How Green Became the Color of Money completo.docx

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WEEKEND EDITION DEC 31-JAN 02, 2010

A Concis e History of the Rise and Fal l of the Enviro Establ ishm ent

How Green Became the Color of Moneyby JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

In the early summer of 1995, Jay Hair quietly resigned as head of the National Wildlife Federation. This

Napoleonic figure had transformed a once scruffy, apolitical collection of local hunting and gun clubs into the

cautious colossus of the environmental movement with more than four million members and an annual budget

of nearly $100 million. By the time Hair left, the Federation enjoyed more political clout in Washington than

the rest of the environmental groups combined.

Hair, a former biology profession who also served as a special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus

during the Carter Administration, was the architect of this astounding transformation. Under the firm hand of

Hairs leadership the Federations membership doubled and its budget tripled. His strategy was simple: market

the Wildlife Federation as a non-confrontational corporate-friendly outfit. Hair created the Corporate

Conservation Council and forged relationships with some of the worlds most toxic corporations: ARCO, Ciba-

Giegy, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Exxon, General Electric, General Motors, IBM, Mobil Oil, Monsanto, Penzoil,USX, Waste Management and Weyerhaeuser. The corporations received the impriatur of the nations largest

environmental group, while the National Wildlife Federation raked in millions in corporation grants.

The conservation giant showed less deference to its members. In 1975, Dr. Claude Moore, a long-time member,

donated a 367-acre tract of forest land in Loudon County, Virginia to the Federation to be managed as a wildlife

sanctuary. The land provided rich habitat for an extraordinary number of birds. A Smithsonian guidebook

called the area a natural gem.

Then in 1986 the National Wildlife Federation decided to sell the sanctuary to a developer for $8.5 million and

use the money to help pay for the construction of the Federations new seven -story office building on 16th

Street in DC. Outraged, Dr. Moore and other members sued the Federation, alleging it had violated a contract

to manage the land as a nature preserve. Moore lost. The land was sold and 1,300 houses constructed on the

site.

While Hair was turning the National Wildlife Federation into a corporate-friendly operation, the Wilderness

Society was being run by a millionaire from Montana named Jon Roush. Roush had formerly been the

chairman of the Nature Conservancy, the most unapologetically pro-corporate of all environmental groups.

In the winter of 1995, Roush was caught selling off $150,000 worth of timber from environmentally-sensitive

lands on his own 800-acre ranch in Montanas Bitterroot Valley. The trees went to Plum Creek Timber

Company, the corporate giant which a conservative congressman from Washington, Rod Chandler, labeled the

Darth Vader of the timber industry.

Roushs first gallant reaction to a probing call was to blame it on his wife, whom he was in the process of

divorcing. He later claimed that he need to sell of the timber to pay his property taxes. However, local taxrecords revealed that Roush owed less than $1,000 a year in taxes on property valued at nearly $3 million.

At the same time, the National Audubon Society was being run by a lawyer named Peter Berle, who

commanded an annual salary of $200,000. After he savagely trimmed away the muscle from the Societys

conservation staff, Berle gloated, Unlike Greenpeace, Audubon doesnt have a reputation as a confrontational

organization.


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How did it come to this? Why in the mid-1990s, when Democrats in control of the government, did the nations

largest environmental groups, which once stood as such a potent force for radical change, mutate into a servile

adjunct to the entrenched powers of Washington and Wall Street?

To uncover the forces that drove this transformation, we have to return to the days of the Nixon

admininstration, the glory time of American environmentalism. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the nation

rallied to the cause of cleaning up the countrys waters and air, preserving its remaining wild lands andundimmed rivers, regulating the use and disposal of hazardous chemicals, rescuing wildlife from extinction.

Recall the first Earth Day: April 20, 1970. It was the brainchild of a United States senator, Gaylord Nelson of

Wisconsin, who wanted a national teach-in on the environment. Nelson proclaimed that the environment was

the most critical issue facing mankind. The teach-in became a media event, orchestrated by a young Harvard

educated lawyer, Dennis Hayes, who set forth the lofty protocols of the new movement: Ecology is concerned

with the total system?not just the way it disposes of its garbage.

That first Earth Day?when millions participated in demonstrations, clean-ups, and rallies across the

country?has been hailed as the largest organized event in American history and as a symbol of rebellion against

pollution and the exploitation of natural America.

It didnt take Congress long to get the message. The House and Senate speedily decreed a new era in

environmental laws: 1970 saw the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and

the passage of the Clean Air and National Environmental Policy acts, under which protecting earth, air and

water legally became a priority for all federal agencies. Environmental impact statements, for example, give

good science a word in response to corporate projects. Even the Pentagon was required to play along. Then in

1972 came the Clean Water Act, the first pesticide regulations, the Noise Control Act and a series of laws

protecting marine animals and coastal beaches. A year later Congress authorized the Endangered Species Act,

regulated toxic chemicals and passed new green laws governing the use of public lands.

Throughout the 1970s, environmental standards stiffened, with legislation covering everything from Superfund

(to finance clean-up of toxic dumps) to drinking water standards. The environmental decade culminated with

the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Act in 1980, which protected about 110 million acres ofwilderness, an area larger than the state of California.

In those halcyon days Congress was well-stocked with conservationists: Ed Muskie, George McGovern,

Jennings Randolph, Birch Bayn and Eugene McCarthy. Even in the West, where states were still commonly

regarded as resources to be exploited, environmentalism had its champions: Idahos Frank Church, Montanas

Lee Metcalf, Arizonas Morris Udall and Oregons Wayne Morse and Bob Packwood, an original co-sponsor of

the Endangered Species Act.

In his 1970 State of the Union address, Richard Nixon embraced the green theme, proclaiming that we must

make our peace with nature and reclaim the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment. Its

literally now or never.

To be sure, that supple politician seized this chance to divert the attention of an increasingly restive middle

class from the horrors of his war against Vietnam. Nixon understood that the environment could bring

together every dreamer green enough to impale an avocado seed on a toothpick and raise it up in the thin light

of the Me Decade. The environment might bring the beat legions of of the counter-culture together with the

heavier left; it could ally those radicals, seniors, working people and the press. Forthwith Nixon created the

Environmental Protection Agency, to which he named William Ruckleshaus as overseer. Ruckleshaus

confronted industry polluters?he was the first federal bureaucrat to do so?before being drafted to his short-

lived tenure as Attorney General, where he turned on his plucky boss.


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In that heady decade even the Supreme Court sheltered a radical conservationist, William O. Douglas. Douglas

believed that nature should be afforded legal rights. In 1972, he drafted a fierce dissenting opinion in the case of

Sierra Club v. Morton, arguing in forceful and poetic language that wilderness itself deserved standing in

federal lawsuits, so that before priceless bits of Americana (such as a valley, an alpine meadow, river or a lake)

are forever lost or are transformed as to be reduced to the eventual rubble of our environmental, the voice of

the existing beneficiaries of these environmental wonders should be heard. Douglas further suggested that

conservationists who have an intimate relationship with the inanimate object about to be injured are itslegitimate spokesmen. Thus did Douglas help give birth to both environmental law and, though he is rarely

credited for it, the deep ecology movment.

