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Slant: Short opinion pieces and rumor-chasing notes News: News: News: FLAMING BUSH TROUSERS SIGHTED AROUND TOWN
As part of a nationwide tour, George W. Bush is spending a week in Eugene — at least in effigy. A towering Bush likeness in full flight suit arrived in Eugene Monday, Sept. 27 and will tour the city until Saturday, pants ablaze, thanks to a blower and colored fabric. As the car tours, a digital ticker board scrolls Bush's lies. Stephanie Detwiler said she and other local volunteers learned of the project, named Pants on Fire, through Truemajority.org, and signed up to drive Bush around town. Organizers at Ben & Jerry's headquarters (Pants on Fire is founded by Ben Coen) were stunned at the Eugene squad's quick response to get involved, Detwiler said. A run-in with vandals with wire cutters in Spokane is causing some electrical headaches here, said Detwiler, but that won't stop the car's tour. Next stop is Reno where Coen reunites with his car. See www.pantsonfire.netfor more info or to order "the doll." — Jeffrey Stout
FOXY AIRPORT TV DRAWS COMPLAINTS Media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has decried the news program as "the most biased name in news" for its "extraordinary right-wing tilt." But that hasn't kept the Eugene airport from pumping Fox News into its departure lounges. The Bush boosting, pro-war station's political rantings forced on airline travelers by the airport have attracted citizen complaints, but Fox has apparently paid the city for exclusive broadcast rights and city officials refuse to change the channel or turn the TVs off. City Councilors Betty Taylor and Bonny Bettman joined citizen complaints about the biased broadcasts at a recent meeting. Bettman said the lounges should be silent. "It's a very serious matter for some people." — Alan Pittman
FORESTED PLOT'S FATE UNCERTAIN The city is poised to purchase one of the last big pieces of undeveloped land in Eugene, but the deal's not yet sealed. The 39-acre plot — bordered by Nectar Way, Garnet Road and Dillard Road in south Eugene — includes steep hills, seasonal creeks, large trees and wetlands. According to planning project manager Andrea Riner, the city's first priority is to protect the stream corridors that connect the plot with 54 acres of open space that the city bought several years ago. The land can then be integrated into the Ridgeline Trail system. The city was interested in acquiring the plot when Portland developer Joe Green bought it for $325,000 last spring. Now Green is offering to sell it to the city for $600,000, or he will develop it. Preliminary discussions about development include building new roads and more than 100 houses. Southeast Eugene resident Lisa Warnes is furious that the city didn't purchase the plot last spring, when the pricetag was lower. "The city could have bought it at a much better price, and they didn't. They dropped the ball on it. They owe it to the city to buy it now, at any price," says Warnes. The city has earmarked $300,000 — a combination of stormwater fees and funds from the 1998 Parks and Open Space bond measure — to purchase the property. Oregon State Parks recently matched this amount with an additional $300,000. But there is one last obstacle before the city can finalize the purchase by Green's Oct. 1 deadline: appraisal of the property at or below $600,000. Riner is optimistic about acquiring the plot, but she says that if the appraisal does not support the purchase price, the deal may fall through. "In terms of property acquisition, we're in a pretty good place," says Riner, "but obviously, the appraisal's outcome is important." The neighbors of southeast Eugene urge concerned citizens to contact the Parks and Open Spaces Division to voice support for the city's purchase of this property. To do so, call Riner at 682-4909, or e-mail andrea.g.riner@ci.eugene.or.us. — Kera Abraham
SOLAR HOME TOUR IS THIS SATURDAY
October is Energy Awareness Month and each year at this time local solar energy advocates collaborate with the state of Oregon to organize a tour of solar installations, including water heaters, space heaters and photovoltaic electricity generators. The Lane County Solar Tour of Homes will be from 10 am to 4 pm Saturday, Oct. 2 and will begin with a talk and slide show at EWEB, 500 4th St, Eugene. The cost is $10 per car or $5 to ride in a tour-provided van. Tickets for those wishing to use their own transportation can be purchased at EWEB until 1 pm. "There's a lot of exciting stuff this year," says Tom Scott, a local solar contractor and advocate who's retiring this year "after 4,000 solar installations and keeping 10,000 tons of carbon from going into the atmosphere." Scott says technology advances are improving the return on investment in solar power. Participants in the tour will get a copy of a slick new 88-page magazine published by the Oregon Department of Energy. — TJT
LOCAL HOME TAPS UNDERGOUND FOR HEAT You've heard of solar, wind and hydro energy. But what about heat from the earth? Often overlooked but full of potential, geothermal heating is a promising energy alternative for households in Eugene. Because geothermal heat pump systems draw heat from the ground rather than from electricity, they are more efficient, saving money and minimizing air pollution.
