LETTERS
LETTERS to the Editor slimed again In their article on the environmental groups ("Slime Green," May issue) authors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair overlook some of the environmental...
...that would violate Indonesian law...
...Incinerators...
...After the agreement squeaked through Congress, John Adams, head of NRDC, boasted, "We broke the back of the environmental opposition to NAFTA...
...Who's battling most effectively for nature: Wetstone and Pope, or the Great Satan himself, Newt Gingrich...
...Why is it that none of the dozens of legitimate news media who visited our mine in the past year—unlike Press, who has never been there—have ever made this allegation...
...It's one thing to have the courage of your convictions...
...Alas, I think I'd be disappointed to remake the discovery of those classical phenomena of identification with the enemy and self-condemning guilt...
...The "center" meant the meeting ground between Clinton and what became known as the Republican moderates...
...But the President should be given credit where he has earned it...
...Eyal Press Self-Haters I've gotten used to your potshots at Israel in contrast with your tut-tut wrist-slaps at the Arabs, but your recent comments ("A 'Good' Shelling," Comment, June issue) beat your worst previous efforts in the nasty demonstration of Jewish self-hate...
...His own outfit, NRDC, was at the head of those green groups mustered in support of the trade agreement...
...Perhaps Freeport could correct any mistaken impressions by taking out some full-page ads in The Progressive to set the readers straight, as it has already done in The New York Times, The Weekly Standard, The Texas Monthly, and other publications since word about the human-rights and environmental problems at its mine began to spread...
...What puzzles me is the disposition to bury the history of the Jewish diaspora...
...Amazingly, Cockburn and St...
...Why is it that none of the hundreds of outsiders who toured our operations in the past year have ever stepped forward to make this charge, other than anonymously to Eyal Press...
...Clair also fail to mention the success of the environmental community over the past year in overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds to derail, before they could reach the President, numerous other Congressional assaults on the environment...
...They also fail to note that in the year since the timber-salvage rider was signed, President Clinton has repeatedly acted to block environmental attacks by an aggressive and hostile Congress...
...This success has been the result of coordinated action by members of the national and local environmental groups who made their voices heard in opposition to Congress's destructive agenda...
...All of which, to Cockburn and St...
...Ignoring polling data from the November elections clearly showing there was still overwhelming public support for tough environmental protection, the green leaders wallowed in self-defeat...
...Cockburn and St...
...Instead, we had people like Jon Roush, then president of the Wilderness Societv...
...The hard hats also seem to be Freeport standard issue...
...But it's quite another to ignore the facts, and substitute invective for analysis...
...and the environmental community...
...Bought from the start, the green leadership lost all capacity for effective criticism...
...But I regret that The Progressive would suspend its standards of integrity by offering up their diatribes as journalism...
...president, you are giving waffles a bad name...
...With the honorable exception of the Sierra Club (as we have noted many times), the national green leadership lent crucial support to Clinton and Gore at a moment when it looked as though the trade agreement might be doomed...
...and, • in the name of "regulatory reform," handcuffed government officials charged with carrying out environmental laws...
...We regard our operation to be a model of economic development that minimizes environmental impacts and respects the rights of the local indigenous peoples...
...As for Egan's sole substantive point, below is a photograph, kindly provided by my anonymous source, of a group of people at the Carstensz Pyramid, the highest mountain between the Andes and the Himalayas, within walking distance of Freeport's mine...
...denied the EPA authority to protect the nation's rapidly disappearing wetlands...
...president newspaper ad that Cockburn and St...
...Doesn't Israeli persistence in efforts to make a peace pact and withdraw from Arab territory count for anything...
...But national and local environmental groups persevered in an ultimately successful effort to convince a skeptical Congress that Americans strongly support our environmental-protection laws, and are offended by special-interest efforts to weaken them...
...The authors suggest that national environmental groups praised President Clinton for signing the budget rescissions bill with the so-called timber-salvage rider last July...
...At times these battles seemed unwinnable...
...It was in response to the President's intervention to block these dangerous proposals that national environmental groups placed the thank you, mr...
...To the contrary, pell-mell retreat was the order of the day...
...The green leadership then eagerly composed the articles of their own surrender...
...Clair to entirely ignore these vital battles, which continue to this day, is a disservice to all who have worked so hard in defense of the environment during the past year and a half...
...Like much of Press's story, it is fiction, part of a smear campaign being waged by him and a small group of other fringe pseudo-journalists...
...The Delaney clause...
...You gave him four pages to create his false illusion, and it would take at least as much space to dispel it, which you would never allow...
...I suppose it's a compliment to Jewish compassion that such Jews demand more of their brethren than they do of their enemies...
