For the past five years, Wendy served as DEP’s environmental advocate, a sort of ombudswoman position to assist citizens and environmental organizations in bringing their concerns effectively before the Department. Wendy did her job so well that the Legislature removed all the staff and funding from her unit. Wendy, deciding that she could be more effective outside of state government, has agreed to serve as PEER’s environmental advocate for the concerns of her former colleagues at the DEP.

"The permanent government, a secular oligarchy... comprises the Fortune 500 companies and their attendant lobbyists, the big media and entertainment syndicates, the civil and military services, the larger research universities and law firms. It is this government that hires the country’s politicians and sets the terms and conditions under which the country’s citizens can exercise their right -- God-given but increasingly expensive -- to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Obedient to the rule of men, not laws, the permanent government oversees the production of wealth, builds cities, manufactures goods, raises capital, fixes prices, shapes the landscape, and reserves the right to assume debt, poison rivers, cheat the customers, receive the gifts of federal subsidy, and speak to the American people in the language of low motive and base emotion."

"The provisional government is the spiritual democracy that comes and goes on the trend of a political season and oversees the production of pageants.... Positing a rule of laws instead of men, the provisional government must live within the cage of high-minded principle, addressing its remarks to the imaginary figure known as the informed citizen or the thinking man, a superior being who detests superficial reasoning and quack remedies, never looks at Playboy, remembers the lessons of history, trusts Bill Moyers, worries about political repression in Liberia, reads (and knows himself improved by) the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal."

[Lapham distinguishes the "permanent government," which is not elected, from the "provisional government," which is:]

–Lewis Lapham, Editor of Harpers Magazine

Unfortunately, some of the young people have been seduced by what they see as positives in the glitter of the West, and are opting for more material values.

Tenzin Thinley, 18, dressed in a leather jacket at Dodo’s disco in Thimphu, Bhutan’s tiny capitol, has seen MTV and heard the "music." He says, "Kids are restless. There’s nothing to do here." (Excerpted from the L.A. Times)

We are presently in the midst of a corporate culture war being waged on our society and environment. As an accomplice, government at all levels has failed to hold corporations accountable for their actions by not demanding that they change their institutional culture to meet basic social responsibilities to the land and its inhabitants.

Community health and environmental protection, for example, are hostage to corporate misinformation campaigns that take advantage of legitimate public concerns, such as jobs, and then put a spin on them. Government regulations to ensure higher standards of corporate behavior are subsequently demeaned as "bureaucratic interference" and "red tape," even when they prove effective.

The nation’s security program, a.k.a. the military, looks increasingly like a giant entitlement program for megacorporations to pioneer idiotic schemes such as Star Wars and "stealth" bombers that fail to function in the rain. Internationally, the U. S. government has become a ‘chamber of commerce’ for multinational private interests as concerns about inhumane labor conditions yield to the demands of trade and the latest quarterly profit margin. Often the biggest loser is the environment when government cedes its power to companies whose leaders are not elected by the people, whose raids on natural resources are not driven by principles of long-term stewardship, and whose priority is answering to corporate boardrooms rather than ecological communities of which our species is a part."