Environmental News Watch:

 

 Old News   Cold News | Orr-Report  | From: Joseph Holmes | From: Ed Dobson

THE WILDNESS WITHIN US

 

Knowledge is Power - Thomas Jefferson

October 10, 2004

 

 

BOGUS POLLS: MEANINGLESS FARCE OR LOOMING TRAGEDY? - Arianna Huffington

Congress moves to close SUV-friendly tax loophole

Not-So-Great Debates: Part 2 - The Nation

Kenyan Environmentalist Wangari Maathai Wins Nobel Peace Prize

 Bush's Crimes Against Nature - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Rome cracks down on SUVs

Closed, For Business: Energy Bill Special-Interests Triumph - t r u t h o u t

Hetch Hetchy report deserves serious discussion

A Terror Attack, Coming Soon to a Plant Near You - Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Earth to Bush - The Nation

Wildlife Protection Standards Waived - t r u t h o u t

Bush revealed his true dependency Thursday

George W. Bush & the "Mandate of Heaven"

Shooting the Messenger Doesn't Discredit the Message - Greg Palast

Lead Levels in Water Misrepresented Across U.S.

Howard Dean | Environmental Policy Affects Health, Economy, Security - t r u t h o u t

Disillusioned and angry American soldiers serving in Iraq - Letters to Michael Moore

10 Questions for Dick Cheney - John Nichols

WE THE PLANET FEST 2004 - HENRY J KAISER AUDITORIUM

Grand Finale: Bruce Springsteen Wants You Next Monday! - Vote for Change tour

The Sweet Music of Activism - Bill Bradley

Two held in French anti-nuclear protest

It's Time for Fundamental Changes in the Way We Derive and Use Energy - Ralph Nader

As Reservoirs Recede, Fears of a Water Shortage Rise

Global Warming Is Expected to Raise Hurricane Intensity - t r u t h o u t

U.S. Can Eliminate Oil Use in a Few Decades

On a mission to save America's natural majesty

Informed Dissent | Is it just me, or is it getting warmer?

Kerry Keeps Hope Alive - The Nation

Refinery Report Release Delayed until after Election - t r u t h o u t

Navajo feel a long way from Washington

Climb every mountain -- on film

Sacramento Bee and SF Chronicle editorials on Hetch Hetchy

Old Testament Vengeance?

Americans Pay High Cost for War

Cornel West's Democracy; Top 10 Reasons to Withdraw from Iraq - AlterNet

Kerry and Bush Sharply Divided on Global Warming - t r u t h o u t

GEORGE W. BUSH AIN'T NO COWBOY

Bush is History's Top Terrorist

Backtracking on bullet train route

WANTED: Program Director, Brower Youth Awards

Robert Redford Criticizes Bush Environmental Record - t r u t h o u t

BROWER POWER - A spotlight on young enviro activists

2004 Brower Youth Awards Honor Outstanding Student Environmental Leaders

The 2003 Brower Youth Award Winners Speak Up

The Next Agenda

Julia Butterfly's Calendar - CIRCLE of LIFE

Butterfly Gardener: Events Calendar & Action Alerts

 

 

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From: "Arianna Huffington" <arianna@ariannaonline.com>
Reply-To: <arianna@ariannaonline.com>
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2004 12:25:19 -0700
To: <browerpower@wildnesswithin.com>
Subject: Bogus Polls: Meaningless Farce Or Looming Tragedy?

   

BOGUS POLLS: MEANINGLESS FARCE OR LOOMING TRAGEDY?

By Arianna Huffington

I've been wanting to weigh in for a while now on the negative - indeed, the downright dangerous - impact that public opinion polls are having on our democracy, but have held off until the numbers turned in John Kerry's favor lest I be accused of following in the footsteps of my Greek ancestors by killing the messenger.

But now that the post-debate figures have swung Kerry's way, let me jump on the chance to say: It's time to pull the plug on the media's obsession with treating polling results as if Moses had just brought them down from the mountaintop.

Over the last month, media coverage of the presidential race has been driven by wildly vacillating poll numbers. For example, Newsweek has Kerry going from 11 points down in its Sept. 4 poll to 2 points up in this week's poll, while Gallup went from Kerry trailing by 14 points on Sept. 16 to dead even on Oct. 4.

Of course, at the same time that Gallup had Bush 14 points ahead, the Pew Center poll had the race all tied up; and now that Gallup has Kerry pulling even with Bush, Pew has the president holding a 7-point advantage.

But no one in the media says, "Hey, wait a minute. What's going on here? Both of you can't be right!" They just dutifully report the latest numbers and set out to explain what they "mean" - without any attempt to account for the huge disparities.

After all, for the big swings in the Newsweek and Gallup polls to be true, close to 16 million voters would have had to change their minds. In four weeks' time. Not even J-Lo is that fickle.

Sure, Kerry was strong in the first debate and Bush was shaky - but for that many voters to switch sides that fast, Kerry would have had to deliver Osama Been Forgotten's head on a silver platter during his closing statement.

And, unless I really spaced out, that didn't happen.

The dirty little secret of the polling industry is that, all too often, its findings are based on flawed methodology and dubious assumptions.

Take that mid-September Gallup poll that found Kerry had plummeted 14 points behind Bush. It sure made it seem as if Kerry were as good as done for, right? And that's the way it was widely reported by everybody, especially Gallup's media partners, USA Today and CNN. The problem is, the poll was absurdly weighted in favor of GOP voters, assuming that on Election Day 40 percent of those casting a ballot will be Republicans and only 33 percent will be Democrats - a turnout breakdown that will only happen in Karl Rove's dreams.

Democrats have accounted for 39 percent of those voting in the last two presidential elections, while Republicans accounted for no more than 35 percent in either 1996 or 2000.

It's like they say about computers: garbage in, garbage out. With polls, it's faulty data in, faulty findings out.

Yet polls are now firmly entrenched as the lingua franca of political analysis. Dissecting the latest numbers is so much easier than actually, y'know, digging for the truth. Cable shows love turning the campaign into a horse race. And it's so much easier if you can parade fatuous numbers as hardcore facts to prove Who's Hot and Who's Not.

Trouble is, these "snapshots of the electorate" quickly harden into portraits, and, in the blink of an eye, guesstimates become the conventional wisdom.

And in politics, as in sports, everybody loves a winner. Thus, as soon as the pollsters delivered Bush his hyper-inflated post-convention bounce, many of the Democratic faithful started seeing the ghosts of Mike Dukakis and Fritz Mondale lurking around every corner. By the same light, now that Bush has supposedly hit the polling skids, the shadow of his Dad's one-and-done presidency has begun to darken the GOP base's doorstep.

These kinds of poll-induced mood swings can have a profound impact on a campaign. The sense that a candidate is tanking - or on a roll - can make the difference between a potential donor making a contribution or keeping his checkbook in his pocket. It can also tip the scales for a would-be volunteer deciding whether to give up more free time to go door-to-door registering voters or work the phones to get out the vote.

I saw firsthand the effect that manufactured momentum has as I traveled around the country speaking. Again and again last month, I was told by Kerry supporters that the gloomy poll numbers hanging over their man's campaign had made them less likely to donate their time and money.

This is how polls morph from meaningless farce into potential tragedy - self-fulfilling prophesies that end up making more likely whatever results they predict while, at the same time, undermining the democratic process.

But despite mounting evidence that poll results can't be trusted, pundits and politicians continue to treat them with a reverence ancient Romans reserved for chicken entrails, ignoring the fact that pollsters are finding it increasingly difficult to get people to talk to them. Thanks to answering machines, caller ID and telemarketers, polling response rates have plunged to 30 percent - and lower. It's pretty hard getting a good read on the public's opinion when people keep hanging up on you.

Plus, pollsters never call cell phones - of which there are now close to 170 million. And even though most cell phone users also have a hard line, a growing number don't - especially young people, an underpolled and hard-to-gauge demographic that could easily turn out to be the margin of difference in this year's race.

Most important, no pollsters, no matter how polished their crystal balls, really know who are going to be the likely voters this November and how many of the unlikely ones are going to turn out at the polls.

Our media mavens obviously know all this, but choose to ignore it. Coming clean about polls would mean taking them off the front pages and sticking them where they belong - back among the horoscopes and comic strips.

And then what would the chattering class chatter about?

 
© 2004 Arianna Huffington.
Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

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DAILY GRIST - 08 Oct 2004

Environmental news from GRIST MAGAZINE

<http://grist.org>


LIKE A CAMEL THROUGH THE EYE OF THE TAX CODE

Congress moves to close SUV-friendly tax loophole

It looks like Congress may soon close one of the U.S. tax code's most
egregious provisions (and that's quite a distinction!). In 2003,
lawmakers raised the business-equipment tax deduction to $100,000,
clearing the way for a massive luxury SUV to be written off as a
business expense -- if it was used "primarily" for business purposes,
of course, wink, wink. The American International Automobile
Dealers, an industry group, claimed the tax break stimulated the
economy, citing, uh, a 6 percent rise in SUV sales. Automakers,
deeply aware of the injustice of it all, advocated that all vehicles
be given the tax break. But consumer, tax-fairness, and enviro
groups suggested that perhaps the federal government shouldn't be
subsidizing the purchase of polluting vehicles at all. In a large
tax bill likely to be approved by the House and Senate by the end of
the week, lawmakers reduced the deduction to $25,000. And rejected a
provision that would have given tax breaks to buyers of hybrid and
other clean cars. But hey: baby steps.

straight to the source: The Detroit News, Jeff Plungis, 07 Oct 2004
<http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=3287>

straight to the source: Detroit Free Press, Associated Press,
Dee-Ann Durbin, 07 Oct 2004
<http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=3288>

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From: The Nation Magazine <emailnation@thenation.com>
Reply-To: emailnation@thenation.com
To: <browerpower@wildnesswithin.com>
Date: Saturday, October 9, 2004 2:13 PM

Not-So-Great Debates: Part 2

Last night's presidential debate was a true-to-form middle episode of a yet-to-be-finished trilogy. In Episode I, the newcomer bested the holder of the throne. In the sequel, the humiliated leader fought back--but at the same time the challenger kept alive the threat to the established order. This all sets up next Wednesday's debate as a potentially dramatic finale.

