For Al Gore, the perfect future is one in which democracy and capitalism as we know them have ceased to exist, conservatives have stopped promoting their smaller government agenda, and there is more regulation.
“Capitalism, like democracy, must also be reformed,” the former vice president argued in his latest book “The Future,” which was released Jan. 30.
Besides bashing capitalism, democracy and conservatives, “The Future” continued to push Gore’s agenda of increased government regulation to prevent what he claims is an impending climate change disaster. He also praised radical Occupy Wall Street as well as Al Jazeera, the new owners of his Current TV network.
According to news reports, Gore made about $100 million from the roughly $500 million deal selling his cable channel to Al Jazeera, and has been defending that decision ever since. In “The Future,” he referred to the terror-friendly network as “feisty and relatively independent,” and praised their involvement in helping to mobilize the Arab Spring. Al Jazeera, however, is a purveyor of propaganda, consistently offering the anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-Islamist line at a time when America has been threatened by Islamic terrorists and has gone to war against them.
He had previously refused to sell Current TV to conservative radio and TV personality Glenn Beck, citing that “The legacy of who the network goes to is important to us and we are sensitive to networks not aligned with our point of view.” But apparently he has no problem with the point of view of those who throw birthday parties for terrorists.
In what seemed like a thinly veiled rant against the dismal unpopularity of Current TV, he expressed disappointment about what he saw as the public’s inability to express itself, due to television “offering no means for interactive dialogue and collaborative decision making.”
Gore also ripped into capitalism saying “the operations of democratic capitalism in its current form are producing unfair and intolerable results,” including “suffocating control of policy decisions by elites, the ever increasing inequalities of income and the growing concentrations of wealth, and the paralysis of any efforts at reform.”
With such views, it is no surprise Gore praised the Occupy movement, whose formation he saw as having been “driven by the dawning awareness of the majority of Americans” of the flaws in “democratic capitalism in its current form.”
According to Gore, the Occupiers fought a losing battle against “the forces of wealth and corporate power,” which he claims are weakening the “state of democratic decision making in the U.S.” and have “paralyzed the ability of the country to make rational decisions in favor of policies that would remedy these problems.”
Gore was apparently baffled as to why anyone would be opposed to further government regulation and about the rise of the conservative Tea Party movement. He repeated the liberal line about the Tea party movement being fake grassroots, labeling it “faux-populist.”
“Within the United States, it is a measure of how distorted the ‘conversation of democracy’ has become that in the aftermath of the economic catastrophe, the most significant ‘populist’ reaction in the U.S. political system was not a progressive demand for protective regulations to prevent a recurrence of what had just happened, but instead a right-wing faux-populist demand by the Tea Party for less government regulation.” Gore then accused the Tea Party of being little more than a front for corporate lobbyists.
Continuing his attacks on conservatives, he imaginatively spoke of a unified political Right with “lockstep discipline.” This group of “corporate Musketeers” as he calls them, strive to “starve the government of its resources,” so that “it is capable of interfering as little as possible with the plans of corporations and the interests of the elites.” Said the guy who just sold his TV network to terrorist sympathizers for $500 million.
“It could be called the Three Musketeers Principle: all for one and one for all. Those primarily interested in opposing any form of gun regulation agree to support the position of oil and coal companies opposed to reduce global warming pollution. Anti-abortion activists agree to support large banks in their opposition to new financial regulations.” Gore wrote.
And of course no Gore book would be complete without a warning about the calamitous threat of climate change. His push for expanded regulation to protect the environment takes up the bulk of the book. One of the sources he cited to back up his claims was NASA scientist, climate change doomsday prophet and favorite of the left: James Hansen. Gore referred to him as a “global warming expert.”
In a speech before Congress in 2008, Hansen called for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for “high crimes against humanity,” according to the U.K. news outlet The Guardian. In 1988, Hansen predicted that global temperatures would rise by 0.45 degrees Celsius. This was not the case. However, Hansen began an Aug. 3, 2012 Washington Post opinion piece by saying that his predictions that year were too optimistic.
In spite of those failed claims, Gore still used him as an expert saying, “James Hansen, for one, surmises that we are witnessing an exponential process of ice mass loss, and that, as a result, the most relevant statistic is the doubling time of the observed loss. Based on his preliminary analysis of the data, Hansen believes it is likely that we will see a ‘multi-meter’ sea level rise in this century.”
But maybe it’s fitting that Gore would use a discredited scientist to back up his warnings. After all, the very day his 2006 movie “An Inconvenient Truth” opened in theaters, Gore told NBC's Katie Couric that sea levels would rise 20 feet or more worldwide by 2010, the polar ice caps would melt and the U.S., Europe, Asia and Africa would become deserts if nothing was done. But, 2010 came and went, and the polar ice caps still exist. Gore should see if he can get a refund for those apocalypse prediction classes that he took from the Mayans.
