Transcript Staff Writer

OKLAHOMA CITY -- Big corporations and government don't mix, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said Friday afternoon.

Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, told a standing-room-only crowd at the University of Oklahoma's Health Science Center that Americans were living in a "scientific nightmare" because corporations -- such as those which are dumping toxins in public water ways -- are running the American government.

"This is the revolving door plunder you get," he said, "when you let corporations run a democracy."

In his speech Kennedy blistered the Bush administration, large corporations, power companies, the poultry industry and the media.

"You can't talk about the environment in any context," he said, "without speaking critically of the Bush administration."

As an example, Kennedy listed the heads of several federal agencies who were previously lobbyists for companies regulated by the same agencies.

"This is the worst environmental White House that we've ever had in American history," he said. "They have put polluters in charge of virtually all the areas of government that are supposed to be protecting us from pollution."

Kennedy also blasted the close ties between politicians and corporate interests.

"They treat the planet as if it was a business to be liquidated," he said.

And Kennedy said many times those connections cause life-threatening problems.

"More than 640,000 babies in this country have been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in their mother's wombs," he said.

Speaking about Oklahoma, Kennedy praised the action of Attorney General Drew Edmondson and announced his support for Edmondson's suit against large-scale poultry producers.

Those chicken producers, Kennedy said, are pollution the public's waterways and "making themselves billionaires by poisoning the rest of us."

He said the companies are "injuring the rest of us" by "dumping their crap into the Illinois River and the other rivers of the state."