The 1970s saw the green movement mature as a political force with a permanent DC presence, most notably

through the creation of the League of Conservation Voters?an organization later headed by Bruce

Babbitt?which, for the first time, tracked the environmental voting records of members of congress. Eco-

lobbyists, often operating from basements and dingy offices on DuPont Circle, were considered the leanest and

most effective on the Hill.

Meanwhile a more confrontational and grassroots-based faction of the environmental community was

beginning to take root, spearheaded by the Arch Druid himself, David Brower. (Brower, branded the Arch

Druid by John McPhee of the New Yorker, was fired by the Sierra Club because he was too radical, foundedFriends of the Earth and was later dislodged from there for similar reasons.)

Using the tactics learned from the civil rights and anti-war movements, this more confrontational wing of the

green movement, mustered in groups such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, deployed aggressive media

campaigns, civil disobedience and direct action against the corporations themselves.

The decade of the 1970s closed with another huge demonstration which was in its own way as prodigious as

Earth Day. In the wake of Three Mile Island, 750,000 people crammed together on the Mall in front of the

Capitol to protest the evils of nuclear power , chanting Hell no, we wont glow along with the likes of Tom

Hayden, Jane Fonda, Jackson Browne, Michael Harrington and Barry Commoner, who had decided to run for

president on the green platform of the Citizens Party ticket. One of the chief organizers of the event was Donald

Ross, a young prot?g? of Ralph Nader, who had helped establish a nationwide network of Public InterestResearch Groups on college campuses.

That bright afternoon on the Mall was the last light that shone on the DC-centered green movment. In a decade

and a half of Reagan, Bush and Clinton, the environmental corps in DC ripened into a complacent putty. The

corporate counter-attack on greens began in the West with the rise of the Sagebrush Rebels, an amalgam of

ranchers, corporate executives, free-market economists and rightwing politicians who decried

environmentalism as socialism-by-another-name and as a backdoor assault on property rights.

The Sagebrush Rebels were largely ignored until the election of Ronald Reagan, who bowed to the enthusiasms

of Joseph Coors?the leading money dispenser of the far right and owner of substantial mineral claims on

federal lands?and selected a suite of Sagebrush leaders to fill important posts in his administration. These

Reagan rebels, headed by James Watt (who ran Coors Mountain States Legal Foundation) and Anne Gorsuch,

called themselves the Crazies on the Hill.

Watt, a millennialist Christian and rabid anti-communist, was given the Department of the Interior, which

oversees nearly 500 million acres of public land. He proclaimed he would make the bureaucracy yield to my

blows and got off to a fast start. Within a matter of months, Watt proposed the sale of 30 million acres of

public lands to private companies, gave away billions of dollars worth of publicly owned coal resources, fought

to permit corporations to manage national parks, refused to enforce the nations strip mining laws, offered up


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the Outer Continental Shelf oil reserves to exploration and drilling, ignored the Endangered Species Act, and

purged the Interior Department of any employee who objected to his agenda.

Watt defended his actions on religious grounds, arguing that conservation of resources for future generations

amounted to a waste of Gods gift to mankind.

I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns, Watt warned. Use it orlose it.

In spite of his ravings, Watt held on. He even survived his bizarre attempt to block the Beach Boys (in his

fevered mind the incarnation of the counter-culture, even though the group had played fundraisers for George

H. W. Bush) from playing a concert on the Mall, a stance that provoked an amusing rebuke from Ronald

Reagan. But like Earl Butz before him, Watt was undone by the racism that welled up invincibly within him.

Attacking affirmative action, Watt complained that he couldnt set up a panel without finding a black, a

woman, a Jew and a person in a wheelchair. Although Watt was later indicted in a scandal over the bilking of

the Department of Housing, Education and Welfare out of millions of dollars, it was this remark that did him

in.

Over at the Environmental Protection Agency, Watts counterpart was Anne Gorsuch, a rough-hewn andignorant Colorado legislator. Gorsuch, who later married Robert Burford, the rancher and mining engineer

Watt selected to run the Bureau of Land Management, surrounded herself with advisers from the pollution

lobby, including lawyers from General Motors, Exxon and DuPont. Her objective was to cripple environmental

laws passed in the 1970s which, she argued, had created an overburden of regulations that had stifled

economic growth.

To lead the toxic waste division of the EPA Gorsuch chose Rita Levelle, a public relations executive with the

Aerojet General Corporation, a defense contractor with potentially vast hazardous waste liabilities. At her

appointment many of the EPAs top scientists and administrators promptly quit.

Gorsuch and Levelle left a miasma of suspended regulations, secret meetings with industry lobbyists, waived

fines and suppressed recommendations of angency scientists. In one piquant case, Levelle refused?at therequest of Joseph Coors?to enforce new rules that prohibited dumping liquid hazardous waste into community

landfills. Coorss breweries disposed of millions of gallons of such waste near Denver.

The climate of cronyism that infected EPA in those days had its source in the highest levels of the Reagan

admininstration, which encouraged agency heads such as Gorsuch to pander to its political allies: Coors,

Browning-Ferris Industries, Westinghouse and Monsanto.

Gorsuchs downfall came after congressional investigators requested records of her warm chats with companies

under EPA jurisdiction. At the advice of a White House counsel, Gorsuch refused to turn over the documents

and was duly cited with contempt of Congress. When she was called to defend herself, the Reagan justice

department declined to accompany her to the Hill. Gorsuch resigned in disgust. The insipid and grossly na?ve

Rita Levelle was eventually convicted on charges of lying to Congress and spent six months in federal prison.

Less heralded, though more sinister, was Reagans appointment of John Crowell as assistant secretary of

agriculture, a critical position overseeing the operations of the Forest Service, one of the largest agencies in the

federal government. As the former general counsel for Louisiana-Pacific, then the largest purchaser of federal

timber, Crowell knew his duty. One of his first actions as assistant secretary was to suppress an internal

investigation of his own predatory former employer. Forest Service investigators had concluded that Louisiana-

Pacific may have bilked the government out of more than $80 million by fraudulent bidding practices on the

Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska.


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Crowell then ordered the Forest Service to double its annual offering of subsidized timber, much of which was

destined for mills owned by Louisiana-Pacific. He temporarily halted designation of new federal wilderness

areas and squashed scientific reports suggesting that relentless clearcutting in the ancient forests of Oregon

and Washington would wipe out of the northern spotted owl.

Such useful objectives quickly accomplished, Crowell departed the Reagan administration for a lucrative

position at a Portland, Oregon law firm, which specialized in clients such as the National Forest ProductsAssociation, which have a profound interest in exploiting the natural resources of the public domain.

The raw ideologies of the Sagebrush Rebellion overreached, but their core message took hold: environmental

regulations sapped economic growth. Environmental overkill became the excited talk of Washington PR houses

such as Buson-Marsteller and lobbying firms such as Akin Gump, which plotted a strategy of containment of

the greens and their dangerous ideology.

