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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>An interesting viewpoint on the new Interior
Secretary. Most of the statements about him have been positive so
far.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>TS</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Verdana size=2>from: </FONT><A href=""><FONT face=Verdana
size=2>http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair12192008.html</FONT></A><BR><BR><FONT
face=Verdana size=2>Weekend Edition<BR>December 19 - 21, 2008<BR>How to Make
Bruce Babbitt Look Like Ed Abbey<BR>Salazar and the Tragedy of the Common
Ground<BR><BR>By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR<BR><BR>Although America’s greatest Interior
Secretary, Harold Ickes, who had the post for nearly a decade under FDR, was
from Chicago, the playbook for presidential transitions calls for picking a
Westerner for Interior, as long as the nominee isn’t a Californian. Pick someone
from Arizona or New Mexico or Colorado. Of course, Colorado has produced two of
the worst recent Interior Secretaries: James Watt and Gale Norton. Ken
Salazar may make it three.<BR><BR>And why not? After all, Salazar was one of the
first to endorse Gale Norton’s nomination as Bush’s Interior
Secretary.<BR><BR>By almost any standard, it’s hard to imagine a more uninspired
or uninspiring choice for the job than professional middle-of-the-roader Ken
Salazar, the conservative Democrat from Colorado. This pal of Alberto Gonzalez
is a meek politician, who has never demonstrated the stomach for confronting the
corporate bullies of the west: the mining, timber and oil companies who have
been feasting on Interior Department handouts for the past eight years. Even as
attorney general of Colorado, Salazar built a record of timidity when it came to
going after renegade mining companies.<BR><BR>The editorial pages of western
papers have largely hailed Salazar’s nomination. The common theme seems to be
that Salazar will be “an honest broker.” But broker of what? Mining claims and
oil leases, most likely.<BR><BR>Less defensible are the dial-o-matic press
releases faxed out by the mainstream groups, greenwashing Salazar’s dismal
record. Here’s Carl Pope, CEO of the Sierra Club, who fine-tuned this kind of
rhetorical airbrushing during the many traumas of the Clinton
years:<BR><BR> “The Sierra Club is very pleased with the
nomination of Ken Salazar to head the Interior Department. As a Westerner and a
rancher, he understands the value of our public lands, parks, and wildlife and
has been a vocal critic of the Bush Administration’s reckless efforts to
sell-off our public lands to Big Oil and other special interests. Senator
Salazar has been a leader in protecting places like the Roan Plateau and he has
stood up against the Bush’s administration’s dangerous rush to develop oil shale
in Colorado and across the West.<BR><BR> “Senator Salazar
has also been a leading voice in calling for the development of the West’s vast
solar, wind, and geothermal resources. He will make sure that we create the
good-paying green jobs that will fuel our economic recovery without harming the
public lands he will be charged with protecting.”<BR><BR>Who knew that
strip-mining for coal, an industry Salazar resolutely promotes, was a green job?
Hold on tight, here we go once more down the rabbit hole.<BR><BR>The Sierra Club
had thrown its organizational heft behind Mike Thompson, the hook-and-rifle
Democratic congressman from northern California. Obama stiffed them and got away
with it without enduring even a whimper of disappointment.<BR><BR>In the
exhaust-stream, not far beyond Pope, came an organization (you can’t call them a
group, since they don’t really have any members) called the Campaign for
American Wilderness, lavishly endowed by the centrist Pew Charitable Trusts, to
fete Salazar. According to Mike Matz, the Campaign’s executive director, Salazar
“has been a strong proponent of protecting federal lands as wilderness…As a
farmer, a rancher, and a conservationist, Sen. Salazar understands the
importance of balancing traditional uses of our public lands with the need to
protect them. His knowledge of land management issues in the West, coupled with
his ability to work with diverse groups and coalitions to find common ground,
will serve him well at the Department of the Interior.”<BR><BR>Whenever seasoned
greens see the word “common ground” invoked as a solution for thorny land use
issues in the Interior West it sets off an early warning alarm. “Common ground”
is another flex-phrase like, “win-win” solution that indicates greens will be
handed a few low-calorie crumbs while business will proceed to gorge as
usual.<BR><BR>In Salazar’s case, these morsels have been a few measly wilderness
areas inside non-contentious areas, such as Rocky Mountain National Park.
