Crimes Against Nature (25 page)

Some of the largest federal subsidies are going to western resource industries — grazing, lumber, mining, and agribusiness — that have spawned the most vocal attacks against federal environmental laws. These industries are run by some of the richest and most radically conservative people in the country, men like Richard Mellon Scaife, Charles Koch, and Joseph Coors. Their intense hatred for federal government is, in a supreme irony, combined with an intense reliance on federal subsidies. Let’s not forget that we taxpayers give away $65 billion every year in subsidies to big oil, and more than $35 billion a year in subsidies to western welfare cowboys, many of whom are destroying our public lands and waterways. Those subsidies helped create the billionaires who financed the right-wing revolution on Capitol Hill and put George W. Bush in the White House. And now they have indentured servants in Washington demanding that we have capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich.

The free market has been all but eliminated in an energy sector dominated by cartels and monopolies and distorted by obscene subsidies to the filthiest polluters. Our once vibrant agricultural markets are now controlled by multinational monopolies with no demonstrated loyalty to our country or its laws. Media consolidation is transforming journalism from a forum of ideas into a marketplace exclusively for commerce.

If you haven’t already done so, say good-bye to the merchants who anchor our local economies and communities. While profits from the big-box stores flow to distant corporate headquarters, struggling small businesses and farmers recycle their profits back into their communities through their support of Boy Scouts, Little Leagues, and Rotary Clubs, through local commerce, and by paying local employees a living wage and benefits. They pay taxes (a duty shirked by 61 percent of large corporations),
¹
and they don’t move their corporate headquarters to Bermuda and their operations to Taiwan. These local entrepreneurs are the training schools for civic leadership, and the loss of them sounds the death knell for consumer choice, civic life, and community investment.

Teddy Roosevelt often observed that American democracy is too sturdy to be destroyed by a foreign enemy. But, he warned, it could easily be destroyed by “malefactors of great wealth” who would subvert our political institutions from within.
²

Roosevelt was no isolated Cassandra. Our greatest political icons from Thomas Jefferson onward have warned Americans against allowing corporate power to dominate our political landscape. In his most famous speech, President Dwight Eisenhower cautioned Americans about the grave danger of falling under control of “the military-industrial complex.”
³
In 1863, in the depths of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln is said to have lamented, “I have the Confederacy before me and the bankers behind me, and for my country I fear the bankers most.” Franklin Roosevelt echoed that sentiment when he warned that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.”
⁴

While communism is the control of business by government, fascism is the control of government by business. My
American Heritage Dictionary
defines fascism as “a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership together with belligerent nationalism.” Sound familiar?

The rise of fascism across Europe in the 1930s offers plenty of lessons on how corporate power can undermine democracy. While the United States confronted its devastating depression by reaffirming its democracy — enacting mininum wage and Social Security laws to foster a middle class, passing income taxes and antitrust legislation to limit the power of corporations and the wealthy, and commissioning parks and public lands and museums to create employment and safeguard the commons — Spain, Germany, and Italy reacted to their economic crises in a very different manner. Industrialists forged unholy alliances with right-wing radicals and their charismatic leaders to win elections in Italy and Germany, and then flooded the ministries, running them for their own profit, pouring government money into corporate coffers, and awarding lucrative contracts to prosecute wars and build infrastructure. Benito Mussolini’s inside view of the process led him to complain that “fascism should more appropriately be called ‘corporatism’ because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

These elected governments used the provocation of terrorist attacks, continual wars, and invocations of patriotism and homeland security to privatize the commons, tame the press, muzzle criticism by opponents, and turn government over to corporate control. “It is always a simple matter to drag the people along,” noted Hitler’s sidekick, Hermann Goering, “whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

The White House has clearly grasped the lesson. The Bush administration won’t ask its industry paymasters to protect their chemical and nuclear plants, but instead has devised an alert system seemingly designed to keep Americans in a constant state of apprehension. As to the war on terror, “It may never end,” warned Vice President Cheney in October 2001. “At least, not in our lifetime.”

The historian Alex Carey observed that the twentieth century has been largely shaped by three trends: “The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.” The Bush administration marks the triumph of this last trend. Under George W. Bush, American government is dominated by corporate power to an extent unprecedented since the Gilded Age, when the sugar, oil, steel, and railroad trusts owned government officials and traded them like commodities.

While claiming to embrace its values, the Bush administration has stolen the soul of the Republican Party. The president and his cronies have taken the conserve out of conservative. Instead of rugged individualism, they’ve created a clubhouse that dispenses no-bid contracts to Halliburton. They talk about law and order while encouraging corporate polluters to violate the law. They proclaim free markets while advocating corporate welfare. They claim to love democracy while undermining open government. They applaud state rights and local control, but they are the first to tear up local zoning laws and bully states into lowering environmental standards to make way for corporate profit taking. They exalt property rights, but only when it’s the right of a property owner to use his property to pollute or destroy someone else’s. Where are these property rights advocates when big coal is demolishing homes in Appalachia, when coal-bed methane barons are destroying Wyoming ranches, when the hog barons are defiling property in North Carolina?

While condemning environmentalists as “radicals,” they promote the radical notion that clean water, clean air, and healthy loved ones are luxuries we can’t afford.

