When we first envisioned an issue on "toxic capitalism," George W. Bush's first 100 days in the presidency had spewed a whirlwind of pro-business, environmentally harmful executive decisions and legislative initiatives. Bush's hard-line stance on the environment included an encyclopedic range of decisions on carbon dioxide, oil drilling, arsenic levels in drinking water, mining, forests, oceans, energy, public access to information on the potential consequences of chemical plant accidents, and the Endangered Species Act. Budget cuts were implemented for renewable energy sources, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Interior Department; the Wetlands Reserve Program was to be dissolved. The administration attempted to restrict protections for marine mammals as part of a sweeping proposal to exempt the military from key provisions of environmental legislation, including the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and hazardous waste laws. To allow the Navy to deploy an anti-submarine "Low Frequency Active" sonar system that could threaten entire populations of whales, dolphins, seals, and other marine mammals, the Bush administration reversed federal policy based on the National Environmental Policy Act, claiming the law does not apply to vast tracts of ocean under U.S. control. Left in place was an executive order that does not allow for judicial review or recourse for the public (Shogren, 2002a; Seelye, 2002a).

Since these measures are out of step with the public on environmental and social concerns, the result has been the mobilization of a broad environmental movement. Clean air and safe drinking water are popular issues with voters, and the public believes global warming poses a real threat. Even EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, who eviscerated state environmental regulations as New Jersey's governor, tried to warn Bush that abandoning his pledge to reduce global warming carbon dioxide emissions would hurt U.S. credibility overseas and alienate a greening conservative constituency at home. Undaunted, the Bush administration pulled out of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global climate change, adding to its list of unilateralist rejections of international agreements on land mines, the international criminal court, and nuclear and biological weapons. Predictably, Bush's Kyoto decision provoked hostile demonstrations in Madrid, Stockholm, and Geneva and angry responses from officials of the European Union (Gelbspan, 2002).

Because the U.S. emits one-quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, Bush's capitulation to the fossil fuel lobby -- the coal industry and ExxonMobil -- on capping carbon emissions from domestic power plants provoked resentment. North American emissions of carbon dioxide expanded over the last decade, while Europe's decreased and Japan's held steady. Energy and the environment are intersecting spheres. Vice President Cheney's energy plan minimized conservation and called for building at least one new power plant per week for the next 20 years, drilling for gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, weakening environmental regulations for refineries and pipelines, and relying more on nuclear power. Since 62 of Bush's 63-member energy advisory team have ties to oil, coal, nuclear, or other polluting interests, the plan smelled of crony capitalism when it proposed to deliver a wish list of deregulatory changes to these industries. The Republican energy plan would subsidize the oil, gas, coal, and nuclear industries to the tune of $35.6 billion over 10 years (Bivens, 2002). Bush turned to "free-market environmentalists" from the industry-funded libertarian Right to defend a market-oriented approach of setting mandatory nationwide targets for emissions reductions, but letting industry decide how to comply. This approach depicts existing clean-air law as a burden on energy producers, with too many rules and too few incentives to be clean. ExxonMobil and the coal industry financed "greenhouse skeptics," who deny the reality of climate change.

Bush filled federal agencies with former oil, mining, auto, timber, and biotech lobbyists. His Interior Secretary, Gale Norton, favored voluntary compliance for industrial polluters as Colorado's attorney general and made a career of undermining strong federal environmental and public health protections as lead lobbyist at James Watt's Mountain States Legal Foundation and as co-chair of the Coalition of Republican Environmental Advocates with right-wing British Petroleum lobbyist Grover Norquist. Her deputy, J. Steven Griles, was a mining industry lobbyist. Bennett Raley, who advocates repealing the Endangered Species Act, became Assistant Secretary for Water and Science. Besides Whitman at the EPA, Linda Fisher -- an executive with Monsanto (a chemical company that was one of the 10 largest U.S. toxic polluters in 1995) -- assumed the deputy administrator slot. The Bush administration was forced to withdraw its first nominee to head the EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, Donald Schregardus, who environmentalists believed would neuter the agency because he opposed the enforcement of federal laws. The current nominee has no experience in environmental policy. In February 2002, the EPA's head of the Office of Regulatory Enforcement resigned, citing frustrations with a pro-industry administration bent on weakening environmental laws and undermining EPA enforcement actions.1

