Chapter 9Barbarians at the Gate
A small picket line at a local congressional office ordinarily does not attract media attention. But when fifty environmentalists, fishermen, and citizens gathered at the Hudson Valley headquarters of Republican congresswoman Sue Kelly on July 17, 1995, the day before there were to be two critical House votes on bills that would gut the Clean Water Act and slash EPA funding, the New York Times, Gannett, two weekly newspapers, a cable television station, and two radio stations chose to cover the event. It was the first time in memory that a Hudson Valley congressional representative had been singled out as an enemy of the environment.
During her 1994 campaign, candidate Kelly had portrayed herself as a staunch environmentalist -- a prerequisite in a district that had produced environmental leaders such as Hamilton Fish, Jr., Richard Ottinger, and Ogden Reid. She pledged to uphold that tradition and to support increased penalties for polluters and the strengthening of the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. Her aggressive environmental posture helped win her the primary endorsement of the New York State League of Conservation Voters and the race to replace the popular Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish, Jr. Yet after only seven months in office, Kelly had earned the enmity of both local and national environmentalists for her slavish support of the 104th Congress' program to dismantle twenty-five years of environmental law. She had received an approval rating of only 18 percent from the Washington-based League of Conservation Voters.
At the demonstration, the press wanted to know how an environmental hotbed like the Hudson River Valley had produced such an anti-environmental renegade. John Cronin explained, "To understand Sue Kelly, you need look no farther than her model, Newt Gingrich."
A Sierra Club member from 1984 to 1990, Newt Gingrich started his congressional career with an environmental platform, fighting for a tougher Clean Air Act, and calling acid rain legislation "the next most important issue" after banishing South African apartheid. All the while Gingrich was quietly curing favor with well-heeled polluters back home. He finally abandoned environmentalism in 1990 for the warm embrace of the New Right, its money, and its powerful corporate friends, and began schooling a new generation of Republicans in ideological warfare and fund-raising. Armed with Gingrich's leadership and large infusions of industry cash, they staged a historic takeover of the House and prepared to do industry bidding with a recklessness that was breathtaking.
The environment was the first loyalty test for the members of the realigned House of Representatives, and Sue Kelly had quickly caved to the pressure, industry money helped make this the most anti-environmental Congress in history. Without once mentioning the word explicitly, Gingrich's Contract with America took aim at the environment with a legislative program that would strip the nation of most of its federal environmental protections.
Gingrich's majority whip, Tom DeLay, was a former pesticide salesman who branded the EPA "the Gestapo of Government." DeLay identified the Endangered Species Act as the second greatest threat to Texas after illegal aliens and called for the lifting of the ban on mirex and DDT, which he labeled "safe as aspirin." Gingrich chose DeLay as the revolution's chief of environmental policy and assigned him the task of drafting and managing the Contract's environmental provisions. DeLay invited a group of 350 lobbyists representing some of America's biggest polluters to collaborate with him in drafting legislation to dismantle federal health, safety, and environmental laws. Their initial barrage was a stealth attack -- a series of "supermandates" concealed in the Contract, each designed to eviscerate whole bodies of environmental law without debate.
One of these, the Takings Bill, purported to protect property rights but masked an initiative giving constitutional protection to the right to pollute. It required environmental agencies to use federal tax dollars to pay polluters and landowners to comply with the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and federal wetlands laws. Another, the Unfunded Mandates Bill, ostensibly protected states and localities from being bullied by Washington legislators. Actually it erected new procedural hurdles to prevent Congress from creating national environmental standards such as those regulating contaminants in municipal drinking water supplies and reducing fish kills at power plants. An amendment that would have exempted laws that protected children's health was handily defeated.
The worst of DeLay's bills was the so-called Regulatory Reform Bill, which, under the pretense of encouraging smaller government, employed a complex legal mechanism to give polluters veto power over all health and environmental laws, and established new bureaucracy and technical requirements designed to tie federal agencies in knots.
Far from streamlining government, these laws were intended to paralyze it. They were driven by industry money and by the 104th Congress' virulent, mindless antigovernment fever. After every item in Congress' stealth attack against the environment passed the House within the first one hundred days, congressional bomb throwers unveiled their direct assault.
