January 14, 2011 A Concise History of the Rise and Fall of the Enviro Establishment (Part Three)
How Green Became the Color of Money
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Click here to read Part One. Click here to read Part Two. In the Clinton era, the contours of environmental politics settled into a triangulated landscape, bounded by the Executive Office Building and its agency outlets (where administrative fiats were handed down with devastating finality); the committee rooms of Congress (where the chairmen of the all-important appropriations committees dole out pork and pollution); and the grey mansions of the special interest lobbies, both environmental and industrial, stacked along K Street. Daily the inhabitants of these centers of power determined the levels of lead in the blood of children in south-central Los Angeles; the number of Chinook salmon chewed up by hydro-electric dams on the Columbia River; the gallons of dioxin flushed into the Mississippi; and the fate of such animals as the grizzly bear, whose habitat can remain protected public land or be transformed into clearcuts or cyanide-laced heap leach gold mines.
At the top of the Executive pyramid squatted Bill Clinton. His interest in environmental matters was, and had always been, opportunistic. Environmental quality and economic progress should advance hand-in-hand, Clinton counseled. If they don't, well, there will always be time to fix the damage to the planet later.
The surest field guide to Clinton's world comes in the form of a list of his campaign contributions through the 1980s, stretching from his successful bid for a second term as Arkansas governor in 1982, after the voters had kicked him out in 1980 following his first term. Long before Clinton hit the national spotlight (with a crashingly tedious keynote speech to the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta), the big money had its eyes on the young governor.
Badly shaken by his 1980 upset and determined never to offend corporate power again, Clinton let the word go forth: the high and mighty had a man they could trust in the governor's mansion in Little Rock. The tycoons responded in appropriate fashion. Money flowed south from Wall Street, from the big securities firms, banks and investment houses: Merrill Lynch, Goldman, Sachs, Drexel Burnham, Citicorp, Morgan Stanley, Prudential-Bache.
Indeed the scandal that dogged Clinton through his first termWhitewatertraced its origins to just such a collusion between Clinton and corporate money. Of the 1,070 major news stories written about the Whitewater scandal between 1992 and 1996, some 90 percent concerned themselves with the cover-up question: if or how the Clinton White House suppressed evidence in the wake of Vince Foster's suicide. Almost all of the remaining stories dealt with the efforts of Governor Bill and the First Lady of Arkansas to keep their friend James McDougal's Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan afloat.
All of these reports overlooked the actual origins of Whitewater, which began with a land deal. In 1978 Bill Clinton, then attorney general of Arkansas, was in the midst of his first campaign for the governship when he and Hillary, along with Jim and Susan McDougal, bought 230 acres in the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas. Though the title to the land was in the Clintons' name, the couple put no money down. McDougal did not yet have the S&L, and was a financial fixer and property dealer. He fronted the money for the down payment on the loan.
The land's previous owner-of-record was a partnership called 101 River Development, which bought it from a local business group. 101 had held the property for only three days, and went out of business a couple of weeks after the sale. The original seller of the land was International Paper, a $16 billion a year timber giant, Arkansas' largest landowner with 800,000 acres in the state and with 7 million acres of land across the US.
International Paper's powerful presence in Arkansas dates back to the 1950s with the arrival of Winthrop Rockefeller. The New York-based timber company had long been backed by Rockefeller interests and when Winthrop went south, the company made a similar migration and set about building up his empire in the state.
The Whitewater sale came at a time when the timber giant was following the pronouncements of candidate Clinton with keen attention. The young attorney general was vowing that as governor he would restrict the use of clearcutting on land held by the big timber companies, such as International Paper, Georgia-Pacific and Weyerhaeuser. These paper and timber companies had gone on a logging binge in the mid-1970s, clearcutting thousand-acre chunks of forest at a time. Clinton promised to introduce legislation banning the practice as soon as he entered the governor's office.
The mysterious 101 River Development had given the Clintons and the McDougals a very good deal, selling the land for $500 an acre. Non-river front property in the area was selling at the time for nearly twice that amount.
The Whitewater sale went through in August of 1979. Clinton won the governorship in November of that year. Environmentalists eagerly awaited action from the new governor on clearcutting and other issues pertaining to the impoverished state's very serious problems with water and air pollution. But the promises of the campaign trail soon lost their fire. Indeed Clinton's commitment to them was pallid from the start. His two predecessors in the governor's mansionDale Bumpers and David Pryorhad both tangled with the timber companies on the matter of clearcutting with a far more vigor than was ever displayed by Clinton.
The newly-elected governor formed a task force on clearcutting stocked with conservationists. The task force swiftly took heat from loggers and executives at Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific. A startled Clinton kicked off the greens and replaced them with industry hacks and recommended voluntary compliance with the soft new regulations.
In what proved to be a fatal blow, Clinton reneged on a pledge to poultry king Don Tyson of Tyson Foods. The governor refused to raise the legal weight for trucks on Arkansas highways to 80,000 pounds. In 1980, Tyson and other moneyed interest shifted their support to Republican Frank White, who soundly defeated Clinton.
After Arkansas voters turned out Clinton at the end of his two-year term, Bill left the governor's mansion and went to work at the Little Rock law firm of Wright, Lindsey and Jennings. Hillary was at the Rose law firm. Both legal outfits represented the timber giants of Arkansas before state regulatory bodies such as the Pollution Control Board and the Department of Ecology.
Clinton recaptured the governor's office in 1982, the same year that Jim McDougal bough Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan. Among those contributing to candidate Clinton's campaign treasury were International Paper, Georgia-Pacific and Tyson Foods. Their investment was swiftly rewarded. Clinton redux was now equipped with a philosophical approach to regulation that was highly congenial to the resource industries and to the poultry factories.
Tyson in particular became a key ally of Clinton after the latter learned his lesson from the trucking dispute. Tyson planes ferried the First Family on its travels and Tyson funds poured into Clinton's campaign coffers.
In return, the poultry magnate received roughly $12 million worth of tax breaks during Clinton's years as governor. Nor was Clinton diligent in monitoring the environmental record of Tyson foods or of the poultry industry in general. During Clinton's years as governor the White River turned into a cesspool. Animal wastes from the poultry and cattle industry polluted the river so badly that 400 miles of streams became unfit for swimming. In 1983, Clinton dallied for 17 months before taking action to control damage from a Tyson plant in Green Forest, Arkansas, which, after a sinkhole developed, poured a million gallons a day of chicken waste into the water table.
The disastrous impact of Tyson's chicken farms on the Arkansas River is fairly well-known. Less notorious but even more toxic are the pulp mills of International Paper, Georgia-Pacific and James River. International Paper's mammoth mill at Pine Bluff was one of the most toxic in the world, venting nearly two million tons of chemicals each year into the air and water.
