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Rolling Stone - Bush is worst environmental president ever



 
 
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Old December 4th, 2003, 10:02 AM
Sportsmen Against Bush
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Default Rolling Stone - Bush is worst environmental president ever

Crimes Against Nature

Bush is sabotaging the laws that have protected America's environment
for more than thirty years

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.


Illustration by Marco Ventura



http://www.rollingstone.com/features...n.asp?pid=2154






George W. Bush will go down in history as America's worst
environmental president. In a ferocious three-year attack, the Bush
administration has initiated more than 200 major rollbacks of
America's environmental laws, weakening the protection of our
country's air, water, public lands and wildlife. Cloaked in
meticulously crafted language designed to deceive the public, the
administration intends to eliminate the nation's most important
environmental laws by the end of the year. Under the guidance of
Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the Bush White House has actively
hidden its anti-environmental program behind deceptive rhetoric,
telegenic spokespeople, secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and
bureaucrats. The Bush attack was not entirely unexpected. George W.
Bush had the grimmest environmental record of any governor during his
tenure in Texas. Texas became number one in air and water pollution
and in the release of toxic chemicals. In his six years in Austin, he
championed a short-term pollution-based prosperity, which enriched his
political contributors and corporate cronies by lowering the quality
of life for everyone else. Now President Bush is set to do the same to
America. After three years, his policies are already bearing fruit,
diminishing standards of living for millions of Americans.
I am angry both as a citizen and a father. Three of my sons have
asthma, and I watch them struggle to breathe on bad-air days. And
they're comparatively lucky: One in four African-American children in
New York shares this affliction; their suffering is often unrelieved
because they lack the insurance and high-quality health care that keep
my sons alive. My kids are among the millions of Americans who cannot
enjoy the seminal American experience of fishing locally with their
dad and eating their catch. Most freshwater fish in New York and all
in Connecticut are now under consumption advisories. A main source of
mercury pollution in America, as well as asthma-provoking ozone and
particulates, is the coal-burning power plants that President Bush
recently excused from complying with the Clean Air Act.

Furthermore, the deadly addiction to fossil fuels that White House
policies encourage has squandered our treasury, entangled us in
foreign wars, diminished our international prestige, made us a target
for terrorist attacks and increased our reliance on petty Middle
Eastern dictators who despise democracy and are hated by their own
people.

When the Republican right managed to install George W. Bush as
president in 2000, movement leaders once again set about doing what
they had attempted to do since the Reagan years: eviscerate the
infrastructure of laws and regulations that protect the environment.
For twenty-five years it has been like the zombie that keeps coming
back from the grave.

The attacks began on Inauguration Day, when President Bush's chief of
staff and former General Motors lobbyist Andrew Card quietly initiated
a moratorium on all recently adopted regulations. Since then, the
White House has enlisted every federal agency that oversees
environmental programs in a coordinated effort to relax rules aimed at
the oil, coal, logging, mining and chemical industries as well as
automakers, real estate developers, corporate agribusiness and other
industries.

Bush's Environmental Protection Agency has halted work on sixty-two
environmental standards, the Food and Drug Administration has stopped
work on fifty-seven standards. The EPA completed just two major rules
-- both under court order and both watered down at industry request --
compared to twenty-three completed by the Clinton administration and
fourteen by the Bush Sr. administration in their first two years.

This onslaught is being coordinated through the White House Office of
Management and Budget -- or, more precisely, OMB's Office of
Information and Regulatory Affairs, under the direction of John
Graham, the engine-room mechanic of the Bush stealth strategy.
Graham's specialty is promoting changes in scientific and economic
assumptions that underlie government regulations -- such as
recalculating cost-benefit analyses to favor polluters. Before coming
to the White House, Graham was the founding director of the Harvard
Center for Risk Analysis, where he received funding from America's
champion corporate polluters: Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto, Alcoa,
Exxon, General Electric and General Motors.

Under the White House's guidance, the very agencies entrusted to
protect Americans from polluters are laboring to destroy environmental
laws. Or they've simply stopped enforcing them. Penalties imposed for
environmental violations have plummeted under Bush. The EPA has
proposed eliminating 270 enforcement staffers, which would drop staff
levels to the lowest level ever. Inspections of polluting businesses
have dipped fifteen percent. Criminal cases referred for federal
prosecution have dropped forty percent. The EPA measures its success
by the amount of pollution reduced or prevented as a result of its own
actions. Last year, the EPA's two most senior career enforcement
officials resigned after decades of service. They cited the
administration's refusal to carry out environmental laws.

The White House has masked its attacks with euphemisms that would have
embarrassed George Orwell. George W. Bush's "Healthy Forests"
initiative promotes destructive logging of old-growth forests. His
"Clear Skies" program, which repealed key provisions of the Clean Air
Act, allows more emissions. The administration uses misleading code
words such as streamlining or reforming instead of weakening, and
thinning instead of logging.

In a March 2003 memo to Republican leadership, pollster Frank Luntz
frankly outlined the White House strategy on energy and the
environment: "The environment is probably the single issue on which
Republicans in general and President Bush in particular are most
vulnerable," he wrote, cautioning that the public views Republicans as
being "in the pockets of corporate fat cats who rub their hands
together and chuckle maniacally as they plot to pollute America for
fun and profit." Luntz warned, "Not only do we risk losing the swing
vote, but our suburban female base could abandon us as well." He
recommended that Republicans don the sheep's clothing of environmental
rhetoric while dismantling environmental laws.

