CSUN : Division of Student Affairs : News & Events : Freshmen Convocation 2007

Robert F Kennedy Jr.: ...mentioned my uncle, President Kennedy, and before I came out here today I looked at a little exhibit about my father, who visited this campus in 1968 just before his assassination during his last campaign. But everywhere I go across the country people introduce me that way - as John Kennedy's nephew, Robert Kennedy's son, or Ted Kennedy's nephew. Or when I am in Massachusetts they say Joe Kennedy's brother, and when in Rhode Island I'm Patrick Kennedy's cousin.

I was in Maryland the other day, where my sister is lieutenant governor, and I was introduced as Kathleen's brother - but when I come out here I am "Arnold's cousin".

I am really happy to be here at Cal State, and am very pleased that the faculty has decided to make this the semester of the environment. I will address that issue with you today - but I am going to address the overarching issue of how the environment and democracy are intertwined, and the corrosive impact of excessive corporate power on American democracy and the environment.

Before I came out here today I had a conversation with a businessman who is a friend of mine, called Gabi Leshum, who is here today. He is a Los Angeles businessperson, but he has a big project in Ogden, Utah, with environmental controversy. But it is a big project - he is restoring a waterfront that is going to end up helping the city and community. But he is doing battle with some of the environmental issues out there, and he talked about finding a balance.

What I said to him, we aren't protecting the environment for the fishes and birds, but because we recognize that nature is the infrastructure of our communities. And that if we want to meet our obligation as a generation, a civilization and a nation, which is to create opportunities for our children that provide them the same opportunities for dignity, enrichment, prosperity and good health, as the communities that our parents gave us, we have to start protecting our environmental infrastructure - the air we breathe, the water we drink, the wildlife, landscapes and public lands that enrich us and connect us with our past and history and provide context to the communities, that are the source ultimately of our values, virtues, and character as a people.

Now, I want to say this - that I have been disciplined over 25 years as an environmental advocate about being non-partisan and bipartisan in my approach to these issues. I don't think there is any such thing as republican or democratic children. The worst thing that can happen to the environment is if it becomes the province of a single political party. So I make sure in every election to support both republicans and democrats on this issue.

But you can't talk honestly about the environment in any context today without speaking critically about this president and White House. This is the worst environmental administration that we have had in American history [applause]. If you look at NRDC's website - Natural Resource Defense Council, one of the groups with which I work - you will see listed there over 400 major and environmental rollbacks that have been promoted implemented by this White House over the past 7 years as part of a deliberate concerted effort to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law. It is a stealth attack. The White House has used all kinds of ingenious imaginations to conceal this radical agenda from the American people - including Orwellian rhetoric, when they want to destroy the forest they call it the "Healthy Forest Act" and when they want to destroy the air it is the "Clear Skies Bill."

But most insidiously, they have put polluters in charge of virtually all of the agencies of government that are supposed to be protecting us from pollution. I just did an article for Vanity Fair magazine that showed that the top 100 environmental officials in the United States Government today are virtually all lobbyists, or former lobbyists, for the worst of the worst of the worst in industrial polluters. The head of the forest services, a timber industry lobbyist, Mark Ray, probably the most rapacious in our history. The head of public lands is a mining lobbyist - was, until he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 months in jail 2 weeks ago - but he was a mining industry lobbyist, Steven Griles, who believes that public lands are unconstitutional. The head of the air division at EPA is an utility lobbyist who has represented nothing but the worst air polluters in our country. The head of Superfund is a woman whose last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade Superfund. The head of the 2nd in command EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist. And the president's number 1 environmental advisor, the head of council on environmental quality, a man named Phillip Cooney, is the former chief lobbyist to the Exxon Company, and as it turns out his principle preoccupation over the past 7 years has been combing through every federal scientific document issued by all of the different agencies of government, and removing or redacting or suppressing any damaging information about the oil industry or coal industry. He suppressed 12 major federal studies that you and I paid for, taxpayer studies, on global warming.

