Cockburn
/ St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War
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Today's
Stories
June
8, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
The March on Rumsfeld's House: Is
the US Anti-War Movement Running Out of Steam?
Phillip
Cryan
Torture, Bombings & the Press in
Colombia
Mark
Zepezauer
Getting Reagan Wrong
Mickey
Z.
Reagan, Radicals and Repetitive Reactions
John
L. Hess
Reagan and Bush in Normandy
Alex
Dawoody
Reagan and Saddam: the Unholy Alliance
Christopher
Fons
Reagan in a Word: Mean
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Some Tenets are More Important Than Others
Ahmed
Bouzid
Nothing New Under the Israeli Sun
Michael
Leon
Bush the Narcissist
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Nature of Ronald Reagan: Will
the Earth Accept His Corpse?
June
7, 2004
Jason
Leopold
New Enron Docs Show Lay and Skilling
Knew of California Trading Schemes
Patrick
Cockburn
The Baghdad Bombings: the Pattern
of Attacks is Changing
Dennis
Hans
From Afghanistan to El Salvador: Reagan's
Dark Global Legacy
Tracy
McLellan
Nader at the National Press Club:
a Glimpse at a Different Kind of Politics
Bill
Blum
The Myth of the Gipper: Reagan Didn't
End the Cold War
Ben
Tripp
What I Owe Reagan: the Brylcreemed
Bullshitter
Susan
Davis
Reagan, In a Nutshell
Phil
Gasper
Reagan: Goodbye and Good Riddance
Website
of the Day
A Child's ABCs of Terrorism
June
5 / 6, 2004
C.
Douglas Lummis
Toward a Universal Declaration of
Human Wrongs
Saul
Landau
Five Cubans in Prison, Victims of Bush's Obsession
Dave
Lindorff
John Walker Lindh, Revisited
Brian
Cloughley
Apologies, Please, From Those Who Got It Wrong
Rich
Gibson
The Grenada 17: the Last Prisoners of the Cold War are Black
Elaine
Cassel
A Sorry FBI
Cathrin
Schütz
On the Ruins of Yugoslavia
Ben
Tripp
Call Me, Mr. Cassandra
Kurt
Nimmo
The Madness of King George
Ron
Jacobs
They Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Unless We Make It So)
Laura
Flanders
The Lynne Cheney Show?
Lenni
Brenner
Renaissance Noir: Caravaggio at the Met
Abigail
Jones
Whatever Happened to Lori Berenson, President Toledo's Trophy
Prisoner?
Mark
Latham
Nothing Bush Said Has Changed Our Hopes
Gerry
Adams
I Was Photographed While Tortured, Too
Toni
Solo
Venezuela 2004, Nicaragua's Contra War Reprised
Derek
Seidman
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old
M.
Junaid Alam
Torture is Just the Symptom
Matt
Siegfried
An American Way of War
Dave
Zirin
The Politics of Charles Barkley
Poets'
Basement
Albert, Krieger, St. Clair
Website
of the Weekend
Overnight Sensations
June
4, 2004
Chris
Floyd
Masked and Anonymous: Inside America's
Animal House
Cornwell
/ Penketh
Exit Tenet: the Fall of a Fall Guy
Wayne
Madsen
Apprehension & Frustation: Neo-Cons on the Brink
Greg
Moses
Agitating for Workers' Rights in Iraq
Yitzak
Laor
Before Rafah
Ghali
Hassan
Ambassador to Death Squads: Who is Negroponte?
Jane
Stillwater
God, the Rapture and Vera Casey
CounterPunch
Wire
D-Day Reconsidered: Was It Really Worth the Carnage?
John
Borowski
Woo-Wooism v. Meteorites: Why the Dems Are No Match for Bush
Mike
Griffin
Caterpillar's Assault on the UAW
Alexander Cockburn
Has Bush Gone Over the Edge?
Website
of the Day
Aquae Urbis Romae:
Water and Empire
June
3, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Iran's Nuclear Dilemma
Dr.
