Cardoza's boss taken to task

Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced, is the principle co-author of the Gut-the-Endangered Species Act, whose No. 1 rightwing Republican promoter is Rep. Richard Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy. The "D" often put after Cardoza's name stands for Democrat, which makes him the symbol of bipartisan unity and "balance" among the ESA gutters. It's obvious why Pombo is in it: it's strictly a matter of his family's real estate business. Although Cardoza's family owns and sells some land, the Shrimp Slayer is in it mainly for UC Merced and developers that would make Merced as large, chaotic, crime-filled and polluted as Fresno. Cardoza carries the local rightwing agenda so well they can't find anything wrong with him. He's exactly their kind of Democrat, a good little functionary for whoever has the money to pay for the tune.

People look at the Pomboza and wonder how any collection of communities could be dumb enough to elect such an unlovely pair to Congress. There must be something in the water. Or is it the air?

Bill Hatch
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Rep. Pombo’s bill an ‘act’ that betrays ecology of the earth
by David James Duncan

March 1, 2006

I am a lifelong fisherman. I became one as a boy out of love for salmon, and also out of love for the fact that Jesus and many of his disciples were fishermen. I feel I owe it to Peter, James and John to protect our increasingly endangered line of work.

I mention this because U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., has pushed a bill through Congress that would gut the Endangered Species Act, a globally admired law that has kept several thousand ark-loads of plants and animals---including wild salmon, sea otters, lynx, eagles, bighorn sheep, condors---from being driven to extinction. If Pombo’s bill becomes law, endangered species will lose to developers, the extinction of wild salmon will in many places be guaranteed, and the ancient trade of Peter, James and John will vanish with the salmon.

At the time I learned of the Pombo bill I was studying recent salmon and river restoration projects in the Pacific Northwest. The contrast is stunning! When even a few tax dollars are spent on restoring life instead squandering it, Americans go bananas in wonderfully altruistic ways. When Washington State was offered a federal grant of just $13 million for wild salmon restoration, the people and businesses of that state answered with over $30 million and hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours of their own. Restoring even 10 yards of ruined riverbank is an arduous undertaking. In five years Washingtonians enhanced some 1,755 miles of spawning and rearing habitat. Some 200,000 native trees have been planted to cool streams and shade out invasive plants. Fiftyfour million salmon have been released into state streams. These united efforts are a labor of love that costs U.S. taxpayers nothing. Tens of thousands of the hero-hours have been logged by school children, whose sole motivation is their yearning to keep salmon alive in our world with them.
What a stick in the eyeball to turn from this to Pombo’s so-called “Endangered Species Recovery Act.” What this Act would really do is terminate America’s long-standing commitment to endangered species by removing the link between wild creatures and their habitat---as if wild animals and birds can live in a bulldozed vacuum. The Act’s veiled purpose is to force Americans to pay developers simply to obey conservation laws the rest of us gladly honor. To accomplish that end, it will prostitute by law the science that protects endangered and threatened species. Getting back to the apostle fishermen, Pombo’s Act will also betray the teachings of the Bible, which tells us that “the Earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof” (Psalms) and that humans are mere “tenants” (Leviticus) placed here as “caretakers” (Genesis), to rule not as the greed-driven would have it, but “on earth as it is in heaven,” as the Father who created and blessed all forms of life would have it.

There are a few among us who still believe in “infinite exploitable resources” despite the finiteness of Earth. There are a few who still believe in the Easter Bunny. The fact remains that industrial civilization has long been engaged in a war not against foreign enemies, but against the life support systems of our world. The 21st will be the century of the Great Cease-Fire in this war, or it will be a century of the kind of environmental terror, havoc and dearth we are now repeatedly witnessing not just in foreign lands, but right here in America. The thousands of businesses recently destroyed by hurricanes, floods, wars and social chaos directly related to fossil fuel overdependence are dire proof that the planet’s life support systems and our economic activites are directly related. The emissions of my car in seemingly clean-skied Montana merge with a carbon dioxide cloud that encircles the globe, contributing to superheated oceans, storms of record-breaking force, the annihilation of commerce, the loss of biological diversity, and increased human suffering. Every nonsustainable act we commit and every shortsighted policy we sign into law now threatens to eliminate long-term business profits.