Often all that was needed was a kindlier visage. Take the case of James Watts replacement as Secretary of the

Interior, Donald Hodel. Shortly after Hodel took up his new duties, he went hiking inYosemites meadows with

David Brower. Brower returned from the outing to pronouce Hodel an honorable man, practically a green. Yet

Hodels policies at Interior were as pro-industry as Watts, and far more effective. During his tenture, the

Bureau of Land Managements timber sales program hit record levels, as did subsidies for the grazing andmining industries. Hodel was the man who objected to the Montreal Protocol for restricting ozone-depleting

chemicals, suggesting that to avoid skin cancer from increased ultraviolet radiation, people should simply wear

sunglasses, long-sleeved shirts, hats and sunscreen.

Watt, Gorsuch, Levelle and Crowell were magnificent villains for fundraising: direct mail revenues of the top

environmental groups exploded tenfold from 1979 to 1981. Green became the color of money, and the rag-tag

band of hardcore activists who populated the Hill in the 1970s gave way to a cadre of Ivy League-educated

lobbyists, lawyers, policy wonks, research scientists and telemarketers. Executives enjoyed perks and salaries

that rivaled those of corporate CEOs.

By the 1990s, Jay Hair was pulling down a quarter of a million dollars a year for overseeing the National

Wildlife Federation and kept his limo engine running at all times, the air-conditioner grinding ozone-shreddinggasses at full tilt against the moment Hair emerged from his office on an eco-mission or deal-making sortie.

To be continued.

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR is the author ofBeen Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of

NatureandGrand Theft Pentagon.His newest book,Born Under a Bad Sky,is published by AK Press /

CounterPunch books. He can be reached at:[email protected].

This essay is excerpted from the forthcoming book GreenScare: the New War on Environmentalism by

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and Joshua Frank.

A Conc ise History o f the Rise and Fall of the Enviro Es tabl ishm ent (Part Two)


Click here to read Part One.
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By the end of Reagans second term, the big environmental organizations were well-pickled in the political

brine of Washington, with freshness and passion drained out.

Early in the 1988 campaign of George H. W. Bush, the Texas transplant attempted to distance himself from the

environmental ethos of Reagan, who had said that if you saw one redwood tree you had seen them all. Bushs

strategy of revision was due mainly to the political instincts of Lee Atwater, who closely scrutinized polling data

showing that support for green causes cut across class lines: over 70 percent of the voters wanted moregovernmental action to protect environmental quality.

Thus, Bush proudly claimed that he intended to be the environmental president. He went after Michael

Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts and the Democratic nominee, over the dismal condition of Boston

Harbor. Bush pledged to support the reauthorization of the Clean Air Act, including new provisions aimed at

controlling acid rain, and to take firm action to curb global warming. He actively promoted a plan for no net

loss of wetlands.

Soon after his decisive election, Bush followed up these promises by appointing William Reilly, the first

professional environmentalist to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Reilly had been executive director

of the Conservation Foundation, a staid environmental outfit founded by Laurence Rockefeller in 1948 to

advance nature-friendly partnerships between government and industry.

I dont care about the regulations, I want results, became Reillys pragmatic mantra at EPA. In practice this

meant that Reilly preferred consent decrees to punitive fines and criminal litigation, and voluntary compliance

by toxic industries instead of mandatory standards for emissions. Reilly was also entranced by the notion that

economic incentives could replace compulsory regulations for achieving improvements in air and water quality.

Reillys primary mission at EPA was to convince his former cohort of environmental executives to get on board

the Bush administrations corporate-friendly overhaul of the Clean Air Act. For help, Reilly turned to Bushs

favorite environmental group: the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a more svelte and modish version of

Reillys old Conservation Fund, stocked with lawyers, lobbyists and scientists.

Nurtured on generous infusions of corporate grants and donations, EDF (now called Environmental Defense)matured into one of the most influential environmental groups in Washington. Their operations were directed

by Fred Krupp for the brawny sum of $125,000 a year. Krupp was known in some circles as the Michael Milken

of the green movement, an allusion to the EDF supremos tireless promotion of the pollution trading credits

scheme, which allows industrial enterprises to sell their right to spew toxins to other companies through the

Chicago Board of Trade.

Waggish environmentalists dubbed Krupps pollution credits cancer bonds. For his part, Krupp didnt have

much use for environmental activism, which he saw as tarnishing the reputation of serious environmental

groups. Krupp liked to proclaim that what the environmental movement needs is more scientists and

engineers and economists. He preferred to work with such allies of the earth as McDonalds and General

Motors, companies which are cordial to the idea that market mechanisms and technology can resolve nearly

every environmental dilemma.

It was precisely these kinds of voluntary and market-oriented approaches which had attracted Reilly and Bush

to Krupp in the first place. The whole scheme was laid out in a milestone white paper on so-called free-market

environmentalism called Project 88, which EDF helped to write for Senators John Heinz, the ketchup heir

from Pennsylvania, and Tim Wirth, the Democrat from Colorado. This document argued that environmental

regulations were financial onerous and often counter-productive. Hurt business, stifle economic growth, Heinz,

Wirth and Krupp asserted, and you deflate corporate interest in protecting environmental quality. Such notions

derive from the belief that environmentalism is a luxury concern toward which Americans turn their attention


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only in times of booming prosperity. The rhetoric of this fake construct is that the best way to protect wildlands,

air quality and endangered species is to keep big business running in overdrive.

That such ideas took root in an era that saw a steady accretion of environmental catastrophes?from Three Mile

Island and Love Canal to Times Beach, Bhopal and Chernobyl; from the listing of the northern spotted owl as a

threatened species and the decimation of commercial fish stocks on both coasts to the wreck of the Exxon

Valdez?shows how thoroughly accustomed the mainstream greens had become to the enervated politicalclimate of Washington, D. C. Groups such as the National Wildlife Federation and Environmental Defense

Fund had lent credence to the notion that environmental quality was a secondary value, that the right to safe

drinking water, clean air and functioning ecosystems could be compromised and mediated.

Project 88 became a biblical text for Reilly, and many of its key provisions later resurfaced in the renovated

Clean Air Act. Heinz was killed in a plane crash in 1991 and a heft chunk of his large estate went to create the

Heinz Foundation, which continues to funnel millions of dollars into green groups that show an understanding

deference to the sensitivities of corporations.

* * *

The anti-regulatory fervor of the Reagan era continued to thrived unabated in the Bush administration. Oneparticularly anti-environmental voice was Bushs budget director, Richard Darman, who recklessly slashed

spending for national park land acquisitions and hazardous waste cleanups. Americans did not fight and win

the wars of the 20th century to make the world safe for green vegetables, Darman thundered in a notorious

lecture at Harvard University. In lighter language Darmans boss, George Bush, lashed out at broccoli, on the

grounds that he had been force-fed the vegetable as a child.