I prosecute polluters on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense
Council, Riverkeeper and Waterkeeper Alliance. As George W. Bush began
his presidency, I was involved in litigation against the factory-pork
industry, which is a large source of air and water pollution in
America. Corporate pork factories cannot produce more efficiently than
traditional family farmers without violating several federal
environmental statutes. Industrial farms illegally dump millions of
tons of untreated fecal and toxic waste onto land and into the air and
water. Factory farms have contaminated hundreds of miles of waterways,
put tens of thousands of family farmers and fishermen out of work,
killed billions of fish, sickened consumers and subjected millions of
farm animals to unspeakable cruelty.

On behalf of several farm groups and fishermen, we sued Smithfield
Foods and won a decision that suggested that almost all of American
factory farms were violating the Clean Water Act. The Clinton EPA had
also brought its own parallel suits addressing chronic air and water
violations by hog factories. But almost immediately after taking
office, the Bush administration ordered the EPA to halt its Clean Air
Act investigations of animal factories and weaken the water rules to
allow them to continue polluting indefinitely.

Several of my other national cases were similarly derailed. Eleven
years ago, I sued the EPA to stop massive fish kills at power plants.
Using antiquated technology, power plants often suck up the entire
fresh water volume of large rivers, killing obscene numbers of fish.
Just one facility, the Salem nuclear plant in New Jersey, kills more
than 3 billion Delaware River fish each year, according to Martin
Marietta, the plant's own consultant. These fish kills are illegal,
and in 2001 we finally won our case. A federal judge ordered the EPA
to issue regulations restricting power-plant fish kills. But soon
after President Bush's inauguration, the administration replaced the
proposed new rule with clever regulations designed to allow the
slaughter to continue unabated. The new administration also trumped
court decisions that would have enforced greater degrees of wetlands
protection and forbidden coal moguls from blasting off whole
mountaintops to get at the coal beneath.

The fishermen I represent are traditionally Republican. But, without
exception, they see this administration as the largest threat not just
to their livelihoods but to their values and their idea of what it
means to be American. "Why," they'll ask, "is the president allowing
coal, oil, power and automotive interests to fix the game?"

Back to the Dark Ages

George w. Bush seems to be trying to take us all the way back to the
Dark Ages by undermining the very principles of our environmental
rights, which civilized nations have always recognized. Ancient Rome's
Code of Justinian guaranteed the use to all citizens of the "public
trust" or commons -- those shared resources that cannot be reduced to
private property -- the air, flowing water, public lands, wandering
animals, fisheries, wetlands and aquifers.

When Roman law broke down in Europe during the Dark Ages, feudal kings
began to privatize the commons. In the early thirteenth century, when
King John also attempted to sell off England's fisheries and erect
navigational tolls on the Thames, his subjects rose up and confronted
him at Runnymede, forcing him to sign the Magna Carta, which includes
provisions guaranteeing the rights of free access to fisheries and
waters.

Clean-air laws in England, passed in the fourteenth century, made it a
capital offense to burn coal in London, and violators were executed
for the crime. These "public trust" rights to unspoiled air, water and
wildlife descended to the people of the United States following the
American Revolution. Until 1870, a factory releasing even small
amounts of smoke onto public or private property was operating
illegally.

But during the Gilded Age, when the corporate robber barons captured
the political and judicial systems, those rights were stolen from the
American people. As the Industrial Revolution morphed into the postwar
industrial boom, Americans found themselves paying a high price for
the resulting pollution. The wake-up call came in the late Sixties,
when Lake Erie was declared dead and Cleveland's Cuyahoga River
exploded in colossal infernos.

In 1970, more than 20 million Americans took to the streets protesting
the state of the environment on the first Earth Day. Whether they knew
it or not, they were demanding a return of ancient rights.

During the next few years, Congress passed twenty-eight major
environmental statutes, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water
Act and the Endangered Species Act, and it created the Environmental
Protection Agency to apply and enforce these new laws. Polluters would
be held accountable; those planning to use the commons would have to
compile environmental-impact statements and hold public hearings;
citizens were given the power to prosecute environmental crimes.
Right-to-know and toxic-inventory laws made government and industry
more transparent on the local level and our nation more democratic.
Even the most vulnerable Americans could now participate in the
dialogue that determines the destinies of their communities.

Earth Day caught polluters off guard. But in the next thirty years,
they mounted an increasingly sophisticated and aggressive
counterattack to undermine these laws. The Bush administration is a
culmination of their three-decade campaign.

Strangling the Environment

In 1980, candidate Ronald Reagan declared, "I am a Sagebrush Rebel,"
marking a major turning point of the modern anti-environmental
movement. In the early 1980s, the Western extractive industries, led
by one of Colorado's worst polluters, brewer Joseph Coors, organized
the Sagebrush Rebellion, a coalition of industry money and right-wing
ideologues that helped elect Reagan president.

The big polluters who started the Sagebrush Rebellion were successful
because they managed to broaden their constituency with
anti-regulatory, anti-labor and anti-environmental rhetoric that had
great appeal both among Christian fundamentalist leaders such as Jerry
Falwell and Pat Robertson, and in certain Western communities where
hostility to government is deeply rooted. Big polluters found that
they could organize this discontent into a potent political force that
possessed the two ingredients of power in American democracy: money
and intensity. Meanwhile, innovations in direct-mail and computer
technologies gave this alliance of dark populists and polluters a
deafening voice in American government.

Coors founded the Mountain States Legal Foundation in 1976 to bring
lawsuits designed to enrich giant corporations, limit civil rights and
attack unions, homosexuals and minorities. He also founded the
right-wing Heritage Foundation, to provide a philosophical
underpinning for the anti-environmental movement. While the foundation
and its imitators -- the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the
American Enterprise Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Federalist
Society, the Marshall Institute and others -- claim to advocate free
markets and property rights, their agenda is more pro-pollution than
anything else.

