Crimes Against Nature
Aozotorp
Crimes Against Nature
George W. Bush will go down as the worst environmental president in U.S.
history, says Robert F. Kennedy.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Interviewed By Jeff Fleischer
October 7, 2004
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The Ungreening of America
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"You simply can’t talk honestly about the environment today without
criticizing this president. George W. Bush will go down as the worst
environmental president in our nation’s history."
So writes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his new book "Crimes Against Nature," which
details how President Bush has rewritten the nation’s environmental laws in
favor of industry and filled his administration with former lobbyists and
corporate executives who now oversee the regulation of their former industries.
A senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council and president of
the grassroots Waterkeeper Alliance, Kennedy argues that the Bush
administration consistently favored corporate interests over the environment
and public health, assaulting the very idea of a common good. He recently spoke
with MotherJones.com George W. Bush's many crimes against nature.
MotherJones.com: How has the U.S. government historically changed its approach
to public "commons" such as the air and water?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: One of the successes of the right-wing propaganda
campaign has been to convince the American people that the environmental laws
were new innovations passed after Earth Day. But in fact, it’s always been
illegal to pollute. The pollution was restricted by two ancient doctrines.
One’s called the Public Trust Doctrine, which says that those assets that are
by their nature shared assets -- the commonwealth, the air and water, the
wildlife, public lands -- are owned by the public. Everybody has a right to use
them, and nobody has a right to treat them in a way that will diminish their
use and enjoyment by others. The other law is Nuisance Law, which protects
private property from intrusion by polluters. Nuisance law has been turned on
its head by the right wing, who claim to be on the side of property rights, but
really only favor property rights when they’re talking about the right of a
polluter to use his property to destroy his neighbor’s property or the public
property. The law in the United States, in every jurisdiction until about 1876,
was that if a factory put smoke into the air, even one day a year, and it got
onto a neighbor’s property, the neighbor had the right to enjoin to close
down the factory, and the courts had no choice but to do that.
Those strong, ancient laws were dismantled through corruption and the political
power of industry, as well as a general recognition that industrialization
would be beneficial to the American public. But the pendulum swung too far, and
by the early 1960s the polluters had basically displaced the public out of
public trust assets. Then you had the reaction; you had Rachel Carson’s book
"Silent Spring," which was the clarion call, and then you had Earth Day, 1970,
when 20 million Americans came out onto the street to demand the return of
their ancient environmental rights. The result of that was the passage of 28
major environmental laws over the next decade that made an effort to restore
those rights to the public.
MJ.com: From there, what tactics did industry use to regain its position?
RFK: The "Gang of Five" foundations that are huge repositories of industrial
polluter money [the John.M Olin Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the
Castle Rock Foundation, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, and the
Bradley Foundation] have been used to create think tanks, to recruit phony
scientists that we call “biostitutes” and to fund politicians in order to
undermine and subvert those environmental laws that were passed after Earth
Day: the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act.
Industry was kind of caught off-guard by Earth Day and the legislative barrage
that followed. But since then, they’ve mobilized to regain control of the
public trust assets. And really, the best measure of how a democracy is
functioning is how it allocates the goods of the land, the public trust assets.
Does it maintain the air and water under control of the people for the benefit
of the public, or does it allow those assets to be privatized by politically
powerful entities?
MJ.com: How surprising has George Bush’s environmental policy been in light
of his track record as governor?
RFK: We weren’t surprised by the federal environmental record, because we saw
that he’d been the worst environmental governor in America. Under his
leadership, Texas became the most polluted state in the country, with the
highest levels of air pollution, the highest levels of water pollution, and the
highest level of toxic waste and toxic releases. And it was 49th among 50
states in per-capita environmental spending. He was only worsted by Gov. Mike
Leavitt of Utah, who he has named his EPA administrator and who is now in
charge of stewarding all of America’s environmental assets.
MJ.com: And yet, as a candidate in 2000, he talked about regulating emissions
and combating global warming.
