GOP has 'Contract' against the environment

by Virginia Warner Brodine

This article was reprinted from the February 17, 1996 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

The infamous Contract on America has two sides. One side is an assault on America' people, the other on America' environment.

Public opinion polls make it clear that we have a big pro- environment majority and this has had some effect. A recent National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) report notes the defeat of three efforts in the Senate to "hamstring pollution control officials in the name of 'regulatory reform.'" Also two votes in the House to reject a sweeping collection of legislative "riders" on the finding bill for the Environmental Protection Agency (HR 2099)."

Thirty-six other anti-environmental riders attached to various bills have passed both houses but have been vetoed by the president. And another victory: The House twice rejected natural resource giveaways in the funding bill for the Department of the Interior.

These victories are important, but they are fingers in a dike the Contract threatens to sweep away. The Contract can poison the air we breathe and the water we drink, destroy what is left of our national heritage of rivers and forests, knock out protection to the work environment, expose hundreds of communities to toxic waste and generally leave us at the mercy of profit-seeking corporations.

Since the late 1960s, a series of environmental protection laws and agencies have been put in place. Inadequate as they were, they were a beginning. The Contract' goal is to trash them. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his Republican troops are marching in step to a corporate tune.

The "terminators" as we have called them, have a variety of tactics to use against each and every environmental measure:

Render it impotent by "reforming" its regulations: A Regulatory Moratorium, prohibiting issuance of new health or environmental safeguards, has passed both houses. A Risk Assessment bill (S-343) was passed by the House and was sent to the Senate. It requires assessing the damage to the environment and balancing it against the cost of preventive or limiting action. If the cost weighs heavily, too bad for the environment.

A "takings" bill requires paying property owners for supposed reductions in the value of their property caused by the environmental regulation. This also passed the House, and is now in the Senate (S-605). Similar provisions have been attached to both the Clean Water Bill and the Endangered Species Bill.

President Clinton vetoed a bill to gut the Clean Air Act, but the House now considers gutting it by repealing the 1990 amendments to this act (HR-479) and is crafting additional anti-clean air bills.

Amend it to death as in the case of what was the Clean Water Act. The amended version -- which so emasculated the act as to earn it the designation of "Dirty Water Bill -- passed the House in May (HR-961, S-851).

As if that were not enough, the Safe Drinking Water Act may be amended, punching it full of loopholes through which toxic chemicals can get into the water, and repealing its public information provisions. This passed the Senate but not the House yet.

Also amended to death is the Superfund Bill (HR-2500, S- 1285) not yet voted on in either house. This would bear heavily on Native American and African American communities because of the racist nature of picking sites. Already passed and signed by the president is a rider to the Recisions Bill banning the listing of new Superfund sites.

Starve it to death. Neither EPA nor OSHA have ever had adequate funding to enforce the law and regulations they were designed to oversee. The Republican budget cuts them to the point of total ineffectiveness.

Kill it outright. This is the fate proposed for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Emboldened by this swing of the Contract axe, a zealous axeman has now introduced a bill to kill OSHA.

Senate Bill 1151 would wipe out the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Reclamation. There is plenty wrong with these agencies but wiping them out makes corrections impossible.

Piggyback anti-environmentalism onto bills on other subjects. The VA-HUD appropriations bill had 17 anti- environmental "riders." Some of the riders vetoed by Clinton are reappearing attached to other bills.

Special "perks" for special industries. Here are just a few of the special gifts offered to various industries:

* Oil companies would get their wish: they are promised drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Passed, now on the president' desk. And oil refineries are to be exempt from Clean Air standards (Clean Air Act, HR-479).

* The mining industry got the moratorium on the outdated Mining Act lifted, permitting mining companies to lease public land for $2.50/acre or buy it at a fraction of its value (HR-1580, S-506), paying only meager royalties on the resource removed. Not passed, but sneaked into the budget reconciliation bill.

* Cattle agribusiness will go merrily on, not only grazing Bureau of Land Management land on the cheap, but overgrazing and destroying it (HR-1713, S-1459).

* The timber industry got its bonanza in the misnamed "Timber Salvage" bill, a rider to the so-called Recisions Bill passed in July and signed by Clinton. This not only opened the way for hundreds of new miles of logging roads into timber land, but also granted timber sales in old growth forest exempt from all environmental restrictions.

* Chemical corporations would get a halt in the addition of chemicals to the Toxic Release Inventory.

* The profits of coal, oil, and chemical companies are given precedence over the danger to our global climate which requires cutting the pollution-causing global warming and making a hole in the ozone layer.

Junior versions of this Contract on the environment have surfaced in many states. For example, risk assessment and "takings" bills were defeated in November in Oregon and Washington but have passed in several others.

The essence of these bills at both state and federal levels is the "property rights" cry of the anti-environment organization Wise Use, financed by corporate money and programmed by corporate PR hired guns.

"Property rights!" has been the slogan against every labor or civil rights advance and now it is being sounded against the people' right to a living and renewable environment. When slaveholders claimed property rights of people a civil war was fought to settle the issue.

That issue is still at the bottom of the Contract' assault on environment. It comes down to a confrontation between the power of property ownership and the power of organized people. Wise Use and a variety of offshoots, all misnamed to sound populist, build on people' dissatisfaction with the federal government. They advocate not only property rights but also state' rights and even county rights over the environment.

Property ownership in natural resources and in productive operations that draw on those resources provide the skeleton of the capitalist system. When any people' movement begins to cut close to that bone, the system screams. The environmental movement has aimed for only small modifications in the system. Yet the principle at the core of the movement is that protection of the environment is a right of all the people and supersedes the property rights of individuals and corporations. That is cutting close to the bone and is enough to bring forth the scream.

Wise Use propaganda puts the emphasis on the property rights of individuals. Many small property owners, particularly in rural areas, fall for it. But it is the property rights of corporations vs. the rights of people to a truly livable environment that are the root of the matter.

Defeating the anti-people, anti-environment Contract depends upon building up the power of organized people to oppose the power of property ownership and its puppets in Congress. Unions, whose strength tends to be in the cities, can well look to environmentalists, whose strength is often in the suburbs and small towns, as anti-Contract allies. The fight against the anti-people, anti-labor, anti-environment Contract is all one fight.