Legislators invited their favorite industry lobbyists to rewrite key environmental statutes, including the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. Congressman Bud Shuster of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, sponsored a reauthorization of the Clean Water Act written by lobbyists for the chemical, food, metal finishing, petroleum, strip mining, and paper industries that was promptly dubbed the Dirty Water Bill. Shuster's bill relaxed restrictions on dumping sewage and toxins into our nation's waters, weakened regulations of fish kills by power plants, removed as much as 80 percent of the nation's wetlands from federal protection, and required that the government pay landowners to protect the rest.
Don Young's Extinction Bill rewrote the Endangered Species Act to allow species to go extinct unless their current economic value exceeded the financial benefit of destroying them. The Superfund rewrite removed the central requirement that polluters pay to clean up after themselves, putting the burden instead upon taxpayers. Legislation by James Hansen of Utah created a Parks Closing Commission that would have put three hundred national parks on the auction block to the highest bidder from the timber, oil, or mineral industry. In April, the Republicans forced Clinton to sign the Timber Salvage Bill (by attaching it as a rider to legislation providing vital relief to the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing and the L.A. riots), reopening the National Forests to 1950s-style clear-cutting. Gingrich's majority leader Dick Armey promised to "close down the Environmental Protection Agency" and slashed the EPA's fiscal year 1996 budget by 34 percent, a cut that would leave the agency structure in place but all its personnel gone or paralyzed.
Big polluters drafted over a hundred bills designed to dramatically weaken or eliminate environmental laws and attached them as riders to the budget bills. The EPA Appropriations Bill became a wish list for corporate polluters, and the Interior Department Appropriations Bill became a natural resources bazaar for western timber, oil, and cattle barons where the public trust was dispensed at bargain-basement prices. The freshmen threatened to shut down the government if Clinton refused to sign them.
Dan Shaefer of Colorado, the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power, defended the new drafting method for its efficiency: "We go to industry and we ask industry, 'What is it we can do to make your job easier and to help you in this competitive world we have?' rather than writing legislation and having industry comment on what we write."
The 104th Congress was swinging a sledgehammer at a cornerstone of contemporary American democracy and undermining the most extraordinary body of environmental law in the world. Instead of empowering the citizenry through regulatory reform, the Gingrich revolution sought to remove power from local communities and deliver it to corporate board rooms. Emboldened by the brazen new Congress, states raced to undo environmental protection laws and regulations passed by previous legislatures. In the Hudson Valley, virtually all environmental enforcement ceased as the state regulatory agency reacted to the federal trends. In the midst of the New York City watershed negotiations, we watched the EPA's resolve to protect drinking water collapse as the agency reacted to the battering it was taking in Washington. The EPA became a piñata for upstate development interests, doling out gifts of compromised water quality at every blow. With the rapidity of a California-to-New York red-eye, anti-environmental forces across the nation pulled together a massive legislative agenda virtually overnight.
The juggernaut appeared unstoppable. National environmental groups considered the transformation of the Hudson Valley's most secure pro-environment congressional seat into an anti-environmental vote a harbinger of worse things to come. To many it looked like the age of environmentalism was over. Even our oldest friends in Congress would not take our calls. Newspapers, mesmerized by the social aspects of Newt's revolution, considered the environmental issue an abstraction. Some environmental groups were folding their tents and talking about how we had to abandon health and safety standards for a "free market system" as they watched twenty-five years of legislative work crumble in one hundred days. One national environmental leader called Bobby to announce he was going to quit his job. "They are tough and well funded," he said, "and they're winning."
Gingrich claimed that his vision simply gave voice to the majority of Americans who wanted the federal government off their backs. But the Gingrich vision and the anti-environmental agenda of the 104th Congress had in fact been written by a decades-old coalition of industry attorneys, public relations geniuses, and scientific hacks who had been waiting for this moment in the sun ever since their ignominious defeat at the hands of a mild-mannered but indomitable marine biologist named Rachel Carson.
