John McCain’s “Green” Credentials Were Developed by an ACTIVE Energy Lobbyist
Of the dozens of lobbyists that work on John McCain’s campaign, one already got nabbed in McCain’s recent "conflict of interest vetting for everyone but my wife" initiative: Eric Burgeson (though the NYT also reports that Tom Loeffler, Fundraising Chair, "was expected to give up his position to comply with the new rules "–presumably that’ll happen once Loeffler has finalized the next round of $30,000 a person fundraising dinners).
One lobbyist out of dozens. Why was Eric Burgeson, an advisor on energy and environmental issues, so much more of a problem for McCain than all the other lobbyists working on his campaign?
Burgeson’s recent job history looks like a wildly revolving door taking him from the White House, to the Department of Energy, and then into lobbying (I’m still trying to figure out whether Burgeson played a part in Dick’s Energy Task Force):
October 2006 to present: Barbour Griffith & Rogers, Vice President, Energy and Environment
April 2005 to October 2006: Chief of Staff, Department of Energy
November 2004 to April 2005: Special Assistant to the President and Associate Director of the Office or Presidential Personnel, White House
May 2004 to November 2004: Deputy Chief of Staff and White House Liaison, DOE
January 2001 to May 2004: Associate Director in the Office of Cabinet Affairs in the White House, Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary of Energy and Senior Legislative Advisor in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
1999 to 2001: Lobbyist for Mercury group, representing (among others) BP Amoco, Lockheed Martin, and the NRA
His 2008 first quarter lobbying for BGR offers more insight into the conflicts Burgeson represented for McCain:
Breakthough Fuel, energy and environment, new client (no quarterly reports)
Coal 2 Liquid, liquid coal, includes Senate lobbying
Contractors International Group on Nuclear Liability, IAEA Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage, includes Senate lobbying
Deloitte Consulting, procurement of technology and systems management, includes Senate lobbying
Energy Enterprise Solutions, IT Management, includes Senate lobbying (more background)
Flambeau River Biorefinery, energy and budget, includes Senate lobbying (more background)
Forest County Potawatami Community, tribal affairs, includes Senate lobbying (more background)
Kurdistan Regional Government, foreign relations, includes Senate lobbying (and Presidential and NSC lobbying)
MLBA Services, insurance reform, includes Senate lobbying
MPI Corporate Holdings, business development, US Mint
Materials Processing Corporation, electronics recycling, includes Senate lobbying (more background)
O2 Diesel Company, renewable energy, includes Senate lobbying (more background)
Qioptiq, defense issues, includes Senate lobbying (more background)
Southern Company Services, climate change, energy independence, includes Senate lobbying (more background)
WE Energies, climate change, electric utilites, and energy independence, includes Senate lobbying (more background)
In other words, one of the campaign advisors who has cultivated McCain’s "green" image has, at the same time, been representing companies from the renewable energy, nuclear energy, and liquid coal industries. Though lobbyist declaration forms don’t specify which Senators Burgeson has been lobbying, it would have been hard for Burgeson to avoid the former Chair of the Commerce Committee–especially since he was sitting with him on the Straight Talk for Lobbyists Express. Which is why I find Burgeson’s answer on the influence of special interests–speaking as McCain’s advisor–to be so amusing:
Renville, Minn.: While I support ethanol and believe that it is a valuable first step, I do not believe that the criticism of subsidies for ethanol is fair. I gladly would support no subsidies or tax breaks for ethanol if the same were done for the oil industry. I cannot believe anyone is strong enough to stand up to the oil industry. Does Sen. McCain believe that this is possible?
Eric Burgeson: You are right, powerful interests in Washington, DC are difficult to stand up to. But if there is anyone in Washington who can do it, it is Senator McCain who has built his career and reputation standing up to special interests. As for subsidies, Senator McCain has a clear position that he opposes subsidies, not just ethanol subsidies, but all subsidies. [my emphasis]
That’s right. McCain stands up to all the special interests–unless they work on his campaign staff.
As an added bonus, I like that McCain, until he decided the lobbyist schtick was ruining his image, had a lobbyist for a Potawatami tribe working for him who, with one other person, billed $80,000 in the first quarter of this year. It seems John McCain’s energy policy was being run by the second coming of Jack Abramoff.
