Michael Powell’s Payoff

Steve Clemons follows up to his post on Michael Powell (which I referred to here), and asks this question:
What corporate boards is Michael Powell going to be invited on?
This is the standard protocol for this administration, (remember Tom Scully from the prescription drug scam?) and as Clemons points out, the Office of Government Ethics is making it easier to do.

At the beginning of his first term, Bush and many others crowed on and on about how the administration would be run as a business… it has been made abundantly clear that he has done rather well in living up to that assertion, at least in the corruption department. The Bushies appoint folks to regulatory boards from the same industries they now regulate, who then dole out favors from the Bush team in the form of windfall legislation and rulings, and then they all move back into the civilian world and take cushy advisory board roles and lobbying jobs. This is the same political party that vowed it was going to run a squeeky-clean show when it took all those seats in 1994.

This isn’t a government; it’s a revolving door... heck, even the inept joke-of-DC Tom Ridge is going to be making $50k a pop for speech engagements...