Crossposted from another newsgroup. I thought maybe some of the roffians
would appreciate a well-stated environmentalist point of view.

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Save the Earth -- Dump Bush
In a slashing interview, environmental leader Bobby Kennedy Jr. denounces
the administration's "crimes against nature" and discusses the Democratic
presidential pack, the dawn of Arnold's California reign -- and his own
political future.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By David Talbot
Salon.com

Nov. 19, 2003 | When Bobby Kennedy Jr. talks about the corporate polluters
he has been fighting for nearly 20 years as an environmental lawyer -- and
their accomplices in the Bush administration -- he gets the same steely
look in his blue eyes that his father did when he was confronting the
moguls of organized crime. "I am angry," he says, with a Kennedyesque hand
chop of the air. "Three of my sons have asthma and I watch them struggle
to breathe on bad air days. And it's just scandalous to me that these
polluters can give millions to Bush and suddenly all these environmental
regulations are thrown out the window. These guys in Washington are
selling huge chunks of America's natural resources, they have our
government up for sale to the highest bidder, and they're getting away
with it scot-free."
Kennedy, who has built a reputation over the past two decades as the
leading defender of the huge Hudson Valley watershed that stretches from
the Adirondacks to New York City, is senior attorney for the Natural
Resources Defense Council and also chief prosecuting attorney for the
Hudson Riverkeeper, an organization of fishermen on behalf of whom he's
battled G.E., Exxon and dozens of other corporate and governmental
polluters of the legendary river. No other environmental champion has a
higher public profile than Kennedy, a factor not just of his family name
and impressive legal accomplishments, but of his tireless speaking
schedule, which takes him all over the country, from an energy industry
association one week to a conservative women's club the next (two recent
engagements, he proudly notes, where he received standing ovations).
Kennedy, who is an avid fisherman and falconer, says he has been an
environmentalist all his life: "My mother said that when I was in the
crib, I was always picking up beetles." As a boy, he wanted to be a
veterinarian, but after his father's assassination in 1968, when Bobby Jr.
was 14, he decided to follow his father's path through Harvard and the
University of Virginia law school. He was working for the Manhattan
district attorney's office in 1983 when the drug problems he had long been
wrestling with caught up with him; while flying to South Dakota for drug
treatment, the 29-year-old Kennedy overdosed on heroin and was arrested
for possession after his plane landed. The following year, as part of his
rehabilitation Kennedy volunteered to work for the Natural Resources
Defense Council. Kennedy will not talk about what he took from this
experience -- "That's not something I want to talk about with the press. I
have other places where I talk about that," he once told the New York
Times -- but it doesn't seem overly dramatic to suggest that by committing
himself to a life of environmental action, he was saving his life. As the
Times noted, 1984 was the year Kennedy (in his words) "reevaluated" his
life: "I was going to do what I wanted to do."
Kennedy's main base of operations is a modest, two-story building on the
Pace University campus in White Plains, N.Y., where he teaches law and
runs an environmental litigation clinic. Outside, a weathered-looking
fishing boat stands vigil. The building lobby is awash in aquatic life,
with mounted fish on the walls and a big, brimming aquarium in the center.
Kennedy's cramped office is adorned on one side with a wall of fame,
including photos picturing him at various events with a mixed bag of
celebrities -- Cameron Diaz, Keith Richards, Bonnie Raitt, Nancy Reagan,
Dan Quayle, Gloria Estefan. (Kennedy has called his family name a
"blessing" that gives him access to a range of public figures who can help
his causes.) Another wall is dominated by a haunting black-and-white
poster of his father, walking down a lonely open road in Oregon, with snow
peaks in the distance, during his 1968 presidential run.
Kennedy, who is 49 years old and lives in nearby Bedford with his wife,
Mary, and six children, sat down in the legal clinic's no-frills boardroom
to talk with Salon over a Chinese take-out lunch and cups of Keeper
Springs water, his bottled water that is sold in the Mid-Atlantic states
(all profits go to the national organization of river keepers). Kennedy,
who was wearing a navy blue work shirt and rumpled white Dockers, has an
unassuming personality. Before digging into his "Triple Delight with
Scallions" and fried rice, Kennedy, who is a devout Catholic, said a
silent prayer and crossed himself. The conversation ranged from Bush's
environmental record to the 2004 Democratic challengers to the fate of
American democracy and his own political future. Kennedy also had a
surprisingly warm assessment of the Republican in his extended family,
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who he is convinced is a strong
environmentalist.

