The silver threads from an epic brain dump.
Not to dilute the profound with the mundane, but hosting a Kennedy is a lot of work. It is not because Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is anything like Paris Hilton or a rock band that destroys hotel rooms. It is because Kennedy is a living touchstone to his family’s legacy and, on his own merits, a force to be reckoned with.
To get him here to Spokane (and to Sandpoint, the day before, to promote the Lake Pend Oreille Waterkeeper) was something of a coup. As most of you know, it was not our first try, and because we were able, this time around, to bring Jim Whittaker to introduce him, it was especially gratifying.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after his Spokane speech on May 19th.
I won’t pretend to be on the short list of the people at the Center for Justice who made it all come together so well, but I do remember how relieved I was to finally sit down, near the front row at the Fox, shortly before 7:30, next to my daughter, son and wife. My son, Devin, is 12. I looked over at him and noticed, to my surprise, that he was wearing an ice-blue collared shirt, one of my favorite ties, and his basketball shorts.
‘Hey, Mr. Kennedy, welcome to Spokane. Hope you can make it back for Hoopfest.’
I wrote about Kennedy’s speech that evening knowing, of course, that I couldn’t begin to capture the full sweep of what he had to say. His hour and a half-long talk was more than the sum of its parts. Kennedy was tired. He was nearing the end of nearly two weeks of world travel, and part of the suspense of his speech was whether his voice (which isn’t very strong to begin with) would leave the stage before he did. The unintended theatrical effect was that the battle between his passion and his failing vocal cords embodied the battle for democracy and the planet itself.
Whether the Spokane audience expected it or not, what it got was a deeply piercing critique of corporate immorality and the corruption of American government. If some dose of optimism was required to avoid sending hundreds of people out into the streets in despair, Kennedy injected it near the end with his hope that the free market can save us—if we can break the headlock that corporate interests have placed on our government. One fleeting thought I’ve had, since, is that RFK, Jr. is what Che Guevara might sound like today if Che, in his twilight years, had mastered English and become a venture capitalist.
The launch point for Kennedy’s basic speech on behalf of the Waterkeeper movement is the scene from an American Legion Hall in Crotonville, New York in 1966. Three hundred people, many of them World War II and Korean War veterans, had gathered to fight for their livelihood as fishermen and crabbers on the lower Hudson River.
The new and biggest problem they were there to confront was the Penn Central Railroad and the four-and-a-half foot wide pipe the railroad was using to dump waste oil from a rail yard directly to the river. The illegal discharge had begun blackening the beaches and, in Kennedy’s words, “made the shad taste like diesel.” It was ruining them (the shad and the fishermen) and because of the political power of the Penn Central, no one would help them stop the pollution.
In their anger, some in the hall suggested mayhem against the railroad, including the idea of stuffing a large mattress into the pipe. But then a legendary writer and fly fisherman, Bob Boyle, spoke up. From his research for a Sports Illustrated article on angling in the Hudson, Boyle had learned of an old law, the 1888 River and Harbors Act. The then-obscure statute not only made it illegal to pollute rivers like the Hudson, but it included a bounty provision—if you turned in a polluter, you would get to pocket half the fine.
“We shouldn’t be talking about breaking the law,” Boyle says in Kennedy’s account of the meeting, “we should be talking about enforcing it.”
And that they did. The leaders of the American Legion Hall meeting would form the Hudson River Fisherman’s Association (it later became the Hudson River Riverkeeper) and they began bringing, and winning, bounty suits against Penn Central and other river polluters. Over time the collected bounties allowed them to buy a boat and hire a Riverkeeper who, in 1984, hired Kennedy to be the Riverkeeper’s prosecuting attorney.
“In a true free market you can’t make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich. What polluters do is make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise the standard of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else.”–Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
The rest of the story is two-fold. The first part is the near-miraculous restoration of the Hudson. (As Kennedy acknowledged, this remarkable accomplishment is tainted by fish consumption restrictions on the lower 200 miles of the river because, over thirty years, the General Electric Company discharged more than a million pounds of the perniciously persisting toxin PCB to the Hudson.) The second part is the growing, world-wide Waterkeeper movement that now includes our own Spokane Riverkeeper project.
There’s nothing remotely conciliatory toward polluters in Kennedy’s vision of what it means to be a Waterkeeper. He sees water pollution—and all other forms of pollution—as a takings of “the commons” and a violation of the public trust doctrine that has been a tenet of the common law dating back to Roman times.
In his role as prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper, Kennedy has shepherded hundreds of lawsuits against Hudson River polluters. He is adamant that a primary purpose of Waterkeepers is to legally compel polluters to internalize the cost of production, to stop corporations from forcing the public to not only accept environmental degradation but the costs to public health and to the public treasury that ensue.
It’s at this point in Kennedy’s analysis that he forcefully and adroitly connects the day-to-day battles of the Waterkeepers to his broader critique of corporations and their corrupting effect upon American democracy. If the Hudson is Exhibit A, then the sickening destruction of the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia by coal companies is Exhibit B. Kennedy has been working in West Virginia for much of his professional life, suing coal companies whose current mode of destruction is mountain top removal.
He recounts how, as a young teenager, he listened to his father explain the permanent poverty of West Virginia, and how that structural poverty is juxtaposed with the wealth created for shareholders by coal companies who, back then, were merely strip-mining the state. Conditions in West Virginia are much worse now, Kennedy explains, with 1.4 million acres of terrain (an area equal in size to the state of Delaware) consumed by mountain devouring draglines just in the past decade.
