Coastal Post Online
MARIN COUNTY'S NEWS
MONTHLY - FREE PRESS
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(415)868-0502(fax) - P.O. Box 31, Bolinas, CA, 94924
November, 2004
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Bush's Crimes Against Nature
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Eugene
Weekly
I've written a book about Bush's environmental record, but it's not so much
about the environment as it is about an excess of corporate power and the
corrosive impact of that on our democracy. And it's not about a Democrat
attacking a Republican. I've been disciplined for 20 years as an environmental
advocate about being non-partisan and bi-partisan in my approach to these
issues. I don't think there's any such thing as Republican children or
Democratic children, and the worst thing that can happen to the environment is
if it becomes the province of a single political party. But you can't talk
honestly about the environment today in any context without speaking critically
about this president. This is the worst environmental president we've had in
American history.
If you look at Natural Resource Defense Council's website, you'll see over
400 major environmental roll-backs that have been promoted by this
administration during the last three and a half years, and I tell you it's part
of a concerted deliberate attempt to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law.
It's a stealth attack. They have concealed their radical agenda from the
American public using Orwellian rhetoric. When they destroy the forest, they
call it the Healthy Forest Law; when they destroy the air they call it the
Clear Skies Bill. And most insidiously they have put polluters in charge of
virtually all the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution.
The head of the Forest Service is a timber industry lobbyist. The head of
public lands is a mining industry lobbyist who believes that public lands are
unconstitutional. The head of the air division at EPA is a utility lobbyist who
has represented the worst air polluters in America. The second in command at
EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist. The head of Superfunds, an agency critical to
quality of life here in Oregon, is a lobbyist whose last job was teaching
corporate polluters how to evade Superfunds.
If you go through all the agency heads, sub-heads and secretaries in the
Department of Agriculture, Department of the Interior, Department of Energy and
EPA, you'll find the same thing: The polluters are running regulatory agencies
that are supposed to regulate them. And these are not individuals who have
entered government service for the sake of the public interest, but rather
specifically to subvert the very laws that they are in charge of enforcing.
This is impacting our quality of life in America in so many ways that we don't
know about because the press simply isn't doing its job of informing the
American public, scrutinizing these policies, connecting the dots between the
corporate contributors and the dramatic decline in American quality of life that
we are now experiencing.
This year for the first time since the passage of the Clean Water Act, EPA
announced that America's waterways are actually getting dirtier. The New York
Times ran a story that the levels of sulfur dioxide (that causes acid rain)
have grown 4 percent over the last year. I have three children who have asthma
and one out of every four black children in this country in our municipalities
now has asthma.
Asthma rates have doubled among our children over the last five years. Whether
it's hormones in our food or antibiotics, something is causing our children to
have these kinds of haywire immune systems. We do know that asthma attacks are
triggered primarily by two components of air pollution: ozone and particulates.
About 60 percent of those materials in our atmosphere are coming from 1,100
coal-burning power plants that are burning coal illegally. They were supposed
to have cleaned up 15 years ago. The Clinton administration was prosecuting the
worst 70 of these plants for criminal violations. But this is an industry that
donated $48 million to President Bush and the Republican Party in the 2000
cycle and has given $58 million since. And one of the first things that
President Bush did when he came into office was to order the Justice Department
to drop those lawsuits against those utilities.
According to the EPA, just the criminal excedences from these 70 plants
kill 5,500 Americans every year. And then the Bush administration tore the
heart out of the Clean Air Act abolishing the New Source Reviews section that
require these companies to clean up their pollution. That decision is killing
30,000 Americans every single year, according to EPA, including 165 people in
the state of Oregon.
Last week the federal EPA announced that in 19 states it's now unsafe to
eat any freshwater fish because of mercury contamination. In 48 states it's now
unsafe to eat at least some of the fish or most of the fish, and Oregon is one of those.
We know a lot about mercury now that we didn't know 10 years ago. We know
that one out of every six American women now has so much mercury in her womb
that her children are at risk for autism, blindness, mental retardation,
cognitive impairment, heart, liver and kidney disease. I have so much mercury
in my body--I got levels tested recently--that I was told by Dr. David
Carpenter, who's a national authority on mercury contamination, that a woman
with my levels, which are three times the safe levels, would have a child with
cognitive impairment. He estimated a permanent IQ loss of 5 to 7 points in her
children. He said the science is very certain. Today there are 630,000 children
born in this country every year who've been exposed to dangerous levels of
mercury in the womb.
Clinton, recognizing this catastrophic national epidemic, reclassified
mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act, which triggered a
requirement that those plants remove 90 percent of the mercury within three and
a half years. It would have cost them less than 1 percent of revenues and it
would have solved the problem. Well, this is the same industry that's given
that $100 million to the president, and eight weeks ago President Bush
announced that he was scrapping the Clinton-era regs, substituting instead
regulations that the industry never has to clean up their mercury
contamination.
