Tag: Al Gore

Billionaire Legacy Builders

/ CRC Staff
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Billionaire Legacy Builders:
Wealth and imagination in the fight to persuade Americans that President Obama has been good for us

By Barbara Joanna Lucas, Foundation Watch, November 2015 (PDF here)

Summary:  The president has begun raising money for his library and foundation, which will be located in Chicago and plans to operate on a grand scale.  Obama hopes to avoid the kind of scandals in which President Clinton’s foundation is mired, and he also hopes his Hollywood friends will be able to embellish a legacy that looks to be mixed at best.

Get ready America. See an entire wing devoted to how President Barack Obama single-handedly killed Osama bin Laden and an even larger wing showing how he provided health care for all Americans. Other exhibits will likely demonstrate how he disarmed Iran, battled Wall Street, and saved the economy from capitalism, along with many other heroic, superhuman, death-defying, unprecedented feats. And he did it all while dealing with snarling Republicans in Congress and Tea Party activists bent on impeding the progress Americans needed, whether they knew it or not.

And you’ll also see all the ways Barack Obama saved the world since leaving the White House, making us all wish that the archaic Constitution hadn’t deprived our country of a third term. Obama will be just 55 years old when he leaves office, comparatively young by presidential standards. He will still have plenty of time both to bask in past glories and to continue trying to fundamentally transform America and potentially the world as an influential private citizen with a foundation, charging six-figure speaking fees along the way. Of course, he’ll also have to fundamentally transform America’s memories of his many catastrophic economic and foreign policies.

Coming sometime in the next decade, it’s the Obama Presidential Library and Museum that will showcase that history, and with it, a global foundation to address world concerns. The president and his supporters have been envisioning this for a while.

A private dinner in February at the White House did not come to light in the pages of the New York Times until August. A group of one-percenters whom Obama and his followers rhetorically loathe in public speeches sat down to talk secretly about Obama’s post-presidency—how history remembers him and what projects he will engage in.

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Al Gore: Fox News & Talk Radio ‘Propaganda’ Has Created A ‘Hostile Environment’ For Progressives

/ Matthew Vadum

Yes,  of course, Al, but there’s no “propaganda” involved.

All Fox News Channel and talk radio hosts have to do is honestly explain progressive-left ideas to Americans and the hostility bubbles up naturally.

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Soros Wants IMF To Subsidize His Green Investments

/ Matthew Vadum

Leftist troublemaker George Soros has already made it explicitly clear he wishes to destroy capitalism.

Maybe the Third World will help the hedge fund manager and currency manipulator do it.

The preeminent funder of the left in America wants the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to become a kind of globetrotting Bernard Madoff, offering low-interest loans to poor countries so they can invest in the doomed global warming industry.

According to Soros, the loans would allow developing countries to “jump-start forestry, land use, and agricultural projects – areas that offer the greatest scope for reducing or mitigating carbon emissions, and that could produce substantial returns from carbon markets.”

Soros, who personally wants to invest $1 billion in “clean” technology, wants the IMF to help stimulate demand for the technology he plans to underwrite.

Specifically, Soros proposes using the IMF’s special drawing rights (SDRs) to make loans to developing countries. The SDRs, which he describes as “arcane financial instruments that essentially constitute additional foreign exchange” can be converted into one of four currencies and lent out at a low interest rate. The loans would be backed by the IMF’s gold reserves.

Of course carbon markets exist only because governments say they do. Governments artificially create demand for carbon indulgences. When the demand for carbon offsets dies off as market participants finally realize  anthropogenic global warming is a fraud, it’s going to get ugly.

As the Ponzi scheme finally unwinds, the governments of the developing world will be left holding the bag. When the bubble bursts, they’re going to get angry, maybe as angry as Albanians got when they were duped in pyramid schemes after the Iron Curtain collapsed.

The victims aren’t likely to be enthusiastic about markets either.

(crossposted at BigGovernment)

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Al Gore, the World’s First Carbon Billionaire?

/ Matthew Vadum

No wonder Al Gore’s terrified of publicly debating the science of global warming and climate change.

He’s got billions of dollars in potential personal worth on the line.

Even the New York Times has finally noticed how much Gore has at stake. “[F]ew have put as much money behind their advocacy as Mr. Gore and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes.”

We noticed Gore’s conflict of interest years ago:

  • Al Gore’s Carbon Empire: Cashing in on Climate Change, by Fred Lucas, Foundation Watch, August 2008
  • Al Gore’s Carbon Crusade: The Money and Connections Behind It, by Deborah Corey Barnes, Foundation Watch, August 2007
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Is Al Gore Not Evil, Just Wrong?

/ Matthew Vadum

On his TV show Glenn Beck briefly highlighted the hassle that environmental journalist Phelim McAleer encountered when he dared to challenge Al Gore during a speech.

The speech in Madison, Wisconsin was sponsored by the Society of Environmental Journalists. Amazingly, these alleged journalists closed ranks and shut McAleer down for daring to challenge the many false and inaccurate statements in Gore’s propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth.


 
McAleer asked Gore, who stands to make mountains of money if the carbon emission controls he supports are made into law, if he plans to address the mistakes in the movie. McAleer said:

A judge in the British high court after a lengthy hearing found there were nine significant errors. This has been shown to children. Do you accept those findings and have you done anything to correct those errors?

