It's always uplifting when a Cabinet Official goes from ostensibly safeguarding the interests of the American people to working for a rapacious corporation like Shell:
Gale Norton is back providing oversight of energy development issues on public
lands in the American West, this time as a key legal advisor for a major global
oil company. Months after she resigned her cabinet post as President Bush's
Interior Secretary—and then seemed to disappear from public view—the Coloradan
apparently has accepted an offer to serve as counsel for Royal Dutch
Shell PLC. Shell, one of the world's largest producers of oil, was also one
of the companies that Norton's Interior Department routinely engaged on matters
of drilling in sensitive ecological settings.
You can get the full story here. What is even more uplifting, I might add, is how nary a single major media outlet covered a story like this one. The noticeable lack of coverage of the seamless transition for Sec. Norton between Government and Big Business--between 'protecting' our land and developing it to enlarge the treasure chests' of a few men--is a good example of the decaying state of American Democracy. This may, of course, be seen as alarmist, as a hysterical extrapolation of a relatively isolated event. But I ask you this: if this was indeed isolated, it would be considered newsworthy. But it is not, and so our politicians are guilty of serious and systemic ethical violations, and our supposedly free press is guilty of enabling these violations through their silence. Until we demand that our local and national news sources start covering stories like these, our politicians will perpetually forget who they work for--us--and they will continue their dialectic of money and power, at the exclusion of everything else.
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