From 1982 forward, Clinton argued that compliance to environmental standards could best be achieved on a voluntary basis, rather than by the imposition of exigent (and politically perilous) rules and regulations. To this end Governor Clinton stacked his pollution control board with members friendly to industry. In 1985 he promoted and signed into law a huge tax break for industrial corporations of his state, including the big timber companies. This easing of the corporate fiscal burden was offset by a regressive sales tax on the citizenry.
Clinton's big offering to the timber companies was a measure called the Manufacturer's Investment Sales and Use Tax Credit, know by its green critics as the "IP bailout law," after International Paper. Under this program state tax breaks were approved for more than $400 million in projects by International Paper and three other pulp and paper mills that then state Senator Ben Allen of Little Rock called "the worst corporate citizens in Arkansas"all this in a state with one of the lowest per capita incomes in the nation and where 29 percent of the children and half of the state's black population lived in poverty.
A few years later officials tried to keep International Paper and two Georgia-Pacific mills off a toxic waterways list, despite overwhelming evidence that they were contaminating rivers with dioxin and rendering the eating of fish from them an unacceptable cancer risk. Meanwhile, International Paper, while taking repeated advantage of the manufacturers' sales tax credit, was ladling out money to their favorite politician, candidate Clinton.
Clinton also supervised a land deal highly favorable to the timber giants. In later years, taunted with the fact that his state ranked 48th in environmental quality, Clinton would make much of the fact that as governor he had acquired thousands of acres for state-owned forests. Two types of deals were involved here. In one set of transactions state-owned lands with profitable timber on them were swapped to the big companies in return for parcels of their land which had been recently clearcut. And, in other instances, the state simply acquired at inflated prices lands which the timber companies had recently logged off its best trees.
Nourished by these benefices, the timber companies and Don Tyson, urged Governor Clintonthen nearing the end of his third termto consider challenging Dale Bumpers for the senate seat he had held since the early 1970s. These predacious companies had no love for Bumpers. The senator had led the charge to reform forest policies on federal lands, culminating in the passage of the National Forest Management Act of 1976.
Bumpers was also a spirited critic of clearcutting and pesticide-spraying by the timber giants in Arkansas. But by this time Clinton was already contemplating a run for the White House and so instead the timber companies, along with other corporate interests, bankrolled the Democratic Leadership CouncilClinton's launching pad to the national scene and the presidency.
As president, Clinton performed many kindly deeds for big timber. But for International Paper, in particular, Clinton wrought two spectacular favors as president. He refused to take any action to stem the flow of raw log exports from the West Coast, where International Paper held about a half million acres of forest land. And the generous Habitat Conservation Plans in the southeast tirelessly promoted by Interior Secretary and fellow DLC alum Bruce Babbitt allowed International Paper and Georgia-Pacific to continue to cut trees on land occupied endangered species such as the red-cockaded woodpecker.
When the Whitewater scandal finally exploded, Clinton's attorney general Janet Reno searched for a special prosecutor and finally came up with Robert Fiske, of the law firm of Davis, Polk and Wardell. At the time, this high-powered New York law firm was also represented International Paper in pollution cases across the country, including Arkansas.
Tyson Foods, Wal-Mart and Jackson Stephens are familiar pillars of the Arkansas power structure. Yet during Clinton's years as governor, the timber companies were the most potent of the lot. Combined, International Paper, Weyerhaeuser, Georgia-Pacific and Potlach controlled more than two-and-a-half million acres of land in Arkansas and operated more than 90 timber mills.
This essay is excerpted from the forthcoming book GreenScare: the New War on Environmentalism by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.â€
Buckminster Fuller
Keith - thanks for posting this typically insightful piece from Jeffrey St Clair.
He's particularly good on the land deal at the heart of Whitewater, and on Clinton's sorry bought and owned ass.
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta." The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
Thanks Jan,I never got into all that Whitewater stuff.What I do know about though is how all the named timber companies operate.The US Forest Service,and BLM (Bureau of Land Management)are Federal agencies,and therefore political in nature.They are bound to Govt.statutes/plans.Thus,there were those that lived in the mountains out here in a certain district that found out that the Forest Service was not following the approved sustainable logging plan,and were overcutting.The local people took the FS to court,and actually won their case.The Forest Service was forced to stop all logging in this District for like 10 years.Amazing!
The timber companies,on the other hand own hundreds of thousands of acres of timberland,and they have little if any regulation held to them.So,what we got with these companies are whole areas clearcut.They had/have a policy of cutting as much as they can NOW,and then they pack up and leave and go to Arkansas,Georgia,or Maine etc.What's left behind is pure eco-destruction.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.â€
Buckminster Fuller
It is truly heart breaking to see a forest that has been clear felled. It is something that I don't think most people know about or have seen with their own eyes. If they did more people would be moved to prevent this sort of crime. :banghead:
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.â€
Buckminster Fuller
Given his attenuated record in Arkansas no one should have expected President Bill Clinton to live up to his campaign promises of attacking "special interests" and defending the "little guy." Any precious illusions about such a possibility disappeared even before the inauguration, when Clinton stock-piled his administration with an assortment of corporate lawyers (Mickey Kantor and Bernard Nussbaum), financiers (Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs), lobbyists (Howard Paster and Ron Brown) and corporate executives (Mack McLarty).
Eager to demonstrate to CEOs that business need not fear the Democrats, Clinton was just as accommodating to big corporations as his Republican predecessors. He pushed through the NAFTA agreement, extended an R&D tax break worth billions to big business, halved his proposed corporate tax increase, dropped his carbon tax and won the enthusiastic endorsement of the auto industry by breaking a campaign pledge to force the Big Three car makers to increase fuel efficiency by 40 percent.
By late 1994, the elite press was congratulating Clinton for his wise policies and wondering why CEOs were more appreciative of his efforts on their behalf. "For all the arguments about whether Bill Clinton is a new Democrat or an old one, when it comes to pushing US business interests abroad, no recent president has demonstrated Clinton's willingness to roll up his sleeves and dive into the sometimes grubby details of international deal-making," wrote the editors of Time.
Business Week also expressed pleasure at Clinton's approach. "Guess who's coming to dinnerlunch and breakfastsince Bill Clinton moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?" asked the magazine. "After years of hobnobbing with Republican presidents, blue-chip CEOs are discovering that they can do brisk business with a Democratic chief executive, too." Business Week observed that Clinton's "outreach campaign [to the corporate sector] transcends anything the Democrats attempted before." The DNC's finance director, Terry McAuliffe, was quoted as gloating that big corporate donors were "screaming to give us checks."
One man much pleased with the Democrats was Dwayne Andreas, top man at Archer-Daniels-Midland. Once known as the "kingpin of GOP fundraising"his signature was on the check found Nixon's Watergate burglarsAndreas changed trains in 1992 when it looked as if Clinton might capture the presidency. In the two years that followed Clinton's coronation as the Democratic candidate, Andreas gave the party some $270,000 in soft money contributions.
