Liberal Billionaire Tom Steyer:
Green Godfather to Democrats, or Green Pied Piper?
by James P.
Pinkerton 28 Feb 2014, 1:14 AM PDT
Once upon a time, Democrats complained
about fatcats funding campaigns. Then they discovered that it was they who had
the fatter cats. So that made the situation different: Fatcats—at least liberal
fatcats—are okay.
The problem for elected Democrats, though,
is that while the money is good, the politics are bad. The new breed of
Demo-fatcat demands that candidates embrace a Green ideology that happens to be
ballot-box poison.
But Greenism is political poison, of
course, only if the voters find out about it. And it’s possible that the money
that’s enticing Democratic candidates can also be used, unfortunately, for
bamboozling the voters. We’ll know for sure this November.
As recently as late last year, President
Obama was asked about the Supreme Court’s Citizens United case, a decision that
opened the door wider to big campaign donations. Quoth the President:
There aren’t a lot of functioning
democracies around the world that work this way, where you can basically have
millionaires and billionaires bankrolling whoever they want, however they want.
Yet interestingly, Obama made no mention
of campaign finance reform in his 2014 State of the Union address. This
agenda-setting speech is typically encyclopedic in its laundry-listing of
everything that’s on a commander-in-chief’s mind—and yet in this particular
speech, nearly 7000 words long, POTUS made no mention of money in politics.
So why the silence? What might have
chilled the President’s interest? One possible clue can be found in a news
article in Sunday’s Washington Post headlined, “Environmental advocates target
climate change as Democratic election issue.” Actually, the headline might be
translated to read, “Green liberal billionaires plot to elect Democrats who
will squeeze down the energy industry.” Indeed, the piece details the efforts
of former vice president Al Gore and a coterie of billionaires, mostly
clustered in the San Francisco Bay Area, including hedge funder Tom Steyer and Esprit founder Susie
Tompkins Buell, to bankroll the Democrats to victory in 2014.
Or maybe we should say, “bankroll
Democrats to survival.” As MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asserted on Sunday, “a rosy
scenario” for Senate Democrats in 2014 is to lose only five seats, and they
could, he added, lose as many as 10. In other words, Democrats need all the
help they can get.
And they can get help from Big Green, and
lots of it—but at a price. As Washington Post writer Juliet Eilperin wrote,
“Wealthy environmentalists are pushing Democrats to take bolder positions on
climate change.” Once again, if we might be allowed to translate, “wealthy”
means, in fact, “super rich.”
Steyer, for example, retired from
investing to devote himself full time to liberal-left activism, mostly, green
activism; he seems determined to play the role of Green Godfather. He
reportedly spent $11 million to help elect Democrat Terry
McAuliffe as governor of Virginia, and he has pledged another $100
million more in the coming the 2014 midterm elections; a look at his website,
Next GenClimate.org, shows he is perfectly happy to be the upfront face of all
his political efforts.
Some might say, of course, that these
liberal Greens are simply trying to keep up with the big spenders on the right.
What about, for example, the Koch Brothers? Surely it takes a lot of Steyerses
to keep with the Kochs. Yet as The Washington Times recently noted:
The Koch brothers, despite their wealth
and interest in politics, are not even in the major league of contributors to
political causes. The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics compiled a
list of “Heavy Hitters,” top political donors from 1989 to 2014, and the Koch
brothers are in 59th place. Thirteen of the top 20 donor groups gave nearly all
of their campaign cash to Democrats, with ActBlue leading
the list with $97.2 million, all of it contributed to Democrats… Only three of
the top 20 donor groups gave predominantly to Republicans.
In other words, the left is beating the
right at the big-money game. So once again, we can see why the Democrats don’t
seem preoccupied anymore with the goal of “getting money out of politics.”
And yet money talks, of course, loudly.
Returning to Sunday’s Washington Post article, we might translate more of the
polite reportage into blunter talk, starting with the reference to “bolder
positions on climate change.” What does
“bolder” mean? What’s a bolder position? Here’s what it means: A big lurch to
the Green left.
