Lobbyist bundling: Money pipeline for Democrats

The Center for Public Integrity has compiled a list of the top lobbyist-bundlers -- volunteer fundraisers, that is. My column today explores the data:

Lobbyists bundling campaign contributions, often from clients, to pass on to powerful politicians is exactly the sort of corruption Democrats came to power promising to fight. But the lobbyists doing the most bundling, and the politicians pocketing the cash, tend to be Democrats, a recent study shows.

A study by the Center for Public Integrity finds that the top four lobbyists in terms of bundling contributions for federal candidates and committees are powerful Democrats who contributed and raised cash exclusively to elect Democrats. These lobbyists' big business clients stand to benefit from Democratic policies on health care, the environment and trade.

Alcoa loves green, but not the environment

Alcoa is one of those "green" companies that lobbies for environmental policy. Of course, Alcoa also stands to profit from these policies, even while the planet might be suffering. My column:

Absent such regulations, an aluminum car frame is much more expensive than a steel car frame. With these regulations, aluminum, which is lighter, becomes more desirable.

So what's the problem? Alcoa is getting rich, but more people are driving lighter-weight, more efficient cars, right? Industry and the Earth both win, right? Hardly.

Making aluminum car frames requires much more energy than making steel car frames. One stage in the process -- dissolving the alumina to get pure aluminum -- inherently gives off carbon dioxide and the far more potent greenhouse gasses hexafluoroethane and tetrafluoromethane.

But Alcoa makes its aluminum in Australia, where Washington's CAFE and climate policies can't touch it. Down under, naturally, Alcoa's lobbying agenda isn't nearly so green. The Australian newspaper reported in 2008 that Alcoa "has warned that even a modest carbon cost on aluminum production could lead to plant closures in Australia and moves to higher-emitting plants in countries such as China."

Sorry, your Chinese-made iPad won’t save the planet

Did you get an iPad? Why? If your decision had anything to do with your perception of Apple as a "Green" company, my column this week has bad news for you:

Under cap-and-trade, Apple would pay for the 400,000 tons of carbon dioxide emitted annually by its U.S. buildings and domestic operations, and also for the 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide emitted by shipping its products. But the 3.8 million tons of CO2 emitted by its manufacturing — 81 percent of the company’s total — would be exempt from a carbon tax because the emissions would be in China.

Many of the companies who take the Chamber’s side against cap-and-trade schemes are in a different position from Apple. These companies actually make stuff here, and so they would actually pay the energy tax that is cap and trade.

So Apple is loudly and self-righteously lobbying for “green” taxes that it intends to continue avoiding.

Under Obamanomics, industry realizes that not everybody wins

The corporate lobby for cap-and-trade is collapsing -- which is what you should expect. My column explains:

Alternating with his disingenuous populist anti-big-business rhetoric, Obama has also offered the opposite: Hope & Change, the-wolf-will-live-with-the-lamb talk of cooperation between business and government.

This cooperation talk is not new. During and after World War I, business giants sought to perpetuate the War Industries Board. WIB member and historian Grosvenor Clarkson described the "contempt" industry leaders had for "the huge hit-and-miss confusion of peacetime industry, with its perpetual cycle of surfeit and dearth" -- replacing competition with government-guaranteed profit....

Big government, unlike the free market, doesn't create wealth -- it redistributes it. In a free market, a rising tide can lift all boats. Under Obamanomics, businesses can rise only by pulling someone under -- usually taxpayers, competitors, consumers or workers.

Global warming industry becomes too big to fail

My K Street column looks at the flap over the leaked/stolen emails from the Climate Research Unit:

"I'm in the process of trying to persuade Siemens Corp. (a company with half a million employees in 190 countries!) to donate me a little cash to do some CO2 measur[e]ments here in the UK -- looking promising," wrote Andrew Manning, a climate-science research fellow at the University of East Anglia, "so the last thing I need is news articles calling into question (again) observed temperature increases."

