You Have to be Willing to
Die With Your Boots On
An Interview with
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

by Sarah Paris
Photos by Mark Werlin

On September 15, 2004, Sarah conducted an interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of the late Senator Bobby Kennedy and arguably the nation's most prominent environmental attorney.

Robert F. Kennedy's new book, Crimes Against Nature, (HarperCollins ISBN# 0060746874) is a forceful attack on the Bush administration and its corporate allies, and a call to the American people to protect our environmental legacy.

Shorter versions of the interview were published in the Irish Times in Dublin and the Tages-Anzeiger in Zurich. Following is the text of the original interview, slightly edited for clarity.

The photos were taken by Mark during Kennedy's speech at the Commonwealth Club in Palo Alto on September 9, 2004.

Mr. Kennedy, In your book you make a compelling argument that the Bush administration has done more damage to the environment than any American president in history. If Bush were reelected, what would the consequences be for the environment?

If the laws that are currently proposed by the Bush administration are actually passed, we will effectively have no significant federal environmental law left in our country. Of course, the states can still regulate, but they don't do that very well. Many of our laws would remain on the books in one form or the other, but they'll be unenforceable. We will be like Mexico, which has these wonderful, poetic environmental laws but nobody knows about them, and nobody complies with them, because they can't be enforced.

What exactly do you mean by "they can't be enforced"?

Well, let's say this: One of the laws that's been composed by the Bush administration is that you can't pass or enforce a federal environmental law that is going to damage somebody's property rights unless you first pay the property owner for costs of compliance. And under that law, the government would have to pay people not to discharge toxics in the air or discharge pollutants into our water, or to destroy endangered species on their property. And of course, if government had to pay people not to do bad things on their property, government would simply cease to exist. You could not print enough money to do that. The result of that will be that government agencies will simply stop enforcing the environmental laws. For example, if a government agency said it's illegal to fill this wetland on your property, the person would say, well then pay me the full value of the wetland. Of course, that agency has no budget for land purchases. And so the person would simply go ahead and fill the wetland. Under the Bush plan, that would apply to all environmental laws.

Did the people who passed this law fully understand the consequences?

Yes. These are are radical ideologues who are opposed to the whole idea of federal government.

But the whole of Congress are not radical ideologues.

Well, the Republican leadership certainly is. Tom DeLay, who's the chief of Congress, says that he entered Congress in order to promote a Biblical world view. He believes that DDT (a pesticide currently banned in the US) "is safe as aspirin." These are radical notions.

Why do moderate Republicans follow that line of thinking? Why do they support such laws?

There's been a lot of questions about how you get people to vote against their economic interests. For example, farmers in this country: the Republican Party has made war on farmers in this country for 50 years. And yet, most farmers still vote Republican. There's two reasons for it. Industry, which controls the Republican Party, has a big bullhorn. They have a lot of money, and they're able to deceive large numbers of people. They have think tanks, they have phony scientists who tell people there's no such thing as global warming. You have to remember that most Americans still don't believe in evolution (theory). Probably half the people in our country still don't believe that global warming exists because of industry's influence on the debate.

The second thing is, they've been able to make this debate, rather than about economic issues and scientific issues, about cultural issues. They've been able to say that the Democrats are about letting black people and gay people control our country. And that they don't believe in God, they don't believe in the Bible. And so the portrait of the Democratic Party has been distorted. And of course, the Republicans have more money, and they're more adept at this kind of street fighting.

But alternative sources of information are available. The Internet is available to most Americans. There are newspapers that have some good information.

If you look at the newspapers in the vast, middle section of our country, you get the same kind of message that you see on Fox News, which is solid propaganda. Americans are insular people, particularly when you get away from the coasts, into what we call the "red states". They're suspicious of outsiders and parochial in their world view

Even in so-called "red states", in Utah, for instance, you have a newspaper like the Salt Lake Tribune that has written some very thoughtful articles and is not just an instrument of propaganda.

Try to find a Salt Lake Tribune in Kansas. The Salt Lake Tribune is an unusual paper. Even those states, in the municipal areas, you get a lot of Democratic control. But in the rural areas, in the small towns, those messages don't get out.

As you explain in your book, it is mostly poor people who shoulder the burden of pollution. However, no one can ultimately escape conditions such as air pollution and global warming. Bush and Cheney have children and grandchildren. Where do they think they will escape to?

I suppose they think they'll escape to gated communities, that they can insulate themselves from the catastrophe that they're causing to the rest of the globe. They're able to convince themselves that those things are not real. There's a lot of money to be made by pollution. There's an economic law called "Tragedy of the Commons" which says that each of us pursuing our own self-interest will devour the commons, will destroy it. The commons is the air, the water, the wildlife, wandering animals, public lands. Those resources that by their nature are owned by all of us, that are part of the commonwealth, will be destroyed if each person is allowed to pursue their own self-interest. That's why you need government regulation. But when Bush talks about regulation, he's seeing it through the prism of the oil industry, where regulation means lower profits. That's the world view that guides his perceptions.

You said in an interview with Grist Magazine that we're "hardwired to compete, to consume and to destroy."

That's the Tragedy of the Commons. Pursuing our own self-interest, we will destroy the planet.

How do we fight against that impulse, if we are actually "wired" that way?

