The Tavis Smiley Show
Transcript: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Doug Nelson
Tavis Smiley: Good evening from Los Angeles. I'm Tavis Smiley. Tonight, a conversation with attorney and activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The tireless environmental advocate is out with a new book taking issue with the Bush administration's record on environmental issues. Also tonight, a look at the role of philanthropy in helping America's children. We'll be joined by the president of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Doug Nelson. We're glad you've joined us. That's all coming up right now.
Tavis: It is a pleasure to welcome Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., here to our program tonight, the longtime environmental advocate. He's out with his latest book, “Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering The Country and Hijacking Our Democracy.” Robert, nice to have you on.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Good to see you, Tavis.
Tavis: I'm not so sure what this book is about. That titleà
Kennedy: It's ambiguous, isn't it?
Tavis: Yeah, that title's a little ambiguous. I'm not quite sure what it means.
Kennedy: Well, you know, it's not--this is not--I've been bipartisan for 20 years as an environmental advocate, 'cause I don't think there's any such thing as Republican children or Democratic children. I don't want the environment to become the province of a single political party. But you can't talk honestly about the environment today in any context without speaking critically of this president. This is the worst environmental president we've had in American history without any rival. If you look at NRDC's web site, you'll see over 400 major environmental rollbacks that have been promoted by the White House over the last 3 1/2 years as part of a deliberate, concerted attempt to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law.
Tavis: Let me ask you, and I know this is--I'm settin' myself up with a question like this. What makes him the worst environmental president ever? And I'm asking that question to try to get at what is it about his public policy approach, about his feeling about the environment? Because we see a guy who loves going to Crawford, Texas, and hangin' in the outdoors and choppin' wood. We see the image of a guy who loves the outdoors. But yet, you're telling me he's the worst environmental president ever. Juxtapose those 2 things for me.
Kennedy: The reason is, I mean, I don't try to go into his head and figure out why he's doing these things. But if you look at his feet, you can tell which way he's walking, and it's towards the money, and there's a lot of money in polluting, and he has put the polluters in charge of the government.
The book really is not so much about the environment as it is about how excessive corporate power can corrode our democracy, and one of the things, you know, that the Bush administration has done is, they use--it's a stealth attack. They don't want the public to know about this, because even the Republicans would turn against them, and this is what their own polling shows, and I show this in the book. And so they conceal their agenda, this radical agenda behind an Orwellian rhetoric. When they want to destroy the forest, they call it the Healthy Forest Act. When they want to destroy the air, they call it the Clear Skies Bill.
But they've--most insidiously, they've put polluters in charge of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. The head of Public Lands in this country is a mining industry lobbyist who believes that public lands are unconstitutional. The head of the Forest Service is probably the most rapacious timber industry lobbyist in history, Mark Ray. The head of the air division of EPA is a utility lobbyist who spent his whole life representing the worst air polluters in America. The head of Superfund is a woman whose last job was teaching corporations how to evade Superfund. The second in command of EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist. And if you go through all of the sub-secretariats and agency heads in the department of agriculture and energy and the interior and EPA, virtually all of them come from polluting industries who have a lot of money at stake in those regulations. And these are not individuals, as I show in my book, who have entered government service for the public interest, but rather to-- specifically to subvert the very laws they're now charged with enforcing.
Tavis: Is it just me, orà Are you starting to--I'm trying to phrase this the right way--change your focus, shift your focus from one of just being labeled, although significant, from one of being exclusively labeled an environmentalist to one who has taken a more “free market” approach?
Kennedy: Well, I've always been a huge advocate of the free market, and I think they're intertwined. I think democracy, the environment, and the free market are intertwined. The best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had a true free-market economy. We don't. In fact, I talked to Jim Hightower the other day about, you know, how great the free market would be for the environment because it promotes efficiency, and efficiency means you eliminate waste, which means you'll eliminate pollution. Pollution is waste, and he said, “Yeah, the free market is a great thing. We should try it sometime.”
This government, this White House claims to love the free market. But really what they like is corporate welfare, you know? They want socialism. They want capitalism for the poor, but socialism for the rich, and, you know, what I show in my book is that there's a huge difference. In a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.
What polluters do is they 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. You show me a polluter, 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 and force the public to pay his production costs.
When a coal company discharges mercury into the air or ozone in particulates-- today, you know, one out of every four black children in America's cities has asthma. I have three sons who have asthma. We have an epidemic today of pediatric asthma. We know that asthma attacks are caused by 2 components of air pollution: ozone and particulates. We know that the principal source of those, about 60% of that material in our atmosphere, is coming from 1,100 coal-burning power plants who are burning coal illegally. It's been illegal for 15 years. They were supposed to modernize their processes.
The Clinton administration was prosecuting them, 70 of the worst ones, for violating the law. But this is an industry that gave $48 million to President Bush during the 2000 cycle and have given $58 million since, and one of the first things that Bush did when he came into office was to order the Justice Department to drop those lawsuits. The Justice Department lawyer said, “This has never been done in American history where a president receives money from a criminal targeted by prosecutors and then gets into office and orders the Justice Department to drop the prosecutions.” Now, you remember when Bill Clinton pardoned Mark Ray and how indignant everybody got. But Mark Ray was just one guy, and this is 70 different criminal enterprises, and Mark Ray never killed anybody. And according to EPA, those 70 plants--just the criminal exceedences from those plants kill 5,500 Americans every year.