Is there anyone besides Jane Hamsher who lives in the dc area who is not a lobbyist? just wondering…
and hey, don’t we all want an environmental policy our rich friends can make money on?
sorry ew, but this isn’t news
call us when mccain DOESN’T have a lobbyist in charge of something
Re DC…well, me, but I moved.
Totally OT (except that it’s about McCain and a different kind of lobbyist, Pastor Hagee).
In my travels across the web, I came across an article from Sarah Posner at TAP, written on March 12, that puts an interesting light on the Bush/McCain appeasement attack against Obama:
McCain may well get explicit about the NIE soon, but meanwhile he’s busy showing Hagee’s followers that he’s no Neville Chamberlain appeasing this century’s Hitler, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Just like Bush appealed to evangelicals by using coded language (such as referring to the Dred Scott decision as code for his opposition to Roe v. Wade), McCain’s new ad invoking the image of Winston Churchill was undoubtedly a ploy to appeal to Christian Zionists without alienating other voters.
One of Hagee’s favorite motivators for his partisans is to compare them to Churchill (and its detractors to the Nazi appeaser Chamberlain). When likening Ahmadinejad to Hitler, Hagee cautions his followers against acting like an enabling Chamberlain and exhorts them to aspire to be a heroic Churchill. As Hagee told his followers in 2006, just months after launching CUFI, “if you compare world history from 1935 until 1939 we are reliving that era. In that era Hitler pledged to kill the Jews and the people of the free world were trying to come to grips with the rise of Hitler’s dictatorship and the threat to democracy. Only Winston Churchill got it right!”
Like they say, read the whole thing.
And I see that Posner has already made this point about the speech.
I think the glimpses in the post are important indicators of the Republican candidate’s regional outlook. One of the interesting features of the energy taskforce was it was a very first Cheney leadership gambit in spring 2001, but Crew’s foia case was making progress in opening the logs to the public only in 2004, yet, finally in 2006, WaPo published a carefully camouflaged list of ‘participants’. I did not see Nino’s name on the list either.
There is a regional poltical similarity between the areas these two folks call home WY and AZ, with respect to resource extraction, and how that relates to lobbyists and campaigners addressing ways to have the loudest voice in a future Republican administration. I would ask, additionally, whether the neat siege of the FEC induced McCain to milk the lobbyist component of his organization beyond even his originally conceptualized centrality of their input into his party’s design of the autumn 2008 nationwide presidential campaign platform. Maybe the Democratic Party’s nifty permissive early timeline for primaries added to McCain’s inability to respond by proportionalizing the representation of his lobbying advisors in a way that would obscure his true intentions for his after-election plan. His politics seem a cookiecutter Republican recipe for patronage.
Living on Earth did an excellent piece on McCain and his selective green stance.
Senator McCain”s climate record
http://www.loe.org/shows/segme…..egmentID=3
good listen
Shorter St. McBush: “We’re green…really! We’re the Big Green Machine! Cash or check, and all major credit cards accepted. And for the first 10,000 investors…ahem…heh heh…donors, a free ride on the Sugar Momma Express.”
The only thing “green” these jackals have accomplished is the fucking “Green Zone”. And it is surrounded by blood red everywhere.
I looked up the first listed entity for which Burgeson registered as a lobbyist, BreakthroughFuelsLLC. It formed in November 2006 but as ew noted has no annual report. The WI division of financial institutions corroborates that information, adding that state law requires an annual report from LLCs. The company looks like a fuel distribution optimization business formed by two people who worked at a drayage outfit, plus a person with background in public relations work for a Fortune500 company also in the distribution side of business. The three gents seem to have garnered business baccalaureats in WI and the ceo’s photo may have a resemblance to Cheney and Rove. Burgeson’s lobbying evidently was as part of his work for Barbour Griffith Rogers. Breakthrough Fuels LLC has a registered lobbyist identification number in both chambers of congress. Its physical address is in De Pere, WI according to the website, and in Green Bay according to the WI Department of Financial Institutions.