...Clair Smoking Gun It seems that ink for poison pens must be cheap and plentiful, because a virtual river of it flowed for Eyal Press's untruthful characterization of our company and its Indonesian mining operations ("Jim Bob's Indonesian Misadventure," June issue...
...The Everglades...
...In all, twenty-four senior people from national green groups went to work for Clinton...
...Why is it that none of the various investigations of human rights—which all determined that PT-FI employees were not involved in the violations—have ever raised this issue...
...In a column that ran prominently in Sierra magazine, I wrote that Clinton had "betrayed the forests...
...Just as Wetstone skirts the NAFTA outrage, he omits everything else that happened in the two years when Clinton and a Democratic Congress had the opportunity to push a green agenda...
...Clair suggest that national green groups, acting as a monolith, "rallied to Clinton in his NAFTA fight"—knowing full well that the Sierra Club opposed NAFTA fervently and publicly...
...We are not perfect, but we are trying...
...The man holding the gun and one other person are shown wearing what appear to be standard company jackets...
...When he did, we placed another ad with a headline charging mr...
...His latest attack on the "big environmental groups" is yet another example not just of sloppy thinking—to which Mr...
...He could have been speaking for almost all the green executives...
...Cockburn has every right—but of sloppy reporting as well...
...To a psychologist, it is no coincidence that the most unremitting critics of the Israeli battle for survival bear names like Rothschild, Chomsky, Solomon, et alii Judaei...
...Clair, note with self-righteous disparagement an ad taken out by the Sierra Club, among others, thanking President Clinton for his initial veto of last year's rescissions bill, which included the timber industry's salvage rider...
...Oh, but that's ancient history...
...My source spoke with the gun-toter, who told him he worked as an engineer for Freeport...
...I don't recall The Progressive's severe condemnation of the PLO-Hezbollah intent to drive the Israelis into the sea and appropriate the whole country, nor of the bombs lobbed from the Gaza Strip onto Israeli farmers plowing their fields below, nor of the suicide bombings of Israelis and bus massacres in Israel...
...Martin Haydon North Brunswick, New Jersey The editors welcome correspondence from readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material previously published in The Progressive...
...Old growth in the Pacific Northwest...
...denied funding for enforcement of pollution-control laws...
...Gingrich has bottled up efforts to destroy the Endangered Species Act, and thus far sidelined the dolphin-death bill, despite vigorous lobbying in its favor by Clinton's enviro hit team headed by Al Gore and Tim Wirth...
...Pope's moral credibility with his members would have been more robust if he had made conspicuous demonstrations of outrage at the White House...
...On the contrary, the environmental community hit the President with everything it had for signing this destructive bill...
...An ad about waffles is scarcely a serious response to a Presidential betrayal of a solemn promise never to sign a bill exempting logging on public lands from environmental laws...
...We placed that ad, as Cockburn should be aware—and would, had he bothered to check with anyone at the Sierra Club—in the full knowledge that Clinton might cave in to industry pressure...
...The threats beaten back over the past year include insidious back-door attacks through regulatory reform and budget legislation, and sweeping proposals to directly roll back landmark environmental laws, including the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Superfund Law, and the Clean Air Act...
...If they had used the elections as an opportunity to hold the Democrats accountable and to build up a strong position independent of both parties, they would have been strategically poised to launch a major counterattack in the first hours of the new Congress...
...But by then...
...When Clinton promulgated his logging plan for old-growth trees on these public lands in the summer of 1993, Pope himself gave it a demure welcome at a time when he should have been chaining himself to the White House fence...
...Clair deem it more important to attack Teddy Roosevelt than Bob Dole, that's their privilege...
...In any event, Egan moans about not having adequate space to dispel the "false illusion" my article created, thus avoiding almost all substantive engagement with it...
...Too bad you weren't publishing The Progressive when nameless Jews were enslaved by the Egyptians or were being tortured to death during the Inquisition, or when eight nameless millions were shoveled into German and Polish pits, or when countless Russian Jews were slashed to ribbons by bloody Cossacks and their survivors shipped off to other countries...
...All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness...
...given away our valuable natural resources to mining companies...
...Under his leadership, the club gave the Administration the OK for some logging, thus provoking a rebellion among the club's own members that led, this spring, to an overwhelming vote mandating the club to adopt a "zero-cut-on-public-lands" position (one which Pope has vehemently opposed, although he has mostly himself to blame for its passage...
...The Clinton Administration has not been perfect on the environment...
...At Babbitt's side at Interior is George Frampton, former head of the Wilderness Society...
...Among the many destructive legislative proposals that would have become law had the President not stepped up with crucial vetoes are those that would have: • opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling...
...In 1993 and 1994, not a single piece of significant environmental legislation emerged...
...The Sierra Club's fundamental mandate is the protection of public lands...