You charge in your Rolling Stone article that Bush is the worst
environmental president in American history.
Yes, that's true. And he's far worse than No. 2, who's Warren Harding.
Based upon the fact that we have 30 major environmental laws that are now
being eviscerated. All of the investment we have made in our environmental
infrastructure since Earth Day 1970 is now being undermined in a
three-year period of astonishing activity.
The NRDC Web site lists over 200 environmental rollbacks by the White
House in the last two years. If even a fraction of those are actually
implemented, we will effectively have no significant federal environmental
law left in our country by this time next year. That's not exaggeration,
it's not hyperbole, it is a fact.
As I say in the Rolling Stone article, many of our laws will remain on the
books in one form or another. But we'll be Mexico, which has these
wonderful, even poetic, environmental laws, but nobody knows about them
and nobody complies with them because they can't be enforced.

You also point out that the Bush administration has been very careful in
how they've gone about rolling back environmental progress. You write
that, unlike the Reagan administration's more confrontational approach,
they operate in a stealth manner. Exactly how does this work?
Well, unlike Reagan, they control both houses of Congress, so they can
attach stealthy, anti-environmental riders to must-pass budget bills. In
that way they can alter statutes without debate or public scrutiny.
Furthermore, a lot of the environmental regulations are arcane and highly
technical and require strict enforcement by the various agencies. The Bush
administration is suspending enforcement or changing agency policies
without altering the regulations. A lot of the changes are illegal, and
groups like the NRDC will sue them and we will win the lawsuits -- but
that litigation process takes 10 or 12 years, and by that time the damage
will be done.

So how are they getting away with it?
Because they've taken control of the agencies that are supposed to be
protecting us. And Congress doesn't scrutinize them because, as I said,
the Republicans control Capitol Hill. The people running Congress these
days, particularly Tom DeLay, are among the strongest advocates for
dismantling our environmental infrastructure. There are no hearings on
Capitol Hill, no public scrutiny.

Why isn't the media being more of a watchdog on this?
The consolidation of American media over the past decade or so has
dramatically diminished the inquisitiveness of our national press. There
are now only 11 companies that control virtually every radio outlet, every
TV outlet and every newspaper in our country. And because of that media
consolidation, the news bureaus are no longer run by newspeople. They are
now corporate profit centers. Most of these companies have liquidated
their foreign bureaus, because they're expensive to run. That's why you
can't get foreign news in this country; you have to go to the BBC. And
they've liquidated their investigative journalism units, because that kind
of reporting is also expensive. So news has become the lowest common
denominator, which is why you see sensational crime coverage, you see Laci
Peterson and Kobe Bryant all the time, you see celebrity gossip, which is
really just a form of pornography. And you see murders, which is really
just another form of pornography. You just see notorious crimes, and you
don't really see much substantive news anymore.
The Tyndall Report, which is the service that analyzes what's on TV,
recently surveyed the environmental content on TV news and of the 15,000
minutes of network news that aired last year only 4 percent of them were
devoted to the environment. And this is at a time when we have a president
who is dismantling 30 years of environmental law, and when we are going
through a global environmental crisis, including mass extinctions
comparable to the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Global fisheries have
dropped to 10 percent of their 1950s levels, the ice caps and glaciers are
melting, sea levels are rising, and one out of every four black children
in New York has asthma.

Your own children have asthma too, don't they?
Yes, three of my six children, three of my boys, have asthma. We don't
know why there's this epidemic of asthma, but we do know that asthma
attacks are triggered by bad air days, especially by high levels of
particulates and ozone. And just a couple weeks ago, the Bush
administration abandoned the new source performance standards (that
regulate industrial pollution), which means that the amount of junk in our
air is actually going to increase. The energy industry contributed $48
million to Bush and the Republicans in the 2000 campaign. And this is one
of their big payoffs -- it will mean billions of dollars in extra profits
for the industry. But the public is going to be paying that debt for
generations -- with children, American children, who are gasping for
breath and people literally dying. The National Academy of Sciences
predicts that 30,000 Americans a year will die because of the Bush
decision. And that's just one of the impacts.
Another is that airborne mercury contamination has made it dangerous to
eat any freshwater fish in 28 states and the fish in most of our coastal
waters. And that mercury is coming from those same power plants. Fifty
percent of the lakes in the Adirondacks are now sterilized from acid rain
that's coming from those same power plants. The forest cover all the way
up the Appalachians from Georgia to Canada is now deteriorating, again
because of acid rain from those same power plants. And in order to provide
the fuel for those power plants, we're cutting down the Appalachian
mountains. It's illegal what they're doing, for coal companies to blast
off the mountaintops and dump them into the adjoining rivers and streams.
But the Bush administration has announced that it will no longer enforce
those laws. And that's what's happening at the White House these days.

