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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Senior Attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council; President, Waterkeeper Alliance; Author, Crimes Against Nature
Answers to Questions from the Audience
Q: Why do you think the press is not making the environment an issue in the campaign? Are they intimidated by conservatives? Is it a function of corporate ownership of mass media?A: It's mainly the function of the mass ownership of the media and the abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine by Ronald Reagan in 1988. The airwaves are owned by the people, they are not owned by the networks. In 1924, when radio broadcasting and the beginnings of television broadcasting began, the federal government passed the Fairness Doctrine that required the networks who got a license to use the airways to use them for a public purpose; of course they were permitted to make a profit, but their primary obligation was to use them for a public purpose, to further and advance the interest of democratic governance. In 1988, as a favor to the big studios who helped get him elected, Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine. What happened after that? The Fairness Doctrine required that broadcasters air important issues of public debate and air both sides of every debate. For example, it was the law in this country that if you advertised a gas-guzzling car, the network who did that had an obligation to give space for asthmatics and other people who may be injured by gas-guzzling cars.
The Fairness Doctrine also encouraged local control of the media and encouraged a diversity of control. Today you have six large multinationals that control all 5,000 television stations in this country and almost all of the 16,000 radio stations and 16,000 newspapers. News departments have become corporate profit centers. They are no longer controlled by people who live in the community or are interested in advancing the community or advancing democracies; they are controlled by these large corporations who want one thing: money for their shareholders. Without restraints, therefore, the news departments have fired documentary staffs; they've fired their investigative reporters because they are expensive; and they've gotten rid of their foreign bureaus, so if you want to get foreign news in this country now you've got to go to the BBC. In order to get viewership, they are appealing to the lowest common denominator: our primal prurient interests in pornography and celebrity gossip. So we get Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant, and when they put that stuff on TV they can watch the Nielsen rating spike. Their war is to attract viewership so that they can sell us products. You put that stuff on full time and there is very little room for the asthmatic kids and the people with mercury poisoning - and there is not an investigative reporter who can take the time to connect the dots to the president's policies and the money he took from the corporate contributors.
Four years ago I worked on the Gore campaign, and people were asking me, How come he is not talking more about the environment? When I was with him, he was. I talked to Bob Shrum and to Al Gore about it and they said, "We are, but when you talk about the environment it doesn't get any coverage. There is no traction in the press, and so I can't do it because they will not print it." They cover the horse race, the fist fight, the blue states versus the red states and the poll numbers, but they are not talking about the substance of these rules, the things that really impact us in this democracy. The television media, where 60 percent of Americans get their news, which used to be the principal form of American democracy, has now simply become a marketplace for commerce.
People ask me, What's the most important environmental law? There are two: One is campaign finance reform and the other is to restore the Fairness Doctrine, because those will fix our democracy. You cannot get sustained environmental protection under any system except for locally based democracy. There are a million reasons for that, the main one being: The fishes and the birds and the children don't vote, and the only way those interests get represented is in a system where individuals who harbor those interests can inject them into the political dialogue. That doesn't happen in a tyranny. There is a direct correlation around the world between the level of tyranny in various governments and the level of environmental destruction; whether it's right-wing tyrannies like Brazil during the '70s or Saddam Hussein's Iraq during the '80s and '90s or left-wing tyrannies like Eastern Europe, China or the Soviet Union, they are facing economic catastrophes because of their failure to invest in their environmental infrastructure. You can write all the laws you want, but unless you get a locally based democracy where individuals have access to government officials and are able to call them to task, those environmental laws will never be enforced.
Q: You describe the Bush administration's stealth campaign to roll back hundreds of environmental regulations. Why hasn't there been an outcry in Congress about this?
A: Congress is controlled by the Republican Party. It's not the rank and file; it's selective - Republicans who have accepted huge amounts of money from corporations. I don't want to make this Republicans against Democrats; the Democratic Party is 60 percent corrupt and the Republican Party is 90 percent corrupt. Look at the level of corruption by the level of money that they're accepting, and that definately distorts the political process. If you want to run for Senate in New York you have to raise $25 million and get a lot of $10,000 contributions from people. I don't know what kind of person can accept those contributions and not feel obligated to give something back. Particularly today, with the Republican Party, the leadership in Congress are ideologically committed to corporate profit-taking and to pollution.