Susan Block
America in tha Hood
Michael
Donnelly
The Bully and the Brahmin
John
Chuckman
Insanity in America: US Ranks Number
One in the Deranged
Christopher
Brauchli
The Return of Cardinal Law: Rome
on $12,000 a Month
Samia
Nassar Melki
Caravaggio in Iraq
Mike
Whitney
Subverting Justice: Pre-Trial Ruminations in the Padilla Case
Diane
Rejman
Memorial Day Isn't Just About the Dead
Scott
Morris
"WMDs" in Cuba
Paul
de Rooij
Palestinian Misery in Perspective
June
2, 2004
Brian
Cloughley
The Liars are Winning
Ray
McGovern
How Far Would They Go? Beware "Credible
Intelligence"
Josh
Frank
The Anybody But Bush Offensive
Mike
Whitney
The Afghanistan Failure: Bush's Warlord Patriots
Jackie
Corr
Iraq and Ireland: Three Tales from Butte, Montana
Robert
Jensen
The US Lost the Iraq War...and It's a Good Thing, Too
Alexander
Cockburn
"Bye, Bye Boonville!"
June
1, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Instant Karma: Bush's Sins Catch Up
with Him
William
A. Cook
Manufacturers of Fear and Loathing in
Rafah
Dave
Lindorff
Will the Times Clean House?
Kevin
Zeese
Inside the Kerry / Nader Meeting: Did
the Kerry Campaign Lie About What Was Discussed?
Jacob
Levich
Coming Soon: Return of the Draft,
a Bipartisan Production
Kathy
Kelly
Voices in the Wilderness v. the US
Government
Website
of the Day
Remind Us
May
29 / 31, 2004
Lee
Ballinger / Dave Marsh
The Origins of Memorial Day
Janine
Pommy Vega
Memo for Memorial Day
Mike
Ferner
On Their Way to Abu Ghraib
Alfred
W. McCoy
The Cruel Shadow: the Long History of CIA Torture Research
Douglas
Valentine
An Open Letter to the NYT: Questions, Questions, Questions
Chris
White
First to Fight Culture: a Former Marine on the Marine Motto
Bruce
Anderson
The Awful Injustice to Tai Abreu
David
Vest
Get Ready for Kerry's War: the 100 Year Quagmire
Saul
Landau
Torture: the Logical Outcome of Bush's War for Democracy?
Kurt
Nimmo
Abu Hamza al-Mazri, Made in the USA
Elaine
Cassel
The Secrets of Surveillance: Ashcroft, Snoops, and Gag Orders
Will
Potter
The New War on "Terror": Protest the Torture of Chimps;
Get Arrested as a "Terrorist"
Ben
Tripp
They Fiddled While Nero Got the Matches
Dr.
Susan Block
Save Abu Ghraib!
Kia
Kojouri
Nukes, the US, Israel and Iran: an
Interview with Sasan Fayazmanesh
Mickey
Z
D-Day: 60 Years is Enough!
Jon
Brown
Correcting the Correction at the Times
Patrick
B. Barr
Pre-emptive War Insurance
Stephen
Gowans
Bad Apples in a Bad Barrel
Tom
Gorman
Gore on Bush in Iraq: the Approach May be Exotic, But It's Hardly
New
Dave
Zirin
Fighting for Boxers' Rights: an Interview with Eddie Mustafa
Muhammad
Gregory
Weiher
Bush to Arabs: "Go Get Yourself Some Democracy"
Erik
Cummings
Jung Meets Bush
Poets'
Basement
Davies, Ford, Kearney, McLellan and Albert
May
28, 2004
Rafael
Rodriguez Cruz
Curtain of Silence on the Cuban 5
Greg
Moses
Bush's Misleading Speech on Abu Ghraib
Dave
Lindorff
Dissing Independent Contractors:
Those Who Do the Dirty Work
Norman
Solomon
Leaping for Lies at the Times
Rep.