Meanwhile, over in the vice presidents office, Dan Quayle was running the White House Council on

Competitiveness, a relay station for the complaints of corporate America about the profit-stifling nature of

environmental rules. The Competitiveness Council was staffed by a young lawyer from Indiana called David

McIntosh, subsequently elected to Congress in 1994, whose primary function was to scrutinize all new federal

regulations with an eye toward how much each might impair the operations of big business. Were here to

listen to the concerns of industry, McInosh confessed. The environmentalists have got the EPA as an audiencefor their complaints.

A typical example of the Councils chivalrous defense of picked upon corporations is the case of the Louisiana

black bear, an especially rare species that inhabits the backwoods swamps and bayous of the Mississippi Delta.

On learning that the US Fish and Wildlife Service might list the imperiled bear as a threatened species,

Louisiana-Pacific, Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific asked Dan Quayles anti-regulatory shop to intervene,

arguing that the protection of the bear would prove a financial hardship to these multi-billion dollar

transnational companies. The Council leapt into action. The listing of the bear was delayed for more than two

years, while the timberbarons clearcut some of the last remnants of the bears habitat.

Over at the Department of the Interior, now under the control of Manuel Lujan, the pro-development

demeanor of the agency was only moderately less aggressive than during the frenzied years of Watt and his

gang. Lujan was a former right-wing congressman from New Mexico with deep ties to the ranching and mining

industries. He pushed relentless to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, continued Watts

drive to accelerate exploratory drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf, and furiously resisted attempts to charge

market prices for cattle grazing on public lands, which during Lujans tenure amounted to $200 million a year

in subsidies to such impoverished public land ranchers as Hewlett-Packard and agribusiness magnate J. R.

Simplot.


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Under instructions from Bush, Lujan ordered the Bureau of Land Management to fast track the purchase of the

Goldstrike Mine by Barrick Resources, a Toronto-based company controlled by financier Peter Munk. The way

thus lubricated, Barrick acquired the 1,800 acre gold mine near Elko, Nevada, for the princely sum of $9,500.

By the time the mine is shuttered, the Goldstrike will yield an estimated $10 billion in gold. In 1995, in

consideration for his favors, George Bush was invited to join Barricks board of advisers.

Lujan became the first Interior Secretary to mount a head-on challenge to the Endangered Species Act. Lujandesperately sought to permit timber companies in Oregon to clearcut ancient forest inhabited by the Northern

Spotted Owl, which had been listed as a threatened species over the Bush administrations objections. The

Interior Secretary furiously fought the court-ordered listing of the owl, fuming: If weve got a species, I dont

see why we have to save a sub-species like the Northern Spotted Owl. Maybe these sub-species arent meant to

survive. Maybe they just cant adapt to their new surroundings.

In a desperate effort to override the Endangered Species Acts prohibition against logging the owls old-grown

habitat, Lujan invoked the so-called God Squad, a death panel of Bush administration appointees which could

vote to sanction activities leading to the extinction of protected species. Lujans God Squad approved the

clearcuts, but its action was later overturned by a federal court.

* * *

Lujan didnt ride into these fraught battles alone. He had plenty of help from the Democratic side of the aisle.

Lujans most powerfulally was the Washington Democrat Tom Foley, who hailed from the Inland Empire in the

eastern part of the state. While serving as Speaker of the House in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Foley was the

principal architect of the anti-environmental policies streaming out of the Congress for more than a decade.

First as chair of the powerful House Agriculture Committee and later as one of the most autocratic speakers in

the history of the House, Foley shamelessly shilled for the timber, mining, aluminum and defense industries,

which stocked his campaign war chest with hundreds of thousands of dollars. Foleys legacy of destruction is

written across the landscape of the Northwest: radioactive contamination at the Hanford Nuclear Site;

destroyed wildlands in Idaho and Montana; numerous endangered species put in extreme jeopardy, headlined

by the Northern Spotted Owl, hundreds of stocks of Pacific salmon and the grizzly bear.

As speaker of the House, Foley assigned key committee chairs to pliable members and dictated the legislative

agenda of the House, determining which bills received votes and which languished despite broad popular

support.

One of Foleys biggest and most reliable campaign donors was the Plum Creek Timber Company, a limited

partnership which owned 2.1 million acres of timber and was the second largest exporter of raw logs to Japan,

China and Korea. Foley voraciously defended Plum Creeks interests from attacks launched within his own

party caucus by Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio and Rep. Pat Williams from Montana, who wanted to stem the flow

of log exports and save 20,000 millworker jobs in the Pacific Northwest. Foley threatened to sanction the

impudent congressmen and retaliated by refusing to the bring legislation they had sponsored to the floor.

* * *

As the Bush administration staggered to a close, many high-profile environmental issues, from the fates of the

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest, remained gridlocked. But a

quiet, vital change had taken place. The core ideas of conservation and protection, that a strong federal

regulatory system represented the best way to protect the American environment, was being steadily refuted by

the leaders of the environmental movement itself.


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Many of the old environmental heroes had moved on to strange new positions. William Ruckleshaus assumed

the post of CEO at Browning-Ferris Industries, the nations largest solid waste company, and was invited to sit

on the boards of timber giant Weyerhaeuser and Monsanto, the agro-chemical company. Lee Thomas, one of

Ruckleshaus successors at EPA, found an especially remunerative position as an executive in the Atlanta

headquarters of convicted federal income tax cheat Georgia-Pacific. Gaylord Nelson, father of Earth Day, joined

the board of the Wilderness Society. Donald Ross and Dennis Hayes abandoned the environmental movement

for more lucrative positions in corporate philanthropy. The promiscuous Bob Packwood traveled the backroadsof rural Oregon trying to salvage his disgraced career by calling for the repeal of the Endangered Species Act.

Corporate criminal Louisiana-Pacific (which pleaded guilty to 16 felonies and misdemeanors involving timber

fraud) served as a proud sponsor of the 25th anniversary celebration of Earth Day.

To be continued.


NatureandGrand Theft Pentagon.His newest book,Born Under a Bad Sky,is published by AK Press /

CounterPunch books. He can be reached at:[email protected].



A Conc ise History o f the Rise and Fall of the Enviro Establ ish ment (Part Three)



Click here to read Part Two.

In the Clinton era, the contours of environmental politics settled into a triangulated landscape, bounded by the

Executive Office Building and its agency outlets (where administrative fiats were handed down with devastating

finality); the committee rooms of Congress (where the chairmen of the all-important appropriations

committees dole out pork and pollution); and the grey mansions of the special interest lobbies, both

environmental and industrial, stacked along K Street. Daily the inhabitants of these centers of power

determined the levels of lead in the blood of children in south-central Los Angeles; the number of Chinook

salmon chewed up by hydro-electric dams on the Columbia River; the gallons of dioxin flushed into theMississippi; and the fate of such animals as the grizzly bear, whose habitat can remain protected public land or

be transformed into clearcuts or cyanide-laced heap leach gold mines.

At the top of the Executive pyramid squatted Bill Clinton. His interest in environmental matters was, and had

always been, opportunistic. Environmental quality and economic progress should advance hand-in-hand,

Clinton counseled. If they dont, well, there will always be time to fix the damage to the planet later.