For more, read David Corn's Capital Games:
http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=1891

And don't miss Corn's new Nation magazine piece highlighting how that the cultural community in the US--and Bruce Springsteen in particular--has taken on the present Administration in unprecedented ways. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041025&s=corn

Progressive musicians have been trying to rock the youth vote at least since John Lennon organized a 1972 concert tour designed to encourage young people to vote against Richard Nixon, as Jon Wiener explains. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041025&s=wiener

Finally, please make sure to check http://www.thenation.com for new weblogs, the RadioNation AudioBlog, exclusive new online reports, info on nationwide activist campaigns, Nation History offerings, reader letters and special weekly selections from The Nation magazine. (This week, we're featuring new magazine articles by Katha Pollitt, Eric Alterman and William Greider!)

Best Regards,
Peter Rothberg, The Nation

P.S. If you like The Nation, please consider subscribing at our discounted rate. It's the only way to read ALL of what's in The Nation week after week--both in print and online.
http://www.thenation.com/ensubscribe

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From: trudyw <trudyw@sierratel.com>
To: Robert brower <browerpower@wildnesswithin.com>
Date: Saturday, October 9, 2004 2:55 AM
Subject: Kenyan Environmentalist Wangari Maathai Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Good people,

What follows is a partial transcript of today's Democracy Now! The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Wangari Maathai is the best news I've heard in a very long time. Besides being an unquestionably deserved honor for Dr. Maathai, it is also international recognition that the peace and well being of the planet are intimately connected to environmental responsibility and human rights. For far too long, the enviro establishment, especially in the US, has isolated itself from indigenous and human rights issues; environmentalists, of all people, should understand the interconnectivity of all life on this planet. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox now and pass this along.


democracynow.org - Friday, October 8th, 2004

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/08/1530258

Kenyan Environmentalist Wangari Maathai Wins Nobel Peace Prize


Kenyan environmentalist and zoology professor Wangari Maathai bcame the first woman from Africa to win the Nobel Peace Prize Friday. We hear Wangari Maathai speaking earlier about the violence she faces in Kenya and we speak with her colleague Terry Tempest Williams. [includes rush transcript]

Today the Chair of the Nobel Prize Committee announced this year's winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.
Ole Danbolt Mjoes, Chair of the Nobel Prize Committee speaking in Oslo, Norway on October 8, 2004.
Chair of the Nobel Prize Committee announcing Wangari Maathai as the 2004 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. She is an environmentalist and zoology professor from Kenya and the first woman from Africa to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She is 63 years old.

Wangari Maathai rose to international fame for campaigns against government-backed forest clearances in Kenya in the late 1980s and 1990s.

She once said of the forest clearances "It's a matter of life and death for this country. The Kenyan forests are facing extinction and it is a man-made problem."

In 1992 riot police clubbed her and three other women unconscious in central Nairobi during a demonstration. She has been tear gassed, threatened with death by anonymous callers, and once thrown into jail overnight for leading protests.
Wangari Maathai, speaking about the violence she faces in Kenya.
Terry Tempest Williams, author, environmental activist and professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Utah. Her newest book is "The Open Space of Democracy".

 

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast.

AMY GOODMAN: Today the chair of the Nobel Peace Prize committee announced this year's winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.

OLE DANBOLT MJOES: The Norwegian Nobel committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2004 to Wangari Maathai for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy, and peace. Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment. Maathai stands at the front of the fight to promote ecologically viable, social, economic, and cultural development in Kenya and in Africa. She has taken a holistic approach to sustainable development that embraces democracy, human rights, and women's rights in particular. She thinks globally and acts locally. Maathai stood up courageously against the former oppressive regime in Kenya. Her unique forms of action have contributed to drawing attention to political oppression, nationally and internationally. She has served as inspiration for many in the fight for democratic rights and has especially encouraged women to better their situation. Maathai combines science, social commitment, and active politics, more than simply protecting the existing environment, her strategy is to secure and strengthen the very basis for ecologically sustainable development.


JUAN GONZALEZ: That was the chair of the Nobel Prize Committee, announcing Wangari Maathai as the 2004 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. She is an environmentalist, a zoology professor from Kenya, and the first woman from Africa to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She is 63 years old. Wangari Maathai rose to international fame for campaigns against government-backed forest clearances in Kenya in the late 1980's and 1990's. She once said of forest clearances, "It's a matter of life and death for this country. The Kenyan forests are facing extinction and it is a man-made problem."

AMY GOODMAN: In 1992, riot police clubbed Wangari Maathai and three other women unconscious in central Nairobi during a demonstration. She's been tear gassed, threatened with death by anonymous callers and once thrown in jail overnight for leading protests. We're going to play now an excerpt of Wangari Maathai speaking about the violence she faces in Kenya.

PROF. WANGARI MAATHAI: I do know that what I do hurts some very powerful people in their own way. And because we live in a very volatile continent and, as well, a volatile country, you just never know when something may happen and you may be at the wrong place.

AMY GOODMAN: Wangari Maathai speaking about her own experience. As we turn now to the author Terry Tempest Williams, who is well known for her environmental writings and has known Wangari Maathai for many years. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Terry.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Hello, Amy. It's wonderful to talk to you.

AMY GOODMAN: It,s great to have you here with us. Can you talk first about Wangari Maathai, how you know her, who she is?

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: I met her in 1985 at the U.N. decade for women conference and the United Nations forum for women in Nairobi. She was a passionate speaker on behalf of deforestation and at that time, that was not a household word. She literally was advocating peace for the planet through the collecting of seeds--Women gathering seeds in the soles of their skirts and planting them in the soils of their community. It was extremely moving and I can tell you personally she changed my life.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of some of the work that she has done subsequently?

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: What she has done, literally, is plant 10 million trees and she took the seedlings that were planted by the women in the villages to the schools, the elementary schools, where the children were then able to nurture hope. So, it's been a communal process that she's been engaged in, it has been a familial process and then she took that into the community at large.

AMY GOODMAN: Terry Tempest Williams, she is the first environmentalist to be awarded the prize, the first African woman. Your response.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: I think this is extremely significant. Wangari Maathai was the first of the global leaders to say the health of our communities is the health of the planet. She said that environmental responsibility is social responsibility. She was one of the first global leaders decades ago to say that there is no separation between how we treat the environment and how we treat each other. I think it's important to note, Amy and Juan, that she said so often those of us working on the margins to create this open space of justice and democracy are not those who then inhabit that space and she has always advocated that we must not only create that space, but then step inside it and I think it's significant to note that she ran for parliament in 2002, won, and was named the Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources.

AMY GOODMAN: When you heard this morning, Terry Tempest Williams, that it was Wangari Maathai, how did you respond?

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: I cried. I just think this is an enormous gesture on behalf of a woman who has risked everything for the environment and who, her whole life, is a gesture of deep bows to women and children in the earth. She's been recognized as a peacemaker, and I think redefines what peace is.

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truthout.org

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100904G.shtml 
 

 Bush's Crimes Against Nature

    By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
    Eugene Weekly

    Thursday 07 October 2004

Editor's Note: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is arguably the nation's most prominent environmental attorney. His new book is "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy." On Sept. 23, he made an impromptu appearance in Eugene, Oregon. Below is an edited transcript of his talk.

    I've written a book about Bush's environmental record, but it's not so much about the environment as it is about an excess of corporate power and the corrosive impact of that on our democracy. And it's not about a Democrat attacking a Republican. I've been disciplined for 20 years as an environmental advocate about being non-partisan and bi-partisan in my approach to these issues. I don't think there's any such thing as Republican children or Democratic children, and the worst thing that can happen to the environment is if it becomes the province of a single political party. But you can't talk honestly about the environment today in any context without speaking critically about this president. This is the worst environmental president we've had in American history.

    If you look at Natural Resource Defense Council's website, you'll see over 400 major environmental roll-backs that have been promoted by this administration during the last three and a half years, and I tell you it's part of a concerted deliberate attempt to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law.

    It's a stealth attack. They have concealed their radical agenda from the American public using Orwellian rhetoric. When they destroy the forest, they call it the Healthy Forest Law; when they destroy the air they call it the Clear Skies Bill. And most insidiously they have put polluters in charge of virtually all the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. The head of the Forest Service is a timber industry lobbyist. The head of public lands is a mining industry lobbyist who believes that public lands are unconstitutional. The head of the air division at EPA is a utility lobbyist who has represented the worst air polluters in America. The second in command at EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist. The head of Superfunds, an agency critical to quality of life here in Oregon, is a lobbyist whose last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade Superfunds.

    If you go through all the agency heads, sub-heads and secretaries in the Department of Agriculture, Department of the Interior, Department of Energy and EPA, you'll find the same thing: The polluters are running regulatory agencies that are supposed to regulate them. And these are not individuals who have entered government service for the sake of the public interest, but rather specifically to subvert the very laws that they are in charge of enforcing. This is impacting our quality of life in America in so many ways that we don't know about because the press simply isn't doing its job of informing the American public, scrutinizing these policies, connecting the dots between the corporate contributors and the dramatic decline in American quality of life that we are now experiencing.

    This year for the first time since the passage of the Clean Water Act, EPA announced that America's waterways are actually getting dirtier. The New York Times ran a story that the levels of sulfur dioxide (that causes acid rain) have grown 4 percent over the last year. I have three children who have asthma and one out of every four black children in this country in our municipalities now has asthma.

    Asthma rates have doubled among our children over the last five years. Whether it's hormones in our food or antibiotics, something is causing our children to have these kinds of haywire immune systems. We do know that asthma attacks are triggered primarily by two components of air pollution: ozone and particulates. About 60 percent of those materials in our atmosphere are coming from 1,100 coal-burning power plants that are burning coal illegally. They were supposed to have cleaned up 15 years ago. The Clinton administration was prosecuting the worst 70 of these plants for criminal violations. But this is an industry that donated $48 million to President Bush and the Republican Party in the 2000 cycle and have given $58 million since. And one of the first things that President Bush did when he came into office was to order the Justice Department to drop those lawsuits against those utilities

    According to the EPA, just the criminal excedences from these 70 plants kill 5,500 Americans every year. And then the Bush administration tore the heart out of the Clean Air Act abolishing the New Source Reviews section that require these companies to clean up their pollution. That decision is killing 30,000 Americans every single year, according to EPA, including 165 people in the state of Oregon.