At the top of the Steyer agenda is
opposition to the Keystone Pipeline. And that’s problematic for politicians in
most parts of the country, because according to a recent poll, by a 56:41
margin, Americans support the job-creating infrastructure project. In other
words, in return for their campaign cash, the Green billionaires expect
Democratic politicians to take an unpopular stand on a high-profile
controversy.
Yet Keystone is just the beginning. A look
at Steyer’s website shows us the full panoply of San Francisco liberalism, including tax
increases and the claim that climate change “ranks right up there” with
“terrorism, epidemics, poverty, [and] the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction.”
Climate change more dangerous than
terrorism or rogue nations? Yes, such a claim might seem laughable to those who
rightly fear Al Qaeda or Iran
or North Korea,
but the view seems to be widely held in elite circles. On February 16,
Secretary of State John Kerry—married
to yet another Green billionaire, Theresa Heinz Kerry—went
one step further, declaring, “Climate change can now be considered another
weapon of mass destruction, perhaps the world's most fearsome weapon of mass
destruction [emphasis added]." As they say, ideas have consequences. And
so if jet-set liberals all agree that carbon dioxide is at least as great a
threat as WMD, well, we shouldn’t be surprised that such views are shaping
Obama administration policy.
Of course, Barack Obama, having been re-elected
to the White House, is now done with elections; it’s the Democrats in Congress
who have to face the voters this November.
So how will these Green ideas play in Peoria? And in the
Heartland as a whole? One clue comes from the 2010 midterm elections, when the
voters had a chance to judge House members on their 2009 vote for the “cap and
trade” legislation. And for Democrats, the results weren’t pretty.
Sample headline in Politico immediately
after the ’10 elections: “Democrats’ day of reckoning comes for climate vote.”
As the article explained:
Democrats who voted for the controversial
House climate bill were slaughtered at the ballot box, including Rep. Rick
Boucher, the 14-term Virginian who helped broker some of the key deals
instrumental to its June 2009 passage. In the Senate, several reliable green
advocates also went down to opponents who derided tough new environmental
policies.
With that in mind, what will 2014 be like
for Democrats who take money from Steyer & Co. and then face the voters?
Donors rich with money and guilt are one thing; voters rich with anxieties
about jobs and income are quite another. As even the liberal-friendly
Washington Post had to concede in its article on Steyer:
The Democratic Party’s relationship with
the environmental movement remains fraught — torn between fervent believers and
centrists reluctant to go against traditional energy industry interests that
play a major role in their state’s economies. Most of the Democratic candidates
facing the toughest Senate races at the moment are in states that traditionally
favor the fossil fuel industry, including Alaska,
Louisiana, Kentucky
and West Virginia.
The problem, of course, is jobs and
economic growth. On Steyer’s website, we see a little bit of language about the
need to “preserve American prosperity”—although no mention of the need to
increase American prosperity. Of course, the case for growth as a result of
Green policies is a hard, if not impossible, argument to make these days; in
the wake of Solyndra and all the other Green boondoggles, only a few
propagandists still claim that a Green Economy will be anything more than a
Lean Economy.
In fact, there’s plenty of evidence that
that’s exactly what the the Greens want: Less, to them, is more. After all, the
roots of today’s Green movement are found in the gloomy maunderings of Thomas
Malthus, who worried about too much growth—back in the late in the late 18th
century. Ever since then, the same mindset, a back-to-nature combination of
pessimism and elitism, has animated the radical wing of the environmental
movement.
Indeed, if we’re curious as to what the
Greens really think, we need only read what they say to each other in policy
discussions. One who monitors the Green Movement closely is Marc Morano of
ClimateDepot.com, which points us to such revealing items as a recent press
release from the Sierra Club (a group headquartered in, where else? San Francisco). In this
release, a Green is approvingly quoted as saying, “There’s no such thing as
sustainable growth, not in a country like the US. We have to de-grow our
economy.” Yes, that’s right: “de-grow.” The goal is to “de-grow our economy.”