The surest field guide to Clintons world comes in the form of a list of his campaign contributions through the

1980s, stretching from his successful bid for a second term as Arkansas governor in 1982, after the voters had

kicked him out in 1980 following his first term. Long before Clinton hit the national spotlight (with a crashingly

tedious keynote speech to the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta), the big money had its eyes on the young

governor.

Badly shaken by his 1980 upset and determined never to offend corporate power again, Clinton let the word go

forth: the high and mighty had a man they could trust in the governors mansion in Little Rock. The tycoons

responded in appropriate fashion. Money flowed south from Wall Street, from the big securities firms, banks

and investment houses: Merrill Lynch, Goldman, Sachs, Drexel Burnham, Citicorp, Morgan Stanley,

Prudential-Bache.
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10/81

Indeed the scandal that dogged Clinton through his first term?Whitewater?traced its origins to just such a

collusion between Clinton and corporate money. Of the 1,070 major news stories written about the Whitewater

scandal between 1992 and 1996, some 90 percent concerned themselves with the cover-up question: if or how

the Clinton White House suppressed evidence in the wake of Vince Fosters suicide. Almost all of the remaining

stories dealt with the efforts of Governor Bill and the First Lady of Arkansas to keep their friend James

McDougals Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan afloat.

All of these reports overlooked the actual origins of Whitewater, which began with a land deal. In 1978 Bill

Clinton, then attorney general of Arkansas, was in the midst of his first campaign for the governship when he

and Hillary, along with Jim and Susan McDougal, bought 230 acres in the Ozark Mountains of northern

Arkansas. Though the title to the land was in the Clintons name, the couple put no money down. McDougal did

not yet have the S&L, and was a financial fixer and property dealer. He fronted the money for the down

payment on the loan.

The lands previous owner-of-record was a partnership called 101 River Development, which bought it from a

local business group. 101 had held the property for only three days, and went out of business a couple of weeks

after the sale. The original seller of the land was International Paper, a $16 billion a year timber giant,

Arkansas largest landowner with 800,000 acres in the state and with 7 million acres of land across the US.

International Papers powerful presence in Arkansas dates back to the 1950s with the arrival of Winthrop

Rockefeller. The New York-based timber company had long been backed by Rockefeller interests and when

Winthrop went south, the company made a similar migration and set about building up his empire in the state.

The Whitewater sale came at a time when the timber giant was following the pronouncements of candidate

Clinton with keen attention. The young attorney general was vowing that as governor he would restrict the use

of clearcutting on land held by the big timber companies, such as International Paper, Georgia-Pacific and

Weyerhaeuser. These paper and timber companies had gone on a logging binge in the mid-1970s, clearcutting

thousand-acre chunks of forest at a time. Clinton promised to introduce legislation banning the practice as soon

as he entered the governors office.

The mysterious 101 River Development had given the Clintons and the McDougals a very good deal, selling theland for $500 an acre. Non-river front property in the area was selling at the time for nearly twice that amount.

The Whitewater sale went through in August of 1979. Clinton won the governorship in November of that year.

Environmentalists eagerly awaited action from the new governor on clearcutting and other issues pertaining to

the impoverished states very serious problems with water and air pollution. But the promises of the campaign

trail soon lost their fire. Indeed Clintons commitment to them was pallid from the start. His two predecessors

in the governors mansion?Dale Bumpers and David Pryor?had both tangled with the timber companies on the

matter of clearcutting with a far more vigor than was ever displayed by Clinton.

The newly-elected governor formed a task force on clearcutting stocked with conservationists. The task force

swiftly took heat from loggers and executives at Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific. A startled Clinton kicked off

the greens and replaced them with industry hacks and recommended voluntary compliance with the soft new

regulations.

In what proved to be a fatal blow, Clinton reneged on a pledge to poultry king Don Tyson of Tyson Foods. The

governor refused to raise the legal weight for trucks on Arkansas highways to 80,000 pounds. In 1980, Tyson

and other moneyed interest shifted their support to Republican Frank White, who soundly defeated Clinton.

After Arkansas voters turned out Clinton at the end of his two-year term, Bill left the governors mansion and

went to work at the Little Rock law firm of Wright, Lindsey and Jennings. Hillary was at the Rose law firm.


11/81

Both legal outfits represented the timber giants of Arkansas before state regulatory bodies such as the Pollution

Control Board and the Department of Ecology.

Clinton recaptured the governors office in 1982, the same year that Jim McDougal bough Madison Guaranty

Savings & Loan. Among those contributing to candidate Clintons campaign treasury were International Paper,

Georgia-Pacific and Tyson Foods. Their investment was swiftly rewarded. Clinton redux was now equipped with

a philosophical approach to regulation that was highly congenial to the resource industries and to the poultryfactories.

Tyson in particular became a key ally of Clinton after the latter learned his lesson from the trucking dispute.

Tyson planes ferried the First Family on its travels and Tyson funds poured into Clintons campaign coffers.

In return, the poultry magnate received roughly $12 million worth of tax breaks during Clintons years as

governor. Nor was Clinton diligent in monitoring the environmental record of Tyson foods or of the poultry

industry in general. During Clintons years as governor the White River turned into a cesspool. Animal wastes

from the poultry and cattle industry polluted the river so badly that 400 miles of streams became unfit for

swimming. In 1983, Clinton dallied for 17 months before taking action to control damage from a Tyson plant in

Green Forest, Arkansas, which, after a sinkhole developed, poured a million gallons a day of chicken waste into

the water table.

The disastrous impact of Tysons chicken farms on the Arkansas River is fairly well-known. Less notorious but

even more toxic are the pulp mills of International Paper, Georgia-Pacific and James River. International

Papers mammoth mill at Pine Bluff was one of the most toxic in the world, venting nearly two million tons of

chemicals each year into the air and water.

From 1982 forward, Clinton argued that compliance to environmental standards could best be achieved on a

voluntary basis, rather than by the imposition of exigent (and politically perilous) rules and regulations. To this

end Governor Clinton stacked his pollution control board with members friendly to industry. In 1985 he

promoted and signed into law a huge tax break for industrial corporations of his state, including the big timber

companies. This easing of the corporate fiscal burden was offset by a regressive sales tax on the citizenry.

Clintons big offering to the timber companies was a measure called the Manufacturers Investment Sales and

Use Tax Credit, know by its green critics as the IP bailout law, after International Paper. Under this program

state tax breaks were approved for more than $400 million in projects by International Paper and three other

pulp and paper mills that then state Senator Ben Allen of Little Rock called the worst corporate citizens in

Arkansas?all this in a state with one of the lowest per capita incomes in the nation and where 29 percent of the

children and half of the states black population lived in poverty.

A few years later officials tried to keep International Paper and two Georgia-Pacific mills off a toxic waterways

list, despite overwhelming evidence that they were contaminating rivers with dioxin and rendering the eating of

fish from them an unacceptable cancer risk. Meanwhile, International Paper, while taking repeated advantage

of the manufacturers sales tax credit, was ladling out money to their favorite politician, candidate Clinton.