If we're looking at an environmental wasteland under Bush, why aren't
there people in the streets the way they were on Earth Day 1970, which
launched the modern environmental movement?
Well, it's not because people aren't interested. The primary reason is
it's not being covered in the news. I asked [Fox News chief] Roger Ailes
about this recently, and he said, "We just don't cover it because it's not
fast-breaking. If you release toxics into the air, people don't get sick
for 20 years. We need something that is happening this afternoon. The
polar ice caps melting -- that's just too slow for us to cover."
And of course the tampering with the regulations you're seeing in
Washington is happening in back corridors, and the networks can't be
bothered to investigate, much less explain to the public the connection
between these regulatory rollbacks, even though the outcomes will be
dramatic and will affect America for generations.
But I'll say this -- every poll shows that both Republicans and Democrats
want strong environmental laws, up around 75 percent of the public, and
there's almost no difference between the parties. Those polls are
confirmed by my own anecdotal evidence. I speak all around the country on
environmental issues. Three weeks ago I spoke at a petroleum and gas
industry conference, and I got a standing ovation from the audience when I
told them about Bush's environmental record. And I'll give you another
example: I was recently in Richmond, Va., speaking to the Women's Club,
which is solidly Republican -- I was told that none of its members had
voted for a Democrat since Jefferson Davis. And I got a standing ovation
there, too. It's because most Republicans are actually Democrats; they
just don't know it. If they knew what was happening in the White House,
they would be angry, they would be furious. And when they are told what is
happening, they get angry. And that's the reaction I get all around the
country. If we get the message out, we win.

You don't think people who belong to an energy trade association
understand what's happening on the environment in Washington?
Well, the people who actually work in the petroleum industry, many of them
are hunters and fishermen and they care about the outdoors and the
environment. And no, I don't think they realize in many cases what their
trade association is doing, what their lobbying groups are doing in
Washington. These groups always take the most radical, ultraright-wing
positions on every issue. But that doesn't necessarily reflect the views
of their membership. And most Americans care about this country and the
outdoors, and they understand that we have to practice some
self-restraint. And over the long term what is good economic policy is
identical to what is good environmental policy.

So why isn't the environmental movement giving Roger Ailes the visuals he
needs by getting out in the streets and practicing the kind of civil
disobedience and spectacular protest that would make the media take
notice? Let me put it another way: Has the environmental movement lost its
political fire and become too legalistic?
It's true that in its early years, the environmental movement was driven
by former labor organizers who knew how to do grass-roots organizing. And
they were able to bring 20 million people out on the streets of America on
Earth Day 1970. But since then it has become less activist. Between then
and 1995, because of the success of the movement, a lot of the leadership
was focused on inside-the-Beltway concerns, about how to push through
maximum contaminant levels for drinking water and water-quality standards,
and issues that were arcane and technical that lost touch with the
parables that gave the environmental movement its original power. The
Cuyahoga River burning, Lake Erie being declared dead, Love Canal, and
Three Mile Island. These were the dramatic stories -- where people
suffered obvious environmental injury -- that once animated the movement.
At the same time, you had an extremely sophisticated industry effort to
discredit the environmental movement, to dismiss them as tree huggers, as
unrealistic, as anti-job, as elitist. And they have been very successful
at it. They've put huge amounts of money into it. The Heritage Foundation
is a creation of this industry movement, and the Competitive Enterprise
Institute -- all of those type of think tanks in Washington are funded by
industry to promote its views. That there is no such thing as global
warming, that DDT is good for you, that caribou love the Alaska pipeline.
And they stock these phony think tanks with marginalized scientists, who
we call "biostitutes," whose whole job is to do the industry's bidding and
to persuade the public that environmental injury doesn't exist, that it's
an illusion, that it's henny-penny-ism.
In most Americans' hearts, the investment in our environmental
infrastructure is well worth making. They want our children to have clean
air and clean water to drink, and they want to preserve the wild places
that make America special, the places that are sacred to Americans.
But there is a marriage between the pollution interests and these
right-wing paranoid movements led by people like Rush Limbaugh, Paul
Weyrich, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. They got a huge infusion of
money in the 1980s from big industrial polluters like Joseph Coors, and it
suddenly gave them an enormous voice. This wing has come to dominate the
Republican Party. And the central platform of all these groups is their
anti-environmentalism. They're against any regulations that interfere with
corporate profit-taking.