In Kennedy’s speech, West Virginia—and the extraordinary biodiversity of the Appalachian wilderness—is a real-life Pandora, as much under assault by coal companies as the ethereal forests of the Na’vi were besieged by the militarized RDA mining corporation in James Cameron’s 2009 film, Avatar.
But this is no Hollywood fantasy. The very real destruction of Appalachia by coal companies is astonishing in its scope and, yet, goes practically ignored. Kennedy’s speech is a distressing reminder of our contemporary media psychososis. Just how did we reach the point where the leveling of a mountaintop in West Virginia is treated as a non-event, while we’re inundated by such phony “news” as Sarah Palin sharing a slice of pizza with Donald Trump?
“What we have to understand as Americans, is that there’s a huge difference between the free market capitalism which makes our nation more efficient, more prosperous and more democratic, and the kind of corporate crony capitalism that has been endorsed on Capitol Hill and a variety of state capitols. It is as antithetical to efficiency, prosperity and democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.”–Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Kennedy described a recent flight that took him above the Cumberland plateau.
“If the American people could see the scene that I saw when I flew out over Appalachia I think there’d be a revolution in this country,” Kennedy said. “I don’t believe people would accept it. We are literally cutting down the Appalachian mountains with these giant machines.”
The spokes to the wheel of this macabre story go in every direction, and Kennedy covered most of them in his visit to the Fox. He bitterly characterized West Virginia’s political and judicial corruption, labeling the state “a banana republic” that has sold its soul to coal companies. The connection to global warming (coal-fired power plants are, by far, the nation’s largest source of carbon-dioxide, surpassing automobile emission by about 1.5 billion tons a year) is straightforward and so staggering that it tends to obscure the dangerous particulate, ozone, sulfuric acid, and mercury pollution from coal plant emissions.
Kennedy made the point about mercury pollution in the most personal way. As we reported a year and a half ago, the Environmental Protection Agency has found that game fish in about half the nation’s water bodies are contemned with mercury to dangerous levels. Recently, Kennedy said, he decided he would have his mercury levels tested:
“My levels are ten times what EPA considers safe. I was told by Dr. David Carpenter, who is a national authority on mercury contamination, that a woman with my levels of mercury in her blood would have children..with permanent brain damage. I said, ‘she might have.’ He said, no, no, no, the science is very clear, her children would have some level of permanent neurological injury.”
In this way, Kennedy’s story of king coal and West Virginia became the deeply disturbing paradigm not just for environmental and economic destruction, but for the perversion of American democracy.
A mountain top removal coal operation in West Virginia. (Associated Press photo.)
“If the American people could see the scene that I saw when I flew out over Appalachia I think there’d be a revolution in this country. I don’t believe people would accept it. We are literally cutting down the Appalachian mountains with these giant machines.”
“In a true free market,” Kennedy said near the end of his speech, “you can’t make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich. What polluters do is make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise the standard of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else. And they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter and I’ll show you a subsidy. I’ll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and getting the public to pay for production costs. Corporations are externalizing machines. Corporations are always devising ways to get someone else to pay their costs of production.”
Later he would use the “f” word—fascism–to describe what he sees as the inexorable outcome of a system, like ours, that seems increasingly incapable of limiting corporate influence over government. Like many others, Kennedy is deeply troubled by the Supreme Court’s January 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
By the end of his talk, Kennedy had completed the circle, placing the Waterkeepers not just as the forefront of a movement to protect rivers and lakes, but at the forefront of a movement to re-build American democracy.
If he were writing this piece, he would surely inject paragraphs about the possibilities he sees for a green future with “smart” power grids and electric cars. But one of the things I most appreciated about his talk is that he didn’t flinch in naming the most formidable obstruction. In Kennedy’s view, it’s not the technological difficulties that stand in our way. Rather, it is the deepening corruption of our democracy by corporations who are increasingly effective in buying politicians willing to help tilt the economic playing field in favor of the oil and coal interests (i.e. the Koch Brothers).
He didn’t sugarcoat the problem. When he spoke of the Citizens United decision he described it, without qualification, as the “death knell of American democracy.”
I’m sure there are as many impressions of Kennedy’s speech as there were people in the Fox that evening. My take is that the passion in Kennedy’s voice is rooted in this frustration, at how our democracy is being dismantled before our eyes. He absolutely hates it and is battling it right to his core.
If there was cause for hope in Kennedy’s unsparing analysis, it is in our history. Not surprisingly, one of Kennedy’s heroes is a former Governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt who, in the earliest years of the 20th century, turned the Republican Party from a salon of business interests to a trust-busting, progressive force in American governance. Roosevelt’s passion for the fight against corporate pillaging is almost always glossed over in school-book texts.
Kennedy (r) with famed mountaineer Jim Whittaker and Spokane Riverkeeper Bart Mihailovich in Riverfront Park.
“I felt his clothes might not contain him,” a journalist wrote about Roosevelt after his landslide election to the Presidency in 1904, “he was so ready to go, to attack anything, anywhere.”
And he did. Roosevelt’s presidency, however brief, launched the progressive era in American politics. As Timothy Egan explores in his 2009 book, The Big Burn, Roosevelt’s remarkable ascendency as a foe of corporate domination and corruption was revolutionary and at least as improbable as the dramatic course correction that Kennedy is exhorting us toward now.
I left the Fox inspired not just because I felt Kennedy was connecting so well with the political legacy of his family, but also because I felt he was channeling Roosevelt’s resolve.
He also reminded me, and us, what our jobs are about and why my colleagues at the Center for Justice worked so hard to help give birth to the Spokane Riverkeeper project in the first place. Sure, it’s about the water. But it’s never been just about the water.
—Tim Connor
