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August 21, 2001
Former
Interior Secretary and Governor of Arizona Lashes Out
at CounterPunch
Babbitt: I Was Wronged!
Not so long ago we drew a harshly unflattering
portrait of an unalluring invertebrate known as Bruce Babbitt.
We described how, contrary to all his pledges when he was Secretary
of the Interior in Clinton time, this same Babbitt is now toiling
for a scumbag DC law firm called Latham and Watkins, helping
large corporations evade whatever pathetic restraints our laws
still place on their rampages. We detailed his long love affair
with nuclear power. We noted how he has now become the hired
legal gun in two of the most outrageous assaults on the environment
in recent California history.
They concern:
The Ahmanson ranch outside
Los Angeles, where Washington Mutual plans to build tract homes,
extirpating endangered species in the process;
North of Cambria on the Central
California Coast where the Hearst family is trying to extort
at least $300 million from the feds and the state of California,
said money being demanded in lieu of the Hearst family disfiguring
the coastline with condos. Babbitt is helping both outfits in
their filthy endeavors, devising legal stratagems of a particularly
despicable nature.
Our denunciation of Babbitt
as a profile in ignominy received wide circulation and now Babbitt
has felt it necessary respond, in the Arizona Republic. We quote
salient sentences and respond to them.
Babbitt starts by saying our
diatribe "alleges that Bruce Babbitt has become a wicked,
greedy capitalist. That's news to me. I am doing the same work
today for the same ideals that I pursued in public service in
Arizona and as secretary of the Interior."
Actually Babbitt is telling
the truth here. He is indeed pursuing the same work he has always
done. Babbitt hails from a wealthy ranching family and there
has never been a day when he has not been serving the interests
of big landowners, mining companies, utilities and real estate
czars. He has been consistent.
Babbitt: "I am trying
to find practical conservation solutions to preserve America's
landscape."
Translation: the word to watch
here is "practical". In other words, Babbitt seeks
"solutions" that appeal to those who are restricted
by environmental laws, whether the water barons of the southwest
or the real estate developers like Donald Brin, of the rapacious
Irvine Development Corporation, who want to annihilate the habitat
of the gnatcatcher, or the sugar lords of south Florida who want
to drain and poison the Everglades.
Babbitt: "The acquisition
of the Headwaters Forest in northern California was a major environmental
achievement of the Clinton administration. We acquired more than
7,000 acres of ancient coastal redwoods for posterity at a price
that was determined by independent appraisal and approved by
Congress."
Translation: I allowed both
the federal government and the state of California to be blackmailed
out of almost half a billion dollars by Charles Hurwitz. If buying
7,000 acres of land is a major environmental accomplishment,
then the millions of acres protected under the 1984 wilderness
bills make Ronald Reagan a titan among greens.
Babbitt: "The alternative
approach" St Clair and Cockburn seem to offer "is confiscation.
That might have worked in Leninist Russia, but it is not the
way we do things in America."
Lenin? Who mentioned Lenin?
Babbitt sounds like he's well versed in the writings of Ron Arnold,
leader of the conservative Wise Use movement who talks of government
confiscation aka "taking" of private assets. In fact,
it was the corporate predator Charles Hurwitz who had confiscated
funds with his taxpayer-financed looting of his savings and loan
and the pillaging of the Pacific Lumber pension funds, as well
as his "confiscation of salmon and owl habitat" by
turning it into eroding stumpfields. Remember, all it would have
taken to protect the Headwaters Grove and the remaining old-growth
and associated forests in northern California would have been
an aggressive enforcement of the Endangered Species Act. Of course,
that never happened. Babbitt reveals his true views about the
endangered species act here. Like the most crazed of the sagebrush
rebels, he sees it as an un-American law that violates the Fifth
Amendment of the constitution.
Babbitt: St Clair and Cockburn
disparage " the use of easements for the protection of open
space. Conservation easements, however, are being promoted by
all environmental organizations as an innovative and cost-effective
means of preserving open space."
Conservation easements are
neither cost-effective nor do they preserve open space. Indeed,
the phrase "open Space" is the give-away here. In
Babbitt's world, open space has been twisted to mean cloverleafs
on interstate highways, cemeteries, golf courses, landfills,
and other useless lands that corporations have gotten credit
or cash for not destroying. What hasn't been protected is habitat,
those big, unwieldy and contentious tracts of land that are
dwindling daily and are needed to protect the wolf, the grizzly,
the owl and the salmon. Babbitt has personal reasons to look
kindly on this approach. His family sold a multi-million conservation
easement that barely restricted their activities. Moreover his
brothers enjoyed got paid a handsome sum not to develop state-owned
lands in Arizona. Nice work if you can get it.
Babbitt: "And that requires
bringing together conservationists and landowners to find common
ground, to establish land values, and to negotiate provisions
that meet the needs of the landowner while preserving the natural
landscape for the enjoyment of future generations.
Here we get to Babbitt's real
legacy, the coercive harmony party, where he strong-armed environmentalists
to form consensus groups with industrialists, all in the name
of the win-win solution. Of course, it took Babbitt, with his
phony green credentials (garnered as former head of the League
of Conservation Voters) to make this work. No one would have
swallowed it during Reagan/Bush time. All militant enviros were
banished from the consensus table. If an enviro said "no"
to a deal, they were given the boot. If a corporado said no,
then the bar was inevitably lowered. That's the way it worked.
