What would the world be like if the Republican Party’s most influential
billionaire backers got their way—if “the geezer empire struck back,” as New
York magazine writer Frank Rich put it
in a recent piece about this posse of unbelievably wealthy white men who have
written million-dollar checks to GOP super PACs and non-profits in 2012.
Beyond the usual GOP jeremiads—cutting taxes and government spending,
shredding safety nets, eviscerating federal regulation and privatizing whatever
remains—many of the GOP’s biggest moneymen have specific issues and goals, often
business-related, and would expect a Romney presidency to advance those
agendas.
There is no shortage of amazing reporting on top GOP donors, such as Rich’s
overview
of these "Sugar Daddies" or The New Republic’s profile
of 80-year-old Harold Simmons. Add in reports from watchdogs, such as the Sunlight Foundation Reporting
Group, and what emerges is a jaw-dropping class of mega-wealthy, alpha-male
vulture capitalists who would barely blink at the human or environmental
consequences of cashing out.
The 2012 campaign has been awash in Republican billionaires who have
discovered they can write checks—small for them at just a million or two—and are
fawned over by political consultants urging them to go for the jugular. Chicago
Cubs owner Joe Ricketts is one such political newcomer. He backed
off a $10 million race-baiting plan to smear Obama with remarks by his
former pastor, but is now investing in a movie where the guilt-by-association is
tied to Obama’s absentee Kenyan father.
Other newcomers include William
Koch, an avid sailor who has opposed a wind turbine farm off Cape Cod and
now grouses about Obama being too regulation friendly, even as the New York
Times editorializes
that his record reining in corporate excesses is “mediocre.”
These all-too-predictable political screeds and their billionaire promoters
appear as babes in the political woods, actually, when compared to the GOP’s
more seasoned big moneymen who have used campaign cash and lobbying to win
government intervention on behalf of their private fortunes. In contrast to
fulminations against Obama’s anti-colonial heritage or supposedly
anti-capitalist inclinations, several billionaire Republicans know exactly why
they are investing in Mitt Romney.
1. Irradiate North America’s Biggest Aquifer
Harold Simmons has come a long way from his hardscrabble rural Texas roots
and schoolteacher parents. In March, he told the Wall Street Journal in
a rare
interview that he, his wife and his companies had given nearly $19 million
to various GOP political committees and that figure might double by November. He
didn’t reveal much besides predictably calling Obama a socialist and “the most
dangerous American alive,” and saying that he was pro-choice.
For decades, Simmons has been buying and selling companies, running into
government regulators and unions along the way, and more often than not
stubbornly overcoming
his opponents—through paying campaign donations, lobbying and changing laws. In
1995, he became involved with a project to create a nuclear waste dump in
Andrews County in West Texas. Last year, after Texas’ legislature passed a bill
to allow 36 states to dump low-level waste, Forbes reported that his stake in
the project jumped from $5 billion to $9.6 billion.
Simmons is hoping that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will allow the
site to start accepting high-grade radioactive waste from power plants and the
military. In 2006, the company won a state environmental permit, after it spent
six years not only changing Texas law to allow it to proceed, but steamrolling
state environmental geologists who worried the project would leak into the Ogallala Aquifer, North
America’s largest.
“Perhaps the nuclear waste business is all that’s driving Simmons’s
interest in the 2012 election,” speculated
TNR’s Charles Homans. “Or perhaps it is a belief that a federal government run
by a now-vehemently anti-regulation GOP will look forgivingly on his other heavy
industrial properties, which one day could find themselves liable for toxic
leftovers.”
2. Push Climate Change To Point of No Return
The Koch brothers and their fossil fuel empire have been the left’s poster
boys for climate change deniers,
anti-unionism
and bare-knuckles political
brawls for years. But they are hardly the only energy billionaires backing
the GOP and Mitt Romney. Harold Hamm, an Oklahoma oil billionaire who gave
$985,000 to a pro-Romney super PAC in March, also was appointed head of the
Romney campaign’s energy
policy group.
Hamm, whose personal holdings are worth $11 billion according to Forbes,
not only has been dismissive of Obama’s “low-pollution green energy" policies,
as the Tulsa World newspaper put
it, but has been an early and leading developer of natural gas fracking in
North Dakota and Montana, as well as a persistent critic of delaying the
construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The project would enable energy firms
to open up Canadian tar sands operations that would release tremendous amounts
of carbon.
The Romney “energy
agenda” includes, the campaign Web site says, opening “America’s energy
reserves to development,” preventing “overregulation of shale gas development
and extraction,” amending “the Clean Air Act to exclude carbon dioxide from its
purview” and expanding NRC “capabilities for approval of additional nuclear
reactor designs.”
Environmentalists have plenty to worry about with possible Obama
administration approval of the Keystone XL pipeline should he be re-elected. But
under a Romney administration guided by the likes of Hamm and Simmons, the
potential damage to America’s drinking water reserves and the Earth’s atmosphere
could last eons.
3. Push Worldwide Recession into Worldwide Depression
During the GOP primaries, both Newt Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry took
aim at Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital, which Perry called
“vulture capitalism,” as opposed to venture capitalism, where the investors help
start-ups that they hope will grow and prosper.