    Last week the federal EPA announced that in 19 states it's now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish because of mercury contamination. In 48 states it's now unsafe to eat at least some of the fish or most of the fish, and Oregon is one of those.

    We know a lot about mercury now that we didn't know 10 years ago. We know that one out of every six American women now has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for autism, blindness, mental retardation, cognitive impairment, heart, liver and kidney disease. I have so much mercury in my body - I got levels tested recently - that I was told by Dr. David Carpenter, who's a national authority on mercury contamination, that a woman with my levels, which are three times the safe levels, would have a child with cognitive impairment. He estimated a permanent IQ loss of 5 to 7 points in her children. He said the science is very certain. Today there are 630,000 children born in this country every year who've been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in the womb.

    Clinton, recognizing this catastrophic national epidemic, reclassified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act, which triggered a requirement that those plants remove 90 percent of the mercury within three and a half years. It would have cost them less than 1 percent of revenues and it would have solved the problem. Well, this is the same industry that's given that $100 million to the president, and eight weeks ago President Bush announced that he was scrapping the Clinton-era regs, substituting instead regulations that the industry never has to clean up their mercury contamination.

    So we are living today in a science fiction nightmare where my children and the children of millions of other Americans who have asthma are being brought into a world where the air is too poisonous to breathe - because somebody gave money to a politician. And where my children and the children of most Americans can no longer go fishing with their father and come home and eat the fish - because somebody gave money to a politician. And the mercury in the waters here in Oregon, the fish are too dangerous, particularly for children and women. Some of that mercury is coming the power plants, most of it's coming from old mining tailings and from Superfund sites. On the Willamette River, that's where the mercury's coming from. Well, guess what? The Bush administration has allowed the Superfund to go bankrupt, which means that those sites will probably never get cleaned up.

    Superfund (money) is raised through a tax on polluting industries, and it's a very, very small tax. But they don't like it. They don't mind the tax, what they mind is that that fund is used as a leverage to force them to spend billions of dollars to clean up their mess. And this is how it works. The Superfund doesn't just clean up orphan sites, but it can also be used by EPA to clean up the sites of recalcitrant polluters. So the EPA - there's a provision in Superfund that says that if a polluter refuses to clean up its Superfund site, the EPA can go to them and say, OK, fine, we're tired of dealing with the lawyers and enriching your lawyers. What we're going to do instead is clean it up ourselves and charge you triple. It's called the Treble Damages Provision.

    At virtually every Superfund site that's been cleaned up by industry over the past 20 years, since 1981, it's been cleaned up because of the threat of the Treble Damages Provision. It's the only thing that makes them clean up. Well, guess what? That threat no longer exists. The teeth have been ripped out of EPA so that they will no longer be able to force polluters to clean up their sites. As a result of that, most of these sites along the Willamette will never get cleaned up, and if they do get cleaned up, guess who's paying for it? You and I and the American public. How ridiculous is that?

    It's always been illegal to pollute the Willamette - the 1888 Rivers and Harbors Act said you can't pollute any waterway in the U.S. Even before that it was illegal to pollute. They were able to get away with it. They thought they could make more money by polluting. Now we've got an administration that rather than telling polluters they have to clean up their mess, they're saying that the public instead is going to foot the bill.

    All of these issues, and there are many, many others, examples of how corporations are controlling our government and plundering the common, stealing what belongs to the American people, our air and water, the commonwealth, the shared resources, the public land, the wandering animals - the things that give us a sense of community, the source of our values, our virtues, our character as a people. And we're plundering those. And if you ask people at the White House, why are you doing this? What they'll say when they're not lying to conceal this radical agenda and mask it from the American people, they'll say well, we have to choose between economic prosperity and environmental protection. And that is a false choice.

    In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy - if we want to measure the economy based upon how it produces jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations, over the long term, and how it preserves the value of the assets of our community. If on the other hand, we want to do what they've been urging us to do with this White House, which is to treat the planet as if it were a business in liquidation, convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution-based prosperity, we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy, but our children are going to pay for our joy ride. And they will pay for it with denuded landscapes, poorer health and huge clean up costs that will be amplified over time, and that they'll never be able to pay.

    Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the costs of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children. There is no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism than myself. I believe that the free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land. It's also the best thing that can happen to the environment because a true free market encourages efficiency and the elimination of waste, and waste is pollution.

    So free market capitalism does not pollute our environment. It's always the suspension of free market rule. In a true free market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich, without enriching your community. So what polluters do is make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market, by forcing the public to pay their production costs. You show me a polluter and I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat who's using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market.

    When those coal companies and utilities put their acid rain into the air and sterilize the lakes of the Adirondacks and destroy the forests from Georgia to Quebec, they put the mercury in the air which poisons our children, makes them mentally retarded, gives them cognitive impairment and terrible diseases, and it makes it so I can no longer go fishing and come home and eat the fish. They have stolen that from me, and as they are discharging the ozone and particulates that give our children asthma and make our workers miss work - all of those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that should, in a true free market economy be reflected in the price of the companies' products in the market. But what polluters do is they use political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and pawn their costs off on the public.

    Corporations are externalizing machines. They are always looking for ways to get the public to pay their production costs, and what all the federal environmental laws are meant to do is to restore free market capitalism in our country, by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true costs of bringing their product to market. What we do as an environmental advocates is to go out into the marketplace - I don't even consider myself an environmentalist any more, I'm a free marketeer. I go out and catch the cheaters, the people who are polluting, and I say to them we are going to force you to internalize your costs the same way you internalize your profits, because when somebody cheats the free market, it distorts the whole marketplace and none of us gets the benefits of the efficiencies and the democracy of our country.

    Americans have to understand that there is a huge difference between free market capitalism which democratizes our country which makes us more efficient, more democratic, and the kind of corporate crony capitalism which has been embraced by this administration and which is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.

    This is an administration that's about plundering our air and our water, plundering our national treasure, shifting our wealth, plundering the great relationships we had with people all over the world, and shifting the wealth of those assets to large corporations who are its donors, who are the lowest bottom feeders who profiteer on the American people.

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To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to

http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/story/0,12576,1322313,00.html

Rome cracks down on SUVs

John Hooper in Rome
Friday October 08 2004
The Guardian


The councillor responsible for traffic, Mario Di Carlo, said he intended making owners of sports utility vehicles (SUVs) pay &euro;1,000 (about &#163;690) each year - more than triple the normal rate for a permit to enter the historic centre.

His announcement was the latest move in a growing Europe-wide backlash against four-wheel drives.

Governments in Sweden and France are considering punitive taxes on SUV purchases. The Paris city council is hoping to ban them from the centre and protected areas. And, in May, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, called 4x4s "bad for London", and their owners "complete idiots".

Four-wheel drives can be a nightmare in the narrow, winding streets of old Rome, where pollution is damaging historic buildings. Yet the city now has almost 10,000 registered SUVs.

Measures to curb them are also being drawn up by the authorities in Florence. Three Italian ministries are considering a plea from a centre-left MP for discriminatory tax measures in the 2005 budget.

As in other parts of Europe, demand for SUVs is soaring. The latest figures show that 5.5% of new Italian plates are put on 4x4s, compared with less than half that figure six years ago.

According to an Italian environmental group, Legambiente, the 10 top-selling SUVs generate on average 70% more pollution in towns than the 10 most popular saloon cars.

But Wanni Zarpellon, of one group supporting SUV owners, the Italian Off-road Federation, said: "If we really want to find a culprit for the pollution of city centres, let's take a look at the scooters - many of which are two-stroke with emissions that are so far unchecked."

Fabrizio Pallocci, a representative of the federation's branch in Lazio, the region surrounding Rome, called the proposed measures "an injustice that above all limits personal freedom. People should be entirely free to buy the car they want."

The centre of Rome is already limited to traffic. Car owners who want to bring their vehicles in have to find &euro;316 for an annual permit or risk a fine. Mr Di Carlo said he planned to triple this for four-wheel drives. But he acknowledged that the council could face a civil liberties challenge in court.

The measure is expected to figure in a comprehensive anti-pollution plan to be unveiled by the council at the end of October. Similar plans are being drawn up in several other parts of Italy.

In France, critics of the crackdown on SUVs say the curbs are driven by the growing success of a type of vehicle not made in France. This is no longer the case in Italy. Fiat now manufacturers a Panda 4x4.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

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From: t r u t h o u t <messenger@truthout.org>
Date: Thursday, October 7, 2004 4:50 PM
Subject: The New York Times | The Verdict Is In

 

t r u t h o u t | 10.08

Closed, For Business: Energy Bill Special-Interests Triumph

http://www.truthout.org/environment.shtml

The New York Times | The Verdict Is In
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100804A.shtml

Take Them Out, Dude: Pilots Toast Hit on Iraqi 'Civilians'
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100804B.shtml

At the U.N., Debate Rages over Taking More - or Less - Risk
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100804C.shtml

Sidney Blumenthal | The Day Dick Cheney Was Silenced
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100804D.shtml

Jonathan Alford | Looking for Votes, Finding America
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100804E.shtml

Newsweek | Rewriting History
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100804F.shtml

Jacques Julliard | The Two Americas
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100804H.shtml

White House to Retract Pentagon Nomination
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100804I.shtml

Saul Landau | Facts and Lies; Slogans and Truth
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100804J.shtml

DeLay Again Faulted by House Ethics Panel
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100804K.shtml

NOW with Bill Moyers | 3rd Party Candidates Speak Out
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100804L.shtml

Chief Arms Inspector: "Bush in Denial" over Iraq WMD
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100804W.shtml

U.S. 'Green Zone' in Iraq Hit by Rocket Fire
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100804X.shtml

L.A. Times | Is Bush a Dope?
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100804Y.shtml

U.S. 'Almost All Wrong' on WMD
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100804Z.shtml

The TO Overview
William Rivers Pitt: 'Sanctions Worked. Weapons Inspectors Worked. That is the Bottom Line.'
http://www.truthout.org/overview.htm

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

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Ventura County Star -10/7/04

http://www.venturacountystar.com/vcs/opinion_columnists/article/0,1375,VCS_223_3236072,00.html

Comment: Dam study is a good start

Hetch Hetchy report deserves serious discussion

Ventura County Star
By John Krist, staff columnist


One of the nation's leading environmental advocacy groups issued a report last week describing how to replace the water and power supplied by the only major dam ever built in a national park, the 312-foot wall of concrete that flooded Yosemite's scenic Hetch Hetchy Valley for the benefit of San Francisco. The response from civic leaders in the city that built the dam was immediate, indignant and thoughtless.

