http://www.rollingstone.com/features/nationalaffairs/featuregen.asp?pid=2154

See also a copy of this article on Common Dreams at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1120-01.htm

Crimes Against Nature

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

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

George W. Bush will go down in history as America's worst
environmental president. In a ferocious three-year attack,
the Bush administration has initiated more than 200 major
rollbacks of America's environmental laws, weakening the
protection of our country's air, water, public lands and
wildlife. Cloaked in meticulously crafted language designed
to deceive the public, the administration intends to eliminate
the nation's most important environmental laws by the end of
the year. Under the guidance of Republican pollster Frank Luntz,
the Bush White House has actively hidden its anti-environmental
program behind deceptive rhetoric, telegenic spokespeople,
secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and bureaucrats.

The Bush attack was not entirely unexpected. George W. Bush
had the grimmest environmental record of any governor during
his tenure in Texas. Texas became number one in air and
water pollution and in the release of toxic chemicals.
In his six years in Austin, he championed a short-term
pollution-based prosperity, which enriched his political
contributors and corporate cronies by lowering the quality
of life for everyone else. Now President Bush is set to do
the same to America. After three years, his policies are
already bearing fruit, diminishing standards of living for
millions of Americans.

I am angry both as a citizen and a father. Three of my sons have
asthma, and I watch them struggle to breathe on bad-air days.
And they're comparatively lucky: One in four African-American
children in New York shares this affliction; their suffering
is often unrelieved because they lack the insurance and
high-quality health care that keep my sons alive. My kids
are among the millions of Americans who cannot enjoy the
seminal American experience of fishing locally with their
dad and eating their catch. Most freshwater fish in New York
and all in Connecticut are now under consumption advisories.
A main source of mercury pollution in America, as well as
asthma-provoking ozone and particulates, is the coal-burning
power plants that President Bush recently excused from complying
with the Clean Air Act.

Furthermore, the deadly addiction to fossil fuels that White House
policies encourage has squandered our treasury, entangled us in
foreign wars, diminished our international prestige, made us a
target for terrorist attacks and increased our reliance on petty
Middle Eastern dictators who despise democracy and are hated by
their own people.

When the Republican right managed to install George W. Bush as
president in 2000, movement leaders once again set about doing
what they had attempted to do since the Reagan years: eviscerate
the infrastructure of laws and regulations that protect the
environment. For twenty-five years it has been like the zombie
that keeps coming back from the grave.

The attacks began on Inauguration Day, when President Bush's
chief of staff and former General Motors lobbyist Andrew Card
quietly initiated a moratorium on all recently adopted
regulations. Since then, the White House has enlisted
every federal agency that oversees environmental programs
in a coordinated effort to relax rules aimed at the oil,
coal, logging, mining and chemical industries as well as
automakers, real estate developers, corporate agribusiness
and other industries.

Bush's Environmental Protection Agency has halted work on
sixty-two environmental standards, the federal Department
of Agriculture has stopped work on fifty-seven standards,
and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has
halted twenty-one new standards. The EPA completed just
two major rules -- both under court order and both watered
down at industry request -- compared to twenty-three completed
by the Clinton administration and fourteen by the Bush Sr.
administration in their first two years.

This onslaught is being coordinated through the White House
Office of Management and Budget -- or, more precisely, OMB's
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, under the
direction of John Graham, the engine-room mechanic of the
Bush stealth strategy. Graham's specialty is promoting changes
in scientific and economic assumptions that underlie government
regulations -- such as recalculating cost-benefit analyses
to favor polluters. Before coming to the White House, Graham
was the founding director of the Harvard Center for Risk
Analysis, where he received funding from America's champion
corporate polluters: Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto, Alcoa,
Exxon, General Electric and General Motors.

Under the White House's guidance, the very agencies entrusted
to protect Americans from polluters are laboring to destroy
environmental laws. Or they've simply stopped enforcing them.
Penalties imposed for environmental violations have plummeted
under Bush. The EPA has proposed eliminating 270 enforcement
staffers, which would drop staff levels to the lowest level
ever. Inspections of polluting businesses have dipped fifteen
percent. Criminal cases referred for federal prosecution have
dropped forty percent. The EPA measures its success by the
amount of pollution reduced or prevented as a result of its
own actions. Last year, the EPA's two most senior career
enforcement officials resigned after decades of service.
They cited the administration's refusal to carry out
environmental laws.

The White House has masked its attacks with euphemisms
that would have embarrassed George Orwell. George W. Bush's
"Healthy Forests" initiative promotes destructive logging of
old-growth forests. His "Clear Skies" program, which repealed
key provisions of the Clean Air Act, allows more emissions.
The administration uses misleading code words such as
streamlining or reforming instead of weakening, and thinning
instead of logging.

In a March 2003 memo to Republican leadership, pollster
Frank Luntz frankly outlined the White House strategy on
energy and the environment: "The environment is probably
the single issue on which Republicans in general and President
Bush in particular are most vulnerable," he wrote, cautioning
that the public views Republicans as being "in the pockets
of corporate fat cats who rub their hands together and chuckle
maniacally as they plot to pollute America for fun and profit."
Luntz warned, "Not only do we risk losing the swing vote,
but our suburban female base could abandon us as well."
He recommended that Republicans don the sheep's clothing
of environmental rhetoric while dismantling environmental
laws.

I prosecute polluters on behalf of the Natural Resources
Defense Council, Riverkeeper and Waterkeeper Alliance.
As George W. Bush began his presidency, I was involved
in litigation against the factory-pork industry, which
is a large source of air and water pollution in America.
Corporate pork factories cannot produce more efficiently
than traditional family farmers without violating several
federal environmental statutes. Industrial farms illegally
dump millions of tons of untreated fecal and toxic waste
onto land and into the air and water. Factory farms have
contaminated hundreds of miles of waterways, put tens of
thousands of family farmers and fishermen out of work,
killed billions of fish, sickened consumers and subjected
millions of farm animals to unspeakable cruelty.

