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Politics : HOWARD DEAN -THE NEXT PRESIDENT? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (1341)	1/4/2004 2:14:38 PM
From: sylvester80	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3079

MUST READ! Bush Deserves an 'F'; Administration has sold out our air, water and food for a quick buck [ed: How can anyone vote for this corrupt POS is beyond me... Nobody, but NOBODY can be as bad a president as Bush has been. NOBODY!] By JOHN PASSACANTANDO KNIGHT RIDER/TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE Jan 2, 2004, Las Vegas Review Journal lvrj.com This question is too easy. I feel like Sammy Sosa facing a 60mph fastball in the American Legion League. The only hard part is convincing the public that President Bush is actually as bad on the environment as I say he is. It’s hard because good-hearted Americans don’t believe that a president would sell out children’s health; the cleanliness of our air, water and food; and the stability of our climate system just for a couple hundred million dollars in corporate contributions from ExxonMobil, Monsanto and a who’s who list of the dirtiest energy, chemical, mining and power companies in the country. It’s like anti-Semitism or racism or homophobia, you’ve got to actually see someone do it to believe it. George Bush came to the White House with a lousy record in Texas, rolling back the clean air laws to help the power companies and giving thousands of kids asthma in the bargain. But this is America, where anybody can have a new start. We chose not to prejudge what the president’s approach toward the environment would be. We could never have guessed anyway. It was far worse than his Texas record. The nonpartisan League of Conservation Voters gave the president’s environmental record a D-minus in 2002 and then dropped it to an F in 2003. To paraphrase Woody Allen, Bush went from miserable to horrible. He gutted regulations making power plants clean up their acts and called it the Clear Skies Initiative. Eric Schaeffer, the top regulatory official at the Environmental Protection Agency, resigned over the rollbacks and the deals the White House was cutting for campaign contributors who didn’t want to face lawsuits from Schaeffer. It doesn’t stop there. Letting logging companies clear cut in America’s national forests, that’s called the Healthy Forests Initiative. It was the same across all the issues. Rollbacks on cleaning up Superfund sites, wetlands protection, increasing snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park - stopped thankfully by a federal judge - opening public lands to mining and gas exploration. And forgive me for the personal example, but Bush’s Justice Department is prosecuting my own organization, Greenpeace, for trying to stop the importation of illegally logged mahogany from the Brazilian rainforest into the United States. We sent several activists onto a ship containing 70 tons of illegally logged mahogany three miles off the coast of Miami. Greenpeace efforts have succeeded in securing a temporary moratorium on the cutting of mahogany in the Brazilian Amazon. The response from the Justice Department: It has indicted Greenpeace using an 1872 law against “sailor mongering,” the first criminal charges in U.S. history brought against an organization for engaging in peaceful protest. Just hours away from Christmas, the Bush administration slipped through an exemption of the “no roads” rule for Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the last intact temperate rainforest in North America. In other words, as the security code went up to Orange and Americans were leaving for the holiday, Bush slipped through a huge favor, 9 million acres to be exact, to the timber barons. But it is even worse than it looks because the once high standard that America set for countries the world over, creating national parks, setting standards for clean air and water, protecting forest and soil, and spurring super-efficient job creating industries like solar and wind power is being destroyed. America is no longer a beacon for values above and beyond the almighty buck. instead we have come to symbolize, under the leadership of President Bush, the newest form of ugly Americans, selling out our environment and our children’s health for a quick buck. John Passacantando is executive director of Greenpeace USA, www.greenpeaceusa.org, a nonpartisan organization devoted to activism on behalf of environmental causes