Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one
of the greatest contemporary
Canaries.
Help Me ...
I was feeling glum today until I came across this interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which was published a year ago at this time in Grist Magazine. What a joy it was to see that there are other people out there who "get it." This gives me great hope and joy.
As for the Christian Taliban, this is what I call the Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. The Christian Hard Right is just as heretical as the Afghanistan Taliban regime that our country toppled in 2001.
Anyway, Mr. Kennedy's comments on capitalism and religion are extremely enlightening. The following interview is so extremely important that I've placed quotes on my blog. I am doing this to remind myself that maybe I'm not crazy after all, since there are some really respectable people who see things as I do. I encourage everyone to read this interview in its entirety on the Grist website .
Great quotes from Robert F. Kennedy:
"We've got to get the money out of politics. It's overwhelming the Democratic process. Campaign finance reform is hands-down the most important environmental bill."
"We are living in a science-fiction nightmare where children are gasping for breath on bad-air days because somebody gave money to a politician. And my children and the kids of millions of other Americans can no longer go fishing and eat their catch because somebody gave money to a politician. And where the oldest wilderness area on the face of the Earth -- the Adirondack Mountains -- has acidified lakes with sterilized fish because somebody gave money to politicians. And the Appalachian Mountains -- the birthplace of American democracy, the landscapes where Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone roamed, the source of our values, our virtues, our character as a people -- are being cut to the ground so somebody can make money."
"The payback far outstrips the contributions. The Bush administration got a record-breaking $100 million in contributions in 2000, largely from corporations that are now reaping billions of dollars of relief. But you and I -- the federal taxpayer and the American citizens -- for generations are going to be paying that campaign debt and that is a civil-rights and a human-rights issue."
"The best thing that could happen to the environment is free-market capitalism. In a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community. In a true free-market economy, you get efficiencies and efficiency means the elimination of waste. Waste is pollution. So in true free-market capitalism, you eliminate pollution and you properly value our natural resources so you won't cut them down. What polluters do is escape the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy -- a fat cat who's using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market."
"Laissez-faire capitalism does not work, particularly in the commons. Individuals pursuing their own self-interest will devour the commons very quickly. That's the economic law -- the tragedy of the commons. You have to force companies to internalize costs. All of the federal environmental laws are designed to restore free-market capitalism in America in this regard."
"I don't even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free-marketeer. I go out into the marketplace and I catch the polluters who are cheating the free market and I say, 'We are going to force you to internalize your costs the same way you are internalizing your profit.' That's what the federal environmental laws allow us to do: restore real property rights in America. You cannot get sustained environmental protection under any system but a democracy. There's a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny in various countries and the level of environmental degradation."
"There's a history since 1980 of a link between [anti-environmentalism] and the fundamental Christian right (which I don't even consider Christianity but Christian heresy) called dominion theology. It's driven by people like James Watt, who claimed that the Bible justified environmental destruction in the same way that white people in the South used to claim that the Bible justified slavery. God gave man dominion over nature, and that means man should dominate and destroy nature. But of course other people read in the Bible myriad mandates that we care for nature. It is not ours to own but ours to keep as a gardener would keep for the owner, who is God."
"There's a link between Christian fundamentalist evangelist leaders like Pat Robertson and Sun Myung Moon, who owns the Washington Times and funded the "wise-use" movement -- originally called the Sagebrush Rebellion -- which ultimately propelled both Reagan and Newt Gingrich. There was an unholy marriage during the '80s between the paranoid right, including the fundamentalist Christians, and industrial polluters, who basically began funding the fundamentalist right because it was in their interest to use that movement as foot soldiers in the battle to retain their giant subsidies."
"I think the environmental issue has ultimately got to be a spiritual issue and a moral issue. I believe we are hardwired to destroy the planet. We are hardwired to compete, to consume, and ultimately that biological urge can only be transcended with a spiritual fire. People have got to recognize that the obligation to the rest of the planet is a moral issue and it demands self-sacrifice and it demands sublimating our biological drives, which otherwise guide most of our decision making."
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