Green Left seduces the Rockefellers

Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon Mobil, John D. Rockefeller’s corporate progeny, shrugged off greenie attacks by the Rockefeller heirs and fired back. Here's the latest from Canada. There are two things Coloradans should keep in mind about this developing story: 1) Unlike CEO James Mulva of our soon-to-be-neighbor in Broomfield, ConocoPhillips, Tillerson and Exxon Mobil haven’t knuckled under to the global warming hysteria (fraud and hoax are other words that come to mind) that’s all the rage these days.

2) Through the work of “climate czarina” Heidi VanGenderen and others, Gov. Ritter has Colorado in the grip of the same Rockefeller crowd who are nipping at Tillerson’s posterior at Exxon Mobil.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund supports an outfit called the Center for Climate Strategies , CCS, which I understand to be, among other things, a self-styled manager/facilitator (puppeteer?) seductively providing resources at no charge mainly to states to “[enable] deliberative democracy” in policy development addressing climate change. However, it appears the only climate change of interest to CCS is anthropogenic global warming (if any), and CCS’s skillful control of agendas leads in only one direction: drastically reduced carbon emissions. Some deliberative democracy (the term used in its mission statement).

In Colorado’s case, a climate action plan was reportedly developed with CCS guidance by another nonprofit, something called the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, RMCO. State climate (read, global warming) action plans engineered by CCS are usually the product of a “Climate Change Advisory Council” (do a Web search on that term, and you’ll see what I mean) appointed directly or indirectly by the governor; the RMCO work might be seen as more “independent,” but I believe that’s a distinction with little difference. A report in the Rocky 11/6/07 seems to confirm what I have learned from other sources, that the Ritter/VanGenderen climate action plan is the RMCO product with some minor variations.

Ominously, RMCO is hand-in-hand with the Natural Resources Defense Council. A major report on warming in the west featured on RMCO’s Website is shown to be the product of both organizations. A recent George Will column noted, “Today's ‘green left’ is the old ‘red left’ revised.” It would be hard to find an organization closer to the heart of the green left for the past 35 years than the NRDC.

Investor’s Business Daily had it right in this 5/29 editorial about Exxon Mobil in contrast to British Petroleum -- and one could add ConocoPhillips, Xcel and dozens of others that have drunk Al Gore’s koolaid. IBD’s comment about the endless ads “touting capitulation to the global warming religion” reminds me of Xcel’s ad about the Coors Field solar array and its Gee Whiz! 14,000 KWH per year. By comparison, the Palo Verde nuclear plant west of Phoenix generates 14,000 KWH in about 13 seconds.

Might one be unduly cynical to suggest that political correctness is the only thing standing between Xcel and nuclear-electric power advocacy?

Hillary mouthing Marxist myths

Hillary Clinton keeps advocating a “gas tax holiday” paid for by “big oil companies” out of their “record profits." Excuse me, Senator, but you have it all wrong in saying we need to "take on" those companies. The nation’s problem is not Big Oil and its alleged record profits, but lack of supply. But when you have outfits like the Sierra Club opposing any kind of drilling at the top of their lungs and with huge propaganda budgets, we wind up with a policy of NDAAAT or "Endat" -- No Drilling Anywhere At Any Time. More supply would bring down profits and prices as a matter of course, but the progressives will have none of it.

But let's look at the root belief behind Clinton's self-defeating policy recommendations. The left-wing progressives have what can only be considered an “agrarian view” of wealth. Like farmland, as they see it, wealth is fixed and indestructible. The crops grow and produce income, which also is fixed, and can be taken for granted. Therefore, the grand task is to redistribute the income and “eliminate poverty." What person of good will would not want to confiscate the farm land from the greedy parasitic land owners who do nothing but ride around in their carriages and cane their tenant farmers?

Trouble is, this was not even a good theory when it was formulated by Karl Marx in 1848; it certainly doesn’t fit an information age economy of the 21st Century.

These days, free markets can create wealth that expands or contracts with confidence or lack of confidence. Take Microsoft for example. When Bill Gates took Microsoft public, his founders stock suddenly made him a wealthy man! But the progressives believe in the Labor Value Theory which states that all wealth is the product of someone’s labor (such as planting and harvesting the crops in the 1848 model). Therefore, profits and wealth can only be exploitation of someone else, and are therefore bad. Therefore, Bill Gates’s wealth is something he should be ashamed of.

This is of course utter nonsense. The wealth creation, jobs, and supporting industries created by Microsoft are a great source of well being for our society as a whole! But the progressives, stuck in the 1840’s, don’t get it! They would like to kill Bill Gates and confiscate his wealth and redistribute it.

Okay, say we do this. Bill Gates is arrested and shot, and the Government announces it will now confiscate every share of Microsoft! What happens to the market price for MSFT? It will go to zero! So the government now has all the outstanding shares of Microsoft, ( 1 or 2 billion?). It redistributes those to every citizen in the country. Now everyone has 10 shares of Microsoft, but they are worthless, good for only toilet paper! Microsoft and the jobs and supporting industries all collapse and the economy contracts! But you can count on the progressives to blame everyone but themselves for the economic malaise.

Too bad the Democrats have put up Marxist lawyers as candidates instead of those who understand how a modern economy works.