BY TED TAYLOR
vert the very laws that they are in charge of en-
forcing. This is impacting our quality of life in
America in so many ways that we don’t know
about because the press simply isn’t doing its
job of informing the American public, scruti-
nizing these policies, connecting the dots be-
tween the corporate contributors and the dra-
matic decline in American quality of life that
we are now experiencing.
This year for the first time since the pas-
sage of the Clean Water Act, EPA announced
that America’s waterways are actually getting
dirtier. This morning The New York Times ran
a story that the levels of sulfur dioxide (that
causes acid rain) have grown 4 percent over
the last year.
tional epidemic, reclassified mercury as a haz-
ardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act,
which triggered a requirement that those
plants remove 90 percent of the mercury
within three and a half years. It would have
cost them less than 1 percent of revenues and it
would have solved the problem. Well, this is
the same industry that’s given that $100 mil-
lion to the president, and eight weeks ago
President Bush announced that he was scrap-
ping the Clinton-era regs, substituting instead
regulations that the industry never has to clean
up their mercury contamination.
So we are living today in a science fiction
nightmare where my children and the children
of millions of other Americans who have
TED TAYLOR
SO WE ARE LIVING TODAY IN A SCIENCE FICTION NIGHTMARE
WHERE MY CHILDREN AND THE CHILDREN OF MILLIONS OF OTHER
AMERICANS WHO HAVE ASTHMA ARE BEING BROUGHT INTO
A WORLD WHERE THE AIR IS TOO POISONOUS TO BREATHE —
BECAUSE SOMEBODY GAVE MONEY TO A POLITICIAN.
Bush’s Radical Agenda
Bobby Kennedy Jr. takes on dirty air,
dirty water, dirty politics.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made an impromptu
appearance in Eugene Sept. 23 and held a
press conference on the EWEB plaza with only
about a dozen people able to attend. Kennedy
is arguably the nation’s most prominent envi-
ronmental attorney. He is currently senior at-
torney for the Natural Resources Defense
Council, chief prosecuting attorney for
Riverkeeper, and president of Waterkeeper
Alliance. His new book is called Crimes
Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His
Corporate Pals are Plundering the Country
and Hijacking Our Democracy. Below is a
partial transcript of his talk in Eugene, with a
more complete version online at www.eugene-
weekly.com.
I
written a book about the Bush’s envi-
’ ve ronmental
record, but it’s not so much
about the environment as it is about an
excess of corporate power and the corrosive
impact of that on our democracy. And it’s not
about a Democrat attacking a Republican. I’ve
been disciplined for 20 years as an environ-
mental advocate about being non-partisan and
bi-partisan in my approach to these issues. I
don’t think there’s any such thing as
Republican children or Democratic children,
and the worst thing that can happen to the en-
vironment is if it becomes the province of a
single political party. But you can’t talk hon-
estly about the environment today in any con-
text without speaking critically about this
president. This is the worst environmental
president we’ve had in American history.
If you look at NRDC’s website, you’ll see
over 400 major environmental roll-backs that
have been promoted by this administration
during the last three and a half years, and I tell
you it’s part of a concerted deliberate attempt
to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law.
It’s a stealth attack. They have concealed
their radical agenda from the American public
using Orwellian rhetoric. When they destroy
the forest, they call it the Healthy Forest Act;
when they destroy the air they call it the Clear
Skies bill. And most insidiously they have put
polluters in charge of virtually all the agencies
that are supposed to protect Americans from
pollution. The head of the Forest Service is a
timber industry lobbyist. The head of public
lands is a mining industry lobbyist who be-
lieves that public lands are unconstitutional.
The head of the air division at EPA is a utility
lobbyist who has represented the worst air pol-
luters in America. The second in command at
EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist. The head of
Superfunds, an agency critical to quality of
life here in Oregon, is a lobbyist whose last job
was teaching corporate polluters how to evade
Superfunds.
If you go through all the agency heads,
sub-heads and secretaries in the Department of
Agriculture, Department of the Interior,
Department of Energy and EPA, you’ll find
the same thing: The polluters are running reg-
ulatory agencies that are supposed to regulate
them. And these are not individuals who have
entered government service for the sake of the
public interest, but rather specifically to sub-
I have three children who have asthma and
one out of every four black children in this
country in our municipalities now has asthma.
