[Vision2020] Libertarian Tea Party Stooges For Corporate Power: "Beyond Washington: The Oil Industry Buys Influence"

[Ted Moffett]

   August, 26, 2010
 Heather Taylor-Miesle <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/heather-taylormiesle>

Director of the NRDC Action Fund
Beyond Washington: The Oil Industry Buys
Influence<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/heather-taylormiesle/beyond-washington-the-oil_b_695626.html>

I worked on Capitol Hill for a long time, and I do not consider myself naive
about the inner workings of Washington. But even I was surprised by two
revelations this week exposing the amount of money the oil industry is
spending to buy political influence.

The first eye-opener came from recently released lobbying numbers. The
OpenSecrets blog
<http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/08/pro-environment-groups-were-outmatc.html>reported
that the oil and gas industry poured $174 million into the political system
in 2009. That's eight times more than the green groups.

What did the oil and gas industry get for its money? A handful of Senators
who blocked all attempts by the Senate to pass a comprehensive clean energy
and climate bill that would have made fossil fuel industries start cleaning
up their global warming pollution.

This week's second revelation made that difference abundantly clear. Jane
Mayer wrote an investigative
piece<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer>in
the New Yorker about the brothers David and Charles Koch who run Koch
Industries -- the biggest corporation you've never heard of -- and who have
spent more than $100 million on anti-government causes.

Koch Industries owns oil refineries and 4,000 miles of pipeline, and was
named one of the top 10 air polluters in the nation in a 2010 UMass-Amherst
report <http://www.peri.umass.edu/toxic_press/>. The Kochs' political
donations are often aimed at promoting their libertarian views, but they
also directly benefit their own profit margins. They have donated millions
of dollars to nonprofit groups that fight environmental regulation and seed
doubt about climate science. In fact, a Greenpeace
report<http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/dirty-money-climate-30032010/>called
them a "kingpin of climate science denial." And though green groups
tend to paint ExxonMobil as the worst of the worst when it comes to lobbying
against climate legislation, Koch outspent even ExxonMobil.

One of David Koch's pet projects is the group Americans for
Prosperity<http://americansforprosperity.org/national-site>,
a group he founded and funds but positions as a grassroots movement. An ad
for one of its training sessions for Tea Party activists says, "The voices
of average Americans are being drowned out by lobbyists and special
interests. But you can do something about it."

But when Americans for Prosperity hosts at least 80 events protesting
climate legislation, is it really acting in the interest of average
Americans or the interest of oil industry donors?

When it funds an attack ad
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANP-_JFST94>against Representative
Betsey Markey from Colorado because she supported
climate legislation last summer that would have brought 30,000 jobs to her
state<http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:wQvyp6K0CIsJ:are.berkeley.edu/~dwrh/CERES_Web/Docs/ES_DRHFK091025.pdf+uc+berkeley+aces+analysis&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjRQWMGA2aUqihaBw9GjPsbpFswxHk_5wdSirgnwLUrFuGZZbJJnIO98mEPWGIOr07f0q3NiR6zOAyEvbfLcutseazZIJWu1Ig-ScG4tegwYM_wSZaTBNcZpWlPwGJK4KW30Ocr&sig=AHIEtbQq0G7oGmDvoYW5-ND4jC7DzE0Hag>,
who is it benefiting?

And when the group pledges to spend an additional $45 million before the
midterm elections, is that money really coming from grassroots activists, or
from deep corporate pockets? These fat cats pretend to fraternize with the
ordinary folks who dangle tea bags from their tri-cornered hats, but, in
fact, they are just using activists to put a populist face on their industry
agenda.

Manipulating other people's fears about the economy when you are a
billionaire -- I would call that the depth of cynicism. But considering
those billionaires are getting in the way of climate solutions, clean energy
and green jobs in America; I have to instead call it dangerous.
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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