Bill Delahunt
Bush's Cruel New Rules on Cuba
Paul
McGeough
Chalabi Baba and the 40 Thieves
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
India and Nehru: 40 Years After
Alexander
Cockburn
NYTs: "Maybe We Did Screw Up...a
Little"
May
27, 2004
Amy
Goodman / David Goodman
Fatal Errors: the Lies of Our Times
Douglas
Valentine
Ragging the Dogs of War at the
NYTs
John
L. Hess
The Times Confesses...Kind Of
Stew
Albert
Dellinger, the Wrestling Pacifist
Dave
Dellinger
a 1993 Interview
Christopher
Brauchli
Tax Breaks for Scions...to Hell with Poor Kids
Rampton
/ Stauber
Banana Republicans: Pumping Irony
May
26, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Goodbye, David Dellinger: He Was a
Friend of Ours
Robert
Fisk
The Things Bush Didn't Say in His Speech
Zeynep
Toufe
New Draft UN Resolution Permits Perpetual Occupation
Conn
Hallinan
Bush and Sharon: the Oil Connection
Tom
Stephens
2 + 2 is On My Mind: More Morons
and War Crimes
Derek
Medley
Protesting Gov. Bigot
CounterPunch
Wire
FBI Abducts Artist; Seizes Art
Andrew
Cockburn
The Trail to Tehran
May
25, 2004
Joe
Bageant
The Covert Kingdom: On Earth as It
is in Texas
Col.
Dan Smith
A Question of Human Dignity
Gary
Handschumacher
Visiting Lori Berenson: Time to Bring Her Home
Toni
Solo
A Developing War in the Andes
Marc
Estrin
September Song: Disturbing Questions
About 9/11
Stephen
Banko, III
A Vietnam Vet on "Supporting the
Troops"
Website
of the Day
The Wizard of Whimsy
May
24, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Dan Senor is Safe!
Kurt
Nimmo
Dirty Tricks & TortureGate: the
Missing Taguba Pages
Sam
Hamod
Gen. Zinni: "Wrong War, Wrong
Place, Wrong Time"
Mike
Whitney
The Wedding was a Bomb
Stan
Goff
Open Season on MAMs
Image
of the Day
A Photo from Abu Ghraib We Didn't See on the Front Page of the
NYTs
May
22 / 23, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
Colin Powell, a Political Obituary
Jeffrey
St. Clair
When War is Swell: Bush and the Carlyle Group
Elizabeth
Weill-Greenberg
Her Son Was Told He Wouldn't See Combat; Now He's Dead: an Interview
with Sue Niederer
Brian
Cloughley
America is Committing War Crimes in Iraq
Saul
Landau
Democracy in Latin America: Great for Investors; Not So Good
for People
Brandy
Baker
Feminists Stand By Their Man: Abortion, Judges and Kerry
Randall
Robinson
Bushwhacked in the Caribbean
Uri
Avnery
The Rape of Rafah
Ben
Tripp
Assume the Worst
Bruce
Anderson
News from Ecotopia: the Truth About the Wine Business
Josh
Ruebner
Why I Burned My Israeli Military Papers
Peter
Wolson, Ph. D.
Exhibitionistic Revenge at Abu Ghraib
Chloe
Cockburn
In Defense of "Troy": What Hector Could Teach Rummy
Linda
Burnham
Sexual Domination in Uniform: an American Value
Adrien
Rain Burke
War of the Necrophiliacs: Spc. Sabrina Harman and Her Corpse
David
Krieger
Charting a New Course for US Nuclear Policy
Ron
Jacobs
Turnaround
Poets'
Basement
Ford, Albert & LaMorticella
May 21, 2004
Ray
Close
The Canards of the Apologists
Christopher
Brauchli
"The Object of Torture is Torture"
Amira
Hass
Darkness at Noon
Jack
McCarthy
Camilo Mejia: Can the Son of a Sandinista Get a Fair Trial from
the US Army?
