WTF? Obama just nominated Ramona
Emilia Romero as General Counsel of the USDA. Who’s she? Well,
she’s spent the last 12 years working as a lawyer for DuPont. You know,
the pesticide company. Among her areas of specialty was antitrust
litigation. I am pretty confident that means that she was helping DuPont
weasel its way through U.S. antitrust and competition law to keep it
from having its mergers denied or getting accused of anti-competitive
behavior. This is a strange pick, considering that right now the Dept of
Justice is doing a series of antitrust workshops focused on
agriculture.

Ramona Emilia Romero’s bio is below, taken from the Whitehouse.gov
site.

Ramona Emilia Romero, Nominee for General Counsel, Department of Agriculture

Ramona Emilia Romero is currently Corporate Counsel at E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company (DuPont), where she provides legal oversight for the acquisition of transportation, distribution, supply-chain management, travel and energy resources, and manages related strategic litigation.  Since 2008, Ms. Romero has also served as General Counsel of Sentinel Transportation LLC, a DuPont joint venture. She has held other key positions at DuPont, including Senior Counsel and then Corporate Counsel for complex commercial and antitrust litigation (1998-2005), and Corporate Counsel and Manager of Operations and Partnering (2005-2007).  In this last role, Ms. Romero directed all facets of DuPont Legal’s industry-leading partnering program and oversaw litigation-related operations.  From 1988 to 1998, she was a commercial, government contracts and white collar litigator at Crowell & Moring in Washington, DC.  Ms. Romero has served on several boards and been affiliated with several professional organizations, including the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, both the House of Delegates and the Presidential Initiative Commission on Diversity of the American Bar Association, the Advisory Committee of The O’Connor Judicial Selection Initiative at the University of Denver, and The Justice at Stake Campaign.  She is also the Immediate Past President of the Hispanic National Bar Association, and a founding member and former officer of the Dominican American National Roundtable.  Ms. Romero is the recipient of multiple honors, including the Lucero (“guiding star”) Award from Latino Justice PRLDEF (formerly known as the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund) and Hispanic Business Magazine’s recognition in 2007 as one of the 100 most influential Hispanics in the United States.  She holds a B.A. from Barnard College and J.D. from Harvard Law School.