Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Show Segment

Part of the presentation given to the participants at the 1996 AARP Convention in Denver Colorado by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr..

.....one of the biggest mother loads of gold in history, ten billion dollars worth of gold and on the federal lands in the state of Nevada, they got the whole thing for five thousand dollars. They got the gold, we got the shaft. Why did they pay, why did they pay, why did they pay five thousand dollars? Because the act says that you've got to pay for the land, or you get to pay, for the land on top of your claim. As much land as you want and you pay two dollars and fifty cents an acre which is the price that Ulysses S. Grant established in 1872 when he was trying to persuade Americans from the cities to risk their lives and go out and settle the Indian lands and the mining companies had such political clout they'd take a whole back price the same for over 100 years. Do you think that if you went to the state of Nevada and said, " I want to buy a little of this Federal land for myself, for my retirement home." do you think you could get it for two dollars and fifty cents an acre, no way. Only the mining companies. That's what the law says and almost all of these companies are Ford owned, they're Canadian, they're Taiwanese, they're South African, they're Korean. It's not even going to Americans. It's going to, and, and, and the worst part about it is their political clout has allowed them to exempt themselves from most of the environmental laws so that when they leave these mining sites, they leave these huge piles of toxic tailings that are contaminated with arsenic and cyanide and every time it rains, that stuff leaches off, there's six thousand miles of western streams that are now contaminated and biologically dead because of those mines and you and I are going to have to pay to clean them up. In the state of Montana alone, there are eleven thousand toxic waste sites on our federal land that's going to cost you and me, the federal taxpayer, twenty billion dollars to clean up. That's a subsidy. That's a subsidy. That's corporate welfare. They figure out the ways to get these things for free and all pollution is the same thing. We own the rivers in this country, we own the air, that's what the Constitution says. The government doesn't own it, the state doesn't own it, you and I own it. It established that in the Magna Carta. It was one of the Bill of Rights and it's in all of our State Constitutions. I own the Hudson River. That's what, that's what the State Constitution of New York says. Everybody in the state has a right to use it, nobody has a right to use it in a way that's going to diminish other peoples use and enjoyment of it. And when somebody pollutes it, and makes it so that I can't eat the fish, they're stealing something from me and they're stealing something from you and from the public. And that's what pollution is. It's a subsidy. When General Electric came up to Glens Falls, New York, and they are making transformers up there, they decided to dump their PCB's into the river. That allowed them to avoid the cost of properly disposing of their PCB's which would have cost them a little extra money and because they avoided those costs, they were able to lower the per unit price of their transformers and undersell their competitors .......and keep their twelve hundred men in work. Then they left the area, they closed the factories, they left the toxic waste site, those people are out of jobs and they took their profits and left. And now I have two thousand clients, the fisherman, who are permanently out of work and they have landed on the welfare roles, or they displaced people who are, and you and I, the Federal Taxpayer, are paying those costs. And every woman between Oswego, New York, and Albany has elevated levels of PCB in her breast milk and every one of you in this room has PCB's in your body. Most of you have General Electric PCB's, all of you have Monsanto PCB's in your body and that's going to cost us all elevated health care costs in the long run and you and I, the federal taxpayer, are paying for that. And those costs should have been reflected in General Electric's product when they brought it to market because that was part of the cost of doing business but they were able to avoid the free market to hide from it and make us pay the cost of bringing their product to market and pay their profit. And what environmentalists are saying, "No. If you want to participate in economic activity, pay your way. Don't ask other people to subsidize you." and that's really what an environmentalist does. It's about fair play and it's about protecting communities because the people who get injured by this are all of us and if you look around in your wealth, you can't say, "I have wealth in stocks or bonds or in social security or in the equity that I have in my property in real estate. But a large part of you, probably much more than you think about, is in a clean environment. Is in the clean air that you breath that you take for granted. They don't in Beijin because they have to pay for clean air. Today I was up in my hotel at the Westin Hotel and I went and I got water from the faucet and I drank it. You can't do that in any city in the former Soviet Union, in any city in Asia, in any city in Africa, in any city in Latin America. They have to pay for bottled water or they'll get very sick and bottled water's ten thousand times the cost of tap water and we, we take these things for granted. Fishing holes if you go to beaches, if you're in Scotland and you want to fish for salmon, it will cost you ten to fifteen thousand dollars a day. We would be angry if somebody charged us five bucks to fish. And, but, because we take those things for granted but somebody, those are the public trusts, the Constitution says we own those things, we have a right to do them but somebody's out there that's trying to take them away from us and trying to injure our communities in the process and that's the kind of work that I do is on the Hudson River is really about and I believe Environmentally is not about protecting nature so much as it is about protecting communities and our right to determine our own destinies and what kind of communities we want and whether we want the incinerator in our backyard or whether we don't and how to make those kind of choices and I work, as I said, for the Hudson River Keeper and the Fisherman's Association and I teach in conjunction with that work at Pace University Law School in White Plains New York. It's a law school that specializes in Environmental Law. I have ten students who, by a special court order are permitted to practice law under my supervision as if they were attorneys. They can do anything that a lawyer can do and we give them each a polity suit at the beginning of the semester, they file complaints, they do discovery, they do, they show up in court, they do their arguing, of course, if they don't win the case, they don't pass the course. We've got over a hundred law suits, these aren't....law suits, these are, these are, these are prosecutions of people who are breaking the law and many of them are breaking criminal laws and the Federal Environmental laws give us the right to step into the shoes of the United States Attorney and prosecute people and they've been fined to go to the Federal Government, they don't come back to us or they go back to the river. We force people to spend, polluters to spend well over a hundred million dollars on the Hudson in the last twelve years and the Hudson today, ......as a result of our work is one of the richest water....if not the richest most productive.....