RFK: The problem for the president is that the environment and our
environmental laws are very popular with both Republicans and Democrats among
the rank-and-file. So, from the beginning, he’s had to conceal his radical
anti-environmental agenda from the American public. He did it on the campaign
trail by simply saying that he was going to support initiatives to control
global warming. But once he got into office, he immediately reversed that and
abandoned that promise, and began dismantling our environmental infrastructure.
In keeping with that, his attack has been a stealth attack. They use Orwellian
rhetoric to conceal this extreme agenda from the public. When they want to
destroy the forests, they call it the Healthy Forest Act; when they want to
destroy the air, they call it the Clear Skies bill. Most insidiously, as part
of this stealth attack, they’ve put polluters in charge of the agencies that
are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. The head of the Forest
Service is Mark Rey, probably the most rapacious timber industry lobbyist in
American history. The head of public lands is Steven Griles, a mining industry
lobbyist who believes public lands are unconstitutional. The head of the air
division of the EPA was Marianne Horinko, whose former job had been advising
corporate polluters on how to evade Superfund. The second in command of EPA was
a Monsanto lobbyist. If you look at virtually all of the sub-secretariats and
agency heads in the Departments of Agriculture, Energy and Interior and EPA,
the same pattern holds. Polluters have been put in charge of the agencies that
are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. As I show in my book, these
individuals have not entered government service for the public interest, but
rather to subvert the very laws they’re now charged with enforcing.
MJ.com: One lesser-known example of that pattern is John Graham at the Office
of Information and Regulatory Affairs. What role does he play?
RFK: He’s been an anti-environmental activist for many, many years. He
founded an anti-environmental think tank at Harvard, which is funded by
polluting industries that pay Graham to produce reports [essentially] defending
their corporate profits. He’s developed these phony algorithms that always
end in the same result, which is that industry wins and the public loses.
He runs the most powerful agency in the government today, which is the OIRA,
part of the Office of Management and Budget. It’s a secretive agency inside
the White House that is not subject to many of the laws that require open
government. The other agencies that are charged with protecting the American
environment from time to time develop new regulations in keeping with that
mission. Usually it takes about eight years for a regulation to go through the
regulatory process, which involves a lot of public debate, public notice and
comment, hearings and review by attorneys and scientists. At the end of this
painstaking and extremely democratic process, those regulations now disappear
into a black hole at OIRA, which is supposed to review the regulations prior to
passage. And at OIRA, the industry meets privately with John Graham and
rewrites the regulations in private. When the regulations come out of his
office, generally they are no longer designed to protect the public, but rather
to protect industry prerogatives and profits.
MJ.com: What's the worst example of how that collaboration between industry and
government has played out?
RFK: One of the worst examples is the rewriting of New Source Review. I have
three sons with asthma; one out of every four black kids in New York City now
has asthma. Asthma attacks are triggered primarily by ozone and particulates,
and the major sources of those materials in our atmosphere are 1,100
coal-burning power plants that are burning coal illegally. The Clinton
administration had initiated investigations and prosecutions against 70 of the
worst of those. 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. One of the first things that Bush did when he came into office was to
order the Justice Department to drop those lawsuits. The Justice Department
lawyer said that this had never happened before in American history, where a
president accepts money from industries targeted for investigation and
prosecution, and then orders the Justice Department to drop those
investigations once he gets into office. There were 70 utilities involved here
and, according to EPA, just the criminal exceedences from those 70 plants
killed 5,500 Americans every year. Then the administration went and rewrote the
Clean Air Act, gutting the New Source rule, which means those plants will be
able to discharge ozone and particulates forever.
MJ.com: How has the situation changed now that Michael O. Leavitt has replaced
Christine Todd Whitman at the EPA?
RFK: It went from bad to worse. Leavitt has giant social skills and charm, but
his record is one of the most anti-environmental of any governor except for
George W. Bush. The first thing that he did when he came into office was to
dismantle President Clinton’s mercury rule. The same utilities that are
discharging ozone and particulates, those same coal-burning power plants are
also discharging huge amounts of mercury into our air, and the mercury ends up
in the fish. Just a few weeks ago, the EPA announced its decision that, as a
result of that, all fish in 19 states are now unsafe to eat because of mercury
contamination. At least some of the fish in 48 states are now unsafe to eat. In
fact, the only two states where they’re “safe” are Alaska and Wyoming,
where the Republican-controlled legislatures refused to allocate the funds for
their agencies to test the fish.