It’s hard to imagine a more shortsighted policy than Pombo’s “Endangered Species Recovery Act.” This bill is indeed an act. While sucking like a leech at the integrity of the word “recovery,” it in fact betrays endangered plants and wildlife and erodes biological, religious and economic integrity by attacking the life support systems and truth-telling that make life and commerce possible.
Please ask Senator Burns and Baucus to send Pombo’s Act back to whatever dark cave it came from.

David James Duncan is an author, fly fisher and educator. His novels include The River Why and The Brothers K. His forthcoming book is God Laughs & Plays: churchless sermons.
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Republican Pete McCloskey Talks about GOP Corruption and the Environment
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Interview

Tuesday 28 February 2006

On February 12, I sat with Pete McCloskey at a public park in Lodi, California, to ask him a few questions about his race against the most anti-environmental congressman in history, Richard Pombo. Mc Closkey is challenging Pombo in the Republican primary, adding a lot of spice to the race, which includes three Democratic challengers as well.

Note: Parts of this interview will appear in an upcoming program on Free Speech TV: SourceCode Episode 3 - Enemies of the Environment. SourceCode teams up with TruthOut to give you the scoop on the biggest threats to preserving our country's public lands, endangered animals, and last wild spaces. Tune into Free Speech TV, Dish Network Ch. 9415, Sunday, March 5, at 9 a.m. and noon, or Monday, March 6, at 8 p.m. or 11p.m. (all times Eastern). Visit sourcecode.freespeech.org to view past shows.

Kelpie Wilson: What was your greatest accomplishment for the environment when you were in Congress in the 1960s and '70s?

Pete McCloskey: I suppose I tried to protect a few porpoises when the tuna fishermen were catching the porpoises in their nets. We tried to reduce the taking of endangered whale species, something my opponent Mr. Pombo now supports the increase of. Japanese whaling is one of the issues between me and him.

KW: What about the Endangered Species Act? What was your role in that?

McCloskey: Well, perhaps the greatest achievement, and we didn't know it at the time, was we held an Earth Day in 1970, and out of that Earth Day a lot of students got involved in saving the environment, or trying to. They listed 12 of my colleagues, the Dirty Dozen, and took out seven of them in the next election. The result was, when Congress convened in January 1971, everyone was now an environmentalist. They had seen a new force, college students, who favored the environment. Out of those next four years, we passed the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Amendments, the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Estuary Protection Act, the Coastal Zone Act; all of those came through my subcommittee, Fish and Wildlife, a subcommittee which is now under Pombo's jurisdiction as chairman as the House Resources Committee.

KW: So the ESA is now 34 years old, and even environmentalists agree that some changes are needed. Pombo wrote and passed a reform bill through the House. What is in that bill?

McCloskey: If it passes in the form that Mr. Pombo got it though his committee, it would gut the ESA, and it would gut the whole scheme of protection for endangered and threatened species. Pombo announced that this was nothing new; he wrote a book in 1995 saying that he wanted to abolish the Endangered Species Act. But he didn't just change those provisions that should be changed, and I can give you a few: we would like to make them more farmer friendly; we would like to make them so that, when the government gets an application to develop endangered species land, the government comes in right at the start and says you can do this or you can't do this or you have to mitigate what you're going to do. It's been hard to get though the bureaucracy.

What Pombo wants to do is make it even tougher to get through the bureaucracy. You could use the entire budget of the Fish and Wildlife Service just to pay off developers. He's put a provision in there that a developer who is restricted by endangered species concerns should be compensated for all future loss of profit for any project he might propose to develop that land. Well, he'd bankrupt the agency with that, and I think that's his purpose. Again, it's not just to end the problems of the Act, it's to abolish it or make it ineffective.

KW: Who are the top Republicans in history who've made important contributions to conservation and environmental protection?

