-- -- PostgreSQL database dump -- SET client_encoding = 'SQL_ASCII'; SET check_function_bodies = false; SET search_path = public, pg_catalog; -- -- TOC entry 3 (OID 602192) -- Name: stories02; Type: TABLE; Schema: public; Owner: richv -- -- -- Data for TOC entry 4 (OID 602192) -- Name: stories02; Type: TABLE DATA; Schema: public; Owner: richv -- COPY tims_picks (id, title, url, content, status, entry_date) FROM stdin; 701 Sen Ted Stevens, on the take, GOP Kings of Graft \N "latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-stevens17dec17,1,5444268.story?coll=la-utilities-politics

THE NATION

Senator's Way to Wealth Was Paved With Favors

By Chuck Neubauer and Richard T. Cooper
Times Staff Writers

December 17, 2003

ANCHORAGE — He wielded extraordinary power in Washington for more than three
decades, eventually holding sway over nearly $800 billion a year in federal
spending.

But outside the halls of the U.S. Senate, which is a world of personal wealth
so rarified some call it "the Millionaires' Club," Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)
had struggled financially.

Then, in 1997, he got serious about making money. And in almost no time, he
too was a millionaire — thanks to investments with businessmen who received
government contracts or other benefits with his help.

Added together, Stevens' new partnerships and investments provide a
step-by-step guide to building a personal fortune — if you happen to be one of
the country's most influential senators.

They also illustrate how lax ethics rules allow members of Congress and their
families to profit from personal business dealings with special interests.

Among the ways that Stevens became wealthy:

•  Armed with the power his committee posts give him over the Pentagon,
Stevens helped save a $450-million military housing contract for an Anchorage
businessman. The same businessman made Stevens a partner in a series of real
estate investments that turned the senator's $50,000 stake into at least
$750,000 in six years.

•  An Alaska Native company that Stevens helped create got millions of dollars
in defense contracts through preferences he wrote into law. Now the company
pays $6 million a year to lease an office building owned by the senator and
his business partners. Stevens continues to push legislation that benefits the
company.

•  An Alaskan communications company benefited from the senator's activities
on the Commerce Committee. His wife, Catherine, earned tens of thousands of
dollars from an inside deal involving the company's stock.

Stevens, in a written response to questions submitted by The Times, said that
in all these cases his official actions were motivated by a desire to help
Alaska, and that he played no role in the day-to-day management of the
ventures into which he put money.

"I am a passive investor," Stevens said of his real estate dealings. "I am not
now nor have I been involved in buying or selling properties, negotiating
leases or making other management decisions."

All in the Family

In these deals and others, Stevens' brother-in-law, William H. Bittner, played
a pivotal role. An Anchorage lawyer and lobbyist, Bittner represents major
business interests for whom the senator has repeatedly gone to bat. In one
instance, Stevens engineered a $9.6-million federal appropriation that chiefly
benefited a Bittner client, part of South Korea's Hyundai conglomerate.

Stevens tucked a single line into a must-pass appropriations bill that used
federal tax dollars to buy the company out of a coal-loading facility in Seward.

Stevens said he did it to lower the company's costs and keep it from canceling
an agreement to buy Alaskan coal. Bittner did not respond to questions from
The Times.

Stevens' relationship with Bittner fits an increasingly widespread pattern in
Washington: Senior senators do favors for special interests that pay hundreds
of thousand of dollars in lobbying and consulting fees to the senators'
children, spouses and other relatives.

As The Times documented in a series of articles in the summer, Sens. John B.
Breaux (D-La.), Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) did favors
for companies and groups that paid their sons as lobbyists and consultants.
Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has pushed through federal land trades and other
provisions benefiting Nevada interests that employ his sons and son-in-law.

The Times also reported that Stevens had continually supported interests that
paid his youngest son, Ben, hundreds of thousands of dollars as a consultant.

The senators all said their decisions on policy issues and legislation had not
been influenced by their relatives.

But Stevens' dealings have carried him a step further. His official actions
have helped individuals and companies from which he himself draws financial
benefits, a six-month Times examination found.

His required financial statements have fallen short of complete disclosure —
especially on the activities of a small investment corporation owned by his
wife and her family, a company that is covered by the reporting rules.

The Senate has few ethics rules governing such arrangements. Although
accepting expensive gifts and speaking fees is banned, the
conflict-of-interest rules are much less explicit. For example, nothing
clearly bars a senator from sponsoring legislation that benefits the clients
of family members who lobby. Nor are lawmakers prohibited from going into
business with people receiving legislative favors.

Mainly, the Senate relies on an ill-defined injunction not to bring shame upon
the body.

Senate Ethics Committee Chairman George Voinovich (R-Ohio) declined to discuss
the issues raised by The Times articles.

House Ethics Committee Chairman Joel Hefley (R-Colo.) said he hoped to convene
an advisory panel of current and former House Ethics Committee members next
year to examine a range of ethics questions, including how to address the
issue of lobbying by relatives.

"I do think we ought to revisit this," he said. He declined to comment on the
issue of lawmakers' financial partners.

Lawmakers should be careful about their business relationships, John D. Saxon,
a former Senate Ethics Committee counsel, said, speaking generally and not
about Stevens in particular.

"It's a very slippery slope for a member of Congress to be entangled with
someone in a business dealing and then use their official position to help
them, even if it's on something completely different," he said.

'Stevens Money'

Today, Stevens is the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, and as
president pro tempore stands just behind the vice president and the speaker of
the House in the constitutional line of succession to the Oval Office.

For more than 20 years, he has been chairman or ranking member of the Senate's
Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Since 1997, he has been chairman or
ranking member of the full Appropriations Committee, which must approve every
dollar of federal discretionary spending each year.

Stevens' position as a senior member of the Commerce Committee adds to his
clout — especially in telecommunications policy, which is under the
committee's jurisdiction.

In Alaska, Stevens exerts unparalleled influence. No state is so dependent on
federal dollars and decisions. The federal government still owns 60% of all
its land, generates one-third of all jobs, and holds the keys to economic
growth through regulation of its major industries — oil and gas, fishing,
timber and tourism.

Federal spending in Alaska, known locally as "Stevens money," runs as much as
70% above the national average on a per capita basis.

Since his first day in the Senate in 1968, Stevens has delivered for Alaska.

He has won tax breaks for Native businesses, bailouts for fishermen, a
pipeline for an oil consortium and restoration of an abandoned Army post as a
tourist attraction for a Yukon village.

He got $28 million for a rail terminal open only during the summer and $40
million for a commercial space satellite facility.

Almost every institution, region and segment of the population in the state
has benefited from Stevens' efforts, from its schools and social programs to
its transportation system, its urban areas and the far-flung villages of
Alaska's Native peoples.

But during the period Stevens has grown wealthy, some longtime supporters say,
the senator has become less willing to hear their views.

"I've been here a long time, and always had a great deal of respect for Sen.
Stevens' enormous power and the good he's done for Alaska," Terry Haines, a
veteran commercial fisherman from Kodiak Island, said recently. "But lately
he's become extremely rigid and doesn't seem to be listening to his
constituents much."

Hard Times

Theodore Fulton Stevens was born Nov. 18, 1923, in Indianapolis. At the outset
of the Great Depression, when Stevens was 6 years old, his parents divorced,
according to his campaign biography.

Stevens went to live with his grandparents after the divorce, helping out by
selling newspapers and working evenings and weekends in a drugstore. He later
moved in with an aunt and uncle in Manhattan Beach, Calif., where he graduated
from high school. Both his father and grandfather died of cancer, Stevens has
said.

Stevens joined the Army Air Corps during World War II, flying cargo planes
"over the Hump" in the Himalayas — some of the most dangerous missions of the
war. He won two Distinguished Flying Crosses and two Air Medals, his biography
says.

The biography describes how he graduated from UCLA and Harvard Law School.
After working in the 1952 Eisenhower campaign, he was hired by a Washington
lawyer, but soon took a new job as a lawyer in Alaska, which was still a
territory.

He played a leading role in the successful campaign for statehood, but
Alaska's voters rejected Stevens the first two times he ran for the Senate.

Winning a seat in the state Legislature, he became House majority leader and
go-to man for Gov. Walter J. Hickel. In 1968, when Sen. E.L. "Bob" Bartlett
died unexpectedly, Hickel picked his ally to fill the vacancy.

In the Senate at last, Stevens worked hard to master legislative details and
committee politics.

But increasing political success was accompanied by personal tragedy.

In 1978, his first wife, Ann, died along with four others when the executive
jet carrying them home crashed at the Anchorage airport. Stevens was one of
two survivors.

At that point, the Stevens' five children were adults. Two years later, he
remarried, and soon had a daughter, Lily, who recently graduated from college.

In the 1980s, Stevens and his new wife, the former Catherine Bittner, suffered
a serious financial reversal.

Along with her younger brother, William Bittner, and other partners, Stevens
invested in the construction of a $2-million crab boat, records show. Before
it was finished, costs soared and the crab market crashed, plunging Stevens
into debt.

The unexpected inheritance of a 54-foot yacht helped Stevens to regain his
financial footing. Records show the boat was a bequest from the late Charles
Willis "Bill" Snedden, publisher of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, a longtime
friend of Stevens'. Stevens sold the boat for about $400,000, according to a
source involved in the transaction who did not want to be named.

Stevens' financial problems underscored the disparity between his personal
situation and that of his wealthy Senate colleagues.

In a news interview in the late 1980s, he lashed out at Alaska voters for
failing to appreciate the personal and financial sacrifices he had made for them.

A $50,000 Investment

In 1997, Stevens began making up for lost time.

"Money was never what Ted Stevens was about," one close associate said of
Stevens' sudden focus on accumulating wealth. The associate attributed it to
Stevens' age — he turned 80 last month — and to concern about his family.

Whatever the reasons for the change, sometime in 1997 — acting at the
senator's request — brother-in-law Bittner contacted a friend, Anchorage real
estate developer Jonathan B. Rubini, about investment opportunities for the
senator, Rubini said.

At the time, Stevens was making about $130,000 a year as a senator, and his
wife reported annual earnings of about $100,000.

Rubini said he would be honored to help, the developer recalled recently
during extensive interviews in his Anchorage office.

A lawyer and a Democrat known for representing liberal clients, Rubini had a
gift for engineering complex deals.

Rubini and his partner, Leonard B. Hyde, made it a practice to form a separate
syndicate of investors for each project. Bittner had often been among those
participants. Rubini arranged for Stevens to put up $50,000, giving him a 7.7%
interest in a new syndicate called JLS Properties.

Rubini, Hyde and another partner who came in on the deal were required to
personally guarantee, if necessary, debts the partnership took on. They also
agreed to contribute more capital if needed.

Stevens was not asked to guarantee notes or promise more money because he was
brought in as a passive investor, Rubini said. The senator said he asked for
that status because it shielded him from the kind of open-ended financial
obligation that had caused his "bad experience" in the crab boat venture.

The deal began in characteristic Rubini fashion, with the purchase of an
$11-million collection of what he called "ragtag" properties, whose
out-of-state owners wanted to unload. Rubini quickly resold several of the
properties to pay down debt.

Among the properties retained were a small office park near the Anchorage
airport and a modest two-story office building downtown. Within three years,
Rubini said, Stevens' equity climbed to about $250,000.

Stevens also invested $50,000 in a separate Rubini syndicate to acquire an
apartment complex in Fairbanks in 1999, records show. Stevens' equity in that
property has grown too, Rubini said.

A Federal Contract

Stevens was soon in a position to do a favor for Rubini.

When Elmendorf Air Force Base, immediately north of Anchorage, was selected to
participate in a new Pentagon program to privatize base housing, Rubini and
another set of partners bid on the $450-million contract in 2000.