On behalf of several farm groups and fishermen, we sued
Smithfield Foods and won a decision that suggested that
almost all of American factory farms were violating the
Clean Water Act. The Clinton EPA had also brought its own
parallel suits addressing chronic air and water violations
by hog factories. But almost immediately after taking office,
the Bush administration ordered the EPA to halt its Clean
Air Act investigations of animal factories and weaken the
water rules to allow them to continue polluting indefinitely.

Several of my other national cases were similarly derailed.
Eleven years ago, I sued the EPA to stop massive fish kills
at power plants. Using antiquated technology, power plants
often suck up the entire fresh water volume of large rivers,
killing obscene numbers of fish. Just one facility, the
Salem nuclear plant in New Jersey, kills more than 3 billion
Delaware River fish each year, according to Martin Marietta,
the plant's own consultant. These fish kills are illegal,
and in 2001 we finally won our case. A federal judge ordered
the EPA to issue regulations restricting power-plant fish
kills. But soon after President Bush's inauguration,
the administration replaced the proposed new rule with
clever regulations designed to allow the slaughter to
continue unabated. The new administration also trumped
court decisions that would have enforced greater degrees
of wetlands protection and forbidden coal moguls from
blasting off whole mountaintops to get at the coal beneath.

The fishermen I represent are traditionally Republican.
But, without exception, they see this administration as
the largest threat not just to their livelihoods but to
their values and their idea of what it means to be American.
"Why," they'll ask, "is the president allowing coal, oil,
power and automotive interests to fix the game?"

Back to the Dark Ages

George w. Bush seems to be trying to take us all the way
back to the Dark Ages by undermining the very principles
of our environmental rights, which civilized nations have
always recognized. Ancient Rome's Code of Justinian guaranteed
the use to all citizens of the "public trust" or commons
-- those shared resources that cannot be reduced to private
property -- the air, flowing water, public lands, wandering
animals, fisheries, wetlands and aquifers.

When Roman law broke down in Europe during the Dark Ages,
feudal kings began to privatize the commons. In the early
thirteenth century, when King John also attempted to sell
off England's fisheries and erect navigational tolls on the
Thames, his subjects rose up and confronted him at Runnymede,
forcing him to sign the Magna Carta, which includes provisions
guaranteeing the rights of free access to fisheries and waters.

Clean-air laws in England, passed in the fourteenth century,
made it a capital offense to burn coal in London, and violators
were executed for the crime. These "public trust" rights to
unspoiled air, water and wildlife descended to the people of
the United States following the American Revolution. Until
1870, a factory releasing even small amounts of smoke onto
public or private property was operating illegally.

But during the Gilded Age, when the corporate robber barons
captured the political and judicial systems, those rights
were stolen from the American people. As the Industrial
Revolution morphed into the postwar industrial boom,
Americans found themselves paying a high price for the
resulting pollution. The wake-up call came in the late
Sixties, when Lake Erie was declared dead and Cleveland's
Cuyahoga River exploded in colossal infernos.

In 1970, more than 20 million Americans took to the streets
protesting the state of the environment on the first Earth
Day. Whether they knew it or not, they were demanding a return
of ancient rights.

During the next few years, Congress passed twenty-eight major
environmental statutes, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean
Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, and it created the
Environmental Protection Agency to apply and enforce these
new laws. Polluters would be held accountable; those planning
to use the commons would have to compile environmental-impact
statements and hold public hearings; citizens were given
the power to prosecute environmental crimes. Right-to-know
and toxic-inventory laws made government and industry more
transparent on the local level and our nation more democratic.
Even the most vulnerable Americans could now participate in
the dialogue that determines the destinies of their communities.

Earth Day caught polluters off guard. But in the next thirty
years, they mounted an increasingly sophisticated and aggressive
counterattack to undermine these laws. The Bush administration
is a culmination of their three-decade campaign.

Strangling the Environment

In 1980, candidate Ronald Reagan declared, "I am a
Sagebrush Rebel," marking a major turning point of
the modern anti-environmental movement. In the early
1980s, the Western extractive industries, led by one
of Colorado's worst polluters, brewer Joseph Coors,
organized the Sagebrush Rebellion, a coalition of industry
money and right-wing ideologues that helped elect Reagan
president.

The big polluters who started the Sagebrush Rebellion were
successful because they managed to broaden their constituency
with anti-regulatory, anti-labor and anti-environmental rhetoric
that had great appeal both among Christian fundamentalist
leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and in certain
Western communities where hostility to government is deeply
rooted. Big polluters found that they could organize this
discontent into a potent political force that possessed the
two ingredients of power in American democracy: money and
intensity. Meanwhile, innovations in direct-mail and computer
technologies gave this alliance of dark populists and polluters
a deafening voice in American government.

Coors founded the Mountain States Legal Foundation in 1976
to bring lawsuits designed to enrich giant corporations, limit
civil rights and attack unions, homosexuals and minorities.
He also founded the right-wing Heritage Foundation, to provide
a philosophical underpinning for the anti-environmental movement.
While the foundation and its imitators -- the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute,
the Reason Foundation, the Federalist Society, the Marshall
Institute and others -- claim to advocate free markets and
property rights, their agenda is more pro-pollution than
anything else.