The Bush administration has handed industry a sizable windfall thanks to its decision not to reauthorize taxes that feed the Superfund toxic waste cleanup program. Already, 33 of the country's most contaminated Superfund sites in 19 states have not received funding requested by EPA branch offices (Van Natta, Jr., and Banerjee, 2002; Seelye, 2002b; Shogren, 2002b). In 1980, Congress and President Carter created the trust fund in response to the public outcry over the toxic disaster at Love Canal in New York. Financed through taxes on polluting industries and court awards for hazardous substance releases, the program provided money for cleanups even on sites where polluters could not be charged. However, the Bush administration said it will not reauthorize the "polluter pays" tax, the idea being to shift the costs of further work to the government's general accounts, paid for by all taxpayers. A Republican Congress rebuffed President Clinton's call for reauthorization when the tax expired in 1995. As a result, the trust fund, which held $3.8 billion as recently as 1996, will have only $28 million in its surplus accounts by the end of 2003. One in four Americans lives within one mile of the 1,222 U.S. Superfund toxic waste sites. These sites are contaminated with toxic chemicals linked to cancer, birth defects, neurological impairment, and other adverse health effects. At 85% of these sites, the ground water is contaminated (Cope, 2002). In a related issue, the Bush administration revived the idea of building nuclear power plants and wants to deposit 77,000 tons of nuclear waste inside Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

The harmful consequences of putting the profits of corporate polluters before public health and the environment are not equally distributed. Environmental racism comes into play since people of color (and generally those with low incomes) are disproportionately affected by environmental risks such as living near landfills, municipal waste combustors, or hazardous waste sites. According to the National Black Environmental and Economic Justice Coordinating Committee, ethnic minorities are 50% more likely than are whites to live in communities with hazardous waste facilities. This exposure increases the risks for ethnic minorities of getting asthma, prostate cancer, and other deadly diseases (Lantigua, 2000). Other harms are more diffuse. According to Bivens (2002), one study in an American Lung Association literature review attributes 30,100 deaths every year to power plant emissions. Citing EPA data, Schaeffer (2002) quantifies the health problems due to pollution from coal-fired smokestacks in one year alone: over 10,800 premature deaths, at least 5,400 incidents of chronic bronchitis, more than 5,100 hospital emergency visits, and over 1.5 million lost work days. Add to that the severe damage to our natural resources, such as acid rain attacks on soils and plants, diminution of the bird population, and nitrogen deposits in critical bodies of water. There are also North-South disparities. A respected British medical journal, The Lancet, estimates that millions of people, mostly in developing countries, will die over the next 20 years from global warming-driven outbreaks of dengue fever, malaria, cholera, encephalitis, and pulmonary diseases (Gelbspan, 2002). Three million people, mostly women and children, die annually from indoor air pollution in countries ranging from Mexico to Tanzania to India (Shogren, 2002c). Moreover, a recent study (CSIRO, 2002) indicates that a combination of natural variability and air pollution from burning fossil fuels and smelting metal in the northern hemisphere is likely to have contributed to the catastrophic Sahel drought in Africa, which caused widespread famine and death.

Domestically, one line of defense against the most egregious harms has been environmental legislation and resort to the courts. According to James Salzman (2000) of American University's Washington College of Law, the Rehnquist Supreme Court lacks a clear environmental vision. The Court significantly extended the reach of the Endangered Species Act to cover not only actions likely to cause the injury of a species, but also the range of actions that adversely modify its habitat. However, it also erected significant obstacles to citizens' suits that seek to enforce the act (and, by extension, all environmental laws that contain citizen-suit provisions). Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have consistent anti-environmental voting records, and if Bush were to appoint new justices with similar outlooks, the scope and strength of federal environmental law could be gravely weakened. According to Georgetown law professor Richard Lazarus (in Salzman, 2000), justices who believe in vigorous checks and balances between the branches of government (such as a strong role for the judiciary in reviewing agency action) and the right of government to restrict uses of private property will be more likely to decide in favor of environmental protections.

The worldviews of Scalia and Thomas reflect their roles as patrons and guests of the Federalist Society, which was nurtured by right-wing foundations and has become highly influential in George W. Bush's administration. Its members, such as Kenneth Starr and Bush's current Solicitor General Theodore Olson, were central to Republican efforts to drive President Clinton from office. Interior Secretary Gale Norton, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, and many members of the White House counsel team are leading members; Attorney General John Ashcroft is a close affiliate (Lewin, 2001; Vulliamy, 2001). The Federalist Society's philosophy underpins administration policies on deregulation of environmental and labor law, education, civil rights, and abortion. Bush used a report commissioned by David McIntosh, a Federalist Society founder, to argue that pulling out of the Kyoto treaty was justified since toxic emissions are "exaggerated" (Vulliamy, 2001).

