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 fre