PAT BUCHANAN: You give me your help, give me your hearts, my friend, on Tuesday here in Arizona, if we can win the Arizona primary, we’re breaking — we’re going to South Carolina, and just days after that, you break out into the open — Georgia, Colorado, Maryland, Yankee primary, a week later through the South, through Super Tuesday. We’re going to go around that Gulf Coast in the Pat Buchanan Express. We’ll set that place on fire. Listen, you give me your hands and hearts, we’ll do it, and we’ll send Bill and Hillary. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’ve got to add one guy to that — we’ve got to add one species to the Endangered Species Act. Bruce Babbitt’s going on the Endangered Species Act!

AMY GOODMAN: Republican candidate Pat Buchanan in Arizona this weekend, where our national affairs correspondent Larry Bensky is in also. And this morning he is in Tucson following the Republican candidates. Over the weekend, he saw Pat Buchanan at the People for the West convention in Tempe. Joining us to discuss the Arizona primary and especially the environmental issues in the campaign are Carolyn Campbell, a former Green Party candidate for the state Legislature and a member of the board of the Center for Voting and Democracy, and Kieran Suckling, head of the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity.

Larry, welcome to Democracy Now! this morning.

LARRY BENSKY: Great to be back.

AMY GOODMAN: Who are the People for the West? And what was Pat Buchanan doing talking to them?

LARRY BENSKY: People for the West, Amy, is an industry-funded citizens’ organization. And if that sounds like a contradiction in terms, it probably is. Ninety-six percent of their funding comes from corporate sources, according to a study by the Audubon Society, corporations like Chevron USA, Homestake Mining, Kennecott Copper, some of which corporations give up to $100,000 to support this so-called citizens’ organization. In the past, they’ve been linked to the “wise use” movement, the “Christian Identity” movement and many other far-right groups in the West of the United States. But at this weekend’s convention, they weren’t showing that face; they were showing their face of wanting to elect Pat Buchanan president by helping to get him the Republican nomination. They claim to now have 25,000 members throughout the West, and their largest chapter is here in Arizona, they say, with some 2,500 members in 26 chapters.

They spent a lot of time at their convention in Tempe on Saturday excoriating environmentalists, and especially the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity, whom they called environmental extremists. They said if the Southwest Center had its way, there would be no more extractive use of lands, and that their motto, the People for the West motto, of “keeping the public lands open,” couldn’t happen.

Kieran Suckling, what exactly are you doing to get these people so jumping up and down?

KIERAN SUCKLING: Well, I think protecting the environment a little too vigorously here in Arizona and throughout the Southwest, and especially when that touches on the three bases of the “wise use” movement here, which is mining, logging and ranching, as [inaudible] called them in his book.

LARRY BENSKY: Could you speak up a little, Kieran?

KIERAN SUCKLING: Yeah, I’m sorry. Our group has done a lot of aggressive work to protect public lands here in Arizona.

LARRY BENSKY: What do you mean by “aggressive work”?

KIERAN SUCKLING: We do a lot of litigation. We do a lot of appeal of timber sales and mining projects and grazing allotments.

LARRY BENSKY: Now, several of the people that I spoke to at the convention were very, very concerned about their own livelihoods. These are people who have lived on and off the land for generations and say that the whole economy of Arizona would collapse if the Southwest Center had its way. Let’s listen for a moment to one of those people, a woman named Linda Dean, who is a co-chair of the chapter of People for the West that is located around Kearny, Arizona.

LINDA DEAN: The truth is that multiple land use is a good thing for our country. It’s important to keep reminding industries, in our cattle industries, in our farmers working and our oilmen, they are the wealth of our nation, and they make our industries grow. They pay paychecks beyond — your copper man goes to work, and he gets a wage, and he pays insurance, and suppliers are purchased. There’s tools. There’s insurance, properties. Homes are bought. Taxes are paid. I mean, the billions of dollars that are input by these industries, it’s just not known.

LARRY BENSKY: What about that, Kieran? Is the entire economy of Arizona going to collapse if your lawsuits move forward?

