The Nature of Ronald Reagan: Will the Earth Accept His Corpse?

"[Reagan's Secretary of Interior James] Watt had doomed himself by denouncing the members of the federal coal-leasing commission as "a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple." The commissioners had shown the audacity to resist Watt's demented shale-oil scheme, which sought to transform the Great Plains into a moonlike landscape of craters and toxic slush ponds. So like Earl Butz before him, Watt's political obituary was written with a racist slur. It's probably fitting that he fell from such a self-inflicted trifle. After all, he was an unrepentent bigot, just like his boss Ronnie. Ask any Apache.
Of course, the Christian fundamentalist and apostle of strip-mining from Wyoming nearly lost his job over another bone-headed misdemeanor: his attempt to bar the Beach Boys from performing at a 4th of July concert on the National Mall. Reagan had to intervene personally on behalf of that All-American band, whose music could have provided the soundtrack for the sunny brand of trickle-down utopianism the president was trying to force-feed the country in those days. The Gipper, who, if nothing else, always demonstrated a keen pr sense, may well have lost confidence in Watt at that precise moment.
But the Interior Secretary, who once declared that the end of the Earth was so close at hand that there was no reason to fret about conserving ecosystems for the long haul, had been on the ropes from the beginning of his tenure, due in large part to the Dump Watt campaign initiated by Brower and his group Friends of the Earth only weeks after Watt's nomination was confirmed by the US senate. Within a few months, Friends of the Earth had gathered more than two million signatures on a petition calling for Watt's removal. In those days, the right to petition the government still seemed to stand for something.
Watt's approach to the plunder of the planet seethed with an evangelical fervor. He brought with him to Washington a gang of libertarian missionaries, mostly veterans of the Coors-funded Mountain States Legal Foundation, who referred to themselves as the Colorado Crazies. Their mission: privatize the public estate. Many of them were transparent crooks who ended up facing indictment and doing time in federal prison for self-dealing and public corruption. They gave away billions in public timber, coal and oil to favored corporations, leaving behind toxic scars where there used to be wild forests, trout streams and deserts. These thieves were part of the same claque of race-baiting zealots who demonized welfare mothers as swindlers of the public treasury. . . .
Watt, who was himself charged with 25 felony counts of lying and obstruction of justice, never hid his rapine agenda behind soft, made-for-primetime rhetoric. He never preached about win-win solutions, ecological forestry or sustainable development. From the beginning, James Watt's message was clear: grab it all, grab it now. God wills it so. The message was so high-pitched and unadulterated that it provoked a fierce global resistance that frustrated Watt at nearly every turn. In the end, he achieved almost nothing for the forces of darkness."