The chosen developer would take title to the existing housing, upgrade and
expand it, then rent the houses back to service families. At 828 units, the
Elmendorf contract was far larger than anything Rubini had built before — "a
big reach for us," as he put it.

Yet with low-interest government construction loans and the Air Force pledging
to pay tenants' housing allowances directly to the contractor for the next 50
years, it looked like a moneymaker.

Bittner became an investor in the Elmendorf group that Rubini put together,
records show. Stevens did not, and he said Monday that he had been unaware of
Bittner's involvement.

The senator said he "strongly supported" privatization because it improved
housing for military families and "it would greatly enhance the likelihood
that Elmendorf would not be closed in the next round of base closures."

When Rubini sought more time to prepare his bid, Air Force officials noted in
their records, he sent the senator a copy of the request.

"I purposely CC'd Sen. Stevens to send a signal to the Air Force that we would
raise the issue with the Alaska delegation if the Air Force acted
unreasonably," Rubini said.

Although it was less than he wanted, Rubini was given a two-week extension.

With only the final paperwork to wrap up, Rubini was told he'd won.

Then, in September 2000, days before the deal was to become final, the Air
Force reneged. One government memo said the Air Force thought Rubini's group
"lacked capacity and adequate financing" — claims Rubini strenuously rejects.

Rubini, whose group had already spent $1 million on preparation work, fought
back. He filed a formal protest and also wrote to Stevens, explaining the
problem and requesting help. Then he flew to Washington. First, he tried to
talk to Air Force officials, who refused to see him. Next, he visited Stevens
on Capitol Hill.

The meeting went so well that Stevens invited Rubini home, where they watched
one of the presidential candidate debates between Al Gore and George W. Bush,
Rubini said.

Military Offensive

Stevens said he decided to get involved with the Elmendorf project.

"My involvement with the Elmendorf project was motivated to ensure that the
Air Force moved forward," he said in his written response.

In addition, he said, he was "looking out for an Alaskan company that was
getting short shrift from the Department of Defense."

Stevens did not answer questions about the specific actions he took. He was
quoted in an August Anchorage Daily News article as saying he called Air Force
generals. The article reported on his relationship with Rubini.

Whatever he did, the Air Force began to feel some heat.

As chairman of Appropriations, Stevens is an ex officio member of its Military
Construction Subcommittee. The chairman of that subcommittee, Conrad R. Burns
(R-Mont.), is one of Stevens' fishing buddies.

In October 2000, Burns wrote to the secretary of the Air Force, F. Whitten
Peters, threatening to take away the Elmendorf privatization money because of
the glitch in awarding the contract.

Burns arranged for a similar letter to go to the Air Force from the chairman
of the corresponding House committee, and House aides said they knew Stevens
was interested in the matter.

Burns did not respond to calls or written questions about his actions.

Meanwhile, Rubini tried one more move: joining forces with the only other
Elmendorf bidder — Hunt Building Corp. of El Paso. Hunt was an established
builder of military housing, though the government had forced the company to
pay $8 million in compensation for construction problems on an earlier project.

In early December 2000, the Air Force put aside its reservations and decided
Rubini and his new partner were acceptable.

Rubini said he did not know specifically what Stevens did on the Elmendorf
project. Whatever it was, "Sen. Stevens would have stepped up to assist any
Alaska business," he said.

Air Force officials say they are happy with the work Rubini's firm has done at
Elmendorf, and recently announced the Rubini group would get to do a second
round of housing upgrades without further competition — this phase 50% larger
than the first.

Inside Track

Stevens' efforts to help Rubini with Elmendorf came just as Rubini was making
a decision that transformed Stevens from a modestly successful investor into a
millionaire.

In October 2000, while Rubini was enlisting the senator's help with the Air
Force, the developer acquired 30 acres in midtown Anchorage that he planned to
cover with gleaming office towers.

Like Elmendorf, this deal was a big step up for Rubini — larger both in size
and potential profits than his earlier ventures.

And Rubini chose to make Stevens and JLS Properties part of it. He said JLS
had accrued equity in the properties it already owned and thus could help with
the new financing.

Rubini could have financed the new development in many ways. He could have
used the financial resources of almost any of his numerous successful
holdings. Or, as he frequently did in such cases, he could have attracted an
entirely new set of investors.

Why did he choose to use JLS to help with financing instead of one of the
other options? It was just a decision he made, Rubini said.

Once again, the senator did not have to agree to guarantee the new venture's
debts, as the other JLS partners were required to do.

The first new building to be constructed, called Centerpoint I, is a striking
$35-million edifice with commanding views of snow-capped mountains. The
remainder of the 30-acre parcel is being developed as Centerpoint II. Stevens
is part of that project too.

Stevens has reported that his investments in JLS, Centerpoint I and
Centerpoint II, all stemming from his initial $50,000 investment, are now
worth between $750,000 and $1.5 million.

Rubini said there was no connection between Stevens' intervention on Elmendorf
and Rubini's decision to move the senator into the Centerpoint deals.

"Clearly, a phone call from Sen. Stevens does not hurt," Rubini said,
referring to the senator's contacts with the Air Force on his behalf.

"But there was no quid pro quo, plain and simple," he said.

Lifetime Annuity

Today, Centerpoint I is fully occupied as the new headquarters of the Arctic
Slope Regional Corp., which is paying $6 million a year on a 20-year lease.

Arctic Slope is no ordinary tenant. A $1-billion-a-year business, it is the
largest Alaskan-owned company in the state. More important, the company —
along with 12 other regional Native corporations — was created through
legislation the senator took the lead in drafting. And it has prospered
through his continuing efforts in the Senate.

Arctic Slope and the other Native regional corporations were born in 1971 as
part of a landmark bill called the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, hailed
as a humanitarian alternative to the failures of traditional reservations.

Under the act, about 40 million acres and almost $1 billion in working capital
went to Native corporations and to some 200 much smaller village bodies to
settle their claims to land. They were to help their shareholders, the Native
people living in their regions, by making investments, starting businesses and
in other ways generating economic activity.

Many of the Native corporations have found it hard to fulfill their mission,
but Arctic Slope, which represents Inupiat Eskimos on the oil-rich North
Slope, gradually built a strong base providing support services to the giant
oil companies at Prudhoe Bay.

And Stevens is now fighting to authorize oil extraction from the nearby Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge, where Arctic Slope owns petroleum rights to 92,000
acres.

Thanks to Stevens, Arctic Slope and the other Native corporations also enjoy
preferences when seeking federal contracts that go well beyond anything
available to blacks or Latinos, even though Arctic Slope ranks among the
nation's 500 largest privately owned companies.

One set of preferences that Stevens inserted into his annual defense
appropriations bills recently enabled Arctic Slope and another Native
corporation to land a $2-billion Pentagon deal without competitive bidding.

Now money is flowing the other way — to Stevens.

A company executive, Conrad Bagne, said Arctic Slope did not find out about
Stevens' ownership in Centerpoint until the company had finalized the deal. He
said Stevens' involvement had no effect on the company's decision to sign the
lease and that there was no impropriety.

"No one is more committed to public service than Sen. Stevens," Bagne said.

Stevens now has a personal stake in his tenant's future. At the same time, he
continues to aid the company's bottom line through his position as chairman of
the Appropriations Committee. This year, for example, he pushed through
legislation renewing the federal defense contract preferences.

In addition, Stevens has inserted a provision in this year's pending
appropriations bill that directs federal agencies to consult with Arctic Slope
and the other Native corporations on equal footing with tribal governments.
This gives Arctic Slope, for one, new legal standing when pushing to open the
Arctic wildlife refuge to oil and gas drilling — a position opposed by at
least some tribal leaders.

"I have and will continue to work with all Alaska Native corporations — both
individually and collectively — in my official capacity," said Stevens, noting
that he does not deal directly with Arctic Slope on its lease.

An Arctic Slope subsidiary has paid Bittner $120,000 since 2002 to lobby on
appropriations and government contracts.

Hidden Interest

Business interests that look to her husband for support have also enriched
Catherine Stevens in a series of transactions that went through Chamer Co.,
the private family investment firm run by Bittner.

Sen. Stevens did not report some of these deals on his financial disclosure
reports; others were reported only sketchily — without the details required by
law.

One of the transactions was a quick stock deal involving the Alaska
Communications Systems Group that earned Catherine Stevens at least $47,000,
records show.

The company has benefited from the senator's influence over communications
policy as a senior member of the Commerce Committee.

For example, Stevens pushed through legislation in 1996 that created a subsidy
for remote telephone service, and he has fought efforts to dilute Alaska's
sizable share of the subsidy. Alaska Communications considers the subsidy,
called the universal service fund, an important revenue source.

Alaska Communications Chairman Charles Robinson said, "The universal service
fund is important to every telephone company in Alaska." He said Stevens had
"done a great job in preserving it."

The senator said his actions had "benefited all Alaskans and all Alaska
communications companies."

Stevens stands to be an even more valuable ally in 2005, when he's scheduled
to take over as Commerce Committee chairman.

Robinson combined the Fairbanks and Anchorage phone companies to create Alaska
Communications in 1999, and took it public in the fall of that year.

As is common before companies go public, a select group of insiders was
allowed to buy stock at a bargain price, in this instance $6.15 a share, the
documents show. In this group were several financiers and others involved in
creating the company, including Bittner, who was and is the company's
Washington lobbyist.

Though she was not on record as an officer or financier for the company,
Catherine Stevens ended up with some of the bargain shares. Robinson said he
knew she had shares but did not remember how she obtained them.

Alaska Communications issued 42,248 shares to Chamer Co., which Catherine
Stevens owns with Bittner, their sister and their mother. She purchased 16,250
of those shares and sold them a year later, according to the Securities and
Exchange Commission.

Ted Stevens did not report the shares on his ethics report for 1999, the year
Chamer acquired them.

Ethics rules require disclosure of activity by a family-owned business, in
detail and in the same year a transaction occurs.

The deal was not reported until 2000, after Catherine Stevens had sold her
shares, most of them at $9.25, for a profit of at least $47,000.

Rubini, the developer of Centerpoint I, said Chamer also had an interest in
that project. He said Chamer put up $250,000 for a 3% short-term stake in
Centerpoint I that earned a 15% return on investment.

Records show Chamer also invested $125,000 in an earlier Rubini syndicate.

Stevens did not disclose either of these investments on his Senate financial
forms.

Although Senate ethics rules encompass his wife's financial activities as well
as his own, Stevens sought to distance himself from Chamer.

"I have no interest in that company, do not participate in its meetings, nor
do I participate in any decisions related to its business activities," he said
Monday. His wife did not respond to telephone messages on Tuesday.

Back in Washington

Stevens continues to push for money and other benefits for Alaskan interests —
including nearly $400 million in pending legislation to help tourism,
education, the environment, scientific research, roads, fisheries and the war
against fetal alcohol syndrome.

There's also $2.5 million to survey the seabed for a fiber-optic cable
connecting Kodiak Island, Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula; Alaska
Communications Systems serves both Anchorage and Kodiak.

*

Researcher Mark Madden in Washington assisted in this report. Staff writer
Judy Pasternak in Washington also contributed.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times
" 2 2003-12-25 702 I am a conservative, I conserve, Toronto Globe \N "The Globe and Mail (Toronto)            December 13, 2003

http://www.globeandmail.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20031213/COBATEMAN13//?query=Conservative

I am a conservative, I conserve

As Canada's political parties realign, 'conservatives' must ask
themselves which they value: social order, family and the environment
-- or the market, says artist/environmentalist ROBERT BATEMAN

By ROBERT BATEMAN
Saturday, December 13, 2003 - Page A21

I am a conservative. This is why I deeply resent the
neo-conservatives who are not conservatives at all. They are the
opposite: radicals who are destroying cherished institutions and
wreaking havoc on our human heritage as well as our natural heritage.