From its conception, the Heritage Foundation and its
neoconservative cronies urged followers to "strangle
the environmental movement," which Heritage named
"the greatest single threat to the American economy."
Ronald Reagan's victory gave Heritage Foundation and
the Mountain States Legal Foundation immeasurable clout.
Heritage became known as Reagan's "shadow government,"
and its 2,000-page manifesto, "Mandate for Change," became
a blueprint for his administration. Coors handpicked his
Colorado associates: Anne Gorsuch became the EPA administrator;
her husband, Robert Burford, a cattle baron who had vowed
to destroy the Bureau of Land Management, was selected
to head that very agency. Most notorious, Coors chose
James Watt, president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation,
as the secretary of the interior. Watt was a proponent of
"dominion theology," an authoritarian Christian heresy that
advocates man's duty to "subdue" nature. His deep faith in
laissez-faire capitalism and apocalyptic Christianity led
Secretary Watt to set about dismantling his department and
distributing its assets rather than managing them for future
generations. During a Senate hearing, he cited the approaching
Apocalypse to explain why he was giving away America's sacred
places at fire-sale prices: "I do not know how many future
generations we can count on before the Lord returns."

Meanwhile, Anne Gorsuch enthusiastically gutted EPA's budget
by sixty percent, crippling its ability to write regulations
or enforce the law. She appointed lobbyists fresh from their
hitches with the paper, asbestos, chemical and oil companies
to run each of the principal agency departments. Her chief
counsel was an Exxon lawyer; her head of enforcement was
from General Motors.

These attacks on the environment precipitated a public revolt.
By 1983, more than a million Americans and all 125 American-
Indian tribes had signed a petition demanding Watt's removal.
After being forced out of office, Watt was indicted on
twenty-five felony counts of influence-pedaling. Gorsuch
and twenty-three of her cronies were forced to resign
following a congressional investigation of sweetheart deals
with polluters, including Coors. Her first deputy, Rita
Lavelle, was jailed for perjury.

The indictments and resignations put a temporary damper
on the Sagebrush Rebels, but they quickly regrouped as the
"Wise Use" movement. Wise Use founder, the timber-industry
flack Ron Arnold, said, "Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate
the environmental movement. We want to be able to exploit
the environment for private gain, absolutely."

By 1994, Wise Use helped propel Newt Gingrich to the speaker's
chair of the U.S. House of Representatives and turn his
anti-environmental manifesto, "The Contract With America,"
into law. Gingrich's chief of environmental policy was
Rep. Tom DeLay, the one-time Houston exterminator who was
determined to rid the world of pesky pesticide regulations
and to promote a biblical worldview. He targeted the Endangered
Species Act as the second-greatest threat to Texas after
illegal aliens. He also wanted to legalize the deadly pesticide
DDT, and he routinely referred to the EPA as "the Gestapo of
government." In January 1995, DeLay invited a group of 350
lobbyists representing some of America's biggest polluters
to collaborate in drafting legislation to dismantle federal
health, safety and environmental laws.

Gingrich and DeLay had learned from the James Watt debacle
that they had to conceal their radical agenda. Carefully
eschewing public debates on their initiatives, they mounted
a stealth attack on America's environmental laws. Rather than
pursue a frontal assault against popular statutes such as
the Endangered Species, Clean Water and Clean Air acts,
they tried to undermine these laws by attaching silent
riders to must-pass budget bills.

But the public got wise. Moderate Republicans teamed up
with the Clinton administration to block the worst of it.
My group, the NRDC, as well as the Sierra Club and the
U.S. Public Interest Research Group, generated more than
1 million letters to Congress. When President Clinton
shut down the government in December 1995 rather than
pass a budget bill spangled with anti-environmental riders,
the tide turned against Gingrich and DeLay. By the end
of that month, even conservatives disavowed the attack.
"We lost the battle on the environment," DeLay conceded.

Undermining the Scientists

Today, with the presidency and both houses of Congress
under the anti-environmentalists' control, they are set
to eviscerate the despised laws. White House strategy is
to promote its unpopular policies by lying about its agenda,
cheating on the science and stealing the language and rhetoric
of the environmental movement.

Even as Republican pollster Luntz acknowledged that the
scientific evidence is against the Republicans on issues
like global warming, he advised them to find scientists
willing to hoodwink the public. "You need to continue to
make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue,"
he told Republicans, "by becoming even more active in
recruiting experts sympathetic to your view."

In the meantime, he urged them to change their rhetoric.
" 'Climate change,' " he said, "is less threatening than
'global warming.' While global warming has catastrophic
connotations attached to it, climate change suggests
a more controllable and less emotional challenge."

The EPA's inspector general received broad attention
for his August 21st, 2003, finding that the White House
pressured the agency to conceal the public-health risks
from poisoned air following the September 11th World Trade
Center attacks. But this 2001 deception is only one example
of the administration's pattern of strategic distortion.
Earlier this year, it suppressed an EPA report warning
that millions of Americans, especially children, are
being poisoned by mercury from industrial sources.

This behavior is consistent throughout the Bush government.
Consider the story of James Zahn, a scientist at the
Department of Agriculture who resigned after the Bush
administration suppressed his taxpayer-funded study proving
that billions of antibiotic-resistant bacteria can be carried
daily across property lines from meat factories into
neighboring homes and farms. In March 2002, Zahn accepted
my invitation to present his findings to a convention of
family-farm advocates in Iowa. Several weeks before the
April conference, pork-industry lobbyists learned of his
appearance and persuaded the Department of Agriculture
to forbid him from appearing. Zahn told me he had been
ordered to cancel a dozen appearances at county health
departments and similar venues.

