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The environment is getting killed...by Clinton and Gore
Mercury News
Thu. Sept. 11, 1996

BY ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Nowhere has the Clinton-Gore campaign drawn a deeper rhetorical line
in the sand than over the question of the environment.  Understandably so.
Poll after poll shows that the voters take green issues very seriously
and adjust their support of candidates and parties accordingly.
No one knew this better than the now-exiled Clinton strategist Dick Morris.
Back at the start of this year, he began telling his boss that enviro
issues were political dynamite, particularly with the all-important
swing contingent, Republican women.

So this year, Bill Clinton and Al Gore have been pounding home
this message: A vote for Republicans is a vote for environmental pillage.
Rallying to the support of the White House have been all the major
environmental organizations.  The approving chorus reached its crescendo
at the democratic Convention in Chicago, when the penultimate day
of the proceedings was reserved for hour upon hour of railing
against Republican rapists of nature.

That same day, the League of Conservation Voters, formerly headed by
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, sounded the final trump, with
the ringing declaration that "Bill Clinton's environmental record
in office is one of the best of any president."  Clinton's running mate
prompted even greater exhuberance from the League: "Al Gore is
without question the most committed environmentalist ever
to hold the office of vice president."

The league-- an influential organization-- had already drawn
considerable attention this year, with a well-publicized
intervention in the tight Oregon Senate race held to fill Bob
Packwood's seat earlier this year.  The league threw its weight
behind the Democrat Ron Wyden and later claimed it had given him
the winning edge.  A couple of months later, the league issued
its Dirty Dozen list of enemies of nature who are up for re-election
this year.  All are Republicans, and the league iscommitting money
to campaigns against them.

Nothing better illustrates the political corruption of the national
environmental movement than these frenetic endorsements of Democrats,
starting with Clinton and Gore.  This year, the big green  groups
have become nothing more than a public relations operation
of the Democratic National Committee.

To cite Clinton as a committed environmentalist is, by any objective
standard, a sick joke.  We need go no further than the founder
of the League of Conservation Voters, America's senior green crusader,
David Brower.  In June, Brower stated categorically that the Clinton-Gore
record on the environment "is worse than the Reagan-Bush record."

It's a startling statement but a valid one.  The 1993-94 Congress,
with Democrats controlling both houses and the White House,
produced fewer pro-environment laws than any Congress since
Dwight Eisenhower's time.  Within months of taking office,
the Clinton administration backed off promises to reform mining,
grazing and logging practices on federal lands.  Directly betraying
specific campaign pledges in Ohio, Al Gore announced that the toxic
wast incinerator outside East Liverpool, Ohio, would be fired up.

By the end of that congressional session, *before* the Gingrich takeover,
the Clinton team had engineered the resumption of logging in ancient
forests, sold out the Everglades and forced through the North American
Free Trade Agreement, without doubt the most destructive environmental
legislation since the Green Revolution began in the Nixon era.

The League of Conservation Voters makes a particular point of all the
"excellent appointments of champions for the environment."
These supposed chamions honored by the League include Carol Browner,
head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Tim Wirth, undersecretary
of state, and Babbitt himself.  The common feature of all these
appointees is that they have used their environmental credentials
to shove vile legislation down the throats of their former colleagues.

From her first day in office, Browner targeted the Delaney Clause,
a piece of legislation dating from 1958, much hated by the food
and chemical industries because it prohibited known carcinogens
from processed foods.  Four years later, in alliance with the Republicans,
she had her way.

koWirth has been the point man on free trade and thus has supervised
the annulment of U.S. environmental laws on dirty gas, dolphin-safe
tuna and the import of dealdy PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls,
from Canada and Mexico.

As secretary of the interior, Babbitt has overseen the administrative
dismantling of the Endangered Species Act.  In a series of Munich-type
concessions, mining companies, real estate developers and
timber companies can now legally destroy previously protected
habitat.

For every Republican targeted in the league's Dirty Dozen,
there are two Democrats easily as bad.  As for the league's ecstacies
about the vice president, we should remember that the person
supervising the appalling environmental performances of the last
four years has been Gore.  The appointments were his, and his is
the fundamental philosophy: negotiated retreats in the face
of corporate presure and a relinquishment of efforts to prevent
pollution, which is now to be "managed" through "market forces"
and technological fixes.

-----
 
  If Big Brother comes to America, he will not be a fearsome,
  foreboding figure with a heart-chilling, omnipresent glare
  as in _1984_.  He will come with a smile on his face,
  a quip on his lips, a wave to the crowd, and a press that
  (a) dutifully reports the suppressive measures he is taking
  to save the nation from internal chaos and foreign threat;
  and (b) gingerly questions whether he will be able to succeed.

  Michael Parenti, _Inventing_Reality_ (1986)