I do not consider destroyers to be conservative. So many cherished
institutions have been built with great care and dedication through
the decades by well-trained people with good hearts. These are being
smashed and weakened in great haste by politicians and ideologues who
do not even understand what they destroy. Creation is long and
difficult; destruction is quick.

Institutions such as railways, medicare, electrical power production
and delivery, environmental protection, social services, schools and
many other government agencies are being attacked, weakened and even
privatized. These aspects of society are useful and helpful and are
there for the common good. Their destruction is done with the aim of
cutting taxes and reducing government. Yet many thinkers, such as
Lord Richard Layard, professor emeritus at the London School of
Economics, argue that taxation is a good thing for creating a state
of balance between work and life.

Neo-conservatives seem to care more about the individual than the
common good; the cult of the individual has grown into an ideology.
Now we are faced with the foolish idea that a corporation should be
regarded legally as "a person." In reality, a corporation is simply a
pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral
allegiance. The slogan of most of these entities is "make too cheap
and sell too high." With few exceptions, there is little obligation
among such corporate "persons" to ideas of public place or public
good. In In the Presence of Fear, Three Essays For a Changed World,
his excellent book written after 9/11, Wendell Berry observes,
"Corporations make the assumption that stable and preserving
relationships among people, places and things do not matter and are
of no worth." And "that there is no conflict between self-interest
and public service." This seems to be the philosophy of the
neo-conservatives.

True conservatives should believe in, and practise, conservation. One
would expect them to act as good stewards to preserve and protect the
natural world. Perhaps the most striking and alarming aspects of
neo-conservatives are not only their neglect of stewardship but their
vigorous attacks on protection and preservation. They seem to regard
natural scientists as enemies whose work should be ignored and whose
careers should be eliminated. Their desire to be rid of regulations
and regulators puts them more in line with anarchists than true
conservatives.

It seems to me, as a conservative, that the family and family values
would be worth preserving. A couple of decades ago then U.S.
vice-president Dan Quayle was decrying the decline of family values
in America. I agreed with him about the decline; I thought his
critique applied to Canada as well.

Mr. Quayle and the other neo-conservatives blamed overly permissive
liberal ideas. There may be some truth to this. But to me, the main
blame falls in the lap of profit-seekers who portion up human society
into age-based market targets. Their advertising programs divide and
conquer the minds of children and teenagers using greed, envy, lust
and fascination with violence to sell products. Family values too
often come from the television set rather than the actual and
extended family. Merchants of Cool design youth to be alienated. If
you preach salvation through shopping instead of salvation through
service, the sense of community is weakened and even destroyed.

Yet, neo-conservatives seem to have no problem with this state of
affairs. They claim one can't interfere with the freedom to make
profit. This has also lead to the disruption and even destruction of
meaningful work.

In his 1973 bestseller, Small is Beautiful , the German-born British
economist E.F. Schumacher wrote, "Next to the family, work and the
relationships established by work [are] the true foundation of
society. If these foundations are unsound, how can society be sound?"

Subsidized, industrial farming has decimated family farms and rural
communities. Subsidized, industrial fishing has closed down entire
fishing communities and brought many fish stocks to the brink of
extinction. Subsidized, industrial forestry has ruined many small
logging communities. And these three industrial "Fs" have devastated
wild nature at every turn.

The horrible irony is, much of this destruction of human communities
and natural ecosystems has been paid for by taxpayers -- you and me.
Neo-conservatives never seem to complain about our taxes being wasted
in this manner, though they do whine about taxes going to help social
programs and a civil society. The cost of corporate welfare amounts
to many times that of social welfare. It is not a question of fiscal
responsibility, it is a question of ideology.

Media analyst Marshall McLuhan spoke of how the technological
revolution of recent decades has produced a maelstrom of bewildering
forces that are neither completely understandable nor predictable,
but bring with them stress, depression, addiction and other negative
side effects. A true conservative would strive to alleviate these
problems; the neo-conservatives seem to encourage the maelstrom to
become bigger and even faster.

In recent elections, I've heard only one main message from all the
major parties, whether they called themselves Liberal or Conservative
or Alliance, or in America, Democrat or Republican. The message is,
"Vote for me, I will cut your taxes and put more money in your own
pocket." Then the implication is, "You can go to the mall and buy
more stuff." In other words, we will achieve salvation through
shopping or salvation through selfishness. We no longer hear messages
such as the one John F. Kennedy gave at his inauguration: "Ask not
what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your
country."

Of course, everyone wants lower taxes; we all have a natural sense of
selfishness and greed. But taxes are the price we pay for
civilization. If you do not like government and taxes, try Somalia.
In fact, I am at a loss to distinguish between the philosophy of the
B.C. Liberal Party and the Fraser Institute on the one hand, and the
American Republican party on the other. I'm not the first to argue
that neo-conservatives should call themselves neo-Republicans.

Although I am a conservative I do not claim that being a conservative
is virtuous. My point is that those who are in favour of rapid change
and destruction of institutions can in no way be called conservative.

Robert Bateman is an internationally renowned artist and naturalist.
" 2 2003-12-23 703 Embattled Farmers: 1776 and 2003 \N "December 19, 2003
CommonDreams.org

Embattled Farmers: 1776 and 2003
by Jody Aliesan

American farmers in the English colonies were expected to produce for the
colonizers. They endured low prices, inadequate credit, high taxes, large
debts, and the dumping of excess English foodstuffs on their local market.

Agrarian insurrections began in 1676 and culminated in the ""Great
Rebellion"" in New York in 1766. British troops routed the insurgent
farmers. Landlords evicted them and destroyed their property.

By April 1775 many colonial farmers were furious that while they lived on
American soil, planted it and built on it, the wealth produced was going to
enrich England particularly the aristocracy and mercantile speculators.

Emerson's stanza honors the moment when the people who worked the land in
seed and harvest stood up to the most powerful political, economic and
military power in the world.

The new colonizers

Also See:
660ef40.jpg Willie Nelson:
It's About America: 1983
Speech on Farm Policy Still True Today

Two centuries later, a handful of agriculture conglomerates work to drive
small farmers off their land by paying them less for their produce than it
costs to grow, moving them into a cycle of loans, mortgages, foreclosures,
repossessions and the sale of land to corporate-controlled agribusiness.

In 1962, a committee of the most powerful corporate executives in the
United States issued ""An Adaptive Program for Agriculture,"" a plan to
eliminate farmers and farms. Called the Committee for Economic Development,
this group represented oil and gas, insurance, investment and retail
concerns as well as the food industry. Industry giants such as Campbell
Soup, General Foods, Pillsbury and Swift lobbied Congress with the message
that the biggest problem in agriculture was too many farmers. The U.S.
government encouraged farmers to move off their farms and retrain, allowing
their land to be consolidated in the ownership of fewer and fewer
corporations.

In the 1970s, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz called on farmers to
""Plant fence row to fence row."" Giant grain companies were selling
U.S.-grown food to Europe, the former U.S.S.R. and the Third World. Prices
were up; farmers experienced their most profitable years in history.

But Secretary Butz also said, ""Get big or get out."" There was no reason not
to trust him. Farmers began to buy all the available land they could find.
To pay the rapidly rising prices, they mortgaged their farms and equipment.
Inflation was driving up land values faster than interest rates were
rising; loan experts claimed that those who didn't take advantage of that
were fools.

But those who made their fortunes on interest were losing ground. Inflation
was eroding their wealth, and they blamed the Federal Reserve. The Fed's
only recourse was to apply the brakes, pull money out of the system, drive
up interest rates and push the economy into a deep recession.

""Severe injustice""

On October 8, 1979, Paul Volcker, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, gave the
banks and financiers what they wanted. The nation's wealthy were the
winners; the nation's middle and lower classes particularly those in rural
America watched themselves lose.

Farmland values fell sharply while interest rates on farm loans shot
through the roof. Diminished land value left mortgages under-collateralized
and loans were called in. Interest rates as high as 15 percent pushed farm
families into foreclosure. After denying them refinancing, the banks resold
their farms with lower-interest loans.

At that point the Reagan Administration moved to practice its economic
theories on rural America. The 1985 Farm Bill decreased government
subsidies. Prices for crops fell almost overnight by as much as 46 percent.
Processors and international exporters experienced a financial boom. The
farmers' money went into the pockets of the multinationals.

To secure their gains, these corporations lobbied hard to have the changes
written into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). As a
result, 600,000 family farms failed before the end of the decade, their
land consolidated into corporate mega-operations hundreds of thousands of
acres in size.

In 1990, George Washington University reported in its Intergovernmental
Health Policy Project that this social engineering had taken a heavy human
toll: collapse of farm-related businesses and rural communities,
unemployment and underemployment, substandard housing, hunger, mental
illness, child abuse, substance abuse, anxiety disorders and depression. By
1989 suicide was the leading cause of death on family farms, three times
the rate of the general population. And that didn't include the ""accidents.""

Buy local, buy often

Those in positions of power consider the collapse of rural America as a
necessary and inevitable result of a global economy. From their point of
view it would be counterproductive to reduce the suffering or mitigate the
effects, let alone reverse the policies.

Multinational corporations assume that we won't make the effort to buy food
directly from local producers or look for retailers who do so. Without
competition, the corporations can pay farmers as little as they choose and
charge us whatever they want. By the time we decide prices are too high and
start looking for the farmers, they may be gone.

Jody Aliesan is the Director of the
Farmland Fund

" 2 2003-12-19 705 Italy's Textile Community Crumbling Under Chinese Competition \N "December 17, 2003

PAGE ONE  
   
TRADE WITH CHINA

Threat From China Starts to Unravel
Italy's Cloth Trade

Close-Knit Industry Became European Powerhouse;
Now, Quality Gap Narrows

By CHRISTOPHER RHOADS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

BIELLA, Italy -- For more than 600 years, the icy rivers that roar through
this Alpine town have made it a natural for weavers, who used the fast-flowing
waters to power looms and clean wool. Over time, the region bred some of the
most famous names in Italian clothing, including Zegna and Cerruti.

The manufacturing towns of northern Italy are built on clusters of small,
often family-run firms that share information, know-how and business. Como has
its silk industry, Lucca its leather goods, Montebelluna its shoes and Biella
its wool, to name a few. In the past, the communal approach was admired for
its flexibility and shared economies of scale.

Now a new factor is radically remaking this arrangement: China. The
competitive threat of its factories is bearing down on Biella and other towns
that for more than a century helped power the Italian economy. Trades built on
craftsmanship and cachet, such as cashmere and leather, for years dismissed
the threat from low-wage countries. But they are suffering today as China
steadily narrows the quality gap.


In the past, the region's strength depended on unity. The impact of China is
scattering Biella companies in different directions. Botto Poala SpA, part of
a group of wool companies started in 1876, is moving more production in-house
to ensure high quality and has laid off workers for the first time in its
history. Ermenegildo Zegna SpA, the men's fashion designer, has moved much of
its business away from Biella and is focusing on building its brand-name,
rather than that of Biella. Fratelli Piacenza SpA, a 270-year-old firm that
specializes in cashmere, is shifting new production to China. In the future,
its executives predict, firms will replace "Made in Italy" with "Created in
Italy" labels to signal that their designs -- if not the production -- remain
home-grown.

The American economy's size, flexibility and embrace of technology have
allowed it to absorb -- and in many ways benefit from -- the effects of
China's emergence, through relocating production or selling more goods to
China. For Italy, the world's sixth-largest economy, China's arrival is
tougher. Inflexible labor laws constrain Italian companies from firing workers
and moving jobs abroad. The majority of manufacturers remain family-run
outfits with fewer than 100 workers. Uprooting to distant China remains out of
the question for many. And many Italian firms believe that what sells their
products -- whether a Versace dress, a Gucci bag or marble sinks -- is that
they bear "Made in Italy" labels.

