Kennedy at the Sierra Club

We now return to Long-Ass Speech Week.

Via Wil Shipley's blog, "Call Me Fishmeal,", a link to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s speech to the Sierra Club last September. As Shipley says, "I don't think you can disagree with this speech. I don't care who you voted for. You simply can't say, 'Yes, I want to be slowly poisoned in a world that's dying, so that 8 or 10 guys can be a little bit richer.'"

Some excerpts:

This is the worst environmental president we've had in American history. If you look at NRDC's website, you'll see over 400 major environmental rollbacks that are listed there that have been implemented or proposed by this administration over the past four years as part of a deliberate, concerted effort to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law. It's a stealth attack. The White House has used all kinds of ingenious machinations to try to conceal its radical agenda from the American people, including Orwellian rhetoric. When they want to destroy the forests, they call it the Healthy Forest Act. When they want to destroy the air, they call it the Clear Skies Bill.

But, most insidiously, they have put polluters in charge of virtually all the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. President Bush appointed as head of the Forest Service a timber-industry lobbyist, Mark Rey, probably the most rapacious in history. He put in charge of public lands a mining-industry lobbyist, Steven Griles, who believes that public lands are unconstitutional. He put in charge of the air division of the EPA, Jeffrey Holmstead, a utility lobbyist who has represented nothing but the worst air polluters in America. As head of Superfund: a woman whose last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade Superfund. The second in command of EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist.

(This is apparently the NRDC site he refers to there.)

On "red" states vs. "blue" states:

I do 40 speeches a year in red states, and there is no difference between how Republican audiences and Democratic audiences react when they hear what this White House and this Congress are doing. There is no difference except that the Republicans come up afterward and say, "Why haven't we ever heard of this before?" I say to them, "It's because you're watching Fox News and listening to Rush." Eighty percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don't know what's going on.

On coal-burning power plants that wanted (and got) longer than 17 years to clean up:

President Clinton's administration was prosecuting the worst 75 of those [coal-burning] plants, but that's an industry that donated $48 million to this President during the 2000 election cycle and has given $58 million since.

One of the first things that Bush did when he came into office was to order the Justice Department and EPA to drop all those lawsuits. The top three enforcers at EPA, Sylvia Lowrance, Bruce Buckheit, and Eric Schaeffer, all resigned their jobs in protest. These weren't Democrats. These were people who had served through the Reagan and Bush administrations, the earlier Bush administration.

On mercury poisoning:

I have so much mercury in my body -- I had my level tested recently, and Waterkeeper will test your level, you can send them a hair sample -- my level is about double what the EPA considers safe. I was told by Dr. David Carpenter, who is the national authority on mercury contamination, that a woman with my levels of mercury in her blood would have children with impairment. I said to him, "You mean she might have," and he said, "No, the science is very certain today. Her children would have some kind of permanent brain damage." He estimated an IQ loss in those kids of about five to seven points.

He goes on to say that the White House had just announced that it was abolishing Clinton-era rules, substituting instead rules that were written by utility-industry lobbyists - rules that will allow those companies to effectively never have to clean up mercury emissions.

On corporations and government:

There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing. They encourage us to take risks. They maximize wealth. They create jobs. I own a corporation. They're a great thing, but they should not be running our government. The reason for that is they don't have the same aspirations for America that you and I do. A corporation does not want democracy. It does not want free markets, it wants profits, and the best way for it to get profits is to use our campaign-finance system -- which is just a system of legalized bribery -- to get their stakes, their hooks into a public official and then use that public official to dismantle the marketplace to give them a competitive advantage and then to privatize the commons, to steal the commonwealth, to liquidate public assets for cash, to plunder, to steal from the rest of us.

...And what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called communism. The domination of government by business is called fascism.

On what this Administration really represents:

I say that this is an Administration that represents itself as the White House of values, but every value that they claim to represent is just a hollow facade, that marks the one value that they really consider worth fighting for, which is corporate profit-taking. They say that they like free markets, but they despise free-market capitalism.

What they like, if you look at their feet rather than their clever, clever mouths, what they really like is corporate welfare, and capitalism for the poor but socialism for the rich. They say that they like private property, but they don't like private property except when it's the right of a polluter to use his private property to destroy his neighbor's property and to destroy the public property.

And they say that they like law and order, but they are the first ones to let the corporate lawbreakers off the hook. And they say that they like local control and states' rights, but they only like those things when it means sweeping away the barriers to corporate profit-taking at the local level.

As with MLK on Monday and Al on Tuesday, this is a long one. But hey, I gave you yesterday off, so read all, I entreat you.

By the way, if you want the book-length treatment, check out his book, "Crimes Against Nature : How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy".