Cheney's infamous secretive, industry-laden energy task force produced what can be boiled down to two main recommendations: "Lower the environmental bar and pay corporations to jump over it," Werbach wrote.
For example, Congress has promised $3 billion in tax cuts to mining corporations to help them access natural gas embedded in underground coal deposits in Georgia's Powder River basin. The Bureau of Land Management has calculated that miners will waste a full 700 million gallons of publicly owned water a year in the process--thereby sucking the region's underground aquifers dry and decimating local farms and wildlife.
The Bush administration's Healthy Forests Initiative essentially entails granting logging companies access to old-growth trees--and then subsidizing them for brush clearing. And even the giant sequoias that former President Bill Clinton sought to protect by creating a 327,000-tree national monument in the southern Sierra Nevada just four years ago risk being logged at a rate of 10 million board-feet of lumber per year--a higher rate than allowed on surrounding national forest lands--in the name of "forest management."
All in all, the Bush administration has launched the greatest giveaway of public natural resources in more than a century. Yet few in the mainstream media have bothered to analyze these plans and put the lie to their rhetorical manipulations.
Sources: "Liquidation of the commons," Adam Werbach, In These Times, Nov. 23, 2003; "Giant sequoias could get the ax," Matt Weiser, High Country News, June 9, 2003.
Censored 2005 : The Top 25 Censored Stories (Censored)
by Peter Phillips
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