Home to more than half of Europe's textile companies along with other low-tech
manufacturing industries, such as shoes, Italy lies squarely in the path of
the charging Chinese economy. China last year exported $20 billion in textile
products, a 53% increase from three years earlier, making it the world's
second-largest textile exporter behind the European Union. China also imports
textiles but in far smaller quantities.

Located in the foothills of the Italian Alps, Biella's textile traditions date
back at least to the 14th century. Toward the end of the 19th century, the
region borrowed technology and factory designs from England, erecting massive
mills along the rivers.

After World War II, lower trade barriers drove a continent-wide economic boom.
Italian clothiers traveled to Paris, the capital of fashion, to learn the
latest weaves and styles. Italy's own growing wealth fueled the rise of Milan,
Rome and Florence as fashion hubs. Even as some high-wage European countries
began scaling back their textile industries in the 1960s and 1970s, Italy's
was flourishing. In Biella, more than a thousand textile companies helped to
make the region one of the richest industrial districts in Italy.


Europe felt the first rumblings from China in the late 1980s, when it ramped
up production of silks, a traditional Chinese product. The ensuing glut drove
many European firms out of business, but buyers then rejected the Chinese
silks for their poor quality. The Italian companies rode out a dip in sales
and then thrived.

In the past three years, the Chinese have returned with much higher quality.
"The second shock has begun," says Michele Canepa, president of the
International Silk Association. Some longtime silk makers in Como have given
up producing silk altogether. E. Boselli & C. SpA, located in the hills
overlooking Lake Como, now just makes polyester blends. Such materials allow
for more innovation, which the company believes is the only way to stay ahead
of the Chinese. "We have to keep looking for new ways," says Giulio Balossi
Restelli, a senior executive, sitting among racks of colorful polyester.
"That's the only way to survive."

Now, China has turned to wool -- making it Biella's turn to feel the consequences.

Biella, which is the name of both the town and the surrounding province, has
about 200,000 people living in the foothills of the snow-capped Alps. Many
residents live in tiny villages that cling to narrow mountain roads. For
centuries, pilgrims have come to pray at its numerous mountain sanctuaries.
But it's the wool and other textile factories, which today provide work for
about one-third of the province's total work force, that put Biella on the
map. Outlet stores selling sportswear, pajamas and blankets clutter the main
road leading into town.

At Botto Poala's mill in the center of a tiny mountain village, sales are down
10% from two years ago and show no sign of improvement. Rodolfo Botto Poala,
whose grandfather started the firm, says he has no choice but to bring more
business in-house. The answer to the Chinese threat, he believes, is focusing
on quality, which calls for more internal production and less outsourcing. The
company now does its own dyeing where in the past it contracted that work out
to others.

But Silvio Botto Poala, Rodolfo's 37-year-old son who handles several business
lines, counters that "quality is no longer enough." The Chinese are winning
business from Botto Poala in nearly every segment, he says, and they are
increasingly competing on quality and design rather than just price. The
decline in sales has prompted the firm's first-ever job cuts, of more than 50
of its 290 workers in the past year.

Across the street, wool company Lanificio di Lessona SpA is also feeling the
pinch. While some specialty customers are sticking with the Italians, more and
more bulk orders -- from major U.S. customers like Calvin Klein and clothing
chain Men's Wearhouse -- are going to the Chinese. "The effect was, 'Ouch!' "
says Elena Crotti, a senior executive at the firm. Men's Wearhouse told her
two years ago it wanted its usual shipment but that it had received a Chinese
offer at half the normal price. "I told them we can't do that, so go for it,"
says Ms. Crotti. "And they went for it." A spokesman for Calvin Klein says
that the company still places many orders with Italian suppliers.

When orders dry up at Botto Poala and Lanificio di Lessona, two of the bigger
producers in these hills, the effect travels immediately several miles up the
mountain road to Rammendo Terzoglio Snc, a small workshop of 16 workers. The
firm is run by Mariangela Terzoglio, a 55-year-old woman with bushy dark hair
and reading glasses draped around her neck; her husband and son also work here.

The company relies on other companies having too much to do. They send her
nearly finished fabrics to check and fix any flaws. Several carts containing
stacks of cashmere and wool clutter the small work area. Still, orders are
down a third from 18 months ago. Ms. Terzoglio has begun to fret about meeting
mortgage payments on the building. She is waiting until next month, after
orders for the next winter season come in, before deciding whether to lay off
staff.

"Everyone is worrying now, that's what's different," she says, smoothing her
soft hands over a large piece of dark, pin-striped wool stretched over her
examining table. "It's not just one or two firms."

Many Biella textile firms have already cut workers. Two thousand textile jobs,
about 8% of the total, have been lost in the past year, according to the
Biella industrial association. Though the local unemployment rate is just
4.8%, that's up from 3.8% a year earlier.

The drop in sales could be cyclical in part. The three-year global economic
slump has persuaded many consumers to put off purchases such as an expensive
suit. The rise of the euro against the dollar and other currencies has made
European exports more expensive abroad. And wool has lately fallen out of
fashion, pushing down prices.


But Biella companies say something more lasting is at work. For years, the
Italian textile makers were the only low-cost providers within the EU. "We
used to be the Chinese of Europe," says Carlo Piacenza, who runs cashmere
company Fratelli Piacenza with his brothers. "In the 1950s and 1960s, we took
the market from England and France. Now we have to be prepared to leave this
to someone else." Since the last remaining global textile quotas will be
abolished in January 2005, as part of trade liberalizations agreed to under
the World Trade Organization, Mr. Piacenza believes the surge of Chinese
textiles will only get worse.

Piacenza, located in a field just outside the main town of Biella, is
transforming its business in response. Since the strength of the Chinese still
lies more in copying products than in making new ones, he says, the company
has changed 70% of its product line in just the past two years, introducing
new blends, dyes and fibers. In the past, such an overhaul would have taken a
decade.

Mr. Piacenza figures that the 224 workers in Biella will increasingly focus on
design and innovation. Production will go to China, where the company opened
its first mill in 1994, employing 200 in Beijing. Mr. Piacenza expects to
transfer "more and more" production there, he says.

The Biella district is trying to fight back. In September, it launched a
marketing campaign at the Milan fashion show to inform customers of the
quality and standards behind its fabrics, including better working conditions
and environmental practices at its factories, compared with those in China.
The local industry association has put out a compact disk with a jingle
touting Biella's excellence; a new Web site bears the slogan "E l'arte di
emozionare," or "It's the art of creating excitement."

But many others are turning their backs on Biella. For Ermenegildo Zegna,
China is a huge opportunity. The company has teamed up with a Chinese garment
company to make clothing there, and it's also opening retail stores to
capitalize on the country's growing wealth. Zegna plans to have 46 such stores
in major Chinese cities by the end of this year, and 60 by the end of next
year, says Paola Zegna, the company's co-chief executive.

The company is pouring its advertising into building its own name; a recent ad
campaign features Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody. Though Biella is where the
company got its start, "If you ask me if we really need it, the answer is no,"
says Mr. Zegna.

For others, the response is even more drastic. Lanificio Alfredo Pria SpA was
one of the biggest mills in Biella, employing more than 1,000 people by World
War II. It later sold its wools to the best houses, including Yves Saint
Laurent and Christian Dior.

But sales declined, in large part due to rising competition from China. In
1999, owner Guido Azario, a relative of the founder, laid off the remaining
200 workers and shut down the plant. Today, Mr. Azario and his wife, Anna,
still live in the building and rent part of it to a call center, an
architecture firm and an art gallery.

One of the rooms houses a renowned archive of more than a thousand
leather-bound volumes, containing textile patterns and other specialized
knowledge on making fabrics. Leafing through the dusty, cracking books, Ms.
Azario said the Chinese are among the most frequent visitors to the room.
"They are taking our ideas," she said. "I don't like to open it to the Chinese
anymore, unless they bring a lot of money."

--Carlta Vitzthum in Madrid contributed to this article.

Write to Christopher Rhoads at christopher.rhoads@wsj.com

Copyright 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved  

" 2 2003-12-17 706 Court Blocks Sierra Logging Project \N "Court Blocks Sierra Logging Project

Appellate panel agrees with activists that U.S. overestimated number of
dead trees after fire.

By Henry Weinstein
Times Staff Writer

December 12, 2003

A federal appeals court blocked a large logging project Thursday in the
Sierra Nevada, siding with environmentalists who argued that the U.S.
Forest Service had overestimated the number of dead trees that needed to be
cut after a 2001 forest fire.

The federal government had sold logging rights to a private company to
clear dead trees from the 17,000 acres that burned west of Lake Tahoe in
the Star fire. But the John Muir Project, an environmental group that
monitors such salvage contracts in California, said the Forest Service had
overestimated the destruction, allowing more logging than would have been
allowed under the state's comprehensive forest plan.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled 2 to 1 in
favor of the Muir Project and reaffirmed an order blocking the contract
that it issued last year.

The judges found that the John Muir Project had demonstrated a reasonable
probability of success that the Forest Service had misstated the conditions
in the El Dorado National Forest in creating the preconditions for a
salvage sale of timber after a major fire.

A key question in the case is just what constitutes a dead tree. The Muir
Project asserted that the Forest Service, in an effort to expand a salvage
project, approved the removal of live trees. The Forest Service sharply
disagreed.

The case arose in the aftermath of an August 2001 wildfire that began on
private land and swept through the El Dorado National Forest and Tahoe
National Forest for 23 days.

Subsequently, Forest Service personnel developed a restoration plan that
spawned two ongoing federal lawsuits.

In this case, the Muir Project challenged the conclusions of the Forest
Service that logging large trees would reduce the potential for damage from
future fires.

The Muir Project contended that the relevant scientific studies focus
solely on smaller trees, while the few studies discussing larger trees
concluded that they should not be logged.

Muir Project attorney Rachel Fazio also asserted that the Forest Service
deliberately used scientifically questionable mortality standards to
overestimate the level of tree destruction in the project area, which is
about 20 miles west of Lake Tahoe and south of Interstate 80 along the
Upper Middle Fork of the American River.

The Muir Project, affiliated with the Earth Island Institute of San
Francisco, also contended that scientific literature overwhelmingly
suggested that a large percentage of trees categorized as dead by a Forest
Service biologist would survive.

The Forest Service countered that the project would salvage dead timber
that was still standing.

In addition, Assistant U.S. Atty. Edmund Brennan, representing the agency,
said the project would restore burned soil and reduce wood fuels.

U.S. District Judge Morrison England Jr., an appointee of President George
W. Bush, rebuffed the Muir Project's request to halt the logging.

Emergency Stay

In November 2002, the 9th Circuit issued an emergency stay, halting logging
of any trees "which have any percentage of green foliage and/or crown
remaining," while a full appeal was considered.

The appellate majority ruled that England had failed to consider "the
broader public interest in the preservation of the forest and its
resources" when making his ruling.

Judge Sidney R. Thomas, joined by Judge John T. Noonan, a President Reagan
appointee, ruled that England had applied the wrong legal standards in
assessing whether the plaintiffs were entitled to a preliminary injunction.

They also ruled that Judge England had erred in permitting the Forest
Service to annul a protected zone for spotted owls on the grounds that the
area was no longer habitable for the birds.

In a concurring opinion, Noonan questioned whether the Forest Service had a
serious conflict of interest "because of its financial interest in the
sale" of the timber.

"In deciding whether or not a sale should be made, the Forest Service
determines the legal rights of a private corporation and the legal rights
of those seeking to enforce the statutes protecting the environment. The
Forest supervisor and the Regional forester making this determination are
not judges in a black gown sitting on a bench, but as surely as such
traditional figures they are applying law to resolve a legal controversy,"
Noonan wrote.

