Sludge Watch ==> Robert F.Kennedy - Vanity Fair- Corporations ARE the Government

[Maureen Reilly]

The Bush Administration - Texas Chainsaw Management

by Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. - Vanity Fair May 2007

Spinning the revolving door between government and business as never
before, the White House has handed more than 100 top environmental
posts to representatives of polluting industries. The author provides
a biographical sampler -
and describes a devastating rollback of three decades of progress.

The verdict of history sometimes takes centuries. The verdict on
George W. Bush as the nation's environmental steward has already been
written in stone. No president has mounted a more sustained and
deliberate assault on the nation's environment. No president has acted
with more solicitude toward polluting industries. Assaulting the
environment across a broad front, the Bush administration has promoted
and implemented more than 400 measures that eviscerate 30 years of
environmental policy. After years of denial, the president recently
acknowledged the potentially catastrophic threat of global warming,
but the words have no more meaning than the promise to rebuild New
Orleans "better than ever."

Most insidiously, the president has put representatives of polluting
industries or environmental skeptics in charge of virtually all the
agencies responsible for protecting America from pollution. Some
egregious officials are now gone, often returning to the private
sector whose interests they served. But the administrators who remain
in place continue to carry the torch - people such as Mark Rey, a
timber-industry lobbyist appointed to oversee the U.S. Forest Service;
Rejane "Johnnie" Burton, at Interior, a former oil-and-gas-company
executive in Wyoming, who has failed to collect billions on leases
from oil companies active in the Gulf of Mexico; and Elizabeth Stolpe,
a former lobbyist for one of the nation's worst polluters, Koch
Industries, who is an associate director (for toxics and environmental
protection) at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

This trend is consistent across all of the departments of government
that pertain to the environment: the Department of Commerce (which
regulates fisheries); the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, and the
Interior; the E.P.A.; and even the relevant divisions of the Justice
Department. More than 100 representatives from polluting industries
occupy key spots at the federal agencies that regulate environmental
quality. The revolving door between business and government - turning
the regulated into the regulators - has never before spun so fast. And
as a consequence environmental protection has been advancing backward
on a broad front.

Consider Jeffrey Holmstead, who for four years was a top official in
the E.P.A.'s Office of Air and Radiation. Before going to the E.P.A.,
Holmstead had worked for the law firm Latham & Watkins and represented
one of the nation's largest plywood producers, seeking to diminish
pollution controls. In 2004, Holmstead ushered through new regulations
exempting wood-products manufacturers from air-pollution rules
governing formaldehyde. According to the /Los Angeles Times,/
Holmstead's new rule "relied on a risk assessment generated by a
chemical industry-funded think tank, and a novel legal approach
recommended by a timber industry lawyer."

Or consider the career of Camden Toohey, who in 2001 was appointed to
be the special assistant for Alaska by Gale Norton, the secretary of
the interior from 2001 to 2006. Toohey, who was previously the
executive director of Arctic Power, the chief lobbying group in the
campaign to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,
oversaw Interior's Alaska operations until resigning, in January of
2006, to take a job at Shell, where Norton now serves as senior legal
adviser.

And then there is Charles Lambert, a former lobbyist for the beef
industry, now a deputy undersecretary at the Department of Agriculture
responsible for marketing and regulatory programs. In June 2004, The
Denver Post reported on an exchange between Lambert and Representative
Joe Baca, a California Democrat, at a hearing on the issue of mad-cow
disease

"Is there a possibility that [the disease] could get through?"

Lambert answered, "No, sir."

"None at all?," Baca asked.

"No," Lambert replied.

"You would bet your life on it - your job on it, right?"

Lambert answered, "Yes, sir."

The disease was discovered in the U.S. six months later.

Reports in The New York Times and on 60 Minutes have highlighted the
case of Phillip Cooney, who was the chief of staff for the White House
Council on Environmental Quality. His job was to advise the president
on the environmental implications of decisions that he makes. Cooney's
previous job had been as the chief lobbyist for the American Petroleum
Institute. His preoccupation during his four-year White House stint,
according to news accounts, was combing scientific documents issued by
the various federal agencies in order to remove damaging statements
about the oil industry and the coal industry. He suppressed or altered
several major studies on global warming in order to protect the
interests of his former clients. After the Times revealed the
alterations, in 2005, Cooney left his job and went to work for
ExxonMobil.

It can be a fine thing to have businesspeople in government, when the
objective is to recruit competence and expertise. But high-ranking
officials such as the ones cited here, and scores of others, have
entered government service not to serve the public interest but rather
to subvert the very laws they are charged with enforcing.  Under the
Bush administration, the big polluters, as the author and activist Jim
Hightower has pointed out, have eliminated the middleman. "The
corporations don't have to lobby the government any more. They are the
government."

http://www.vanityfair.com/