The White House has recruited from the bastions of American conservative thinking, funded for the last 20 years by the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the John M. Olin Foundation for the purpose of staffing organizations from which incoming conservative administrations could select personnel (Lewin, 2001). This funding created the infrastructure for a network of very conservative organizations (the American Enterprise Institute and Federalist Society are most influential in the Bush administration, but the list also includes the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the Hudson Institute). Recruitment to ensure a conservative federal judiciary is handled through the Olin and Scaife-funded Federalist Society and three other right-wing organizations funded by the Scaife Foundation: the Law and Economics Center (LEC), the Liberty Fund, and the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE). They have organized a series of junkets so that judges can attend political seminars on the advantages of deregulation in environment, labor, and civil rights law. FREE and LEC trips for judges are also funded by oil giants Shell and Exxon, as well as by Philip Morris (Vulliamy, 2001). A Washington-based watchdog group, Community Rights Counsel, has concluded that the verdicts of judges who attend these seminars display doctrinal shifts and there is considerable evidence that the education they receive has led to a strand of judicial activism that is pro-market, hostile to federal environmental regulations, and consistent with the curriculum of FREE seminars (Ibid.).

Deregulatory reform under Bush is an extension of the neoliberal offensive of the 1980s, in which the Thatcher and Reagan governments played integral roles, as did the International Monetary Fund internationally. Domestically, conservatives tried to enact policies that would reduce the cost of labor, minimize environmental constraints on producers, and cut back on state welfare benefits (Wallerstein, 2002). The Bush administration continues to undo New Deal reforms and more recent efforts to protect workers, consumers, and the environment. In this context, it means reversing 30 years of environmental legislation and overcoming local resistance to dangerous and objectionable industrial practices. The new regulatory framework is a full-bore assault on antitrust enforcement, environmental protections, telecommunications, workplace rules, consumer protections, financial services, and the ways in which the military and other agencies buy goods and services from the private sector (Labaton, 2001).

This antiregulatory mania has skidded up against the Enron and corporate accounting scandals, which revealed the disastrous effects of deregulating financial and energy markets. These scandals, and the corporate corruption of government, are the logical outcome of the market fundamentalism that has accompanied the political, cultural, and financial ascent of neoliberalism. Wilentz (2002) argues that the Enron affair is possibly the largest political and financial scandal in American history. Political connections entangle every level of the Bush administration.2 Bush himself has been charged with insider self-enrichment based on the sale of fraudulently inflated Harken Energy stock and has received over $550,000 from Enron, its employees, and their relatives during his political career -- the most from any source (Kuttner, 2002). He was compelled to partially repudiate laissez-faire business politics when he signed into law what he described as the toughest corporate reform bill since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. For Wilentz (2002), the lessons for Americans are "that business corrupts politics, that capitalism cannot be trusted simply to the capitalists, and that without government safeguards, the public trust and the public treasury are always at grave risk." The "infectious greed" of present-day corporate Robber Barons, who manipulate markets and purchase immunity from regulatory oversight, has worried defenders of the broader system, for it threatens the accumulation model itself. William Clay Ford, Jr., the chief executive at Ford Motor, warned that the auto industry is facing a problem on environmentalism akin to what others face in accounting and corporate governance, citing a common "lack of trust" (Hakim, 2002).

Some progressives, along with liberal Democrats who have recognized the folly of the perpetual rightward drift of the New Democrats, have called for a reassertion of New Deal protections. Globalization may make this a necessary but insufficient tactic. Given their modest successes nationally, conservatives forcefully moved into the international arena. Attempts to gut environmental legislation in 1995 helped to undermine the Gingrich revolution. Yet, less restrictive to laissez-faire's hegemony has been the "global free market, in which speculative money flows periodically wreck the economies of developing countries, undercut labor and environmental regulation in advanced democracies, and invite the creation of tax havens for the wealthy" (Kuttner, 2002).

With globalization, transnational and multinational firms, in conjunction with liberalized treaties and international financial institutions, promote the expansion of environmentally hazardous activity around the world. The effect is to undermine domestic environmental controls on corporations. Local sovereignty has been usurped through instruments such as the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), which began functioning in 1994 and 1995. They established tribunals to resolve disputes over government measures that act as trade barriers, give domestic companies an advantage over foreign firms, or reduce the value of existing investments. According to Collier (2002), a Virginia firm, Ethyl Corp., used NAFTA rules to force Canada to overturn a ban on the fuel additive MMT, which the Canadians consider dangerous. Metalclad Corp. of Newport Beach won a $16.7 million ruling against Mexico as compensation for its refusal to allow the firm to install a toxic-waste dump on ecologically sensitive lands. California's plan to ban the gasoline additive MTBE, which is blamed for poisoning groundwater across the state, may be vetoed by NAFTA if it upholds a $970 million claim filed by a Canadian firm, Methanex Corp.

