This quote also from the R.F. Kennedy Speech on George W Bush and the US Coal Industry:
โI’ll give you an example. As I said, a gigantic diminution in quality of life has taken place in this country as a direct result of this President’s environmental policy that Americans mainly don’t know about. I’m just going to focus on one industry, which is coal-burning powerย plants.
I have three sons who have asthma. One out of every four black children in America’s cities now has asthma. We know that asthma attacks are triggered primarily by bad air โ by ozone and particulates. We know that the principle source of those materials in our atmosphere is the 1,100 coal-burning power plants that are burning coal illegally. It’s been illegal for 17 years. President Clinton’s administration was prosecuting the worst 75 of those plants, but that’s an industry that donated $48 million to this President during the 2000 election cycle and has given $58 millionย since.โ
โOne of the first things that Bush did when he came into office was to order the Justice Department and EPA to drop all those lawsuits. The top three enforcers at EPA, Sylvia Lowrance, Bruce Buckheit, and Eric Schaeffer, all resigned their jobs inย protest.
These weren’tย Democrats.
These were people who had served through the Reagan and Bush administrations, the earlier Bush administration. A top Justice Department official said that this had never happened in American history before, where a Presidential candidate accepts money, contributions from criminals under indictment or targeted for indictment, and then orders those indictments and investigations dropped when he achievesย office.โ
[myย emphasis]
