An Interview with Robert F Kennedy Jr.

[Guest guest]

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17398

 

 

An Interview with Robert F Kennedy Jr.

 

By , BuzzFlash

December 15, 2003

 

This, to me, is one of the most alarming things that this Administration is

doing – it's compromised the scientific process and systematically intimidated,

blackballed, fired, muzzled and gagged scientists in every department of

government. Scientists who produce science that challenges corporate profit

taking, or that might be an obstacle to corporate profit taking, are routinely

punished or punished by muzzled or gagged. – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

 

 

 

BuzzFlash: Toward the end of your recent indictment of the environmental

policies of President George W. Bush in Rolling Stone you ask the question:

" Does the government protect the Commonwealth on behalf of all of the community

members or does it allow wealth and political clout to steal the commons from

the people? " What is your judgment about the Bush Administration in terms of how

it measures up on that question?

 

 

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: One of the central roles of government from the

beginning of the first organized communities has been protection – the

safeguarding of the commons on behalf of the public. The commons under Roman law

– under the Code of Justinian – were defined as those things that are not

susceptible to private ownership; in other words, the shared resources, the air

that we breathe, the waterways, the dune lands, wetlands, wandering animals.

 

 

 

And under Roman law, if you were a citizen of Rome, the Emperor himself, whether

you were humble, noble, rich or poor, could not stop you from crossing a beach

flowing at an ebb and taking out the fish. Everybody had a right to use those

resources. Nobody had a right to use them in a way that would diminish or injure

their use and enjoyment by others.

 

 

 

That principle is echoed in the Magna Carta and in the constitutions of all of

our states, through a doctrine that's called the Public Trust Doctrine. And it's

at the heart of our environmental laws. And again, from the beginning of time,

the first acts of tyranny were to privatize the commons. In fact, the Magna

Carta was passed because of the Battle of Runneymede, which was precipitated by

King John's efforts to turn the rivers, the fisheries and the deer over to

private corporations and privileged parties.

 

 

 

Under the Bush Administration, we're seeing the same thing that happened in this

country during the 1880s and 1890s, during the Gilded Age, where now – as then –

large corporations have an undue influence on government officials, and where

they are literally stealing things that belong to the public.

 

 

 

One out of every four black children in New York now has asthma. We don't know

what's causing the pandemic itself, but we know that asthma attacks are

triggered by ozone in particulates, and that the primary source – about 40

percent of those components of air pollution – are coming from 1,100 coal-fire

power plants that were supposed to have been cleaned up 10 years ago.

 

 

 

But the energy industry gave $48 million to President Bush and the Republican

Party during the 2000 race, and the payback is billions of dollars of relief

from regulations that are meant to protect the commons, including the Clean Air

Acts' resource performance standards, which the Bush Administration abandoned

last month. So it's illegal for those companies to put those substances into our

air, but the Bush Administration has now said that it is no longer going to

enforce the laws against them.

 

 

 

BuzzFlash: You call this, in your article in Rolling Stone, " looting the

commons. "

 

 

 

Kennedy: Let me add one other thing. Yesterday, the Bush Administration

announced that it wasn't going to enforce mercury standards. And mercury, you

know, is a potent neurotoxin brain poison. Forty percent of the mercury

emissions in our country are coming from those same 1,100 power plants, and they

have poisoned the fresh water bodies across America. There're now 28 states in

which it is unsafe to eat any freshwater fish in the state.

 

 

 

According to the CDC, there are 325,000 children born each year who have been

subjected to such high levels of mercury in the womb that they are at risk for

permanent brain damage. The Clinton Administration classified mercury as a toxic

substance under the Clean Air Act, and required the utilities industry to remove

90 percent of the mercury within three years. But the Bush Administration has

now abandoned that requirement and adopted a new proposal that will effectively

allow them to discharge mercury forever.

 

 

 

BuzzFlash: How is this happening? You've been involved with the environment

throughout your professional career. You're an attorney who works on cases

trying to protect the environment. How is the Bush Administration getting away

with what you describe – in essence, an assault on almost every aspect of the

environment?

 

 

 

Kennedy: There are over 200 major environmental rollbacks that are now being

promoted by the Bush Administration, and they're listed on NRDC's website.

They're getting away with this because the media isn't paying attention. And the

reason I say that is that polling, including the Republican Party polls taken by

Frank Luntz, consistently shows that Americans across party lines favor strong

environmental protection and strict enforcement of our laws. Republicans and

Democrats favor strengthening our environmental laws by margins upwards of 75

percent. So the White House proceeded with an understanding that its

anti-environmental agenda is unpopular with the American people and has

successfully concealed its agenda through a series of stealth attacks designed

to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law.

 

 

 

NRDC obtained a memo and released it to the press – from Frank Luntz to the

President and to top Republican leaders – in which he recommended that strategy

as necessary for preserving the president's electoral strength. Luntz says in

his memo that the rollbacks are unpopular with the public, including the

Republican Party stalwarts, and that the science was against the Republicans on

these issues. And he recommended recruiting industry scientists who would sow

confusion about the science. And he recommended concealing the

anti-environmental actions of the Administration underneath the mantle of

environmental rhetoric.

