A Dirty Dozen

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8. MARK REY, Agriculture Department undersecretary for natural resources. Rey, who now is caretaker of America's 156 national forests, has spent his entire career as a timber industry lobbyist and congressional staffer hell-bent on fattening industry profits by letting corporations clear-cut the public's trees. He headed the American Forest and Paper Association, the leading proponent of logging our national forests, prior to becoming a senate staffer and authoring an infamous 1995 act that suspended all environmental laws to give the green light for corporations to clear cut old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. He also wrote a bill that would have eliminated local citizen committees that oversee timber harvests. As forest chief, Rey has been the key force behind Bush's "Healthy Forests" scam that would allow nearly unlimited clear-cutting in pristine national forests.

9. THOMAS SANSONETTI, assistant attorney general for environment and natural resources. Now the public's lead lawyer for defending our environmental protection programs in court, Sansonetti is a Republican Party political operative and a lobbyist from Wyoming who represented coal companies and other energy corporations in their efforts to undermine these same environmental protections. He previously was chief lawyer for the Republican National Committee, and, as a lobbyist, he pushed in Washington to let each coal company increase its mining on federal lands by one-third. Another of the far-right corporatists that Bush has put in charge of the machinery of government, Sansonetti, is a proud member of the government-hating, laissez-faire Federalist Society, which is amply funded by ultra-conservative, corporate foundations.

10. PATRICIA LYNN SCARLETT, assistant interior secretary for policy. This overseer of overall policy affecting our nation's public resources is no fan of the public even holding resources and doesn't like regulation of private efforts to exploit the public's resources. She has written that "environmentalism is a coherent philosophy that rivals Marxism." Most of Scarlett's career has been spent with the Reason Foundation, a think tank that vigorously opposes government regulations and is funded by such corporations as Chevron, Dow, Enron, ExxonMobil, Phillip Morris, and Shell Oil, as well as by the American Petroleum Institute, American Plastics Council, and American Chemistry Council.

11. CARMEN TOOHEY, special interior assistant for Alaska. Cam, as he is known, is Gale Norton's handpicked aid to oversee environmental policies affecting the vast federal landholdings in our nation's largest state. For the Bushites, policy priority Number One in Alaska is, of course, to turn loose their oil buddies to build roads, move in drilling rigs, and extend pipelines across the majestic Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Cam is well-versed on this priority and completely in tune with it, for he comes to his government job from having led Arctic Power, a lobbying group supporting corporate interests that want to open our public refuge to their private profit schemes.

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