Now there is nothing wrong with having businesspeople in government. It is a good thing if your objective is to recruit competence and expertise. But in all of these situations, as I show in my book "Crimes Against Nature", these particular individuals have entered government service not to serve the public interest but rather to subvert the very laws that they are now charged with enforcing in order to enrich the president's corporate paymasters. They have imposed dramatic diminution in quality of life on the people of this country.

Most Americans don't know about it, don't make the connection between the president's policies, and the diminution in the quality of life, because we have a negligent and indolent press or media in this country that has let down American democracy. And I am not going to talk about that - but you have seen, you know - and this again is because of corporate control of our media. There are now five corporations that control all 14,000 radio stations in America, all 2000 television stations, 80% of our newspapers and most of the large internet content providers, and all of our billboards. So there are 5 guys deciding what Americans hear as news. The news departments which used to have the obligation to serve the public interest and advance our democracy have become corporate profit centers. They are no longer serving the public interest, but only the interest of the shareholders. And they do that not by telling us the news that we need to understand to make rational decisions in a democracy, but rather by entertaining us. By appealing to the prurient interests that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brains for sex and celebrity gossip. So they give us Anna Nicole Smith, then Paris Hilton, then Lindsay Lohan, and we know more about Tom Cruise and Brad and Jen, or Brad and whoever, than we do about global warming. We are the best entertained and least informed people on the earth - and that is a real problem for American democracy. You can't have democracy for long if you do not have an informed public, and we no longer have an informed public in our country.

And - but let me give you a couple of examples [clears throat] from the area in which I work. About this disconnect between public perception and reality - and I will talk just about one industry, which is the coal-burning power plants, which affects the state of California.

I have 3 sons who have asthma. 1 out of every 4 black children in American cities now have asthma. 10% of the children born in California cities now have asthma or other respiratory disease that is so grave that it will shorten their lives and hound them until the end of their shortened lives with poor health.

We know about asthma attacks that the principal cause of asthma attacks is bad air - it is ozone and particulates. And the primary source of those materials in our atmosphere are 400 coal-burning power plants that are burning coal illegally. It has been illegal for 18 years. The Clean Air Act said that it was illegal - said that they all had to clean up 18 years ago. In many states they did clean up - there are about 1100 of them that did clean up. But 400 did not - they are operating illegally. The Clinton administration was prosecuting the worst 75 of those plants and investigating hundreds of others. But this is an industry that donated 48 million dollars to President Bush during the 2000 cycle, and have given 58 million dollars since. One of the first things that the Bush administration did when it came into office was to order the Justice Department and EPA to drop all those lawsuits. The top 3 enforcers at EPA - Bruce Bachite, Sylvia Lawrence, and Eric Schafer - all resigned their jobs in protest.

These weren't democrats; these were people who had worked through the Regan administration and the previous Bush administration. The top justice department attorney said that this had never happened before in American history, where a presidential candidate accepts money from criminals under indictment and then orders those cases dropped when he achieves office. Immediately after doing that President Bush abolished the New Source Rule, which was the heart and soul of the Clean Air Act, the most important provision in that statute. That is the rule that required those companies to remove the ozone and particulates 18 years ago. So now there is no requirement that they ever have to remove that stuff, and all of those companies that did remove it are now at a huge disadvantage in the marketplace. And I am going to be able to watch my children gasping for air on bad air days because somebody gave money to a politician. And if you go home tonight and look at EPA's website, not NRDC's website but the federal EPA, you will see that the single decision alone by President Bush to abolish the New Source Rule kills 18,000 Americans every year. 6 times the number of people who were killed in the World Trade Center attacks - but not just once, year after year, after year, after year. This should be the front page headline of every newspaper in our country, every day. But you will not read about this in the American press.

