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
"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.
Jeff Fleischer is an editorial fellow at MotherJones.com.
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