Monday, May 12, 2008
The Democrats railed at big corporations with one fist and took their money with the other, while Al Gore's speech invoked the class warfare politics of yesteryear.
Aug 21, 2000 | The eve of the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles proved to be a summary moment in the politics of left-wing hypocrisy. Center stage was Jesse Jackson descending from his $2,000 a night presidential suite at the Santa Monica Loews Hotel to ... protest the anti-labor policies of the Santa Monica Loews Hotel! A multimillionaire from lifetime profits earned as a crusader for the oppressed, Jackson led demonstrators in a familiar chant of rebellion: "We the people, we the workers will win!" Later in the week as he moved to the Staples convention podium, the chant metamorphosed into "More Gore, more Gore, more Gore."
Another leader at the Sunday night protest was John Sweeney, the socialist head of the AFL-CIO and a key financial force behind Al Gore's "We're Fighting For You Against Them" campaign. Many of Sweeney's own union leaders are currently under indictment or in jail for illegally laundering nearly 1 million campaign dollars on behalf of the Clinton-Gore team. But this didn't prevent Sweeney from mounting the ramparts of self-righteousness to denounce Loews as a "corporation without conscience."
Sweeney was something of a moderate compared to another Gore fat cat, Gerald McEntee, who was also a speaker at the convention and a force behind the protest. McEntee is head of the government union AFCSME and a target of the money laundering investigation. He has become an increasingly familiar face as a prime-time ranter at the anti-globalization demonstrations in both Seattle and Washington, where he railed against putting "profits above people," resurrecting an old Marxist slogan. A fresher slogan that echoed the same sentiments on the streets of both party conventions was: "Hey, hey, ho, ho, private property has got to go!"
The labor dispute at the Loews Santa Monica pitted immigrant workers from Mexico and the Philippines against the giant hotel chain. The strikers claim that Loews is a union-busting corporation that denies its workers representation and a "living wage." In response, Loews put up $125,000 to place an initiative on the ballot that would forbid the City of Santa Monica from enacting a "living wage" law.
Why was Jackson in the hotel at all? For that matter, why was the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee -- the chief fundraising entity for all Democratic senatorial campaigns -- also headquartered at the Loews? Why didn't they leave the moment they knew the dispute was brewing?
The answer is that while Al Gore is positioning himself as a champion "for the people and against the powerful," Gore's close friend, key funder and longtime "kitchen cabinet" member, Jonathan Tisch, is the CEO of the Loews Corporation.
In the last three years, Tisch has personally given Democrats $335,500 in soft money contributions. (Two Tisch-owned companies gave another $290,000 to the Republicans.) Tisch personally gives hard money contributions at $1,000 a shot exclusively to Democrat candidates with only one exception -- a Republican who sits on a committee affecting the entertainment industry. (Jonathan's brother Steve is a film mogul at Universal.) Among the Democrats Tisch funds are Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Charles Robb, Mary Landrieu, Christopher Dodd, Bob Kerrey, John Kerry, Charles Schumer, Tom Daschle, Byron Dorgan, Robert Torricelli, Barbara Mikulski, Charles Rangel, Eric Vitaliano, Nita Lowey, Jerry Nadler, Patrick Leahy, Robert Wexler, Bob Graham, Harry Reid, Shelley Berkley, Jonathan Miller, Mel Carnahan, Carolyn Maloney, John Tanner, Jon Corzine, Sam Farr, Thomas Carper and Robert Weygand.
Jonathan is not the only Tisch who gives to Democrats, moreover. The Tisch family's political contributions fill up 25 pages of Federal Election Commission reports. In addition to Jonathan, there are Alice, Andrew, Bonnie, Daniel, James, Joan, Laura, Larry, Merryl, Robert, Steve, Tommy and Wilma Tisch. In addition to Jonathan's Democrats, the siblings give to Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Sam Gejdenson, Fritz Hollings, Diane Feinstein, Joe Biden and Tom Harkin, among others. (Two or three Tisches also give to Republicans.) And to square their liberal circles, they give both to Emily's List and the tobacco lobby.
The Loews Corporation is a $60 billion holding company controlled by the Tisch family, which owns (in addition to the hotels) CNA Insurance, which is Big Insurance heavily invested in the healthcare industry; Diamond Offshore Drilling, which is a company that supplies oil rigs to the offshore oil industry; and P. Lorillard & Sons, the tobacco giant that makes Kent cigarettes whose filters have contained heavy doses of asbestos, so that the company has had to settle several lawsuits of workers who died from exposure.
Of course Gore doesn't need the Tisch family to score the contradictions. As protesters outside the convention will not let him forget, Occidental Petroleum made the Gore fortune and is presently engaged in drilling the rain forest burial grounds of the U'wa Indians with Gore's blessing. Back in Tennessee, a zinc mine Gore acquired under sweetheart terms from Occidental Petroleum has been tagged three times by the Environmental Protection Agency for polluting the Caney Fork River in the Cumberland Valley. "It takes somebody who is independent from Big Oil to take on Big Oil," Gore said to the Washington Times back in June. Apparently it does.
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