About 20 months ago the federal EPA announced that in 19 states it is now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish caught in the state because of mercury contamination. That mercury is coming from those same coal-burning powerplants. In 49 states, including California, at least some of the fish (in this state, most of them) are now unsafe to eat because of mercury contamination. In fact, the only state where all the fish are still safe to eat is Dick Cheney's home state of Wyoming, where the republican-controlled legislature has refused to appropriate the money to test the fish. But in all the other states, at least some, most, or all of the fish are unsafe to eat.

We know a lot about mercury that we didn't know a few years ago. We know, for example, that according to CDC one out of every six American women now has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases. Autism, blindness, mental retardation, heart, liver and kidney disease. I have so much mercury in my body - I was tested recently, as every woman of child-baring age, or everyone should - you can get your levels tested by going to our website, the waterkeeper alliance, and sending us a little lock of your hair - and we will send back your mercury levels. My levels are 2.5 times what EPA considers safe, just from eating fish. And if you eat sushi or you eat tuna fish you should get your levels tested tonight.

But I was told by Dr David Carpenter that a woman with my levels of mercury in her blood would have children with cognitive impairments. I said "she might have?" And he said "no, science is certain today - her children would have some level of permanent damage and permanent IQ loss of somewhere between 5-7 points, permanent IQ loss." Well today, according to CDC there are 640,000 children born in this country every year who have been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in their mother's wombs.

The Clinton administration, recognizing the gravity of this national health epidemic, reclassified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act. That triggered a requirement that all of those plants remove 90% of the mercury within 3.5 years. It would have cost them less than 1% of the plant revenues. It was a great deal for the American people, but still billions of dollars for that industry. That is the industry that donated 100 million dollars to this administration, and 6 months ago the White House announced that it was abolishing the Clinton-era rules and substituting instead rules that were written by utility industry lobbyists that would require the industry to never have to clean up the mercury.

I will tell you the rest of the story. The new rules were written, not by government officials, but by attorneys for a law firm called Lathem and Watkins, which does a lot of good things, but also traditionally the lobbying and litigation firm for the worst of the worst of the worst utilities companies, like the Southern Company which is just a criminal enterprise. And the chief lobbyist for that law firm was a man named Jeffery Homestead, who today is the head of the air division at EPA. So he just took rules that were written by his old colleagues for his old clients and made them American law, and saved billions of dollars for his friends by imposing 10s of billions of dollars of costs on the rest of us. After doing that he and his 2 deputies went back immediately to work for the Southern Company, the company that had benefited from these changes. And this is the revolving door of plunder that we see in our government officials today.

I want to tell you one other story. 2 weeks ago I flew over the coal fields of the Appalachians and I saw something that if the American people could see it there would be a revolution in this country. We are cutting down the Appalachian Mountains with these giant machines called "draglines" which are 22 stories high - I flew underneath one of them in a pipercup. They cost a half billion dollars, and practically dispense for the need for human labor - which indeed is the point. When my father was fighting strip mining in the 1960s I remember a conversation that I had with him when I was 14 years old where he said that they aren't just destroying the environment, they are permanently impoverishing these communities, because there is no way that they will ever regenerate an economy from these barren moonscapes that are left behind.

And he said that they were doing it to break the unions, which is exactly what they have done. When he told me that there were 140,000 unionized mine-workers in West Virginia digging coal out of tunnels in the ground. Today there are fewer than 11,000 miners left in the state, and almost none are unionized because the strip industry isn't. They are taking more coal out of West Virginia than in 1968 - the difference is that in 1968 some of the money was left behind for the communities and pensions and salaries, but today virtually all of it is leaving the state to the corporate offices Massey Coal and Peabody Coal up on Wall Street and the banking houses like Morgan Stanley. 95% of the mines in the state are owned by New York or out of state firms, and they are liquidating West Virginia for cash. Using these giant machines and 2500 tons of dynamite that they explode there every day, a Hiroshima bomb once a week, they are blowing the tops off the mountains to get at the coal seams beneath. Then they take the rock and debris and rubble and use these big machines to scrape it into the adjacent river valley. They have buried 2500 miles of American rivers and streams. By the time this president leaves office they will have flattened an area of the Appalachians the size of Delaware. They have already cut down the 460 highest mountains in the state, and flattened them.