In May, the White House blocked the EPA staff from
publicly discussing contamination by the chemical
perchlorate -- the main ingredient in solid rocket
fuel. The administration froze federal regulations
on perchlorate, even as new research reveals alarmingly
high levels of the chemical in the nation's drinking
water and food supply, including many grocery-store
lettuces. Perchlorate pollution has been linked to
neurological problems, cancer and other life-threatening
illnesses in some twenty states. The Pentagon and several
defense contractors face billions of dollars in potential
cleanup liability.

The administration's leading expert in manipulating
scientific data is Interior Secretary Gale Norton.
During her nomination hearings, Norton promised not
to ideologically slant agency science. But as her friend
Thomas Sansonetti, a coal- industry lobbyist who is now
assistant attorney general, predicted, "There won't be
any biologists or botanists to come in and pull the wool
over her eyes."

In autumn 2001, Secretary Norton provided the Senate
Committee on Energy and Natural Resources with her agency's
scientific assessment that Arctic oil drilling would not
harm hundreds of thousands of caribou. Not long afterward,
Fish and Wildlife Service biologists contacted the Public
Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which defends
scientists and other professionals working in state and
federal environmental agencies. "The scientists provided
us the science that they had submitted to Norton and the
altered version that she had given to Congress a week later,"
said the group's executive director, Jeff Ruch. There were
seventeen major substantive changes, all of them minimizing
the reported impacts. When Norton was asked about the
alterations in October 2001, she dismissed them as
typographical errors.

Later, she and White House political adviser Karl Rove
forced National Marine Fisheries scientists to alter
findings on the amount of water required for the survival
of salmon in Oregon's Klamath River, to ensure that large
corporate farms got a bigger share of the river water.
As a result, more than 33,000 chinook and coho salmon
died -- the largest fish kill in the history of America.
Mike Kelly, the biologist who drafted the original opinion
(and who has since been awarded federal whistle-blower
status), told me that the coho salmon is probably headed
for extinction. "Morale is low among scientists here,"
Kelly says. "We are under pressure to get the right results.
This administration is putting the species at risk for
political gain -- and not just in the Klamath."

Norton has also ordered the rewriting of an exhaustive
twelve-year study by federal biologists detailing the
effects that Arctic drilling would have on populations
of musk oxen and snow geese. She reissued the biologists'
report two weeks later as a two-page paper showing no
negative impact to wildlife. She also ordered suppression
of two studies by the Fish and Wildlife Service concluding
that the drilling would threaten polar-bear populations
and violate the international treaty protecting bears.
She then instructed the Fish and Wildlife Service to redo
the report to "reflect the Interior Department's position."
She suppressed findings that mountaintop mining would
cause "tremendous destruction of aquatic and terrestrial
habitat" and a Park Service report that found that snowmobiles
were hurting Yellowstone's air quality, wildlife and the
health of its visitors and employees.

Norton's Fish and Wildlife Service is the first ever not
to voluntarily list a single species as endangered or
threatened. Her officials have blackballed scientists
and savaged studies to avoid listing the trumpeter swan,
revoke the listing of the grizzly bear and shrink the
remnant habitat for the Florida panther. She disbanded
the service's oldest scientific advisory committee in
order to halt protection of desert fish in Arizona,
New Mexico and Texas that are headed for extinction.
Interior career staffers and scientists say they are
monitored by Norton's industry appointees to ensure
that future studies do not conflict with industry
profit-making.

Cooking the Books on Global Warming

There is no scientific debate in which the White House
has cooked the books more than that of global warming.
In the past two years the Bush administration has altered,
suppressed or attempted to discredit close to a dozen major
reports on the subject. These include a ten-year peer-reviewed
study by the International Panel on Climate Change, commissioned
by the president's father in 1993 in his own efforts to dodge
what was already a virtual scientific consensus blaming
industrial emissions for global warming.

After disavowing the Kyoto Protocol, the Bush administration
commissioned the federal government's National Academy of
Sciences to find holes in the IPCC analysis. But this ploy
backfired. The NAS not only confirmed the existence of global
warming and its connection to industrial greenhouse gases,
it also predicted that the effects of climate change would
be worse than previously believed, estimating that global
temperatures will rise between 2.5 and 10.4 degrees by 2100.

A May 2002 report by scientists from the EPA, NASA and the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, approved
by Bush appointees at the Council on Environmental Quality
and submitted to the United Nations by the U.S., predicted
similarly catastrophic impacts. When confronted with the
findings, Bush dismissed it with his smirking condemnation:
"I've read the report put out by the bureaucracy. . . ."

Afterward, the White House acknowledged that, in fact,
he hadn't. Having failed to discredit the report with
this untruth, George W. did what his father had done:
He promised to study the problem some more. Last fall,
the White House announced the creation of the Climate
Research Initiative to study global warming. The earliest
results are due next fall. But the White House's draft plan
for CRI was derided by the NAS in February as a rehash of
old studies and established science lacking "most elements
of a strategic plan."

In September 2002, administration censors released the
annual EPA report on air pollution without the agency's
usual update on global warming, that section having been
deleted by Bush appointees at the White House. On June 19th,
2003, a "State of the Environment" report commissioned by
the EPA in 2001 was released after language about global
warming was excised by flat-earthers in the White House.
The redacted studies had included a 2001 report by the
National Research Council, commissioned by the White House.
In their place was a piece of propaganda financed by the
American Petroleum Institute challenging these conclusions.

This past July, EPA scientists leaked a study, which the
agency had ordered suppressed in May, showing that a Senate
plan -- co-sponsored by Republican Sen. John McCain -- to reduce
the pollution that causes global warming could achieve its goal
at very small cost. Bush reacted by launching a $100 million
ten-year effort to prove that global temperature changes have,
in fact, occurred naturally, another delay tactic for the
fossil-fuel barons at taxpayer expense.