Clinton also supervised a land deal highly favorable to the timber giants. In later years, taunted with the fact

that his state ranked 48th in environmental quality, Clinton would make much of the fact that as governor he

had acquired thousands of acres for state-owned forests. Two types of deals were involved here. In one set of

transactions state-owned lands with profitable timber on them were swapped to the big companies in return for

parcels of their land which had been recently clearcut. And, in other instances, the state simply acquired at

inflated prices lands which the timber companies had recently logged off its best trees.


12/81

Nourished by these benefices, the timber companies and Don Tyson, urged Governor Clinton?then nearing the

end of his third term?to consider challenging Dale Bumpers for the senate seat he had held since the early

1970s. These predacious companies had no love for Bumpers. The senator had led the charge to reform forest

policies on federal lands, culminating in the passage of the National Forest Management Act of 1976.

Bumpers was also a spirited critic of clearcutting and pesticide-spraying by the timber giants in Arkansas. But

by this time Clinton was already contemplating a run for the White House and so instead the timber companies,along with other corporate interests, bankrolled the Democratic Leadership Council?Clintons launching pad to

the national scene and the presidency.

As president, Clinton performed many kindly deeds for big timber. But for International Paper, in particular,

Clinton wrought two spectacular favors as president. He refused to take any action to stem the flow of raw log

exports from the West Coast, where International Paper held about a half million acres of forest land. And the

generous Habitat Conservation Plans in the southeast tirelessly promoted by Interior Secretary and fellow DLC

alum Bruce Babbitt allowed International Paper and Georgia-Pacific to continue to cut trees on land occupied

endangered species such as the red-cockaded woodpecker.

When the Whitewater scandal finally exploded, Clintons attorney general Janet Reno searched for a special

prosecutor and finally came up with Robert Fiske, of the law firm of Davis, Polk and Wardell. At the time, thishigh-powered New York law firm was also represented International Paper in pollution cases across the

country, including Arkansas.

Tyson Foods, Wal-Mart and Jackson Stephens are familiar pillars of the Arkansas power structure. Yet during

Clintons years as governor, the timber companies were the most potent of the lot. Combined, International

Paper, Weyerhaeuser, Georgia-Pacific and Potlach controlled more than two-and-a-half million acres of land in

Arkansas and operated more than 90 timber mills.

To be continued.


NatureandGrand Theft Pentagon.His newest book,Born Under a Bad Sky,is published by AK Press /CounterPunch books. He can be reached at:[email protected].



1.

January 14, 2011

A Concise History of the Rise and Fall of the Enviro Establishment (Part Three)

How Green Became the Color of Money

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Click here to read Part One.Click here to read Part Two.

In the Clinton era, the contours of environmental politics settled into a triangulated landscape, bounded by theExecutive Office Building and its agency outlets (where administrative fiats were handed down with devastatingfinality); the committee rooms of Congress (where the chairmen of the all-important appropriations committeesdole out pork and pollution); and the grey mansions of the special interest lobbies, both environmental andindustrial, stacked along K Street. Daily the inhabitants of these centers of power determined the levels of lead inthe blood of children in south-central Los Angeles; the number of Chinook salmon chewed up by hydro-electricdams on the Columbia River; the gallons of dioxin flushed into the Mississippi; and the fate of such animals as thegrizzly bear, whose habitat can remain protected public land or be transformed into clearcuts or cyanide-laced heap
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13/81

leach gold mines.At the top of the Executive pyramid squatted Bill Clinton. His interest in environmental matters was, and hadalways been, opportunistic. Environmental quality and economic progress should advance hand-in-hand, Clintoncounseled. If they dont, well, there will always be time to fix the damage to the planet later.The surest field guide to Clintons world comes in the form of a list of his campaign contributions through the1980s, stretching from his successful bid for a second term as Arkansas governor in 1982, after the voters hadkicked him out in 1980 following his first term. Long before Clinton hit the national spotlight (with a crashinglytedious keynote speech to the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta), the big money had its eyes on the young

governor.Badly shaken by his 1980 upset and determined never to offend corporate power again, Clinton let the word goforth: the high and mighty had a man they could trust in the governors mansion in Little Rock. The tycoonsresponded in appropriate fashion. Money flowed south from Wall Street, from the big securities firms, banks andinvestment houses: Merrill Lynch, Goldman, Sachs, Drexel Burnham, Citicorp, Morgan Stanley, Prudential-Bache.Indeed the scandal that dogged Clinton through his first termWhitewatertraced its origins to just such acollusion between Clinton and corporate money. Of the 1,070 major news stories written about the Whitewaterscandal between 1992 and 1996, some 90 percent concerned themselves with the cover-up question: if or how theClinton White House suppressed evidence in the wake of Vince Fosters suicide. Almost all of the remaining storiesdealt with the efforts of Governor Bill and the First Lady of Arkansas to keep their friend James McDougals MadisonGuaranty Savings and Loan afloat.All of these reports overlooked the actual origins of Whitewater, which began with a land deal. In 1978 Bill Clinton,then attorney general of Arkansas, was in the midst of his first campaign for the governship when he and Hillary,along with Jim and Susan McDougal, bought 230 acres in the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas. Though thetitle to the land was in the Clintons name, the couple put no money down. McDougal did not yet have the S&L, andwas a financial fixer and property dealer. He fronted the money for the down payment on the loan.The lands previous owner-of-record was a partnership called 101 River Development, which bought it from a localbusiness group. 101 had held the property for only three days, and went out of business a couple of weeks afterthe sale. The original seller of the land was International Paper, a $16 billion a year timber giant, Arkansas largestlandowner with 800,000 acres in the state and with 7 million acres of land across the US.International Papers powerful presence in Arkansas dates back to the 1950s with the arrival of WinthropRockefeller. The New York-based timber company had long been backed by Rockefeller interests and whenWinthrop went south, the company made a similar migration and set about building up his empire in the state.The Whitewater sale came at a time when the timber giant was following the pronouncements of candidate Clintonwith keen attention. The young attorney general was vowing that as governor he would restrict the use ofclearcutting on land held by the big timber companies, such as International Paper, Georgia-Pacific andWeyerhaeuser. These paper and timber companies had gone on a logging binge in the mid-1970s, clearcuttingthousand-acre chunks of forest at a time. Clinton promised to introduce legislation banning the practice as soon ashe entered the governors office.The mysterious 101 River Development had given the Clintons and the McDougals a very good deal, selling theland for $500 an acre. Non-river front property in the area was selling at the time for nearly twice that amount.