It is all illegal. You cannot in the United States take rock, debris and rubble and dump it into a waterway without a Clean Water Act permit. So we sued them in front of a conservative republican federal judge in West Virginia, Judge Charles Hayden. And Judge Hayden said the same thing I said - he said it is all illegal, and it has been illegal since day one. He stopped all of the mountaintop mining. 2 days from when we got the decision lobbyists for Peabody Coal and Massey Coal met in the back room of the interior department with Gayle Norton's first deputy, Steven Griles who is a former lobbyist for Massey and Peabody, and they rewrote one word of the Clean Water act. The definition of the word "fill" - to change 30 years of statutory interpretation. This effectively overruled the judge's decision and made it legal, not just in West Virginia but in every state in this union including California, to dump rock, debris, rubble, garbage, or any kind of solid pollutant into any kind of waterway in the United States without a Clean Water Act permit . All you need today is a rubber-stamp permit from the corps of engineers, which in most districts you can get for a phone call or through the mail.

This is what we are dealing with today - it is not just the destruction of the environment. It is the subversion of American democracy. And you know, the polluting industries and their indentured servants in the political process have been very adept over the past 2 decades about marginalizing environmentalists as radicals or tree-huggers, or as I heard the other day "pagans who worship trees and sacrifice people."

But, there is nothing radical about the idea of clean air and clean water for our children. And we are not protecting the environment for the fishes and birds. We are protecting it, as I said, because it is the infrastructure of our communities. If you talk to the people on Capital Hill who are promoting these kind of roll-backs and ask why they do this - they invariably say "well, we have to choose now between economic prosperity on one hand and environmental protection on the other" and that is a false choice. In 100% of the situations good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy. If we want to measure our economy, and this is how we ought to be measuring it, based upon how it produces jobs and the dignity of jobs over the long-term, over the generations, and how it preserves the value of the assets of our community.

If on the other hand we want to do what they have been urging us to do on Capital Hill, which is to treat the planet as if it were a business in liquidation, convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution-based prosperity, we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy, but our children will pay for our joyride. They will pay with the denuded landscapes and poor health and huge clean up costs that are going to amplify over time and that they will never be able to pay.

Environmental injury is deficit spending - it is a way of loading the costs of our generation's prosperity on to the backs of our children. One thing that I have done over the past two decades is to constantly go around and confront this argument that an investment in our environment is a diminishment of our nation's wealth. It doesn't diminish our wealth if it is an investment in our infrastructure. It is the same as investing in telecommunications or road-construction - it is an investment we to make if we are going to insure the economic vitality of our generation and the next generation.

I want to say one more thing, which is this - there is no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism than myself. I believe that the free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land, and the best thing that can happen to the environment is if we have true free-market capitalism in this country, because the free market promotes efficiency, which means the elimination of waste, and pollution is waste.

But in a true free-market economy you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community. But what polluters do is make themselves rich by making everyone else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everyone else - they do this by escaping the discipline of the free-market. Show me a polluter and I will show you a subsidy, or a fat-cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free-market and force the public to pay his production costs.

That is what all pollution is. When the Southern Company puts mercury in the air in Mississippi from one of its plants, and it lands in New York state, and poisons the fish and poisons our children's brains, and when it puts ozone and particulates in the air that causes 18,000 people to die every year, a million asthma attacks, a million lost work days, when it puts acid rain in the air - all of those impacts put costs on the rest of us that should in a true free-market economy be reflected in the price of the company's product when it makes it to the marketplace. But Southern Company and all polluters use political clout to escape the discipline of the free market, and force the public to pay their production costs.