"These people are obviously looking for water in the sand because that's where their heads are," Jim Wunderman, president of the Bay Area Council, told the Sacramento Bee. "Our organization is not willing to look at any study that involves removing the O'Shaughnessy Dam."

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a former San Francisco mayor, was equally dismissive.

"I am firmly opposed to the destruction of one of the largest sources of clean drinking water in California," she said in a press release issued quickly by her office. "In a state that has faced repeated droughts and is desperate for water sources, I believe this would be a terrible mistake."

What's remarkable about those statements is the contempt they display for fact-based discourse. Not only had both speakers already made up their minds about whether it's feasible to remove the dam blocking the Tuolumne River -- a decision they made without reference to any reliable data, there having been no thorough study of the proposal until now -- they clearly do not even want to think about it.

The public deserves better from its leaders, Feinstein in particular. Unlike most politicians, she has taken a serious interest in California water issues. She has been a stalwart supporter, for example, of the state-federal process known as CALFED, which is intended to resolve ecological, supply and reliability problems associated with the San Francisco Bay-Delta, the linchpin of the state water system. (Less than two weeks before release of the Hetch Hetchy study, Feinstein announced she had helped secure Senate approval of $395 million to fund the federal government's share of CALFED projects.)

Feinstein's work to advance CALFED, a thankless task that involves trying to balance the interests of every combatant in the state's long series of skirmishes over water, should have made clear to her the value of creative, cooperative and bold thinking. Yet, when it comes to the Hetch Hetchy proposal, she apparently is clinging to a model of water supply and delivery that's nearly a century old. Defending an outdated status quo may pay short-term political dividends, but it cannot be characterized as leadership.

Notwithstanding the glib characterization offered by Wunderman, who leads a business lobbying group, the report released Sept. 27 by Environmental Defense is not the work of impractical dreamers. It is based on a technical study of water and hydropower operations by Schlumberger Water Services, a company known for its international expertise; analysis of the legal and regulatory framework by the Sacramento law firm Somach, Simmons & Dunn, which has long experience in California water-rights litigation; and a review of water-quality issues by Oakland-based EOA Inc., a consulting firm that counts numerous public agencies among its clients (the report is available at http://www.environmentaldefense.org/hetchhetchy/).

As might be expected, the issues associated with possible removal of a major water and hydropower project are complex. Contrary to Sen. Feinstein's assertion, Hetch Hetchy Reservoir is not "one of the state's largest sources of clean drinking water," but it is significant to San Francisco, providing a quarter of the city's water storage capacity and playing a key role in a network of dams and aqueducts operated by several urban and agricultural water agencies.

The new report makes it clear that replacing the lost water and power will not be easy if O'Shaughnessy Dam is removed. But neither will it be impossible or prohibitively expensive. And the potential benefit is significant: restoration of a long-submerged component of California's signature national park, a twin to beloved but congested Yosemite Valley.

Is that gain sufficient to justify removing the dam? Surely that's a suitable subject for public debate, and now is a good time to start: Not only does the Environmental Defense report offer a thoughtful starting point, but San Francisco and its suburban utility customers are beginning a $3.6 billion upgrade of their aging water system.

That debate cannot begin, however, unless civic leaders are willing to let facts inform their opinions. Sadly, that may be the biggest hurdle advocates of Hetch Hetchy restoration must overcome.

John Krist is a senior reporter and Opinion page columnist for The Star.

 

=====================+++


RELATED

San Joaquin Record - 10/7/04

http://www.recordnet.com/daily/news/articles/letters.php#28253


Letter to Editor: Hetch Hetchy can be saved


By Spreck Rosekrans
Environmental Defense, Oakland


Thanks for acknowledging that Hetch Hetchy Valley was once a pristine and majestic part of Yosemite National Park ("No going back to paradise," The Record, Sept. 30).

We agree restoration might seem idealistic but contend it's possible.

We've crunched the numbers to show it's feasible to store the same Tuolumne River water now held in Hetch Hetchy in existing reservoirs farther downstream, outside the national park.

We've identified ways to continue the water and power supply to the Bay Area, even during shortages in critically dry years.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assemblyman Tim Leslie, R-Tahoe City, demonstrated the type of environmental leadership needed for Hetch Hetchy restoration when they created the Sierra Nevada Conservancy in September.

Like Lake Tahoe and Yosemite Valley, Hetch Hetchy was once a crown jewel in the Sierra Nevada. It can be again.

People can learn more about Hetch Hetchy and its potential restoration from our report, available at www.discoverhetchhetchy.org

=====================================================+

 

Published on Thursday, October 7, 2004 by the Los Angeles Times

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1007-22.htm


A Terror Attack, Coming Soon to a Plant Near You

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.


George W. Bush likes to boast of his record on homeland security, but the truth is that
corporate and political favoritism by the White House has badly compromised our capacity to
defend ourselves against a terrorist attack.

For example, even as we searched, apparently fruitlessly, for weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq, thousands of potential WMD - our nation's chemical and nuclear energy facilities -
have been left unguarded to please the president's corporate friends and funders.

Of the nation's 15,000 chemical plants, the Environmental Protection Agency has identified
123 where toxic gases released by a terrorist assault could kill or injure more than 1 million
people, and 700 others where deaths and injuries would exceed 100,000. Yet a series of
recent investigations by news organizations has found that most of these plants are
effectively unguarded, even though the risks are beyond dispute and Al Qaeda's interest in
these targets is generously documented.

Seven weeks after 9/11, a GOP-controlled Senate committee unanimously passed a bill to
require chemical plants to take steps to protect the public from terrorist attacks. But the White
House, at the chemical industry's behest, derailed the bill and then removed the EPA's
existing regulatory authority to require improvements in chemical plant security. Why would
the Bush administration do this? All we know for sure is that President Bush and his party
have accepted more than $22 million from the chemical industry since 1998.

The nuclear power industry, which gave $15 million to Bush and the GOP, also falls under
the White House umbrella. A 2003 General Accounting Office report faulted the
administration for failing to bolster nuclear plant defenses and found faulty security the rule
at nuclear plants nationwide, despite myriad evidence that U.S. commercial nuclear reactors
are high-priority terrorist targets. Astonishingly, federal law absolves nuclear power operators
from protecting themselves against attack by enemies of the United States.

In order to be licensed, operators are required to protect their facilities from vandals. But both
the GAO and industry reports acknowledge that the industry's private security guards are
undertrained, underequipped and demoralized. When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
stages mock assaults, the attackers are able to penetrate plant defenses in half their
attempts and trigger simulated catastrophic radiation releases - even though the defenders
have advance notice of the exact time of the exercise and reinforce their defenses in
anticipation. According to the GAO, the federal government deliberately stages "softball"
mock attacks to give the impression of plant security and routinely shields the industry by
burying significant security breaches.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's top aide, Al Martinez-Fonts, a former executive of
JPMorgan Chase, recently explained why his department was reluctant to force the industry
to adopt security reforms beyond voluntary programs, which Ridge himself admits don't work.

"I was in the private sector all my life," explained Martinez-Fonts. "Did I like it when the
government came in and stepped in and told [us] to do certain things? The answer's no. I
think we're trying to avoid that."

Applying this philosophy broadly, the White House, at the behest of the airline industry and
air cargo carriers, has opposed a bill by Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) to require that all
commercial cargo placed on passenger planes be physically screened, just like luggage.
Only about 5% of air cargo is now screened. Airline passengers are often sitting only inches
above cargo that has not been checked, despite a Transportation Security Administration
estimate in 2002 that there is a 35% to 65% chance that terrorists are planning to place a
bomb in the cargo of a U.S. passenger plane.

The administration's record on port security is equally dismal. Only 1% of the 10 million cargo
containers entering American ports each year are ever checked, yet the administration has
opposed bipartisan legislation creating a cargo-container profiling plan that focuses on
inspections of high-risk cargo.

Tiptoeing around other big contributors, the White House has done nothing to secure
railroad and transit networks or protect oil and gas pipelines. Two billion dollars in annual
federal anti-terror grants to the states has been distributed more on the basis of pork than on
need.

Martinez-Font's idea that industry will step up to the plate on its own is pure folly. In July
2003, the Conference Board, a business research group, found that American corporations
had hiked security expenditures less than 4% on average since the Sept. 11 attacks.

While asking sacrifice of young soldiers and future generations who will pay his giant deficits,
Bush has been reluctant to curtail corporate profits or prerogatives or to ask sacrifice of
political pals or the large donors who helped put him in office.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the author of "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and
His Corporate Pals Are Plundering Our Country and Hijacking Our Democracy"
(HarperCollins, 2004).

© Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

=====================================================+

 

From: The Nation Magazine <emailnation@thenation.com>
Reply-To: emailnation@thenation.com
To: <browerpower@wildnesswithin.com>
Date: Thursday, October 7, 2004 1:56 PM

Earth to Bush

This afternoon, President Bush reiterated his view that he had been right to invade Iraq in the face of a new US report, which found that Saddam Hussein did not have the banned weapons cited as the main reason for the war and thus was a not a threat--immediate or otherwise--to the United States.

For more on the new report, read David Corn's new Capital Games. http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=1887

As Corn argues, on Planet Bush, facts don't matter. They are weightless. And Election Day will determine whether he really can defy the gravitational pull of the truth.

Ralph Nader has not been helping the anti-Bush cause. And, as Ari Berman details in today's Daily Outrage, Nader is now taking money from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/outrage?bid=13

One of the worst consequences of a second Bush term will be his potential Supreme Court nominees. As Katha Pollitt warns in her new Nation magazine column: Be afraid. Very afraid.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041025&s=pollitt

And check out ActNow, The Nation's activist weblog, for info on how you can help out with voter registration and education in the next few, crucial weeks. http://www.thenation.com/blogs/actnow?pid=1859

 

Election 1920, pitting Governor James Cox of Ohio against Senator Harding, was another heated contest. Read The Nation's advice that year to voters in our new Nation History section. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=19201027&s=vote

Finally, please make sure to check http://www.thenation.com for coverage of tomorrow night's presidential debate, new weblogs, exclusive new online reports, info on nationwide activist campaigns, Nation History offerings, reader letters and special weekly selections from The Nation magazine. (This week, we're featuring new magazine articles by Katha Pollitt, Eric Alterman, William Greider and Ana Louise Bardach!)

