Crimes Against Nature

Forwarded with Compliments of Government of the USA in Exile (GUSAE): 
Free Americans Proclaiming  Total Emancipation and Working Towards 
Democracy.   NOTE:  Thanks to Isabel Ebert for this; it is on balance 
a helpful history but I must point out that the eco-laws "Bush is 
sabotaging" are themselves woefully inadequate and have not 
"protected America's environment."       -  kl, pp

Crimes Against Nature

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

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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)

For more information on the Bush administration's environmental 
actions, see <http://www.nrdc.org/bushrecord/default.asp>The Bush 
Record from NRDC, the Natural Resources Defense Council