Payback time for Bush — at the expense of environment
By Margot Higgins
enn.com
During the 2000 campaign for U.S. president, George
W. Bush raised more
money than any other candidate in history.
Donors to the Bush campaign and the Republican
National Party contributed
$314 million, 80 percent of which came from
corporations or individuals
employed by them.
With the exception of labor, Bush gathered more
funding than former Vice
President Al Gore in every major sector of the U.S.
economy, including oil
and gas, real estate, energy, agribusiness and the
automotive industry.
Now, environmentalists claim, the president is
returning the favor at the
expense of clean air, clean water and the protection
of public land.
One blatant example is a proposal, backed by
President Bush, to drill for oil
in the pristine coastal plain of the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge. The oil
and gas industry made its largest contribution to a
presidential campaign, and
more than 75 percent of the money went to the
Republican Party, according
to conservation groups.
The Bush administration's recent abandonment of a
plan to lower the amount of arsenic in U.S.
drinking water appears suspect in light of a $5
million campaign contribution from the mining industry,
environmentalists also note. "A lot of the waste
dumped from mining operations contains arsenic," said
Deanna White, deputy political director of the
Sierra Club, "and Bush is letting them off the hook."
Environmental groups point to other variations on
the same theme, including Bush's cabinet
appointments, a proposal to reverse Clinton's
roadless areas rule and recent budget cuts.
"After elections, the payback begins," said Larry
Noble, an analyst at the Center for Responsive
Politics, a non-partisian information house. "While
this has occurred with every president in recent
years, the problem is escalating."
Since the early 1980s, CRP has offered the public a
record of the money spent by politicians in U.S.
elections. Now that information is available online
at www.opensecrets.org, where visitors can track
campaign donations by industry, candidate or
location.
"We want to make sure the public understands that
the people who contribute heavily to campaigns
get paid back after the election is over," Noble
said.
The Dirty Money Tracker Web site, launched by the
Environmental Working Group, also allows
people to examine how money from anti-environmental
corporations and coalitions affects
environmental decisions on Capitol Hill.
In the wake of Bush's recent abandonment of U.S.
commitment to the Kyoto Protocol on climate
change, the United Kingdom-based Ethical Consumer
unveiled www.boycottbush.net, which lists the
top 20 corporate donors to the Republican Party. The
site also offers a guide to products sold by
those corporations and notes more ethical
alternatives that are on the market.
Creators of the site hope that by targeting the
companies that bankrolled Bush to victory in November,
individuals can force the president to take a
different approach to climate talks scheduled for Bonn in
July.
"We recognise that corporate environmental damage is
carried out on economic rather than ideological
grounds and therefore every penny spent can
potentially impact on this decision-making," said Matt
Fawcett, a spokesperson for ERCA. "Some of the
corporations on the list have a direct interest in the
failure of the Kyoto agreement. By also taking on
major corporate sponsors which do not have a
direct stake in climate change, we hope to pressure
them to use their influence to persuade Bush to
honor his commitment to the Kyoto protocol."
-- (sad time for @ the. human race), April 25, 2001.