Manning's e-mail, written in October to a colleague at East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit, was one of the thousands of private communiques exposed to public view by a whistleblower or a hacker. The note and others like it reveal the intriguing relationship between industry giants like Siemens and the scientists driving climate change fears. More importantly, though, Manning's e-mail shows the incentives of climate scientists: Convince people there is a climate disaster coming, get more money.

A mining giant in bed with Boxer, Kerry

Adding to the gallery of climate bandits, my column today explores why mining giant Rio Tinto is lobbying for climate-change legislation:

Rio Tinto stands to profit in many ways from Boxer-Kerry, often in ways that provide no real benefit to consumers or the environment, while increasing costs for everyone.

In 2008, Rio Tinto mined more uranium than any company in the world, according to Chiaro. Uranium is the feedstock for nuclear power plants. Litigation and regulation have for decades blocked the expansion of nuclear power, and many companies see robust climate legislation as the way to knock down the regulatory barriers....

But Rio Tinto also sees profit in Boxer-Kerry in ways that harm the consumer. Boxer-Kerry would add to the cost of gasoline, heating oil, and electricity, and also force less efficient energy sources on American families and manufacturers, while imposing new costs on taxpayers. This would drive business to Rio Tinto's other ventures.

Rio Tinto and BP, for instance, have formed a joint venture called Hydrogen Energy, which is building plants in California, Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere that aim to combine the technologies of fueling a power plant by hydrogen and pumping carbon dioxide underground in order to keep the gas out of the atmosphere. These projects are already subsidized by taxpayers, and Rio Tinto is lobbying for the additional subsidies Boxer-Kerry would provide.

The Chamber fights Obama's regulatory robbery

My column today makes sense of some of the sound and fury these days about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

But there's another reason Obama is running low on enemies: He's already bought off many of the most powerful industries and businesses.

Look at health care, where Obama has brought the name-brand drug makers on board to his reform with promises of subsidies and pledges not to attack the industry's special favors. Look at cigarettes, where Obama signed a tobacco regulation bill with the firm backing of Philip Morris.

And of course, look at climate-change legislation, where Obama has on his side coal giants like American Electric Power, manufacturing giants like Nike, agribusiness giant Monsanto, and lobbying giant General Electric, to name a few. The Democrats have bought off these special interests by rigging the legislation so that taxpayer and ratepayer money is funneled into corporate coffers.

So why hasn't Obama won over the Chamber of Commerce on his regulatory pushes?

The problem is that the chamber is so varied. Its members are manufacturers, service businesses, high-tech companies, finance companies and everything in between, ranging in size from Exxon to Mom & Pop, and in geography from Anchorage to Miami.

Nike's green lobbying: Corporate responsibility or regulatory robbery?

Nike, as an act of protest, relinquished its spot on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's board of directors. Nike supports federal laws restricting greenhouse-gas emissions while the Chamber opposes them. My column explores the angles:

Nike won't bear most of the costs of a cap-and-trade scheme in the U.S. because Nike doesn't make stuff in the U.S. Cap-and-trade adds to manufacturing costs by attaching a price to emissions, which makes energy more expensive. But "a vast majority" of Nike goods are made overseas, a company spokesman told me in an email.

While Nike outsources its manufacturing to factories in Vietnam and other poor countries where greenhouse gasses are unregulated, some of its competition makes their shoes here in the U.S., where Nike is lobbying to increase costs.

How a power giant profits from greenhouse regs

Big Coal is lining up behind the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. My column makes sense of it all:

"Without this bill, without a strict regime for controlling carbon emissions, Big Oil and Big Coal win," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif. "And the environment, endangered species, our kids, our grandkids, you, and I will be the losers."

Got that? It's Big Coal against the children.

A[merican] E[lectric] P[ower], however, qualifies as Big Coal. One of the biggest electricity producers in the country, AEP generates more than two-thirds of its electricity by burning coal. Many years, the company is the Western Hemisphere's largest consumer of coal.

So how come AEP is on the same side as Woolsey, Reps. Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, not to mention "our kids" and the "endangered species"?