'Further Investigation'

He said the Forest Service is dependent for some of its budget on timber
sales and from them derives "many millions of dollars" a year.

"Any governmental agency would put a premium on an operation that gives it
a perpetual revolving fund not dependent" on a congressional appropriation,
Noonan wrote. "Further investigation of the budgetary process of the forest
and the impartiality of the service appears appropriate," when the case
goes back to Judge England, Noonan added.

Judge Richard R. Clifton, a George W. Bush appointee, dissented. He said
that England had used the correct legal standard and that the plaintiffs
had failed to show the likelihood of irreparable harm if the injunction was
not granted.

Muir Project attorney Fazio praised the ruling, saying that she was
particularly pleased about Noonan's concurrence. The organization has long
expressed concern about the Forest Service's decision-making in reviewing
proposed logging projects such as this one.

The decision was criticized by Justice Department lawyer Brennan and David
Dun, the attorney for Sierra Pacific Industries, which had been awarded the
logging contract. Both attorneys said England's rulings had been correct.
They also said that Congress had decades ago created the program that the
Forest Service operates and that no one had found any evidence that it was
run improperly.

Brennan said the government has not decided yet whether it will ask the 9th
Circuit to review the decision with a larger panel of judges.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times
" 2 2003-12-12 707 Paper Cos' Tree Massacre \N "The Tennessee Tree Massacre

by Alex Shoumatoff

The paper industry is destroying one of America's last great stands of native forest to bring you fresh shopping bags and toilet paper.

THE FLYOVER

If there were an international tribunal that prosecuted crimes against the planet, like the one in The Hague that deals with crimes against humanity, what is happening on the Cumberland Plateau in eastern Tennessee would undoubtedly be indictable.

The crime -- one of many clandestine ecocides American corporations are committing around the world -- has taken place over three decades. About 200,000 acres on this tableland have already been clear-cut by the paper industry, and the cutting continues. Where once grew some of the most biologically rich hardwood forest in North America's Temperate Zone (which extends from the Gulf of Mexico to southern Canada), there are now row after row of fast-growing loblolly pine trees genetically engineered to yield the most pulp in the shortest time. But the paper industry's insatiable appetite for timber has met with unexpected competition from an equally voracious insect. In the last four years, an estimated 50 to 70 percent of the pines planted on the plateau have been devoured by the southern pine beetle. The entire South has been ravaged by the worst outbreak in its history of this native predator of pine trees, caused by the tremendous increase in the amount of pine available for it to eat on the industry plantations that have replaced the native forest. Unable to salvage its dead timber, the paper industry has been losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet it seems still committed to destroying what remains of the extraordinarily lush forest on the Cumberland Plateau, which, along with eastern Tennessee's Great Valley and the Cumberland Mountains, has the highest concentration of endangered species in North America. The loss of biodiversity is tragic but also absurd economically; it doesn't even make good business sense.

Not many people are aware of what is taking place. Nearly 90 percent of the Cumberland Plateau is in private hands and exempt from all but a few government regulations. The federal and state agencies that are supposed to be regulating the paper, timber, and mining industries are populated with these companies' former executives and have come to view these industries as clients whose permits and projects should be facilitated rather than scrutinized. The cozy relationship that exists between Tennessee's public and private sectors, and the impunity and magnitude of the environmental destruction taking place on the plateau, are what you might expect in Guatemala or deep in the Brazilian Amazon, not in our republic, where there are supposed to be laws that protect our wilderness treasures and prosecute conflicts of interest. But a quarter of the world's paper and 60 percent of America's wood products are being produced in the South, and the will to address the abuses of the paper industry, which contributes millions of dollars to the campaign coffers of politicians around the country, just isn't there -- certainly not in Tennessee.

There's another reason for the lack of public awareness: Much of the devastation is hidden from view by thin "beauty strips" of native forest left along the plateau's highways. The only way to get the full picture is to go up in a small plane and see it from the air.

Species on the Cumberland Are Facing New Threats

The Cumberland has the highest number of endemic species anywhere in North America. Some animals, above, are already rare (the cougar) or endangered; the red wolf is locally extinct due to overhunting. The pine plantations that replace forests after they're clearcut -- "environmental disaster zones," says plant ecologist David Haskell -- will only make it worse.

So early this past September I took off from Knoxville in a Cessna 182 piloted by Hume Davenport, the founder of a nonprofit, conservation-minded aviation service called SouthWings. Hume, whose ancestors came to the Cumberlands in l801, has provided his "flying classroom" to dozens of journalists, environmentalists, and policymakers trying to grasp the enormity of what is happening on the plateau.

The Cumberlands (some dispense with the s) are made up of the Cumberland Plateau and the mountains and foothills on its edges. The plateau itself is a 400-mile-long tableland that is the tail end of the Appalachian Plateau; it extends from West Virginia and Virginia down into Kentucky and Tennessee on a southwesterly diagonal and peters out in Alabama. The part in Tennessee tapers from 55 miles wide to about 38 and covers 6,875 square miles -- an area larger than the state of Connecticut. About 85 percent of it is still covered with the native woodland. Some of the last remaining large stands of the Appalachian mixed mesophytic forest (where a variety of hardwoods grow in moderately moist conditions) are here, but the plateau was "pretty much raked over the coals a century ago," Hume explained, and most of the trees are second growth. East of the plateau, plunging a thousand feet in a steep escarpment that was a formidable barrier for the westering pioneers until Daniel Boone forged a route through the Cumberland Gap in l769, is the Great Valley of East Tennessee, where Knoxville and Chattanooga are and where the Tennessee River winds.

Soon we were over the Cumberland Mountains, whose peaks range from 2,000 to 4,000 feet. Hume's aeronautical map indicated "numerous strip mines," and we could see that some of the mountains had been cored like apples. Others had been decapitated, or "cross-ridge mined" in the industry's euphemism. The heyday of the mining was between l920 and l970, and its scars are mostly overgrown with vegetation. But mining is making a comeback. We circled Zeb Mountain, which the Robert Clear Coal Corporation had just gotten a permit to cross-ridge mine. Roads and sediment ponds had been put in on its slopes, and the trees had been clearcut, like a person who'd been shaved before an operation. Mud was oozing down into a stream below, smothering the habitat of a striking little fish called the blackside dace, which is found in only 30 streams on earth.

"Mining and clearcutting go hand in hand," Hume explained.

In nearby Pioneer, we made a few passes over the Royal Blue chip mill, owned by International Paper, the biggest paper company in the world. A chip mill is a satellite facility, where hardwoods of smaller diameter and plantation pines are diced into wafers that are taken to a mother mill, to be dissolved into pulp. The larger hardwoods are sawed into boards at another mill.

There are 156 chip mills and 103 pulp mills in the 13 southern states. More than a hundred of the chip mills were constructed between l987 and l997, when chip exports (mostly to Japan) escalated by 500 percent. Eleven mills get their wood from the plateau. Royal Blue alone eats up 7,000 acres of hardwood trees a year -- oaks, tulip poplars, and half a dozen other species -- from within a 75-mile radius. We could see two miniature logging trucks coming down the highway far below us, another being unloaded, and four waiting behind it. A huge claw suspended from a crane picked up the logs and fed them into the chipper, which spewed the chips out a pipe directly onto railroad cars that would take them to the Blue Ridge Paper Company's Pigeon River mill in Canton, North Carolina. Most of the wood here is "gatewood": Few, if any, questions are asked about where the timber comes from or the manner in which it was harvested.

We banked southwest and, heading right down the middle of the plateau, began to see massive devastation. "This isn't Ma-and-Pa, let's-clear-40-acres stuff," Hume yelled through the headphones. "It's big, industrial tree farming. When they took out the big trees a century ago, at least they left the little ones to take their place. But now they're scraping off the soil, right down to the bedrock. Because it's thin and sandy, they have to spray massive amounts of fertilizer from crop dusters so the pine trees can grow. It's complete insanity. Most of the trees they're planting are being chewed up by beetles. Look at these plantations. It's a graveyard."

Below us, vast stands of dead gray loblolly pine, covering hundreds of acres, had been skeletonized by the southern pine beetle, Dendroctonus frontalis. The beetle breaks out every 10 to 30 years -- what triggers the outbreak is not understood -- and attacks native longleaf, shortleaf, Virginia, black, yellow, Table Mountain, and white pines that are sparsely scattered in the hardwood forest. But with many tens of thousands of acres of monoculture pine on the plateau, the beetles have been having a field day. The beetles are even chewing up saplings and the prize conifers in people's yards. In a race against the plague, the paper companies are forced to harvest their timber before it is mature, creating a glut of scrawny "bugwood" on the market. This has severely depressed the price of pulp. Couple this with the hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue from the timber the beetles have beaten them to, and competition from Canada's timber, and it' clear why the South's paper companies are in trouble.

The biggest landowner on the southern plateau is Bowater, the biggest manufacturer of newsprint in the country and one of the largest producers of the free-sheet coated paper used for glossy magazines and catalogs. Now, as we flew south over Crossville, the commercial hub of the southern plateau and a burgeoning retirement community, houses abruptly gave way to Bowater's industrial tree farms and huge squares of mangled wasteland that had been hacked out of the forest and not yet replanted. "This plateau has been ransacked," Hume said sadly. He took us over a particularly vast mutilated swath that some activists have dubbed the Triangle of Destruction, but it is only one of many.

The only clearcutting I had seen on this scale was in the Amazon 25 years ago. Every merchantable stick below us had been taken, streambeds and banks had been torn up and gouged by recklessly driven machines, and the understory shrubs and stripped-off branches and other debris had been bulldozed into windrows, some of which had been torched and were shooting up sooty flames. "It used to be just Bowater," Hume said, "but in the last few years International Paper and J.M. Huber -- a wood products company -- have gotten into the act. When Huber showed up in '97, we saw a vast increase, maybe a doubling, of the clearcutting." Four million additional acres of the South's forests are being converted to pine plantations each year, according to the U.S. Forest Service, and the conversion rate is expected to double by 2040.

On the plateau, this translates to an annual holocaust of about 3 million trees, 14 million if you count smaller trees and pines. What's driving this? Consider that a quarter of the world's paper is produced in the South. The average American consumes about half a ton a year -- that's factoring in toddlers and oldsters and people on life support. This is 111 times the per capita consumption in India, 300 times that of some African countries. Much of this consists of glossy catalogs and other junk mail, which I get a two-foot stack of each week; the sections of the paper that I chuck without even glancing at them (the Washington Post and other newspapers are printed on Bowater paper taken straight from the plateau); the inch-high stack of napkins we're handed whenever we get takeout; the 10 feet of toilet paper we rip off to clean ourselves. As one environmentalist put it arrestingly: "We're wiping our asses with habitat."

" 2 2003-12-10 708 In Memorium:Terrific JFK Speech on Liberalism \N "QUOTE:

"I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose,
in human liberty as the source of national action,
in the human heart as the source of national compassion,
and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas."

=======================================================

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/presidents/35_kennedy/psources/ps_nyliberal.html

JOHN F. KENNEDY, 35th President of the United States
Acceptance of the New York Liberal Party Nomination
September 14, 1960

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal?" If by
"Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in
his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned
with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members
demonstrate that we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they
mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas
without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people --
their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights,
and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the
stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what
they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."

But first, I would like to say what I understand the word "Liberal" to mean
and explain in the process why I consider myself to be a "Liberal," and what
it means in the presidential election of 1960.