What about the Democratic Party? Isn't it part of the problem too?
Democratic politicians receive money from many of these same corporate
polluters. And Al Gore certainly failed to make the environment a major
issue in the last presidential race, even though he was supposedly Mr.
Environment.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's because most of the candidates do not
know how to explain these issues in a way that makes them relevant to the
average voter. And in fact they have extraordinary relevance to average
people. We're not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes
and the birds; we're doing it because it enriches us. It's the basis of
our economy, and we ignore that at our peril. The economy is a wholly
owned subsidiary of our environment. It also enriches us aesthetically and
recreationally and culturally and historically -- and spiritually. Human
beings have other appetites besides money, and if we don't feed them,
we're not going to become the beings that our Creator intended us to
become.
When we destroy the environment, we are diminishing ourselves and we're
impoverishing our children. And our obligation as a generation -- as
Americans, as a civilization -- is to create communities that give our
children the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as the
communities that our parents gave us. And we cannot do that if we don't
protect our environmental infrastructure. And that's really what this is
all about.

So why didn't Al Gore go near this issue in the 2000 race?
That was a great disappointment to me. I urged him to do it. And I believe
he would be president if he had.

Have you talked with him about it since the race?
No, not since the race. But I talked to him and to [key Gore advisor] Bob
Shrum during the race.

And what was their explanation at the time -- that it wouldn't get him
swing votes?
Their rationale was, No. 1, that they were talking about the environment,
but that it wasn't getting traction with the press, and No. 2, that
everyone knew that Gore was an environmentalist and he needed to establish
his credentials in other areas.
But it was my feeling that Americans don't vote for a politician because
he's mastered the issues -- they vote for a politician who they believe
shares values with them. And is passionate about those values, and will
fight for those values. And I think Gore's challenge was to explain the
environment in ways that made Americans understand it was intertwined with
all the other issues they cared about, and all their basic values.
Gore's failure was he didn't embrace the thing he genuinely cared about --
he didn't have the confidence to do that. Instead, he felt he had to prove
his competence in all these other areas, to master the minutiae of every
other issue. And Americans don't care about that.
I mean, look at George W. Bush -- he knows nothing about any issue. He
doesn't seem to have a single complex thought in his head or shred of
curiosity. I mean, he claims he doesn't even watch the news or read
newspapers. But people find something kind of charming and trustworthy
about his manner -- and that's all they need.

Ironically, the environment -- because he did care so strongly about it --
might have been the one issue that humanized Gore as a candidate.
Exactly. And make people trust him. Make them feel he's not just a guy
who's following the polls and consumed by ambition. That he's running
because he has a core value that he considers worth fighting for. That's
the challenge that every politician has. Instead, people just saw him as a
phony, that he didn't really believe in anything, aside from getting
elected. And that his campaign wasn't about a vision for America and for
the world -- it was just about ambition.

You've endorsed John Kerry in the 2004 race. Do you think he'll champion
the environment more boldly than Gore in his campaign?
I think he already is; he's already framed this as his issue. I like all
of the Democratic candidates and they're all relatively good on the
environment. Actually, I don't know anything about Wes Clark on this
issue, I haven't talked to him. But I have good friends who have and they
say he's expressed strong feelings on the environment. So I think all the
Democratic candidates are in the right place.
But Kerry has the best record of any senator; he has a 96 percent lifetime
rating with the League of Conservation Voters. This has been a passion for
him since he got into public life. He was the Massachusetts organizer for
Earth Day in 1970, and he has fought hard for fuel efficiency standards,
which is now the holy grail of the environmental movement. He's been the
one consistent champion on that issue.
I've known Kerry almost all my life and he's an outdoorsman, he loves
being on the water, he loves fishing. I've spent a lot of time on
Nantucket Sound with him. Last summer he called my brother Max and asked
him to come to Wood's Hole to go windsurfing with him, and they ended up
windsurfing all the way from Wood's Hole to Nantucket, which is 45 miles,
over open ocean. And that's pretty good for a 56-year-old guy. And he
wasn't calling a press conference or anything. He just did it because they
got into the water. It's genuine.

Have you campaigned for Kerry?
Yeah. But I also have relationships with all the other candidates. Whoever
the Democrat is, I'm going to be supporting him. I want someone to beat
Bush, that's all I care about. And I think Kerry is more likely to do that
than any of the other candidates.
In a one-to-one debate, Kerry's unbeatable. He's a genuine war hero,
unlike the draft dodgers who are now devising our foreign policy, Bush,
Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, DeLay. Of course there are lots of people who
evaded the draft during Vietnam due to moral qualms about the war. But
these characters were pro-war hawks. They just wanted someone else to die
for our country. Kerry's record of bravery, on the other hand, will appeal
to voters in swing states like South Carolina where there are plenty of
veterans who understand the significance of the sacrifice that he was
willing to make.