Without living long enough to hear it proclaimed, Rachel Carson came to be regarded as the mother of the contemporary environmental movement. It is doubtful the modest scientist would have accepted the accolade. But she would have been the first to recognize that the very same interests that had attacked her 1962 book, Silent Spring, were the first link in an unbroken chain that led to the architects of the 104th Congress.
With the publication of Silent Spring, Carson riveted America's attention on the coming age of environmental horrors. Following World War II the Department of Agriculture and a robust young chemical industry were promoting DDT, the chemical that promised America the unchallenged position as food supplier to the world. With meticulous scholarship, Carson showed Americans how pesticides were exterminating their songbirds, waterfowl, raptors, and game fish, killing their domestic animals with monotonous regularity, and threatening humans with cancer and sterility. She realized that her conclusions would threaten the core financial interests of a powerful $300 million industry with strong governmental allies. Anticipating possible criticism for inaccuracy, she carefully checked and rechecked every fact, assuring that each statement had at least three references. Carson asked sixteen experts to review the text and comment on it prior to publication. She provided fifty-five pages of notes and cited specific authorities throughout the book for the various propositions.
Nonetheless, as soon as the New Yorker magazine published the first of a three-part prepublication condensation of Silent Spring in June 1962, the chemical industry mounted a deliberate and expensive public relations attack designed to destroy Carson's credibility. The Monsanto Company, a major chemical manufacturer of pesticides and PCBs, threatened to sue Carson and her publishers if the book was released, and implicated her in a communist plot to cripple American agriculture.
Other chemical companies threatened to withhold advertising from garden magazines and weekly supplements should they publish favorable reviews of Silent Spring. The industry invested millions in public relations, which paid off in supportive articles from the mainstream press including the New York Times, Time, Sports Illustrated, and Reader's Digest. The American Medical Association, one of the targets of the industry barrage, criticized Carson's book as "a serious threat to the continued supply of wholesome nutritious food..." and urged its members to contact the pesticide industry if their patients had any safety questions.
Despite these attacks, the book was a popular sensation, selling 100,000 copies by December and climbing to the top of the best-seller list where it remained for a record eighty-six weeks. Carson, dying of cancer, largely let the attacks go unanswered, gratified by the public support of many internationally known scientists.
Carson's final dramatic vindication came in a report prepared by President Kennedy's Scientific Advisory Committee, which had spent eight arduous months investigating the facts of Silent Spring. The report condemned the USDA and chemical industry scientists and recommended that the government eliminate the use of persistent toxic pesticides. The report endorsed all the principal findings of Carson's book and closed with praise for its author.
By the end of 1963, forty states had introduced pesticide legislation. But Carson's book did not just expose the dangers of toxic chemicals. It questioned the unrestrained control of the national environment by special interests, who were abetted by government allies, and ignited the generation of activists who founded the environmental movement and celebrated the first Earth Day.
The message of Earth Day resounded with the same democratic principles Carson had expressed in her final public appearance seven years earlier when she testified before Congress. With the knowledge of her impending death from cancer, she urged the committee to consider what she termed "a much neglected problem, that of the right of the citizen to be secure in his own home against the intrusion of poisons applied by other persons. I speak not as a lawyer," she said, "but as a biologist and as a human being, but I strongly feel that this is or should be one of the basic human rights."
The notion of environmental protection as a basic human right represented a greater threat to industry than the banning of DDT. For those industries benefiting heavily from environmental subsidies or reliant on pollution, environmental regulation represented a genuine threat to their profit margins. Many of these concluded that the best return on investment was not in retooling their plants, retraining workers, or research and development but by investing it in political clout to thwart the application of environmental laws.
By funneling huge sums of money to compliant politicians, the pesticide industry evaded regulation of its deadly products by having its political foot soldiers insert a "cost-benefit" analysis provision in the federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodentide Act (FIFRA). This provision made it next to impossible for the EPA to remove a pesticide from the market. In the thirty-some years since Carson's book was written, only sixteen of six hundred chemical pesticides used on foods have been removed. Today we use ten times the amount of pesticides that we did at the time when Rachel Carson died.