Best Regards,
Peter Rothberg, The Nation

P.S. If you like The Nation, please consider subscribing at our discounted rate. It's the only way to read ALL of what's in The Nation week after week--both in print and online.
http://www.thenation.com/ensubscribe

=====================================================+

 

From: t r u t h o u t <messenger@truthout.org>
To: <rbrower4@mac.com>
Date: Wednesday, October 6, 2004 4:51 PM
Subject: Steve Weissman | Stop Thinking and See What You're Told

 

t r u t h o u t | 10.07

Wildlife Protection Standards Waived

http://www.truthout.org/environment.shtml

Steve Weissman | Stop Thinking, and See What You're Told
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704A.shtml

Misleading Assertions Cover Iraq War and Voting Records
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704B.shtml

Bremer Critique on Iraq Raises Political Furor
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704C.shtml

C.I.A. Report Casts Doubt on Terrorist's Iraqi Ties
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704D.shtml

Probe into Iraq's Oil-for-Food Program to Reach White House
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704E.shtml

NATO Expects Rush of Taliban Attacks in Afghanistan
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704F.shtml

Under OSCE's Eye to Conjure Away 2000 "Nightmare"
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704H.shtml

Michael Schwartz | The Opiate of the Electorate
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704I.shtml

Iraq Chief Gives a Sobering View about Security
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704J.shtml

U.S. Vetoes Resolution for Israel to Halt Gaza Operations
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704K.shtml

U.S. Airstrikes Build Iraqi Support for al-Zarqawi
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704L.shtml

Nicholas D. Kristof | Beaten Afghan Brides
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704V.shtml

Report to Say Iraq Posed Little Immediate Threat
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704W.shtml

Cheney v. Edwards: The Full Debate Transcript
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704X.shtml

Edwards Shoots And Scores
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704Y.shtml

William Rivers Pitt: Cheney's Avalanche of Lies
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704Z.shtml

The TO Overview
William Rivers Pitt: 'How Do We Score a War on Terror?'
http://www.truthout.org/overview.htm

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

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gadflyer.com - 10.05.04

http://gadflyer.com/articles/print.php?ArticleID=226


Drunken Rage

Bush revealed his true dependency Thursday

by Thomas F. Schaller, Executive Editor

We saw The Scowl, The Fidget, The Eye-Roll and The Grimace. We heard the ten repetitions that fighting
terrorists and securing America's homeland is "hard work." We heard another seven repetitions of "wrong war,
wrong place, wrong time" ­ which only reinforced the notion that Iraq was a mistake more than they debunked it.
And then, in a transparent attempt to pretend that the President Bush wasn't incoherent, unsure and ill-prepared,
we heard conservatives desperately try to score last Thursday's presidential debate a "tie."

The President revealed something far darker during those ninety minutes in Miami. He proved that a man is never
totally cured of his addictions, and that his alcohol dependency has transmuted into a public drunkenness with
his own power. Without the enabling of staffers at work and the adoring audiences on the campaign trail who
shield and worship him, Bush stammered and stumbled through a sobering debate in Coral Gables.

For all his talk about how humbling the awesome responsibilities of the presidency are, beware anyone who
comes between Bush and the powerful tonic of his office. When John Kerry dared to do so last week, the
President morphed into an angry, irascible drunk ­ a man not in full, but half-cocked with rage and seething
denial.

Bottled up

Last Thursday the President's endemic character flaws were exposed plainly, for all to see. Absent his handlers
and note cards and teleprompters, we saw into his very core. At least four truths about the President's
personality ­ many of them long-suspected ­ were confirmed by his on-stage behavior in Miami:

He was too lazy and selfish to bother preparing. Bush was a mediocre student at Andover who
nevertheless got into Yale; a mediocre Yalie who nevertheless got into Harvard Business School; and,
despite scoring in the bottom quartile on the Air National Guard exam, he got a coveted billet ahead of
hundreds above him on the list to fly in Texas rather than grab a rifle and helmet to fight for his country in
Southeast Asia. Given how far he's gone without really trying, why would we expect him to prepare for a
debate?

Bush's nonchalance disrespected all of those who donated money to his campaign or volunteered to hand
out palm cards and register voters; the staffers who have worked 80-hour weeks on his behalf; and, heck,
even those "unaffiliated" Swift Boaters who engaged in "uncoordinated" efforts to help get him re-elected.
Their collective investments in Bush during the past year or two were erased in less than ninety minutes
because their president was too lazy to validate all their hard work by doing a little homework of his own.

He is a pathological name-dropper. The single thread woven throughout the entirety of Bush's life is
the access and invidious influence his family name has provided him. A dropped name has often delivered
to Bush what others must work to achieve. And the names ­ from Ben Barnes back in his draft-dodging
days to James Baker during the Florida recount ­ are too numerous to list.

So when Bush began to stagger in Miami, he reached out for the vicarious legitimacy that others have
always provided him: Betcha didn't know I talk with Director Mueller ­ every day, in fact. Tony Blair is a
strong ally of mine, and so is Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski. Prime Minister Allawi told me
things are progressing in Iraq, and don't you dare denigrate Mr. Allawi. And Vladurmur, Dear Vladurmur ­
he knows me, he can vouch for my soul like I did his.

He is a terrible listener. Countless conservative commentators on television, radio, or on websites
lamented that Bush repeatedly fumbled easy opportunities to point out contradictions in Kerry's
statements, or to rebut the Senator's statements with ready examples or tip-of-the-finger facts. Belligerent
and scowling, the teetering president let himself be distracted from doing what a good debater does,
namely, listen carefully to his opponent's answers, and prepare the most relevant and proportional
response. Instead he swung wildly, missing his punches, leaving himself open.

Again, the parallels here are obvious, and voluminous: Bush didn't want to hear critics' warnings about
post-war complications in Iraq; he didn't want to hear the recommendations about troop size; etc. On
most days, others pay the price for his petulance. On Thursday, his tin ear and dulled senses cost him
dearly.

He is impatient to a fault. Bush could hardly wait for the red-yellow-green light system to offer his
replies, and urged moderator Jim Lehrer to extend the discussion another 30 seconds for each candidate.
(Once, Bush so lost his cool that he started to interject even though he was entitled to an automatic,
90-second rebuttal.) Champing at the bit prevented Bush from thinking carefully about how to deliver
appropriate replies. And so he blurted out dumb answers, like his most embarrassing line of the night: "I
know Osama bin Laden attacked us ­ I know that."

This was the most ironic of Bush's flaws on display, for he was demonstrating impatience at the very
moment Kerry was criticizing him for it, such as in the hasty re-allocation of troops from Afghanistan to
Iraq.

Deep Bloat

Bush has grown into the presidency, but there is an ugly side to his comfort level in office which rises to the surface
when his authority is challenged. Despite his constant refrains about how humbled he is by the awesome responsibility
of the job, Bush has developed a bloated sense of himself. To substitute for the lifelong vice he gave up when he turned
forty, the President now intoxicates himself with power.

He blurted, blundered and blameshifted, even pointing the finger at the Republican Congress for those record-setting
deficits. Is it any wonder that, when pressed to cite a single mistake at his last press conference, he couldn't think of
anything?

Kerry was a one-man political intervention in Miami. When the Senator challenged the President's facts, assertions and
decisions, Bush showed what kind of president ­ and person ­ he really is: insular, immodest, irascible and intoxicated
with the idea of his own imperial presidency. He showed that he is twelve steps away from reforming his presidency.
The American people will have to decide whether they can enable him any more.

Copyright © 2004 New Progressive Institute Inc. All rights reserved.

=====================================================+

 

Published on Tuesday, October 5, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1005-27.htm

George W. Bush & the "Mandate of Heaven"

by William Marina


Since at least the epic of Job described in the Bible, humans have tried to understand why
their God has inflicted cruelties upon believers. Many years ago, I recall my daughter of
almost four, after we had been in an auto accident which injured my year-and-a-half-old son,
asking my mother what had he done wrong to deserve such punishment from God?

Empires, such as that here in America, exalted by the neoconservative faithful such as
William Kristol, are especially in need of rationalizations to explain the awful things happening
abroad such as global "terrorism," as well as the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. Add to
that the most unusual hurricane season in decades, where such entities as "Ivan" don't
easily die, but are reborn and circle back, and some may ask what has America's
fundamentalist leadership under George W. Bush done to make God so angry at this
nation?

The Chinese Empire, even as its elite outgrew primitive religion millennia earlier, was still
faced with answering this same question. Since they had no intention of doing away with the
institutions of empire, their only answer was to regularly replace specific emperors. Thus was
developed the concept of the "Mandate of Heaven," which linked nicely with the dominant
neo-Confucianism of the Empire.

The Chinese believed that good things happened to the people and their Empire when the
leaders lived lives of "truth" and "virtue." When they did not, they had lost the "Mandate of
Heaven" and needed to be replaced. Whether or not George W. Bush ever had such a
"Mandate of Heaven," even if he believes that he has-perhaps it was "bestowed" upon him
by the Supreme Court certifying his election in 2000-he certainly seems to have lost it since
then.

Now blathering on by Bush in speeches about virtue, or writing about it by the
sanctimonious, compulsive gambler, William Bennett, or praying about it (or is it preying?) as
do other U.S. leaders, is not a substitute for virtuous behavior.

These Chinese ideas, having filtered back to Europe in the 18th century Enlightenment,
played a role in the discussions by American leaders in the founding of the republic. Thomas
Jefferson was especially taken with them, talking about a "natural aristocracy of talent and
virtue," and an educational system of government schools which as the sinologist H.G. Creel
noted, was clearly borrowed from China.

As the great economist Lord Bauer once mentioned to me, Alexis de Tocqueville, that
insightful observer of America, when he saw these developments in early 19th century
France, called it, "le system chinois (the Chinese system)," and the Japanese, in the late 19th
century, searching for Western models, adopted the French educational system. What irony,
Confucianism by way of France! Nations may "clash," but civilizations tend to borrow from
each other.

It was the usually dour John Adams, who in their correspondence, questioned Jefferson's
verbal constructs. He noted that there were all kinds of talents, not just the
intellectual/academic ones favored by Jefferson, even a king's mistress displayed certain
talents, but most importantly, "how do you teach virtue?"

