Let's keep this.. Fair & balanced...
Tom SteyerThe newest celebrity in the liberal universe is billionaire Tom Steyer. In a story headlined "The Wrath of a Green Billionaire," Bloomberg Businesweek reporter Joshua Green explained he’s hailed as “a liberal analogue of the conservative Koch brothers, the billionaire owners of Koch Industries, whose lavish support of free-market causes and political ruthlessness loom large in the liberal imagination.’‘
Steyer’s obsession is stopping global warming. “If you look at the 2012 campaign, climate change was like incest—something you couldn’t talk about in polite company,” he says. Naturally, this swagger reminds the Bloomberg-owned magazine of...well, Bloomberg:
So Steyer, 55, a major Democratic contributor, quit Farallon [Capital] to devote his time and much of his money to changing this reality. In doing so, he's joined an emerging class of billionaires -- including this magazine's owner, Michael Bloomberg and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg-who have forsaken the traditional approach of working through the political parties and instead jumped directly into the fray, putting their reputations and fortunes behind a cause.
When people ask about his occupation, Steyer says, “I actually tell them ‘professional pain in the ass.’ Before, I was only an amateur.”
After liberals couldn’t get a cap-and-trade bill through a Democrat-controlled Senate before the 2010 midterms, Green wrote “Steyer and many other Democrats preoccupied with climate change are convinced that only a smash-mouth, confrontational style of politics can save the planet. He subscribes to the analysis offered in a recent paper by Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol that the loss derived from Democrats’ naive faith that their best chance at climate legislation was cooperating with polluters on a grand bargain negotiated by Washington power brokers. The strategy failed to account for Republicans’ radicalization and use of the filibuster. And because environmental groups had neglected to organize, no grassroots pressure materialized when the legislation stalled.”
Notice that the radical environmentalists who hate the gasoline engine are somehow unlabeled as the story introduced the Republicans as radicalized.
The story underlines how leftists who hate billionaires intervening in politics grow mellow when they join their side. “I’m not happy about big money playing such an important role in political campaigns,” says Henry Waxman. “But I want to see a pushback, and we can’t unilaterally disarm. I’m glad someone like Tom is willing to spend.”
Green says the problem for liberals on climate change hasn’t been their funding. “What was missing was any conviction among voters that global warming is an urgent concern.” Reporters don’t usually say that out loud. They just quietly ignore the issue until their liberal friends push it into the spotlight, and then they ignore it again.
Steyer appeared on “The Daily Rundown” on MSNBC on April 23, and declared “I think that I'm very different from the Koch brothers in the sense that I have absolutely no personal interest in what happens except as a citizen of the United States. So whereas they're representing points of view that are in their personal monetary interests, I'm actually representing the citizens of the whole country in terms of their diffuse interests against concentrated economic interests that the Koch brothers represent.”
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2013/04/28/billionaire-tom-steyer-liberal-analogue-koch-brothers-latest-bloomberg-oDEMOCRACY ALLIANCE (DA)Founded in the spring of 2005, the Democracy Alliance (DA) is a non-tax-exempt, nonprofit, self-described "liberal organization" that serves as a funding clearinghouse for progressive groups. DA does not accept donations outright, but rather solicits contributions from left-wing millionaires and billionaires (whom it calls "partners"), and then serves as a "pass through" that funnels their money to its "favored organizations."
Political operative Rob Stein, who served as chief of staff to Commerce Department Secretary Ron Brown during the Bill Clinton administration, conceived the DA project and was its first managing director. DA's founding mission was "to build progressive infrastructure that could help counter the well-funded and sophisticated conservative apparatus in the areas of civic engagement, leadership, media, and ideas."
Stein began working on the project shortly after the Republican Party had gained eight House seats and two Senate seats in the 2002 midterm elections. Lamenting that he was “living in a one-party [Republican] country, Stein at that point resolved to study the conservative movement and determine why it was winning the political battle. After a year of analysis, he concluded that a few influential, wealthy family foundations -- most notably Scaife, Bradley, Olin, and Coors -- had spearheaded the creation of a $300 million network of politically influential organizations. Stein featured these facts in a comprehensive PowerPoint presentation titled “The Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix,” which mapped out, in painstaking detail, the conservative movement's networking strategies and funding sources.
Next, Stein set out to show his presentation, mostly in private meetings, to political leaders, activists, and prospective big-money donors of the left. He hoped to inspire them to join his crusade to build a new a financial clearinghouse dedicated to offsetting the efforts of conservative funders and injecting new life into the progressive movement. At each presentation, Stein asked the viewer to pledge that he or she would keep confidential the substance of the proceedings, so as to give the project a chance to coalesce and gain some momentum without excessive public scrutiny.
Stein officially filed DA's corporate registration in the District of Columbia in January 2005. By that point, he had shown his PowerPoint presentation to more than 700 key people in private meetings. Stein recalls that during those sessions, he consistently observed “an unbelievable frustration” by big Democrat donors who felt hopelessly unconnected to one another, even as they longed to be part of a strategic coalition that could work collaboratively and cohesively. This was particularly true of the billionaire financier George Soros, thus it was most significant that Soros quickly and enthusiastically embraced Stein's concept.
In April 2005, Soros brought together 70 likeminded, carefully vetted, fellow millionaires and billionaires in Phoenix, Arizona, to discuss Stein's ideas and expeditiously implement a plan of action. Among the attendees were former Clinton White House aides Mike McCurry and Sidney Blumenthal, and Schumann Center for Media & Democracy president Bill Moyers. Most of those in attendance agreed that the conservative movement represented “a fundamental threat to the American way of life.” And, like Soros, a considerable number of them looked favorably on Stein's analysis and concept. Thus was born the Democracy Alliance.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7151----------------------------------------------------------------------
The illusion the democrats are poor and coming from the small people is just that: an illusion. Political campaigns cost mucho dineros.
Ask obama why he is rewarding people with zero political background to be offered ambassadorship spot all over the world? Because they paid for it. It is that simple. Does that mean Rove is not a power broker working for the established republican machine, pushing hard to destroy the Tea Party? Of course he is.