Today, one out of every six American women has so much mercury in her womb that
her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases, including autism,
blindness, mental retardation and heart, liver and kidney disease. My own
levels of mercury are so high -- I had them tested recently -- that a woman
with the same levels would have a child with cognitive impairment. The Clinton
administration had classified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean
Air Act, which triggered a requirement that those utilities remove 90 percent
of the mercury within three and a half years. It would have cost less than 1
percent of plant revenue, and the great thing about it is that it works; we now
know that when the utilities stop discharging mercury, that the fish downstream
clean up almost immediately.
But this is an industry that gave all that money, over $100 million, to the
president. A few months ago, the Bush administration announced that it was
scrapping the Clinton-era regulations and substituting instead regulations that
were written by utility lawyers, from the law firm of Latham and Watkins. Under
the new rules, the utilities will effectively never have to clean up their
mercury. And the chief lobbyist for Latham and Watkins was Jeffrey Holmstead,
who is now the head of the air division of EPA. This is an example of how
corporations have infiltrated our government and are dismantling it in order to
privatize the commons.
MJ.com: In "Crimes Against Nature" you explain how the administration has cut
funding to laws already on the books, such as Superfund cleanup.
RFK: Superfund has gone bankrupt. The Superfund itself, which was raised
through a small tax on the chemical and oil industry, was used to clean up
orphaned sites -- sites where the responsible party could not be found. But
more importantly, it was used to leverage recalcitrant polluters to clean up
their own sites, because Superfund includes a triple-damages provision. That
gives the EPA power, when a polluter drags its feet, to say to the polluter,
“Okay, we’re going to clean up the site ourselves, and then we’re going
to charge you triple.” And 90 percent of the Superfund sites that have been
cleaned up in America have been cleaned up as a result of that threat. Without
that threat, Superfund just becomes a welfare program for corporate lawyers,
who can argue forever and ever about who’s responsible and what kind of
cleanup should result. So today, with Superfund bankrupt, you’re not going to
see many Superfund sites really cleaned up. And if they are cleaned up, it’ll
be with taxpayer money, which is absurdly unjust.
MJ.com: If John Kerry wins the election, to what extent can he undo the
environmental damage this administration has done?
RFK: Some of the damage can be patched up. Some of it is going to be
irreparable, but for the rest it will need congressional help and cooperation.
So a lot would depend on who controls Congress. At this point, Congress is
controlled by anti-environmental Republicans like Tom DeLay. Tom DeLay is a
former Houston bug killer who entered politics because he was angry that his
extermination business had been impacted by the ban on DDT and other
pesticides, and he’s out to destroy America’s environmental laws.
MJ.com: What consequences do you see for the environment if Bush is re-elected?
RFK: I can’t imagine! What he’s done already would have been unimaginable
five years ago. He is the number-one threat to the global environment. And the
disastrous impacts of this administration don’t just go to the environment,
but also to our democracy. My book is really not just about the environment,
but more about the excess of corporate power and the corrosive impacts of
excessive corporate power on our democracy.
Larry Harrell
> http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/10/09_402.html
>
> Crimes Against Nature
>
> George W. Bush will go down as the worst environmental president in U.S.
> history, says Robert F. Kennedy.
>
Not as far as the Forest Service is involved!
I will not be voting for him but, the facts don't prove out this
"revelation" from a member of the Democrats version of the perfect
corrupted political family.
Once again, the Democrats put to rest Bush's version of "Healthy
Forests". This is ancient history and set in stone. CONGRESS revamped
"Healthy Forests" into a much better program than Mark Rey's dream of
re-paying the Bush contributors.
Have we seen 3 log loads of Forest Service logs going down the
highways?
NO
Have we seen clearcutting return to spotted owl territories??