You talk a lot about the environment in spiritual terms. Are you a
practicing Catholic?
Yes.

And yet, as you point out in your Rolling Stone article, some of the most
passionate ground troops for the anti-environment backlash have come from
the Christian right. How do you make sense of that -- that these people
are also inspired by religious conviction?
I would say what the fundamentalists call "dominion theology" is a
Christian heresy. These are people who read the Bible in a certain way, to
justify corporate domination of the planet, the same way people used to
read the Bible to justify slavery.

Dominion Christians believe that the Apocalypse is coming soon, the planet
was put here for us to exploit, to liquidate for cash, and we have a duty
to do that -- even if we destroy nature in the process. Reagan's EPA chief
James Watt was a radical dominion fundamentalist -- he believed it was
sinful for us to protect the earth for future generations.
The industrialist who first recognized the potential for organzing these
right-wing fanatics into a political movement was Joseph Coors, who was
Colorado's biggest polluter. Coors engineered a pact between polluting
industries and this marginalized, paranoid element that has existed
throughout America's political history. This was in the 1980s, around the
same time that world communism was falling apart, and so the right wing
needed a new bugaboo. If you read Pat Roberts' book "New World Order," the
evolution is clearly outlined; he says the new communists are the
environmentalists. He calls them "watermelons" -- green on the outside,
but red on the inside. And he makes the same association that the John
Birch Society did -- that because Earth Day happened to fall on Lenin's
birthday, this was evidence that environmentalists were the new secret
spies of the new world order, as communism disappeared.
Robertson interprets American politics through the lens of his apocalyptic
theology. He calls environmentalists "the minions of Satan," who are
trying to turn America --
which is the New Jerusalem -- over to the philistines of the earth who
seek to dominate us through internationalism and the U.N.

Does this radical fringe actually have influence within the Bush
administration?
Absolutely. Many of Bush's key appointments come out of this far-right
fringe and the industries that fund them. [Interior Secretary] Gale Norton
was Watts' successor at Mountain States Legal Foundation. Steven Griles,
an energy industry lobbyist who is now Norton's deputy, also came right
out of Watts' shop, and now he's busy doing all these terrible things --
giving away our parks, punishing scientists who tell the truth. The
administration is full of these people, like Andrew Card, Condoleezza
Rice, Spencer Abraham -- they come out of the auto or oil industries, the
militantly anti-environmental wing of industry.

Why do you think Christie Todd Whitman resigned as EPA chief?
It was clearly a no-win situation for her. Now Whitman had an absolutely
miserable environmental record when she was governor of New Jersey; she
was one of the worst governors in the country -- the first thing she did
when she took office in New Jersey was fire every lawyer in the state
environmental department who knew how to do enforcement. We would have
fought her EPA appointment, but despite her disastrous record, she
actually looked good in comparison to some of the other characters Bush
was recruiting as Cabinet secretaries.
After she took over the EPA, she tried to rein in the Bush administration
on Kyoto [the global warming accords] and made a couple of anemic efforts
to mitigate the industry looting. But each time, she was humiliated by the
White House and ended up looking like a feeble scold at a frat house orgy.
So if you look at it from her point of view, she was not making friends
with the environmental movement and she was not making friends within the
Republican Party. So what's the point of being there? It was just an
untenable, no-win situation for her.

So for someone like Christie Whitman to find herself in an untenable
position ...
Shows the radicalism of this crowd. That they made her look moderate!