Tire tariffs show another cost of cap and trade: Free trade

Obama's tire tariffs, I argue in my column today, show how cap-and-trade is the enemy of free trade:

And cap and trade makes a trade war a political necessity, because the policy otherwise will ship U.S. jobs overseas. A trade war may cost jobs, but in a way less traceable to specific policies. In this way -- when U.S. politicians claim China is subsidizing its exports by not taxing emissions -- carbon caps could become a net short-term winner for manufacturing companies.

Cap-and-trade legislation may not stop the oceans' rise, as Obama has suggested. On the contrary, it may cause a rising tide of prices that lifts the fortunes of the well-connected companies, leaving American taxpayers and consumers drowning.

Leaked e-mail shows how GE puts the government to work for GE

My column this week provides a look behind the scenes at the most prolific corporate lobbyist in the country--General Electric:

"The intersection between GE's interests and government action is clearer than ever," General Electric Vice Chairman John G. Rice wrote in an Aug. 19 e-mail to colleagues.

'Strange bedfellows' watch: Fred Krupp, Environmental Defense Fund

[From Beltway Confidential]

My pet beat is covering the cooperation between big business and big government, a phenomenon much more common than many journalists seem to think and than many politicians care to admit.

One of my hobbies, then, is collecting "strange bedfellow" remarks--when writers, businessmen, or politcians do notice big business lobbying for bigger government, they often accompany the observation with a declaration of "In an interesting twist..." or "strange bedfellows" or "an unusual alliance." Of course, a phenomenon should only be allowed to be "strange" or "unusual" so many times before it becomes commonplace.

Somehow, though, Big Business-Big Government collusion gets to be surprising every single time it shows up, which is every single day. So, today I am beginning an occasional feature on this blog, called " 'Strange Bedfellows' Watch," in which I chronicle the claims of "odd alliances" that are about as odd together as Ham and Cheese.

Today, from a piece worth reading on the tensions within the corporate alliance for climate change regulations, comes this quote:

What's significant is that USCAP has demonstrated that industry and environmentalists can agree on a framework for addressing climate change, said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund.

"It's very unusual for big corporations to raise their hands and say, 'We want to be regulated for something that we're not regulated for now,'" Mr. Krupp said. "When the history...is written, it will show USCAP to have played a very constructive role."

No, Mr. Krupp, it's not "very unusual," and neither is your claim that it is unusual.

Pelosi buys off agri-business to advance climate bill

Global warming legislation is, like most big-government "reforms," becoming a costly porkfest benefiting well-connected corporations. My Examiner column today discusses the favors Democratic leaders have thrown at agribusiness to pass their climate change bill:

Here's how it works: Farmers need to kill weeds around their crops. They can till the ground to kill the weeds--a practice that releases carbon dioxide buried in the soil. Alternatively, they can spray the fields with chemicals that kill the weeds--thus leaving the CO2 underground.

The latter practice requires farmers to buy an herbicide such as agricultural Roundup, made by Monsanto, and also to buy Monsanto's genetically modified "Roundup Ready" seeds, which grow into plants that can withstand repeated Roundup spraying.

With the help of Monsanto, Novecta, a consulting and lobbying arm of the Iowa and Illinois Corn Growers Associations, has called on Congress this spring to grant farmers valuable offsets for shifting to "no-till" farming--a shift that will spur sales of Roundup and Roundup Ready seeds. Thanks to the Peterson-Pelosi deal, this scheme could become law.

Read the whole thing here.

“Subsidymagination:” GE’s regulatory robbery

General Electric's "Ecomagination" initiative turned four years old this week. My Examiner column today digs into what this whole green thing is about.

Imagine a salesman comes to your door peddling composting barrels. You tell him that while composting would offer some benefits—good for the environment, free topsoil—you don’t think it’s worth the cost.

He replies, “Oh, sir, but I’m afraid you don’t really have a choice. You see, the county government just passed a law requiring everyone to use a composting barrel. I should know—I’m also a lobbyist, and I helped write the law.”

You’d call that a racket. On a far larger scale—peddling “greenhouse gas credits” and windmills instead of composting barrels—General Electric calls it “Ecomagination.”

