It took more than the usual Clintonian brass for the president to choose the Mississippi Delta during his "poor tour" last week as the venue for declaring his commitment to bringing jobs to America's neglected regions. In the last two years, the Clinton administration has waged a war against dozens of industries trying to bring jobs to America's poor areas. And in the Delta alone, the administration has forced cancellation of a $ 700 million plastics plant and an $ 800 million nuclear fuel enrichment plant -- all because the Environmental Protection Agency says these Louisiana facilities were guilty of "environmental racism," an alleged conspiracy of industry and state governments to locate plants with a disproportionate pollution impact in poor areas.
The theory is cockamamie (see Henry Payne's "Green Nonsense, Black Losses" in the Aug. 3, 1998, WEEKLY STANDARD), but its effects are all too pernicious: excluding jobs from America's poor areas. Clinton's hypocritical tour comes two months after the administration's environmental racism policy claimed its latest victim: Select Steel Company announced cancellation of plans to build a $ 175 million plant in economically distressed Genesee Township near Flint, Mich., after being sued by local activists for violating EPA rules. Genesee supervisor Scott Streeter, whose community strongly supported the facility, is puzzled by Clinton's stated commitment to economic development in needy areas. "If he really feels strongly about those views," says Streeter, "we wouldn't have had the problems that we ran into here." The federal government designates Genesee a "distressed community," which makes it eligible for tax breaks designed to attract business. The two Louisiana plants were also located in state-designated "empowerment zones." No matter. Though the administration claims to support these kinds of economic affirmative action, it made life miserable for the companies anyway.
Just this once, though, THE SCRAPBOOK is prepared to forgive the media for not scrutinizing the Clinton blarney more closely. A healthy indifference seems to have taken hold. As sociologist Christopher Jencks confessed to the New York Times last week, he had little to say about the president's trip: "One of the ways I preserve my mental health," Jencks told Jason DeParle, "is to read as little as possible about Bill Clinton."