In Rolling Stone, you use the term "corporate fascism" to describe what's
happening under Bush. Do you think that's excessive rhetoric?
No, I don't. When I was growing up, I was taught that communism leads to
dictatorship and capitalism leads inevitably to democracy. And I think
that's the assumption of most Americans. Certainly if you listen to people
like Sean Hannity or any other voices of the right, there's an assumption
that capitalism in any form is beneficial for democracy. But that's not
always true. Free market capitalism certainly democratizes a nation and a
people. But corporate capitalism has the opposite effect. The control of
the capitalist system by large corporations leads to the elimination of
markets and ultimately to the elimination of democracy. And we desperately
need to understand that point in our country -- that the domination of our
country by large corporations is absolutely catastrophic for our
democratic process.
Corporations don't want free markets, they want profits. And the best way
to guarantee profits is to eliminate the competition; in other words,
eliminate the marketplace, through the control of government. And that's
what we're seeing today in our country. There is no free market left in
agriculture. The free market has almost been eliminated in the energy
sector. These are two of our most critical sectors, and the marketplace
has disappeared. We're seeing the same process underway in the media
industry now. So there's very little consumer choice and Americans aren't
getting the benefits and efficiencies that the free market promises us.
Under Bush we're seeing the complete corporate domination of the various
departments of government. The Agriculture Department, which was created
to benefit small farmers, is now a wholly owned subsidiary of big
agribusiness and the principal instrument of their destruction. The Forest
Service is being run by a timber industry lobbyist, Public Lands by a
mining industry lobbyist. Virtually all Bush's Cabinet secretaries,
department deputies and agency heads come from the very industries that
those agencies are supposed to be regulating.
The same thing happened in Germany, Italy and Spain during the fascist
takeover in the 1920s and '30s -- you had industrialists flooding the
ministries and running the ministries, and running them in many ways for
their own profit. If you read the American Heritage Dictionary definition
of fascism, it says "the domination of a government by corporations of the
political right, combined with bellicose nationalism." Well, we're seeing
that today.
Of course the first people who start talking about this connection are
going to be derided for it. Even though Rush Limbaugh calls feminists
"Nazis." The right wing for years has tried to discredit anyone who
believes in the idea of community as a "communist" or a "pinko." But it's
time that people started telling the truth about what's going on in this
country. And start realizing that democracy is fragile, that corporate
cronyism is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.
The other day I got something in the mail from a farmer -- small farmers
in this country understand better than anyone how markets are being stolen
and democracy is being eroded. He sent me a quote from Mussolini that said
fascism should really be called "corporatism" -- because it's the control
of government by large corporations.
Another farmer sent me my favorite quote. This one was by Lincoln, in
1863, during the height of the Civil War, when he says, "I have the South
in front of me and the bankers behind me -- and for my country, I fear the
bankers most." Lincoln, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Eisenhower and
all of our great leaders have warned our nation that the greatest threat
to our democracy is from large corporate interests.

Many conservatives would say it's easy for wealthy liberals like the
Kennedys to talk about saving the environment because they've amassed
their wealth already. Your grandfather Joe Kennedy was the buccaneer
capitalist who made the family fortune, and all his descendants are living
off his wealth. But what about the rest of us, who are still clawing our
way toward our piece of the American dream and are being hobbled by
government regulations? These are people who equate environmentalism with
elite liberalism, and the Kennedy name to them symbolizes all of that.
Well, let me say this: Good environmental policy is identical to good
economic policy, if we want to measure our economy -- and this is how we
should be measuring it -- based on how it produces jobs, and the dignity
of those jobs, and how it creates opportunity, and how it preserves the
value of our nation's assets. If, on the other hand, you want to treat the
planet the way the current Washington regime does, like it's a business in
liquidation, to convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as
possible, to have a few years of pollution-based prosperity, well then you
can create the short-term illusion of a prosperous economy, but our
children are going to pay for our joy ride. And they're going to pay for
it with denuded landscapes and poor health and huge cleanup costs that
they're never going to be able to pay. Environmental injury is deficit
spending. It's a way of loading the costs of our prosperity onto the backs
of our children.

So your environmentalism is not the luxury hobby of a rich kid?
There is no stronger advocate of free-market capitalism than myself. As a
small businessman who is founder and operator of a bottled water company,
I believe in and understand the free market a lot better than Sean Hannity
ever will. But in a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich
without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.
What polluters do is make themselves rich by making everyone else poor.
They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life
for everyone else. And they do that by escaping the discipline of the free
market. 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 and forcing the public to pay his costs of production.
You look at all the Western resource issues, like grazing and lumber and
mining and agriculture, and it's all about subsidies -- for some of the
richest people in America, these welfare cowboys in the Western states who
are getting $35 billion a year in federal subsidies that are destroying
our ecosystems out there. And these are the same people who financed this
right-wing revolution on Capitol Hill and helped put Bush in the White
House, and now they have their indentured servants in Washington all
demanding that we have capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich.
I'll give you another example of how pollution is a form of corporate
subsidy. When General Electric dumped PCBs into the Hudson River, it was
avoiding the costs of bringing its product to market, which was the cost
of properly disposing of a dangerous processed chemical. But when it
avoided the cost, the cost didn't just disappear -- it went into the fish,
it made people sick, it put people who depend on the river for their
livelihood out of work. I now have 1,000 commercial fishermen, my clients,
who are now permanently out of work. It dried up the river's barge traffic
because the shipping channels are now too toxic to dredge. It forced local
towns along the Hudson to invest in expensive water filtration systems.
Every woman between Oswego and New York has elevated levels of PCB in her
breast milk. And everybody in the Hudson Valley has PCBs in our flesh and
our organs. All those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that should,
in a true free-market economy, be reflected in the prices of G.E. products
when they make it to the market. But what G.E. did --
which is what all polluters do -- is use political clout to escape the
discipline of the free market and force the public to pay the costs of its
production.