So we are living today in a science fiction nightmare where my children
and the children of millions of other Americans who have asthma are being
brought into a world where the air is too poisonous to breathe--because
somebody gave money to a politician. And where my children and the children of
most Americans can no longer go fishing with their father and come home and eat
the fish--because somebody gave money to a politician. And the mercury in the
waters here in Oregon, the fish are too dangerous, particularly for children
and women. Some of that mercury is coming from the power plants, most of it's
coming from old mining tailings and from Superfund sites. On the Willamette River, that's where the mercury's coming from. Well, guess what? The Bush
administration has allowed the Superfund to go bankrupt, which means that those
sites will probably never get cleaned up.
Superfund (money) is raised through a tax on polluting industries, and
it's a very, very small tax. But they don't like it. They don't mind the tax,
what they mind is that that fund is used as a leverage to force them to spend
billions of dollars to clean up their mess. And this is how it works. The
Superfund doesn't just clean up orphan sites, but it can also be used by EPA to
clean up the sites of recalcitrant polluters. So the EPA--there's a provision
in Superfund that says that if a polluter refuses to clean up its Superfund
site, the EPA can go to them and say, OK, fine, we're tired of dealing with the
lawyers and enriching your lawyers. What we're going to do instead is clean it
up ourselves and charge you triple. It's called the Treble Damages Provision.
At virtually every Superfund site that's been cleaned up by industry over
the past 20 years, since 1981, it's been cleaned up because of the threat of
the Treble Damages Provision. It's the only thing that makes them clean up.
Well, guess what? That threat no longer exists. The teeth have been ripped out
of EPA so that they will no longer be able to force polluters to clean up their
sites. As a result of that, most of these sites along the Willamette will never
get cleaned up, and if they do get cleaned up, guess who's paying for it? You
and I and the American public. How ridiculous is that?
It's always been illegal to pollute the Willamette--the 1888 Rivers and
Harbors Act said you can't pollute any waterway in the US Even before that it
was illegal to pollute. They were able to get away with it. They thought they
could make more money by polluting. Now we've got an administration that rather
than telling polluters they have to clean up their mess, they're saying that
the public instead is going to foot the bill.
All of these issues, and there are many, many others, examples of how
corporations are controlling our government and plundering the commons,
stealing what belongs to the American people, our air and water, the
commonwealth, the shared resources, the public land, the wandering animals--the
things that give us a sense of community, the source of our values, our
virtues, our character as a people. And we're plundering those. And if you ask
people at the White House, why are you doing this? What they'll say when
they're not lying to conceal this radical agenda and mask it from the American
people, they'll say well, we have to choose between economic prosperity and
environmental protection. And that is a false choice.
In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to
good economic policy--if we want to measure the economy based upon how it
produces jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations, over the long term,
and how it preserves the value of the assets of our community. If on the other
hand, we want to do what they've been urging us to do with this White House,
which is to treat the planet as if it were a business in liquidation, convert
our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of
pollution-based prosperity, we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the
illusion of a prosperous economy, but our children are going to pay for our joy
ride. And they will pay for it with denuded landscapes, poorer health and huge
clean-up costs that will be amplified over time, and that they'll never be able
to pay.
Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the costs
of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children. There is no
stronger advocate for free-market capitalism than myself. I believe that the
free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of
the land. It's also the best thing that can happen to the environment because a
true free market encourages efficiency and the elimination of waste, and waste
is pollution.
So free market capitalism does not pollute our environment. It's always
the suspension of free market rule. In a true free market economy, you can't
make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich, without enriching your
community. So what polluters do is make themselves rich by making everybody
else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of
life for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the discipline of the
free market, by forcing the public to pay their production costs. You show me a
polluter and I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat who's using
political clout to escape the discipline of the free market.
When those coal companies and utilities put their acid rain into the air
and sterilize the lakes of the Adirondacks and destroy the forests from Georgia
to Quebec, they put the mercury in the air which poisons our children, makes
them mentally retarded, gives them cognitive impairment and terrible diseases,
and it makes it so I can no longer go fishing and come home and eat the fish.
They have stolen that from me, and as they are discharging the ozone and
particulates that give our children asthma and make our workers miss work--all
of those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that should, in a true free
market economy be reflected in the price of the companies' products in the
market. But what polluters do is they use political clout to escape the
discipline of the free market and pawn their costs off on the public.
Corporations are externalizing machines. They are always looking for ways
to get the public to pay their production costs, and what all the federal
environmental laws are meant to do is to restore free market capitalism in our
country, by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true costs of bringing
their product to market. What we do as an environmental advocate is to go out
into the marketplace--I don't even consider myself an environmentalist any
more, I'm a free marketeer. I go out and catch the cheaters, the people who are
polluting, and I say to them we are going to force you to internalize your
costs the same way you internalize your profits, because when somebody cheats
the free market, it distorts the whole marketplace and none of us gets the
benefits of the efficiencies and the democracy of our country.
Americans have to understand that there is a huge difference between free
market capitalism which democratizes our country which makes us more efficient,
more democratic, and the kind of corporate crony capitalism which has been
embraced by this administration and which is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.
This is an administration that's about plundering our air and our water,
plundering our national treasure, shifting our wealth, plundering the great
relationships we had with people all over the world, and shifting the wealth of
those assets to large corporations who are its donors, who are the lowest
bottom feeders who profiteer on the American people.
© : t r u t h o u t 2004