Here's an interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. some months ago who recently wrote
the book Crimes Against Nature. If you have a sense of environmentalism, I recommend
the book, but this interview will give you some idea of Kennedy's concerns.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Web Page: home.earthlink.net/~mtnviews