Bill
Kauffman
Nader v. Bush
Omar
Barghouti
No More Tears for America
Ghali
Hassan
Moral Failure of the "Free World" in Gaza
Christopher
Reed
How the CIA Taught the Portuguese to
Torture
Website
of the Day
Eric Idle on the Bush Administration: Fuck You, So Very Much
May
20, 2004
Andrew
Cockburn
The Truth About Chalabi
Kathy
Kelly
A Visit from the FBI
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Brown and Bored of Education in India
Tom
Stephens & John Philo
The War Crimes of Bush, Cheney & Co.
Sam
Bahour / Michael Dahan
Genocide by Public Policy
Robert
Ovetz
Ending the Race for the Last Turtle
Billy
Wilson
The Most Important Thing I Learned at School This Year
Website
of the Day
Rafah Today
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
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Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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|
June
8, 2004
The
Nature of Ronald Reagan
Will
the Earth Accept His Corpse?
By
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
In early October of 1983, I found myself
at the old Weir Cook airport in Indianapolis awaiting the arrival
of David Brower, the great environmentalist. Brower emerged from
the plane, his face aglow with impish triumph. We hustled down
the terminal to the airport bar where he imparted the momentous
news that his nemesis James Watt, the messianic Secretary of
Interior, had just been evicted from his post in the Reagan administration.
Watt had doomed himself by
denouncing the members of the federal coal-leasing commission
as "a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple." The
commissioners had shown the audacity to resist Watt's demented
shale-oil scheme, which sought to transform the Great Plains
into a moonlike landscape of craters and toxic slush ponds. So
like Earl Butz before him, Watt's political obituary was written
with a racist slur. It's probably fitting that he fell from such
a self-inflicted trifle. After all, he was an unrepentent bigot,
just like his boss Ronnie. Ask any Apache.
Of course, the Christian fundamentalist
and apostle of strip-mining from Wyoming nearly lost his job
over another bone-headed misdemeanor: his attempt to bar the
Beach Boys from performing at a 4th of July concert on the National
Mall. Reagan had to intervene personally on behalf of that All-American
band, whose music could have provided the soundtrack for the
sunny brand of trickle-down utopianism the president was trying
to force-feed the country in those days. The Gipper, who, if
nothing else, always demonstrated a keen pr sense, may well have
lost confidence in Watt at that precise moment.
But the Interior Secretary,
who once declared that the end of the Earth was so close at hand
that there was no reason to fret about conserving ecosystems
for the long haul, had been on the ropes from the beginning of
his tenure, due in large part to the Dump Watt campaign initiated
by Brower and his group Friends of the Earth only weeks after
Watt's nomination was confirmed by the US senate. Within a few
months, Friends of the Earth had gathered more than two million
signatures on a petition calling for Watt's removal. In those
days, the right to petition the government still seemed to stand
for something.
Brower loathed Watt, but viewed
him as a comical figure, a corrupt moralist sprung from the pages
of a Thackery novel. He reserved his real animosity for the appalling
Reagan, the supreme Confidence Artist of American politics.
Unlike many liberals, Brower
never wrote off Reagan as an incompetent and incoherent stooge.
He knew better. Brower, the archdruid, and Reagan, the union-busting
snitch, had sparred with each other across the decades-- first
in California over parks and wild rivers, pesticide spraying,
nuclear power and the governor's brutal attacks on the peaceable
citizens of Brower's hometown of Berkeley; and later around the
globe over wilderness, endangered species, the illegal war on
Nicaragua and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
During the pitched battles
to save some of the world's largest trees, Brower and his cohorts
goaded Reagan into making his infamous declaration: "Once
you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all." That Zen
koan-like pronouncement pretty much summed up Reagan's philosophy
of environmental tokenism. Later, Reagan propounded the thesis
that trees generated more air pollution than coal-fired power
plants. For the Gipper, the only excuse for Nature was to serve
as a backdrop for photo-ops, just like in his intros for Death
Valley Days.
