RFK Jr.: White House rewards industry reps with enviro posts: "No president has acted with more solicitude toward polluting industries."

RFK Jr.: White House rewards industry reps with enviro posts | Mike Sheehan | Published: Thursday April 5, 2007

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. sheds light on how the Bush administration appoints industry types to environmental jobs in the forthcoming issue of Vanity Fair.

"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," writes Kennedy, who outlines "a devastating rollback of three decades of progress."

Kennedy, a lawyer and talk show host, rips President George Bush's ecological record by saying, "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."

He keeps up the criticism of Bush, asserting that the president "has promoted and implemented more than 400 measures that eviscerate 30 years of environmental policy."

Kennedy says, "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."

He acknowledges that some of the particularly troubling officials have departed the administration, but notes that they often return "to the private sector whose interests they served." Yet many continue to hold key positions, maintains Kennedy, at the very federal agencies that regulate the environment.

"The revolving door between business and government —- turning the regulated into the regulators —- has never before spun so fast," he writes. "And as a consequence environmental protection has been advancing backward on a broad front." ...