To mainstream environmental activists, Ron Arnold merits special disdain. A former Sierra Club conservation committee member, Arnold now runs, with associate Alan Gottlieb, the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise in Bellevue, Washington. Together they wrote a 1993 expose of the environmental movement, Trashing the Economy: How Runaway Environmentalism is Wrecking America, which remains...
Post
Dissing the Eco-Paranoids
“There’s a world of misery in every X mouthful of meat,” fumes the headline in an advertisement back in the September/October 1993 issue of E, “The Environmental Magazine.” The ad continues: “The grain which fattens animals for our dinner tables is oft time ‘appropriated’ from the peoples of Third World countries; it enriches dictators while...
Post
The Pacific Legal Foundation
Only a few years ago prospects for the Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation, the country’s oldest “conservative” public interest law firm, hardly seemed promising. In 1986, PLF president and CEO Ronald Zumbrun decided to indulge in deficit spending to continue unpopular land use and takings litigation. The legacy of judicial activism from the 1960’s and 70’s...
Post
Jerry Brown Talks
On July 7 Chronicles sent freelance writer Jim Christie to interview Jerry Brown in Oakland, California. Ask any Democratic Party insider in California about Jerry Brown, and he will usually say Brown is one of three things; an embarrassment, a flake, or a jerk. The institutional meanness, the state party’s party line, toward the former...
Post
Pushed Only So Far
Violent crime in California dropped for the first nine months of 1993 over the same period in 1992, reported attorney general Dan Lungren last winter. But statistics are of no comfort, and Lungren knows it. During the same press conference he even said so: “The reason people are more worried today than they ever have...
Post
Follow the Money
The California Teachers Association (CTA) and its allies raised $17 million to defeat Proposition 174, California’s school voucher initiative, which proposed granting parents a voucher worth as much as $2,600 that could be applied to tuition at public or private schools. Ironically, this special interest didn’t even have to break a sweat: the campaign budget...
Post
Limits to Litigation
Gerald N. Rosenberg, an assistant professor of political science and an instructor in law at the University of Chicago, has some simple advice for activists who think a United States Supreme Court ruling is an end-all: not only are you wrong, but your money is better spent out of court than in court. In The...
Post
S&L to L.A.
If you’re white in the United States, you, says Professor Andrew Hacker, have at least that much going for you. “No matter how degraded their lives, white people are still allowed to believe that they possess the blood, the genes, the patrimony of superiority,” Hacker, a political scientist, writes of white Americans. “No matter what happens, they...