Read the whole thing here.

AES and GE imitate Enron on coal and climate

Continuing on my theme of cap-and-trade as corporate welfare, my Examiner column this week looks at the new Enrons:

A global power company that inherited some of Enron’s coal-fired power plants in Africa has also followed the late energy giant in the effort to profit from climate change legislation.

Virginia-based AES Corp. has partnered with General Electric Co. in peddling greenhouse gas offsets while lobbying for policies to make those offsets valuable — the same buy-low, lobby-hard, sell-high strategy tried by Enron. AES simultaneous expansion of coal-fired power in Asia, South America and Africa, however, highlights how environmental regulations can yield profit without necessarily yielding environmental gains.

Read the whole thing here.

Who benefits from federal fuel efficiency mandates?

I find it important to point out that environmental policy usually enriches some business with powerful lobbyists. My Examiner column today digs into fuel efficiency regulations:

And the President’s fuel-efficiency mandates may not hurt struggling auto companies, because Obama’s philosophy is the one Ronald Reagan mocked: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.

Carmakers have long been able to make more efficient cars, but consumers haven’t been willing to pay enough to make them profitable. In the bailout era launched by President Bush, however, profitability is hardly a concern: If the government likes what you’re doing, taxpayers pick up the tab.

Read the whole thing here.

Global warming bill becomes another Washington porkfest

I've been writing since Enron about how climate change legislation is a racket. My Examiner today column hits on one specific angle, the giveaway of emissions credits.

Considering the anti-business and pro-environment rhetoric of ruling Democrats, you might expect all businesses would have to pay for all emissions. But the rule of thumb in Washington—at least as true in Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi’s Washington as it was in George W. Bush and Tom DeLay’s Washington—is that no important bill passes unless a well-connected special interest benefits from it. Following the rule, climate change legislation is starting to look like the stimulus bill: a buffet of handouts.

Currently, Waxman’s bill gives away about half the credits, with most free credits going to the power industry. Edison Electric, the trade group representing these companies, has endorsed this bill.

It’s unsurprising the power companies should get their way. Data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show that the electric utility industry’s political action committees contributed $12.3 million to candidates last election—more than the PACs of the oil and gas, commercial bank, investment, real estate, or telecom industries—and nearly as much as all defense PACs.

Read the whole thing here.

The Clean Coal Lobby

[cross-posted at Beltway Confidential]
What do you do if environmentalists are gunning for you and want to use Washington to destroy or at least severely curb the use of the only project you sell? You call on Washington for billions in subsidies to make your product cleaner. Hence, the clean coal lobby.

The Center for Public Integrity's new initiative tracking the boom in climate change lobbying looks at the clean coal lobby in a new report, on the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity:

However one interprets ACCCE’s message, it has the power of well-heeled and politically engaged companies behind it. Amid the punishing economy of 2008, the top five U.S. coal mining companies saw their profits more than double to $1.9 billion. And the industry is determined to use a slice of those profits to deliver its message. Senate disclosure forms reveal that ACCCE spent $9.95 million on Washington lobbying last year, far more than any other group devoted to climate change — although ACCCE says the figure was inflated because it included advertising and grassroots advocacy that most groups don’t report.

EPA finding on greenhouse gases puts pressure on climate lobby

My K Street page in today's Examiner includes this noteworthy Bloomberg story:

The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed declaration that greenhouse gases pose a health danger will ratchet up pressure on Congress and the burgeoning climate-change lobby to pass new limits on emissions.

Obama’s hidden bailout of General Electric

Are climate change laws a bailout for GE? My Examiner column follows the money trail.

While many companies hire lobbyists to win earmarks, General Electric’s unmatched lobbying force has secured a tax increase — or its equivalent — in President Barack Obama’s budget.

Labeled “climate revenues” and totaling $646 billion over eight years, this line item in Obama’s budget has inspired confidence in GE Chief Executive Officer Jeff Immelt. As Immelt put it in a letter this week, he believes that the Obama administration will be a profitable “financier” and “key partner.”

Read the whole thing here.