In return for his public cheerleading for Clinton's 1993 budget plan, Andreas got ethanol (the "alternative" corn-based fuel of which ADM was the world's largest producer) exempted from Clinton's BTU tax proposal, an exemption that opened the door to so many other challenges that ultimately the entire plan was scuttled. Clinton also quietly maintained a Bush-era tax subsidy for ethanol that ended up costing the government an estimated $3.4 billion.
But Clinton's biggest gift, granted a mere one week after Andreas co-chaired a fundraising dinner that netted the Democrats $2.5 million in June of 1994, was an EPA ruling that by 1996 one-tenth of all gasoline sold in the United States had to contain ethanol. ADM, which produced 70 percent of the nation's ethanol, gained an estimated $100 million a year as a result of this environmentally dubious decision.
Don Tyson, the Arkansas poultry tycoon and head of Tyson Foods, seemed to prosper no matter which party was in power. But his success during the early Clinton years was so staggering that he and his company were soon being investigated by a special prosecutor. The immediate focus: gifts of Super Bowl tickets, travel and a scholarship for the girlfriend of Clinton's first Agriculture Secretary, Mike Espy, who was charged with overseeing and enforcing rules on the chicken industry. (Espy was acquitted in a jury trial. But Tyson Foods pleaded guilty to corruption charges and agreed to pay $6 million in fines.)
Tyson's expansion into the fishing industrysoon becoming the second largest company fishing for Pacific whitingalso became the subject of controversy. In 1993 and 1994, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown took the highly unusual step of vetoing his own department's Fisheries Council in two decisions that collectively meant millions of dollars for Tyson Foods.
In the first case, which came a year after Tyson purchased the Arctic Alaska Fishing Company (and renamed it Tyson Seafood Group), Brown allotted 70 percent of the highly-prized whiting catch to Tyson and other companies with massive factory trawlers and reserved only 30 percent for small fishermen, who have been increasingly edged out of the business by the giant firms. The Commerce Department's Pacific Fisheries Management Council had suggested that the trawlers get just 26 percent.
In 1994, the Council ruled that factory trawlers, of which Tyson owned two, should pay 20 times more for permits than small boat owners, reflecting their far larger capacity. But Brown stepped in again, ruling that the ratio be cut to 12-to-1, thereby saving Tyson $800,000 with the stroke of a pen.
* * *
When Clinton came to DC, he brought Mack McLarty, formerly with the natural gas behemoth ARKLA and a golfing pal of the tycoons of Arkansas, with him as chief of staff. Along with the corporate lobbyist Vernon Jordon, McLarty played a decisive role in choosing Clinton's cabinet, including Alice Rivlin at the Office of Management and Budget, Bruce Babbitt at Interior, Ron Brown at Commerce and former Al Gore staffers Carol Browner as administrator of the EPA and Katie McGinty as supervisor of the White House Office of Environmental Quality.
All were cut from the same pro-business, anti-regulatory cloth spun by the Democratic Leadership Council. In a move that was later to yield useful dividends, the Clinton transition team also stocked the administration with a cluster of 24 top-level staffers from the ranks of DC-based environmental groups. At the head was George Frampton, former president of the Wilderness Society, picked to serve as assistant secretary of Interior.
It didn't take McLarty long to exert his veto power over environmental policy. The administration's initial budget request to Congress included a provision to reform federal policies governing gold mining and subsidized grazing and timber sales on public lands. Widely supported by greens, these provisions would protected millions of acres of public forest and grassland from clearcutting, mining and livestock grazing, while saving the federal treasury nearly a billion dollars a year. Instead, it started a firestorm in the public lands states of the West. A group of western Democrats, led by Senator Max Baucus of Montana and Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado (who later skipped to the Republican side of the aisle), wrote an angry letter denouncing the provision and threatening to launch a filibuster against it on the senate floor. McLarty swiftly invited the bellicose senators to the White House where he obediently agreed to pull the measure from the budget request.
Bruce Babbitt, whose office had drafted the proposal, found out about the McLarty's deal-making the next night at a cocktail party. His unlikely informant was Jay Hair, still the head of the National Wildlife Federation. "The son of a bitch," Babbitt raged. "He didn't even have the fucking courtesy to ask me about it or even to tell me what he'd done."
McLarty's cave-in occurred on the eve of the first ever-presidential summit on environmental issues: the Presidential Conference on Northwest Forests, held in Portland, Oregon, on April 2, 1993. The timber summit, as it came to be known, had its roots in the acrid controversy over the northern spotted owl and the clearcutting of ancient forests on federal lands in the Pacific Northwest.
The spotted owl, which lives only in large stands of old-growth trees, had been listed as a threatened species in 1990. The following year William Dwyer, a federal judge in Seattle, halted all logging on 6 million acres of old-growth forest in Oregon, Washington and northern California. The Reagan-appointed judge excoriated the government for a "systematic disregard" of the nation's environmental laws. The timber industry predictably bellowed that the injuntion was going to put them out of business and throw 100,000 millworkers and loggers onto the unemployment lines. Environmentalists responded that the decline in the owl's population was just the beginning of a larger annulment of old-growth dwelling species, including dwindling stocks of Pacific salmon, marten, Pacific fisher, and marbled murreletsall imperiled by logging. The most puissant predators of the forest, Weyerhauser, Georgia-Pacific and International Paper, which owned their own highly productive lands, were not affected by the injunction and, in fact, had seen their profits soar.
During their campaign swings through the Northwest, Clinton and Gore promised that within 90 days of taking office he would convene a summit to resolve the "timber crisis" once and for all. "I want to produce a legal plan for managing these forests," Clinton assured voters, "and get the logs rolling back into the mills."
So on April 2, 1993, Clinton summoned his top cabinet officials, corporate executives, millworkers, loggers, economists, bureaucrats, the Cardinal of Seattle, forest sociologists, academic and agency scientists and mainstream environmentalists to Portland, Oregon.
The timber summit itself proved to be an orchestrated piece of theater designed to allow Clinton to demonstrate his affection for nature and to show that he "felt the pain" of laid off millworkers. At the same time, the President humbly deferred to the true source of the timber workers' economic woes: Weyerhaeuser vice president Charlie Bingham, who commanded the exportation of billions of board feet of raw logs to mills overseas. Bingham and Clinton had known each other for years.
At the close of the day, Clinton bragged of taking the conflict "out of the courtroom and into the conference room," and promised that his administration would produce a "scientifically credible and legally responsible plan" within in a mere 90 days. The stated goal of the plan was to provide a steady flow of timber to Northwest mills and to protect the federally-owned habitat of the northern spotted owl and Pacific salmon stocks.
Insinuated into every line of Clinton's screed, however, was the promise that the roar of chainsaws would be sacrosanct in the federal woods, immune from even modest attempts to slow the frenzied pace of the logging of ancient trees or the export of unprocessed logs. And so it came to pass.