The Whitewater sale went through in August of 1979. Clinton won the governorship in November of that year.Environmentalists eagerly awaited action from the new governor on clearcutting and other issues pertaining to theimpoverished states very serious problems with water and air pollution. But the promises of the campaign trailsoon lost their fire. Indeed Clintons commitment to them was pallid from the start. His two predecessors in thegovernors mansionDale Bumpers and David Pryorhad both tangled with the timber companies on the matter ofclearcutting with a far more vigor than was ever displayed by Clinton.The newly-elected governor formed a task force on clearcutting stocked with conservationists. The task forceswiftly took heat from loggers and executives at Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific. A startled Clinton kicked offthe greens and replaced them with industry hacks and recommended voluntary compliance with the soft newregulations.In what proved to be a fatal blow, Clinton reneged on a pledge to poultry king Don Tyson of Tyson Foods. Thegovernor refused to raise the legal weight for trucks on Arkansas highways to 80,000 pounds. In 1980, Tyson andother moneyed interest shifted their support to Republican Frank White, who soundly defeated Clinton.After Arkansas voters turned out Clinton at the end of his two-year term, Bill left the governors mansion and wentto work at the Little Rock law firm of Wright, Lindsey and Jennings. Hillary was at the Rose law firm. Both legaloutfits represented the timber giants of Arkansas before state regulatory bodies such as the Pollution Control Board

and the Department of Ecology.Clinton recaptured the governors office in 1982, the same year that Jim McDougal bough Madison GuarantySavings & Loan. Among those contributing to candidate Clintons campaign treasury were International Paper,Georgia-Pacific and Tyson Foods. Their investment was swiftly rewarded. Clinton redux was now equipped with aphilosophical approach to regulation that was highly congenial to the resource industries and to the poultryfactories.Tyson in particular became a key ally of Clinton after the latter learned his lesson from the trucking dispute. Tysonplanes ferried the First Family on its travels and Tyson funds poured into Clintons campaign coffers.In return, the poultry magnate received roughly $12 million worth of tax breaks during Clintons years as governor.Nor was Clinton diligent in monitoring the environmental record of Tyson foods or of the poultry industry ingeneral. During Clintons years as governor the White River turned into a cesspool. Animal wastes from the poultry


14/81

and cattle industry polluted the river so badly that 400 miles of streams became unfit for swimming. In 1983,Clinton dallied for 17 months before taking action to control damage from a Tyson plant in Green Forest, Arkansas,which, after a sinkhole developed, poured a million gallons a day of chicken waste into the water table.The disastrous impact of Tysons chicken farms on the Arkansas River is fairly well-known. Less notorious but evenmore toxic are the pulp mills of International Paper, Georgia-Pacific and James River. International Papersmammoth mill at Pine Bluff was one of the most toxic in the world, venting nearly two million tons of chemicalseach year into the air and water.From 1982 forward, Clinton argued that compliance to environmental standards could best be achieved on a

voluntary basis, rather than by the imposition of exigent (and politically perilous) rules and regulations. To this endGovernor Clinton stacked his pollution control board with members friendly to industry. In 1985 he promoted andsigned into law a huge tax break for industrial corporations of his state, including the big timber companies. Thiseasing of the corporate fiscal burden was offset by a regressive sales tax on the citizenry.Clintons big offering to the timber companies was a measure called the Manufacturers Investment Sales and UseTax Credit, know by its green critics as the IP bailout law, after International Paper. Under this program state taxbreaks were approved for more than $400 million in projects by International Paper and three other pulp and papermills that then state Senator Ben Allen of Little Rock called the worst corporate citizens in Arkansasall this in astate with one of the lowest per capita incomes in the nation and where 29 percent of the children and half of thestates black population lived in poverty.A few years later officials tried to keep International Paper and two Georgia-Pacific mills off a toxic waterways list,despite overwhelming evidence that they were contaminating rivers with dioxin and rendering the eating of fishfrom them an unacceptable cancer risk. Meanwhile, International Paper, while taking repeated advantage of themanufacturers sales tax credit, was ladling out money to their favorite politician, candidate Clinton.Clinton also supervised a land deal highly favorable to the timber giants. In later years, taunted with the fact thathis state ranked 48th in environmental quality, Clinton would make much of the fact that as governor he hadacquired thousands of acres for state-owned forests. Two types of deals were involved here. In one set oftransactions state-owned lands with profitable timber on them were swapped to the big companies in return forparcels of their land which had been recently clearcut. And, in other instances, the state simply acquired at inflatedprices lands which the timber companies had recently logged off its best trees.Nourished by these benefices, the timber companies and Don Tyson, urged Governor Clintonthen nearing the endof his third termto consider challenging Dale Bumpers for the senate seat he had held since the early 1970s.These predacious companies had no love for Bumpers. The senator had led the charge to reform forest policies onfederal lands, culminating in the passage of the National Forest Management Act of 1976.Bumpers was also a spirited critic of clearcutting and pesticide-spraying by the timber giants in Arkansas. But bythis time Clinton was already contemplating a run for the White House and so instead the timber companies, alongwith other corporate interests, bankrolled the Democratic Leadership CouncilClintons launching pad to thenational scene and the presidency.As president, Clinton performed many kindly deeds for big timber. But for International Paper, in particular, Clintonwrought two spectacular favors as president. He refused to take any action to stem the flow of raw log exportsfrom the West Coast, where International Paper held about a half million acres of forest land. And the generous

Habitat Conservation Plans in the southeast tirelessly promoted by Interior Secretary and fellow DLC alum BruceBabbitt allowed International Paper and Georgia-Pacific to continue to cut trees on land occupied endangeredspecies such as the red-cockaded woodpecker.When the Whitewater scandal finally exploded, Clintons attorney general Janet Reno searched for a specialprosecutor and finally came up with Robert Fiske, of the law firm of Davis, Polk and Wardell. At the time, this high-powered New York law firm was also represented International Paper in pollution cases across the country,including Arkansas.Tyson Foods, Wal-Mart and Jackson Stephens are familiar pillars of the Arkansas power structure. Yet duringClintons years as governor, the timber companies were the most potent of the lot. Combined, International Paper,Weyerhaeuser, Georgia-Pacific and Potlach controlled more than two-and-a-half million acres of land in Arkansasand operated more than 90 timber mills.

To be continued.http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair01142011.html

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author ofBeen Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: thePolitics of NatureandGrand Theft Pentagon.His newest book,Born Under a Bad Sky,ispublished by AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at:[email protected].

This essay is excerpted from the forthcoming book GreenScare: the New War on Environmentalismby Jeffrey St.Clair and Joshua Frank.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the

existing model obsolete.

Buckminster Fuller

Reply With Quote
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15/81

2. 01-18-2011 10:44 PM#2

Jan Klimkowski

Founding Member

Join Date

Sep 2008

Posts

5,639

Keith - thanks for posting this typically insightful piece from Jeffrey St Clair.

He's particularly good on the land deal at the heart of Whitewater, and on Clinton's sorry bought and owned ass.

"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."

"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."

"They are in Love. Fuck the War."

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."

The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war

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3. 01-18-2011 11:34 PM#3

Keith Millea

Member

Join Date

Oct 2008

Posts

1,939

Thanks Jan,I never got into all that Whitewater stuff.What I do know about though is how all the named timber

companies operate.The US Forest Service,and BLM (Bureau of Land Management)are Federal agencies,and

therefore political in nature.They are bound to Govt.statutes/plans.Thus,there were those that lived in the

mountains out here in a certain district that found out that the Forest Service was not following the approved

sustainable logging plan,and were overcutting.The local people took the FS to court,and actually won their case.The

Forest Service was forced to stop all logging in this District for like 10 years.Amazing!