KIERAN SUCKLING: Well, I’d love to know where the billions of dollars came in. Somehow, I don’t think it will, I mean, if you look at just one industry, for example, logging. It provides only 300 jobs in Arizona. It’s a tiny portion of our economy. We’re a desert state. And the jobs that are provided get a small proportion of the money being made. You know, i.e. our timber industry here is dominated by multinational corporations, like Stone Forest Industries, for example. So, it’s a very small part of Arizona’s economy. And furthermore, it’s not as if it’s being eradicated. It’s incredible hysteria being generated on the part of these folks, when what’s happening is, for the first time, the public is getting involved in the management of public land, and the private corporations aren’t real pleased about that.

LARRY BENSKY: Well, you seem to have a lot of political opposition on the other side, on the People for the West side, for example. The governor of the state of Arizona, Fife Symington, addressed the convention. And also addressing the convention was a man named Jim Irvin, a conservative Republican who’s running for the Corporations Commission here in Arizona. Corporations Commission is a statewide body which, as I understand it, has great regulatory powers about what industry does and doesn’t do. Let’s listen for a moment to Jim Irvin giving his little talk to People for the West.

JIM IRVIN: I don’t want to be shutting down water, shutting down wells, shutting down small water companies, because we’ve got some stupid amoeba in there or some pollywog or some fish that some environmentalist from Washington comes out, doesn’t even know what they look like, and says this thing is an endangered animal. Who gives a damn?

LARRY BENSKY: Now, how about that “who gives a damn” attitude towards endangered species and other things? Kieran, do you find that widespread here in Arizona?

KIERAN SUCKLING: No, I don’t. And, in fact, the answer to who gives a damn, over and over again, has been answered in Arizona, that most Arizonans. We’ve had a number of environmental polls here in the last few years, and in every instance, the vast majority of Arizonans say, “We want stronger environmental protection laws. In particular, we want stronger protection for our water and for our forests.” And so, in fact, the vast majority of our state is in favor of environmental protection. Unfortunately, we’ve got a governor, we’ve got a state Legislature, and we have many appointees who are really in the pockets of industry. And these are the folks you’re hearing down there.

LARRY BENSKY: Let’s bring Carolyn Campbell into this. Carolyn, you’re with the Green Party here in Arizona, and you’re now engaged in a statewide campaign to get Ralph Nader on the ballot, for which you need relatively few signatures. Isn’t that correct?

CAROLYN CAMPBELL: Well, we need about 15,000 signatures of registered voters to get on the ballot here this year, ’96.

LARRY BENSKY: That’s not very many when you consider there’s something like 2 million registered voters in this state.

CAROLYN CAMPBELL: Right, yeah. In Arizona, I think we’ve — this Ralph Nader for President campaign has really had a good impact on the Green Party. You know, sometimes we wonder where people like Ralph Nader have been, because everything that we’re saying makes sense and is the only hope for the future. But we know it takes a while to really have a national impact, but we’re really proud that he’s going to be joining us here. And so we’re out collecting signatures to get on the ballot, to get Ralph Nader on the ballot, and of course also to run local campaigns, as well.

LARRY BENSKY: Well, now, let me ask you the classic third-party question then. Arizona is a state that is very Republican. In fact, in presidential elections, it’s the most Republican in the country. It hasn’t gone for a Democrat since 1948. That’s the longest of any state in the country. Recent polls, which may not mean much this far ahead of the election, show that if the election were held now, President Clinton would defeat Bob Dole, would defeat Pat Buchanan, would defeat anybody here in Arizona. But you’re trying to put somebody on the ballot who has a chance of getting 3, 4, 5%, maybe more, and would assure the Republicans of winning again here in Arizona. Is that part of your calculation, that you may be helping Republicans get elected if you have Ralph Nader on the ballot?

CAROLYN CAMPBELL: Well, that’s, of course, like you say, a classic argument. People — first of all, we’re trying to change the election system, too, and I think the Republicans are seeing that in the primary here tomorrow, that somebody like Pat Buchanan can win, what, 23% of the votes and win all of the electors’ votes here in Arizona. So I think that the votes — even though a Republican has won for president every time, I think that the votes are a little bit skewed, because someone can win not even a majority, but, you know, 25, 30% of the people that are actually voting, and can elect a Republican candidate for president.

