LETTERS
LETTERS to the Editor Slime or No Slime? Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair are wrong to assert that the Republican Congressional leaders' attempt to weaken environmental standards was...
...On April 29, Clinton signed an executive order lifting a three-decade-old ban on the export of North Slope crude oil to the lucrative markets of Japan and China...
...Months earlier, President Clinton had promised to veto any budget bill that opened the refuge...
...Brian J. Johnson, Associate Director for Communications, The Council on Environmental Quality, The Executive Office of the President The authors reply: As for the Convention on Biodiversity, the United States signed the general declaration, which is mostly inoffensive boilerplate...
...Clair are wrong to assert that the Republican Congressional leaders' attempt to weaken environmental standards was unnecessary because President "Clinton and the Democrats had already done most of the damage themselves" ("Slime Green," May issue...
...Finally, virtually all of the examples cited in the article are misleading or false...
...They made three separate efforts to weaken every kind of public-health and environmental safeguard: the regulatory "reform" bill, budget, and so-called takings bill...
...The Republican leadership in Congress has sought to enact dozens of specific measures to create loopholes in environmental laws or turn over public resources to narrowly defined interests...
...But the Administration has refused to endorse important side agreements on such vital issues as bioengineered technologies, and indeed is undercutting what positive agreements there were...
...Alexander Coekburn and Jeffrey St...
...In fact, the Clinton Administration signed the treaty almost three years ago...
...Corinne Sabo San Antonio, Texas I've just read your editorial in the May issue, and I feel compelled to write and thank you...
...I hope voters in California and anywhere else Nader's name appears on the ballot take into consideration that remark, as well as his refusal to endorse affirmative action and immigrant rights...
...I anticipate a long and happy relationship with your magazine...
...Emily A. Baker Alexandria, Virginia The editors welcome correspondence front readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material pre-viously published in The Progressive...
...I couldn't agree with you more when you state that "the left must stand up for gay and lesbian rights...
...He rightly refuses to be ensnared into being a spokesman for issues that are peripheral to major societal problems and that weaken his advocacy of solutions to those problems...
...But Clinton has given the oil companies a prize they sought vainly from five previous Presidents...
...It's refreshing to see that The Progressive is willing to stand up for all of our rights...
...This extraordinary action—almost entirely ignored by the press—multiplies by five times the value of Exxon's, BP'S, and ARCO's holdings in Alaska...
...To counter the trickle of cancellations, here is my next renewal a bit early...
...Johnson claims that Clinton beat back Representative Don Young's attempts to speed up clearcutting on the nation's largest temperate rainforest...
...All too often I find liberal organizations and publications that don't believe lesbian and gay rights and women's rights are appropriate issues...
...Clair Nader and Gay Rights It is one thing to be fair and just—whatever that means— to homosexuals ("gay" is a word they have usurped), but another to be co-opted by their viewpoints...
...But Dole-style regulatory reform and "takings" self-destructed without ever getting out of the Senate—mainly because of dissent within the Republican Party...
...These measures would be law right now if not for President Clinton and Democrats in Congress...
...AH letters max be edited for clarity and conciseness...
...Johnson prudently avoids any mention of Clinton's administrative record...
...And the corporate press and many green organizations have played along with the scam...
...The executive order makes it profitable for them to accelerate their drilling rates, and thus renders it almost inevitable that the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge will be opened to drilling in the near future...
...There is no way a Republican President could have maneuvered this measure through the Congress...
...These measures—as well as measures to close national parks and give oil refineries a special clean-air loophole— were among almost fifty different Republican anti-environment budget measures blocked by President Clinton and pro-environment members of Congress, most of them Democrats...
...Nor did we detail the Clinton Administration's efforts to derail legislation to require labels for bioengineered food products, such as rBGH-laden milk...
...Only a very small number of Republican anti-environment measures have become law—such as the "timber-salvage rider"—and the fact remains that it is the Republican majority that sponsors them and President Clinton who fights them...
...When the elite green resistance crumbled and environmentalists duly relinquished their injunction...
...But, of course, this is where much of the dirty work has taken place...
...Take the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which Johnson boasts Clinton has sworn to protect...
...As always with the Clinton gang, the rule has been, "Watch what we say, not what we do...
...In fact, the Administration supports a bill that contains stronger—not weaker— provisions for lead, arsenic, and radon...
...Alas, what they say is fraudulent...
...Apparently the words "progressive" and "Nader" do not belong in the same sentence...
...Finally, President Clinton vetoed the Republican leaders' attempt to use the budget as a vehicle for a series of special-interest policy riders, such as one to expand clearcutting in the Tongass rainforest and one to block new efforts to protect endangered fish and wildlife...