From its conception, the Heritage Foundation and its neoconservative
cronies urged followers to "strangle the environmental movement,"
which Heritage named "the greatest single threat to the American
economy." Ronald Reagan's victory gave Heritage Foundation and the
Mountain States Legal Foundation immeasurable clout. Heritage became
known as Reagan's "shadow government," and its 2,000-page manifesto,
"Mandate for Change," became a blueprint for his administration. Coors
handpicked his Colorado associates: Anne Gorsuch became the EPA
administrator; her husband, Robert Burford, a cattle baron who had
vowed to destroy the Bureau of Land Management, was selected to head
that very agency. Most notorious, Coors chose James Watt, president of
the Mountain States Legal Foundation, as the secretary of the
interior. Watt was a proponent of "dominion theology," an
authoritarian Christian heresy that advocates man's duty to "subdue"
nature. His deep faith in laissez-faire capitalism and apocalyptic
Christianity led Secretary Watt to set about dismantling his
department and distributing its assets rather than managing them for
future generations. During a Senate hearing, he cited the approaching
Apocalypse to explain why he was giving away America's sacred places
at fire-sale prices: "I do not know how many future generations we can
count on before the Lord returns."

Meanwhile, Anne Gorsuch enthusiastically gutted EPA's budget by sixty
percent, crippling its ability to write regulations or enforce the
law. She appointed lobbyists fresh from their hitches with the paper,
asbestos, chemical and oil companies to run each of the principal
agency departments. Her chief counsel was an Exxon lawyer; her head of
enforcement was from General Motors.

These attacks on the environment precipitated a public revolt. By
1983, more than a million Americans and all 125 American-Indian tribes
had signed a petition demanding Watt's removal. After being forced out
of office, Watt was indicted on twenty-five felony counts of
influence-pedaling. Gorsuch and twenty-three of her cronies were
forced to resign following a congressional investigation of sweetheart
deals with polluters, including Coors. Her first deputy, Rita Lavelle,
was jailed for perjury.

The indictments and resignations put a temporary damper on the
Sagebrush Rebels, but they quickly regrouped as the "Wise Use"
movement. Wise Use founder, the timber-industry flack Ron Arnold,
said, "Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental
movement. We want to be able to exploit the environment for private
gain, absolutely."

By 1994, Wise Use helped propel Newt Gingrich to the speaker's chair
of the U.S. House of Representatives and turn his anti-environmental
manifesto, "The Contract With America," into law. Gingrich's chief of
environmental policy was Rep. Tom DeLay, the one-time Houston
exterminator who was determined to rid the world of pesky pesticide
regulations and to promote a biblical worldview. He targeted the
Endangered Species Act as the second-greatest threat to Texas after
illegal aliens. He also wanted to legalize the deadly pesticide DDT,
and he routinely referred to the EPA as "the Gestapo of government."
In January 1995, DeLay invited a group of 350 lobbyists representing
some of America's biggest polluters to collaborate in drafting
legislation to dismantle federal health, safety and environmental
laws.

Gingrich and DeLay had learned from the James Watt debacle that they
had to conceal their radical agenda. Carefully eschewing public
debates on their initiatives, they mounted a stealth attack on
America's environmental laws. Rather than pursue a frontal assault
against popular statutes such as the Endangered Species, Clean Water
and Clean Air acts, they tried to undermine these laws by attaching
silent riders to must-pass budget bills.

But the public got wise. Moderate Republicans teamed up with the
Clinton administration to block the worst of it. My group, the NRDC,
as well as the Sierra Club and the U.S. Public Interest Research
Group, generated more than 1 million letters to Congress. When
President Clinton shut down the government in December 1995 rather
than pass a budget bill spangled with anti-environmental riders, the
tide turned against Gingrich and DeLay. By the end of that month, even
conservatives disavowed the attack. "We lost the battle on the
environment," DeLay conceded.

Undermining the Scientists

Today, with the presidency and both houses of Congress under the
anti-environmentalists' control, they are set to eviscerate the
despised laws. White House strategy is to promote its unpopular
policies by lying about its agenda, cheating on the science and
stealing the language and rhetoric of the environmental movement.

Even as Republican pollster Luntz acknowledged that the scientific
evidence is against the Republicans on issues like global warming, he
advised them to find scientists willing to hoodwink the public. "You
need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary
issue," he told Republicans, "by becoming even more active in
recruiting experts sympathetic to your view."

In the meantime, he urged them to change their rhetoric. " 'Climate
change,' " he said, "is less threatening than 'global warming.' While
global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate
change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge."

The EPA's inspector general received broad attention for his August
21st, 2003, finding that the White House pressured the agency to
conceal the public-health risks from poisoned air following the
September 11th World Trade Center attacks. But this 2001 deception is
only one example of the administration's pattern of strategic
distortion. Earlier this year, it suppressed an EPA report warning
that millions of Americans, especially children, are being poisoned by
mercury from industrial sources.

This behavior is consistent throughout the Bush government. Consider
the story of James Zahn, a scientist at the Department of Agriculture
who resigned after the Bush administration suppressed his
taxpayer-funded study proving that billions of antibiotic-resistant
bacteria can be carried daily across property lines from meat
factories into neighboring homes and farms. In March 2002, Zahn
accepted my invitation to present his findings to a convention of
family-farm advocates in Iowa. Several weeks before the April
conference, pork-industry lobbyists learned of his appearance and
persuaded the Department of Agriculture to forbid him from appearing.
Zahn told me he had been ordered to cancel a dozen appearances at
county health departments and similar venues.