What we’re trying to do, what we’ve always tried to do, is wake up a lot of those people that just gave up. You know, the lesser of two evils. The only reason people go to vote these days is to defeat somebody that’s even worse. And so, as everyone knows, there is just not that many people voting anymore, because people just don’t think it’s going to make a difference. And so, actually, I think that Ralph Nader, he’s not a known presidential candidate to most of the country yet, but when he is, I think there’s going to be a lot of people voting that would have stayed home.

LARRY BENSKY: One thing people don’t seem to realize about Arizona — and I must say I didn’t before I came here a few days ago — is how urban a state this is. You think of it as part of the Southwest and the wide open spaces. But 85% of the voters live in Phoenix and Tucson. The rural areas are relatively depopulated. Only 12% of the population lives in rural areas. Kieran Suckling, are you able to get support in urban areas for environmental preservation greater than you can out in the rural areas, where the People for the West and the “wise use” movement seem to have an impact?

KIERAN SUCKLING: Yeah, that’s generally true. In fact, we recently moved our group, from a very rural area, into Tucson just a few months ago, largely because we want to do mass organizing, and we’re getting better support in the urban areas.

But one of the things we’ve also found is almost any rural area you go to in Arizona has its own homegrown environmental group there. You go to the White Mountains, which is in eastern Arizona, real heart of the “wise use” movement, and you’ve got the White Mountain Conservation League, a very strong and active group there. However, what generally happens is that the “wise use” movement brings the voices of extraction from the rural areas to the cities, and they say, “Hey, these are what the people, the rural people, feel.” And what happens, I think, generally, is that even liberal-minded folks in the city have a tendency to listen to that voice.

*LARRY BENSKY: Well, because they put a human face on what they say is the suffering of people who are living in rural areas. And they presented several of these at their convention over the weekend, and I interviewed some of them. And I must say they didn’t seem like Hollywood actors to me. They seemed very sincere people who were tremendously afraid that they would lose their jobs and their homes. What do you say to those people?

KIERAN SUCKLING: Well, generally, what we try to do is point out to them, you know, the actual economic conditions that put them where they are. I mean, you look at Arizona. We used to have over 200 sawmills in Arizona, operated by dozens of different local corporations. Today we’ve got three logging companies. All of them are massive corporations. And so, folks have very few places to go for employment, because they’ve been taken over by corporations. Consequently, when the profit margin is not high enough, these places close down. We’ve seen that time and time again. Stone Container is a classic one, who will continually close their mills at a very ripe political moment in order to make a statement and create lots of hysteria, and then, a month later, open it up again when it’s politically OK to do that.

LARRY BENSKY: Carolyn Campbell, the Green Party, when you try to appeal to people in urban areas, what do you find the reaction is? I’m asking this because I spoke to some of the people who are canvassing for Kieran’s organization, and they told me that sometimes when they knock on doors, they get a really hostile reception.

CAROLYN CAMPBELL: Well, we’ve found the opposite, really. We’ve knocked on a lot of doors in our campaigns. And what we’re finding now, in terms of mainstream Arizonans, is that people — all this rhetoric, the anti-environmental rhetoric that was happening in the '80s, is really getting — trying to be pushed ahead now in the ’90s, and people are really waking up. People are saying environmental protection laws, you know, not just the Endangered Species Act, but all the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, all the environmental protection laws, have been with us for, you know, close to — what? — 25 years now, and people really think that they're, you know, part of their inalienable rights almost, and they can’t believe that this is being challenged at this point. So they’ve been quiet in the '80s and shook their heads, but now they're really — this is what’s really struck a chord with the mainstream now. And so people are coming out and standing up. People that have not considered themselves activists before are saying, “Wow! If government isn’t for anything else, it should be protecting the health and protecting our environment.”