G.E. was finally forced to pay some of the costs of the cleanup, wasn't
it?
Well, they're going to do an initial cleanup, but that doesn't start until
2006. They'll never have to account for the true costs that they imposed
on the Hudson River community. I don't even consider myself an
environmentalist anymore; I consider myself a free marketeer. We go out
into the marketplace and we catch the cheaters. And we say to them, "We're
going to force you to internalize your costs, the same way you internalize
your profits." Because when someone cheats the free market, it distorts
the whole marketplace.

The Kennedy family and the Bush family are the two modern American
political dynasties. How would you characterize the differences between
the two families and what they stand for?
What I see is this. I think there's always been a tension in American
history between two separate philosophies. One is the philosophy that was
first articulated by Jonathan Winthrop when he made the most important
speech in American history, in 1630, as he approached the New World with a
convoy of Puritans. He was the Moses of the great Puritan migration. And
he stood up on the deck of the sloop Arbella, and he gave his famous
speech, which was called "A Model of Christian Charity." And he said this
land is being given to us by God so that we can create cities on a hill,
not so that we can increase our carnal opportunities or expand our
self-interest or disappear into the lure of real estate, but so that we
can build cities on a hill --
models to all the rest of the nations of what human beings can accomplish
if they work together and maintain their focus on a spiritual mission. And
even though he was a Puritan and an Englishman, what he said that day was
integrated into the fabric of what became America.
Now that philosophy distinguished the European settlement of North America
from the European conquest of Asia, Africa and Latin America -- where the
Europeans came as conquistadors to subjugate the peoples, extract the
metals, and enrich themselves and then keep moving. Here, in America, they
came to build communities that were models to the rest of the world.
There is, of course, also a conquistador aspect to our American character,
which really didn't take a strong hold in our nation until the Gold Rush
of 1849, when people said, "Oh, this is a place where you can go and get
rich quick and take care of yourself, and it's all about making my pile
higher and whoever dies with the most stuff wins."
I think those two polarized philosophies provide the tension that has
driven every major political conflict in American history. One vision is
about building communities, and emphasizing that we can't advance as a
nation by leaving our poor brothers and sisters behind, or by abandoning
our obligation to the next generation. And the other philosophy is "just
take care of myself," and that will somehow drive the economy and make us
great.

So you think those clashing philosophies are what define the Kennedy
family vs. the Bush family?
Well, I don't want to make generalizations about the whole Bush family,
but I think it definitely defines the current president. He's got the
conquistador mentality, that you take care of your friends, you enrich
yourself, and that's the point of government.

I know you've been asked this question many times, but I'm going to ask it
again. The legendary environmental activist Dave Foreman has said that
what the movement needs is a leader with charismatic appeal to make these
issues come alive for the American people. I can't think of any other
environmentalist with as high a profile as you have -- and it's based not
just on your name but years of hard work as an environmental activist. I
think you did the right thing by keeping a low profile for many years and
just letting your work speak for itself. And that's certainly a
commendable thing. But at this stage, clearly what America lacks is a
solid bench of talented, progressive leaders. The country is crying out
for it now. I know there must be a number of personal reasons that have
made you hold back from going into politics to espouse these ideas. But
certainly if there were any time for a leader to articulate the
environmental agenda -- which is a progressive social agenda, as you point
out -- it would be now. So why haven't you run for public office -- is it
something that you've ruled out forever?
No. But I would prefer not to run for political office, because of the
costs it imposes on the rest of your life. I have six children. And my
primary obligation is to them. Otherwise, I almost certainly would have
run, if I did not have children.