In short, having set forth my view -- I hope for all time -- two nights ago in
Houston, on the proper relationship between church and state, I want to take
the opportunity to set forth my views on the proper relationship between the
state and the citizen. This is my political credo:

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty
as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national
compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our
ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and
as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not
so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude
of mind and heart, a faith in man's ability through the experiences of his
reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of
justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

I believe also in the United States of America, in the promise that it
contains and has contained throughout our history of producing a society so
abundant and creative and so free and responsible that it cannot only fulfill
the aspirations of its citizens, but serve equally well as a beacon for all
mankind. I do not believe in a superstate. I see no magic in tax dollars which
are sent to Washington and then returned. I abhor the waste and incompetence
of large-scale federal bureaucracies in this administration as well as in
others. I do not favor state compulsion when voluntary individual effort can
do the job and do it well. But I believe in a government which acts, which
exercises its full powers and full responsibilities. Government is an art and
a precious obligation; and when it has a job to do, I believe it should do it.
And this requires not only great ends but that we propose concrete means of
achieving them.

Our responsibility is not discharged by announcement of virtuous ends. Our
responsibility is to achieve these objectives with social invention, with
political skill, and executive vigor. I believe for these reasons that
liberalism is our best and only hope in the world today. For the liberal
society is a free society, and it is at the same time and for that reason a
strong society. Its strength is drawn from the will of free people committed
to great ends and peacefully striving to meet them. Only liberalism, in short,
can repair our national power, restore our national purpose, and liberate our
national energies. And the only basic issue in the 1960 campaign is whether
our government will fall in a conservative rut and die there, or whether we
will move ahead in the liberal spirit of daring, of breaking new ground, of
doing in our generation what Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry
Truman and Adlai Stevenson did in their time of influence and responsibility.

Our liberalism has its roots in our diverse origins. Most of us are descended
from that segment of the American population which was once called an
immigrant minority. Today, along with our children and grandchildren, we do
not feel minor. We feel proud of our origins and we are not second to any
group in our sense of national purpose. For many years New York represented
the new frontier to all those who came from the ends of the earth to find new
opportunity and new freedom, generations of men and women who fled from the
despotism of the czars, the horrors of the Nazis, the tyranny of hunger, who
came here to the new frontier in the State of New York. These men and women, a
living cross section of American history, indeed, a cross section of the
entire world's history of pain and hope, made of this city not only a new
world of opportunity, but a new world of the spirit as well.

Tonight we salute Governor and Senator Herbert Lehman as a symbol of that
spirit, and as a reminder that the fight for full constitutional rights for
all Americans is a fight that must be carried on in 1961.

Many of these same immigrant families produced the pioneers and builders of
the American labor movement. They are the men who sweated in our shops, who
struggled to create a union, and who were driven by longing for education for
their children and for the children's development. They went to night schools;
they built their own future, their union's future, and their country's future,
brick by brick, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, and now in their
children's time, suburb by suburb.

Tonight we salute George Meany as a symbol of that struggle and as a reminder
that the fight to eliminate poverty and human exploitation is a fight that
goes on in our day. But in 1960 the cause of liberalism cannot content itself
with carrying on the fight for human justice and economic liberalism here at
home. For here and around the world the fear of war hangs over us every
morning and every night. It lies, expressed or silent, in the minds of every
American. We cannot banish it by repeating that we are economically first or
that we are militarily first, for saying so doesn't make it so. More will be
needed than goodwill missions or talking back to Soviet politicians or
increasing the tempo of the arms race. More will be needed than good
intentions, for we know where that paving leads.

In Winston Churchill's words, "We cannot escape our dangers by recoiling from
them. We dare not pretend such dangers do not exist."

And tonight we salute Adlai Stevenson as an eloquent spokesman for the effort
to achieve an intelligent foreign policy. Our opponents would like the people
to believe that in a time of danger it would be hazardous to change the
administration that has brought us to this time of danger. I think it would be
hazardous not to change. I think it would be hazardous to continue four more
years of stagnation and indifference here at home and abroad, of starving the
underpinnings of our national power, including not only our defense but our
image abroad as a friend.

This is an important election -- in many ways as important as any this century
-- and I think that the Democratic Party and the Liberal Party here in New
York, and those who believe in progress all over the United States, should be
associated with us in this great effort. The reason that Woodrow Wilson and
Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson had influence abroad,
and the United States in their time had it, was because they moved this
country here at home, because they stood for something here in the United
States, for expanding the benefits of our society to our own people, and the
people around the world looked to us as a symbol of hope.

I think it is our task to re-create the same atmosphere in our own time. Our
national elections have often proved to be the turning point in the course of
our country. I am proposing that 1960 be another turning point in the history
of the great Republic.

Some pundits are saying it's 1928 all over again. I say it's 1932 all over
again. I say this is the great opportunity that we will have in our time to
move our people and this country and the people of the free world beyond the
new frontiers of the 1960s.
" 2 2003-11-23 709 Bush Gang's Crimes Against Nature, Kennedy \N "December 11, 2003
Rolling Stone

Crimes Against Nature

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.   (8,486 words)

George W. Bush will go down in history as America's worst environmental
president. In a ferocious three-year attack, the Bush administration has
initiated more than 200 major rollbacks of America's environmental laws,
weakening the protection of our country's air, water, public lands and
wildlife. Cloaked in meticulously crafted language designed to deceive the
public, the administration intends to eliminate the nation's most important
environmental laws by the end of the year. Under the guidance of Republican
pollster Frank Luntz, the Bush White House has actively hidden its
anti-environmental program behind deceptive rhetoric, telegenic spokespeople,
secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and bureaucrats. The Bush attack
was not entirely unexpected. George W. Bush had the grimmest environmental
record of any governor during his tenure in Texas. Texas became number one in
air and water pollution and in the release of toxic chemicals. In his six
years in Austin, he championed a short-term pollution-based prosperity, which
enriched his political contributors and corporate cronies by lowering the
quality of life for everyone else. Now President Bush is set to do the same to
America. After three years, his policies are already bearing fruit,
diminishing standards of living for millions of Americans.

I am angry both as a citizen and a father. Three of my sons have asthma, and I
watch them struggle to breathe on bad-air days. And they're comparatively
lucky: One in four African-American children in New York shares this
affliction; their suffering is often unrelieved because they lack the
insurance and high-quality health care that keep my sons alive. My kids are
among the millions of Americans who cannot enjoy the seminal American
experience of fishing locally with their dad and eating their catch. Most
freshwater fish in New York and all in Connecticut are now under consumption
advisories. A main source of mercury pollution in America, as well as
asthma-provoking ozone and particulates, is the coal-burning power plants that
President Bush recently excused from complying with the Clean Air Act.

Furthermore, the deadly addiction to fossil fuels that White House policies
encourage has squandered our treasury, entangled us in foreign wars,
diminished our international prestige, made us a target for terrorist attacks
and increased our reliance on petty Middle Eastern dictators who despise
democracy and are hated by their own people.

When the Republican right managed to install George W. Bush as president in
2000, movement leaders once again set about doing what they had attempted to
do since the Reagan years: eviscerate the infrastructure of laws and
regulations that protect the environment. For twenty-five years it has been
like the zombie that keeps coming back from the grave.

The attacks began on Inauguration Day, when President Bush's chief of staff
and former General Motors lobbyist Andrew Card quietly initiated a moratorium
on all recently adopted regulations. Since then, the White House has enlisted
every federal agency that oversees environmental programs in a coordinated
effort to relax rules aimed at the oil, coal, logging, mining and chemical
industries as well as automakers, real estate developers, corporate
agribusiness and other industries.

Bush's Environmental Protection Agency has halted work on sixty-two
environmental standards, the federal Department of Agriculture has stopped
work on fifty-seven standards, and the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration has halted twenty-one new standards. The EPA completed just two
major rules -- both under court order and both watered down at industry
request -- compared to twenty-three completed by the Clinton administration
and fourteen by the Bush Sr. administration in their first two years.

This onslaught is being coordinated through the White House Office of
Management and Budget -- or, more precisely, OMB's Office of Information and
Regulatory Affairs, under the direction of John Graham, the engine-room
mechanic of the Bush stealth strategy. Graham's specialty is promoting changes
in scientific and economic assumptions that underlie government regulations --
such as recalculating cost-benefit analyses to favor polluters. Before coming
to the White House, Graham was the founding director of the Harvard Center for
Risk Analysis, where he received funding from America's champion corporate
polluters: Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto, Alcoa, Exxon, General Electric and
General Motors.

Under the White House's guidance, the very agencies entrusted to protect
Americans from polluters are laboring to destroy environmental laws. Or
they've simply stopped enforcing them. Penalties imposed for environmental
violations have plummeted under Bush. The EPA has proposed eliminating 270
enforcement staffers, which would drop staff levels to the lowest level ever.
Inspections of polluting businesses have dipped fifteen percent. Criminal
cases referred for federal prosecution have dropped forty percent. The EPA
measures its success by the amount of pollution reduced or prevented as a
result of its own actions. Last year, the EPA's two most senior career
enforcement officials resigned after decades of service. They cited the
administration's refusal to carry out environmental laws.

The White House has masked its attacks with euphemisms that would have
embarrassed George Orwell. George W. Bush's "Healthy Forests" initiative
promotes destructive logging of old-growth forests. His "Clear Skies" program,
which repealed key provisions of the Clean Air Act, allows more emissions. The
administration uses misleading code words such as streamlining or reforming
instead of weakening, and thinning instead of logging.

In a March 2003 memo to Republican leadership, pollster Frank Luntz frankly
outlined the White House strategy on energy and the environment: "The
environment is probably the single issue on which Republicans in general and
President Bush in particular are most vulnerable," he wrote, cautioning that
the public views Republicans as being "in the pockets of corporate fat cats
who rub their hands together and chuckle maniacally as they plot to pollute
America for fun and profit." Luntz warned, "Not only do we risk losing the
swing vote, but our suburban female base could abandon us as well." He
recommended that Republicans don the sheep's clothing of environmental
rhetoric while dismantling environmental laws.

I prosecute polluters on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense Council,
Riverkeeper and Waterkeeper Alliance. As George W. Bush began his presidency,
I was involved in litigation against the factory-pork industry, which is a
large source of air and water pollution in America. Corporate pork factories
cannot produce more efficiently than traditional family farmers without
violating several federal environmental statutes. Industrial farms illegally
dump millions of tons of untreated fecal and toxic waste onto land and into
the air and water. Factory farms have contaminated hundreds of miles of
waterways, put tens of thousands of family farmers and fishermen out of work,
killed billions of fish, sickened consumers and subjected millions of farm
animals to unspeakable cruelty.

On behalf of several farm groups and fishermen, we sued Smithfield Foods and
won a decision that suggested that almost all of American factory farms were
violating the Clean Water Act. The Clinton EPA had also brought its own
parallel suits addressing chronic air and water violations by hog factories.
But almost immediately after taking office, the Bush administration ordered
the EPA to halt its Clean Air Act investigations of animal factories and
weaken the water rules to allow them to continue polluting indefinitely.

Several of my other national cases were similarly derailed. Eleven years ago,
I sued the EPA to stop massive fish kills at power plants. Using antiquated
technology, power plants often suck up the entire fresh water volume of large
rivers, killing obscene numbers of fish. Just one facility, the Salem nuclear
plant in New Jersey, kills more than 3 billion Delaware River fish each year,
according to Martin Marietta, the plant's own consultant. These fish kills are
illegal, and in 2001 we finally won our case. A federal judge ordered the EPA
to issue regulations restricting power-plant fish kills. But soon after
President Bush's inauguration, the administration replaced the proposed new
rule with clever regulations designed to allow the slaughter to continue
unabated. The new administration also trumped court decisions that would have
enforced greater degrees of wetlands protection and forbidden coal moguls from
blasting off whole mountaintops to get at the coal beneath.

The fishermen I represent are traditionally Republican. But, without
exception, they see this administration as the largest threat not just to
their livelihoods but to their values and their idea of what it means to be
American. "Why," they'll ask, "is the president allowing coal, oil, power and
automotive interests to fix the game?"