In May, the White House blocked the EPA staff from publicly discussing
contamination by the chemical perchlorate -- the main ingredient in
solid rocket fuel. The administration froze federal regulations on
perchlorate, even as new research reveals alarmingly high levels of
the chemical in the nation's drinking water and food supply, including
many grocery-store lettuces. Perchlorate pollution has been linked to
neurological problems, cancer and other life-threatening illnesses in
some twenty states. The Pentagon and several defense contractors face
billions of dollars in potential cleanup liability.

The administration's leading expert in manipulating scientific data is
Interior Secretary Gale Norton. During her nomination hearings, Norton
promised not to ideologically slant agency science. But as her friend
Thomas Sansonetti, a coal- industry lobbyist who is now assistant
attorney general, predicted, "There won't be any biologists or
botanists to come in and pull the wool over her eyes."

In autumn 2001, Secretary Norton provided the Senate Committee on
Energy and Natural Resources with her agency's scientific assessment
that Arctic oil drilling would not harm hundreds of thousands of
caribou. Not long afterward, Fish and Wildlife Service biologists
contacted the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which
defends scientists and other professionals working in state and
federal environmental agencies. "The scientists provided us the
science that they had submitted to Norton and the altered version that
she had given to Congress a week later," said the group's executive
director, Jeff Ruch. There were seventeen major substantive changes,
all of them minimizing the reported impacts. When Norton was asked
about the alterations in October 2001, she dismissed them as
typographical errors.

Later, she and White House political adviser Karl Rove forced National
Marine Fisheries scientists to alter findings on the amount of water
required for the survival of salmon in Oregon's Klamath River, to
ensure that large corporate farms got a bigger share of the river
water. As a result, more than 33,000 chinook and coho salmon died --
the largest fish kill in the history of America. Mike Kelly, the
biologist who drafted the original opinion (and who has since been
awarded federal whistle-blower status), told me that the coho salmon
is probably headed for extinction. "Morale is low among scientists
here," Kelly says. "We are under pressure to get the right results.
This administration is putting the species at risk for political gain
-- and not just in the Klamath."

Norton has also ordered the rewriting of an exhaustive twelve-year
study by federal biologists detailing the effects that Arctic drilling
would have on populations of musk oxen and snow geese. She reissued
the biologists' report two weeks later as a two-page paper showing no
negative impact to wildlife. She also ordered suppression of two
studies by the Fish and Wildlife Service concluding that the drilling
would threaten polar-bear populations and violate the international
treaty protecting bears. She then instructed the Fish and Wildlife
Service to redo the report to "reflect the Interior Department's
position." She suppressed findings that mountaintop mining would cause
"tremendous destruction of aquatic and terrestrial habitat" and a Park
Service report that found that snowmobiles were hurting Yellowstone's
air quality, wildlife and the health of its visitors and employees.

Norton's Fish and Wildlife Service is the first ever not to
voluntarily list a single species as endangered or threatened. Her
officials have blackballed scientists and savaged studies to avoid
listing the trumpeter swan, revoke the listing of the grizzly bear and
shrink the remnant habitat for the Florida panther. She disbanded the
service's oldest scientific advisory committee in order to halt
protection of desert fish in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas that are
headed for extinction. Interior career staffers and scientists say
they are monitored by Norton's industry appointees to ensure that
future studies do not conflict with industry profit-making.

Cooking the Books on Global Warming

There is no scientific debate in which the White House has cooked the
books more than that of global warming. In the past two years the Bush
administration has altered, suppressed or attempted to discredit close
to a dozen major reports on the subject. These include a ten-year
peer-reviewed study by the International Panel on Climate Change,
commissioned by the president's father in 1993 in his own efforts to
dodge what was already a virtual scientific consensus blaming
industrial emissions for global warming.

After disavowing the Kyoto Protocol, the Bush administration
commissioned the federal government's National Academy of Sciences to
find holes in the IPCC analysis. But this ploy backfired. The NAS not
only confirmed the existence of global warming and its connection to
industrial greenhouse gases, it also predicted that the effects of
climate change would be worse than previously believed, estimating
that global temperatures will rise between 2.5 and 10.4 degrees by
2100.

A May 2002 report by scientists from the EPA, NASA and the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, approved by Bush appointees at
the Council on Environmental Quality and submitted to the United
Nations by the U.S., predicted similarly catastrophic impacts. When
confronted with the findings, Bush dismissed it with his smirking
condemnation: "I've read the report put out by the bureaucracy. . . ."

Afterward, the White House acknowledged that, in fact, he hadn't.
Having failed to discredit the report with this untruth, George W. did
what his father had done: He promised to study the problem some more.
Last fall, the White House announced the creation of the Climate
Research Initiative to study global warming. The earliest results are
due next fall. But the White House's draft plan for CRI was derided by
the NAS in February as a rehash of old studies and established science
lacking "most elements of a strategic plan."

In September 2002, administration censors released the annual EPA
report on air pollution without the agency's usual update on global
warming, that section having been deleted by Bush appointees at the
White House. On June 19th, 2003, a "State of the Environment" report
commissioned by the EPA in 2001 was released after language about
global warming was excised by flat-earthers in the White House. The
redacted studies had included a 2001 report by the National Research
Council, commissioned by the White House. In their place was a piece
of propaganda financed by the American Petroleum Institute challenging
these conclusions.

This past July, EPA scientists leaked a study, which the agency had
ordered suppressed in May, showing that a Senate plan -- co-sponsored
by Republican Sen. John McCain -- to reduce the pollution that causes
global warming could achieve its goal at very small cost. Bush reacted
by launching a $100 million ten-year effort to prove that global
temperature changes have, in fact, occurred naturally, another delay
tactic for the fossil-fuel barons at taxpayer expense.

