Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Crimes Against Nature: How George
Bush and His Corporate Pals are Plundering the Country and
Hijacking Our Democracy. Harper Collins,
2004
Kennedy, a lawyer who is also the son of the
late Senator Robert Kennedy, has been the leader of the
environmental watchdog agency Riverkeepers for many years.
In this capacity he has filed a myriad of environmental
lawsuits with the intent to force
polluters to
clean up
their past messes or to make their current operations more
environmentally friendly. He
won a majority of these court
judgments until the administration of George W. Bush assumed
power. Kennedy claims that Bush has sought – successfully –
to roll back every environmental law on the books to appease
a number of polluting businesses, industries and utilities
that contributed heavily to Republican campaigns.
In
Crimes Against Nature, Kennedy seeks not only to identify
these polluters along with their former lobbyists who,
thanks to Bush, now head the very government offices and
regulatory agencies they used to do everything possible to
hinder. While Kennedy is strongly identified with the
Democratic Party, in this
book he maintains that he is not
espousing a liberal agenda per se, but rather making an
urgent plea to citizens of all political persuasions to pay
more attention to a beleaguered environment that, in his
view, has seen its hard-won protections systematically
stripped away by the Bush White House, via stealthy
dismantling of legislation such as the Clean Air Act and the
Clean Water Act.
Chapters of the book are devoted to
abuses of the coal industry, the gutting of the Superfund
that gave the EPA the budget to clean up pollution hotspots,
agribusiness polluters such as the massive pig farms that
proliferate in many states of the US, and the presidential
appointments of environmental and regulatory agency leaders
who had previously worked for the very companies that the
agencies had been created to regulate.
The original
hardcover edition of Crimes Against Nature was published
ahead of the 2004 election. The 2005 trade paperback edition
contains a new afterword that examines how the Republicans
won the election.
Not all of the book addresses
environmental abuses. Considerable space is also devoted to
a discussion of the inexorable conservative takeover of the
media, especially television and radio. Kennedy describes a
ruthlessly efficient conservative machine that clandestinely
distributes talking points to its advocates in media, who
shill in lockstep for the interests of business and
industry. Kennedy insistently debunks the claimed liberal
media bias decried by Republicans, arguing that most media
outlets are inherently conservative due to their corporate
ownership. He also mourns the disappearance of investigative
journalism in the face of an American public that prefers to
watch or read news about celebrity murder trials or American
Idol.
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