There is only one answer to Adams, as Confucius understood. Virtue is taught, or not taught,
by the young emulating the behavior of their parents and elders, and by the people
observing the actions of their leaders.

In this regard, has the U.S. reached new depths of degradation in pursuing an unprovoked
war in Iraq and the declaration of perpetual war globally? Certainly, George Bush has lost
the "Mandate" of most of the rest of the world, outside of a few client states and toadies; the
President's recent reception before the U.N. made that quite evident.

At home Bush piles on more and more "bread and circuses", combining huge farm,
education, Medicare and other pork and corporate welfare schemes with tax breaks mostly
for the wealthier (but even a smidgen for the middle classes, as did the Caesars of old) with a
paper money inflationary system (also borrowed from China). If one counts Off-Budget
Expenditures (OBE) the U.S. government now owes over $72 trillion to its own people and
the world, which the government will probably attempt to inflate away in the future if the
system itself doesn't collapse in the short run.

Just as with those empires of old, which sought what the historian Carroll Quigley (Bill
Clinton's guru at Georgetown University) called "Universal Empire," that is, not just imperial
centralization, but hegemony over their existing "Core and Periphery," which today literally
means the entire world, I believe that the U.S. has not only failed, but is in decline.

The Chinese understood that imperial states come and go. The great centralized,
bureaucratic empires of Rome, China, Spain, Britain, and Russia have broken apart or
declined.

Whether in Quigley's terminology our social, political and economic institutions can once
again be made into viable "instruments of expansion," is the real systemic question facing us.
George Bush did not create these tendencies that go well back into our history, but he has
greatly accelerated and exacerbated them. In short, he has clearly lost the "Mandate of
Heaven"!

But, who will tell him that he has no clothes? He rejected his father's advice on Iraq.
Perhaps, others in his family, which protected and elevated a mediocrity, his mother or his
wife, will tell him he has lost the "Mandate"; even if, in a so-called Democracy, the voice of the
electorate is considered the "Voice of God"!

But, perhaps it is really the American people themselves who have lost the "Mandate of
Heaven," since, after all, it is they who elect U.S. government leaders. Whether the American
nation can be perhaps the first in history to eschew empire and return to a decentralized
republic will be the great question facing us in the 21st century. Can Americans find leaders
with virtue and vision who can restore the "Mandate of Heaven"?

William Marina is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif., and
Professor Emeritus in History at Florida Atlantic University.

=====================================================+

 

From: palast@gregpalast.com
Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2004 01:49:55 -0400
To: browerpower@wildnesswithin.com
Subject: Shooting the Messenger Doesn't Discredit the Message

Shooting the Messenger Doesn't Discredit the Message

The Real Lt. Col. Burkett - in His Own Words to BBC Television


by Greg Palast

Tuesday October 5, 2004

When Dan Rather went down for airing a document he couldn't source, he did the courageous thing: blamed someone else.

In this case, Rather and CBS loaded their corporate guilt on a guy you've probably never heard of before, rancher Bill Burkett of Abilene, a retired Lieutenant Colonel from the Texas Air National Guard.

CBS did a no-no -- used a document on air without fully checking out its source. No excuses. Shouldn't have done it. They got the document from Burkett.

Once CBS hung out its source and painted a target on him, Rove-ing gangs of media hit men finished him off. Burkett's an evidence "fabricator," "Bush-hater," and even, suggests William Safire in the New York Times as he fantasizes a dark left-wing conspiracy, a felon ready for hard time.

Let me tell you about this Burkett "criminal." I met him while filming for BBC's Television documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes." Better than that, I'm posting a transcript of our hour-and-a-half interview.

Burkett a 'Bush-hater'? "George W. Bush was an excellent pilot," Burkett told me, "He had the right leadership skills, he had the 'Top Gun' approach."

But I didn't go interview Burkett to chat about our President's days when he flew high. He has an important story to tell which has not one damn thing to do with a memo by some Lt. Col. Killian. It has to do with a phone call and a shredder.

Burkett, a top advisor to Major General Daniel James at the Air Guard, was working at Camp Mabry with Major General James when a call came in from Joe Allbaugh, the Chief of Staff to then-Governor George W. Bush. Bush was about to get a political polishing up for his White House run, with a ghost-written autobiography, which would include his heroic years during the war in Vietnam. Allbaugh, according to Burkett, stated that Bush political operatives Karen Hughes and Dan Bartlett would be dropping by the Air Guard offices to look at the war record and wanted to, "make sure there's nothing in there that'll embarrass the Governor."

According to Burkett, the General and his minions who work for the Governor, not the US Air Force, took this as an unsubtle hint from the boss to purge the record. Lt. Col. Burkett, both curious and disturbed by the call, wondered how his fellow comrades-in-arms would respond. His answer was in the trash-to-be-shredded bin: George Bush's military pay records. "I saw what are called LES (Leave and Earnings Statements) which are pay documents. I saw Retirement Points documents and other administrative information."

He did not see their content, only Bush's name, and therefore cannot answer the 64 million dollar question: Did those records, now "missing," indicate that our President went AWOL while others ended up on the Black Wall?

That's Burkett's story and it's in the BBC film. Watch the film, read the transcript, and judge for yourself. I think you'll find in Burkett a straight shooter, telling a piece of the larger draft-dodge story which mounting evidence corroborates.

So what about that "Killian" document? We don't have it in the BBC film - we couldn't source it so we wouldn't use it. Burkett passed it on from a third party, obviously someone still in the Guard or fearful of Bush Family retribution. Now why would they imagine that?

Under pressure, Burkett gave CBS a false name to cover for the whistleblower. Burkett should not have done that. It is inexcusable. Period. Yet, that does not tell us the document was fabricated. It was the job of CBS to follow up -- they are the journalists.

And it is also the President's job. Safire in the Times, in charging that Burkett faked the document, demanded the military open a criminal investigation. Darn right they should. They haven't. Why not? Maybe they don't want to check into this 'fake' document because maybe it's not fake.

An investigation should begin with questions for the President. After all, he can clear up the matter lickety-split.

"Mr. President, did you or did you not ask your commander Lt. Col. Killian how you could shirk your duty to show up?"

"Mr. President, did you or did you not refuse a direct order to take a medical exam and pee into a jar?" (The record is solid on the evidence of refusing that order, Mr. Top Gun -- you were stripped of your flight wings.)

"Mr. President, did Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes make any calls to get you out of 'Nam and into the Air Guard? Yes or no?"

See Dan, that's how it should be done. It wasn't Burkett's job to verify the evidence, it was the job of Dan and the President.

It is for the President, not Bill Burkett, to answer the question, "Did your daddy the congressman vote to send other men's sons to Vietnam while pulling the strings to keep you cozy and safe? Yes or no, Mr. President, yes or no?"

For a clip from the BBC Television investigative reports on George Bush's military career, go to
http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm

Greg Palast's interview with Col. Burkett for BBC can be read at
http://www.gregpalast.com/documents/BurkettTranscript.pdf

=====================================================+

 

Comment from Grist - 10/5/04

Lead Levels in Water Misrepresented Across U.S.

LEAD ASTRAY

Lead contamination in municipal water systems systematically underreported

If you live in the U.S., the water you drink may contain unsafe
levels of lead, thanks to a water-safety enforcement system rife with
manipulation and negligence. Water utilities across the U.S. are
discarding unfavorable test results and ignoring safety regulations.
State regulators rarely enforce standards and in many cases assist
utilities in avoiding penalties. The U.S. EPA, charged with
overseeing state efforts and penalizing utilities that fail to comply
with regulations, has drastically reduced enforcement in recent years
and doesn't have the staff to do the job adequately even if it wanted
to. In 2003, the number of EPA enforcements against water utilities
was less than a tenth of the number in 1997. Despite all this, EPA
Acting Assistant Administrator Benjamin Grumbles told Congress in
July that "we have not identified a systemic problem." Perhaps he
should get in touch with the folks at The Washington Post. Seems
they have.

Straight to the source: The Washington Post, Carol D. Leonnig, Jo
Becker, and David Nakamura, 05 Oct 2004
<http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=3254>

===========================+++



Lead Levels in Water Misrepresented Across U.S.

By Carol D. Leonnig, Jo Becker and David Nakamura

Cities across the country are manipulating the results of tests used to detect lead in water, violating federal law and putting millions of Americans at risk of drinking more of the contaminant than their suppliers are reporting.

Some cities, including Philadelphia and Boston, have thrown out tests that show high readings or have avoided testing homes most likely to have lead, records show. In New York City, the nation's largest water provider has for the past three years assured its 9.3 million customers that its water was safe because the lead content fell below federal limits. But the city has withheld from regulators hundreds of test results that would have raised lead levels above the safety standard in two of those years, according to records.

The result is that communities large and small may have a false sense of security about the quality of their water and that utilities can avoid spending money to correct the problem.

In some cases, state regulators have helped the utilities avoid costly fixes. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is supposed to ensure that states are monitoring utilities, has also let communities ignore requirements to reduce lead. In 2003, records show, the EPA ordered utilities to remedy violations in just 14 cases, less than one-tenth of the number ordered in 1997.

Taken together, the records point to a national problem just months after disclosures that lead levels in the District's water are among the highest in the country, a problem the city's utility concealed for months. Documents from other cities show that many have made similar efforts to hide high lead readings, taking advantage of lax national and state oversight and regulations riddled with loopholes.

The Washington Post examined 65 large water systems whose reported lead levels have hovered near or exceeded federal standards. Federal, state and utility records show that dozens of utilities obscured the extent of lead contamination, ignored requirements to correct problems and failed to turn over data to regulators.

Jim Elder, who headed the EPA's drinking water program from 1991 to 1995, said he fears that utilities are engaging in "widespread fraud and manipulation."

"It's time to reconsider whether water utilities can be trusted with this crucial responsibility of protecting the public. I fear for the safety of our nation's drinking water," said Elder, now a water consultant. "Apparently, it's a real crapshoot as to what's going to come out of the tap and whether it will be healthy or not."

Recent attention to the dangers of the District's drinking water has prompted scientists and some members of Congress to call for revamping the lead rules in the 30-year-old Safe Drinking Water Act, which was aimed at limiting dangerous contaminants flowing out of the tap. EPA Administrator Michael Leavitt declined to be interviewed for this article, but his agency has said that a major overhaul to its regulations is unnecessary.