Corporations in the U.S. can no longer legally dump toxic waste into rivers, lakes, and oceans, although they still burn toxic wastes in incinerators, including deadly dioxin. Environmental activists were integral to those successes and failures and have been part of the anti-globalization protests in Seattle, Washington, D.C., Prague, and Quebec. This next generation is cognizant of the global connections between labor, safety, trade, and environmental issues and is building cross-border movements for social and environmental justice. A compelling alternative vision is needed to counter the Bush administration's perspective, which despite being exceedingly pro-development and favorable toward exploiting public resources for the profit of private industry, is not unique in viewing the environment primarily as resources to be mined, logged, and drilled. Authors like the American Society for Environmental History president, Carolyn Merchant (The Death of Nature), argue that we must change the way we think about the ecological crisis before we can solve it. The mechanistic worldview of Descartes and the scientific revolution, which became the dominant view and ideology of industrial capitalism, gives permission to exploit and dominate nature. The results are seen in the ecological crisis (in Schoch, 2002). Global capitalism, which is depleting nonrenewable resources and potentially renewable ones, depends structurally on growth and on increasingly global monopolies and huge global corporations to achieve that growth. Thus, it has become increasingly difficult to transform, or even to envisage alternatives. Half of the largest 100 economic entities in the world are large corporations.3 Among them are the largest toxic polluters, who form a powerful lobby in Washington.

We must envision an alternative that provides basic human needs: food, clothing, shelter, energy, healthcare security, and security in old age. For Merchant, these types of basic human rights are the essence of democracy and the quality of human life, and can be compatible with environmental integrity and sustainability. She calls for a social reconstruction based on new narrative based not on the death of nature or mechanistic science, but on a sustainable partnership with nature and between human groups. By the middle of the 21st century, we will be compelled to accept a different set of assumptions about production, reproduction, ecology, and consciousness, constituting a global ecological revolution. This would involve green political parties, sustainable development or livelihood, an earth summit and attempts to reach biodiversity treaties, as well as serious efforts to confront global warming and ozone depletion. Sandra Steingraber (Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment) takes on the chemical industry, which has fought to cut the EPA's budget, prevent the EPA from collecting chemical use data, and otherwise limit its authority. Her work on the evidence linking cancer to chemical contamination of the environment leads her to suggest the adoption of a human rights approach to chemicals. This would replace the current system of regulating the use, release, and disposal of known and suspected carcinogens -- rather than preventing their generation in the first place. She calls for "precautionary action" since science can never prove beyond all doubt that chemicalization of the human economy is responsible for a substantial part of the cancer epidemic.4

In this double issue, the first section deals with the environmental crimes of entities with a global reach -- the World Bank, the U.S. military, the chemical industry, and toxic waste disposers -- and the responses of activists and victims to these policies and practices. David O. Friedrichs and Jessica Friedrichs' case history of a World Bank-financed dam in Thailand addresses whether the policies and practices of an international financial institution can be characterized as a form of crime and whether the "crimes of globalization" need to receive special attention. The authors review charges of World Bank complicity in harmful policies: those with genocidal consequences, that exacerbate ethnic conflict and the gap between rich and poor, that foster immense ecological and environmental damage, or displace indigenous people in developing countries without adequate (or extremely insensitive) resettlement plans. The article assesses the role of activist protest and engagement, as well as that of human rights law, in countering such practices. Vincenzo Ruggiero's essay on Attac, an organizational acronym that in French stands for "Association for the taxation of financial transactions to help citizens" (in reference to the Tobin tax), is a companion piece on social movements attempting to counter hegemonic globalization.

Déborah Berman Santana's "Resisting Toxic Militarism: Vieques Versus the U.S. Navy" casts the U.S. military as the most egregious domestic polluter, subject to less oversight, regulation, and sanction than any other toxic criminal. It is the main energy consumer, generates far more toxic waste per year than the top three chemical companies, and most of the nuclear waste. The essay centers on anti-military movements linked to issues of environmental and social justice. The clearest example is the grass-roots struggle to oblige the U.S. Navy to stop bombing Vieques, Puerto Rico, and to clean up and return the lands for community directed, ecologically and socially sustainable use. In "Environmental Crime and Pollution," Alan Block discusses the emergence of criminal cartels in the toxic waste disposal industry at the time the U.S. government passed the first important toxic waste legislation in its history. The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which mandated special handling of the newly recognized category of waste called either toxic or hazardous, was designed to patrol and discipline the waste disposers, not the producers. In the 1980s, the Superfund legislation mandated that all responsible parties (producers and disposers) would have to clean up polluted sites. The article compares the methods of expansion of carting companies and landfill operators run by organized crime and those run by a two-firm private oligopoly that became the waste industry's most important companies. Bloc finds very little variance between the organized crime cartel and the industry giants in terms of legal issues such as antitrust violations and pollution. He also examines the firms' involvement in illicit plans and actions to dump toxic waste in Third World countries.