Through democracy. You have to trust that in a democracy, enough people harbor the values and a sense of responsibility towards future generations, that they can force government to act responsibly. But what happens is, everywhere you see environmental injury, you see also a failure of democracy. The environmental injury in our country is being caused by large corporations that have captured control of our government. The head of public lands in America is a mining lobbyist who believes that public lands are unconstitutional. The head of the forest service is a timber industry lobbyist. The head of the air division at EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) is a utilities lobbyist who has represented the worst polluters in America. The head of the Superfund is a woman whose previous job was teaching polluters how to evade the Superfund. These are the people who are making the decisions, and this is a failure of democracy.

How can ordinary people fight on behalf of the environment?

Number one, is campaign finance reform, get the money out of politics. And number two, through the fairness doctrine which puts the media back in the hands of the people and away from corporate profiteers.

Note: The Federal Communications Commission requirement of licensed broadcasters to provide equal air time to opposing political viewpoints - the "Fairness Doctrine" - was established in 1934 and repealed under the Reagan administration in 1987.

John Kerry has a very good environmental rating.

He has the best rating of anybody in the Senate. He has a 96% rating.

Yet some of his ideas are controversial among environmentalists. For instance, his promotion of so-called "clean coal." In you book, you label coal as the worst source of pollution. What do you think of Kerry's approach regarding coal?

I think coal is going to be part of our portfolio for a long time. We have more coal than any country on Earth. We have enough coal to supply all of our energy needs for the next two or three hundred years. If we are serious about weaning ourselves from mid-Eastern oil, I think we have to look at coal reserves, and we have to try to figure out ways to burn coal and to mine coal that will not destroy our other values as a country.

I'm against subsidies to any of the industries because I believe in the free market. But today, we have to acknowledge that the oil industry is heavily subsidized; this $200 billion war in Iraq is just a subsidy to big oil. We give $65 billion in direct subsidies to Big Oil every year. Coal also receives plenty of federal subsidies. I'm against all of them, but I think it does make sense to try, since it's a national security issue, to figure out if coal can have a role in weaning us from oil dependency.

And of course, Kerry does need those votes in West Virginia.

Of course.

Bush is in league with the Christian right; Kerry is a Catholic. Do you feel religion is playing a strong role in this election?

I think it plays a strong role in every American election. Unfortunately, American politics is guided too often by two things: one is intensity, and the other is money. The religious right is able to generate lots of intensity. It has a disproportionate impact on American elections.

Are Americans hooked on that intensity? Do they need that sort of visceral thrill? Do they vote with their guts rather than their brains?

To me, it's incomprehensible that anybody would vote for George W. Bush. If he was a CEO of a company, he would be fired. He's taken a $5 trillion surplus and turned it into a $5 trillion deficit, a $10 trillion shift in wealth. He has squandered the moral authority that America once wielded in the world. When I was a little boy, I travelled all over Europe with my father and I saw huge crowds of people who loved our country and wanted us to exercise leadership. They named their streets after our presidents.

I recall the day after 9/11, when the headline in Le Monde was "We're All Americans Now", and the love that we had after 230 years of history, the huge stores of love and respect that we had built up around the globe. Today, we're the most despised nation on Earth. Five billion people hate us. This is what this president has done in three and a half years: he squandered our public lands, he squandered our public treasury, he squandered the goodwill we had around the world. He's gotten us entangled in a war that is draining our treasury and is draining the treasure of American lives. He's alienated our allies and alienated the moderates in the Arab world, and made this country a much less safe place to live. He's squandered the opportunity to really do homeland security. There's no protection of our chemical plants, our nuclear plants, our cargo, our airlines. That's where we should be funneling money, and we should be rebuilding Afghanistan as a model to the Muslim world to show that we're not just in to grab oil, but that we actually are concerned about welfare and democracy in their nations. We've squandered all of those opportunities.

This president is a shallow man who is boastful about his own ignorance. He boasts that he doesn't read the papers, he doesn't read books. He has no curiosity about the world. The arrogance of this president is unprecedented in our history. The catastrophe that he has caused in our nation really calls for his impeachment. And yet, there's a chance he may even be reelected. It's incomprehensible.

You have made comparisons between the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and the current political climate in the USA. You mention the influence of large corporations on the government as one of the indicators of fascism. Many people think of fascism as driven more by individuals like Hitler or Mussolini, and Bush isn't quite in their league. Or is he?

No, I would never compare Bush to those diabolical leaders. But listen: Germany was a democratic country. It was the most educated country in the world. And it's arrogant for us to believe that it could happen there and it can't happen here. We need to safeguard our democracy. We need to nurture it. We need to guard against corporate domination. From the beginning of American political history, our greatest leaders have warned the American public against domination by corporate power. Teddy Roosevelt, who was a Republican, said that America would never be conquered or subdued by a foreign power, but that our democratic institutions could be subverted by what he called "malefactors of great wealth" who would undermine our institutions from within. Dwight Eisenhower's most famous speech was when he warned America against domination by the military-industrial complex.

The American Heritage Dictionary [the 1983 version] defines fascism as a merger of state and corporate power. Mussolini himself said fascism should be called "corporatism", because it's the merger of state and corporate power. Today we have more corporate CEOs in government and the Cabinet than any time in history. If you look at the sub-secretariats, they're virtually dominated by corporate interests who are operating not in the public interest, but to subvert the very laws that they're now charged with enforcing.

What inspires you to keep fighting against such powerful forces?

To me, it's like everything in life. We don't have power over the results. The results are in God's hands. Our job is to fight as hard as we can to do what's right, and then let God handle the results. I have to be able to look at myself in the mirror every morning and say that I tried as hard as I could to leave a world for my children that gives them the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment and good health, as the world that my parents gave me. As long as I can do that, I've done my job. I think that you just have to have faith that God is going to do right over the long term.

You have to be willing to die with your boots on.