"We have not identified a systemic problem," EPA Acting Assistant Administrator Benjamin H. Grumbles told Congress in July. In an interview, Grumbles said, "We are going full throttle" to pinpoint lead levels across the country. "So far," he said, "we have not seen anything that closely resembles the District in the data we've received."

EPA data analyzed by The Post identified 274 utilities, which together serve 11.5 million people, that have reported unsafe lead levels since 2000. Those numbers do not include cities where testing methods concealed true lead levels.

Utility officials defend their testing methods, saying that they are not designed to deceive the government and that state regulators approved their practices. Others argue that they should not have to spend millions to remove lead that often leaches from their customers' own fixtures.

Some suppliers have worked hard to avoid lead problems. The utility in Kansas City, Mo., tested its water more frequently and treated it more aggressively than the law required. And after the District's problem surfaced, several other jurisdictions in the Washington region voluntarily tested their water and found less contamination than in the city.

Lynn Stovall, a Greenville, S.C., utility manager and member of the American Water Works Association, said many utilities are "hard-pressed" and need more public funding to comply with mounting regulations and improve aging plants.

"The drinking water community faces a complex array of expensive new federal requirements and new standards," Stovall told Congress at this summer's hearing on lead.

Lead exposure can cause serious health problems, including lower IQs in children and brain and kidney damage in adults. Although health experts agree that no amount of lead in drinking water is considered safe, there is some dispute about how much tainted water has to be consumed to cause permanent damage. Because the effect is cumulative, lead in water is particularly problematic in older, urban areas where children are more likely to also be exposed to lead paint, which utilities note is a more prevalent threat.

Despite the health risk caused by lead in water, efforts to eliminate it have run up against other realities, including the high cost of replacing underground pipes that contain lead. Recognizing that states lacked the resources to carefully monitor more than 90 contaminants covered by federal law, the EPA issued lists of priorities starting in 1996. In both cases, its top concern was microbes, which can sicken large populations overnight. Lead did not make the list, and this year, the EPA dropped drinking water altogether from its enforcement priority list, records show.

Competing interests were also in play in 1991 when the EPA wrote new rules on lead. The compromise that emerged requires that, when lead levels exceed 15 parts per billion, utilities must inform the public, treat the water to make it less corrosive or, in some cases, replace pipes.

Because of the cost, many utilities are reluctant to act. In the District, where the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority is under an order to replace service lines, water customers are expected to pay for most of the $350 million project over the rest of the decade.
Withholding Results
Water suppliers are required by law to test for lead regularly -- the largest utilities must check the water in at least 50 homes once every three years. They must follow a strict regimen, trying consistently to test the same "high risk" homes most likely to have lead problems. High-risk homes are defined as those with lead service lines or built in the 1980s, before lead solder in plumbing was banned.

Because so few homes are tested, the results of just one or two can mean the difference between passing and failing. Utilities are required to report to regulators all their test results -- good and bad.

The D.C. Water and Sewer Authority knew in the summer of 2001 that its water contained unsafe lead levels, but it withheld six high test results and said the water was fine, records show. When it tested over the next two years, records show, WASA dropped half of the homes that had previously tested high for lead and avoided high-risk homes.

The EPA, which cited WASA for violations in June, called the utility's practices unprecedented and a "serious breach" of the law.

Documents show that water systems across the country have used similar practices.

In such cities as Boston and Detroit, records indicate that utilities have failed to test the high-risk homes they were required to check. State regulators and the EPA discovered in the spring that at least one-fourth of the locations tested in the Boston area were not high risk and ordered the utility to revamp its program, records show.

After several years of above-the-limit test results, New York water officials reported that tests in 2000 showed lead had fallen to safe levels. But the city had not reported all of its results.

Records obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request revealed more than 300 withheld test results that, if reported, would have given New York water a failing grade for safety in 2001 and 2002. That would have required the city to alert the public to the problem and take expensive steps to fix it.

Christopher O. Ward, commissioner of New York's Department of Environmental Protection, said his agency is "highly confident" the city's water is safe. He said extra tests were taken to ensure that the city had a sufficient number to report to regulators, though he said the agency did not formally notify state and city regulators of this practice or seek their approval. Ward said that he believed this complied with the rules and that it was unfair now to count irrelevant results.

"In light of the issues that have recently been raised, DEP is in the process of reviewing our lead and copper monitoring to ensure that all requirements in the regulations are being met," Ward said.

In a similar situation, when WASA said the six test results it withheld were replacement or backup samples, the EPA cited the utility and said it was a violation of the law.

In Philadelphia, state and utility officials said they could produce none of the required documentation for their decision to toss out a high test result in 2002. The federal law does not allow utilities to discard high tests except under very limited circumstances, and the utilities must carefully document their reason.

Utility director Gary Burlingame said in an interview that the high test result "didn't jibe" with past tests and that the utility decided it should be discarded after learning the house had undergone plumbing work. Had that test been counted, records show, it would have put Philadelphia over the federal safety limit and required corrective steps.

The law prohibits throwing out tests for the reasons given in Lansing, Mich., in 2001 -- that homeowners did not follow directions in collecting them. Four discarded tests would have put the water over the federal lead limit, documents show. In one case, the homeowner disputed the reason the utility gave for tossing her sample -- that the occupants had been away overnight.

"That's a big, fat lie," said Jennie Horiszny, an 85-year-old Lansing resident. She said she had not gone out of town and had carefully followed the utility's instructions not to run the water overnight. She remembers pouring glasses of water before going to bed in case she or her husband became thirsty -- and taking the sample first thing in the morning. "That's what the directions said to do, and that's what I did," she said. "It was a clean sample."

John Strickler, a spokesman for the Lansing water system, said, "I find it hard to believe that any of our employees would have made that up." He said the city has voluntarily embarked on an aggressive plan to replace lead service lines, in part because "we started seeing news stories" about the District's problem.

Federal law also requires utilities to try to test the same homes over time and prohibits dropping any merely because they have tested high.

After exceeding the acceptable limits in 2000, the Ridgewood, N.J., water system dumped "hot" houses that had tested high, records show. Frank Moritz Sr., director of operations for Ridgewood's water department, said that was not done by design. "Each year, we take out the previous year's list and ask if they want to participate," he said.

But five residents whose homes showed high lead readings said in interviews that the utility never informed them of the results or asked them to test again.

"It would have been nice if someone had looked out for us," said Matthew Criscenzo, whose son was 4 at the time. "Obviously, this news is causing some alarm."

Bradley M. Campbell, New Jersey's commissioner of environmental protection and an EPA official in the Clinton administration, said that his agency is "actively investigating" testing irregularities uncovered by The Post in Ridgewood and other communities in northern New Jersey and that it could take action against some utilities. "The public has a paramount right to know" the true lead levels in those communities, he said.

Just as dropping tests can lower the official lead figures, so can adding tests.

The utility in Providence, R.I., exceeded safe lead levels in 2002. Instead of informing the public, as required, records show that the utility waited and, the next summer, sampled 30 more homes, most of which showed very low lead and brought levels below the federal standard. Utility officials said they believed that their actions complied with the law. June Swallow, the Rhode Island official charged with overseeing utilities, said Providence did not comply and that the state will in the future ensure that utilities test within the requisite four-month period.
Frequent Irregularities
Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, states must oversee utilities to ensure that they follow the law and the EPA is required to step in when states fail to correct problems.

For the most part, states take the word of utilities, doing little to check whether they are testing properly. The EPA's most recent audits point out that testing irregularities are common. Also, states frequently miss the violations or fail to force utilities to take required steps to reduce lead, according to the audits.

The latest EPA audit of Hawaii's program, for instance, found in 2001 that regulators there "put an emphasis on 'helping' " utilities "rather than enforcing the law."

Records show that regulators rarely force communities to replace lead service lines, even in such cases as Yonkers, N.Y., where the law required it because repeated tests showed excessive lead levels.

In Seattle, the city missed a 1997 deadline to reduce lead by making its water less corrosive. The state of Washington gave it six extra years to correct the problem, allowing high lead to persist until last year. Denise Clifford, director of the state's office of drinking water, said the delay gave Seattle time to build treatment facilities that will reduce lead and other more serious contaminants.

"I know this doesn't look like a good decision to a lot of people," she said, but "there are more acute public health risks than lead."

In the interim, more than 43,000 Seattle residents -- including Nimi Sandhu -- gave birth, according to vital records statistics. Sandhu used unfiltered tap water to make her babies' formula, unaware of the lead levels.

"It's outrageous -- the state is supposed to be protecting us," said Sandhu, whose children are 5, 4 and 10 months old. "I don't know how they can live with themselves knowing that they were possibly endangering children."

State officials say they are forced to engage in a form of triage.

"It's tough, given all the other priorities out there for drinking water, to oversee this rule at that level of detail," said Barker G. Hamill, chief of the New Jersey Bureau of Safe Drinking Water.

If states fail to enforce the law, the EPA is the last line of defense. But the agency devotes four times the staff to enforcing the laws that govern sewage released into rivers and lakes as it does to safeguarding the nation's drinking water supply, records show. The agency has 72 enforcement employees to oversee the nation's drinking water laws -- one employee for every 2,238 water systems.

"We can't afford to do these kind of checks everywhere, and neither can the states," said Jon M. Capacasa, water administrator in the EPA's mid-Atlantic office.

Officials at EPA headquarters say the need for intervention has declined over the years, because more utilities understand and comply with the law. But sometimes the EPA is without the information it needs to act.

A March report by the agency's inspector general found that the data the EPA uses to assess water quality are "flawed and incomplete" because states are not reporting violations, despite legal requirements.

But even when it is aware of a problem, the agency does not always enforce the law, records show.

It didn't do so in Portland, Ore., for instance, where excessive lead persisted through much of the past decade. The state approved the city's decision to launch a public education campaign on lead dangers rather than build an expensive treatment plant to comply with the law.

Lead levels climbed, and in 2002 the EPA stepped in, but not to discipline the city. Instead, the agency suggested testing more homes in the suburbs. The utility dropped more than half the homes with lead higher than the federal limit, replacing them with suburban homes that had, on average, significantly lower levels, records show.

