Crimes Against Nature

Published by the December 11, 2003 issue of Rolling Stone
Crimes Against Nature
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 federal Department of Agriculture has stopped
work on fifty-seven standards, and the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration has halted twenty-one new 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?"

continued at: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1120-01.htm