Crimes Against Nature Read Free

themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise the standard of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everyone else. And they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market.
    The coal-burning utilities that acidify the Adirondack lakes, poison our waterways with mercury, provoke 120,000 asthma attacks, and kill 30,000 of our neighbors every year are imposing costs on the rest of us that should, in a free-market economy, be reflected in the price of the energy when they bring it to the marketplace. By avoiding these costs, the utilities are able to enrich their shareholders and put their more conscientious and efficient competitors out of business. But these costs don’t disappear. The American people pay for them downstream — with poisoned fish, sickened children, and a diminished quality of life. Every one of our federal environmental laws is intended to restore true free-market capitalism so that the price of bringing a product to market reflects the costs that it imposes on the public.
    The truth is, I don’t even think of myself as an environmentalist anymore. I consider myself a free-marketeer. Along with my colleagues at the NRDC and Waterkeeper, I go out into the marketplace and catch the cheaters. We tell them, “We’re going to force you to internalize your costs the same as you internalize your profits.” Because when polluters cheat, it distorts the entire marketplace, and none of us benefits from the efficiencies and democracy that the free market promises.
    Corporate capitalists don’t want free markets, they want dependable profits, and their surest route is to crush the competition by controlling the government. The domination of our government by large corporations leads to the elimination of markets and, ultimately, to the loss of democracy.
    Some of the largest federal subsidies are going to western resource industries — grazing, lumber, mining, and agribusiness — that have spawned the most vocal attacks against federal environmental laws. These industries are run by some of the richest and most radically conservative people in the country, men like Richard Mellon Scaife, Charles Koch, and Joseph Coors. Their intense hatred for federal government is, in a supreme irony, combined with an intense reliance on federal subsidies. Let’s not forget that we taxpayers give away $65 billion every year in subsidies to big oil, and more than $35 billion a year in subsidies to western welfare cowboys, many of whom are destroying our public lands and waterways. Those subsidies helped create the billionaires who financed the right-wing revolution on Capitol Hill and put George W. Bush in the White House. And now they have indentured servants in Washington demanding that we have capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich.
    The free market has been all but eliminated in an energy sector dominated by cartels and monopolies and distorted by obscene subsidies to the filthiest polluters. Our once vibrant agricultural markets are now controlled by multinational monopolies with no demonstrated loyalty to our country or its laws. Media consolidation is transforming journalism from a forum of ideas into a marketplace exclusively for commerce.
    If you haven’t already done so, say good-bye to the merchants who anchor our local economies and communities. While profits from the big-box stores flow to distant corporate headquarters, struggling small businesses and farmers recycle their profits back into their communities through their support of Boy Scouts, Little Leagues, and Rotary Clubs, through local commerce, and by paying local employees a living wage and benefits. They pay taxes (a duty shirked by 61 percent of large corporations), 1 and they don’t move their corporate headquarters to Bermuda and their operations to Taiwan. These local entrepreneurs are the training schools for civic leadership, and the loss of them sounds the death knell for consumer choice, civic