There’s no shortage of investment managers supporting Romney, especially
from Bain, which is among the biggest donors to the pro-Romney super PAC,
Restore Our Future. As Thomas Edsall recently wrote
in his New York Times column, “if Mitt Romney’s campaign and the
Romney-supporting super PAC Restore Our Future were a public company, the
financial services industry would have a controlling interest.”
Perhaps Edsall exaggerates, as only 42.5 percent of the $56.4 million
donated to Restore Our Future is from “people and corporations in finance.”
Their agenda, he says,
is to repeal the Dodd-Frank regulatory act passed after the equities market
collapsed in 2008, weaken the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002—passed after Enron’s
bankruptcy—and to cut overall tax rates, maintain current rates for investments,
and repeal estate taxes.
The Obama campaign and Democrats have also received plenty of money from
Wall Street. However, among the GOP’s million-dollar super PAC donors are some
men with more specific agendas who feel that electing Romney would be electing a
kindred spirit.
No one stands out more so in this regard than New York City’s Paul Singer—as does
his way of making money at his hedge fund, which is worth $19 billion, according
to Fortune. At Bain, Romney bought companies. Singer, who also has given nearly
$10 million to groups and campaigns supporting gay rights, buys countries.
More specifically, he buys government debt from countries in economic
distress—for pennies on the dollar—and then uses legal hardball to collect as
much as he can. Singer has wrung tens of millions of dollars per transaction
from some of the world’s poorest counties, nations where children stand on
street corners hawking baggies of water for a penny instead of going to
dilapidated schools.
Singer’s firm owns Argentine bonds
with a face value of $630 million that he says are now worth $2.3 billion with
interest, according to court documents—where he has won judgments but has not
yet been able to repossess Argentine assets. As Spanish bank credit ratings fell
last week, raising the possibility that a Eurozone debt crisis will erupt with
global ripples, Singer sees similar “opportunity” in Europe “in such periods of
market tumult,” according to Fortune, quoting from one of his late 2011
newsletters.
Singer clearly wants a man in the White House who will let the market chips
fall as they might, regardless of human impact, because that is the cost of
doing business. As Frank Rich wrote in
New York magazine, “Mitt’s coterie of Wall Street vulture capitalists
is second to none in rapaciousness—starting with the hedge-fund gambler John
Paulson, who collaborated with Goldman Sachs on his megabet against the entire
American housing industry before the crash. Another Romney hedge-fund patron,
Paul Singer, is notorious for slick trafficking in Third World debt, with
results that leave the destitute masses of countries in far sadder state than
the hapless Goldman clients.”
4. Consumer Protections? What Consumer Protections?
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission announced
that POM Wonderful had engaged in deceptive advertising for health claims
surrounding its fruit-based products, according to a decision by an
administrative law judge. POM seized on another part of the ruling and launched
an advertising campaign trumpeting the ruling as a triumph—raising eyebrows in
legal circles as an audacious act taunting the FTC.
But such hype is standard fare among another cadre of Romney’s billionaire
donors: men who have made fortunes by multi-level marketing schemes where the
cost to join often exceeds income—based on similar over-promises that has prompted
a handful of state attorneys general to sue alleging these plans were little
more than pyramid schemes.
Steven Lund, an executive at Utah-based Nu Skin, which settled out of
court, is a million-dollar donor to Romney’s super PAC. So is Frank VanderSloot,
whose Idaho-based Melaleuca,
another multi-level marketing firm, has a Web site featuring a woman saying she
earned half a million dollars, but according to Mother Jones magazine,
the average income can
be under $100. Romney has praised
VanderSloot for his “vision” and “social responsibility,” although he also is
known in Idaho for his anti-gay rights campaigns.
In Romney’s proto-capitalistic world, prizes go to the winners at the top
of the income pyramid. That same attitude can be found with one more corner of
the top GOP donors—only this time the goals are far more ideological, and the
stakes are higher because they are fanning the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
5. Supporting Israel’s Most Extreme Right-Wingers
It's well known that Las Vegas casino owner Sheldeon Adelson, whose family
has given more than $20 million to Newt Gingrich’s super PACs, has called
the Palestinians an “invented people” and has based much of his support on
Gingrich’s hard-line stances supporting Israel. But another million-dollar donor
to a Romney super PAC is Irving
Moskowitz, a physician-turned-hospital owner who has channeled one
unexpected area of business profits—bingo parlors—into buying West Bank land for
Jewish settlers.
Moskowitz has a foundation that runs the parlors in California, where the
income is used to finance
Israeli settler housing developments in Arab areas in East Jerusalem. Adelson
owns one of Israel’s largest free newspapers, which supports the government’s
hard-line stance toward Palestinians. But a one-man colonial empire is not just
eyebrow raising, it’s incendiary—fomenting hatred on the ground that is not
going away anytime soon.
The GOP’s billionaire donors—all white, wealthy men and patriarchs heading
their own empires—have a lot in common. They know no rules other than doing
whatever it takes to win. They don’t take no for an answer. They keep at it
until they get what they want. And they see Mitt Romney as a kindred spirit who
shares their values and will get the federal government to step in, or step
aside, to help them secure their next fortune.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Steven Rosenfeld covers democracy issues for AlterNet
and is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet
Books, 2008).
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