Excerpts of statements made by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the Tavis Smiley show, Tuesday September 28th 2004, relating to his latest book, �Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering The Country and Hijacking Our Democracy.�
Kennedy:
"I've been bipartisan for 20 years as an environmental advocate, 'cause I don't think there's any such thing as Republican children or Democratic children. I don't want the environment to become the province of a single political party. But you can't talk honestly about the environment today in any context without speaking critically of this president. This is the worst environmental president we've had in American history without any rival. If you look at The National Resources Defence Council's web site , you'll see over 400 major environmental rollbacks that have been promoted by the White House over the last 3 1/2 years as part of a deliberate, concerted attempt to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law."
They don't want the public to know about this, because even the Republicans would turn against them, and this is what their own polling shows, and I show this in the book. And so they conceal their agenda, this radical agenda behind an Orwellian rhetoric. When they want to destroy the forest, they call it the Healthy Forest Act. When they want to destroy the air, they call it the Clear Skies Bill.
But they've - most insidiously, they've put polluters in charge of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. The head of Public Lands in this country is a mining industry lobbyist who believes that public lands are unconstitutional. The head of the Forest Service is probably the most rapacious timber industry lobbyist in history, Mark Ray. The head of the air division of EPA is a utility lobbyist who spent his whole life representing the worst air polluters in America. The head of Superfund is a woman whose last job was teaching corporations how to evade Superfund. The second in command of EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist. And if you go through all of the sub-secretariats and agency heads in the department of agriculture and energy and the interior and EPA, virtually all of them come from polluting industries who have a lot of money at stake in those regulations. And these are not individuals, as I show in my book, who have entered government service for the public interest, but rather to specifically to subvert the very laws they're now charged with enforcing.
. . . When a coal company discharges mercury into the air or ozone in particulates - today, you know, one out of every four black children in America's cities has asthma. I have three sons who have asthma. We have an epidemic today of pediatric asthma. We know that asthma attacks are caused by 2 components of air pollution: ozone and particulates. We know that the principal source of those, about 60% of that material in our atmosphere, is coming from 1,100 coal-burning power plants who are burning coal illegally. It's been illegal for 15 years. They were supposed to modernize their processes.
The Clinton administration was prosecuting them, 70 of the worst ones, for violating the law. But this is an industry that gave $48 million to President Bush during the 2000 cycle and have given $58 million since, and one of the first things that Bush did when he came into office was to order the Justice Department to drop those lawsuits. The Justice Department lawyer said, �This has never been done in American history where a president receives money from a criminal targeted by prosecutors and then gets into office and orders the Justice Department to drop the prosecutions.� Now, you remember when Bill Clinton pardoned Mark Ray (?) and how indignant everybody got. But Mark Ray was just one guy, and this is 70 different criminal enterprises, and Mark Ray never killed anybody. And according to EPA, those 70 plants - just the criminal exceedences from those plants kill 5,500 Americans every year.
. . .
One out of every 6 American women now has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases - autism, blindness, mental retardation, heart, liver, and kidney disease. I got my levels tested recently. I have so much mercury in my body, just from eating fish, that Dr. David carpenter, who's the national authority on mercury contamination, told me that a woman with my levels of mercury in her body would have children with cognitive impairment. He estimated permanent IQ loss of 5 to 7 points in all of her children.
Now, there are 630,000 children born in this country every single year who have been subjected - exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in the womb. The Clinton administration, recognizing this national epidemic, declared mercury a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act. That triggered a requirement that those coal utilities had to remove 90% of that mercury within 3� years. But this is the same industry that gave $100 million to this president, and eight weeks ago, President Bush announced he was scrapping the Clinton-era regs and substituting instead regulations that were written by industry lawyers."
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