And what all federal environmental laws are intended to do is restore free-market capitalism in this country by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true costs of bringing their product to market. And what we do in the "water-keeper" movement, we sue polluters - we don't even consider ourselves environmentalists anymore, we are free-marketeers. We go out into the marketplace and catch the cheaters, the polluters, and say to them that we will force them to internalize their costs the same way that they internalize their profits. Because as long as they can cheat the free-market it distorts the whole marketplace and none of us get the advantages of the efficiency and the prosperity and democracy that the free-market otherwise promises our country.

What we have to understand as Americans is that there is a huge difference between free-market capitalism, which makes the country more efficient, more prosperous and more democratic, and the corporate crony capitalism which has been embraced in Washington DC and is as antithetical to democracy, efficiency and prosperity in America as it is in Nigeria.

You know - there is nothing wrong with corporations - they are a good thing, driving the economy and encourage us to assemble wealth and then to risk it - but they shouldn't be running our government. The reason they shouldn't be running our government is because corporations want different things for America than Americans want - the corporations don't want democracy, they don't want free markets, they want profits. And the best way for them to get profits too often is to use our campaign finance system, which is just a system of legalized bribery, to get their hooks into a public official then use that public official to dismantle the marketplace, to give them monopoly control and allow them to privatize the commons - to steal the air from my children's lungs, to steal our water, fisheries, etc. That is why from the beginning of our national history our greatest political leaders have warned Americans against domination by corporate power, republican and democrat.

Teddy Roosevelt, a republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign enemy (like Osama Bin Laden), but he warned that our treasured democratic institutions and our constitution itself would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth, who would rob them from within.

Dwight Eisenhower, another republican, said in his most famous speech ever - he warned Americans against the domination by the military industrial complex.

Abraham Lincoln - the greatest republican in our history - said during the height of the Civil War, "I have the south in front of me, and I have the bankers behind me. And for my nation, I fear the bankers more."

And Franklin Roosevelt during World War II said that the domination of government by corporate power is "the essence of Fascism." And Benito Mussolini, who had an insider's view of that process, said essentially the same thing - he complained that Fascism shouldn't be called Fascism; it should be called corporatism, because it is the merger of state and corporate power.

What we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called communism. The domination of government by business is called Fascism. And what our job is is to walk that narrow trail between - free-market capitalism and democracy, keeping big government at bay with our right hand, and corporate power at bay with our left. In order to do that we need an independent press that is fierce and that constantly is speaking truth to power. And we need an informed public that can recognize all of the milestones of tyranny and is willing to stand up and fight against it.

I will say one last thing - what I tried to start off with - we aren't protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and the birds, but because we recognize that nature enriches us. It enriches us economically, yes, it is the basis of our economy - but it also enriches us aesthetically, recreationally, culturally, historically and spiritually. And human beings have other values besides money - and if we don't feed those values we won't grow up to be those kinds of beings that our creator intended us to become.

I want to thank you all for having me here. I want to congratulate you for your admission to this wonderful college, and urge you to continue to fight for the values that make this country proud. Thank you.< /p>

President Koester: Thank you very much Mr. Kennedy for your remarks. Our goal in inviting such a prominent speaker to this event is to inspire serious reflection and discussion among all of you and other students on this important issue. I hope tonight and tomorrow you will talk with your friends about what it is that you heard here this evening, and think critically and carefully about Mr. Kennedy's remarks. Mr. Kennedy, if you would join me for a moment here at the podium, we do want to give you a small token of our appreciation. First, a memento that commemorates your father's visit, and hopefully your visit as well - a Sundial Article for those of you from the Sundial, and a clock to watch time with the California State University Northridge theme on it. Thank you very much.

At this time I would like to acknowledge and thank the many persons who have made this event possible. The generous contributions of the University Corporation, the CSUN Alumni Association, the University Student Union, and the Associated Students.

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Freshman Convocation 2007

Robert F Kennedy Jr.'s Freshman Convocation Speech

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