Princeton geo-scientist Michael Oppenheimer told me, "This
administration likes to emphasize what we don't know while
ignoring or minimizing what we do know, which is a prescription
for paralysis on policy. It's hard to imagine what kind of
scientific evidence would suffice to convince the White House
to take firm action on global warming."

Across the board, the administration yields to Big Energy.
At the request of ExxonMobil, and with the help of a lobbying
group working for coal-burning utility Southern Co., the Bush
administration orchestrated the removal of U.S. scientist
Robert Watson, the world-renowned former NASA atmospheric
chemist who headed the United Nations' IPCC. He was replaced
by a little-known scientist from New Delhi, India, who would
be generally unavailable for congressional hearings.

The Bush administration now plans to contract out thousands
of environmental-science jobs to compliant industry consultants
already in the habit of massaging data to support corporate
profit-taking, effectively making federal science an arm of
Karl Rove's political machine. The very ideologues who derided
Bill Clinton as a liar have institutionalized dishonesty and
made it the reigning culture of America's federal agencies.
"At its worst," Oppenheimer says, "this approach represents
a serious erosion in the way a democracy deals with science."

Inside the Cheney Task Force

There is no better example of the corporate cronyism now hijacking
American democracy than the White House's cozy relationship with
the energy industry. It's hard to find anyone on Bush's staff who
does not have extensive corporate connections, but fossil-fuel
executives rule the roost. The energy industry contributed more
than $48.3 million to Republicans in the 2000 election cycle,
with $3 million to Bush. Now the investment has matured. Both
Bush and Cheney came out of the oil patch. Thirty-one of the
Bush transition team's forty-eight members had energy-industry
ties. Bush's cabinet and White House staff is an energy-industry
dream team -- four cabinet secretaries, the six most powerful
White House officials and more than twenty high-level appointees
are alumni of the industry and its allies (see "Bush's
Energy-Industry All-Stars," on Page 183).

The potential for corruption is staggering. Take the case of
J. Steven Griles, deputy secretary of the Interior Department.
During the first Reagan administration, Griles worked directly
under James Watt at Interior, where he helped the coal industry
evade prohibitions against mountaintop-removal strip mining.
In 1989, Griles left government to work as a mining executive
and then as a lobbyist with National Environmental Strategies,
a Washington, D.C., firm that represented the National Mining
Association and Dominion Resources, one of the nation's largest
power producers. When Griles got his new job at Interior,
the National Mining Association hailed him as "an ally of
the industry."

It's bad enough that a former mining lobbyist was put in
charge of regulating mining on public land. But it turns
out that Griles is still on the industry's payroll. In 2001,
he sold his client base to his partner Marc Himmelstein for
four annual payments of $284,000, making Griles, in effect,
a continuing partner in the firm.

Because Griles was an oil and mining lobbyist, the Senate
made him agree in writing that he would avoid contact with
his former clients as a condition of his confirmation. Griles
has nevertheless repeatedly met with former coal clients
to discuss new rules allowing mountaintop mining in Appalachia
and destructive coal-bed methane drilling in Wyoming. He also
met with his former oil clients about offshore leases. These
meetings prompted Sen. Joseph Lieberman to ask the Interior
Department to investigate Griles. With Republicans in control
of congressional committees, no subpoenas have interrupted the
Griles scandals.

With its operatives in place, the Bush energy plan became an
orgy of industry plunder. Days after his inauguration, Bush
launched the National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired
by Cheney. For three months, the task force held closed-door
meetings with energy-industry representatives - then refused
to disclose the names of the participants.

For the first time in history, the nonpartisan General Accounting
Office sued the executive branch, for access to these records.
NRDC put in a Freedom of Information Act request, and when
Cheney did not respond, we also sued. On February 21st, 2002,
U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ordered Energy Secretary
Spencer Abraham and other agency officials to turn over the
records relating to their participation in the work of the
energy task force. Under this court order, NRDC has obtained
some 20,000 documents. Although none of the logs on the vice
president's meetings have been released yet and the pages were
heavily redacted to prevent disclosure of useful information,
the documents still allow glimpses of the process.

The task force comprised Cabinet secretaries and other
high-level administration officials with energy-industry
pedigrees. The undisputed leader was Cheney, who hails from
Wyoming, the nation's largest coal producer, and who, for six
previous years, was CEO of Halliburton, the oil-service company.
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was chairman of the Aluminum
Company of America for thirteen years. Aluminum-industry profits
are directly related to energy prices. O'Neill promised to
immediately sell his extensive stock holdings in his former
company (worth more than $100 million) to avoid conflicts of
interest, but he delayed the sale until after the energy plan
was released. By then, thanks partly to the administration's
energy policies, Alcoa's stock had risen thirty percent.
Energy Secretary Abraham, a former one-term senator from
Michigan, received $700,000 from the auto industry in his
losing 2000 campaign, more than any other Senate candidate.
At Energy, Abraham led the administration effort to scuttle
fuel-economy standards, allow SUVs to escape fuel-efficiency
minimums and create obscene tax incentives for Americans to
buy the largest gas guzzlers.

Joe Allbaugh, director of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,
sat next to Abraham on the task force. Allbaugh's wife, Diane,
is an energy-industry lobbyist and represents three firms
-- Reliant Energy, Entergy and TXU, each of which paid her
$20,000 in the three months of the task force's deliberation.
Joe Allbaugh participated in task-force meetings on issues
directly affecting those companies, including debates about
environmental rules for power plants and -- his wife's
specialty -- electricity deregulation.

Commerce Secretary Don Evans, an old friend of the president
from their early days in the oil business, was CEO of
Tom Brown Inc., a Denver oil-and-gas company, and a trustee
of another drilling firm. Interior Secretary Gale Norton,
a mining-industry lawyer, accepted nearly $800,000 from the
energy industry during her 1996 run in Colorado for the
U.S. Senate.