The pesticide industry wasn't alone with the incentive and capacity to manipulate the political process to advantage. Over the coming years, similarly affected industries -- lumber, coal, power, tobacco, mineral, oil, and automobile -- would pay hundreds of millions of dollars in direct political contributions to industry-friendly candidates, industry lawyers, public relations geniuses, and trade associations to promote their antiregulatory political agenda. These investments played a key role in creating the advent of the 104th Congress.
The techniques used by the pesticide industry in their attempt to discredit Rachel Carson have been refined and widely employed to advance industry's anti-environmental agenda. The pioneer of corporate public relations campaigning has been the tobacco industry. In 1958, the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton helped create the Tobacco Institute, which today is a $20-million-a-year effort that has successfully shielded an industry that kills 10 percent of its customers from regulations that might interfere with corporate profit taking. Other industries also employ PR firms to promote stories portraying environmentalists as hysterical and antihuman or driven by sinister socialist agendas, and to argue that environmental protection will cost jobs and destroy the economy. They create phony think tanks and front organizations and retain crackpot scientists to persuade the public that global threats from overpopulation, ozone layer depletion, pesticides, depleted fisheries, or global warming are illusory.
By 1990, according to PR Watch, U.S. businesses were spending an estimated $500 million on hiring the services of anti-environmental PR professionals and "greenwashing" their corporate image. That number doubled to $1 billion by 1995. That year, the top fifteen firms took in $100 million in environmental PR.
Among the most successful greenwash consultants is E. Bruce Harrison who, in 1962, at age thirty, served as the pesticide industry's "manager for environmental information" charged with orchestrating the smear campaign against Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. Harrison, now the president of his own company, has written a book on greenwashing: Going Green: How to Communicate Your Company's Environmental Commitment, which uses corporatespeak to teach polluters how to use scientific misinformation, emotional appeals, front groups, and mailings; how to recruit doctors and scientists; how to create grassroots groups to serve as "objective" third parties in the battle to defend corporate profit making.
Harrison's company does $6 million worth of annual greenwashing for the likes of Coors, Clorox, R. J. Reynolds, Vista Chemical, Uniroyal and General Motors, Dow Chemical, Union Carbide, Monsanto, Laidlaw Waste Systems, Ford, and AT&T.
Probably the best-known greenwasher is Burson-Marsteller, which took in nearly $18 million in 1993 on its environmental PR projects. Burson-Marsteller (B-M), the world's largest PR firm, made its bones whitewashing Argentina's "dirty war," Ceausescu's murderous Romanian regime, and South Korea's human rights abuses. Exxon and Union Carbide hired B-M to "greenwash" the Valdez spill and the deadly Bhopal chemical explosions, respectively. In 1990 Bobby battled the company in Quebec, where B-M is pushing Hydro-Quebec's efforts to drown the largest wilderness area in eastern North America, and two years later on Clayoquot Sound in British Columbia, where B-M's client, MacMillan Bloedel, is cutting the earth's largest intact coastal temperate rain forest against the wishes of Indian owners. In Clayoquot Sound, B-M has helped to create phony grassroots groups on behalf of the Canadian timber industry to persuade the public that old-growth harvesting is sustainable and that the government should deregulate the industry.
A prime tactic of each of these firms is to discredit environmentalists who oppose the client's interests. In 1994 Bobby gave a speech to Canadian forestry activists and NRDC members in New York City on forest protection in British Columbia. Two public relations officials from B-M's timber industry-funded "grassroots" group attended the speech and then reported a phony version to an industry-friendly reporter. The reporter published the fake statements, critical of Prime Minister Harcourt and the British Columbian people, as if he had attended the speech and provided them to the Vancouver Sun, another Burson-Marsteller client. Before he was even aware of the controversy, Bobby had been officially declared persona non grata by the government of British Columbia.
In August 1991, Greenpeace obtained a revealing memo prepared by Ketchum Public Relations for its client, Clorox Corporation, for dealing with new studies showing that the chlorine derivatives in its household products were highly carcinogenic. Among the tactics recommended by Ketchum to counter anticipated criticism from environmentalists and the press were labeling environmentalists as "terrorists" or "irrational," suing "unalterably green journalists" for slander, enlisting the support of unions to defend Clorox in the name of saving jobs, and dispatching teams of "independent" scientists to serve as "ambassadors" to the media and government officials.