What are their ages?
My oldest is 19, and my youngest is 2. But my aspiration is to try to be
effective without imposing the costs of a political race on my kids. At
this point I can travel a lot and bring my family with me, and I see them
every night at dinnertime and I'm able to spend weekends with them, while
at the same time I'm doing my best [in the public arena].
But in the last six months, I've made a shift -- I'm going to be doing
more public stuff, because I believe that we win this debate if the public
understands it. And it seems so overwhelming a battle a lot of the time,
because industry has so much money to get their arguments out there, and
we have so little. But as Winston Churchill said, you just have to keep
talking about it, you have to keep telling the story again and again and
again. And ultimately the public will realize the truth. And I see that as
my role. I'm going to do everything I can to tell this story to as many
people as possible, with the hope that at some point the public will
recognize the truth, and when they do, they'll share the same kind of
anger and indignation that I feel.
I believe that George W. Bush is stealing my country, that he is
absolutely stealing the environment from our children, stealing the breath
from my children's lungs and stealing the Bill of Rights, selling off the
sacred places, and trashing all the things I value about America. Our
reputation across the globe, the love and admiration that other peoples
and nations once had for America, the safety of our nation, the security
of our children, the economy, the ability of our children to educate
themselves for the future -- it's all being liquidated by this president
for his wealthy friends and contributors. And I am so furious at this man
for stealing the thing I love most, which is America, my country.

As a young man, your father was among the first public officials to
recognize the dangers of organized crime, how it was infiltrating and
corrupting business, labor and politics and undermining the nation. This
threat clearly brought out the passionate crusader in your father. And I'm
wondering if there is a parallel between his crusade against the
underworld bosses and your own campaign against corporate polluters?
I'm very comfortable with my father's philosophies, and I feel very
strongly that my life in many ways is an extension of the battles that he
was trying to fight. His book on organized crime was titled "The Enemy
Within" -- and I think the enemy within is still the greatest threat to
our country, but it's no longer the Mafia, it's corporate control of our
country and our communities, it's the erosion of democracy. I'm not scared
of Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. They can never hurt America in any
fundamental way. As Teddy Roosevelt said, American democracy will never be
destroyed by outside enemies -- but it can be destroyed by the malefactors
of great wealth who subtly rob and undermine it from within. And I see
that process happening today. And just as there were a lot of people who
denied that the Mafia existed at that time, today there's a huge lobby
that is denying the fact that our democracy is really threatened by
corporate control.

Before I let you go, I have to ask you about the latest elected official
in the extended Kennedy clan, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Do you think
Schwarzenegger, knowing him as you do, will prove to be the governor who
cozied up with Ken Lay of Enron or, as he claims he will, the governor of
the people?
I think Arnold will be good for California. I think that having a
Republican in office is always a bad thing, because you're bringing in the
people who got you elected -- the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the
Farm Bureau, the American Petroleum Institute, and all of these kind of
bad characters, the pirates of the American economy. But I think Arnold
will be good. He said to me last summer, during an August weekend on Cape
Cod, that he wanted to make the environment one of his key issues, that he
was going to be the greatest environmental governor in the history of
California. And he asked me then to help him put together a team. I didn't
endorse him because I had a close relationship with Governor Gray Davis
and Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante, who had done decent things on the
environment. But I helped Arnold put together an environmental policy,
which Arnold read and then adopted. And it's probably stronger than Gore's
policy. It's certainly stronger than anybody else who was running for
California governor, with the exception of the Green Party candidate.
I'll be able to answer this question better in a little while, when Arnold
will announce the new chief of California's Environmental Protection
Agency. I encouraged Arnold to name a very strong conservationist, Terry
Tamminen, who is the Santa Monica Baykeeper, to the post. And it looks
like he's going to do it. And there's never been anyone with those kind of
environmental credentials in that position. [Last week Schwarzenegger did
indeed name Tamminen as his new environmental secretary.]
I know he was urged by very strong Republicans not to appoint Terry. I
have a friend who was in the room with him when Arnold received a call
from a Republican whom he's very fond of and who's in his inner circle [he
was later identified in press reports as Schwarzenegger's powerful
transition chief, California Rep. David Dreier], and he said to Arnold,
"You cannot appoint Terry Tammimen." And Arnold said to him, "I deeply
appreciate the work you did on my campaign and I value your advice, but
I'm the governor and I'm going to appoint who I want." That made me
extremely encouraged and proud.

Arnold still has one environmental flaw, his love of Hummers -- have you
talked to him about that?
(Laughs) Yeah, extensively. He understands the issue and he's converting
one of his Hummers to hydrogen. And he also understands that he needs to
exert his influence on Detroit. And he supports the California fuel
efficiency bill, which will make it the most progressive state in the
country.
--
Wayne T. Watson (Watson Adventures, Prop., Nevada City, CA)
(121.015 Deg. W, 39.262 Deg. N) GMT-8 hr std. time)
Obz Site: 39° 15' 7" N, 121° 2' 32" W, 2700 feet
(Formerly Homo habilis, erectus, heidelbergensis and now
sapiens)

"The only title in our democracy superior to that of
President
is the title of citizen." -- Louis D. Brandeis

Web Page: home.earthlink.net/~mtnviews