Rafael and Barbara Aldave are pleased with the geothermal ground source heat pump system installed at their home in southwest Eugene. Although its installation cost the Aldaves close to $14,000 (including trenches and retrofit duct work), they received a $1,500 tax credit from the state, and the energy-efficient system reduced their monthly electricity bills. Geothermal heat pumps work by taking advantage of the temperature in the shallow ground, which constantly hovers around 55 degrees despite the temperature of the outside air. The system's key component is the ground heat exchanger, a pipe loop buried about five feet deep in the ground. Water circulates through the loop to absorb or release heat, always returning to the house around 55 degrees. In the winter, the heat pump takes heat from the loop and moves it through the house's ducts. In the summer it does the reverse, pumping hot air from the house to the loop. Or, in the Aldaves' case, excess hot air is piped straight to the water heater, saving even more energy. The biggest factor limiting geothermal heat pump installations is space, because the pipe loop needs to pass through about 500 feet of ground. For that reason, rural homes are often more conducive to geothermal heat pumps than city homes with small yards. But the savings are indisputable. According to systems engineer John Beasley of Automatic Heat, the standard geothermal heat pump is two to three times more efficient than conventional heating systems, and a new geothermal pump by Climate Masters is four to five times more efficient than anything else on the market. — Kera Abraham
MRG GETS BEHIND ELECTION PARTICIPATION Two state ballot measures have drawn the attention of a local foundation that supports progressive causes. The McKenzie River Gathering (MRG) Foundation is making available $8,000 in small grants between now and Nov. 2 for groups working on voter registration and voter mobilization regarding Measures 36 and 37. Priority will be given to groups that are "reaching Oregon's low-income communities, women, youth, immigrants, people of color and rural populations; education on divisive issues such as marriage equality; and collaboration and coalition building across issue areas," says Marjory Hamann, MRG Foundation's executive director. Hamann says voters will not only elect our next president, but they will "grapple with ballot measures that have the potential to write unequal treatment into our Constitution (Measure 36), and gut our land use laws (Measure 37)." In late September, MRG Foundation will be hosting trainers from the national Alliance for Justice and the Western States Center to meet with its grantees in Portland and Eugene. The all-day workshops will provide detailed information about what non-profits can and cannot do, suggest specific actions that groups can take between now and the elections, and offer an opportunity for grantees to share stories and inspire one another to do more. For more information on the grants, contact Anita Rodgers at (503) 289-1517.
CORRECTIONS/CLARIFICATIONS In the last paragraph of Vanessa Salvia's music column last week, the phrase "caustic metal" was added by an editor and does not reflect Vanessa Salvia's opinions regarding the band Eagles of Death Metal. In our Eugene Celebration story (9/16) "Seeing Red Over Blues," the name of The Vipers guitar player was misspelled. It should have read John Ward.
Even some of the West Eugene Parkway's biggest boosters are starting to sound like they don't want the project now. Eugene Mayor Jim Torrey, a long-time WEP booster, said at a council meeting Sept. 22 that the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) had done Eugene a "disservice" by dragging out the final parkway decision for so long. Torrey said dedicating money to the WEP had diverted money from projects like relieving congestion on Beltline Highway. Torrey said Beltline, not the WEP, is the city's "number one" need for road improvements. "We've lost numerous opportunities," Torrey said. "You [ODOT] need to let us know sooner rather than later whether or not this [WEP] project is going to happen." At the council meeting, the focus of Torrey and other WEP supporters appeared to center on not whether the WEP will be built, but whether ODOT or the city will get the blame for killing it. Torrey said if the city rather than ODOT is blamed for killing the project, the agency may decide it "can't do business with the city of Eugene." Councilor Gary Papé, another long-time WEP booster, said the city should support the project "and not be the scapegoat" for killing it. Rob Zako, a local transportation advocate for 1000 Friends of Oregon, says it now looks as if no one wants the WEP, but none want the blame for killing it. Zako shakes his head about the mayor finally admitting that the wetlands highway is diverting money from higher priority road needs. "Duh. That was what this was all about." "This is what the anti-WEP people have been saying all along," said Councilor Bonny Bettman. Zako pointed out the same Beltline project that Torrey now says is a higher priority was sidelined by the mayor and other WEP supporters three years ago when they pushed to cancel their funding in favor of building the WEP. If the city had canceled the WEP three years ago and focused on alternatives, "we would have been 75 percent into correcting the [traffic] problems out there" in west Eugene, Bettman said. "This project has turned into a stinking albatross