And jobs? Should we “de-grow” them, too?
Another Green quoted in the same Sierra Club item declares, “We know that when
an economy isn't growing, you tend to get a fallout of higher unemployment. So
you have to spread the work around more evenly.” Got that? Higher unemployment
is acceptable, maybe even a goal? And we can all try to pay the mortgage on, 30
hours of work a week? Or maybe 25?
These are shocking quotes, to be sure. Yet
in view of their history, why shouldn’t we take the Greens at their word—that
is, when they say they want everyone to live with less?
Well, okay, maybe not everyone has to live
with less: When we compare the lifestyle that Big Green billionaires choose for
themselves, compared to the lifestyle that they would choose for us, words such
as “double standard” and “hypocrisy” leap to mind. They might have a Prius or a
bicycle for show, but when they really need to get around, limousines and
private jets are the standard mode of transportation. Here’s looking at you, Al
Gore!
In light of these Green Malthusian
pronouncements, Steyer’s vague pledge to “preserve” America’s prosperity looks
similarly double standard-ish, if not downright deceitful.
By contrast, the Koch Brothers, and their
allies on the pro-growth right, are utterly sincere; what you see is what you
get. Love them or hate them, they have always been upfront about what they
believe in: lower taxes, less regulation, and inexpensive and abundant energy.
So voters who want growth should vote with
the Kochs—and no voter who wants “more” should be deceived into voting
otherwise. As for those who sincerely oppose growth, they should vote with Steyer.
Obviously such clear-cut calculus poses a
big problem for Democrats, because the vast majority of voters do indeed want
growth. As shown by what happened to the Democrats in the 2010 midterms, Steyer
could prove to be less of a Green Godfather and more of a Green Pied
Piper—piping a tune that carries Democrats to their doom.
So here’s where all the Green billionaires
and their lavish campaign contributions can potentially make a decisive
difference—that is, they might be able to buy some elections for Democrats. As
we have seen, Obama and his allies don’t want to do anything to crimp such
spending and thus stymie the attempted campaign bamboozlement.
In addition, the mainstream media can come
to the aid of the Greens and the Democrats. Just over the weekend, CNN
declared, “There are some stories which do not have two sides. The climate
change debate is one of them.” In other words, if anyone questions the
importance of climate change, well, they’re just not to be taken seriously.
Actually, while CNN
might not ever want to admit it, there is a great deal of scientific literature
on the other side of the debate. For a look, one might start with the work
Steven Goddard, who has tirelessly tracked the oscillations of scientific
“consensus”—as it has veered from dire projections of global cooling, then to
projections of global warming, and now to the all-purpose catchall projection
of “climate change.”
And that’s the key word, “change,”
although not in the way the Greens wish to say it. Over the course of billions
of years, long before humans came on the scene , the temperature of the earth
has varied greatly. Why? One big reason is the sun: When the sun varies, earth
varies, too. (Other big variables are volcanic eruptions and meteor strikes,
neither of which are subject to human influence.)
In fact, the amount of heat that humans
generate is vastly outnumbered by the amount of radiant energy coming from the
star next door. Outnumbered by how much? According to the Sandia National
Laboratory in Albuquerque, NM, the solar energy that hits the earth every year
is some 300,000 times greater than the world’s annual energy production. In
other words, the slightest tick, upward or downward, in solar radiation has vastly
more impact on the earth’s temperature than anything that mere humans might do
or not do.
Scientific evidence suggests that solar
radiation has decreased in the last decade or so, signaling that we might be in
for a cooling period, “greenhouse gases” notwithstanding. Indeed, the recent
reduction in radiation seems to explain the “pause” in warming that even
global-warming alarmists have been forced to acknowledge.
