From the Center for Biological Diversity:
Aurelia Skipwith has been at the Department of the Interior since April 2017 and has helped oversee virtually every effort to dismantle protections for wildlife, national parks and monuments.
“Aurelia Skipwith has been working in the Trump administration all along to end protections for billions of migratory birds, gut endangered species safeguards and eviscerate national monuments,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Skipwith will always put the interests of her old boss Monsanto and other polluters ahead of America’s wildlife and help the most anti-environmental administration in history do even more damage.”
Under current U.S. law, the president cannot appoint a person to run the Fish and Wildlife Service unless the person is “by reason of scientific education and experience, knowledgeable in the principles of fisheries and wildlife management.” Skipwith’s nomination breaks with decades of tradition from presidential administrations of both parties in that she has neither education nor experience in fisheries and wildlife management.
“Skipwith is utterly unqualified to run the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,” said Hartl. “Putting unqualified ideological fanatics into positions of power continues to be the Trump administration’s game plan. These people have utterly no compunction or shame about destroying the very agencies they’re being appointed to lead.”
During Skipwith’s tenure the Fish and Wildlife Service has repeatedly put the interests of the pesticide industry ahead of imperiled wildlife. In the spring of 2017, the Service scrapped the first nationwide biological reviews that assessed the impacts of pesticides on endangered species. In August it reversed a 2014 decision prohibiting bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides and genetically modified, pesticide-resistant crops on national wildlife refuges.
Skipwith has also overseen the national park system in her current position and was instrumental in the agency’s sham review of the national monument system that enabled Trump to illegally eliminate Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
“The Senate should ask Skipwith hard questions about her tenure at the Service, because confirming her would be a travesty for our nation’s wildlife,” said Hartl.
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”
— Giovanni Gentile, the philosopher of fascism
If I did not know better, I would say the Dotard is trolling us…
This is just laughable. Except it’s not.
Fox, enter hen house, and eat!
Trump et. al. are an existential threat to all life on earth, and - to my life. At this point, we require more than non-violent responses to Trump’s extinction and genocide actions and policies, much more. Sooner or later …
It’s why Noam Chomsky calls the US Republican Party the most dangerous organization on Earth.
Let’s just go ahead and change it to Department of the Ulterior.
This will end well, and by “well” I mean “Well, them pesticides and herbicides shore did kill all them fish and birds right quick!”
Every day another slap in the face
If there were ANY doubts we were living in an Idiocracy…this should end them…and us.
Why the hell not? We have an active criminal as our chief law enforcement officer.
“If you think it can’t get worse, just wait 24 hours (or less).”
— Tio Wally
Monsanto is one of those companies where you try and try to find something good about them, but nuh-uh.
He a little man full of vengeance against those who don’t buy into his BS.
Monsanto? Oh, you mean the corporation that has/does produce such environmentally friendly products as DDT, PCBs, Agent Orange and recombinant bovine growth hormone not to mention genetically modified seeds and crops and, of course Roundup, the all-American weed killer for which Monsanto was found guilty of knowingly producing and distributing an effective carcinogen.
And we are going to allow Trump to appoint a former Monsanto executive with a proven track record of favoring the interests of corporations like Monsanto, to protect fish & wildlife? Sort of the same as hiring a fox to guard the hen house, isn’t it?
I was about to say, yet another fox has been appointed to manage the hen house. GMTA
The irrational drive to kill as much as possible in order, it seems, to squeeze every last dollar out of the environment is very strange.