 

 

 

BuzzFlash: Can you give examples? The cynically named " Clear Skies, " for

instance?

 

 

 

Kennedy: Yes, " The Clear Skies " initiative. The Bush Administration has followed

Luntz's advice by cloaking its anti-environmental agenda with deceptively named

initiatives – for example, " The Healthy Forests Act, " which was passed

Wednesday, is really a way of reintroducing 1950s-style industrial logging to

public lands that were thought to be protected forever. " The Clear Skies " Agenda

is a bill that guts the Clean Air Act. Environmentalists called it the Clear

Lies Initiative. And Luntz recommends that, instead of " weakening, " that the

Republicans use the word " streamlining, " which they do.

 

 

 

The Administration invariably releases news about these initiatives on Friday

afternoons when the press is sleeping, or on holidays. Over the next several

weeks during the Christmas holiday, you can expect that we're going to see a lot

more of these initiatives.

 

 

 

BuzzFlash: The use of science comes off as somewhat ironic almost from the first

week Bush was sworn in. One of the first issues that came up was global warming.

He said we're not going to enact any regulations unless we can first put them

through a " science-based " series of tests. What you're suggesting, Robert, as

one of the subtitles in the Rolling Stone commentary states, is that they're

" cooking the books " scientifically.

 

 

 

Kennedy: Yes. This, to me, is one of the most alarming things that this

Administration is doing – it's compromised the scientific process and

systematically intimidated, blackballed, fired, muzzled and gagged scientists in

every department of government. Scientists who produce science that challenges

corporate profit taking, or that might be an obstacle to corporate profit

taking, are routinely punished, muzzled or gagged.

 

 

 

I'll give you an example. Last year, a Department of Agriculture scientist

produced a series of reports that showed that discharges from hog factories

operated by big agri-businesses like Smithfield and Tyson's Foods, include, on

average, a billion antibiotic-resistant bacteria every day, which cross property

lines and threaten downwind neighbors and their herds.

 

 

 

I invited this scientist to make a presentation to a group of farmers and farm

activists in Clear Lake, Iowa last year, to about 1,100 or 1,200 farmers and

farm activists who are fighting agri-business on factory farms. And the hog

industry – the Pork Producers Council – learned a day before he was supposed to

make his presentation to us that he was going to visit our conference. They

contacted the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Department of

Agriculture ordered him not to appear at the conference. He later told me that

he had been ordered to not speak at over a dozen events – mainly presentations

to local county health departments on his findings. And remember, this is a

taxpayer-funded study. The USDA also ordered him to withdraw the study and not

publish it.

 

 

 

The study is peer-reviewed quality study that was funded with taxpayer money,

but it offended the industry. And the industry has so much control over our

government officials that the USDA, which is supposed to be protecting small

farmers and rural communities, has instead become an advocate for big

agri-business and is muzzling its own scientists when the science shows that

agri-business practices are posing a public health threat. The same

Administration ordered government scientists not to study methyl bromide,

another pesticide. They've ordered government scientists not to study mercury.

And they've muzzled two scientists within the EPA who were studying mercury

poisoning.

 

 

 

The U.S. Department of Interior has altered a series of reports on polar bears,

trumpeter swans, and caribou in the Arctic that show that industry practices are

damaging these animals. They've done the same on desert fishes in Arizona, on

timber wolves, on grizzly bears. All of these reports indicated that corporate

activity was threatening the continued existence of these species. And so the

Administration ordered the science halted.

 

 

 

BuzzFlash: On this specific topic of manipulation of science, you have a

paragraph, about midway through the article, about global warming, in which you

mention that a report, which had been suppressed by the Bush Administration, was

leaked by dissident EPA scientists. It showed that a Senate plan co-sponsored by

John McCain could reduce pollution that causes global warming at a very small

cost, and the Administration basically squashed that. To knock the leaked study

off the radar screen, the Bush Administration announced it was launching a $100

million, 10-year effort to prove that global temperature changes have, in fact,

occurred naturally.

 

 

 

Kennedy: Ha.

 

 

 

BuzzFlash: And you say now the delay tactic was done to benefit the fossil fuel

barons. So we had a study ostensibly that showed really we could reduce the

pollution that causes global warming for very little cost. The Bush

Administration suppresses that. When it finally is leaked, then they come up

with a study that's going to waste one-tenth of a billion dollars to try to

prove, over a 10-year period, that it's all really due to natural causes.

 

 

 

Kennedy: That's right. My Rolling Stone piece mentions 12 different major

studies on global warming that have been suppressed or altered by the Bush

Administration. And the president's father used this same tactic. One of the

studies that this Bush Administration has suppressed was a 10-year intensive

study that was inaugurated by President Bush's father when he was president for

the same reason – to delay action on what was already a consensus among the

world's scientists: that global warming exists, and that it's caused by the

byproducts of our population growth aided by industrial discharges into our

atmosphere.

 

 

 

That report, inaugurated by the original President Bush, also concluded that

this is a crisis that has to be addressed immediately. That was suppressed, and

now the son has launched another 10-year study. His intention is transparent – a

continued delay on any action on global warming gasses.