In the winter and spring of 2001, executives and lobbyists
from the oil, coal, electric-utility and nuclear industries
tramped in and out of the Cabinet room and Cheney's office.
Many of the lobbyists had just left posts inside Bush's
presidential campaign to work for companies that had donated
lavishly to that effort. Companies that made large contributions
were given special access. Executives from Enron Corp., which
contributed $2.5 million to the GOP from 1999 to 2002, had
contact with the task force at least ten times, including
six face-to-face meetings between top officials and Cheney.

After one meeting with Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, Cheney dismissed
California Gov. Gray Davis' request to cap the state's energy
prices. That denial would enrich Enron and nearly bankrupt
California. It has since emerged that the state's energy
crisis was largely engineered by Enron. According to the
New York Times, the task-force staff circulated a memo that
suggested "utilizing" the crisis to justify expanded oil
and gas drilling. President Bush and others would cite
the California crisis to call for drilling in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge.

Energy companies that had not ponied up remained under
pressure to give to Republicans. When Westar Energy's
chief executive was indicted for fraud, investigators
found an e-mail written by Westar executives describing
solicitations by Republican politicians for a political
action committee controlled by Tom DeLay as the price
for a "seat at the table" with the task force.

Task-force members began each meeting with industry lobbyists
by announcing that the session was off the record and that
participants were to share no documents. A National Mining
Association official told reporters that the industry managed
to control the energy plan by keeping the process secret.
"We've probably had as much input as anybody else in town,"
he said. "I have to take my hat off to them -- they've been
able to keep a lid on it."

When it was suggested that access to the administration
was for sale, Cheney hardly apologized. "Just because somebody
makes a campaign contribution doesn't mean that they should
be denied the opportunity to express their view to government
officials," he said. Although they met with hundreds of
industry officials, Cheney and Abraham refused to meet
with any environmental groups. Cheney made one exception
to the secrecy policy: On May 15th, 2001, the day before
the task force sent its plan to the president, CEOs from
wind-, solar- and geothermal-energy companies were granted
a short meeting with Cheney. Afterward, they were led into
the Rose Garden for a press conference and a photo op.

While peddling influence to energy tycoons, the White House
quietly dropped criminal and civil charges against Koch
Industries, America's largest privately held oil company.
Koch faced a ninety-seven-count federal felony indictment
and $357 million in fines for knowingly releasing ninety
metric tons of carcinogenic benzene and concealing the
releases from federal regulators. Koch executives contributed
$800,000 to Bush's presidential campaign and to other top
Republicans.

Last March, the Federal Trade Commission dropped a Clinton-era
investigation of price gouging by the oil and gas industries,
even as Duke Energy, a principal target of the probe, admitted
to selling electricity in California for more than double
the highest previously reported price. The Bush administration
said that the industry deserved a "gentler approach."
Administration officials also winked at a scam involving
a half-dozen oil companies cheating the government out of
$100 million per year in royalty payments.

Southern Co. was among the most adept advocates for
its own self-interest. The company, which contributed
$1.6 million to Republicans from 1999 to 2002, met with
Cheney's task force seven times. Faced with a series of
EPA prosecutions at power plants violating air-quality
standards, the company retained Haley Barbour, former
Republican National Committee chairman and now
governor-elect of Mississippi, to lobby the
administration to ignore Southern's violations.

The White House then forced the Justice Department
to drop the prosecution. Justice lawyers were "astounded"
that the administration would interfere in a law-enforcement
matter that was "supposed to be out of bounds from politics."
The EPA's chief enforcement officer, Eric Schaeffer,
resigned. "With the Bush administration, whether or
not environmental laws are enforced depends on who
you know," Schaeffer told me. "If you've got a good
lobbyist, you can just buy your way out of trouble."

Along with Barbour, Southern retained current Republican
National Committee chairman and former Montana Gov. Marc
Racicot. Barbour and Racicot repeatedly conferred with
Abraham and Cheney, urging them to ease limits on
carbon-dioxide pollution from power plants and to gut
the Clean Air Act. On May 17th, 2001, the White House
released its energy plan. Among the recommendations
were exempting old power plants from Clean Air Act
compliance and adopting Barbour's arguments about
carbon-dioxide restrictions. Barbour repaid the favor
that week by raising $250,000 at a May 21st GOP gala
honoring Bush. Southern donated $150,000 to the effort.

Cheney's task force had at least nineteen contacts with
officials from the nuclear-energy industry -- whose trade
association, the Nuclear Energy Institute, donated $100,000
to the Bush inauguration gala and $437,000 to Republicans
from 1999 to 2002. The report recommended loosening
environmental controls on the industry, reducing public
participation in the siting of nuclear plants and adding
billions of dollars in subsidies for the nuclear industry.

Cheney wasn't embarrassed to reward his old cronies
at Halliburton, either. The final draft of the task-force
report praises a gas-recovery technique controlled by
Halliburton -- even though an earlier draft had criticized
the technology. The technique, which has been linked to
the contamination of aquifers, is currently being
investigated by the EPA. Somehow, that got edited
out of the report.

Big Coal and the Destruction of Appalachia

Coal companies enjoyed perhaps the biggest payoff. At the
West Virginia Coal Association's annual conference in
May 2002, president William D. Raney assured 150 industry
moguls, "You did everything you could to elect a Republican
president." Now, he said, "you are already seeing in his
actions the payback."

Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal company and a major
contributor to the Bush campaign, was one of the first to
cash in. Immediately after his inauguration, Bush appointed
two executives from Peabody and one from its Black Beauty
subsidiary to his energy advisory team.