Subsequent articles deal with an important conundrum for the study of environmental crime and the practical politics of environmental protections: there are few if any avenues for reducing environmental degradation (whether labeled crime, regulatory violations, or just smart business practices) in the context of a social system predicated on the continual accumulation and expansion of capital. Rob White's "Environmental Harm and the Political Economy of Consumption" addresses the conceptual foundations for a political economy of environmental harm. White reviews the criminological study of environmental harm and examines how production and consumption are organized within capitalist society. This has implications for the social regulation of environmental harm. Complementing a political economy of environmental harm is the literature in theoretical environmentalism, in which "sustainability" is currently deployed globally as a political catchphrase that engenders a vague sense of goodwill toward the Third World, and the environment generally, but has done little to radically shift us away from top-down development strategies and oppressive global trading practices. Mario Petrucci's insightful "Sustainability -- Long View or Long Word?" takes a close look at these issues and reviews the options for an alternative environmental ethic. Vincenzo Ruggiero's review of Pearce and Tombs' Toxic Capitalism: Corporate Crime and the Chemical Industry rounds out this section. The book examines neoliberal globalization and takes an in-depth look at corporate crimes such as accidents within the chemical industries.

The second set of articles in this issue covers the widening net of criminalization affecting the disempowered, and the retrograde racial politics associated with discourses on welfare mothers, the drug war, immigrants, violent schools, and Native Americans. Randall R. Beger's article observes that recent school shootings produced a climate of fear that facilitated an expansion of law enforcement into schools and a constriction of Fourth Amendment rights for public school children. In the name of school safety, lawmakers have made it easier to punish children as adults for a wide range of offenses that were traditionally handled informally by teachers. Moreover, the courts have failed to safeguard the rights of students against arbitrary police power by granting police and school officials greater authority to conduct searches of students, often in the name of creating a drug-free environment. Garry L. Rolison et al.'s article assesses black female incarceration and drug arrests in the 1980s. The study reveals that proportionately more black women were incarcerated for drug offenses than were white women and that black women incarcerated for drug offenses were substantially less likely to have been involved in the criminal justice system than were their violent offense counterparts. Consequently, the War on Drugs served to punish Black women drug users, not to punish criminals. A more humane treatment approach seems unlikely given President Bush's appointments of John Walters as White House drug policy director and Asa Hutchinson to head the Drug Enforcement Administration, both of whom have a traditional law-and-order perspective on the drug war.

In "Crime and Justice in American Indian Communities," Lisa M. Poupart examines the ways in which the historical domination and oppression of American Indians by Western nations perpetuates crime and injustice in American Indian communities. The social ills devastating American Indian communities today -- alcoholism, family violence, incest, sexual assault, and homicide -- were practically nonexistent in tribal communities before the European invasion. Poupart argues that the domination and oppression of American Indian Nations have brought about economic deprivation, loss of tribal sovereignty and increased dependency, internalized oppression, unresolved historical grief, and the normalization of violence, all of which contribute to crime in Indian communities today. She also alludes to the ways in which corporate America has polluted reservation air, land, and drinking water. The article by Cecilia Menjívar and Sang Kil uses media analysis to explore the subtle exclusionary language in U.S. public officials' discourse on immigrant-related issues. Their case studies, primarily of Latino immigrants, demonstrate how "liberal," benevolent rhetoric can disguise exclusionary practices toward immigrants and criminalize their behaviors without proposing viable alternatives to improve the conditions being condemned. Benevolent rhetoric based on law and order often serves to substantiate the opponents of immigration, who use more restrictionist language.

Finally, Rita Maran reports on the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance that took place under United Nations auspices in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001. In this global forum, which the Bush administration effectively boycotted, member states were to commit to remedying and ultimately eliminating racism and related violations. The report summarizes major themes of the conference, among them reparations as an internationally accepted principle for compensating people for violations of their human rights, race and gender, environmental racism, migrants' rights, and race and criminal justice.