Back to the Dark Ages

George w. Bush seems to be trying to take us all the way back to the Dark Ages
by undermining the very principles of our environmental rights, which
civilized nations have always recognized. Ancient Rome's Code of Justinian
guaranteed the use to all citizens of the "public trust" or commons -- those
shared resources that cannot be reduced to private property -- the air,
flowing water, public lands, wandering animals, fisheries, wetlands and aquifers.

When Roman law broke down in Europe during the Dark Ages, feudal kings began
to privatize the commons. In the early thirteenth century, when King John also
attempted to sell off England's fisheries and erect navigational tolls on the
Thames, his subjects rose up and confronted him at Runnymede, forcing him to
sign the Magna Carta, which includes provisions guaranteeing the rights of
free access to fisheries and waters.

Clean-air laws in England, passed in the fourteenth century, made it a capital
offense to burn coal in London, and violators were executed for the crime.
These "public trust" rights to unspoiled air, water and wildlife descended to
the people of the United States following the American Revolution. Until 1870,
a factory releasing even small amounts of smoke onto public or private
property was operating illegally.

But during the Gilded Age, when the corporate robber barons captured the
political and judicial systems, those rights were stolen from the American
people. As the Industrial Revolution morphed into the postwar industrial boom,
Americans found themselves paying a high price for the resulting pollution.
The wake-up call came in the late Sixties, when Lake Erie was declared dead
and Cleveland's Cuyahoga River exploded in colossal infernos.

In 1970, more than 20 million Americans took to the streets protesting the
state of the environment on the first Earth Day. Whether they knew it or not,
they were demanding a return of ancient rights.

During the next few years, Congress passed twenty-eight major environmental
statutes, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered
Species Act, and it created the Environmental Protection Agency to apply and
enforce these new laws. Polluters would be held accountable; those planning to
use the commons would have to compile environmental-impact statements and hold
public hearings; citizens were given the power to prosecute environmental
crimes. Right-to-know and toxic-inventory laws made government and industry
more transparent on the local level and our nation more democratic. Even the
most vulnerable Americans could now participate in the dialogue that
determines the destinies of their communities.

Earth Day caught polluters off guard. But in the next thirty years, they
mounted an increasingly sophisticated and aggressive counterattack to
undermine these laws. The Bush administration is a culmination of their
three-decade campaign.

Strangling the Environment

In 1980, candidate Ronald Reagan declared, "I am a Sagebrush Rebel," marking a
major turning point of the modern anti-environmental movement. In the early
1980s, the Western extractive industries, led by one of Colorado's worst
polluters, brewer Joseph Coors, organized the Sagebrush Rebellion, a coalition
of industry money and right-wing ideologues that helped elect Reagan
president. The big polluters who started the Sagebrush Rebellion were
successful because they managed to broaden their constituency with
anti-regulatory, anti-labor and anti-environmental rhetoric that had great
appeal both among Christian fundamentalist leaders such as Jerry Falwell and
Pat Robertson, and in certain Western communities where hostility to
government is deeply rooted. Big polluters found that they could organize this
discontent into a potent political force that possessed the two ingredients of
power in American democracy: money and intensity. Meanwhile, innovations in
direct-mail and computer technologies gave this alliance of dark populists and
polluters a deafening voice in American government.

Coors founded the Mountain States Legal Foundation in 1976 to bring lawsuits
designed to enrich giant corporations, limit civil rights and attack unions,
homosexuals and minorities. He also founded the right-wing Heritage
Foundation, to provide a philosophical underpinning for the anti-environmental
movement. While the foundation and its imitators -- the Competitive Enterprise
Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Reason Foundation, the
Federalist Society, the Marshall Institute and others -- claim to advocate
free markets and property rights, their agenda is more pro-pollution than
anything else. From its conception, the Heritage Foundation and its
neoconservative cronies urged followers to "strangle the environmental
movement," which Heritage named "the greatest single threat to the American
economy." Ronald Reagan's victory gave Heritage Foundation and the Mountain
States Legal Foundation immeasurable clout. Heritage became known as Reagan's
"shadow government," and its 2,000-page manifesto, "Mandate for Change,"
became a blueprint for his administration. Coors handpicked his Colorado
associates: Anne Gorsuch became the EPA administrator; her husband, Robert
Burford, a cattle baron who had vowed to destroy the Bureau of Land
Management, was selected to head that very agency. Most notorious, Coors chose
James Watt, president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, as the
secretary of the interior. Watt was a proponent of "dominion theology," an
authoritarian Christian heresy that advocates man's duty to "subdue" nature.
His deep faith in laissez-faire capitalism and apocalyptic Christianity led
Secretary Watt to set about dismantling his department and distributing its
assets rather than managing them for future generations. During a Senate
hearing, he cited the approaching Apocalypse to explain why he was giving away
America's sacred places at fire-sale prices: "I do not know how many future
generations we can count on before the Lord returns."

Meanwhile, Anne Gorsuch enthusiastically gutted EPA's budget by sixty percent,
crippling its ability to write regulations or enforce the law. She appointed
lobbyists fresh from their hitches with the paper, asbestos, chemical and oil
companies to run each of the principal agency departments. Her chief counsel
was an Exxon lawyer; her head of enforcement was from General Motors.

These attacks on the environment precipitated a public revolt. By 1983, more
than a million Americans and all 125 American-Indian tribes had signed a
petition demanding Watt's removal. After being forced out of office, Watt was
indicted on twenty-five felony counts of influence-pedaling. Gorsuch and
twenty-three of her cronies were forced to resign following a congressional
investigation of sweetheart deals with polluters, including Coors. Her first
deputy, Rita Lavelle, was jailed for perjury.

The indictments and resignations put a temporary damper on the Sagebrush
Rebels, but they quickly regrouped as the "Wise Use" movement. Wise Use
founder, the timber-industry flack Ron Arnold, said, "Our goal is to destroy,
to eradicate the environmental movement. We want to be able to exploit the
environment for private gain, absolutely."

By 1994, Wise Use helped propel Newt Gingrich to the speaker's chair of the
U.S. House of Representatives and turn his anti-environmental manifesto, "The
Contract With America," into law. Gingrich's chief of environmental policy was
Rep. Tom DeLay, the one-time Houston exterminator who was determined to rid
the world of pesky pesticide regulations and to promote a biblical worldview.
He targeted the Endangered Species Act as the second-greatest threat to Texas
after illegal aliens. He also wanted to legalize the deadly pesticide DDT, and
he routinely referred to the EPA as "the Gestapo of government." In January
1995, DeLay invited a group of 350 lobbyists representing some of America's
biggest polluters to collaborate in drafting legislation to dismantle federal
health, safety and environmental laws.

Gingrich and DeLay had learned from the James Watt debacle that they had to
conceal their radical agenda. Carefully eschewing public debates on their
initiatives, they mounted a stealth attack on America's environmental laws.
Rather than pursue a frontal assault against popular statutes such as the
Endangered Species, Clean Water and Clean Air acts, they tried to undermine
these laws by attaching silent riders to must-pass budget bills.

But the public got wise. Moderate Republicans teamed up with the Clinton
administration to block the worst of it. My group, the NRDC, as well as the
Sierra Club and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, generated more than 1
million letters to Congress. When President Clinton shut down the government
in December 1995 rather than pass a budget bill spangled with
anti-environmental riders, the tide turned against Gingrich and DeLay. By the
end of that month, even conservatives disavowed the attack. "We lost the
battle on the environment," DeLay conceded.

Undermining the Scientists

Today, with the presidency and both houses of Congress under the
anti-environmentalists' control, they are set to eviscerate the despised laws.
White House strategy is to promote its unpopular policies by lying about its
agenda, cheating on the science and stealing the language and rhetoric of the
environmental movement.

Even as Republican pollster Luntz acknowledged that the scientific evidence is
against the Republicans on issues like global warming, he advised them to find
scientists willing to hoodwink the public. "You need to continue to make the
lack of scientific certainty a primary issue," he told Republicans, "by
becoming even more active in recruiting experts sympathetic to your view."

In the meantime, he urged them to change their rhetoric. " 'Climate change,' "
he said, "is less threatening than 'global warming.' While global warming has
catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more
controllable and less emotional challenge."

The EPA's inspector general received broad attention for his August 21st,
2003, finding that the White House pressured the agency to conceal the
public-health risks from poisoned air following the September 11th World Trade
Center attacks. But this 2001 deception is only one example of the
administration's pattern of strategic distortion. Earlier this year, it
suppressed an EPA report warning that millions of Americans, especially
children, are being poisoned by mercury from industrial sources.

This behavior is consistent throughout the Bush government. Consider the story
of James Zahn, a scientist at the Department of Agriculture who resigned after
the Bush administration suppressed his taxpayer-funded study proving that
billions of antibiotic-resistant bacteria can be carried daily across property
lines from meat factories into neighboring homes and farms. In March 2002,
Zahn accepted my invitation to present his findings to a convention of
family-farm advocates in Iowa. Several weeks before the April conference,
pork-industry lobbyists learned of his appearance and persuaded the Department
of Agriculture to forbid him from appearing. Zahn told me he had been ordered
to cancel a dozen appearances at county health departments and similar venues.

In May, the White House blocked the EPA staff from publicly discussing
contamination by the chemical perchlorate -- the main ingredient in solid
rocket fuel. The administration froze federal regulations on perchlorate, even
as new research reveals alarmingly high levels of the chemical in the nation's
drinking water and food supply, including many grocery-store lettuces.
Perchlorate pollution has been linked to neurological problems, cancer and
other life-threatening illnesses in some twenty states. The Pentagon and
several defense contractors face billions of dollars in potential cleanup
liability.

The administration's leading expert in manipulating scientific data is
Interior Secretary Gale Norton. During her nomination hearings, Norton
promised not to ideologically slant agency science. But as her friend Thomas
Sansonetti, a coal- industry lobbyist who is now assistant attorney general,
predicted, "There won't be any biologists or botanists to come in and pull the
wool over her eyes."

In autumn 2001, Secretary Norton provided the Senate Committee on Energy and
Natural Resources with her agency's scientific assessment that Arctic oil
drilling would not harm hundreds of thousands of caribou. Not long afterward,
Fish and Wildlife Service biologists contacted the Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility, which defends scientists and other professionals
working in state and federal environmental agencies. "The scientists provided
us the science that they had submitted to Norton and the altered version that
she had given to Congress a week later," said the group's executive director,
Jeff Ruch. There were seventeen major substantive changes, all of them
minimizing the reported impacts. When Norton was asked about the alterations
in October 2001, she dismissed them as typographical errors.

Later, she and White House political adviser Karl Rove forced National Marine
Fisheries scientists to alter findings on the amount of water required for the
survival of salmon in Oregon's Klamath River, to ensure that large corporate
farms got a bigger share of the river water. As a result, more than 33,000
chinook and coho salmon died -- the largest fish kill in the history of
America. Mike Kelly, the biologist who drafted the original opinion (and who
has since been awarded federal whistle-blower status), told me that the coho
salmon is probably headed for extinction. "Morale is low among scientists
here," Kelly says. "We are under pressure to get the right results. This
administration is putting the species at risk for political gain -- and not
just in the Klamath."

Norton has also ordered the rewriting of an exhaustive twelve-year study by
federal biologists detailing the effects that Arctic drilling would have on
populations of musk oxen and snow geese. She reissued the biologists' report
two weeks later as a two-page paper showing no negative impact to wildlife.
She also ordered suppression of two studies by the Fish and Wildlife Service
concluding that the drilling would threaten polar-bear populations and violate
the international treaty protecting bears. She then instructed the Fish and
Wildlife Service to redo the report to "reflect the Interior Department's
position." She suppressed findings that mountaintop mining would cause
"tremendous destruction of aquatic and terrestrial habitat" and a Park Service
report that found that snowmobiles were hurting Yellowstone's air quality,
wildlife and the health of its visitors and employees.