...And on and on and on...
...What I don't read is any recognition of the threat to Israeli survival in the face of Hezbollah's campaign to eliminate the Jews in Israel...
...Giddy with excitement at their proximity to power, these green leaders lost all sense of political reality...
...For Cockburn and St...
...Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St...
...Wetstone claims that the timber-salvage provision was "only the first in a long series of Congressional attacks...
...We staged a widely publicized "twenty-one-chainsaw salute" outside the White House, protesting the decision to sign the rider into law, and set about working to have the provision repealed...
...blocked the clean-up of Su-perfund hazardous waste sites...
...Carl Pope of the Sierra Club tries to manufacture a history of sinewy principle for his group...
...Norway's renegade whaling operations...
...Headed by Bruce Babbitt, former head of the League of Conservation Voters, enviro leaders flocked into government...
...Clair erroneously imply was a response to the salvage-logging bill...
...Carl Pope, Executive Director, The Sierra Club The authors reply: Over the past four years, the national environmental groups have made two fundamental political miscalculations...
...Press has made this charge before, quoting different unnamed sources...
...How many years of history does it take to erase Jewish wandering and the Jews' right to their country...
...Thus it's no surprise that the difficult acronym NAFTA occurs nowhere in Wetstone's letter...
...To read Gregory Wetstone's letter, you would think that the years 1993 and 1994 had never been, and that all discussion of the Clinton years begins in 1995, with the capture of Congress by the Republicans...
...As for PCBs, far from trying to "cover up" for the Clinton Administration, we've taken it to court...
...Because this charge is a lie...
...proclaiming that the environmental movement had to move towards the center...
...July 1995, Clinton had already signed a bill placing a moratorium on all new listings under the Endangered Species Act, and he had encouraged the Congress to pass the Unfunded Mandates bill, which—as we wrote in our Progressive article—established the theoretical and legal groundwork for relinquishing federal authority on environmental matters to the states...
...If Cockburn and St...
...As a psychologist, I'd give a lot to probe the minds of Jew-hating Jews...
...On all of these, the Clinton crowd took a dive, without a bleat from the green leaders, and sometimes with their enthusiastic support...
...In the spring of 1993, Brock Evans—then at National Audubon and long considered the most effective green lobbyist inside the Beltway—exclaimed that it was wonderful to walk through the halls of the Executive Office Building and have people call you by your first name...
...Clair overlook some of the environmental community's greatest achievements ever—beating the odds to block a long list of devastating legislative assaults from the 104th Congress—and fail to mention several crucial facts...
...This picture was taken on the morning that my source was abruptly awakened by the sound of guns being fired against the side of a mountain...
...Gregory S. Welstone, Legislative Director, National Resources Defense Council I long ago stopped expecting i fairness from Alexander Cockburn, but I do regret that The Progressive did not trouble to check his facts...
...blocked EPA efforts to issue health standards for drinking water...
...We will continue to work with responsible individuals and groups to improve our operations, and we will not be swayed by individuals like Press, whose sole contribution to the debate is to spew mud and mendacity...
...So let us settle for this one point: Press quotes a person using an alias, who quotes another individual anonymously, saying that employees of PT-Freeport Indonesia, our Indonesian mining affiliate, carry AK-47s...
...Clair neglect to mention that the timber-salvage provision was, unfortunately, only the first in a long series of Congressional attacks on our nation's environment...
...the American people...
...Cockburn and his coauthor, Jeffrey St...
...Perhaps the authors' newspaper delivery had been interrupted...
...The first was to reckon that with the arrival of Clinton and Gore in 1993, and a Democratic Congress behind them, a new Green Age was at hand...
...promoted clear-cutting of Alaska's magnificent Tongass National Forest...
...Thomas J. Egan, Senior Vice President and Senior Administrative Deputy to the Office of the Chairman, Freeport-McMoRan The author replies: You would think that Thomas Egan, whose company dumps thousands of tons of untreated mine tailings into the rivers of Irian Jaya on a daily basis, would hesitate before accusing others of engaging in activity whose end result is to create rivers of poison...
...The second great miscalculation of the green leaders came after Newtsweep in late 1994...
...The truth is that our employees do not have guns...
...Clair, reflects our "determination to greenwash Clinton...
...Cockburn and St...
...Sadly, the entire article is riddled with similar omissions, misstatements of fact, and willful skewing of the truth...
...A coalition of national groups took out full-page advertisements in national newspapers charging the President with "flip-flopping on the environment," ran radio ads against the President in the largest cities of the Northwest, and gathered across the street from the White House to give the President a sarcastic twenty-one-chainsaw salute with real chainsaws, to call attention to the devastation in our forests...
Vol. 60 • August 1996 • No. 8