Princeton geo-scientist Michael Oppenheimer told me, "This
administration likes to emphasize what we don't know while ignoring or
minimizing what we do know, which is a prescription for paralysis on
policy. It's hard to imagine what kind of scientific evidence would
suffice to convince the White House to take firm action on global
warming."

Across the board, the administration yields to Big Energy. At the
request of ExxonMobil, and with the help of a lobbying group working
for coal-burning utility Southern Co., the Bush administration
orchestrated the removal of U.S. scientist Robert Watson, the
world-renowned former NASA atmospheric chemist who headed the United
Nations' IPCC. He was replaced by a little-known scientist from New
Delhi, India, who would be generally unavailable for congressional
hearings.

The Bush administration now plans to contract out thousands of
environmental-science jobs to compliant industry consultants already
in the habit of massaging data to support corporate profit-taking,
effectively making federal science an arm of Karl Rove's political
machine. The very ideologues who derided Bill Clinton as a liar have
institutionalized dishonesty and made it the reigning culture of
America's federal agencies. "At its worst," Oppenheimer says, "this
approach represents a serious erosion in the way a democracy deals
with science."

Inside the Cheney Task Force

There is no better example of the corporate cronyism now hijacking
American democracy than the White House's cozy relationship with the
energy industry. It's hard to find anyone on Bush's staff who does not
have extensive corporate connections, but fossil-fuel executives rule
the roost. The energy industry contributed more than $48.3 million to
Republicans in the 2000 election cycle, with $3 million to Bush. Now
the investment has matured. Both Bush and Cheney came out of the oil
patch. Thirty-one of the Bush transition team's forty-eight members
had energy-industry ties. Bush's cabinet and White House staff is an
energy-industry dream team -- four cabinet secretaries, the six most
powerful White House officials and more than twenty high-level
appointees are alumni of the industry and its allies (see "Bush's
Energy-Industry All-Stars," on Page 183).

The potential for corruption is staggering. Take the case of J. Steven
Griles, deputy secretary of the Interior Department. During the first
Reagan administration, Griles worked directly under James Watt at
Interior, where he helped the coal industry evade prohibitions against
mountaintop-removal strip mining. In 1989, Griles left government to
work as a mining executive and then as a lobbyist with National
Environmental Strategies, a Washington, D.C., firm that represented
the National Mining Association and Dominion Resources, one of the
nation's largest power producers. When Griles got his new job at
Interior, the National Mining Association hailed him as "an ally of
the industry."

It's bad enough that a former mining lobbyist was put in charge of
regulating mining on public land. But it turns out that Griles is
still on the industry's payroll. In 2001, he sold his client base to
his partner Marc Himmelstein for four annual payments of $284,000,
making Griles, in effect, a continuing partner in the firm.

Because Griles was an oil and mining lobbyist, the Senate made him
agree in writing that he would avoid contact with his former clients
as a condition of his confirmation. Griles has nevertheless repeatedly
met with former coal clients to discuss new rules allowing mountaintop
mining in Appalachia and destructive coal-bed methane drilling in
Wyoming. He also met with his former oil clients about offshore
leases. These meetings prompted Sen. Joseph Lieberman to ask the
Interior Department to investigate Griles. With Republicans in control
of congressional committees, no subpoenas have interrupted the Griles
scandals.

With its operatives in place, the Bush energy plan became an orgy of
industry plunder. Days after his inauguration, Bush launched the
National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Cheney. For three
months, the task force held closed-door meetings with energy-industry
representatives - then refused to disclose the names of the
participants.

For the first time in history, the nonpartisan General Accounting
Office sued the executive branch, for access to these records. NRDC
put in a Freedom of Information Act request, and when Cheney did not
respond, we also sued. On February 21st, 2002, U.S. District Judge
Gladys Kessler ordered Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and other
agency officials to turn over the records relating to their
participation in the work of the energy task force. Under this court
order, NRDC has obtained some 20,000 documents. Although none of the
logs on the vice president's meetings have been released yet and the
pages were heavily redacted to prevent disclosure of useful
information, the documents still allow glimpses of the process.

The task force comprised Cabinet secretaries and other high-level
administration officials with energy-industry pedigrees. The
undisputed leader was Cheney, who hails from Wyoming, the nation's
largest coal producer, and who, for six previous years, was CEO of
Halliburton, the oil-service company. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill
was chairman of the Aluminum Company of America for thirteen years.
Aluminum-industry profits are directly related to energy prices.
O'Neill promised to immediately sell his extensive stock holdings in
his former company (worth more than $100 million) to avoid conflicts
of interest, but he delayed the sale until after the energy plan was
released. By then, thanks partly to the administration's energy
policies, Alcoa's stock had risen thirty percent. Energy Secretary
Abraham, a former one-term senator from Michigan, received $700,000
from the auto industry in his losing 2000 campaign, more than any
other Senate candidate. At Energy, Abraham led the administration
effort to scuttle fuel-economy standards, allow SUVs to escape
fuel-efficiency minimums and create obscene tax incentives for
Americans to buy the largest gas guzzlers.

Joe Allbaugh, director of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,
sat next to Abraham on the task force. Allbaugh's wife, Diane, is an
energy-industry lobbyist and represents three firms -- Reliant Energy,
Entergy and TXU, each of which paid her $20,000 in the three months of
the task force's deliberation. Joe Allbaugh participated in task-force
meetings on issues directly affecting those companies, including
debates about environmental rules for power plants and -- his wife's
specialty -- electricity deregulation.

