Robert Kennedy, Jr.

I just got back from a speech (if it could be called that — it seemed to be completely extemporaneous) by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that was quite the medicine for the doldrums of the last couple of weeks (need I remind you of a particular election?).

If Kennedy can continue his fight with the miserable failure and his administration's systematic ruination of our environment (amongst other things), then I and like-minded liberal Americans need to buck up and quit moping.

I wish I'd taken a tape recorder. I wish I'd taken notes.

Kennedy noted, as I've heard him tell before, that he considers himself a "free marketeer" — that the Bush administration believes not in a free market economy, but in a crony capitalist economy. They don't believe in a true free market, in which the success of a company is based on its ability to make it in the marketplace — they believe in maximizing profits at the expense of the environment and to the detriment of the least advantaged in this country. They believe in privatizing the commonwealth:

The environmental movement is a struggle over the control of the commons — the publicly owned resources, the things that cannot be reduced to private property — the air, the water, the wandering animals, the public land, the wildlife, the fisheries. The things that from the beginning of time have always been part of the public trust.

[...]

The best thing that could happen to the environment is free-market capitalism. In a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community. In a true free-market economy, you get efficiencies and efficiency means the elimination of waste. Waste is pollution. So in true free-market capitalism, you eliminate pollution and you properly value our natural resources so you won't cut them down. What polluters do is escape the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy — a fat cat who's using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market.

[...]

In terms of the conventional way that we think of civil rights, the burden of environmental injury always falls on the backs of the poorest people. Four out of every five toxic-waste dumps in America is in a black neighborhood. The largest toxic-waste dump in America is in a community in Alabama that is 85 percent black. The highest concentration of toxic-waste dumps is in the South Side of Chicago. The most contaminated ZIP code in California is East L.A. There's 150,000 Hispanic farm workers that are poisoned by pesticides every year. And God knows what's happening to their families. Navajo youth have 17 times the rate of sexual-organ cancer as other Americans because of the thousands of tons of toxic uranium tailings that have been dumped on their reservation land. So the poor are shouldering the burden for pollution-based prosperity by large corporations who have control of the political process.

Really all environmental injury is an assault on democracy, because the most important measure of how a democracy is functioning is how it distributes the goods of the land, the commons. Democracy must ensure that the public-trust assets stay within the hands of the people.

I found an interview which includes much of what he addressed tonight (and from which the above quotes were taken), so take a look.

I was amazed at his ability to move me nearly to tears on several occasions. This man is the type of person I want leading my country; I couldn't help but wondering why there aren't more liberal politicians who are as capable of speaking so adroitly and passionately about the environment. I wondered what a room full of red state Bush voters would think of what he had to say; I couldn't imagine that they could disagree with anything he had to say.