Clinton swiftly assembled a task force of federal bureaucrats, headed by Forest Service research ecologist Jack Ward Thomas and forester Jerry Franklin, who also happened to be a board member of the Wilderness Society. The scientists devised eight options for the president's consideration. None of them permitted enough logging to satisfy Clinton's political objectives to appease the timber industry and other corporations watching from the sidelines. Clinton and his Interior Secretary, Bruce Babbitt, instructed the team to concoct another alternative, the infamous Option Nine.
While Option Nine reduced the amount of logging allowed on national forest lands, it failed to set aside any permanently protect old-growth forest preserves, and permitted clearcutting in most ancient forest groves and inside the most vital spotted owl and salmon habitat. In fact, the environmental analysis accompanying the Clinton plan admitted that this politically-driven approach placed hundreds of species at increased risk of extinction, including the spotted, marbled murrelet and dozens of stocks of salmon and steelhead trout.
The scientists working on the project were prohibited from talking to the press, and their leader, Jack Ward Thomas, promptly shredded documents that revealed the fake science behind Option Nine.
Months later, Clinton tapped Thomas as the new chief of the Forest Service. Leaders of the DC environmental groups dutifully claimed Thomas's appointment as a major victory, despite his role in developing the new old-growth logging plan.
Thomas was known as a brilliant ecologist, but also as an arrogant and mean-spirited quisling, dating back to his days managing a Forest Service research station in eastern Oregon called the Starker Forest. The Starker Forest was meant to be immune from industrial logging. Here stood one of the last untouched stands of old-growth ponderosa pines in the Blue Mountains. It had become a Mecca for scientists studying the ecology of old-growth systems in the dry interior West. As chief research ecologist, Thomas managed the land and decided who could conduct studies there. When research money began to dry up in the 1980s, Thomas secretly sold an area of prime forest to Boise-Cascade, which promptly clearcut it. When scientists protested, Thomas threatened to kill their research projects and ban future studies on the forest.
Within months of assuming his new post in the Clinton administration, Thomas approved the biggest timber sale in the modern history of the Forest Service. The so-called Prince-of-Wales timber sale on the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska called for the clearcutting of thousands of acres of ancient rainforest and the construction of more than 100 miles of logging roads into an ecologically fragile and previously roadless landscape. The sale, which wnt to Lousiania-Pacific, prompted strenuous objections from numerous biologists and geologists within the Forest Service.
But Thomas didn't tolerate internal dissent. In the spring of 1994, Thomas fired two Forest Service whistleblowers. Ernie Nunn and Curtis Bates had both stood up to the timber and mining companies in Montana. The pair first ran into trouble back in 1990, when they signed a letter which described the Forest Service has being dominated by the whims of the extractive industries and out of touch with the environmental concerns of the American public. That letter sparked such a revolt inside the Forest Service that the Bush administration attempted to sack the dissident forest supervisors. This Republican bid failed, rebuffed by congressional hearings and public outcry. Four years later, with a Democratic president and a Democratic congress, Thomas moved swiftly and with impunity to fire Bates and Nunn.
Despite these outrages, many of the big green groups remained locked in a necrotic embrace with the Clinton administration. The Sierra Club's Carl Pope, a long-time pal of Al Gore, hailed the Option Nine logging plan as a "fair and reasonable compromise." The National Audubon Society's Brock Evans, long touted as the best environmental lobbyist on the Hill, pronounced it a "shaky victory."
The Clinton administration floated a draft version of Option Nine before the public. Then Bruce Babbitt called on environmental leaders to annul the very legal injunctions they had won in Judge Dwyer's courtroom against logging in spotted owl habitat. As a "gesture of goodwill" to the Clinton administration, Babbitt demanded that the environmentalists swallow a raft of timber sales in ancient forests. If they refused, Babbitt warned, the Clinton administration would ask Congress to overturn the injunction with what's known as a sufficiency rider, a despicable legal tactic from of the Reagan/Bush years. With such a rider, Congress can simply over-ride existing legal hurdles, such as the Endangered Species Act, and make the logging immune from future challenges in the federal courts.
Lawyers for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (the self-proclaimed "dream team" of environmental law firms) forthwith arm-twisted its clients into handing over several thousand acres of old-growth forest for logging and then, months later, relinquished the Dwyer injuction itself.
Grassroots greens vigorously resisted this surrender. But the Defense Fund, which held a near monopoly on non-profit environmental litigation, threatened to abandon any clients who refused to go along with its advice. One of the strange pathologies afflicting contemporary environmentalism is that a conservation group without a law firm behind it suffers extreme pangs of institutional impotence. "The problem was that SCLDF's arguments stemmed from political, not legal, judgments," recalls Oregon environmentalist Larry Tuttle. "And those arguments were shaped in large measure by their own economic self-interest, that is their right to sue and reap heft attorneys' fees from the government, and not the future the forests or the spotted owls."
Eventually, the environmentalists collapsed. And in the spring of 1994, the logging of ancient forests resumed for the first time in four years. Things had indeed been better with George Bush and gridlock.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.â€
Buckminster Fuller
January 28 - 30, 2011 A Concise History of the Rise and Fall of the Enviro Establishment
How Green Became the Color of Money
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR A Touch of Babbittry Bruce Babbitt's inglorious role in brokering the Deal of Shame, which restarted logging in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest, shocked many greens. After all, Babbitt was viewed as one of them. He had been president of the League of Conservation Voters, and many had seen him as the eco-chevalier of the Clinton administration. But the gratuitous stab in the back should have surprised no one.
Babbitt came from a big-time ranching family fed and fattened on the western traditions of cheap water, free range and unregulated mining. When mineworkers in Arizona walked off the job citing unsafe and unfair working conditions at the Phelps Dodge silver mine in the early 1980s, then Governor Babbitt called in the National Guard to crush the strike on behalf of the mining company, which had long planned the confrontation in consort with the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School as a test case for breaking strikes and unions with permanent "replacement workers."
Babbitt also strong-armed federal park officials in order to secure approval of a resort complex near the rim of the Grand Canyon. The resort was owned by a long-time friend and political supporter.
But Babbitt is perhaps most notorious for his single-minded pursuit of Colorado River water. The multi-billion dollar Central Arizona Project channeled millions of 'acre feet' of precious water into sprawling developments absurdly located in the Arizona desert to assuage the thirst of real estate czars in Phoenix and Tucson. While Babbitt supported mighty water allocations to his state, he opposed them for his neighbors, vigorously objecting to water claims made by California and Utah. These western water battles brought Babbitt into the embrace of the infamous Richard Carver, a commissioner in Nye County, Nevada. Carver was a key leader of the 'county supremacy' movement, which asserts that the federal government does not have the constitutional right to own land. Carver promoted his cause at gatherings of far right groups across the West, most notably at the Jubilation, an event organized by the racist Posse Comitatus.