When the task force released its final report, it recommended
accelerating coal production and spending $2 billion in federal
subsidies for research to make coal-fired electricity cleaner.
Five days later, Peabody issued a public-stock offering,
raising $60 million more than analysts had predicted. Company
vice president Fred Palmer credited the Bush administration.
"I am sure it affected the valuation of the stock," he told
the Los Angeles Times.

Peabody also wanted to build the largest coal-fired power
plant in thirty years upwind of Mammoth Cave National Park
in Kentucky, a designated UNESCO World Heritage site and
International Biosphere Reserve. With arm-twisting from
Deputy Interior Secretary Steven Griles and another $450,000
in GOP contributions, Peabody got what it wanted. A study
on the air impacts was suppressed, and park scientists who
feared that several endangered species might go extinct
due to mercury and acid-rain deposits were silenced.

At the Senate's request, Griles had signed a "statement
of disqualification" on August 1st, 2001, committing himself
to avoiding issues affecting his former clients. Three days
later, he nevertheless appeared before the West Virginia
Coal Association and promised executives that "we will fix
the federal rules very soon on water and soil placement."
That was fancy language for pushing whole mountaintops into
valleys, a practice worth billions to the industry. As a
Reagan official, Griles helped devise the practice, which
a federal court declared illegal in 2002, after 1,200 miles
of streambeds had been filled and 380,000 acres of
Appalachian forestlands had been rendered barren
moonscapes.

Now Griles was promising his former coal clients he would
fix these rules. In May 2002, the EPA and the Army Corps
of Engineers adopted the language recommended by his former
client, the National Mining Association. Had Griles not
intervened, the practice of mountaintop-removal mining
would have been severely restricted. Griles also pushed
EPA deputy administrator Linda Fisher to overrule career
personnel in the agency's Denver office who had given a
devastating assessment to a proposal to produce coal-bed
methane gas in the Powder River basin in Wyoming. Although
Griles had recused himself from any discussion of this
subject because it would directly enrich his former clients,
he worked aggressively behind the scenes on behalf of a
proposal to build 51,000 wells. The project will require
26,000 miles of new roads and 48,000 miles of pipeline,
and will foul pristine landscapes with trillions of
gallons of toxic wastewater.

Blueprint for Plunder

The energy-task-force plan is a $20 billion subsidy to the
oil, coal and nuclear industries, which are already swimming
in record revenues. In May 2003, as the House passed the plan
and as the rest of the nation stagnated in a recession abetted
by high oil prices, Exxon announced that its profits had tripled
from the previous quarter's record earnings. The energy plan
recommends opening protected lands and waters to oil and gas
drilling and building up to 1,900 electric-power plants.
National treasures such as the California and Florida coasts,
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the areas around
Yellowstone Park will be opened for plunder for the trivial
amounts of fossil fuels that they contain. While increasing
reliance on oil, coal and nuclear power, the plan cuts the
budget for research into energy efficiency and alternative
power sources by nearly a third. "Conservation may be a
sign of personal virtue," Cheney explained, but it should
not be the basis of "comprehensive energy policy."

As if to prove that point, Republicans simultaneously
eliminated the tax credit that had encouraged Americans
to buy gas-saving hybrid cars, and weakened efficiency
standards for everything from air conditioners to automobiles.
They also created an obscene $100,000 tax break for Hummers
and the thirty-eight biggest gas guzzlers. Then, adding insult
to injury, the Energy Department robbed $135,615 from the
anemic solar, renewables and energy-conservation budget to
produce 10,000 copies of the White House's energy plan.

To lobby for the plan, more than 400 industry groups enlisted
in the Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth, a coalition
created by oil, mining and nuclear interests and guided by
the White House. It cost $5,000 to join, "a very low price,"
according to Republican lobbyist Wayne Valis. The prerequisite
for joining, he wrote in a memo, was that members "must
agree to support the Bush energy proposal in its entirety
and not lobby for changes." Within two months, members had
contributed more than $1 million. The price for disloyalty
was expulsion from the coalition and possible reprisal
by the administration. "I have been advised," wrote Valis,
"that this White House 'will have a long memory.' "

The plan represents a massive transfer of wealth from the
public to the energy sector. Indeed, Bush views his massive
tax cuts as a way of helping Americans pay for inflated
energy bills. "If I had my way," he declared, "I'd have
[the tax cuts] in place tomorrow so that people would have
money in their pockets to deal with high energy prices."

Looting the Commons

Although congress will have its final vote on the plan in
November, the White House has already devised ways to implement
most of its worst provisions without congressional interference.
In October 2001, the administration removed the Interior
Department's power to veto mining permits, even if the mining
would cause "substantial and irreparable harm" to the environment.
That December, Bush and congressional Republicans passed an
"economic-stimulus package" that proposed $2.4 billion worth
of tax breaks, credits and loopholes for Chevron, Texaco, Enron
and General Electric. The following February, the White House
announced it would abandon regulations for three major
pollutants -- mercury, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide.

Early in the Bush administration, Vice President Cheney
had solicited an industry wish list from the United States
Energy Association, the lobbying arm for trade associations
including the American Petroleum Institute, the National
Mining Association, the Nuclear Energy Institute and the
Edison Institute. The USEA responded by providing 105 specific
recommendations from its members for plundering our natural
resources and polluting America's air and water. In a speech
to the group in June 2002, Energy Secretary Abraham reported
that the administration had already implemented three-quarters
of the industry's recommendations and predicted the rest
would pass through Congress shortly.

