil, anti-regulatory culture, agenda, and ideology relentlessly advanced by Cheney and others in the Bush administration unquestionably led to the catastrophe that now threatens to destroy the environment and economy of America’s Gulf Coast—Cheney’s Katrina."

Climate Progress