In August 1994, Carver ignited a war with the federal government when he mounted a bulldozer and plowed an illegal road into the Toiyabe National Forest, nearly running over two Forest Service rangers. Carver, who touted Babbitt as one of his closest friends, threatened to shoot anyone who tried to stop him. Although harassment of a federal employee is a felony, punishable by a $250,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison, six months passed and the federal government took no action. Finally, only a civil suit was filed, and that against the Nye County government itself, no Carver. Some local BLM and Forest Service rangers believed that Babbitt intervened with the Department of Justice investigation on behalf of his friend Carver.
Other friends of Bruce Babbitt haven't fared nearly so well. Take Jim Baca, who came from one of the oldest Hispanic families in the Southwest and who served for several years as the lands commissioner for the state of New Mexico, where he acquired a reputation as a progressive and hard-nosed conservationist. But Baca's anti-cattle grazing stance earned him the enmity of ranchers throughout the West. Over the objections of the National Cattlemen's Association and the American Mining Congress, Babbitt chose Bace to oversee the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the agency in charge of administering about 250 million acres of public lands in the Westlands long viewed as the private dominion of cattle ranchers and gold mining companies.
Baca tried to make ranchers pay market rates for the use of public grasslands. (At the time, ranchers paid less than a fifth of grazing rates charged on private and state landsa $200 million a year subsidy.) Then Baca went after the gold companies. The feisty new head of the BLM became a vigorous advocate for the repeal of the 1872 Mining Law, which allowed gold and silver mining companies to claim title to public lands for as little as $2.50 an acre and then pay no royalties on the billions of dollars of minerals they extract. Baca fought for an 8 percent royalty on mining of all public minerals and for an end to the transfer of federal lands to mining companies. Finally, Baca became the first BLM director to openly advocate for the need for more legally-designated wilderness. He supported setting aside nearly 20 million acres of high desert and mountain country in Utah, Idaho and Oregon as wilderness: closed to logging, mining and grazing.
This ran Baca athwart very powerful interests, many residing in the Democratic Party. Baca's most vicious opponent turned out to be the Democratic Governor of Idaho, Cecil Andrus, former Secretary of the Interior and a former employee of the Wilderness Society, where Baca had once served as a director. In December of 1993, Andrus attacked Baca in a letter to Babbitt, pronouncing: "My friend, frankly, you don't have enough political allies in the West to treat us this shabbily." Later, Andrus, who after retiring as governor joined the boards of two mining companies, threatened publicly, "It's either Baca or Babbitt. One of them's gotta go."
A few days later Babbitt announced in the Washington Post that Baca had been unceremoniously transferred from his BLM post to a vague new role as a policy advisor to Babbitt. There was a problem. No one had told Baca about the move and he resisted, publicly.
"I thought that Babbitt at least owed it to me as a long-time friend to explain why I was being ousted," Baca said. "I wanted him to ask me for my resignation personally." Babbitt, chastened by criticism from the press, pulled back. He held off removing Baca for a month. Then he called Baca into his office and told him to either accept the demotion or tender his resignation. Baca resigned. A month later, as he contemplated a run for governor of New Mexico, Baca said, "Babbitt can't stand up for his principles, because he has no backbone."
The Baca debacle was eerily reminiscent of a similar purge of federal land managers during the first Bush administration, when White House chief of staff John Sununu engineered the removal of regional directors of the National Park Service and Forest Service who had stoop up against the timber, mining and oil companies which wanted increased access to the public lands adjacent to Yellowstone National Park. This firing of federal land managers sparked roars of protest from environmentalists, prompting congressional hearings and stories in the press and on TV. However, the national environmental leadership remained strangely mute following the removal of Baca.
The man Babbitt chose to replace Baca, Mike Dombeck, was much friendlier to ranching and mining interests. Six months after his appointment Dombeck drafted a secret memo to Bruce Babbitt outlining a plan that would have seemed radical during the tenure of James Watt. As a budget-cutting measure, Dombeck advised Babbitt that the BLM could either turn over 110 million acres of federal land to the states or sell them off to the highest bidder. An attempt earlier in the 20th century to dispose of public lands and resources had sent former Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall to prison in the Teapot Dome scandal.
Babbitt's right hand man at Interior was Tom Collier. Before joining the Clinton administration, Collier and Babbitt worked together at the DC law firm / lobby shop Steptoe and Johnson, where their clients included many of the same companies they were later in charge of regulating at Interior, including Burlington-Northern, Aluminum Companies of America, Canadian Forest Industries Council, Canyon Forest Village Corp., Sealaska, Yavapai-Prescott Tribe and the Forest Industries Committee on Timber Taxation and Valuation.
One of the companies previously represented by Collier and Babbitt was Norwegian Cruise Lines, which held a lucrative permit for cruise visits into Glacier Bay National Park in southeast Alaska. For years the company and former Alaska Senator Frank Murkowski pressured the National Park Service to increase the number of cruise visits into the narrow fjords of Glacier Bay. The Park Service resisted, fearing harmful affects from the huge ships on orca, gray whales and other marine life. In fact, Park Service biologists were hoping to curtail the number of cruise ships permitted in the bay, if not ban them outright. Then Babbitt and Collier intervened. They overruled Park Service scientists and arbitrarily raised the number of cruise ship visits, leading to millions in profits for their former clients.
* * *
In the spring of 1995 the Clinton administration's merciless pursuit of free trade pacts collided head on with the world's most glamorous animal: Delphinus delphisdolphins to you.
Here's how this ugly episode went down.
For many years Mexico had been whining about being prohibited from selling its canned tuna north of the border. The US had mandated that only dolphin-free tuna be imported into the country, requiring methods of fishing that don't snag dolphins as part of the tuna haul. This prohibition was one of the great victories of the 1980s, but no sooner was the NAFTA agreement signed by the Clinton administration than Mexico denounced the US tuna law as a cruel restraint on free trade and demanded its rescission.
Prodded by Mickey Kantor, the chief US trade rep, the Clinton White House speedily assented, but cautioned that some national environmental organizations would have to be wheeled forward to provide political cover against assaults from the volatile and potent dolphin lobby. Enter the Environmental Defense Fund, a fanatical espouser of free trade as the salve for more or less everything. EDF was vociferously pro-NAFTA and had positioned itself as a long-time foe of dolphin protection laws as "ideologically unsound."
The crucial meeting to settle the dolphins' fate took place at the Mexican embassy in Washington, DC in July of 1995. Here US and Mexican bureaucrats hunkered down with executives from the Environmental Defense Fund, National Wildlife Federation, World Wildlife Fund and the Center for Marine Conservation. Carefully excluded from this parlay were pro-dolphin groups such as Earth Island Institute and the Humane Society. Also shut out were the congressional members and staffer who had framed the 1992 law protecting the dolphins, seven million of which had perished in the waters of the eastern Pacific between 1970 and 1992.