Designating a wilderness inside a national park is about as risky as placing the
National Mall off-limits to oil drilling.<BR><BR>But Salazar’s green gifts
haven’t come without a cost. In the calculus of common ground politics,
trade-offs come with the territory. For example, Salazar, under intense
pressure from Coloradoans, issued a tepid remonstrance against the Bush
administration’s maniacal plan to open up the Roan Plateau in western Colorado
to oil drilling. But he voted to authorize oil drilling off the coast of
Florida, voted against increased fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks
and voted against the repeal of tax breaks for Exxon-Mobil when the company was
shattering records for quarterly profits.<BR><BR>On the very day that Salazar’s
nomination was leaked to the press, the Inspector General for the Interior
Department released a devastating report on the demolition of the Endangered
Species Act under the Bush administration, largely at the hands of the disgraced
Julie MacDonald, former Deputy Secretary of Interior for Fish and Wildlife. The
IG report, written by Earl Devaney, detailed how MacDonald personally interfered
with 13 different endangered species rulings, bullying agency scientists and
rewriting biological opinions. "MacDonald injected herself personally and
profoundly in a number of ESA decisions,” Devaney wrote in a letter to Oregon
Senator Ron Wyden. “We determined that MacDonald's management style was abrupt
and abrasive, if not abusive, and that her conduct demoralized and frustrated
her staff as well as her subordinate managers."<BR><BR>What McDonald did
covertly, Salazar might attempt openly in the name of, yes, common ground. Take
the case of the white-tailed prairie dog, one of the declining species that
MacDonald went to nefarious lengths to keep from enjoying the protections of the
Endangered Species Act. Prairie dogs are viewed as pests by ranchers and their
populations have been remorselessly targeted for elimination on rangelands
across the Interior West.<BR><BR>Ken Salazar, former rancher, once threatened to
sue the Fish and Wildlife Service to keep the similarly imperiled black-tailed
prairie dog off the endangered species list. The senator also fiercely opposed
efforts to inscribe stronger protections for endangered species in the 2008 Farm
Bill.<BR><BR>"The Department of the Interior desperately needs a strong, forward
looking, reform-minded Secretary," says Kieran Suckling, executive director of
the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity. "Unfortunately, Ken Salazar is
not that man. He endorsed George Bush's selection of Gale Norton as Secretary of
Interior, the very woman who initiated and encouraged the scandals that have
rocked the Department of the Interior. Virtually all of the misdeeds described
in the Inspector General’s expose occurred during the tenure of the person Ken
Salazar advocated for the position he is now seeking."<BR> <BR>As a
leading indicator of just how bad Salazar may turn out to be, an
environmentalist need only bushwhack through the few remaining daily papers to
the stock market pages, where energy speculators, cheered at the Salazar pick,
drove up the share price of coal companies, such as Peabody, Massey Energy and
Arch Coal. The battered S&P Coal index rose by three per cent on the day
Obama introduced the coal-friendly Salazar as his
nominee.<BR> <BR>Say this much for Salazar: he’s not a Clinton
retread. In fact, he makes Clinton Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt look like Ed
Abbey. The only way to redeem Clinton's sorry record on the environment is for
Obama to be worse.<BR><BR>As Hot Rod Blajogevich demonstrated in his earthy
vernacular, politics is a pay-to-play sport. Like Ken Salazar, Barack Obama’s
political underwriters included oil-and-gas companies, utilities, financial
houses, agribusiness giants, such as Archer Daniels Midlands, and coal
companies. These bundled campaign contributions dwarfed the money given to Obama
by environmentalists, many of whom backed Hillary in the Democratic Party
primaries.<BR><BR>Environmentalists made no demands of Obama during the election
and sat silently as he backed off-shore oil drilling, pledged to build new
nuclear plants and sang the virtues of the oxymoron known as clean-coal
technology. At this point, the president-elect probably feels he owes them no
favors. And he gave them none. The environmental establishment
cheered.<BR><BR>So the environmental movement has once again been left out in
the cold, begging Rahm Emmanuel for a few sub-cabinet appointments. They may get
one or two positions out of a couple hundred slots. But Big Green’s docile
genuflections to Salazar won’t make those table-scraps go down any
smoother.<BR><BR>Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked
Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest
book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He
can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. <BR><BR> </FONT>
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