Brower viewed Reagan as a mean-spirited
and calculating politician, entirely cognizant of and culpable
for his crimes. He refused to allow the old man access to the
twin escape hatches of plausible deniablity and senile dementia.
Born a year apart, the two
men were part of the same generation and both had spent most
of their lives in California. Yet, the tenor of their lives couldn't
have been more different. In World War II Brower served as an
instructor for the famous 10th Mountain Division and returned
home a pacifist. He didn't talk much about his war experience,
preferring to brag about the number of Sierran peaks he'd bagged
(70 first ascents) or the wild rivers he'd floated.
Reagan spent World War II in
Hollywood making racist propaganda films to inflame the fever
for a war that tens of thousands of others would die fighting
in. Years later he boasted (that is: lied) about liberating the
Nazi death camps, even as he was forced to defend his bizarre
decision to bestow presidential honors on the dead at the cemetery
in Bitburg, Germany, final resting place for the blood-drenched
members of the Waffen SS. Reagan possessed a special talent for
the suspension of disbelief when it came to the facts of his
own life. Perhaps, if the Earth in Simi Valley refuses to receive
his corpse, the custodians of Bitburg could erect a cenotaph
for Reagan on those chilly grounds.
After a couple of hours spent
draining Tangueray-powered martinis at that airport bar in Indianapolis,
some of the initial glow gradually dissipated from Brower's face.
"You know, Jeffrey, we may soon come to miss old Watt,"
Brower predicted.
He was right, of course. James
Watt proved to be the greatest fundraising gimmick the big environmental
groups ever stumbled across, far outperforming panda calendars
and postcards of baby Harp seals about to fall victim to the
fur-trader's skull-crushing club. During Watt's tenure, the top
10 environmental groups more than doubled their combined budgets
and for a brief time became the most powerful public interest
lobby on the Hill.
Watt's approach to the plunder
of the planet seethed with an evangelical fervor. He brought
with him to Washington a gang of libertarian missionaries, mostly
veterans of the Coors-funded Mountain States Legal Foundation,
who referred to themselves as the Colorado Crazies. Their mission:
privatize the public estate. Many of them were transparent crooks
who ended up facing indictment and doing time in federal prison
for self-dealing and public corruption. They gave away billions
in public timber, coal and oil to favored corporations, leaving
behind toxic scars where there used to be wild forests, trout
streams and deserts. These thieves were part of the same claque
of race-baiting zealots who demonized welfare mothers as swindlers
of the public treasury.
Watt, who was himself charged
with 25 felony counts of lying and obstruction of justice, never
hid his rapine agenda behind soft, made-for-primetime rhetoric.
He never preached about win-win solutions, ecological forestry
or sustainable development. From the beginning, James Watt's
message was clear: grab it all, grab it now. God wills it so.
The message was so high-pitched and unadulterated that it provoked
a fierce global resistance that frustrated Watt at nearly every
turn. In the end, he achieved almost nothing for the forces of
darkness.
Soon, Watt's divinely-inspired
vigilantism against nature would be replaced by a more calculating
approach, a kinder and gentler path to exploitation, that reached
a terrible crescendo under Clinton and Gore, a team which, according
to Brower's expert calculation, did more damage to the American
environment in their first four years in office than Reagan and
Bush I accomplished in 12 years.
Still there's reason to miss
Watt and Reagan. Their brazen contempt for the world inspired
ordinary people to rise up against the leaders of their government
on behalf of the spotted owl and Yellowstone grizzly--rise up,
and on occasion, actually rout them. Today even Watt's minions,
like Steven Griles and Gale Norton, who are now directing the
berserker environmental policies of the Bush 2 administration,
don't ride nearly as tall in the saddle as Reagan and Watt did
in the early 1980s, when it seemed that real demons stalked the
earth.
Fade to black.
What follows is an excerpt
on the Reagan years from my book, Been
Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature
(Common Courage Press).