Babbitt has a lot to own up to, but the green groups that went
along with him are even more to blame.
Babbitt: "Now on to Southern
California. The Ahmanson Ranch is an award-winning planned community
on the northern edge of Los Angeles. The owner of the property
has already made a gift of more than 10,000 acres of the ranch
and nearby lands to the Santa Monica Mountains Land Conservancy
for permanent preservation as open space."
Translation: the 10,000 acres
couldn't be developed in any event. So in a typical Babbitt two-step,
the developers (a Seattle banking house/real estate conglomerate)
are getting credit [and awards, no less) for not destroying lands
that they couldn't build on in the first place. Only in Babbitt-land
world could this "gift" somehow make up for the fact
that they are destroying the habitat for not one but two endangered
species.
Babbitt: "The owner is
now preparing to develop the planned community on less than 2,000
acres of the remaining land. I have been retained to work with
environmental organizations and the surrounding communities to
hear their remaining concerns, and to assure that the developers
are meeting the highest standards relating to traffic management,
storm drainage, endangered species and other land-use issues."
Translation: the key phrase
here is "work with environmental organizations." The
local groups working to protect the lowly spineflower and red-legged
frog rightly despise Babbitt. So do the local wise use groups,
who see him as a two-faced con artist. The only people Babbitt
can influence these days are the big environmental groups who
he has used so shamefully in the past, groups like the Planning
and Conservation League, the Environmental Defense fund and
the NRDC.
Babbitt: When St Clair and
Cockburn condemn "my work with a landowner seeking to develop
less than 16 percent of its land after gifting over the other
84 percent into public ownership," it only unmasks their
" hostility toward working within the system to achieve
good, lasting conservation solutions."
Translation: Babbitt evokes
his work with 'landowners', suggesting that his reign at Interior
was focused saving on the plight of the Jeffersonian agrarianist.
Naturally, this is a ruse. Babbitt's landowners were big timber
corporations, big real estate developers, big mining companies,
and big agribusiness. Babbitt didn't "work within the system".
He bent the system of existing environmental laws so that corporations
could get away with destroying rare habitat without incurring
legal sanctions and indeed sometimes even getting handsome government
handouts.
Babbitt: "What about nuclear
power? There is an abundant need for more creativity in responding
to America's power generation and conservation needs. There is
no one solution. I do believe that for the foreseeable future,
nuclear power is and should be part of America's power supply
mix."
No translation required. While
Bush and Cheney are rightly savaged for wanting to revive nuclear
power, Babbitt here outs himself as one of their peers, which
is no surprise to those who know him and his services for the
Palo Verde reactor outside Phoenix, one of the biggest nukes
in the US.
Babbitt: "Why? Because
the continued burning of fossil fuels - coal, gas and oil - is
the principal cause of global warming, which is far and away
the most severe environmental threat of our time.
Translation: This is straight
out of the Nuclear Energy Institute's playbook: nuclear power
should enjoy a new round of subsidies because of the threat of
global warming.
Babbitt: "For the sake
of future generations, we must phase out fossil fuels, especially
coal. Even as we invest in conservation and efficiency and renewable
energy, we will need nuclear in the mix to provide base-load
power. If we reject nuclear power and continue to burn fossil
fuels at current rates, our children are going to be living in
summer temperatures of 135 degrees in Phoenix."
Translation: Patently absurd.
Even under the gloomiest of the global warming scenarios (which
are all open to question, as even they admit), the climate of
Phoenix is likely to get better not worse. Even so, if there
is one major city that could power itself off of solar radiation,
it's Phoenix.
Babbitt: "And they will
be without water, for as the Colorado Rivers dwindles in volume,
the Central Arizona Project will dry up as other states with
higher priorities claim the entire river supply."
Babbitt's support of the Central
Arizona Project, one of the most wasteful and destructive water
projects since the days of Mulholland, as governor and Secretary
of interior is the most telling evidence of his malign environmental
credentials.
Babbitt: "As secretary
I helped the president to set aside 60 million acres of roadless
areas in national forests, to protect an additional 20 million
acres under the Endangered Species Act, and to create nearly
10 million acres of new national monuments."
Translation: In no way did
we ever seriously discommode the lumber and mining companies,
and in fact we saved them from the fury of federal judges like
Dwyer of Seattle, outraged at the way both the government and
the corporations were flouting the law.
Babbitt: St Clair and Cockburn
are "really saying we haven't done enough because we should
agree that landowners are not entitled to the reasonable use
of private property. Obviously I disagree with such radical
nonsense. There is room both to protect creation and to accommodate
human needs on this planet. It is hard work, and it frequently
means bringing opposing parties together to find common ground.
I am proud to be doing that, much as I have done throughout my
time as governor of Arizona and secretary of the Interior."
Translation: Thank God for
law firms like Latham and Watkins, which is paying my legal bills,
stemming from charges that as Secretary of the Interior I was
privy to an extortion scheme aimed at gouging money out of poor
Indians. CP
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