Tavis: Let me ask you, Robertà I feel it sitting here next to you, and I'm sure the viewers feel it coming through the television screen they're watching right now--your passion around these issues. Tell me, given the passion that you have around these issues and your expertise in this field, if you were running for president--I know you're not--but if you were running for president, how do you make these issues sexy? And I ask that because these issues affect all of us, black, white, rich or poor. They affect all of us, but when these issues are talked about, when Kerry, for example, tries to get some traction talking about these issues, whether it's the media or the American people, these issues are not sexy. They don't get the traction you need, although they affect every one of us.
Kennedy: And it's mainly the media, and I talk about that. I have a chapter in my book on why the media's not covering these issues, but you know, Americans, if they understood what these federal policies were doing to their lives, would be completely indignant. They would be rebellious about it. And let me tell you one example. This week, the federal EPA announced that in 19 states, it's now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish in the state. In 48 states, some of the freshwater fish are now unsafe to eat because of mercury contamination. The mercury's coming from those same 1,100 coal-burning power plants. We know a lot about mercury we didn't know--
Tavis: Is California one of the states? 'Cause I was going to order salmon for dinner tonight.
Kennedy: Well, California has a lot of rivers and lakes that are unsafe to eat fish from because of mercury. Not all of them, but some of them. It's not one of the 19 states where all freshwater fish--
Tavis: OK.
Kennedy: OK. One out of every 6 American women now has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases--autism, blindness, mental retardation, heart, liver, and kidney disease. I got my levels tested recently. I have so much mercury in my body, just from eating fish, that Dr. David carpenter, who's the national authority on mercury contamination, told me that a woman with my levels of mercury in her body would have children with cognitive impairment. He estimated permanent IQ loss of 5 to 7 points in all of her children.
Now, there are 630,000 children born in this country every single year who have been subjected--exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in the womb. The Clinton administration, recognizing this national epidemic, declared mercury a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act. That triggered a requirement that those coal utilities had to remove 90% of that mercury within 3+ years. But this is the same industry that gave $100 million to this president, and eight weeks ago, President Bush announced he was scrapping the Clinton-era regs and substituting instead regulations that were written by industry lawyers.
Tavis: So it's all about the money.
Kennedy: Yeah, and that will require them never to have to clean up. And you know, it would only cost them 1% of plant revenues to clean up the mercury, which is a great deal for the American people. But it's still billions of dollars for those utilities, and they now, by making that $100 million contribution to the president, have made billions of dollars in profits, but you and I and the rest of America is going to pay that campaign debt for decades.
Tavis: Before my time with you runs out, let me ask to juxtapose something else for me that you mentioned earlier. You mentioned that one in four children, one in four black children, to your point, in America have asthma.
Kennedy: In American cities.
Tavis: Right. One in 3 in Harlem has asthma, as you well know.
Kennedy: And one in 2 in shelters now has asthma.
Tavis: OK, tell me how, then, you juxtapose saying that the environment--environmental issues are the primary civil rights issue of today, and yet environmental racism in this country is run amok.
Kennedy: It's run amok, and, you know, the burden of environmental injury always falls hardest on the backs of the poor. Four out of every five toxic waste dumps in America is in a black neighborhood. The largest toxic waste dump in America is Emelle, Alabama, which is 85% black. The highest concentration of toxic waste dumps in America is the Southside of Chicago. The most contaminated zip code in California is east L.A., and on and on. You know, there's 250,000 Hispanic farm workers who are poisoned by pesticides every year, and God knows what's happening to their children, 'cause nobody's in there taking those measurements.
But if you look around, you know, the environmental injury--no matter what is, whether it's the access to parks, public land, who's breathing the bad air, who's breathing the good air--it always falls hardest on the backs of the poor. How we protect the environment, the public trust assets, the air, the shared resources--the air, the water, the public lands, the fisheries, the wildlife, that's the best measure of how a democracy is working. Do you allow some large corporations to steal the breath from our children's lungs 'cause they gave money to a politician, or do we have laws in place that say no, that air belongs to those children, nobody can contaminate it, no matter how much money you're going to make by doing it?
Tavis: Let me ask you. You know John Kerry, I presume. If you had to synthesize for him the top three things out of this book, in terms of his agenda, that he would do, assuming that he were to win the White House come January, on the environment, list those three things for me.
Kennedy: Well, you know, I think that probably the top thing he should be working on is fuel efficiency in our automobiles, because that helps everything.
If we raise fuel economy of our automobiles by one mile per gallon, that's two arctic national wildlife refuges full of oil. If we raise it by 2.7 miles per gallon, we can eliminate all the imports of oil from Iraq and Kuwait combined. If we raise it 7.6 miles per gallon, just 7--almost 8--less than 8 miles per gallon, we can eliminate 100% of Persian Gulf oil. That eliminates the need, you know, to spend $200 billion in Iraq or, you know, protecting our oil lines in Saudi Arabia.
All that money we can bring home and spend on rebuilding our neighborhoods, our schools, our medical care system. It also saves all of us money, because right now I spend $3,000 on gasoline driving my 22-mile-per-gallon minivan. If I was getting 40 miles per gallon, I'd have $1,200 in my pocket at the end of every year, and so would every other American. Imagine what that would do as an economic stimulus package. It would preserve us from price shocks on the international oil market, and, you know, it would help us pay off our national debt, and it would give us cleaner air, so that really, in one fell swoop, that is what we ought to be doing.
Tavis: The book is “Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy,” written by the one and only Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Robert, nice to see you. You're welcome back any time.
Kennedy: Thank you.
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