Over the past decade, industry has spent hundreds of millions creating phony groups with deceptive names to carry on lobbying and public relations or to pose as scientists or experts in order to persuade Americans that the environmental crisis is a myth. In 1976, public relations firms created the U.S. Council of Energy Awareness, with a $20 million annual budget paid by the nuclear industry, to promote commercial nuclear power.
The deceptively named Citizens for the Environment (CFE) has no citizen membership but gets its support from a long list of corporate sponsors who use the organization to lobby against the Clean Air Act and all other environmental regulations. The Environmental Conservation Organization is a front group for land developers and other businesses opposed to wetlands regulations. The Evergreen Foundation is a timber-industry front group that tries to promote the idea that clear-cut logging is beneficial to the environment. The National Wetlands Coalition, whose logo features a duck rising off a wetland, is a coalition of oil drillers and large real estate companies opposed to wetlands regulations. Citizens for Sensible Control of Acid Rain is a phony grassroots front opposed to all controls of acid rain. Created by paid public relations consultants for the oil and electric industry, this group was the biggest-spending political lobby in Washington in 1986.
There are hundreds more of these groups. They pop up wherever there is an environmental controversy. In 1992 Riverkeeper was forced to trademark the "Keeper" name because it became so attractive to polluters organizing phony grassroots groups. For example, the upper Delaware Riverkeeper was organized by real estate developers in the Catskill region with the stated purpose to fight water quality regulations on the upper Delaware. More recently, the notorious polluter Con Edison tried to create a "Bronx Riverkeeper" as a corporate mouthpiece.
Using these front groups, industry bombards Americans with a steady stream of propaganda on radio and television talk shows, editorial pages, and hard-news outlets, while keeping both audiences and news reporters ignorant about the true source of the misinformation. Most Americans are shocked to learn that the famous "America the Beautiful" television ads that ran during the 1970s and 1980s featuring an American Indian shedding a tear over a littered street was a critical element of a stealth campaign to derail Bottle Bill legislation in the United States. "America the Beautiful" is a corporate front group of the aluminum and glass industry that was able to use its nonprofit status to garner over $550 million in free air time at taxpayer expense. The weeping Indian ad was meant to shift the guilt about pollution from the bottling industry to the consumer.
Most of these front groups are letterhead organizations with no membership, but in some cases the industries have organized a kind of hybrid grassroots organization that relies on paid professional organizers and a large flow of dollars.
The tobacco industry, which kills 400,000 of its customers annually in America alone, can claim credit for perfecting the use of grassroots front groups. The National Smokers Alliance, created by Burson-Marsteller with millions of Philip Morris dollars, has become the model for corporate grassroots campaigning. The alliance uses full-page newspaper ads, direct telemarketing, paid canvassers, free 800 numbers, and newsletters to bring thousands of smokers into its ranks each week. By 1995, the NSA claimed a membership of three million smokers. The campaign's game is to rile up and mobilize a committed cadre of foot soldiers in a grassroots political operation directed by Burson-Marsteller to produce the illusion of broad public interest and participation opposed to tobacco regulations.
The tobacco industry's success has helped make "Astro Turf organizing" an industry unto itself. Dozens of PR firms specialize in organizing "grassroots" support for the oil, chemical, and extractive industries and for big mall developers. "Company employees usually form the core of any Astro Turf environmental group," James Lindheim, Burson-Marsteller's director of public affairs, told Joyce Nelson of Chemistry and Industry magazine in 1989. "Don't forget, the chemical industry has many friends and allies that can be mobilized...employees, shareholders, and retirees. Give them the song sheets and let them help industry carry the tune."
Industry fronts adopted the tactics that authentic grassroots groups developed during the 1970s -- telephone, fax, and letter-writing campaigns; research reports, public testimony, lobbying, forming political coalitions. They also use advertising, press releases, public testimony, bogus surveys, and public opinion polls, and generally disseminate disinformation to the press and hate-radio jocks. They use telemarketing techniques that, for the right price, can flood a congressional office with thousands of phony "constituent" letters and telegrams: in a single day. These groups not only deceive the public and some politicians but also support certain politicians who want to do industry's bidding and need "grassroots support" for political cover.
