Black Friday

Washington, DC -- Congress just doesn't get it. This week's worst news was the passage, overwhelmingly, of an Energy Bill that makes almost every aspect of our lives worse.

According to internal Congressional analysis, it will increase the cost of gasoline, not bring it down. It will provide billions of dollars of new subsidies for oil, gas, nuclear, and coal, worsening the budget deficit and slowing our transition to a clean, new, efficient energy future. It eliminates environmental review of a host of damaging energy projects, accelerating the loss of family farms, ranches, and watersheds to the oil industry, particularly in the mountain West. It opens the door to an amped-up international trade in weapons-grade uranium -- just what we don't need in today's rapidly nuclearizing world. It instructs the Department of the Interior to get ready to lease the entire coast of the United States for oil and gas drilling, including places like California, Florida, the Carolinas, New England, and the Pacific Northwest that have been protected since the early 1980's.

As part of the effort to pass this bill, the Bush administration suppressed an EPA report showing that auto companies are using technological progress to increase the muscle of their cars, and actually falling behind on fuel economy. The report, however, lets another cat out of the bag -- this inaction is dangerous. "Fuel economy is directly related to energy security." Duh.

Is there anything to like about this Energy Bill? Well, they did abandon the idea of protecting the oil companies from liability for the damage they caused by polluting groundwater with the gasoline additive MTBE. And a proposal to weaken the Clean Air Act was shelved.

Almost as bad as the Energy Bill, though, was the passage of a pork-laden public works bill that failed to shift funding from boondoggles for special interests and campaign contributors to the much-needed job of first fixing America's existing bridges, highways, and transit systems. Don Young of Alaska got his money for his Bridges to Nowhere (See "Taking the Initiative," May 31). A bunch of his Congressional colleagues were similarly blessed with pork handouts, in a number of cases as blatant bribes for agreeing to support the Central American Free Trade Agreement, the week's third shame.

CAFTA passed 215-217, after the House Leadership and the White House held the vote open for an hour so they could pass out enough boodle to squeak through. The proposal would allow foreign investors to challenge and upset in court almost any U.S. law that interferes with their business plans, including state and local environmental regulations. Outrageously, it gives foreign investors more rights in U.S. courts than American investors have under the Constitution -- go figure. The crucial votes came from representatives of the sugar-producing states, who told their constituents that they had been forced to vote for CAFTA because the Administration and the Congressional leadership made it clear that, if they did not, the U.S. sugar industry would be destroyed.

Is this how democracy is supposed to work? Our own government tells an industry (albeit one that in Florida is a bad polluter and that, overall, totally depends on government subsidies) that if foreign investors don't get special privileges in U.S. courts, the government will destroy that same industry?

This isn't democracy -- it's a mugging.