Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has had a bellyful of corporate America's carping about how the nation's environmental laws are hurting the economy.
The free-market argument that's so often heard nowadays is little more than a ruse designed to make "a few people rich, leaving a lot of people poor," he said.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticized corporations' calls to limit environmental laws. He spoke Wednesday at Kansas University.
A truly free economy, he said, relies on an "environmental infrastructure" that's protected, open to all, and free of corporate subsidies.
"You show me pollution and I'll show you a subsidy," Kennedy said, during an often-impassioned lecture Wednesday afternoon at Kansas University Law School.
Kennedy, the son of former U.S. Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, is senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and chief prosecuting attorney for Hudson Riverkeeper Fund, a group that fights pollution with citizen activism and lawsuits.
He's also co-author of "The Riverkeepers: Two Activists Fight to Reclaim our Environment as a Basic Human Right," an account of how blue-collar communities on the Hudson River used a little-known 19th-century statute to collect a "bounty" from polluters, which was later used to buy a boat to patrol the river looking for more polluters.
The Hudson Riverkeeper Fund now has "river keepers" posted on every major waterway on the East and West coasts. Within seven years, he said, the group expects to have a presence throughout North America.
Kennedy bristled at the often-heard call for a giving local governments more control. He warned: "Local control is really corporate control."
He cited several examples of corporations General Electric in the Hudson Valley, corporate hog operations in North Carolina that promised communities prosperity, only to exploit their natural resources before abandoning them.
"When (a natural resource) is free or near-free, wastefulness is encouraged," he said, noting that corporate agriculture in Idaho is allowed to tap the region's water supply, paying 11 cents for an acre-foot worth $800.
"There hasn't been salmon season in Idaho in the past 15 years," Kennedy said. "We ignore the environment at our peril."
Judging from the round of warm applause, Kennedy's comment were well received. About 125 people attended the lecture, which was open only to faculty and students.
"He has a way of making things make sense," said John Schwartz of Lenexa. "He makes environmental policy sound like it should be; that it shouldn't be so terrible for the economy, which seems to the claim of a lot of people who want to delay or prevent those policies from coming in to being."
Before coming to KU, Kennedy participated in a morning rally at the Kansas City Airport Hilton. There a coalition of family farmers, animal welfare activists and environmentalists announced the filing of federal lawsuits in Missouri, Florida and North Carolina.
The Missouri and North Carolina lawsuits accuse Smithfield Foods, the nation's largest hog producers, of violating environmental laws. The Florida lawsuit alleges violations of federal racketeering laws and claims the company is funded by illegal pollution-based profits.
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