NO
Have we seen old growth being liquidated and ecosystems "destroyed",
as the "preservationists" like to say???
NO
What kind of forestry legacy did we see from the Clinton
Administration??
Let's see.
He approved the logging of old growth timber with diameters up to 59"
dbh
(Northwest Forest Plan)
He did a miniature re-write of the then-current Roadless Rules but
still allowed logging and mining to continue, as did the old rules.
He allowed our forests to become choked with flammable brush and weedy
trees resulting in several record fire seasons.
He also allowed National Forest management to become choked with
all-too-restrictive rules, "analysis paralysis" and loopholes for
frivilous lawsuits.
He pushed for diameter limits (as low as a mere 12" dbh) on the
cutting of trees in California's increasingly flammable Sierra Nevada.
(Sierra Nevada Framework)
He set the stage for massive bark beetle infestations in much of the
southwest, resulting in 12 MILLION dead trees in the San Bernardino
National Forest, alone.
However, Bush HAS mismanaged our forests in many ways, too. "Stealing"
funds from less "affluent" National Forests to dump onto impacted
Forests which have powerful people living nearby. Not fully funding
the "Healthy Forests" program, alone, is inexcusable, in my book. The
"stealth tactics", also used by Democrats, should not be condoned by
either party.
And, finally, Kerry doesn't deserve a vote, either, from me. He was
like an ostrich with his head in the sand when western Democrats were
lining up to vote on their corrected version of "Healthy Forests".
Fires were burning and people were dying while Kerry declined to vote.
If I were registered, I wouldn't vote for either of them.
Larry, a true environmentalist
Donald L Ferrt
> aozo...@aol.com (Aozotorp) wrote in message news:<20041007184913...@mb-m06.aol.com>...
> > http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/10/09_402.html
> >
> > Crimes Against Nature
> >
> > George W. Bush will go down as the worst environmental president in U.S.
> > history, says Robert F. Kennedy.
> >
>
> Not as far as the Forest Service is involved!
>
> I will not be voting for him but, the facts don't prove out this
> "revelation" from a member of the Democrats version of the perfect
> corrupted political family.
>
> Once again, the Democrats put to rest Bush's version of "Healthy
> Forests". This is ancient history and set in stone. CONGRESS revamped
> "Healthy Forests" into a much better program than Mark Rey's dream of
> re-paying the Bush contributors.
>
> Have we seen 3 log loads of Forest Service logs going down the
> highways?
>
> NO
>
> Have we seen clearcutting return to spotted owl territories??
>
> NO
>
> Have we seen old growth being liquidated and ecosystems "destroyed",
> as the "preservationists" like to say???
>
> NO
>
>
>
> What kind of forestry legacy did we see from the Clinton
> Administration??
Clinton was the most middle of the road president we have had!
Give him 4 more and we will see lost of losses:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9948-2004Oct5?language=printer
Wildlife Protection Standards Waived
Move May Allow More Logging In U.S. Forests
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A25
The Bush administration has set aside Reagan-era rules aimed at
protecting wildlife in national forests, rules that environmentalists
had used to block logging projects in the Pacific Northwest and
elsewhere.
Under a temporary regulation published last week, U.S. Forest Service
managers reviewing road-building, logging or other proposals are
allowed to waive the 22-year-old requirement that the forests maintain
"viable populations" of fish and wildlife. Instead of having to
conduct population counts of representative species, for example,
officials now can rely on "best available science," a less specific
standard, to guide their decisions.
The change, which is not subject to public comment, is the latest move
in an ongoing battle over how to protect vulnerable species in
national forests. The forests cover 191 million acres, or roughly 8
percent of the national landscape, and are home to one-quarter of the
U.S. species at risk of extinction.
In the last year of the Clinton administration, officials issued
stricter regulations requiring forest managers to maintain conditions
that provide a "high likelihood" of maintaining the viability of
native and desired plants and animals. The Bush administration
suspended the Clinton rules in May 2001, and the Forest Service has
been drafting a replacement regulation since then. In the meantime,
forest managers have been relying on the 1982 standards.