that now not even the state wants to take responsibility for." Bettman was referring to the subject of the council meeting last week: commenting on ODOT's proposal to transfer responsibility for the eastern half of the WEP to the city. ODOT says it needs the transfer to get around regulations that forbid spending federal money on a new highway that is projected to be overly congested. City Manager Dennis Taylor said he planned to sign an agreement with ODOT to talk about the transfer of jurisdiction. Taylor said he hopes ODOT will later agree to pay for construction and maintenance of the roadway. Torrey admitted that he personally campaigned for the WEP three years ago with promises that the state will pay to build and maintain all of the roadway. "I'm not about to take back something I said. I said it." WEP critics pointed out that ODOT's request for a jurisdiction switch contradicts earlier positions taken by the state agency. Councilor Scott Meisner pointed out ODOT recently refused to allow dedicated bus rapid transit lanes on Route 126 through the city because of state highway standards. Now, the agency wants to dump those congestion standards for 126 on the west side of town. Councilor David Kelly pointed out that ODOT earlier rejected proposals to build half the parkway and rely on city streets for the remainder because streets under local jurisdiction wouldn't meet its standards. "Now ODOT's own proposal doesn't meet ODOT standards," Kelly said. Bettman said if the WEP is built, the new local street "highway" will be a "stone's throw" from existing underused streets. "It's ridiculous." Bettman also questioned whether the new "half a WEP" proposal will require a new round of lengthy legal approvals for the project. "That is a very, very different project." Kelly says the WEP also has far bigger problems. He pointed to opposition by the BLM to building a parkway through federally acquired parkland full of rare wetlands and species. He questioned how a street under local jurisdiction could serve as a highway given that the city lacks the ability to prevent the road from clogging with business driveways. Kelly said it will be difficult to decide what additional road projects to cancel to fund the WEP's spiraling price tag, now estimated at $130 million, up about $30 million from just three years ago. "This plan is too much money for too little effect," Meisner, once the key swing vote for the WEP, now says. Council concerns drew blank looks and few answers from city staff, once among the WEP's most important boosters. At one point, Eugene Public Works Director Kurt Corey described the WEP approval process as a many-tentacled octopus. Councilor Nancy Nathanson, a staunch WEP supporter, said she's disappointed and fears the project is caught in an "endless loop" of regulations with ODOT not moving forward. "It seems the state in some cases has put a hold on this." That may be wise considering the recent election of a new mayor and council majority openly opposed to the controversial wetland highway. What if the new council votes against the WEP in January? "I don't know," says ODOT project leader Karl Wieseke.
The
Sacred Feminine For more than two decades women have opened the pages of the We'moon calendar and drawn daily inspiration from it's empowering, woman-centric art and prose, embracing feminine goddess culture and celebrating the connection between pagan rituals and natural cycles.
"Every day women call me, sometimes in tears, telling me they love the calendar so much," said One, the office manager of Mother Tongue Ink (MTI), publisher of the calendar. "They thank me for the work that we do. Many of these women are straight, some are married. All kinds of women use We'moon. It offers them a different way of seeing the world." Next weekend One, whose birth name is Tosca Clements, and special editor and contributing artist Bethroot Gwynn will conduct a series of workshops unveiling We'moon 2005: Gaia Rhythms for Womyn — Sacred Paths. In its 24th edition, We'moon is an international publication of wo-men's art, poetry and prose formatted as a daily planner. It is popular in Eugene and every year hundreds of residents buy the new We'moon calendar. We'moon's founders merged the Gregorian calendar with "knowledge of goddess culture and awareness of natural cycles," says Amy Schutzer, MTI's assistant manager. The calendar "emerged out of the women's movement," she says. "They sought to offer alternative information, to show that we don't have to carry on in a patriarchal way." The result is a book that can be used for the day-to-day while informing users of moon cycles, astrology, pagan holidays and goddess myth. The calendar also challenges linguistic norms, particularly the use of the word "women." Founder Musawa writes in the We'moon 2005 introduction: "Instead of defining ourselves in relation to men (as in woman or female), we use the word we'moon to define ourselves by our primary relation to the natural sources of cosmic flow." The book also presents and supports the artwork of women all over the world. Artists come from as near as Eugene and Portland, as far away as Auckland, New Zealand and Quito, Ecuador. Poems to goddesses, paintings of women and political prose fill every page. The images are as magical as they are diverse, incorporating graceful, swirling lines, brilliant colors, and influences from the natural world. The portraits include women of all shapes and sizes and frequently goddesses while