 

 

 

BuzzFlash: Near the end of the indictment of the Bush Administration, you make

the statement that corporate capitalists do not want free markets. They want

dependable profits, and their surest route to crush competition is by

controlling the government. You go on to suggest that what we've seen happen in

the Bush Administration is that the industries that are governed are now

basically governing themselves because Bush has appointed so many industry

people to regulatory jobs. They've gone through the revolving door and end up

policing the very industries they're coming from.

 

 

 

Kennedy: All of our federal agencies have now been captured by the industries

that they're intended to regulate. The head of the Forest Service is a timber

industry lobbyist. The head of our public lands is a mining industry lobbyist.

The chief of staff in the White House, Andrew Card, was chief counsel to General

Motors and its top lobbyists. And 22 of the top 38 White House officials all

have energy industry pedigrees. We have a president that says that he doesn't

listen to TV, and he doesn't get his news from the newspapers, but gets it from

his staff. Unfortunately, all of his staff are from the energy industries, and

the rest of them have corporate pedigrees. So they, of course, have a rosy view

of what's going on in our country, and their opinions about how our nation ought

to work may not always reflect the best interests of the American public.

 

 

 

I think my concern regarding the increasing control of government by large

corporations should be a central issue to all Americans. I was raised in a

milieu where I was taught that communism leads to dictatorship and capitalism

leads to democracy. But it's not that simple. Free-market capitalism definitely

democratizes a country. But corporate crony capitalism is as antithetical to

democracy in America as it is in Nigeria. And corporate control of government is

fascism. The definition of communism is the control of business by government.

The definition of fascism is the control of government by business.

 

 

 

A farmer sent me a copy of the American Heritage Dictionary's definition of

fascism the other day, and the definition is roughly that the control of

government by large corporations with right-wing ideologies, driven by bellicose

nationalism. That has a familiar ring these days.

 

 

 

Democracy is fragile. It needs to be nurtured. It needs to be stewarded. And the

free market has to be protected through government regulation. As I say,

capitalists do not want free markets. They want profits. And the best way to

capture profits – to capture a reliable profit stream – is to get control of

government and use government to crush your competition.

 

 

 

And that's what's happening in this country – the free market is being

eliminated. And in many of the major sectors, the free market has already

disappeared. There is no free market left in agriculture. A farmer can't raise a

pig and get it slaughtered, and bring it to a stockyard and sell it. The

stockyards are gone. The farmers are out of business, and hog production and

meat production and chicken production in this country is now controlled by

giant agri-businesses, as is grain production. The same is true in the energy

sector, and in the media – you've got 17,000 news outlets in this country that

are now controlled by 11 corporations. And it's even happening on Main Street,

where Wal-Mart is coming and knocking out the Main Street merchants, the small

entrepreneurs – those who really make American democracy viable. And it's a

frightening thing for our country. But we need a free market.

 

 

 

I heard Jim Hightower say that the free market is a great thing. We should try

it sometime. We're losing it in America. And when we lose the free market – the

free market democracy, the democracy of the marketplace – political democracy

will fall soon after. And that's something all of us should be afraid of.

 

 

 

BuzzFlash: Again, you've devoted your life to trying to keep the environment as

pristine and as useable as possible for the public good. There's been talk by

some large corporations – Enron was dabbling in it – of actually privatizing

water rights. Is the public not seeing what's happening in terms of the

privatization of the environment?

 

 

 

Kennedy: The privatization is occurring when a coal company and a utility poison

the air that your children are supposed to be breathing. That's the

privatization of a public resource. It's a privatization of a public resource

when General Electric dumps PCBs into the Hudson River so that nobody can eat

the fish, so it's illegal to sell the fish in the marketplace, because those

fish were owned by the public. And they were owned by the commercial fishermen

who utilized that resource for generations – for 350 years. But all of a sudden,

those fishermen were put out of business – the small business enterprises were

put out of business because General Electric had better lobbyists up in Albany.

And they were able to dump grease onto the political skids and dump their PCBs

into the Hudson. They made a big profit by privatizing the commons – by

liquidating a public asset for cash, which were the fish of the Hudson River.

 

 

 

And the coal companies and the utilities are liquidating a public asset for

cash, which is the air that we breathe. And it's not just that our public lands

are being opened, or that our water systems are being sold to private companies,

but you can privatize the commons through pollution, because that's a public

asset that is being essentially reduced to private control. It's being stolen

from the public through your actions.

 

 

 

And that's what's going on on Capitol Hill. It's much more subtle, in most

cases, than somebody kind of outright buying a public water supply. But it's

much more ubiquitous too. It's happening everywhere, all around us, with the

things that we always took for granted – the air, the water, the fisheries, the

wetlands. All the things that are owned by the public, such as the aquifers that

are the infrastructure to our quality of life. Those things are being stolen

from us by private corporate entities with political clout.

 

 

 

BuzzFlash: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., thank you very much for your time.

 

 

 

Kennedy: Thanks for having me.

 

 

 

This interview was originally published on Buzzflash.com

 

 

 

 

 

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