Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [55]
The neighborhood groups Bob Martin worked with in Denver prevailed. A year after he left Washington, the radioactive waste that was leaching into the water was being hauled away. Citigroup was picking up only $7 million of the estimated $35 million cost to remove soil contaminated by a half century of processing radium and by making chemicals that contained uranium, molybdenum, and rhenium. Call Bob Martin in Tallahassee, and he’ll tell you the cost of the Shattuck cleanup will be much higher than $35 million. In his lawsuit, he alleges the cleanup agreement approved by the EPA will save Citigroup between $30 and $100 million.
Citi’s gain will be the taxpayers’ loss.
Citigroup is a huge company that seems to own part of everything, and there was nothing to suggest that John Whitman was involved in decisions regarding Shattuck. Christine and John Whitman have both denied any impropriety. Still, the close ties between Christine and John Whitman, Citigroup, and the Shattuck dump wouldn’t pass the smell test even in Texas, where we’re used to bidness and politics sleeping in the same bed and feeding at the same public trough. In the end, the EPA’s inspector general issued a report clearing Whitman of all conflict charges. (The inspector general did, of course, work for her.)
But that’s another story. It’s easy to lose sight of the permanent damage being done. Busting the ombudsman was a small part of a big plan that began with Ronald Reagan, continued with Newt Gingrich, and now is in the hands of Bush & Cheney. The dirty secret is that the Superfund isn’t super anymore. What was once a $3.8 billion trust bottomed out $28 million in 2003—not even enough to cover one of the hundreds of abandoned sites in the country. The money’s gone. In 1995 Newt Gingrich killed the special tax on chemical companies that had provided money for the Superfund since 1980. Bill Clinton couldn’t persuade a Republican Congress to reinstate it. And they’ll be serving beer in Lubbock (which has been dry since Prohibition) before Dubya Bush proposes a tax on chemical companies.
Superfund cleanups are now paid for by general revenue—that is, by you and me rather than the chemical and oil companies who made the mess. Martin was sent packing because an independent ombudsman could force the EPA to work on sites it is required by law to clean up, and to find the money to do so. It’s tough to cut taxes when people believe the money might be better spent cleaning up the radiation waste across the street from where they live.
So who, other than Christine Whitman, might have wanted Bob Martin out of the picture, and wanted the ombudsman’s office neutered? Near the end of Martin’s lawsuit, Judge Roberts asked the lawyer representing the EPA for his consent to extend the temporary restraining order for a week. It was a request so routine that most lawyers answer with a nod. “I don’t have the authority to make that decision,” said the lawyer defending the agency against Martin’s suit. The lawyer who lacked the authority to make a pro forma decision wasn’t the EPA in-house counsel you would expect in an employee-sues-boss case. It was assistant attorney general Robert McCollum, who answers to John Ashcroft and two elected officials: Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.
Every crime has its motive, and there is an explanation for the crime the Bushies perpetrated against the American people by destroying the ombudsman’s office.
Ten years earlier, when Marie Flickinger finally had the EPA on the run, she got word from a local lawyer that EPA administrator William Reilly would be in town and would like to meet with her. The lawyer told her someone from Baker Botts had talked the EPA chief into coming down to Brio. Flickinger didn’t graduate from Yale Law; she graduated from high school in Council Bluffs, Iowa, but there’s no slack in her rope. She knew that the law firm that had arranged for the EPA director to come to Houston was the same firm that represented many of the industries that dumped their waste at Brio. “Baker Botts!” she said. “They represent the polluters.