The secret session in the Mexican embassy was not an auspicious occasion for the world's brainiest mammal. The conspirators agreed that the 1992 law should be over-turned and new statutory language devised that would allow Mexico's dolphin-lethal tuna to roll north into US supermarkets. Staffers from the EDF and World Wildlife Fund would write the new bill in language congenial to corporate-friendly greens with help from Bud Walsh, an attorney who had labored for big business and the Wise Use Movement.
Next came the task of selling dolphin death on the Hill. In the forefront of the lobbying was former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth, who had been brought on by Clinton to serve as Undersecretary of State for global environmental affairs. Wirth dispatched hand-written notes to crucial senators urging them to sign on to the bill and promoted it as a a "good package with a sound science/enviro base with Breaux and Stevens as sponsors."
Now, when it comes to environmental matters John Breaux of Louisiana and Ted Stevens of Alaska were four-square for rape and pillage and long carried water for Don Tyson, Arkansas's chicken and fish king. But some seasoned observers of Beltway politics were puzzled at Wirth's stance for the dolphin killers. Early in 1995 Wirth had taken the trouble to leak to the Washington Post a memo he'd sent to the White House urging Clinton to stand firm against those around him counseling sell-outs of Mother Nature.
But the dark side of Tim Wirth's environmentalism goes back to his days in the senate and his friendship with Senator John Heinz, the ketchup heir, with whom he had drafted "Project 88," the detailed manifesto of free-market environmentalism, which zestfully encouraged replacement of federal laws and regulations with cash inducements for corporate pillagers to behave themselves.
After Senator Heinz's death, Wirth and his wife Wren grew especially close to his widow Teresa Heinz. Following a period of grieving, the widow soon pressed forward into a romance with Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. The tinder ignited at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, where they mightily impressed other junketeers by conversing in French.
Teresa Heinz, the daughter of a Portuguese doctor, was brought up as a child of empire in Mozambique, went to university in apartheid South Africa and apparently brought with her to the United States an ardent veneration for the capitalist system, and indeed for capitalists. Fortified by Heinz millions, Teresa made her way onto the board of the Environmental Defense Fund andin the late 1980s when the EDF was heavily involved in various Amazonian promotions and fundraising endeavorsused to sweep into the western Amazon in great style, gazing with marked disfavor on the unruly rubber-tappers mustered at the Rio Branco airport to meet her. Frantic EDF staffers would plead with the seringueiros to shed their radical buttons and signs lest Madame Teresa conclude that the EDF had fallen into bed with Third World revolutionaries, instead of promoting parks from which Indians and rubber-tappers could swiftly be evicted.
Being a member of the Heinz family added clout to Teresa's stern ideological views, clout in the form of a fortune then estimated at between $670 million and $740 million. Hence the moral crisis for Senator John Kerry. Teresa Heinz lobbied forcefully for the new death-to-dolphins bill. But her new husband (the couple had married in July of 1995) was a doughty dolphin ally, possibly because this splendid mammal is not profuse on the St. George's Banks, nor in other haunts of the New England fishing fleet.
If a last-ditch defense of the 1992 law was to be mounted, John Kerry was the very man to lead it. But the senator had new cares and burdens. When he gave up Morgan Fairchild for Teresa Heinz and joined with her in the refreshments of matrimony, Kerry was asked whether he would use his wife's fortune to stake his political races. Kerry said he wouldn't. Unless, that is, his opponent also put up family money.
In the waning days of 1995, Massachusetts's Gingrich-loving Governor, William Weld, announced that he would challenge Kerry. The wealthy Weld proved a formidable opponent. Kerry thus confronted an enormous temptation to turn to his wife for help. His zeal for the dolphins declined markedly.
Meanwhile Teresa busily pressed the Heinz Corporation, whose subsidiary, Star-Kist, is the world's leading tuna processor. Having invested millions in dolphin-safe fishing fleets and having mined excellent publicity for its "dolphin-safe tuna," Star-Kist was loath to see the 1992 law changed. It claimed that the new law would cost the company 6,000 jobs in American Samoa. Nonetheless, Teresa, one of the Heinz Corporation's largest stockholders, lobbied Star-Kist to adopt a more cold-blooded attitude toward the dolphins. All this work paid off in 1997 when congress finally passed the dolphin death act.
In December of 1995, Teresa Heinz, through her foundation, disbursed the largest single environmental grant in US history: $20 million for an environmental center to promulgate the free-market economics her late husband outlined before his death.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.â€
Buckminster Fuller
February 4 - 6, 2011 A Concise History of the Rise and Fall of the Enviro Establishment
How Green Became the Color of Money
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
"Smoke Screens" How is power really leveraged in Washington? Read Bob Packwood's diaries. The private record of this disgraced Oregon senator and top recipient of campaign contributions from the timber industry from 1985 to 1995 tells the story.
Packwood told the chief lobbyist for the National Lumber Wholesalers Association that if the Lumber Wholesalers wanted him to gut the Endangered Species Act, a hefty contribution was needed. Money duly flowed into Packwood's campaign treasuryand he promptly began attacking the spotted owl.
Packwood was a Republican. Democrats are no different. The leading recipient in the House of timber industry money during that same period was Norm Dicks, the Democrat from Washington.
After the Republicans seized control of Congress at the end of 1994, green groups cried tremulously that foxes were in charge of the coup. They were partially right. At the Senate Interior Committee, chaired by Frank Murkowski of Alaska, Mark Rey became chief of staff. In his previous job, Rey was the top lobbyist for the American Forest and Paper Association, a $60 million a year lobbying giant. Under Rey's watch the rewriting of the nation's environmental laws began.
The green groups looked in desperation to the White House and the veto power which was all that stood between nature and the corporate predators. But the mighty veto sword remained in its scabbard. Clinton and his number two, Al Gore did nothing. The truth is that the fox had been in charge of the coop long before November of 1994.
Consider the career of Peter Knight. From 1979 to 1991, Knight worked as chief legislative aide for Senator Al Gore. Then he was tapped as chairman of the vice presidential campaign that designated Gore as electoral flypaper for the green vote. Knight duly became vice chairman in charge of personnel for the Clinton-Gore transition team, overseen by deal-maker extraordinaire Vernon Jordan, who counted among his innumerable obligations to the corporate sector the duties of lobbyist for the timber industry.
Peter Knight later emerged in shining armor as a lawyer-lobbyist for the Washington law firm of Wunder, Diefenderfer, Cannon and Thelen. Among this firm's prime clients, with who Knight dealt on a regular basis, were Manville of asbestos fame, the solid waste giant Browning Ferris Industries and two of the nation's largest forest products companies: Riverwood and Kimberly-Clark. The firm also represented the American Forest and Paper Association, where Mark Rey once toiled to make the wild woods safer for the chainsaw.
