Take our country back
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Speech, 9/10/05 > Press Room > Sierra Club
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at the Sierra Club’s National Convention and Expo on September 10, 2005 in San Francisco. Kennedy received the Sierra Club’s William O. Douglas Award on behalf of the Waterkeeper Alliance.
It’s a stealth attack. The White House has used all kinds of ingenious machinations to try to conceal its radical agenda from the American people, including Orwellian rhetoric. When they want to destroy the forests, they call it the Healthy Forest Act. When they wanted to destroy the air, they called it the Clear Skies Bill.
But most insidiously, they have put polluters in charge of virtually all the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. President Bush appointed as head of the Forest Service a timber-industry lobbyist, Mark Rey, probably the most rapacious in history. He put in charge of public lands a mining-industry lobbyist, Steven Griles, who believes that public lands are unconstitutional. He put in charge of the air division of the EPA, Jeffrey Holmstead, a utility lobbyist who has represented nothing but the worst air polluters in America. As head of Superfund, a woman whose last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade Superfund. The second in command of EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist.
There is nothing wrong with having businesspeople in government. It’s a good thing, if your objective is to recruit competence and expertise. But in all of these cases, these individuals, as I show in my book, have entered government service not to benefit the public interest but rather to subvert the very laws they’re now charged with enforcing in order to enrich the president’s corporate pay masters.
They have imposed enormous diminution in quality of life in this country. The problem is most Americans don’t know about it. They don’t see the connection, and the reason for that is because we have a negligent and indolent media and press in this country which has absolutely let down American democracy.
I look at this White House and I ask myself –and this may be unfair — but I ask myself a lot of times, how did they get so many draft dodgers in one place? You know, the president, Dick Cheney five deferments; John Ashcroft, six deferments. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Tom DeLay, all of their buddies, Dennis Hastert, Rush Limbaugh. There are a lot of people who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War, and I know a lot of them. Most of them did it because they had moral qualms about that war.
But not these people. These people loved the war; they just wanted somebody else to fight it. And it occurs to me that the reason for that is that these are people who don’t understand the values that make America worth fighting for. But America is worth fighting for, and it’s worth dying for. Those of us who know that it’s worth fighting for have to take it back now from those who don’t.