In a scathing article, environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes that no other president has catered more to polluting industries, putting their representatives or environmental skeptics in charge of virtually all the agencies responsible for protecting America from pollution.
Kennedy, president of the non-governmental Waterkeeper Alliance that promotes clean water throughout the world, said some administrators have returned to the private sector whose interests they served but those who remain continue to carry the torch.
“The revolving door between business and government—turning the regulated into the regulators—has never before spun so fast,” Kennedy wrote. “And as a consequence environmental protection has been advancing backward on a broad front.”
His article provides biographical sketches and summarizes a devastating rollback of progress that has led to the current reality where corporations no longer have to lobby government because they are the government.
“It can be a fine thing to have businesspeople in government, when the objective is to recruit competence and expertise,” Kennedy wrote. “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.”