Why was the reaction to the Clinton betrayals on the environment so subdued? Perhaps, like the Christian Right during the era of Bush, the Beltway greens felt there was nowhere else to turn. It was also clear that many lodged their hopes in Vice President Al Gore.
Gore's reputation among the Washington press corps as environmentalist was largely based on his grandstanding at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and his tedious book Earth in the Balance, which stressed environmental discipline for the Third World, while neglecting to mention the corporate plunder of North America's forests, river and mountains. (This is nothing new, of course. Heading the rush to the Amazon to protest deforestation in the late 1980s were many US politicians who would be aghast at the thought of curbing the depredations of timber companies operating in North America.)
Gore was a tireless promoter of free-market environmentalism, and the probable ghost-writer of Clinton's noxious "the invisible hand has a green thumb" line. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Gore argued with increasing stridency that the bracing forces of market capitalism are potent curatives for the ecological entropy bearing down on the American environment. He was a passionate disciple of the gospel of efficiency, suffused with an inchoate technophilia.
At EPA, Browner wasted little time in promoting ideas such as wetland trading, which during the Bush administration had met with howls of derision from the green lobby. One of her very first actions was to the put the imprimatur of the EPA on the Everglades deal she had brokered a few years earlier in Florida. This was a precedent of sorts: the first time the federal government had officially sanctioned the pollution of a national park.
Following in Gore's footsteps, Browner initiated a campaign to reinvent the EPA by beginning to peel away "excessive environmental regulations." The theme here echoes back to the late 1970s and the writings of Stephen Breyer, then an aide to Senator Ted Kennedy, who Clinton elevated in 1994 to a spot on the Supreme Court. Breyer postulated that federal regulations should be evaluated through two tests: risk assessment and cost/benefit analysis. The costs of pollution control would be weighed against the heavily-discounted benefits of human health and environmental qualitya certain recipe for more hazardous waste landfills, dioxin-belching incinerators and higher cancer rates.
Browner's first target was the so-called Delaney Clause in the Food and Drug Act, which placed a strict prohibition against any detectable level of carcinogens in processed food. Though long the bane of the American Farm Bureau and the Chemical Manufacturer's Association, the Delaney Clause remained inviolate, even through the Reagan and Bush years. Within months of taking office Browner announced that she felt this standard was too severe and moved to gut it. "We just don't have unlimited financial resources to enforce all these measures and that can create a backlash," Browner complained. "So we need to be realistic. We need the strongest possible standards, but we need flexibility in how to achieve those standards."
* * *
When Bill Clinton journeyed to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in the fall of 1997 to preside over the creation of a new national monument, he quipped to reporters that it was disappointing there was so much fog in Arizona. He complained that he could hardly see across the giant chasm. That wasn't fog, Mr. President, it was smog, clogging the air in one of the most remote and least populated areas in North America.
Grand Canyon is not the only national park threatened by bad air. In the parks of the California Sierras, King's Canyon, Yosemite, and Sequoia, the toxic compounds in the air are stunting tree growth and killing alpine flora. Similar situations afflict Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, Mesa Verde in Colorado, and Quatico-Superior, the luscious country of forests and lakes on the Minnesota and Canadian border.
The situation in America's cities was even worse. In places such as Salt Lake City and Minneapolis, more children were getting sick and more elderly people were dying from just breathing the air than at any time since the mid-1960s. Yet the deterioration of America's air aroused little attention from the nation's major media outlets or politicians.
Indeed, one of the least covered environmental stories of 1996 was the EPA's announcement of new air pollution standards, proclaimed on a hot news day: the Friday after Thanksgiving, November 29, when most Americans were out shopping their way into the next holiday. On that Friday the EPA finally delivered its long-awaited new report on air quality, concentrating on smog and soot. The EPA's last assessment was in 1987.
Industry had been awaiting the EPA report, which was ordered by a federal court in 1992 after a successful suit by the American Lung Association and a coalition of environmental groups, with considerable nervousness. And with good reason.
The story begins more than 20 years ago, in the policy battles preceding the passage of the Clean Air Act. Environmental policymakers and their scientific advisers were looking at two principal classes of compounds fueling the smog process: hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides.
Now the particles have come home to kill; our air has indeed become more toxic. No fewer than 185 different scientific studies all tend to that conclusion. Around 60,000 Americans die prematurely every year from respiratory illnesses and heart attacks linked to fine particle exposure. Some 250,000 children a year fall victim to aggravated asthma and other respiratory disorders caused by breathing toxic air, and the rate has increased by 11 percent since 1980. Respiratory problems are now the leading cause of hospital admissions of children. In all, nearly 74 million Americans are daily exposed to harmful levels of particulate air pollution.
In the 1970s the bureaucrats decided that it would be easier to control hydrocarbons as emitted in vapors of various solvents, including benzene, kerosene, gasoline, and partially burned fuel in automobile exhaust. Regulation would be a matter of controlling nozzles at the gas pumps, adding tailpipe catalysts to burn unused fuel, controlling the vapors in dry cleaning shops, and so forth.
This option seemed simpler than what would be required for even a minimal assault on oxides of nitrogen, generated by combustion of fuels such as coal, gas, kerosene, and crude oil, and controlled by lowering the temperature of combustion. Simpler maybe, but wrong. As a 1992 study sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences showed, two decades' worth of stringent regulatory effort on hydrocarbons has yielded very little in the reduction of air pollution--certainly nothing like the progress predicted.
Industry's nervousness at the EPA review of air quality stemmed from the fact that the early decision to go easy on oxides of nitrogen meant in effect giving a pass to the utilities, incineration plants, and oil refineries. But it's clear now that if air quality is to be improved, these industries must be targeted.
The Geneva Steel Co. in Provo, Utah, provided one particularly vivid illustration. In the 1980s Dr. C. Arden Pope, an economist at Brigham Young University, got some students to start examining hospital admissions in Provo, cross-referencing them to levels of production at the Provo steel plant. The students' findings were dramatic.
When Geneva Steel was running full-tilt, admissions for lung ailments shot up, with the rate doubling for young children. The test had the virtue of extreme clarity. The area is inhabited by Mormons, who don't smoke, and there is no other industry. The perpetrators were clear enough: tiny particles from the steel plant, one-thirtieth the diameter of a human hair. Pope's study caused a huge commotion in the enviro-scientific and enviro-bureaucratic circles. Other studies confirmed the particularly lethal effect of fine particulates containing arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, vanadium, and zinc. The EPA's previous focus had been on large particulates, such as road dust, fly ash, cement kiln dust, and other construction-related pollution.
