So much for the left easing up on its pathological demonization of the Koch brothers after Democrats' withering losses in the midterms. Tired old habits are hard to break, especially for Jurassic liberals like Thom Hartmann.
Ever since Ed Schultz abruptly ended his radio show last spring to spend more time at his Canadian fishing lodge (buy American!), Hartmann has moved that much closer to becoming the top-rated liberal radio host, a distinction equal to being the tallest building in Topeka, to paraphrase William F. Buckley's take on Michael Harrington as America's leading socialist.
Hartmann, author of several books, comes across as more cerebral than Schultz -- then again, who doesn't? -- and exhibits an eel-like rhetorical slipperiness that rivals that of Rachel Maddow, a jedi master of misdirection.
Here's what Hartmann claimed on his radio show about energy magnates Charles and David Koch and the proposed Keystone XL pipeline (audio) --
Number one, sometimes in order to know what is, you have to ask the question, what would happen if something wasn't? (quoting Rumsfeld ...?). For example, if the Koch brothers had not put hundreds of paid staffers on the ground in Florida, would Rick Scott have won? If the Koch brothers had not put hundreds of millions of dollars into races all around the country, would Republicans have won?
If left-wing sugar daddy Tom Steyer hadn't spent $74 million in the midterms to bolster Democrats, would Republicans have won anyway?
If Chevron had not spent $3 million backing a candidate for mayor in Richmond, Calif., site of a Chevron refinery, would anti-Chevron candidate Tom Butt (yes, that's his name) have gotten elected instead?
As for Hartmann's claim that the Kochs have spent "hundreds of billions of dollars into races all around the country," the campaign finance watchdog site OpenSecrets.org lists the Kochs as number 42 of their "Heavy Hitters: Top All-Time Donors, 1989-2014," with the dastardly siblings spending $24.7 million in that period-- a far cry from Hartmann's hyperventilation. Steyer contributed more to Democrats in the last cycle than the Kochs have donated all told in the last quarter century. Then again, big money in politics is bad only when liberals don't get their way. Back to Hartmann --
I think frankly the answer is no, Republicans would not have won without the Koch brothers, which means that the Koch brothers should be the number one story of this election cycle and you will not hear a word about them in any other corporate media. Why? Well, first of all, a lot of their money ended up with the corporate media. Secondly, they've done a fairly good job of concealing an awful lot of what they're doing (... and transparency is high atop the pantheon of values that liberals hold most dear) and reporters tend to be lazy, especially in this day and age where, you know, most good investigative reporters have been fired or laid off and, you know, most reporters are stenographers.
.... Here's why I say this is of consequence. The Koch brothers, this from Forbes magazine, all right, a piece by Tim Worstall, and he points out, he says, you know, we can quibble on the details but the basic premise is valid -- Koch Industries potential profits due to the Keystone XL pipeline could easily reach $100 billion, more than the Kochs' current combined net worth of $92 billion. These profits could roughly be projected by multiplying two key figures, 15 billion barrels of recoverable, profitable to produce tar sands crude oil that the Kochs could have on its (sic) reported 2 million acres in Alberta's tar sands territory -- the Kochs are the largest American owners of tar sands in Canada -- multiplied by $15 billion in gross profit from production, or $15 per barrel due to the Keystone XL pipeline. You add these two figures together, it produces $225 billion in gross revenue and then Kochs' refining subsidiary, Flint Hill(s) Resources, is going to make $20 billion less in profits due to Keystone. ... So bottom line, they'd make $100 billion.
How about that, Tim Worstall at Forbes actually did write about Keystone and the Kochs. I especially like the headline of Worstall's post -- "The Kochs Will Not Make a $100 Billion Profit From Keystone XL." And did I mention that Hartmann cited Worstall as his source ...?
"This is such a fabulous claim that I thought I'd better have a look at the numbers they were using," Worstall writes. "And the answer is that it's not just a fabulous claim, it's a fantastical one: the authors have confused gross income with profit."
Worstall elaborates on this and then points out a second way that Keystone opponents are off the mark --
Let's again, just for the sake of argument, accept what they're trying to tell us. There really will be a $100 profit from the building of Keystone XL. This is being used as an argument against the building of the pipeline: when in fact it's an extremely strong argument in favour of building it. (emphasis added)
Recall what profit actually is: it's the surplus from sales over and above the cost of production of whatever it is. Another way of saying the same thing is that profit is the value added by the activity, whatever it is. So if there's a $100 billion worth of wealth that has been added to the stock available to us, the human race. Sure, maybe the Kochs will have it for some period of time. But it's still $100 billion of new wealth that's been created.
Keystone XL is apparently costed at $7 billion. We've now a claim that it's going to create $100 billion of new wealth. That sounds like an alarmingly strong argument that it should be built to me.
Ed Schultz spouted the same bogus claim about the Kochs and Keystone last spring, though I haven't heard him make it since. We'll see if Hartmann shows the same restraint. Perhaps he'd care to investigate how Warren Buffett, liberals' favorite billionaire, stands to profit -- if Keystone isn't built.