Reagan's
Crazies
The corporate counter-attack
on greens began with the rise of the Sagebrush Rebels, an amalgam
of ranchers, corporate executives, free-market economists and
right-wing politicians who decried environmentalism as socialism-by-another-name
and as a backdoor assault on property rights.
The Sagebrush Rebels were 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 Rebels to fill important posts
in his administration. These Reagan rebels, headed by James Watt
(who ran Coors's 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 Interior,
which oversees the management of nearly 500 million acres of
public land. He proclaimed he would make the "bureaucracy
yield to my blows" and got off to a galloping 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
manage national parks, refused to enforce the nation's strip
mine law, offered up the Outer Continental Shelf oil reserves
to exploration and drilling, ignored the Endangered Species Act
and purged the Interior Department of any employees who objected
to his agenda.
Rebel Watt defended his actions
as being divinely inspired, arguing that conservation of resources
for future generations amounted to a waste of "God's gift
to mankind."
"I do not know how many
future generations we can count on before the Lord returns,"
Watt warned. Use it or lose it.
In spite of his ravings Watt
held on. He even survived his bizarre attempt to block the Beach
Boys (in his fevered mind they represented the incarnation of
the counter-culture, even though the group did fundraisers for
George Bush) from playing a concert on the Mall, a stance that
provoked an amusing rebuke from Reagan, who reminded Watt that
the boys were all-American-and, more importantly, Californian.
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 couldn't set up a panel without finding
"a black, a woman, a Jew ]and a person in a wheelchair."
Although Watt was later indicted on charges that he bilked the
Department of Housing, Education and Welfare out of millions,
it was this remark that did him in.
Over at the Environmental Protection
Agency, Watt's counterpart was Anne Gorsuch, a rough-hewn and
ignorant Colorado legislator. Gorsuch, who later married Robert
Burford, the rancher and mineral engineer Watt tapped to head
the Bureau of Land Management, surrounded herself with a coven
of advisors 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 "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 news of her
appointment many of the EPA's top scientists and administrators
promptly quit.
Gorsuch and Burford left a
miasma of suspended regulations, secret meetings with industry
lobbyists, waived fines, and suppressed recommendations of agency
scientists. In one piquant case Levelle refused-at the behest
of Joseph Coors-to enforce new rules which prohibited dumping
liquid hazardous waste into community landfills. Coors's breweries
disposed of millions of gallons of such wastes near Denver.
The climate of cronyism that
infected the EPA in those days had its source in the highest
levels of the Reagan administration, which encouraged agency
heads such as Gorsuch to pander to its political allies: Coors,
Browning-Ferris Industries, Westinghouse and Monsanto.
Gorsuch's downfall came after
congressional investigators requested records of her warm chats
with companies under EPA's jurisdiction. At the advice of a White
House counsel she refused to give over the documents and was
duly cited with contempt of Congress. When she was called to
defend herself, the Reagan Justice Department refused to accompany
her. Gorsuch resigned in disgust.
Meanwhilee, the insipid and
grossly naïve Levelle, took the fall for the entire corrupt
regime. She was eventually convicted on charges of lying to Congress
and spent six months in federal prison.
Less heralded, though equally
sinister, was Reagan's appointment of John Crowell as assistant
secretary of agriculture, a critical position overseeing the
operations of the Forest Service, which is one of the largest
agencies in the federal
government. As the former general counsel for Louisiana-Pacific,
the nation's largest purchaser of federal timber, Crowell knew
his duty. One of his first schemes was to suppress an internal
investigation of his 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 Alaska.
Crowell then commanded 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 the relentless
clearcutting in Washington and Oregon would wipe out the northern
spotted owl.
Such useful objectives quickly
accomplished, Crowell departed the Reagan administration for
a more lucrative tenure at a Portland law firm, which specialized
in clients such as the National Forest Products Association,
which have a profound interest in exploiting the natural resources
of the public domain.