The timber companies,on the other hand own hundreds of thousands of acres of timberland,and they have little ifany regulation held to them.So,what we got with these companies are whole areas clearcut.They had/have a policy

of cutting as much as they can NOW,and then they pack up and leave and go to Arkansas,Georgia,or Maine

etc.What's left behind is pure eco-destruction.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the


Buckminster Fuller

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4. 01-18-2011 11:55 PM#4

Magda Hassan

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It is truly heart breaking to see a forest that has been clear felled. It is something that I don't think most people

know about or have seen with their own eyes. If they did more people would be moved to prevent this sort of

crime.

"I think it would be a good idea." Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.Karl Marx.

"Well, he would, wouldn't he?"Mandy Rice-Davies, 1963, replied Ms Rice Davies when the prosecuting counsel

pointed out that Lord Astor denied an affair or having even met her.

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5. 01-19-2011 12:20 AM#5

Keith Millea

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This used to be a forest.........

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o clearcut.jpg(44.6 KB, 7 views)"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the


Buckminster Fuller

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6. 01-23-2011 12:17 AM#6

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January 21 - 23, 2011

A Concise History of the Rise and Fall of the Enviro Establishment

How Green Became the Color of Money

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR


Click here to read Part Two.Click here to read Part Three.

"Gestures of Goodwill"

Given his attenuated record in Arkansas no one should have expected President Bill Clinton to live up to hiscampaign promises of attacking special interests and defending the little guy. Any precious illusions about such

a possibility disappeared even before the inauguration, when Clinton stock-piled his administration with an

assortment of corporate lawyers (Mickey Kantor and Bernard Nussbaum), financiers (Robert Rubin of Goldman

Sachs), lobbyists (Howard Paster and Ron Brown) and corporate executives (Mack McLarty).

Eager to demonstrate to CEOs that business need not fear the Democrats, Clinton was just as accommodating to

big corporations as his Republican predecessors. He pushed through the NAFTA agreement, extended an R&D tax

break worth billions to big business, halved his proposed corporate tax increase, dropped his carbon tax and won

the enthusiastic endorsement of the auto industry by breaking a campaign pledge to force the Big Three carmakers to increase fuel efficiency by 40 percent.

By late 1994, the elite press was congratulating Clinton for his wise policies and wondering why CEOs were more

appreciative of his efforts on their behalf. For all the arguments about whether Bill Clinton is a new Democrat or

an old one, when it comes to pushing US business interests abroad, no recent president has demonstrated Clintons

willingness to roll up his sleeves and dive into the sometimes grubby details of international deal-making, wrote

the editors of Time.

Business Weekalso expressed pleasure at Clintons approach.Guess whos coming to dinnerlunch and

breakfastsince Bill Clinton moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? asked the magazine. After years of

hobnobbing with Republican presidents, blue-chip CEOs are discovering that they can do brisk business with a

Democratic chief executive, too.Business Weekobserved that Clintons outreach campaign [to the corporate

sector] transcends anything the Democrats attempted before. The DNCs finance director, Terry McAuliffe, was

quoted as gloating that big corporate donors were screaming to give us checks.

One man much pleased with the Democrats was Dwayne Andreas, top man at Archer-Daniels-Midland. Once known

as the kingpin of GOP fundraisinghis signature was on the check found Nixons Watergate burglarsAndreas

changed trains in 1992 when it looked as if Clinton might capture the presidency. In the two years that followed

Clintons coronation as the Democratic candidate, Andreas gave the party some $270,000 in soft money

contributions.

In return for his public cheerleading for Clintons 1993 budget plan, Andreas got ethanol (the alternative corn-

based fuel of which ADM was the worlds largest producer) exempted from Clintons BTU tax proposal, an
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exemption that opened the door to so many other challenges that ultimately the entire plan was scuttled. Clinton

also quietly maintained a Bush-era tax subsidy for ethanol that ended up costing the government an estimated

$3.4 billion.

But Clintons biggest gift, granted a mere one week after Andreas co-chaired a fundraising dinner that netted the

Democrats $2.5 million in June of 1994, was an EPA ruling that by 1996 one-tenth of all gasoline sold in the United

States had to contain ethanol. ADM, which produced 70 percent of the nations ethanol, gained an estimated $100

million a year as a result of this environmentally dubious decision.Don Tyson, the Arkansas poultry tycoon and head of Tyson Foods, seemed to prosper no matter which party was in

power. But his success during the early Clinton years was so staggering that he and his company were soon being

investigated by a special prosecutor. The immediate focus: gifts of Super Bowl tickets, travel and a scholarship for

the girlfriend of Clintons first Agriculture Secretary, Mike Espy, who was charged with overseeing andenforcing

rules on the chicken industry. (Espy was acquitted in a jury trial. But Tyson Foods pleaded guilty to corruption

charges and agreed to pay $6 million in fines.)

Tysons expansion into the fishing industrysoon becoming the second largest company fishing for Pacific

whitingalso became the subject of controversy. In 1993 and 1994, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown took the

highly unusual step of vetoing his own departments Fisheries Council in two decisions that collectively meant

millions of dollars for Tyson Foods.

In the first case, which came a year after Tyson purchased the Arctic Alaska Fishing Company (and renamed it

Tyson Seafood Group), Brown allotted 70 percent of the highly-prized whiting catch to Tyson and other companies

with massive factory trawlers and reserved only 30 percent for small fishermen, who have been increasingly edged

out of the business by the giant firms. The Commerce Departments Pacific Fisheries Management Council had

suggested that the trawlers get just 26 percent.

In 1994, the Council ruled that factory trawlers, of which Tyson owned two, should pay 20 times more for permits

than small boat owners, reflecting their far larger capacity. But Brown stepped in again, ruling that the ratio be cut

to 12-to-1, thereby saving Tyson $800,000 with the stroke of a pen.

* * *

When Clinton came to DC, he brought Mack McLarty, formerly with the natural gas behemoth ARKLA and a golfing

pal of the tycoons of Arkansas, with him as chief of staff. Along with the corporate lobbyist Vernon Jordon, McLarty

played a decisive role in choosing Clintons cabinet, including Alice Rivlin at the Office of Management and Budget,Bruce Babbitt at Interior, Ron Brown at Commerce and former Al Gore staffers Carol Browner as administrator of

the EPA and Katie McGinty as supervisor of the White House Office of Environmental Quality.

All were cut from the same pro-business, anti-regulatory cloth spun by the Democratic Leadership Council. In a

move that was later to yield useful dividends, the Clinton transition team also stocked the administration with a

cluster of 24 top-level staffers from the ranks of DC-based environmental groups. At the head was George

Frampton, former president of the Wilderness Society, picked to serve as assistant secretary of Interior.

It didnt take McLarty long to exert his veto power over environmental policy. The administrations initial budget

request to Congress included a provision to reform federal policies governing gold mining and subsidized grazing

and timber sales on public lands. Widely supported by greens, these provisions would protected millions of acres of

public forest and grassland from clearcutting, mining and

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