Commerce Secretary Don Evans, an old friend of the president from
their early days in the oil business, was CEO of Tom Brown Inc., a
Denver oil-and-gas company, and a trustee of another drilling firm.
Interior Secretary Gale Norton, a mining-industry lawyer, accepted
nearly $800,000 from the energy industry during her 1996 run in
Colorado for the U.S. Senate.

In the winter and spring of 2001, executives and lobbyists from the
oil, coal, electric-utility and nuclear industries tramped in and out
of the Cabinet room and Cheney's office. Many of the lobbyists had
just left posts inside Bush's presidential campaign to work for
companies that had donated lavishly to that effort. Companies that
made large contributions were given special access. Executives from
Enron Corp., which contributed $2.5 million to the GOP from 1999 to
2002, had contact with the task force at least ten times, including
six face-to-face meetings between top officials and Cheney.

After one meeting with Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, Cheney dismissed
California Gov. Gray Davis' request to cap the state's energy prices.
That denial would enrich Enron and nearly bankrupt California. It has
since emerged that the state's energy crisis was largely engineered by
Enron. According to the New York Times, the task-force staff
circulated a memo that suggested "utilizing" the crisis to justify
expanded oil and gas drilling. President Bush and others would cite
the California crisis to call for drilling in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge.

Energy companies that had not ponied up remained under pressure to
give to Republicans. When Westar Energy's chief executive was indicted
for fraud, investigators found an e-mail written by Westar executives
describing solicitations by Republican politicians for a political
action committee controlled by Tom DeLay as the price for a "seat at
the table" with the task force.

Task-force members began each meeting with industry lobbyists by
announcing that the session was off the record and that participants
were to share no documents. A National Mining Association official
told reporters that the industry managed to control the energy plan by
keeping the process secret. "We've probably had as much input as
anybody else in town," he said. "I have to take my hat off to them --
they've been able to keep a lid on it."

When it was suggested that access to the administration was for sale,
Cheney hardly apologized. "Just because somebody makes a campaign
contribution doesn't mean that they should be denied the opportunity
to express their view to government officials," he said. Although they
met with hundreds of industry officials, Cheney and Abraham refused to
meet with any environmental groups. Cheney made one exception to the
secrecy policy: On May 15th, 2001, the day before the task force sent
its plan to the president, CEOs from wind-, solar- and
geothermal-energy companies were granted a short meeting with Cheney.
Afterward, they were led into the Rose Garden for a press conference
and a photo op.

While peddling influence to energy tycoons, the White House quietly
dropped criminal and civil charges against Koch Industries, America's
largest privately held oil company. Koch faced a ninety-seven-count
federal felony indictment and $357 million in fines for knowingly
releasing ninety metric tons of carcinogenic benzene and concealing
the releases from federal regulators. Koch executives contributed
$800,000 to Bush's presidential campaign and to other top Republicans.

Last March, the Federal Trade Commission dropped a Clinton-era
investigation of price gouging by the oil and gas industries, even as
Duke Energy, a principal target of the probe, admitted to selling
electricity in California for more than double the highest previously
reported price. The Bush administration said that the industry
deserved a "gentler approach." Administration officials also winked at
a scam involving a half-dozen oil companies cheating the government
out of $100 million per year in royalty payments.

Southern Co. was among the most adept advocates for its own
self-interest. The company, which contributed $1.6 million to
Republicans from 1999 to 2002, met with Cheney's task force seven
times. Faced with a series of EPA prosecutions at power plants
violating air-quality standards, the company retained Haley Barbour,
former Republican National Committee chairman and now governor-elect
of Mississippi, to lobby the administration to ignore Southern's
violations.

The White House then forced the Justice Department to drop the
prosecution. Justice lawyers were "astounded" that the administration
would interfere in a law-enforcement matter that was "supposed to be
out of bounds from politics." The EPA's chief enforcement officer,
Eric Schaeffer, resigned. "With the Bush administration, whether or
not environmental laws are enforced depends on who you know,"
Schaeffer told me. "If you've got a good lobbyist, you can just buy
your way out of trouble."

Along with Barbour, Southern retained current Republican National
Committee chairman and former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot. Barbour and
Racicot repeatedly conferred with Abraham and Cheney, urging them to
ease limits on carbon-dioxide pollution from power plants and to gut
the Clean Air Act. On May 17th, 2001, the White House released its
energy plan. Among the recommendations were exempting old power plants
from Clean Air Act compliance and adopting Barbour's arguments about
carbon-dioxide restrictions. Barbour repaid the favor that week by
raising $250,000 at a May 21st GOP gala honoring Bush. Southern
donated $150,000 to the effort.

Cheney's task force had at least nineteen contacts with officials from
the nuclear-energy industry -- whose trade association, the Nuclear
Energy Institute, donated $100,000 to the Bush inauguration gala and
$437,000 to Republicans from 1999 to 2002. The report recommended
loosening environmental controls on the industry, reducing public
participation in the siting of nuclear plants and adding billions of
dollars in subsidies for the nuclear industry.

Cheney wasn't embarrassed to reward his old cronies at Halliburton,
either. The final draft of the task-force report praises a
gas-recovery technique controlled by Halliburton -- even though an
earlier draft had criticized the technology. The technique, which has
been linked to the contamination of aquifers, is currently being
investigated by the EPA. Somehow, that got edited out of the report.

Big Coal and the Destruction of Appalachia

Coal companies enjoyed perhaps the biggest payoff. At the West
Virginia Coal Association's annual conference in May 2002, president
William D. Raney assured 150 industry moguls, "You did everything you
could to elect a Republican president." Now, he said, "you are already
seeing in his actions the payback."

Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal company and a major
contributor to the Bush campaign, was one of the first to cash in.
Immediately after his inauguration, Bush appointed two executives from
Peabody and one from its Black Beauty subsidiary to his energy
advisory team.

When the task force released its final report, it recommended
accelerating coal production and spending $2 billion in federal
subsidies for research to make coal-fired electricity cleaner. Five
days later, Peabody issued a public-stock offering, raising $60
million more than analysts had predicted. Company vice president Fred
Palmer credited the Bush administration. "I am sure it affected the
valuation of the stock," he told the Los Angeles Times.

Peabody also wanted to build the largest coal-fired power plant in
thirty years upwind of Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, a
designated UNESCO World Heritage site and International Biosphere
Reserve. With arm-twisting from Deputy Interior Secretary Steven
Griles and another $450,000 in GOP contributions, Peabody got what it
wanted. A study on the air impacts was suppressed, and park scientists
who feared that several endangered species might go extinct due to
mercury and acid-rain deposits were silenced.

At the Senate's request, Griles had signed a "statement of
disqualification" on August 1st, 2001, committing himself to avoiding
issues affecting his former clients. Three days later, he nevertheless
appeared before the West Virginia Coal Association and promised
executives that "we will fix the federal rules very soon on water and
soil placement." That was fancy language for pushing whole
mountaintops into valleys, a practice worth billions to the industry.
As a Reagan official, Griles helped devise the practice, which a
federal court declared illegal in 2002, after 1,200 miles of
streambeds had been filled and 380,000 acres of Appalachian
forestlands had been rendered barren moonscapes.

Now Griles was promising his former coal clients he would fix these
rules. In May 2002, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers adopted
the language recommended by his former client, the National Mining
Association. Had Griles not intervened, the practice of
mountaintop-removal mining would have been severely restricted. Griles
also pushed EPA deputy administrator Linda Fisher to overrule career
personnel in the agency's Denver office who had given a devastating
assessment to a proposal to produce coal-bed methane gas in the Powder
River basin in Wyoming. Although Griles had recused himself from any
discussion of this subject because it would directly enrich his former
clients, he worked aggressively behind the scenes on behalf of a
proposal to build 51,000 wells. The project will require 26,000 miles
of new roads and 48,000 miles of pipeline, and will foul pristine
landscapes with trillions of gallons of toxic wastewater.

Blueprint for Plunder

The energy-task-force plan is a $20 billion subsidy to the oil, coal
and nuclear industries, which are already swimming in record revenues.
In May 2003, as the House passed the plan and as the rest of the
nation stagnated in a recession abetted by high oil prices, Exxon
announced that its profits had tripled from the previous quarter's
record earnings. The energy plan recommends opening protected lands
and waters to oil and gas drilling and building up to 1,900
electric-power plants. National treasures such as the California and
Florida coasts, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the areas
around Yellowstone Park will be opened for plunder for the trivial
amounts of fossil fuels that they contain. While increasing reliance
on oil, coal and nuclear power, the plan cuts the budget for research
into energy efficiency and alternative power sources by nearly a
third. "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue," Cheney
explained, but it should not be the basis of "comprehensive energy
policy."

As if to prove that point, Republicans simultaneously eliminated the
tax credit that had encouraged Americans to buy gas-saving hybrid
cars, and weakened efficiency standards for everything from air
conditioners to automobiles. They also created an obscene $100,000 tax
break for Hummers and the thirty-eight biggest gas guzzlers. Then,
adding insult to injury, the Energy Department robbed $135,615 from
the anemic solar, renewables and energy-conservation budget to produce
10,000 copies of the White House's energy plan.

To lobby for the plan, more than 400 industry groups enlisted in the
Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth, a coalition created by oil,
mining and nuclear interests and guided by the White House. It cost
$5,000 to join, "a very low price," according to Republican lobbyist
Wayne Valis. The prerequisite for joining, he wrote in a memo, was
that members "must agree to support the Bush energy proposal in its
entirety and not lobby for changes." Within two months, members had
contributed more than $1 million. The price for disloyalty was
expulsion from the coalition and possible reprisal by the
administration. "I have been advised," wrote Valis, "that this White
House 'will have a long memory.' "

The plan represents a massive transfer of wealth from the public to
the energy sector. Indeed, Bush views his massive tax cuts as a way of
helping Americans pay for inflated energy bills. "If I had my way," he
declared, "I'd have [the tax cuts] in place tomorrow so that people
would have money in their pockets to deal with high energy prices."

Looting the Commons

Although congress will have its final vote on the plan in November,
the White House has already devised ways to implement most of its
worst provisions without congressional interference. In October 2001,
the administration removed the Interior Department's power to veto
mining permits, even if the mining would cause "substantial and
irreparable harm" to the environment. That December, Bush and
congressional Republicans passed an "economic-stimulus package" that
proposed $2.4 billion worth of tax breaks, credits and loopholes for
Chevron, Texaco, Enron and General Electric. The following February,
the White House announced it would abandon regulations for three major
pollutants -- mercury, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide.

Early in the Bush administration, Vice President Cheney had solicited
an industry wish list from the United States Energy Association, the
lobbying arm for trade associations including the American Petroleum
Institute, the National Mining Association, the Nuclear Energy
Institute and the Edison Institute. The USEA responded by providing
105 specific recommendations from its members for plundering our
natural resources and polluting America's air and water. In a speech
to the group in June 2002, Energy Secretary Abraham reported that the
administration had already implemented three-quarters of the
industry's recommendations and predicted the rest would pass through
Congress shortly.