scenes often depict women interacting with each other and the elements in empowering ways. Because only a few hundred of the thousands of submissions can be printed in the calendar, One takes the submissions to "Weaving Circles" around Oregon to get feedback from as many women as possible. The Weaving Circles are open to any woman and in them, they discuss and share what artwork resonates with them. The process allows "all kinds of women to choose what will go in the next year's calendar." "I think this is why the calendar is moving for so many women," One said. "The end product is universal." That end product also appeals to some men. "We have been seeing an increase in men buying the calendar," Schutzer said. "There are a lot of men who also agree with this way of living — in harmony with earth and cycles." Musawa is also the founder of the We'moon land, a women's intentional community on 52 acres in Estacada, Ore. MTI's offices are based there and the company has six primary employees, three We'moon residents along with three women from off the land. "As a women's intentional community, We'moon is set up to empower women to empower themselves," long-time resident Schutzer said. "Women learn various life skills, one of which is a cottage industry, (the We'moon calendar), that provides women's jobs." "Living with women gives us a certain kind of freedom you don't have in a patriarchal culture. We can walk around with our shirts off," One said, laughing. "We can mow the lawn naked if we want to, and we do." Thursday, Oct. 7 from 6 to 8 pm at Mother Kali's Books, 720 E.13th Ave, One and Bethroot Gwynn will present the 2005 calendar. Gwynn has been living on women's land for 29 years and recently brought her play, Women: The Longest Revolution to Eugene. The evening "is a chance for anyone to ask questions about the We'moon land and calendar, including what it's like to live on women's land, what it's like to work for We'moon, how to use the astrology and questions about the feminist information," One said. Friday, Oct. 8 from 6 to 8 pm at Living Earth Herbs, 383 W.3rd Ave., One and Living Earth employees will lead a workshop on the herbs and flower essences that are highlighted in We'moon 2005. Saturday, Oct. 9 from 1 to 5 pm will be a Eugene Weaving Circle open to all women. There will also be a Weaving Circle in Corvallis Sunday, Oct. 10 from 1 to 5 pm. Call (503) 630-7848 for directions to either circle.
Bush's
Radical Agenda Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made an impromptu appearance in Eugene Sept. 23 and held a press conference on the EWEB plaza with only about a dozen people able to attend. Kennedy is arguably the nation's most prominent environmental attorney. He is currently senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper, and president of Waterkeeper Alliance. His new book is called Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy. Below is a transcript of his talk in Eugene, edited for length.
I've written a book about the 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. This morning 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 your 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 ashthma 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 the 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. We must turn them out of office.
Below are Kennedy's comments in a discussion with EW following the press conference: He was asked why people who favor environmental protection still support Bush. People believe that the government is protecting the environment and that any debate they hear about is about fine tuning at the margins, and there's no real threat to the environment. When they find out about it, both Republicans and Democrats switch their votes. I speak to Republican groups all the time and they get just as upset about it. The polling shows too that 81 percent of the public wants stronger environmental laws and want them strictly enforced. The same 81 percent believe Bush is doing that. The problem is the press. We've had a collapse of the Fourth Estate, total negligence. You (the alternative media) are the exception but in the corporate-owned media the news has become a profit center. They are not covering the issues, not informing the public, they are no longer the forum of our democracy, the marketplace of ideas, they are simply the marketplace of commerce. They've fired their investigative reporters, gotten ride of their documentary staffs and foreign news bureaus, and they are appealing to the lowest common denominator in order to attract viewership to sell product. The lowest common denominator is sex, celebrity gossip and fear. So we see Michael Jackson, Coby Bryant, Lacy Peterson and terror alerts every five minutes. What we're not seeing are the real problems, one of which is that one out of every six women in our country now can no longer safely have a child due to high mercury levels. Imagine if the terrorists had poisoned one out of every six women. That's the real issue that should be on the front page of every newspaper, but it's not there because they don't have the staff to be able to connect the dots between the president's corporate contributors, the mercury in the fish, the mercury in our women. The press is negligent. They are stenographers now, no longer journalists. The entire White House press corps is just a cult. They should drink poison Kool-Aid and do us all a favor.
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