Clinton's green policies created poverty out West

Clinton's poverty tour brought angry responses from many Westerners. They know that, while Clinton is not to blame for the poverty he saw-any more than he may claim credit for the surging economy-he is the reason for the crises facing some Western towns.

Libby, in northwestern Montana, is one example. Blessed with abundant and renewable timber, Libby began as, and could remain, a timber town. It is not, despite the expenditure of millions of dollars in state-ofart equipment. Lawsuits by environmental extremists, and anti-logging policies by Clinton's officials, closed the mills.

Libby thought it could rely, for economic activity, on a world-class mineral deposit able to provide hundreds of high-paying jobs while complying with all environmental laws. Unfortunately, those hopes appear to have been dashed by the opposition of environmental groups and by Clinton officials.

But Libby never expected to make Clinton's "I feel your pain" photo-opportunity tour. After all, when Libby tried to get Interior Secretary Babbitt-who flew into the area to be photographed "fighting" a forest fire--to come talk about lost jobs, he said no.

The Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and other wellmeaning statutes, under the zealous enforcement of former environmental activists turned Clinton bureaucrats, are the tools used to achieve, at least in the West, Vice President Gore's Earth in the Balance goal: "a wrenching transformation of society."

It began with Clinton's Northern Spotted Owl policy, which put scores of timber communities in Washington and Oregon on life support, and continues to this day. It is not just the environmental laws. Federal land managers and officials within the everexpanding Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are engaged, in Gore's words, in "an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, every treaty and alliance, every tactic and strategy, every plan and course of action" to stop economic activity in the rural West.

Federal Landgrab Killed 1,000 Jobs

One of those laws is the Antiquities Act of 1906, which Clinton used to kill 1,000 jobs in economically hard-pressed Garfield and Kane Counties in Utah when he closed 1.7 million acres of federal lands to economic activity by designating the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Kane and Garfield Counties could have used those jobs; Clinton had killed 1,000 jobs to "save" the Mexican Spotted Owl. But the folks in the Kane County seat of Kanab did not expect Clinton to visit to talk about lost jobs. After all, when Clinton announced the Monument, he did so in Arizona, not in Utah.

The Utah coal mine isn't the only one Clinton killed. He acceded to the demands of environmental groups by killing one in southwestern Montana that would have employed hundreds in high paying jobs. When Congress responded by passing a law to compensate Montana by transferring federal coal near Ashland, the poorest part of the poorest state, Clinton and Babbitt arrogantly refuse to comply. So, add Ashland, to -the list of towns Clinton could have visited to see poverty. Instead he went to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in nearby South Dakota.

Clinton's visit to the reservation was steeped in irony. For despite all of Clinton's flowery rhetoric about helping the disadvantaged, Clinton has made it much more difficult for minority and low-income communities to attract businesses. After all, Clinton's executive order on "Environmental Justice" ordered federal officials to raise the regulatory bar for industry attempting to locate there. Thus, for example, environmental groups and Clinton's EPA killed a job-producing facility in Convent, La., an African-American community.

Earlier this summer, Congressman Patrick Kennedy (D.-R.I.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told reporters that Democrats had '"witten off the rural areas." After enduring the environmental policies of Clinton, Gore and Babbitt for the past six years, Congressman Kennedy's statement did not surprise those people living in the pockets of poverty President Clinton didn't get around to visiting.

Mr. Pendley is chief legal officer of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, under whose auspices this article was written

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Sep 17, 1999
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