Norton's Fish and Wildlife Service is the first ever not to voluntarily list a
single species as endangered or threatened. Her officials have blackballed
scientists and savaged studies to avoid listing the trumpeter swan, revoke the
listing of the grizzly bear and shrink the remnant habitat for the Florida
panther. She disbanded the service's oldest scientific advisory committee in
order to halt protection of desert fish in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas that
are headed for extinction. Interior career staffers and scientists say they
are monitored by Norton's industry appointees to ensure that future studies do
not conflict with industry profit-making.

Cooking the Books on Global Warming

There is no scientific debate in which the White House has cooked the books
more than that of global warming. In the past two years the Bush
administration has altered, suppressed or attempted to discredit close to a
dozen major reports on the subject. These include a ten-year peer-reviewed
study by the International Panel on Climate Change, commissioned by the
president's father in 1993 in his own efforts to dodge what was already a
virtual scientific consensus blaming industrial emissions for global warming.

After disavowing the Kyoto Protocol, the Bush administration commissioned the
federal government's National Academy of Sciences to find holes in the IPCC
analysis. But this ploy backfired. The NAS not only confirmed the existence of
global warming and its connection to industrial greenhouse gases, it also
predicted that the effects of climate change would be worse than previously
believed, estimating that global temperatures will rise between 2.5 and 10.4
degrees by 2100.

A May 2002 report by scientists from the EPA, NASA and the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, approved by Bush appointees at the Council on
Environmental Quality and submitted to the United Nations by the U.S.,
predicted similarly catastrophic impacts. When confronted with the findings,
Bush dismissed it with his smirking condemnation: "I've read the report put
out by the bureaucracy. . . ."

Afterward, the White House acknowledged that, in fact, he hadn't. Having
failed to discredit the report with this untruth, George W. did what his
father had done: He promised to study the problem some more. Last fall, the
White House announced the creation of the Climate Research Initiative to study
global warming. The earliest results are due next fall. But the White House's
draft plan for CRI was derided by the NAS in February as a rehash of old
studies and established science lacking "most elements of a strategic plan."

In September 2002, administration censors released the annual EPA report on
air pollution without the agency's usual update on global warming, that
section having been deleted by Bush appointees at the White House. On June
19th, 2003, a "State of the Environment" report commissioned by the EPA in
2001 was released after language about global warming was excised by
flat-earthers in the White House. The redacted studies had included a 2001
report by the National Research Council, commissioned by the White House. In
their place was a piece of propaganda financed by the American Petroleum
Institute challenging these conclusions.

This past July, EPA scientists leaked a study, which the agency had ordered
suppressed in May, showing that a Senate plan -- co-sponsored by Republican
Sen. John McCain -- to reduce the pollution that causes global warming could
achieve its goal at very small cost. Bush reacted by launching a $100 million
ten-year effort to prove that global temperature changes have, in fact,
occurred naturally, another delay tactic for the fossil-fuel barons at
taxpayer expense. Princeton geo-scientist Michael Oppenheimer told me, "This
administration likes to emphasize what we don't know while ignoring or
minimizing what we do know, which is a prescription for paralysis on policy.
It's hard to imagine what kind of scientific evidence would suffice to
convince the White House to take firm action on global warming."

Across the board, the administration yields to Big Energy. At the request of
ExxonMobil, and with the help of a lobbying group working for coal-burning
utility Southern Co., the Bush administration orchestrated the removal of U.S.
scientist Robert Watson, the world-renowned former NASA atmospheric chemist
who headed the United Nations' IPCC. He was replaced by a little-known
scientist from New Delhi, India, who would be generally unavailable for
congressional hearings.

The Bush administration now plans to contract out thousands of
environmental-science jobs to compliant industry consultants already in the
habit of massaging data to support corporate profit-taking, effectively making
federal science an arm of Karl Rove's political machine. The very ideologues
who derided Bill Clinton as a liar have institutionalized dishonesty and made
it the reigning culture of America's federal agencies. "At its worst,"
Oppenheimer says, "this approach represents a serious erosion in the way a
democracy deals with science."

Inside the Cheney Task Force

There is no better example of the corporate cronyism now hijacking American
democracy than the White House's cozy relationship with the energy industry.
It's hard to find anyone on Bush's staff who does not have extensive corporate
connections, but fossil-fuel executives rule the roost. The energy industry
contributed more than $48.3 million to Republicans in the 2000 election cycle,
with $3 million to Bush. Now the investment has matured. Both Bush and Cheney
came out of the oil patch. Thirty-one of the Bush transition team's
forty-eight members had energy-industry ties. Bush's cabinet and White House
staff is an energy-industry dream team -- four cabinet secretaries, the six
most powerful White House officials and more than twenty high-level appointees
are alumni of the industry and its allies (see "Bush's Energy-Industry
All-Stars," on Page 183).

The potential for corruption is staggering. Take the case of J. Steven Griles,
deputy secretary of the Interior Department. During the first Reagan
administration, Griles worked directly under James Watt at Interior, where he
helped the coal industry evade prohibitions against mountaintop-removal strip
mining. In 1989, Griles left government to work as a mining executive and then
as a lobbyist with National Environmental Strategies, a Washington, D.C., firm
that represented the National Mining Association and Dominion Resources, one
of the nation's largest power producers. When Griles got his new job at
Interior, the National Mining Association hailed him as "an ally of the
industry." It's bad enough that a former mining lobbyist was put in charge of
regulating mining on public land. But it turns out that Griles is still on the
industry's payroll. In 2001, he sold his client base to his partner Marc
Himmelstein for four annual payments of $284,000, making Griles, in effect, a
continuing partner in the firm.

Because Griles was an oil and mining lobbyist, the Senate made him agree in
writing that he would avoid contact with his former clients as a condition of
his confirmation. Griles has nevertheless repeatedly met with former coal
clients to discuss new rules allowing mountaintop mining in Appalachia and
destructive coal-bed methane drilling in Wyoming. He also met with his former
oil clients about offshore leases. These meetings prompted Sen. Joseph
Lieberman to ask the Interior Department to investigate Griles. With
Republicans in control of congressional committees, no subpoenas have
interrupted the Griles scandals.

With its operatives in place, the Bush energy plan became an orgy of industry
plunder. Days after his inauguration, Bush launched the National Energy Policy
Development Group, chaired by Cheney. For three months, the task force held
closed-door meetings with energy-industry representatives - then refused to
disclose the names of the participants.

For the first time in history, the nonpartisan General Accounting Office sued
the executive branch, for access to these records. NRDC put in a Freedom of
Information Act request, and when Cheney did not respond, we also sued. On
February 21st, 2002, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ordered Energy
Secretary Spencer Abraham and other agency officials to turn over the records
relating to their participation in the work of the energy task force. Under
this court order, NRDC has obtained some 20,000 documents. Although none of
the logs on the vice president's meetings have been released yet and the pages
were heavily redacted to prevent disclosure of useful information, the
documents still allow glimpses of the process.

The task force comprised Cabinet secretaries and other high-level
administration officials with energy-industry pedigrees. The undisputed leader
was Cheney, who hails from Wyoming, the nation's largest coal producer, and
who, for six previous years, was CEO of Halliburton, the oil-service company.
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was chairman of the Aluminum Company of
America for thirteen years. Aluminum-industry profits are directly related to
energy prices. O'Neill promised to immediately sell his extensive stock
holdings in his former company (worth more than $100 million) to avoid
conflicts of interest, but he delayed the sale until after the energy plan was
released. By then, thanks partly to the administration's energy policies,
Alcoa's stock had risen thirty percent. Energy Secretary Abraham, a former
one-term senator from Michigan, received $700,000 from the auto industry in
his losing 2000 campaign, more than any other Senate candidate. At Energy,
Abraham led the administration effort to scuttle fuel-economy standards, allow
SUVs to escape fuel-efficiency minimums and create obscene tax incentives for
Americans to buy the largest gas guzzlers.

Joe Allbaugh, director of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, sat next
to Abraham on the task force. Allbaugh's wife, Diane, is an energy-industry
lobbyist and represents three firms -- Reliant Energy, Entergy and TXU, each
of which paid her $20,000 in the three months of the task force's
deliberation. Joe Allbaugh participated in task-force meetings on issues
directly affecting those companies, including debates about environmental
rules for power plants and -- his wife's specialty -- electricity deregulation.

Commerce Secretary Don Evans, an old friend of the president from their early
days in the oil business, was CEO of Tom Brown Inc., a Denver oil-and-gas
company, and a trustee of another drilling firm. Interior Secretary Gale
Norton, a mining-industry lawyer, accepted nearly $800,000 from the energy
industry during her 1996 run in Colorado for the U.S. Senate.

In the winter and spring of 2001, executives and lobbyists from the oil, coal,
electric-utility and nuclear industries tramped in and out of the Cabinet room
and Cheney's office. Many of the lobbyists had just left posts inside Bush's
presidential campaign to work for companies that had donated lavishly to that
effort. Companies that made large contributions were given special access.
Executives from Enron Corp., which contributed $2.5 million to the GOP from
1999 to 2002, had contact with the task force at least ten times, including
six face-to-face meetings between top officials and Cheney.

After one meeting with Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, Cheney dismissed California Gov.
Gray Davis' request to cap the state's energy prices. That denial would enrich
Enron and nearly bankrupt California. It has since emerged that the state's
energy crisis was largely engineered by Enron. According to the New York
Times, the task-force staff circulated a memo that suggested "utilizing" the
crisis to justify expanded oil and gas drilling. President Bush and others
would cite the California crisis to call for drilling in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge. Energy companies that had not ponied up remained under
pressure to give to Republicans. When Westar Energy's chief executive was
indicted for fraud, investigators found an e-mail written by Westar executives
describing solicitations by Republican politicians for a political action
committee controlled by Tom DeLay as the price for a "seat at the table" with
the task force.

Task-force members began each meeting with industry lobbyists by announcing
that the session was off the record and that participants were to share no
documents. A National Mining Association official told reporters that the
industry managed to control the energy plan by keeping the process secret.
"We've probably had as much input as anybody else in town," he said. "I have
to take my hat off to them -- they've been able to keep a lid on it."

When it was suggested that access to the administration was for sale, Cheney
hardly apologized. "Just because somebody makes a campaign contribution
doesn't mean that they should be denied the opportunity to express their view
to government officials," he said. Although they met with hundreds of industry
officials, Cheney and Abraham refused to meet with any environmental groups.
Cheney made one exception to the secrecy policy: On May 15th, 2001, the day
before the task force sent its plan to the president, CEOs from wind-, solar-
and geothermal-energy companies were granted a short meeting with Cheney.
Afterward, they were led into the Rose Garden for a press conference and a
photo op.

While peddling influence to energy tycoons, the White House quietly dropped
criminal and civil charges against Koch Industries, America's largest
privately held oil company. Koch faced a ninety-seven-count federal felony
indictment and $357 million in fines for knowingly releasing ninety metric
tons of carcinogenic benzene and concealing the releases from federal
regulators. Koch executives contributed $800,000 to Bush's presidential
campaign and to other top Republicans.

Last March, the Federal Trade Commission dropped a Clinton-era investigation
of price gouging by the oil and gas industries, even as Duke Energy, a
principal target of the probe, admitted to selling electricity in California
for more than double the highest previously reported price. The Bush
administration said that the industry deserved a "gentler approach."
Administration officials also winked at a scam involving a half-dozen oil
companies cheating the government out of $100 million per year in royalty
payments.

Southern Co. was among the most adept advocates for its own se