...After six months of dispute and two government shutdowns, the Republican leadership abandoned this strategy and restored most of the President's add-back request...
...Cockburn and St...
...Although I've only recently become a subscriber...
...Yet, only days before Johnson wrote his letter to 77ie Progressive, the Clinton Admini^ tration unveiled its plan fOP the Tongass, prescribing three times as much clearcutting as their own biologists say is sustainable and legal...
...Clinton endorsed budget cuts in funding for wetlands protection and CITES (the international agreement on endangered species) by 50 percent, effectively crippling both programs...
...President Clinton also vetoed the Republican effort to cut his request for funding for cleaning up toxic dumps 25 percent, EPA enforcement 25 percent, and safe-drinking-water by 45 percent...
...After Democrats defeated it three times on the Senate floor, the GOP leadership put a version of it on a debt-ceiling bill...
...President Clinton vetoed the Republican move to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drillers, which was attached to the budget bill...
...Superfund and energy-efficiency programs took similar hits...
...He mentions the regulatory "reform" bill, "takings" legislation, and the budget...
...Evidently, Ralph Nader has enough acumen to understand that heterosexuals are by and large repelled by insistent advocacy of homosexual rights...
...We failed to mention such efforts as the Administration's tireless lobbying on behalf of the so-called Dolphin Death Bill...
...I feel that it is unfortunate and debilitating that left publications like The Progressive identify with the homosexual "cause" (see Editor's Note...
...silence would have been better...
...As we pointed out, Clinton's obsession with free trade at any cost has turned the United States into a PCB-importing country...
...Back in year one of Clinton time, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt was already threatening greens with just such a rider unless they agreed to give back a federal court injunction preventing any logging of old-growth forests in the Northwest...
...It should extend this lesbian's subscription until June 2001...
...what they do has been dangerous to our nation's health and environment...
...Clinton's record on toxics makes George Bush look like Rachel Carson...
...Or consider the Tongass National Forest...
...Clinton betrayed this promise and with a stroke of his pen suspended all environmental laws on the nation's federal forests so that the timber companies might have their way...
...which unleashed the chainsaw on old-growth forests across the country...
...Oilman George Bush tried and failed...
...And most of the examples they cite to prove it are seriously misleading or downright false...
...But only two years later...
...May issue...
...laws protecting dolphins from the lethal fishing methods employed by the Colombian and Mexican tuna fleets...
...Johnson raises the specter of the Republican Horror, and the terrible things Newt's troops tried to accomplish before the courageous Clinton threw them back...
...On safe drinking water, the Clinton approach is to bemoan excessive regulation and turn the enforcement of the law over to the states...
...I am appalled that Ralph Nader equates lesbian/gay rights with "gonadal politics...
...And it is inaccurate to assert that the Administration supports "weakening the Safe Drinking Water Act" so that "increased levels of lead, radon, and arsenic will be allowed to enter the nation's water supplies" for the first time since the law was passed during the Ford Administration...
...L'rhumi, Illinois Ihope you never get tired of hearing "thank you" for your recognition of the humanity you share with lesbians and gay men...
...There's also Clinton's cynical attempt to appease the NRA by issuing an executive order opening all National Wildlife Refuges to hunting...
...As a feminist, I have long been a supporter of gay and lesbian rights, along with women's rights...
...In the name of free trade, the Clinton Administration is promoting legislation that seeks to demolish U.S...
...Morton K. Brusse...
...I thought he had more compassion and humanity than that...
...To take two examples: It is inaccurate to assert that "despite Al Gore's homilies at Rio, the United States has still not signed on to the Convention on Biodiversity...
...President Clinton vetoed it...
...Nowhere is Johnson's effrontery more brazen than his discussion of the "salvage-logging rider," signed into law by Clinton in July 1995...
...Clair note the timber rider as evidence that Democrats have sold out the environment— but they fail to note that when President Clinton, working with Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington, sought to repeal it, Republicans in the Senate provided forty-nine of the fifty-four votes to block that effort...
...The Contract with America's regulatory "reform" bill—sponsored in the Senate by Bob Dole—would weaken every toxic-waste, clean-water, meat-safety, or other public-health and environmental law on the books...
...maybe not in the same universe...
...You are right...
...Babbitt promised that the Administration would aggressively oppose and veto any similar riders in the future...
...The only misleading element in our story was that space constraints made it impossible for us to recount even half of the Clinton Administration's sell-outs on environmental issues...
...The only virtue of the salvage rider is the fact that it is time-bound and will expire at the end of the year...
Vol. 60 • July 1996 • No. 7