McCloskey: The father of Republican environmentalism is Teddy Roosevelt, who, with Gifford Pinchot, started to set aside wilderness and national forests and national parks. Teddy Roosevelt Island has become a national park in the middle of the Potomac River, right across from the Watergate Hotel. Pombo wants to sell Roosevelt Island for development for residential purposes, along with fourteen other parks, one of which is in his own district, in the town of Danville. He believes that the solution to this country's ills is to take all of the public lands and turn them into private development. Well, the beauty that we have here, half of northern California, is in public lands. If you develop it, you lose the priceless privilege of kids out there that are looking for crabs or frogs or something of that kind, growing up near flowing rivers, or swamps, or tidelands, particularly the High Sierra. He's got a bill to put 18 dams in the Immigrant Wilderness. Well if you ever backpacked up there, the idea of one more dam in the High Sierra is crazy, but that's his view, and that's his belief, and that's why I'm running against him.

KW: So what are the Republican values that you represent and how are they different from Richard Pombo's?

McCloskey: In my time, we served with noble and ethical leaders: Gerry Ford, Bob Michael, John Rhodes, men of impeccable honesty. We didn't have anybody locked up for a violation of ethics. Of course we were in the minority, nobody wanted to bribe a Republican; you bribed the Democrats in those days. We had 36 or so congressmen indicted, and all but one of them was a Democrat. But now the Republicans have had the power for the last 13 years, and I believe they've been corrupted: the arrangements between Tom DeLay, the majority leader, and Jack Abramoff. Remember, Tom DeLay jumped Pombo over six other congressmen to make him chairman of the Resources Committee.

The values that we had were, first: honesty and ethics. Second: we wanted a balanced budget; we had fiscal responsibility. Pombo and his allegedly conservative friends have spent us into the greatest deficits in history, trillions of dollars in deficits. That's no Republican value. We were environmentalists of the Teddy Roosevelt theory. We believed in separation of church and state. We believed in the independence of the Supreme Court not being subject to politicians. Now you've got Pombo introducing a bill ... he wants to give Congress the right to overrule Supreme Court decisions on constitutional issues. That's not a Republican value, that's almost radical. That would destroy the checks and balances that the Constitutional forefathers provided.

I suppose the worst value of all is that he wants to give away the public lands for development. My wife and I have spent half our lives, half our adult lives, trying to save special parts of California. I'll give you examples: the Bridgeport Valley over in Modoc County; the Bear Valley up in Calaveras County. We've managed to set those aside in conservation. Most recently, the Hearst Ranch, 82,000 acres. That preserves 15 miles of pristine beach. That's worth doing. It's worth preserving the remaining public lands of California, for your kids and my kids and grandchildren. Pombo wants to destroy all that. He really thinks development is the key to Northern California. You've seen what it's done in Southern California. A lot of us are fugitives from Southern California, trying to preserve the last of Northern California's open space wilderness.

KW: What he's trying to do is kind of like selling off family heirlooms to pay the rent.

McCloskey: I've differed strongly with the Bush administration. It's cut back all of the money for the parks and the forests. They want to put snowmobiles in Yosemite. What they want to do is roll back the environmental progress of 30 years, and it's just wrong. Pombo is their chief operative in doing that, so I'd like to take him out of the Congress and maybe restore a Republican value of the preservation of open space in wilderness. He thinks wilderness is bad because no people are allowed to go into the wilderness. Well, that's baloney, you go into the wilderness like Mohammed went to the mountain or Moses went into the desert. You get inspiration from the wilderness. It is not in this man to preserve and protect wilderness.

KW: Getting back to Republican values, what are the worst examples of Pombo's corruption?