On August 27th, 2002 -- while most of America was heading
off for a Labor Day weekend -- the administration announced
that it would redefine carbon dioxide, the primary cause of
global warming, so that it would no longer be considered a
pollutant and would therefore not be subject to regulation
under the Clean Air Act. The next day, the White House repealed
the act's "new source review" provision, which requires
companies to modernize pollution control when they modify
their plants.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, the White
House rollback will cause 30,000 Americans to die prematurely
each year. Although the regulation will probably be reversed
in the courts, the damage will have been done, and power
utilities such as Southern Co. will escape criminal prosecution.
As soon as the new regulations were announced, John Pemberton,
chief of staff to the EPA's assistant administrator for air,
left the agency to work for Southern. The EPA's congressional
office chief also left, to join Southern's lobbying shop,
Bracewell, Patterson.

By summer 2003, the White House had become a virtual pi-ata
for energy moguls. In August, the administration proposed
limiting the authority of states to object to offshore-drilling
decisions, and it ordered federal land managers across the
West to ease environmental restrictions for oil and gas
drilling in national forests. The White House also proposed
removing federal protections for most American wetlands
and streams. As an astounded Republican, Rep. Christopher
Shays, told me, "It's almost like they want to alienate
people who care about the environment, as if they believe
that this will help them with their core."

EPA: From Bad to Worse

On August 30th, president bush nominated Utah's three-term
Republican Gov. Mike Leavitt to replace his beleaguered EPA
head, Christine Todd Whitman, who was driven from office,
humiliated in even her paltry efforts to moderate the pillage.
In October, Leavitt was confirmed by the Senate.

Like Gale Norton, Leavitt has a winning personality and
a disastrous environmental record. Under his leadership,
Utah tied for last as the state with the worst environmental
enforcement record and ranked second-worst (behind Texas)
for both air quality and toxic releases. As governor,
Leavitt displayed the same contempt for science that
has characterized the Bush administration. He fired
more than seventy scientists employed by state agencies
for producing studies that challenged his political agenda.
He fired a state enforcement officer who penalized one of
Leavitt's family fish farms for introducing whirling
disease into Utah, devastating the state's wild-trout
populations.

Leavitt has a penchant for backdoor deals to please corporate
polluters. Last year he resurrected a frivolous and moribund
Utah lawsuit against the Interior Department and then settled
the suit behind closed doors without public involvement,
stripping 6 million acres of wilderness protections.
This track record does not reflect the independence,
sense of stewardship and respect for science and law
that most Americans have the right to expect in our
nation's chief environmental guardian.

The Threat to Democracy

Generations of Americans will pay the Republican campaign debt
to the energy industry with global instability, depleted national
coffers and increased vulnerability to price shocks in the oil
market.

They will also pay with reduced prosperity and quality of
life at home. Pollution from power plants and traffic smog
will continue to skyrocket. Carbon-dioxide emissions will
aggravate global warming. Acid rain from Midwestern coal
plants has already sterilized half the lakes in the Adirondacks
and destroyed the forest cover in the high peaks of the
Appalachian range up into Canada. The administration's
attacks on science and the law have put something even
greater at risk. Americans need to recognize that we are
facing not just a threat to our environment but to our values,
and to our democracy.

Growing up, I was taught that communism leads to dictatorship
and capitalism to democracy. But as we've seen from the the
Bush administration, the latter proposition does not always
hold. While free markets tend to democratize a society,
unfettered capitalism leads invariably to corporate control
of government.

America's most visionary leaders have long warned against
allowing corporate power to dominate the political landscape.
In 1863, in the depths of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln
lamented, "I have the Confederacy before me and the bankers
behind me, and I fear the bankers most." Franklin Roosevelt
echoed that sentiment when he warned that "the liberty of a
democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of
private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their
democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism
-- ownership of government by an individual, by a group or
by any controlling power."

Today, more than ever, it is critical for American citizens
to understand the difference between the free-market capitalism
that made our country great and the corporate cronyism that
is now corrupting our political process, strangling democracy
and devouring our national treasures.

Corporate capitalists do not want free markets, they want
dependable profits, and their surest route is to crush
competition by controlling government. The rise of fascism
across Europe in the 1930s offers many informative lessons
on how corporate power can undermine a democracy. In Spain,
Germany and Italy, industrialists allied themselves with
right-wing leaders who used the provocation of terrorist
attacks, continual wars, and invocations of patriotism and
homeland security to tame the press, muzzle criticism
by opponents and turn government over to corporate control.
Those governments tapped industrial executives to run
ministries and poured government money into corporate
coffers with lucrative contracts to prosecute wars and
build infrastructure. They encouraged friendly corporations
to swallow media outlets, and they enriched the wealthiest
classes, privatized the commons and pared down constitutional
rights, creating short-term prosperity through pollution-based
profits and constant wars. Benito Mussolini's inside view
of this process led him to complain that "fascism should
really be called 'corporatism.' "

While the European democracies unraveled into fascism,
America confronted the same devastating Depression by
reaffirming its democracy. It enacted minimum-wage and
Social Security laws to foster a middle class, passed
income taxes and anti-trust legislation to limit the
power of corporations and the wealthy, and commissioned
parks, public lands and museums to create employment and
safeguard the commons.

The best way to judge the effectiveness of a democracy
is to measure how it allocates the goods of the land:
Does the government protect the commonwealth on behalf
of all the community members, or does it allow wealth
and political clout to steal the commons from the people?

Today, George W. Bush and his court are treating our country
as a grab bag for the robber barons, doling out the commons
to large polluters. Last year, as the calamitous rollbacks
multiplied, the corporate-owned TV networks devoted less
than four percent of their news minutes to environmental
stories. If they knew the truth, most Americans would share
my fury that this president is allowing his corporate
cronies to steal America from our children.

(From RS 937, December 11, 2003)

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

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