They invoke Christianity to justify the rape of the land, violating manifold Christian precepts that require us to be careful stewards. Rather than elevating the human spirit, their interpretation of Scripture emphasizes the grimmest vision of the human condition. They embrace intolerance, selfishness, pride, arrogance toward creation, and irresponsibility to the community and future generations.

The easiest thing for a political leader to do is appeal to our fear, our hatred, our greed, our prejudices. My most poignant memory of my father came in the days after he died. I was 14 at the time. After his wake at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, we took him on the train to Washington, D.C. I will never forget the hundreds of thousands of people who lined the tracks — blacks, whites, priests, nuns, rabbis, hippies, men in uniform — many with tears running down their faces, many waving American flags or carrying signs bidding “Good-bye Bobby.” From Union Station in Washington we rode in a convoy past the Mall, where thousands of homeless men were encamped in shanties left from Martin Luther King Jr.’s last campaign, and they came to the edge of street and stood with their heads bowed as we passed, crossing the Potomac and heading up the hill at Arlington to bury my father under a simple stone next to his brother.

The faces I saw that day were a cross section of America, the faces of the American community. And yet four years later, I learned from polling data that many of the white people who had supported my father in the 1968 Maryland primary, and had then waved to us from beside that railway track, had voted not for George McGovern in the 1972 primary, but for George Wallace, a man whose philosophies were diametrically opposed to everything my father stood for. It struck me then — and my observations have confirmed this many times since — that every nation, and every individual, has a dark side and a light side. And the simplest strategy for a politician is to exploit our baser instincts.

Our greatest politicians have accepted the tougher task of appealing to our sense of community, asking Americans to transcend their own self-interest. Throughout our history they have persuaded us to find the hero in ourselves, and to make sacrifices on behalf of future generations — and for the principles that underpin America’s unique mission. John Winthrop, the Moses of the Puritan migration, said that mission was to build a “city on a hill” — an example to the world of what nations can accomplish if we work together in community. Winthrop’s 1630 sermon — arguably the most important speech in American history — called for his fellow citizens to steer away from the greed and power politics that had corrupted the old-world culture. He urged people to build a land that would be “a model for Christian charity.” Winthrop’s words are often quoted by neoconservatives who invariably omit his warning against the temptation to elevate commercial values lest we “disappear into the lure of real estate.”

But instead of inspiring us with invocations for courage, community, and sacrifice, President Bush’s campaign strategy revolves around fear-mongering and appeals to selfishness — Karl Rove’s two
t
’s: taxes and terrorists. Instead of can-do American ingenuity, this is the administration of “can’t do.” It has constructed a philosophy of government based on self-interest run riot: It has borrowed $9 trillion from our children and looted our Treasury, poisoned our water and air, destroyed our public lands, and sacrificed our health — all to enrich the wealthy few. It has reduced the honorable profession of public service to an opportunity for plunder and self-enrichment.

In
The Shame of the Cities,
his watershed 1904 study of the American political system, Lincoln Steffens concluded that the corruption and failures of American democracy stemmed largely from a single source — the control of government by businesspeople acting in their own self-interest. Steffens characterized that formula as a kind of treason because “the effect of it is literally to change the form of government from one that is representative of the people to an oligarchy representative of the special interests.”

Generations of Americans will pay for the Republican campaign debt to the energy industry and other big polluters with global instability, depleted national coffers, and increased vulnerability to oil-market price shocks. They will also pay with reduced prosperity and quality of life at home. Pollution from power plants and traffic smog will continue to skyrocket. Carbon dioxide emissions will aggravate global warming. Acid rain and mercury will continue to sterilize our lakes, poison our fish, and sicken our people. The administration’s attacks on science and the law have put something perhaps even greater at risk — our values and our democracy.

George W. Bush and his court are treating our country as a grab bag for the robber barons, doling out the commons to giant polluters. Together they are cashing in our air, water, aquifers, wildlife, and public lands and divvying up the loot. They are turning our politicians into indentured servants who repay campaign contributions with taxpayer-funded subsidies and lucrative contracts and reign in law enforcement against a booming corporate crime wave.

If they knew the truth, most Americans would share my fury that this president is allowing his corporate cronies to steal America from our children.

I want to thank Jann Wenner, who convinced me to summarize George W. Bush’s environmental offenses for a
Rolling Stone
article published in December 2003 and who conceived the title of this book. Thanks also to my lifelong friend Peter Kaplan, who steered me to my editor, Mark Bryant, at HarperCollins, persuaded me to write this book, and then read and critiqued the manuscript.

Many people worked double-time to help me get this book out quickly. In particular, I owe thanks to:

Mary Beth Postman, who worked around the clock to carefully coordinate a baffling array of drafts and footnotes. I am grateful for her motivational skills and good judgment.

Lori Morash transferred my long-hand chicken scratch into print at lightning speed, often laboring on nights, weekends, and holidays.

David Ludlum coordinated fact-checking for not only this book but also an article in
Rolling Stone
and another in
The Nation,
both of which inspired this book. I am grateful for his hard work, care, thoroughness, and commitment, not to mention his willingness to relinquish a long-planned Texas vacation to work on the endnotes.

I’m indebted to my superb editors: Delia Marshall, who, with unerring judgment, carved my 100,000-word manuscript in half and reorganized the chapters into a sensible configuration; and Mark Bryant, who helped me polish the book with brilliant editorial recommendations. Mark’s confidence in the book, and our long conceptual conversations about it, made a difficult task fun.