Tom DeLay is a bug killer from Texas; he got into public life because he was an exterminator and he was angry at the ban of DDT and atrazine. He says DDT is safe as aspirin; that's a quote. All of them are indentured servants for the big polluters. If you want to pollute you can make a lot of money polluting by stealing the commons: the air, the water, those things that are not susceptible to private ownership but, by their nature, belong to all the people. The coal industry and utilities have given this president and the Republican Party $100 million over the last three and a half years. They've gotten billions and billions of regulatory relief. If you're a coal company or a timber company or a pharmaceutical company, you have a surplus at the end of the year, probably the best investment you can make is not retooling your plant or retraining your workers but to invest in a politician who is going to protect your prerogative to steal from the public trust. That economic tension is always going to prove a vulnerability to our democratic system and we have to guard against it.
Q: If you're unemployed in the Bush economy, why should you be paying attention to the environment?
A: Somebody who is unemployed is likely not to be concerned about anything except for their families and survival, but the primary wealth of all Americans - and the poorer you are the truer this is - is the environment: the air you breathe, the water you drink. Bottled water costs ten thousand times the price of tap water, and it's a savings to you to be able to drink tap water for free and to breathe air that is free. The most important measure of how democracy is working is: How does it provide access to public officials and to justice for the most vulnerable and alienated people in the system? But, more importantly, how does it distribute the goods of the land, the bounty of the nation, the things that we all share in common? Those have been designated as public trust assets since ancient times - Roman law, the Code of Justinian, the Magna Carta - those belong to all the people, everybody has a right to use them; nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. It is literally the common wealth, and for most Americans, particularly poor Americans, the largest asset they have is a clean environment.
The struggle is that there are corporations that want to take that away from you, that want to burn coal that's going to poison your baby. The mother of that child or the father, they may be unemployed, but they've got to bring their child to the emergency room. They don't have insurance; they can't go out and get a nebulizer like I can for my kids. They may have to go to the emergency room two to three times a week just to keep that child alive. The poorest people in our country are the primary victims of environmental injury. Four out of every five toxic waste dumps is in a black neighborhood; the largest toxic waste dump is Emelle, Alabama, which is 85 percent black; the highest concentration of toxic waste dumps in America is the South Side of Chicago; the most contaminated ZIP code in California is East L.A. I would say even the poorest people, even unemployed people, have a huge stake in environmental protection.
Q: You talked a lot about corporate polluters. Are there examples of good corporate environmental citizens?
A: There are many, many examples, even within the fields that we consider big polluters. There is a huge difference between the behavior of the various companies in the oil industry. For example, there are great companies that are really trying to do the right thing - like BP and Hess Oil; and there are really bad companies like Exxon and Texaco. You get some institutional cultures within these corporations that are responsible and that see wealth as a way to benefit the community and others that have an extremely rapacious attitude that is all about plunder.
Q: A lot of people are wondering if you can use your influence with Arnold Schwarzenegger to turn him into a green governor - or is a governor who once owned nine Humvees lost to us all?
A: Governor Schwarzenegger asked me very early in the campaign to help him design an environmental program, and his environmental platform actually was the greenest of any governor that was running last year. When he got into office he appointed Terry Tamminen, who was the Santa Monica Baykeeper, a terrific, very strong, very smart environmentalist and very committed. He is probably the best Cal/EPA commissioner that we've ever had, and he has brought a lot of good environmentalists into the government. Arnold has done a number of really good things, including the HOV lane, opening it up to hybrids, which is a bill that took tremendous courage for him to sign because it pitted him against a lot of his old buddies in Detroit. There are a number of important issues that are wrapped up in the California budget debates, and the environmental community is fighting hard to make sure some of these bills are signed into law. I have my fingers crossed that he does the right thing, and I'm putting my two cents in every chance that they give me.
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