Beginning in the late 1980s, industry money and a cadre of professional grassroots organizers and charismatic leaders from the radical right helped create a hybridized grassroots movement that would help industry take over Congress and make naked anti-environmentalism politically acceptable even in the Hudson Valley.
The new movement found its roots in the American West where stockmen, large farmers, and mining and timber companies have dominated the political landscape for over a century. Western historians call them "boomers." Teddy Roosevelt called them "land grabbers." Today they are known as "welfare cowboys."
The boomers grew fat exploiting subsidized water and grasslands originally made available to their forebears by a federal government eager to encourage western pioneering. They cut timber below cost and dug minerals for free at great loss to U.S. taxpayers.
They made billions each year denuding National Forest lands, turning public lands into desert, sucking salmon streams dry, robbing our nation's mineral wealth and leaving behind thousands of miles of polluted streams and great expanses of wilderness poisoned with deadly mine wastes. The boomers converted their federally subsidized economic sucCess into a political power base that maintained their System of socialism for the rich. The unfortunate workers employed in these destructive industries became the frightened armies of their movement.
In 1976, the Carter administration adopted legislation requiring federal land managers to start granting equal priority to all uses of federal lands including those that compete with grazing and mineral extraction. At the same time, hunters, hikers, and fly fishermen began taking an increased interest in desert land. Their subsidies threatened, boomers declared that these federal land policies amounted to a "war on the West." Wealthy ranchers and miners demanded greater access to public lands for grazing, logging, and mining. The cattlemen and timber companies who started what came to be known as the Sagebrush Rebellion were largely successful because they managed to broaden their constituency with an antiregulatory, antilabor, and anti-environmental rhetoric that had great appeal in certain western communities where hostility to government and dependence on federal subsidies are deeply rooted. They found that with large amounts of money, they could organize this discontent into a political force that would support their continued profit taking.
The first westerner to contribute serious funds was the Colorado brewer Joseph Coors, whose fortune relied heavily on federal natural resources subsidies and pollution-based profits. Coors was one of the largest polluters in Colorado. He cut the initial $250,000 check that opened the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which would help construct the philosophical underpinning of the anti-environmental Wise Use movement. Heritage's function is to produce -- at lightning speed -- short, concise policy analyses of fast-breaking issues. These simple position papers go out to thousands of news directors and journalists, congressional offices, public officials, and, more recently, talk-radio jocks. Through clever invocations of patriotism, Christianity, and laissez-faire capitalism, Heritage offers pithy philosophical justification for national policies that promote the narrow interests of a wealthy few.
Not surprisingly, Heritage claims to advocate open markets and property rights, but its agenda is more pro-pollution than anything else. The foundation dismisses global warming, acid rain, and other environmental crises as "benny pennyism." In a recent forum, leading conservatives writing in Heritage's Policy Review urged their followers to "strangle the environmental movement," which they named "the greatest single threat to the American economy." Heritage's prominence as the leading voice for pollution-based prosperity helped it attract giant donations from the automobile, coal, oil, and chemical companies and right-wing foundations that currently contribute $23 million toward its annual funding.
Just as the Heritage Foundation became an imitation of a think tank, Coors founded the Mountain States Legal Foundation in 1976 to mimic the work of public-interest organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council, which fought the frontline legal battles for the environmental movement. Funded by major companies such as Phillips Petroleum, Marathon Oil, Amoco, Shell, and Chevron, it filed nuisance suits to block efforts by environmentalist unions and racial minorities that might slow the companies' easy profits.
That alliance between wealthy western extractive industries and a radical right-wing antigovernment element helped Ronald Reagan win the presidency and laid the foundation for building the Wise Use movement. "I am a Sagebrush Rebel," candidate Reagan declared in 1980.
After Reagan's inauguration, the people who had funded the new institutions such as the Heritage Foundation and the Mountain States Legal Foundation found themselves