The raw ideologues of the Sagebrush
Rebellion over-reached, but their core message took hold: environmental
regulations sapped economic growth. Environmental overkill became
the excited talk of Washington's PR houses such as Burson-Marsteller
and lobbying firms such as Akin, Gump and Patton, Boggs and Blow,
which plotted a strategy of containment.
Often all that was needed was
a kindlier visage. Take the case of James Watt's replacement
at Interior, Donald Hodel. Shortly after Hodel took up his new
duties he was hailed by several environmental CEOs, as an "honorable
man." Yet Hodel's policies at Interior were as pro-industry
as Watt's, and far more effective. During his time there, Bureau
of Land Management timber sales hit record levels, as did subsidies
for the grazing and mining industries. Hodel was the man who
objected to the Montreal protocol for restricting ozone-shredding
chemicals, suggesting that to avoid skin cancer from increased
ultraviolet radiation, people should simply wear sunglasses,
hats and sunscreen.
Watt, Gorsuch, Levelle and
Crowell were magnificent villains for fundraising: direct mail
revenues for the top environmental groups exploded tenfold from
1979 to 1981. Green became the color of money, and the rag-tag
band of hard-core 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 end of the 1980s, Jay
Hair was pulling down a quarter of a million dollars a year for
overseeing the National Wildlife Federation's $80 million budget,
and kept his limo engine running at all times, the air-conditioner
grinding ozone at full-tilt against the moment he emerged from
his office on an eco-mission or deal-making sortie.
Over at the Audubon Society
a lawyer named Peter Berle commanded $200,000 a year. As he trimmed
away at the muscle of the conservation staff, he gloated, "Unlike
Greenpeace, Audubon doesn't have a reputation as a confrontational
organization."
The Wilderness Society meanwhile
passed into the grip of William Turnage, a Yale-educated manager,
after the board of directors ousted Stewart Brandborg. Turnage
vowed to transform the Wilderness Society into a "mainstream
organization" devoted to policy analysis. Within three years,
37 staffers, denounced by Turnage as "young, radical, crusader
types," had been kicked out the door, including Dave Foreman,
who went on to found Earth First! The greens were replaced by
Harvard-educated lawyers, such as Peter Coppleman (who went on
to serve as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration),
conservative economists such as Alice Rivlin (tapped by Clinton
to head the Office of Management and Budget), and industry foresters
such as Jeff Olson, who formerly worked for timber colossus Boise/Cascade.
The big environmental organizations
were by now well pickled in the political brine of Washington,
with freshness and passion largely gone.
Perhaps Reagan and Watt had
triumphed after all.
Weekend Edition
Features for June 5 / 6, 2004
C.
Douglas Lummis
Toward a Universal Declaration of
Human Wrongs
Saul
Landau
Five Cubans in Prison, Victims of Bush's Obsession
Dave
Lindorff
John Walker Lindh, Revisited
Brian
Cloughley
Apologies, Please, From Those Who Got It Wrong
Rich
Gibson
The Grenada 17: the Last Prisoners of the Cold War are Black
Elaine
Cassel
A Sorry FBI
Cathrin
Schütz
On the Ruins of Yugoslavia
Ben
Tripp
Call Me, Mr. Cassandra
Kurt
Nimmo
The Madness of King George
Ron
Jacobs
They Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Unless We Make It So)
Laura
Flanders
The Lynne Cheney Show?
Lenni
Brenner
Renaissance Noir: Caravaggio at the Met
Abigail
Jones
Whatever Happened to Lori Berenson, President Toledo's Trophy
Prisoner?
Mark
Latham
Nothing Bush Said Has Changed Our Hopes
Gerry
Adams
I Was Photographed While Tortured, Too
Toni
Solo
Venezuela 2004, Nicaragua's Contra War Reprised
Derek
Seidman
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old
M.
Junaid Alam
Torture is Just the Symptom
Matt
Siegfried
An American Way of War
Dave
Zirin
The Politics of Charles Barkley
Poets'
Basement
Albert, Krieger, St. Clair
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