And I think people — just like Kieran said, the anti-environmental agenda is not popular with the American people, and the politicians that are pushing it must know that. I mean, they must be just doing this for some other big corporate sponsors, because if they don’t realize that this is an anti- — that this isn’t popular, then I don’t know where — they’re either ignorant of it or they just don’t care.

LARRY BENSKY: Carolyn Campbell of the Arizona Green Party, Kieran Suckling from the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity are our guests this morning on Democracy Now! We have just a couple of minutes left, and I wanted to get each of your reactions to something that I’ve noticed since I’ve been here in Arizona, which is the very monolithic nature of the news media here. There’s very little alternative media. There are weekly papers in Tucson and Phoenix. I don’t know how widely read they are. There’s no alternative radio to speak of. There’s certainly no alternative television. And the news media coverage of this Republican convention has really been extremely conventional, I might say as an understatement. Do you have trouble getting the word out, Kieran and Carolyn, about your environmental campaigns here in Arizona.

KIERAN SUCKLING: I’ll answer that first, Carolyn. We actually don’t have any trouble at all. And I think that’s a really good indicator that our papers are not just mainstream, frankly. Many of them are fairly right-wing. However, they’re also quite environmental. And what it shows you is that Arizonans, who have traditionally voted Republican, are not voting against the environment. So, for example, papers like The Arizona Republic, a very conservative newspaper, will run editorials saying “Stop the Chainsaw Massacre.” In Tucson, the large paper down here, covers our issues on a regular basis. So, we really don’t have any problem getting the message out through these kind of mainstream —

LARRY BENSKY: How about the Green Party, Carolyn?

CAROLYN CAMPBELL: Well, Larry, I’m going to argue with you, too. You’re here right at the time where the Republicans are having their primary, and I know that’s all over the media. But when we had our campaigns a couple years ago, it was quite refreshing. You know, I know we were a new party then, and perhaps a lot of it was a novelty with the television media. They had a lot of coverage of the Green Party. And when we had — our candidates were endorsed not only by, you know, a lot of the interest groups — the Sierra Club and NOW and things like that — but all of the print media was — I was endorsed by the more liberal morning daily paper, as well as the more conservative daily afternoon paper — that was quite a surprise — as well as the alternative weekly and the gay publication. Basically, all of the print media endorsed my candidacy.

And I really feel also — you know, there’s no — we don’t have a Green Party presidential candidate right now here in Arizona. And when we do, I hope that it gets covered. I think that’s probably where the Green Party had the most impact back in '92, because now I see that the media is all covering pretty fairly Libertarian candidates and independent candidates, a lot more so than they did before our Green Party campaign. So I'm actually — at least locally, I’m encouraged.

LARRY BENSKY: Well, on that note, I want to thank both of you for joining us, and maybe have a little chat here for a moment myself with Amy Goodman about the Arizona primary itself, coming up tomorrow evening and night. We will have results, of course, on Democracy Now! later this week and analysis of how it turned out. But right now, to get back to the horse race, it looks like the three horses that you might expect are all contesting for the lead. But one of the things that’s proven most interesting to me is that how little voter interest, Amy, there seems to be in this primary out here in Arizona among Republicans. There are almost a million registered Republicans in this state. And —

AMY GOODMAN: Now, it is — Larry, it is just a Republican primary?

LARRY BENSKY: Right, it is just a Republican primary, but the Registrar of Voters is saying that they expect fewer than 100,000 people, out of a million, to participate, and this despite the media blitz. And it is intense. I mean, you can’t turn on a television set for two seconds without seeing a political ad from Dole or Buchanan or especially Forbes. But there’s very little real voter interest among Republicans on the ground, it seems.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we were just talking about money in politics, and I fear that that’s what has the most to do with it, is how removed these elections are. And I think we’re going to be bringing on Frances Fox Piven one of these days to talk about why people don’t vote, because that seems to be one of the most significant factors in this and the Iowa primary, as well. Larry, thank you for joining us this morning. Larry Bensky, Pacifica’s national affairs correspondent, speaking to us fro Tucson, Arizona.

Coming up next, we’re going to be talking about Cuba and presidential politics. This is Democracy Now!