McCloskey: His corruption: Here's a man, Jack Abramoff with his K Street Lobbying project, who has given all this money to Pombo - $54,500. Well, we say, what? Why Pombo? Why would Mr. Abramoff bestow this largess on Pombo? Why would Pombo's staff get these thousand-dollar seats to this skybox? What did he give up for that? We don't know the answer to that yet, the grand jury or the federal attorney hasn't told us, but one example is the Marianas Islands. Abramoff started in the 1990s to try to shield the Marianas Islands from US immigration and labor laws. A man named Willie Tan, who ran this sweatshop operation, brought in young women from all over China and Southeast Asia and the other islands, saying: "Come to America and sign this paper that you'll pay $5,000 for the privilege of going to America." Well, they got them to the Marianas Islands, which is a US trust territory, which can use the label "Made in America" on the clothing it manufactures. Pombo went to the Marianas in 2004, and suddenly gets nine contributions in the thousands of dollars from Marianas businessmen. Now why are they giving Pombo that money? Pombo absolutely refuses to investigate Abramoff and his connection with the Marianas, the sweatshops, the prostitution, and these girls being lured into coming there. Why won't he investigate it? That's what Congressional committees do when sweatshops or fraud are brought to your attention, and a man goes to jail for pleading guilty to bribing congressmen. You investigate that. Pombo won't. That's corruption.

KW: Anything else?

McCloskey: I'll tell you one other thing, that is corruption. When he put in this bill to amend the Endangered Species Act, he not only took out habitat protection but he put a provision in there to exempt farmers from using pesticides for five years in endangered species areas. We wonder: why would a California congressman do that? Then we see suddenly that he's funded in his travel, illegally, by a private foundation. He gets $23,000 from this foundation to travel, which you can't accept. He's a founding governor of the foundation; he can't deny he knew it was a private foundation. But this foundation, who is it funded by? The Japanese Whaling Association, the Association of Fur Traders - these are the guys that import elephant tusks or endangered parrots, and finally, Monsanto gave this foundation $115,000. Well, who benefits from the allowing of the use of pesticides? Monsanto. Whenever you find Pombo doing or not doing something, you chase it down to his contributors.

Big mines: He tried to get hundreds of thousands of acres of mining lands transferred to mining companies for development. Even the Congress couldn't accept that. They took it out of a bill he inserted it in privately. We have about 200,000 of those acres in Northern California; he was going to put it up for sale to mining companies. You follow his contributions: half of those were from big oil, big timber, big railroads, and big mining companies. I'm not going to take any PAC money. I may lose, because I won't get as much money as he does. I'd like to draw the distinction between congressmen who are on the take and whose positions reflect their largest contributors and those who don't. Here is Abramoff going to jail for bribing congressmen and Pombo. You ask him ... "Oh, he never lobbied me." Baloney.

KW: Why won't Pombo debate you?

McCloskey: I don't know that he won't debate me. He always speaks through spokesmen. The spokesman says: We don't want to debate McCloskey; he's way back in the 70s. Those values of his, about honesty and not being controlled by lobbyists, that's the seventies, and he's unworthy to debate. Well, if you're running for the Great Debating Society of United States, the United States Congress, I think you would want to debate your opponent. I always did. I served in the House 15 years and when someone ran against me, I'd say, I'll debate you every two weeks between now and Election Day. Let the public learn from hearing the debates. I won't say he's afraid to debate, but it looks that way.

KW: A final question. What are some of the ways that Pombo has been neglecting the district here, his own district?

McCloskey: There's the water quality in the San Joaquin River, the levees, and the strength of the levees in the Delta, most of all the traffic. Half of my old district seems to be moving from the Peninsula and the East Bay over here for affordable housing. The other morning, I drove out at 5:30 in the morning coming to Stockton on Route 580; cars were ten feet apart, four lanes abreast. At 5:30 in the morning there's an absolute traffic jam. He hasn't brought in any money to widen those highways. He really has not paid attention to this district. One child in six is getting asthma as a result of the air quality. He refuses to accept that global warming is an issue. He says that certainly automobile emissions are not creating greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. That's a head-in-the-sand attitude for this valley, in which traffic and air pollution are crucial issues. San Joaquin County is part of the poverty belt of California. They're below poverty level, way below the average in California. He's just voted to cut Medicaid and Medicare and Head Start programs. That's not what a congressman from this district ought to be doing.