"That change in the sampling population helped" the city slip back under the federal limit, said Mark Knudson, the Portland Water Bureau's director of operations. EPA officials said that that was not their goal and that they had recommended the changes to get a fuller picture across the area.

Although top EPA officials have contended that the law does a good job of catching most problems, those charged with enforcing it do not always agree. EPA regulators who met in the spring in Newport, R.I., noted in a three-page memo a series of loopholes that weaken the law. Among them: Nothing requires utilities to notify individual homeowners that their water has high lead, and the regulation does not allow the same stiff sanctions for high lead that it does for other contaminants such as bacteria.

At headquarters, the EPA's Grumbles has said in recent weeks that he will push to ensure that cities are complying with the law when they test and that he will consider changes early next year, such as stricter rules for notifying the public. But critics fear that, without much tougher laws and enforcement, unsafe water in other communities may not come to light.

"The problems we know about are just the tip of the iceberg," said Erik D. Olson of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, "because utilities are gaming the system, states have often been willing to ignore long-standing violations and the EPA sits on the sidelines and refuses to crack down."


Database editor Sarah Cohen and staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company

=====================================================+

 

From: t r u t h o u t <messenger@truthout.org>
To: <rbrower4@mac.com>
Date: Monday, October 4, 2004 4:45 PM
Subject: Scott Galindez | Kerry Can Win Allies Bush Lost


t r u t h o u t | 10.05

Howard Dean | Environmental Policy Affects Health, Economy, Security

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100504L.shtml

EPA Is Lax on Coal Power Rule, Report Says
http://www.truthout.org/environment.shtml

Francois-Xavier Gomez | Oil War Threatens Nigeria
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100504H.shtml

Scott Galindez | Kerry Can Win Allies Bush Lost
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100504A.shtml

Edwards-Cheney Debate Looks Crucial
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100504B.shtml

Appointment in Samarra: An Eyewitness Account
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100504C.shtml

The Draft Card: The Option Nobody's Pushing. Yet.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100504D.shtml

The New York Times | More Troubles for Diebold
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100504E.shtml

Bob Herbert | Bush and Reality
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100504F.shtml

As Afghan Vote Nears, Taliban Isn't Only Worry
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100504I.shtml

Lou Dubose | The Decay of DeLay
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100504J.shtml

Pat Robertson Warns GOP: 'Don't Touch Jerusalem'
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100504K.shtml

As Deadlines Hit, Rolls of Voters Show Big Surge
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100504W.shtml

Kerry Accuses GOP of Suppressing Voting
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100504X.shtml

26 Dead as Car Bombs Rock Baghdad
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100504Y.shtml

Marc Ash | Edwards v. Halliburton
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100504Z.shtml

The TO Overview
William Rivers Pitt: 'Debate Round II: Cheney v. Edwards'
http://www.truthout.org/overview.htm

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

=====================================================+

 

To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1319718,00.html

Disillusioned and angry American soldiers serving in Iraq

Dear Mike, Iraq sucks

Michael Moore
Tuesday October 05 2004
The Guardian

Civilian contractors are fleecing taxpayers; US troops don't have proper equipment; and supposedly liberated Iraqis hate them. After the release of Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore received a flood of letters and emails from disillusioned and angry American soldiers serving in Iraq. Here, in an exclusive extract from his new book, we print a selection:

From: RH
To: mike@michaelmoore.com
Sent: Monday, July 12, 2003 4:57 PM
Subject: Iraqi freedom veteran supports you


Dear Mr Moore,

I went to Iraq with thoughts of killing people who I thought were horrible. I was like, "Fuck Iraq, fuck these people, I hope we kill thousands." I believed my president. He was taking care of business and wasn't going to let al Qaeda push us around. I was with the 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry, 3rd Infantry division out of Fort Stewart, Georgia. My unit was one of the first to Baghdad. I was so scared. Didn't know what to think. Seeing dead bodies for the first time. People blown in half. Little kids with no legs. It was overwhelming, the sights, sounds, fear. I was over there from Jan'03 to Aug'03. I hated every minute. It was a daily battle to keep my spirits up. I hate the army and my job. I am supposed to get out next February but will now be unable to because the asshole in the White House decided that now would be a great time to put a stop-loss in effect for the army. So I get to do a second tour in Iraq and be away from those I love again because some guy has the audaci!
ty to put others' lives on the line for his personal war. I thought we were the good guys.

From: Michael W
Sent: Tuesday July 13 2004 12.28pm
Subject: Dude, Iraq sucks


My name is Michael W and I am a 30-year-old National Guard infantryman serving in southeast Baghdad. I have been in Iraq since March of 04 and will continue to serve here until March of 05.

In the few short months my unit has been in Iraq, we have already lost one man and have had many injured (including me) in combat operations. And for what? At the very least, the government could have made sure that each of our vehicles had the proper armament to protect us soldiers.

In the early morning hours of May 10, one month to the day from my 30th birthday, I and 12 other men were attacked in a well-executed roadside ambush in south-east Baghdad. We were attacked with small-arms fire, a rocket-propelled grenade, and two well-placed roadside bombs. These roadside bombs nearly destroyed one of our Hummers and riddled my friends with shrapnel, almost killing them. They would not have had a scratch if they had the "Up Armour" kits on them. So where was George W. Bush on that one?

It's just so ridiculous, which leads me to my next point. A Blackwater contractor makes $15,000 a month for doing the same job as my pals and me. I make about $4,000 a month over here. What's up with that?

Beyond that, the government is calling up more and more troops from the reserves. For what? Man, there is a huge fucking scam going on here! There are civilian contractors crawling all over this country. Blackwater, Kellogg Brown &amp; Root, Halliburton, on and on. These contractors are doing everything you can think of from security to catering lunch!

We are spending money out the ass for this shit, and very few of the projects are going to the Iraqi people. Someone's back is getting scratched here, and it ain't the Iraqis'!

My life is left to chance at this point. I just hope I come home alive.

From: Specialist Willy
Sent: Tuesday March 9 2004 1.23pm
Subject: Thank you

Mike, I'd like to thank you for all of the support you're showing for the soldiers here in Iraq. I am in Baghdad right now, and it's such a relief to know that people still care about the lemmings who are forced to fight in this conflict.

It's hard listening to my platoon sergeant saying, "If you decide you want to kill a civilian that looks threatening, shoot him. I'd rather fill out paperwork than get one of my soldiers killed by some raghead." We are taught that if someone even looks threatening we should do something before they do something to us. I wasn't brought up in fear like that, and it's going to take some getting used to.

It's also very hard talking to people here about this war. They don't like to hear that the reason they are being torn away from their families is bullshit, or that their "president" doesn't care about them. A few people here have become quite upset with me, and at one point I was going to be discharged for constantly inciting arguments and disrespect to my commander-in-chief (Dubya). It's very hard to be silenced about this when I see the same 150 people every day just going through the motions, not sure why they are doing it.

Willy sent an update in early August:

People's perceptions of this war have done a complete 180 since we got here. We had someone die in a mortar attack the first week, and ever since then, things have changed completely. Soldiers are calling their families urging them to support John Kerry. If this is happening elsewhere, it looks as if the overseas military vote that Bush is used to won't be there this time around.

From: Kyle Waldman
Sent: Friday February 27 2004 2.35am
Subject: None

As we can all obviously see, Iraq was not and is not an imminent threat to the United States or the rest of the world. My time in Iraq has taught me a little about the Iraqi people and the state of this war-torn, poverty-stricken country.

The illiteracy rate in this country is phenomenal. There were some farmers who didn't even know there was an Operation Iraqi Freedom. This was when I realised that this war was initiated by the few who would profit from it and not for its people. We, as the coalition forces, did not liberate these people; we drove them even deeper into poverty. I don't foresee any economic relief coming soon to these people by the way Bush has already diverted its oil revenues to make sure there will be enough oil for our SUVs.

We are here trying to keep peace when all we have been trained for is to destroy. How are 200,000 soldiers supposed to take control of this country? Why didn't we have an effective plan to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure? Why aren't the American people more aware of these atrocities?

My fiancee and I have seriously looked into moving to Canada as political refugees.

From: Anonymous
Sent: Thursday April 15 2004 12.41am
Subject: From KBR truck driver now in Iraq

Mike, I am a truck driver right now in Iraq. Let me give you this one small fact because I am right here at the heart of it: since I started this job several months ago, 100% (that's right, not 99%) of the workers I am aware of are inflating the hours they claim on their time sheets. There is so much more I could tell you. But the fact is that MILLIONS AND MILLIONS of dollars are being raped from both the American taxpayers and the Iraqi people because of the unbelievable amount of greed and abuse over here. And yes, my conscience does bother me because I am participating in this rip-off.

From: Andrew Balthazor
Sent: Friday August 27 2004 1.53pm
Subject: Iraqi war vet - makes me sound so old

Mr Moore, I am an ex-military intelligence officer who served 10 months in Baghdad; I was the senior intelligence officer for the area of Baghdad that included the UN HQ and Sadr City.

Since Bush exposed my person and my friends, peers, and subordinates to unnecessary danger in a war apparently designed to generate income for a select few in the upper echelon of America, I have become wholeheartedly anti-Bush, to the chagrin of much of my pro-Republican family.

As a "foot soldier" in the "war on terror" I can personally testify that Bush's administration has failed to effectively fight terrorists or the root causes of terror. The White House and the DoD failed to plan for reconstruction of Iraq. Contracts weren't tendered until Feb-Mar of 2003, and the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (the original CPA) didn't even come into existence until January 2003. This failure to plan for the "peace" is a direct cause for the insecurity of Iraq today.

Immediately after the "war" portion of the fighting (which really ended around April 9 2003), we should have been prepared to send in a massive reconstruction effort. Right away we needed engineers to diagnose problems, we needed contractors repairing problems, we needed immediate food, water, shelter, and fuel for the Iraqi people, and we needed more security for all of this to work - which we did not have because we did not have enough troops on the ground, and CPA decided to disband the Iraqi army. The former Iraqi police were engaged far too late; a plan should have existed to bring them into the fold right away.

I've left the military. If there is anything I can do to help get Bush out of office, let me know.

From: Anthony Pietsch
Sent: Thursday August 5 2004 6.13pm
Subject: Soldier for sale

Dear Mr Moore, my name is Tony Pietsch, and I am a National Guardsman who has been stationed in Kuwait and Iraq for the past 15 months. Along with so many other guar