Robert Kennedy Speech To Sierra Club:

[Jon8503]

For those interested in environomental issues. I belong to the Sierra Club who did this interview with Robert Kennedy Jr.:

Waterkeeper Alliance President Robert Kennedy, Jr., a featured speaker at the Sierra Summit this September, helped lead the fight to restore the Hudson River, which in turn spawned more than 125 Waterkeeper organizations worldwide. The author of the bestselling book, Crimes Against Nature, he was recently named one of Time magazine’s “Heroes for the Planet.” He spoke with Planet editor Tom Valtin about the current threats to democracy and the environment, and the need for an independent press in America.


Planet: What is the biggest environmental problem we face in this country today?

Kennedy: George W. Bush, without any rival.

Planet: The Sierra Club obviously feels much the same way. But we found during last year’s elections that when we criticized Bush the person, many people—including Sierra Club members—were angered, and consequently less open to our message. How do we oppose the policies without criticizing the person?

Kennedy: I think you have to do both. Winston Churchill said that you have to just keep telling the truth, and telling it, and telling it. And ultimately, people are going to believe it. It can be frustrating, and of course industry and its indentured servants use every method to discredit you, including saying that you’re tree-huggers, or radicals, or against the president. But you have to persevere. There’s a huge systemic problem in our democracy now, which is the endless negligence of the American press and the huge corporate consolidation of the media. That’s the principal threat to American democracy, and it’s an issue that environmentalists have to take an interest in curing. We have to develop outlets and methods of getting our message across to the American public that don’t rely on the mainstream press, which is now controlled by the right wing and giant corporations who are interested not in informing the public but in entertaining us in order to increase their own revenues.

Eighty percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don’t know what’s going on. The press is not doing its job.
Planet: On Arianna Huggington’s blog—one current alternative to the mainstream press—you wrote that for the last 15 years King Coal and Big Oil have funded Washington think tanks with aberrant scientists to persuade the public that the science is still out on global warming, and that message is reinforced by people like Rush Limbaugh who delude the public with junk science. But lately some conservatives have been warning that global warming is real. Do you think we’re finally beginning to turn a corner?

Kennedy: Yes, I think there’s a sea change going on now. Cinergy, the biggest utility in the country, just put global warming on the cover of its shareholder’s report and devoted 35 pages of the report to that issue. Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, has called for a national policy to address global warming. Exxon last week announced a massive campaign to develop technologies to deal with global warming.

Planet: You’ve said that every time environmentalists argue for “balance,” we lose something because industry controls the debate. What do we do about that?

Kennedy: The public has to know what’s actually happening. If people knew what was going on they’d be on our side. The problem is their information is cooked by industry, by the worst polluters, by the think tanks on Capitol Hill who are dictating what happens in the news.

The press is letting this president get away with policies without ground truth in them, and by that I mean the easily discernable lies of this White House on so many issues—from Medicare to the environment, the Iraq war to the budget. If we had an active, independent press that was willing to speak truth to power, the voters in this country would not be behaving irrationally. A democracy relies on an aggressive, independent press, and we no longer have that.

Planet: So does there have to be some sort of a breakup akin to the Justice Department breaking up AT&T 20 years ago?

Kennedy: Yes, I think we need to bring back the Fairness Doctrine—the requirement that the press tell both sides of the issues—and break up the big conglomerates that control the press, or ask them to divest themselves, so that the press is locally controlled, there’s diversity of control of the airwaves, and the airwaves are back in the hands of the public.

It’s ironic that the Bush administration makes the claim that they are an administration of “values,” because all of the things they claim to represent are simply hollow facades that mask the one value that they really consider worth fighting for: corporate profit-taking. They claim to be conservatives, but they’ve torn the “conserve” out of conservativism. They claim to like free markets but they despise free markets. What they fight for is corporate welfare—capitalism for the poor, socialism for the rich. They claim to like property rights, but only when it’s the right of a polluter to use his property to destroy his neighbor’s property or the public property. They claim to like law and order, but they’re the first ones to let the corporate lawbreakers off the hook. They claim to like local control and states’ rights, but they only embrace states’ rights when it means chopping down the barriers to corporate profit-taking at the local level. They claim to embrace Christianity, but they’ve violated every one of the manifold mandates of the Christian faith that we care for the environment and treat future generations with responsibility and the earth as stewards.

Planet: Considering the times we’re in, what gives you hope?

Kennedy: The great source of my optimism is that if you look at the values that Americans share, there’s no difference between rank and file Republicans and Democrats. We all want a clean environment. According to the latest Gallup poll, 81 percent of Republicans want stronger environmental laws and want them strictly enforced. The problem is that the Republican leadership is controlled by big polluters and large corporations and the press is not reporting the truth to the American people.

Planet: You’ve said that when you focus on corporate accountability, you get a good response whether you’re in a "red" state or a "blue" one. How can we translate this consensus into stronger environmental protection?

I get the same response as I do from blue-state residents except for this—red-state voters are always asking, ”How come I haven’t heard this before?”
Kennedy: Again, I see very little philosophical difference between red-state residents and blue-state residents. The distinction is really a huge information deficit among the people who supported President Bush. A recent PIPA (Program on International Policy Attitudes) survey by the University of Maryland found that Americans basically share the same values. I give over 100 speeches a year, more than 40 of them in the red states, and on the issue of corporate accountability, I get the same response as I do from blue-state residents, except for this: red-state voters are always asking, “How come I haven’t heard this before?” The reason is that they’re getting their news from Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the Sinclair network, which are not telling them the truth. So they have all kinds of misconceptions about environmentalists, about environmental laws, about the war in Iraq, etc. The PIPA Report showed that 65 percent of the president's supporters believed that Bush strongly supported the Kyoto Protocol and strong labor and environmental standards in our international treaties. But when PIPA asked them, “What do you believe,” there was almost no difference between the core beliefs of Republicans and Democrats. In essence, 80 percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don’t know what’s going on. The press is not doing its job. All the talk about changing our message or fine-tuning our communications—it’s all nonsense. It’s like changing deck chairs on the Titanic. The system is broken, and we’ve got to repair if we want to start communicating with the American people.

Planet: That sounds like a long-term project, not an overnight fix.

Kennedy: There is an overnight fix. It’s called the Fairness Doctrine. We need to bring it back. That’s the most important environmental law that we can pass.
http://www.sierrasummit2005.org/interviews/rfk.asp

[halobeam]

1. The Fairness Doctrine...

There's something that we can do. Spread it around, picket for it, blog about it, educate the "Repubs who are Dems, but don't know what's going on."

by the way,

"kick" and nominated, environmentalists go after the media, we need all special interest groups to realize the media is the root of the problem.

great post by the way

[glitch]

2. Thanks for posting a link to this

RFK jr is fighting the good fight hard. He is remarkable, I never miss a chance to grab one of his speeches.

[Jon8503]

3. Thanks for the reply and interest. I also don't miss too much

from RFK JR. I have always admired and respected him for what he has done and attempts to do. He is not afraid of a fight and always on the right side as far as I am concerned.