In anticipation of the EPA report, industry lobbies--among them the Air Quality Standards Coalition spearheaded by Geneva Steel--tried to discredit the health data and science while simultaneously stressing that the utilities, steel plants, and refineries had done all they could do, and that once again the regulatory axe should fall on the motorist and the dry cleaner down the block. Speaking for the American Petroleum Institute, Paul Bailey said that fine particulate matter was no big deal and people seemed "actually to adapt to it." Speaking for the Automobile Manufacturers, Gerald Esper said that the publicity over increased deaths caused by exposure to fine particulates was exaggerated because "many of the deaths are of elderly people and others who are sick who would have died within days anyway."
By late summer in 1997, the 1,500 page report was tossed nervously around the government, from the EPA to OMB and through Al Gore's office at the White House. The EPA's scientists recommended that standards on ozone and fine particulates be drastically tightened. Carol Browner had given herself bureaucratic cover by establishing a review group of industry scientists. The latter group recommended far more modest tightening of the standards. Browner ended up splitting the difference between the two. As a result, the EPA estimated that somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people will continue to die each year from breathing toxic air.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.â€
Buckminster Fuller
Jeffrey St Clair nails the false saint of the green movement:
Quote:Gore's reputation among the Washington press corps as environmentalist was largely based on his grandstanding at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and his tedious book Earth in the Balance, which stressed environmental discipline for the Third World, while neglecting to mention the corporate plunder of North America's forests, river and mountains. (This is nothing new, of course. Heading the rush to the Amazon to protest deforestation in the late 1980s were many US politicians who would be aghast at the thought of curbing the depredations of timber companies operating in North America.)
Gore was a tireless promoter of free-market environmentalism, and the probable ghost-writer of Clinton's noxious "the invisible hand has a green thumb" line. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Gore argued with increasing stridency that the bracing forces of market capitalism are potent curatives for the ecological entropy bearing down on the American environment. He was a passionate disciple of the gospel of efficiency, suffused with an inchoate technophilia.
At EPA, Browner wasted little time in promoting ideas such as wetland trading, which during the Bush administration had met with howls of derision from the green lobby. One of her very first actions was to the put the imprimatur of the EPA on the Everglades deal she had brokered a few years earlier in Florida. This was a precedent of sorts: the first time the federal government had officially sanctioned the pollution of a national park.
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta." The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
St Clair mentions our great Republican Senator Bob Packwood at the beginning of his latest segment.I thought it would be good to introduce people to Ex-Senator Packwood,so I found this article.Packwood was slime,and it was because he couldn't keep his hands off women that he finally was brought down.
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The other Packwood scandal - ex-Sen. Bob Packwood's misuse of influence and campaign funds - includes related articles - Cover Story
In the stranger-than-fiction world of Washington politics, it's worth remembering that former Sen. Bob Packwood once had to be dragged from his office and then carried onto the Senate floor--feet-first--before he'd vote on a campaign finance reform measure.
It was the cleaning woman who tipped off the sergeant-at-arms and a couple of aides to Packwood's hiding place on that February midnight in 1988, but even after the authorities unlocked Packwood's office door the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee refused to surrender, using his shoulder to try to keep them out.
The police prevailed, but Packwood won where it counted; the campaign finance reform bill, like similar ones before and since, was killed by a Republican-led filibuster. Packwood was thus freed to return to what we now know was his senatorial style: trading favors, wielding power, selling access, chasing campaign cash--and groping women.
We know because six years later it was again women--former staffers, campaign aides and lobbyists--who blew the whistle on Packwood, charging him with what amounted to a decades-long pattern of sexual misconduct. And when the Senate Ethics Committee began to investigate, Packwood again tried to bar the door--denying the charges and then saying he couldn't remember what he'd done, all the while stonewalling investigators and working to discredit his accusers. But for all his altering of diary entries, Packwood could not rewrite history.
In the end the Ethics Committee's unanimous vote recommending Packwood's expulsion from the Senate was based on more than his abuse of women. While the committee's investigation had confirmed "at least 18 separate unwanted and unwelcome sexual advances" and numerous instances of evidence-tampering, it also concluded that Packwood had "abused his position of power ... by engaging in a deliberate and systematic plan to enhance his personal financial position by soliciting, encouraging and coordinating employment opportunities for his wife from persons who had a particular interest in legislation or issues that [he] could influence."
In fact, the diaries reveal far more than that. Packwood's diaries and supporting documentation--correspondence, staff memos, records of votes and committee testimony, plus reports filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC)--indicate that:
* Packwood not only sought financial favors from persons needing his legislative or regulatory help, but also did their bidding: speaking at committee hearings; instructing his staff to write memos to address their concerns; sponsoring and tailoring legislation; putting in a good word with regulators; championing the nominee for a government job.
* He was almost always soliciting campaign funds, and he judged most contacts, meetings and some political decisions according to how much support--and money--they would generate. In a September 1992 diary entry he recounted a visit from a local businessperson. "He gave me $1,000," Packwood said, adding, "that's worth 10 minutes."
* In some cases Packwood knowingly skirted or violated federal campaign laws.
* Packwood and key supporters and lobbyists operated in a small, incestuous, revolving-door world. Former aides became lobbyists, fundraisers, campaign consultants and corporate executives; lobbyists and executives became friends and sycophants.
* In addition to using his own Senate office and employees for political campaign purposes--and attempting to cover it up--Packwood advised his Republican colleagues to destroy any evidence of such activities in their own offices.
* Some of Packwood's "requests" for contributions to his legal defense trust fund stopped just short of extortion.
Packwood's diaries depict a world in which money rules, and where the people and special-interest groups that provide it have extraordinary power. The evidence provided by the Packwood case suggests that the current political and campaign financing system works because the people in office need the people with the money--and vice versa. The system creates, in Packwood's words, "a happy relationship"--for an extremely narrow group of individuals and interests.
Bob and the Fat Cats
October 18, 1989: I did have time to come back to the office, talk to Tim Lee and Tim says he'll be happy to put up $10, 000 a year for Georgie. Talked to Ron Crawford. He'll put up $7,500 a year for Georgie. That's three out of three and I haven't even hit up [Name Deleted] or Steve Saunders. I've got to handle this carefully. I don't want in any way there to be any quid pro quo. I'm not going to do anything for these guys that I would not do anyway. ... I think I'll ask them for $5,000 apiece and hold it in reserve and indicate to Georgie that if she can make $20,000 I'll make sure she gets another $20,000. Then I'll come up with more and that will give me enough of an asset base to be able to buy a small two bedroom townhouse.
March 27,1990: I said, "Well, if you're going to support Georgie in the style to which I'd like her to become accustomed..." And he laughed. He says, "Yeah, I'll guarantee the $7,500 for five years." And he said, "If you're chairman of the Finance Committee I can probably double that." We both laughed. I don't intend to do that. I frankly don't intend this supplement to Georgie to last more than five years in any event. I'd also talked with Tim Lee today to re-verify his $10,000 and $10,000 from Bill Furman for Georgie. She'll have basically $30,000 to $40,000 in income for five years as long as I remain in the Senate.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.â€
Buckminster Fuller