In the meantime, as the science sorts
itself out, national policymakers are better advised to focus on immediate
issues—that is, not on the sea level in a hundred years, but, rather, on jobs
and the economy.
Indeed, the importance of economic growth
suggests that the American people will reject Steyer & Co. this November—no
matter how much money they are willing to spend.
But we must remember: Win or lose in 2014,
Steyer will still be rich, and presumably he’ll be ready to rumble yet again in
2016.
Susie Tompkins Buell
Susie
Tompkins Buell was a funder for the Bill, Hillary &
Chelsea Clinton Foundation, a contributor for the American Bridge 21st Century, a member of the Democracy Alliance, a contributor at Ready for
Hillary, a donor for Media Matters, and
is a national finance council member at Ready for Hillary.
Note: Open
Society Foundations was a funder for the Bill,
Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, and the Center for American Progress.
George Soros
is the founder & chairman for the Open Society Foundations,
a co-chair, national finance council for the Ready for
Hillary, a director at the Brain Trauma Foundation,
was a contributor for the American Bridge 21st
Century, a member of the Democracy Alliance,
and the chairman for the Foundation to Promote Open
Society.
Foundation
to Promote Open Society was a funder for Media
Matters, the Center for American
Progress, the Center for International
Policy, the Climate Reality Project,
and the Brookings Institution (think tank).
Darcy
Burner is a director at the Center for International
Policy, and was a director at ActBlue.
Hassan
Nemazee was a director at the Brain Trauma Foundation,
is a friend of Terence R. McAuliffe, and a friend
of Albert A. Gore Jr.
Terence
R. McAuliffe is a friend of Hassan Nemazee,
a director at the Bill, Hillary &
Chelsea Clinton Foundation, and the governor-elect for the Virginia state government.
Albert A.
Gore Jr. is a friend of Hassan Nemazee,
and the chairman for the Climate Reality Project.
Carol M.
Browner was a director at the Climate Reality Project,
the energy czar for the Barack Obama
administration, and is a senior fellow, director at the Center for American Progress.
John D.
Podesta is a counselor for the Barack Obama
administration, the chair & counselor for the Center for American Progress, and was the temporary CEO for
the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
Lawrence H. Summers
is a distinguished fellow at the
Center for American
Progress, was a trustee at the
Brookings
Institution (think tank), and a 2008
Bilderberg conference participant (think tank).
Laura
D'Andrea Tyson is a fellow at the Center for American
Progress, was a trustee at the Brookings
Institution (think tank).
Teresa
Heinz Kerry is an honorary trustee at the Brookings
Institution (think tank), married to John F.
Kerry, a life trustee at the Carnegie Mellon University,
and a trustee at the Carnegie Museums of
Pittsburgh.
John F. Kerry
is married to Teresa Heinz Kerry, and the secretary
at the U.S. Department of State for the Barack Obama administration, and his brother is Cameron F. Kerry.
Cameron
F. Kerry is John F. Kerry’s brother, a fellow
at the Brookings Institution (think tank),
and was the general counsel; acting secretary for the U.S.
Department of Commerce.
Jessica Tuchman Mathews
was an honorary trustee at the
Brookings
Institution (think tank), is the president of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (think
tank), a director at the
Nuclear Threat Initiative
(think tank), a director at the American Friends of
Bilderberg (think tank), and a 2008
Bilderberg conference participant (think
tank).
Ed Griffin’s interview
with Norman Dodd in 1982
(The investigation into
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace uncovered the plans for
population control by involving the United States in war)
Andrew
Carnegie was the founder of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace (think tank), the endowed
predecessor schools for the Carnegie Mellon University,
and the founder of the Carnegie Museums of
Pittsburgh.
Teresa
Heinz Kerry is a life trustee at the Carnegie Mellon University,
a trustee at the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, an
honorary trustee at the Brookings Institution
(think tank), and married to John F. Kerry.
Ted Turner
is a co-chairman for the Nuclear Threat Initiative
(think tank), and the founder for CNN.