Asthma rates have doubled among our chil-
dren over the last five years. Whether it’s hor-
mones in our food or antibiotics, something is
causing our children to have these kinds of
haywire immune systems. We do know that
asthma attacks are triggered primarily by
ozone and particulates. About 60 percent of
those materials in our atmosphere are coming
from 1,100 coal-burning power plants that are
burning illegally. They were supposed to have
cleaned up 15 years ago. The Clinton adminis-
tration was prosecuting the worst 70 of these
plants for criminal violations. But this is an in-
dustry that donated $48 million to President
Bush and the Republican Party in the 2000
cycle and have given $58 million since. And
one of the first things that President Bush did
when he came into office was to order the
Justice Department to drop those lawsuits
against those utilities.
According to the EPA, just the criminal
excedences from these 70 plants kill 5,500
Americans every year. And then the Bush ad-
ministration tore the heart out of the Clean Air
Act, abolishing the New Source Reviews sec-
tion that require these companies to clean up
their pollution. That decision is killing 30,000
Americans every single year, according to EPA,
including 165 people in the state of Oregon.
Last week the federal EPA announced that
in 19 states it’s now unsafe to eat any freshwa-
ter fish because of mercury contamination. In
48 states it’s now unsafe to eat at least some of
the fish or most of the fish, and Oregon is one
of those.
We know a lot about mercury now that we
didn’t know 10 years ago. We know that one
out of every six American women now has so
much mercury in her womb that her children
are at risk for autism, blindness, mental retar-
dation, cognitive impairment, heart, liver and
kidney disease. I have so much mercury in my
body — I got levels tested recently — that I
was told by Dr. David Carpenter who’s a na-
tional authority on mercury contamination,
that a woman with my levels, which are three
times the safe levels, would have a child with
cognitive impairment. He estimated a perma-
nent IQ loss of 5 to 7 points in her children. He
said the science is very certain. Today there
are 630,000 children born in this country
every year who’ve been exposed to dangerous
levels of mercury in the womb.
Clinton, recognizing this catastrophic na-
asthma are being brought into a world where
the air is too poisonous to breathe — because
somebody gave money to a politician. And
where my children and the children of most
Americans can no longer go fishing with their
father and come home and eat the fish — be-
cause somebody gave money to a politician.
And the mercury in the waters here in Oregon,
the fish are too dangerous, particularly for
children and women. Some of that mercury is
coming from the power plants, most of it’s
coming from old mining tailings and from
Superfund sites. On the Willamette River,
that’s where the mercury’s coming from. Well,
guess what? The Bush administration has al-
lowed the Superfund to go bankrupt, which
means that those sites will probably never get
cleaned up.
Superfund (money) is raised through a tax
on polluting industries, and it’s a very, very
small tax. But they don’t like it. They don’t
mind the tax, what they mind is that that fund
is used as a leverage to force them to spend bil-
lions of dollars to clean up their mess. And this
is how it works. The Superfund doesn’t just
clean up orphan sites, but it can also be used
by EPA to clean up the sites of recalcitrant pol-
luters. So the EPA — there’s a provision in
Superfund that says that if a polluter refuses to
clean up its Superfund site, the EPA can go to
them and say, OK, fine, we’re tired of dealing
with the lawyers and enriching your lawyers.
What we’re going to do instead is clean it up
ourselves and charge your triple. It’s called the
Treble Damages Provision. At virtually every
Superfund site that’s been cleaned up by in-
dustry over the past 20 years, since 1981, it’s
been cleaned up because of the threat of the
Treble Damages Provision. It’s the only thing
that makes them clean up. Well, guess what?
That threat no longer exists. The teeth have
been ripped out of EPA so that they will no
longer be able to force polluters to clean up
their sites. As a result of that, most of these
sites along the Willamette will never get
cleaned up, and if they do get cleaned up,
guess who’s paying for it? You and I and the
American public. How ridiculous is that?
This is an administration that’s about plun-
dering our air and our water, plundering our
national treasure, shifting our wealth, plunder-
ing the great relationships we had with people
all over the world, and shifting the wealth of
those assets to large corporations who are its
donors, who are the lowest bottom feeders
who profiteer on the American people. We
must turn them out of office.
ew
SEPTEMBER 30, 2004 13