From Gore’s deer-in-the-headlights look and stammering response, you can see why the former U.S. vice president doesn’t like answering questions about his wacky climate change theories.

After organizers cut McAleer’s microphone they confronted him in the hallway. Said McAleer:

At the Society for [sic] Environmental Journalists the reaction of the journalists, the actions of Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, and the action of the journalists was to shut down the journalist and protect the politician.

McAleer says journalists are too often cheerleaders for environmentalists.

What I would like of environmental journalists like myself is, that you treat Big Environment the same way as you treat Big Politics and Big Government and Big Business. Treat Big Environment the way you treat Big Business. Where does the money come from? Who’s channeling it? Is that reported [unintelligible]? And where is the independent verification of those claims?  But  they don’t. If an environmentalist organization says something it’s accepted as gospel.

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Podesta Group Attacks Climate Extremist

/ Matthew Vadum

Al Gore shill Joseph Romm of John Podesta’s Center for American Progress tries to distance himself from NASA’s reigning climate kook, James Hansen, in a revealing Huffington Post op-ed.

Too late.

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Pickens Explains His Support for Totalitarian Cap-and-Trade Bill

/ Matthew Vadum / 2 Comments

Billionaire T. Boone Pickens, who has supported many worthy free-market causes in his life, explained on the “Glenn Beck Program” Tuesday his curious support for the Democrats’ totalitarian cap-and-trade legislation.

“We haven’t had the leadership in Washington in 40 years to have an energy plan,” Pickens complained to substitute host (retired) Judge Andrew Napolitano. Pickens has spent millions of dollars to date promoting the “Pickens Plan” that is aimed at reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.

Pickens hailed the bill, sponsored by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), as “the most encompassing ” energy legislation ever. The legislation, which is also backed by global warming alarmist Al Gore who compares the struggle against climate change to the war against the Nazis, would kill jobs and regulate every aspect of Americans’ behavior.

Pickens said that cap-and-trade “isn’t my issue” but that the measure has “some good things in it” such as its treatment of wind energy, solar energy, and provisions for electric grid modernization.

Those “good things” are government subsidies for T. Boone Pickens.

“Pickens wants to hard-wire the market to consume the things he’s investing in and have the government lavish him with subsidies in the course of doing so,” according to Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute.

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ACORN Getting Involved in Global Warming Hysteria

/ Matthew Vadum / 2 Comments

Now the ACORN crime family is jumping on the global warming alarmism bandwagon, according to (the left-leaning) Worldwatch Institute.

The radical community group, which is now facing voter registration fraud charges in Nevada, has joined forces with Al Gore and other groups for the ultimate taxpayer shakedown: carbon emission controls.

From the Worldwatch article:

Brian Kettenring,  ACORN’s deputy director of national operations, said his group – the largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate- income people in the United States – was inspired to join the Climate Equity Alliance and work with groups such as the Sierra Club after seeing the vulnerability of cities such as New Orleans to rising sea levels and more intense climatic events. The group, which lobbies for affordable housing and improved education in urban areas, is also encouraged by the hope of “green jobs,” environmentally sustainable employment opportunities.

“ACORN families understand that building a green economy that’s sustainable and builds jobs for working families is good for them, good for the environment, and good for communities,” Kettenring said.

ACORN’s contribution will include direct lobbying of Congress. In the long term, Kettenring expects more ACORN chapters to become involved in green jobs initiatives, such as efforts to collect federal funding for weatherizing urban buildings. […]

Maybe the corrupt ACORN network needs more money to pay its back taxes and mounting legal bills.

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The Climate-Industrial Complex

/ Matthew Vadum

Danish enviro-skeptic Bjorn Lomborg had an excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month.

He’s right to say that much of corporate America is pushing for draconian carbon emission controls because visions of dollar signs are dancing in their heads. They are more than happy to eat U.S. tax dollars in order to supposedly save the planet.

I would go farther than that. I would say that they are recklessly indifferent to whether the new energy taxes they support –whether they be direct (carbon taxes) or hidden (cap and trade)– will harm America.

We’ve been following the destructive lobbying of U.S. big businesses on this issue for some time.

Timothy P. Carney profiled the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) for us in the June 2008 edition of Organization Trends. Fred Lucas detailed the efforts by Al Gore to feed the global warming hysteria in the August 2008 Foundation Watch and also looked at the efforts by Goldman Sachs to cash in on that hysteria in the October Foundation Watch. In the August 2007 Foundation Watch Deborah Corey Barnes spotlighted Al Gore’s environmental scaremongering business.

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GE’s Terrible Jeff Immelt Self-Servingly Lauds Cap-and-Tax

/ Matthew Vadum

General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, a left-wing panderer who has presided over his company’s decline in recent years, says the economy-killing cap-and-trade system of trading emission permits is the best way to crack down on carbon emissions, Jeff Poor of NewsBusters writes.

And Immelt seems to be using his company’s media conglomerate NBC Universal, which owns media outlets NBC, MSNBC and CNBC, to promote GE’s financial interest in regulating carbon.

GE is also a major player in the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), which Timothy P. Carney profiled for Capital Research Center last year in the June 2008 Organization Trends. USCAP is also pushing for cap-and-trade.

So is Goldman Sachs , which along with Al Gore, will rake in incomprehensibly huge sums of money from carbon trading.

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