On August 27th, 2002 -- while most of America was heading off for a
Labor Day weekend -- the administration announced that it would
redefine carbon dioxide, the primary cause of global warming, so that
it would no longer be considered a pollutant and would therefore not
be subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. The next day, the
White House repealed the act's "new source review" provision, which
requires companies to modernize pollution control when they modify
their plants.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, the White House
rollback will cause 30,000 Americans to die prematurely each year.
Although the regulation will probably be reversed in the courts, the
damage will have been done, and power utilities such as Southern Co.
will escape criminal prosecution. As soon as the new regulations were
announced, John Pemberton, chief of staff to the EPA's assistant
administrator for air, left the agency to work for Southern. The EPA's
congressional office chief also left, to join Southern's lobbying
shop, Bracewell, Patterson.

By summer 2003, the White House had become a virtual pi-ata for energy
moguls. In August, the administration proposed limiting the authority
of states to object to offshore-drilling decisions, and it ordered
federal land managers across the West to ease environmental
restrictions for oil and gas drilling in national forests. The White
House also proposed removing federal protections for most American
wetlands and streams. As an astounded Republican, Rep. Christopher
Shays, told me, "It's almost like they want to alienate people who
care about the environment, as if they believe that this will help
them with their core."

EPA: From Bad to Worse

On August 30th, president bush nominated Utah's three-term Republican
Gov. Mike Leavitt to replace his beleaguered EPA head, Christine Todd
Whitman, who was driven from office, humiliated in even her paltry
efforts to moderate the pillage. In October, Leavitt was confirmed by
the Senate.

Like Gale Norton, Leavitt has a winning personality and a disastrous
environmental record. Under his leadership, Utah tied for last as the
state with the worst environmental enforcement record and ranked
second-worst (behind Texas) for both air quality and toxic releases.
As governor, Leavitt displayed the same contempt for science that has
characterized the Bush administration. He fired more than seventy
scientists employed by state agencies for producing studies that
challenged his political agenda. He fired a state enforcement officer
who penalized one of Leavitt's family fish farms for introducing
whirling disease into Utah, devastating the state's wild-trout
populations.

Leavitt has a penchant for backdoor deals to please corporate
polluters. Last year he resurrected a frivolous and moribund Utah
lawsuit against the Interior Department and then settled the suit
behind closed doors without public involvement, stripping 6 million
acres of wilderness protections. This track record does not reflect
the independence, sense of stewardship and respect for science and law
that most Americans have the right to expect in our nation's chief
environmental guardian.

The Threat to Democracy

Generations of Americans will pay the Republican campaign debt to the
energy industry with global instability, depleted national coffers and
increased vulnerability to price shocks in the oil market.

They will also pay with reduced prosperity and quality of life at
home. Pollution from power plants and traffic smog will continue to
skyrocket. Carbon-dioxide emissions will aggravate global warming.
Acid rain from Midwestern coal plants has already sterilized half the
lakes in the Adirondacks and destroyed the forest cover in the high
peaks of the Appalachian range up into Canada. The administration's
attacks on science and the law have put something even greater at
risk. Americans need to recognize that we are facing not just a threat
to our environment but to our values, and to our democracy.

Growing up, I was taught that communism leads to dictatorship and
capitalism to democracy. But as we've seen from the the Bush
administration, the latter proposition does not always hold. While
free markets tend to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism
leads invariably to corporate control of government.

America's most visionary leaders have long warned against allowing
corporate power to dominate the political landscape. In 1863, in the
depths of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln lamented, "I have the
Confederacy before me and the bankers behind me, and I fear the
bankers most." Franklin Roosevelt echoed that sentiment when he warned
that "the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate
the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than
their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism --
ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any
controlling power."

Today, more than ever, it is critical for American citizens to
understand the difference between the free-market capitalism that made
our country great and the corporate cronyism that is now corrupting
our political process, strangling democracy and devouring our national
treasures.

Corporate capitalists do not want free markets, they want dependable
profits, and their surest route is to crush competition by controlling
government. The rise of fascism across Europe in the 1930s offers many
informative lessons on how corporate power can undermine a democracy.
In Spain, Germany and Italy, industrialists allied themselves with
right-wing leaders who used the provocation of terrorist attacks,
continual wars, and invocations of patriotism and homeland security to
tame the press, muzzle criticism by opponents and turn government over
to corporate control. Those governments tapped industrial executives
to run ministries and poured government money into corporate coffers
with lucrative contracts to prosecute wars and build infrastructure.
They encouraged friendly corporations to swallow media outlets, and
they enriched the wealthiest classes, privatized the commons and pared
down constitutional rights, creating short-term prosperity through
pollution-based profits and constant wars. Benito Mussolini's inside
view of this process led him to complain that "fascism should really
be called 'corporatism.' "

While the European democracies unraveled into fascism, America
confronted the same devastating Depression by reaffirming its
democracy. It enacted minimum-wage and Social Security laws to foster
a middle class, passed income taxes and anti-trust legislation to
limit the power of corporations and the wealthy, and commissioned
parks, public lands and museums to create employment and safeguard the
commons.

The best way to judge the effectiveness of a democracy is to measure
how it allocates the goods of the land: Does the government protect
the commonwealth on behalf of all the community members, or does it
allow wealth and political clout to steal the commons from the people?

Today, George W. Bush and his court are treating our country as a grab
bag for the robber barons, doling out the commons to large polluters.
Last year, as the calamitous rollbacks multiplied, the corporate-owned
TV networks devoted less than four percent of their news minutes to
environmental stories. If they knew the truth, most Americans would
share my fury that this president is allowing his corporate cronies to
steal America from our children.

(From RS 937, December 11, 2003)
 




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