The regulation issued last week declared that "the 1982 rule is not in
effect" but gave managers the option of applying the older standard
voluntarily when revising forest-management plans.
Forest Service spokesman Dan Jiron initially said in an interview that
there was "zero difference" between the new rules and what the
administration had put in place in 2001, but he later said evaluations
of specific projects will now be conducted differently.
Environmentalists and some academics blasted the switch, saying it
would undermine protections for animals including moose and the
Appalachian brook trout.
"For the first time since 1982, the government is saying we no longer
have any legal obligation to maintain wildlife populations on national
forests," said Mike Leahy, natural resources counsel for Defenders of
Wildlife.
Timber industry officials, however, said they do not believe the move
would ease restrictions on logging. Christopher West, who represents
makers of forest products in 12 western states as vice president of
the American Forest Resource Council, said that the new distinction
"to us is meaningless" and that "people are crying wolf for
election-year politics."
Jiron also dismissed the criticism as unfounded, saying the
administration will use other scientific methods to assess how animals
are faring. He said managers will focus on gauging habitat conditions
"to ensure you have a dense habitat for wildlife."
Environmental groups have repeatedly charged that the administration
was not conducting adequate population counts of "indicator species,"
which give a sense of how other plants and animals are doing in the
forest. In June, for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th
Circuit in Denver ruled that federal officials did not do a sufficient
population count of several Utah forest species; the new rule may
bolster the administration's case that such surveys are not critical.
The rule issued last week noted that courts have required population
counts for years but asserted that "other tools often can be useful
and more appropriate in predicting the effects of implementing a land
management plan, such as examining the effect of proposed activities
on the habitat of specific species."
But Leahy at Defenders of Wildlife questioned this approach, noting
that in Wyoming's Teton Mountains the Forest Service has accelerated
the issuance of permits allowing helicopters to fly skiers to
mountaintops. He said the flights may not harm habitat but they
disturb wolverines in the area.
The rules issued last week went into effect immediately without a
public comment period, Jiron said, because "it's an interpretation of
an existing rule."
Steve Schulin
aozo...@aol.com (Aozotorp) posted Robert F. Kennedy Jr. interview,
which in part included:
> ... One of the successes of the right-wing propaganda campaign has
> been to convince the American people that the environmental laws
> were new innovations passed after Earth Day. But in fact, it’s
> always been illegal to pollute. The pollution was restricted by two
> ancient doctrines. One’s called the Public Trust Doctrine, which
> says that those assets that are by their nature shared assets -- the
> commonwealth, the air and water, the wildlife, public lands -- are
> owned by the public. Everybody has a right to use them, and nobody
> has a right to treat them in a way that will diminish their use and
> enjoyment by others. The other law is Nuisance Law, which protects
> private property from intrusion by polluters. Nuisance law has been
> turned on its head by the right wing, who claim to be on the side of
> property rights, but really only favor property rights when they’re
> talking about the right of a polluter to use his property to destroy
> his neighbor’s property or the public property. The law in the
> United States, in every jurisdiction until about 1876, was that if a
> factory put smoke into the air, even one day a year, and it got onto
> a neighbor’s property, the neighbor had the right to enjoin to close
> down the factory, and the courts had no choice but to do that.
>
> Those strong, ancient laws were dismantled through corruption and
> the political power of industry, as well as a general recognition
> that industrialization would be beneficial to the American public.
> But the pendulum swung too far, and by the early 1960s the polluters
> had basically displaced the public out of public trust assets. ...
The shift to permission-by-regulation, rather than judicial recourse for
damages, intrusion and nuisance, is truly an important one. In the
radiation regulation debate, John Gofman eloquently calls for
Neuremberg-style trials for those who have presumed, under color of
government, to allow statistical murder. Mr. Kennedy would be more
persuasive if he called for getting regulatory agencies out of the
standard-setting business, and restoring the matters of damages and
risk-taking to their historic venues.
Very truly,
Steve Schulin
http://www.nuclear.com/environment/climate_policy/default.html