Robert F Kennedy Jr: Crimes Against Nature

Speaking of looting, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote the following in the Apr. 20, 2006 issue of Rolling Stone:

Gale Norton stepped down as Secretary of the Interior on March 31st, ending her ferocious five-year assault on the lands and wildlife she was charged to protect. A former lobbyist and lawyer for the mining and timber industries, Norton made it her goal as secretary to give away as many of our publicly owned resources as she could to the energy, timber and mining interests, often for free or at fire-sale prices. She opened tens of millions of acres of key wildlife habitat to oil and gas tycoons, industrial logging barons and reckless developers. She blocked hard-won plans to control the use of snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park and campaigned tirelessly to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. She suppressed dozens of scientific studies and punished scientists when their findings challenged corporate profit-taking. She put polluters and their lobbyists in charge of virtually all of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from polluters. She even refused to reprimand her deputy, the former mining and oil lobbyist Steven Griles, after an investigation by the Interior Department's inspector general found that he had doled out multimillion-dollar favors to his former clients.

Now that she is leaving, Norton says she is setting her sights on "the private sector." Her record suggests she has been working for the private sector all along.

It's hard to recall anything that the Bush-Cheney Administration has done that won't have to be undone once sanity returns. Not that it's all that clear that sanity will return. But experience has shown that trends that can't be sustained indefinitely won't be. Bush has kept his political juggernaut afloat by converting public assets into private favors. Those assets are finite.

posted 2006-04-19