Today we get the news that the House has sent the President a new energy bill. That bill whatever its virtues and vices, is absolutely silent on one of the biggest issues facing the public today - the ongoing fleecing of taxpayers by the big oil companies.

The U.S. needs tougher penalties on the companies who cheat Americans by not paying their full royalties.  It will apparently take a Democratic Administration to crack down on Big Oil fleecers. But can we be sure that our candidates will do the right thing?

Last week Jerome posted about MyDD's partnership with the Oil Accountability Project and their work in exposing the enormous amounts of money being looted from the public coffers by oil companies who suck petroleum off our public lands and then don't pay the royalties the government is owed.

In his post, Jerome called on the Democratic campaigns to promise to do the right thing and crack down on oil companies who don't pay what they owe for petroleum pumped from public lands. So far the answer has been silence.

We've been researching the reasons that some of our candidates may be playing it coy and we'll be rolling out some of that information in coming posts but hopefully our candidates will step up and do the right thing. It seems like a no brainer but nothing is simple in Washington DC when there are millions of dollars involved.