Meet the Democrat backer behind "green industrial complex"

One may call it the “green industrial complex.”

Enter John Doerr, a billionaire venture capitalist at the Silicon Valley firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers (KPCB). There, Doerr has been responsible for the firm’s successful investments in companies like Compaq, Intuit, AOL, Amazon, Netscape and Google.

No one would argue that Doerr hasn’t earned his spot on Forbes magazine’s annual richest people in the world list. However, in recent years, Doerr has redirected his talent from picking out successful start-up companies to successfully lobbying the Obama administration into supporting “green” initiatives.

While Doerr considers himself “a raging capitalist,” what he has been doing the last few years may be more akin to crony capitalism. With his lobbying, political advising and picky investing, Doerr has been one of the main movers behind green policy initiatives in Washington D.C, creating a web of players within a new industrial complex of green initiatives and renewable energy. He’s also been one of the biggest profiteers from it.

Since 2000, Doerr and his wife Anne have donated approximately $800,000 to Democrats. Moreover, KPCB has donated more than a million dollars to Democrats since 2005. Doerr has since been rewarded by being given at least some input in shaping the administration’s economic policy. In February 2009, President Obama named Doerr to the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB).

“I think Doerr, like most, supports people he knows will support him,” Chris Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Caller.

“He [Doerr] is invaluable to them as a committee hearing witness. And, because they [politicians] are promoting the coercive transfer of wealth to ‘investments’ of his – investments that he made on the cheap because they’re uneconomic, but can reap tremendous ‘rents’ if their agenda of taking effective control of the energy sector is affected – they are invaluable to him,” said Horner.

He added, “I don’t know if he has been trading tit for tat, but it is clearly a mutual benefits society.”

In the stimulus bill that passed Congress, $86 billion was earmarked for “green initiatives,” something that was heavily lobbied for by Doerr. The Department of Energy (DOE) was then put in charge of choosing which companies to award grants to.

Congress 2, White House 0 on immigration and cap-and-trade

Last week, a draft memo surfaced from the Department of Homeland Security suggesting ways to administratively circumvent existing law to allow several categories of illegal immigrants to avoid deportation and, indeed, for some to be granted permanent residency. Most disturbing was the stated rationale. This was being proposed "in the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform." In other words, because Congress refuses to do what these bureaucrats would like to see done, they will legislate it themselves.

Regardless of your feelings on the substance of the immigration issue, this is not how a constitutional democracy should operate. Administrators administer the law, they don't change it. That's the legislators' job.

When questioned, the White House played down the toxic memo, leaving the impression that it was nothing more than ruminations emanating from the bowels of Homeland Security. But the administration is engaged in an even more significant power play elsewhere.

A 2007 Supreme Court ruling gave the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate carbon emissions if it could demonstrate that they threaten human health and the environment. The Obama EPA made precisely that finding, thereby granting itself a huge expansion of power and, noted The Post, sending "a message to Congress."

It was not a terribly subtle message: Enact cap-and-trade legislation -- taxing and heavily regulating carbon-based energy -- or the EPA will do so unilaterally. As Frank O'Donnell of Clean Air Watch noted, such a finding "is likely to help light a fire under Congress to get moving."

Well, Congress didn't. Despite the "regulatory cudgel" (to again quote The Post) the administration has been waving, the Senate has repeatedly refused to acquiesce.

Good for the Senate.

Now that borrowers are taking care and markets have calmed down, Washington is about to reopen the too-big-to-fail window

For 25 years, Washington has done everything in its power to subsidize Americans' profligate borrowing habits. Debt became the fuel for economic growth. Washington subsidized the financial industry's borrowing through implicit guarantees against loss.

The feds first started rescuing creditors to "too big to fail" banks in 1984. Since then, it's become clear to lenders -- Wall Street's global bondholders and trading counterparties -- that the government would save them anytime a large financial firm foundered.

Indemnified against losses, bondholders could lend nearly infinitely to Wall Street. Wall Street found creative ways to lend that money right back to the public, through mortgage brokers and credit card marketers.

Some exceptions exist. In September 2008, the feds refused to rescue Lehman Brothers' lenders. But the exceptions have only proven the rule. Today, conventional Washington wisdom is that letting Lehman fail was a catastrophe.

The Dodd-Frank bill is a monument to the status quo. Despite promises that the bill will end bailouts, it enshrines bailouts into law.

It provides for an "orderly liquidation authority," for example, which allows "systemically important" financial firms to escape bankruptcy and to escape, too, consistent losses for their creditors. It also sets up a fast-track procedure through which the White House can ask Congress for guarantees for Wall Street's lenders in a future crisis.

In effect, the government is saying to Wall Street's lenders: Carry on as you did before 2008.

Ordinary Americans, though, understand that they can't go on as before. Since 2008, they've started paying their debt back.

The process is painful. As Americans borrow less, they spend less and pay less for houses.

But as Americans pare back their debt, the economy will begin to heal permanently. As house prices fall, for example, because less borrowed money exists to send them higher, Americans will have more money left over after paying the mortgage.

They can invest that money in the stock market for retirement. Those funds, in turn, will go to entrepreneurs who create jobs outside of the financial industry.

The Dodd-Frank bill would pervert this healthy process. It would pit Washington's too-big-to-fail subsidies and Wall Street's creativity against Americans who are trying to do the right thing for themselves and the country

41% say random selection would produce a better Congress

The latest national telephone survey of Likely Voters finds that 41% say a group of people selected at random from the phone book would do a better job addressing the nation’s problems than the current Congress. Almost as many (38%) disagree, however, and another 20% are undecided.

These findings show little change from early January and early September 2009. However, the number of voters who feel a random selection could do better is up eight points from early October 2008, just before the presidential election.

Yet while 57% of Mainstream voters think a random selection from the phone book would do a better job than the current Congress, 90% of the Political Class disagree.

Only 32% of all voters are at least somewhat confident that their representatives in Congress have the voters' best interests in mind. Sixty-six percent (66%) don't share the confidence, down 10 points from October 2008.

Again, while 79% of the Political Class are confident that their members of Congress do have their best interests at heart, 84% of Mainstream voters don't see it that way.

How bad is it for the Democrats? Honolulu might send a Republican to Congress in a special election

Honolulu City Councilman Charles Djou has the advantage in the special election for Congress, a new Hawai'i Poll has found, giving Republicans the best opportunity in two decades to claim the urban Honolulu district.

Djou leads with 36 percent, former congressman Ed Case is chasing at 28 percent, and state Senate President Colleen Hanabusa is trailing with 22 percent. Thirteen percent were undecided.

The poll, taken for The Advertiser and Hawai'i News Now, confirms fears among Democrats that Case and Hanabusa could split the Democratic vote in the winner-take-all election and help Djou score a rare Republican upset.

The poll was conducted by Ward Research from April 23 through April 28 among 349 voters who said they were likely to mail back their ballots in the May 22 election. The margin of error was 5.2 percentage points.

"Right now, for me, it's about fiscal responsibility," said Walter Yuen, a retired flight attendant who lives in Hawai'i Kai and is leaning toward Djou.

Yuen believes federal and state lawmakers rely too much on tax increases to maintain governments that have grown too large. "We've got to learn how to control our spending," he said. "If I have to do it, they should have to do it."

WSJ: "epic discontent" with elected officials

By almost every conceivable measure, Americans are less positive and more critical of their government these days. There is a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government—a dismal economy, an unhappy public, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.

These are among the principal findings from a new series of Pew Research Center surveys. Rather than an activist government to deal with the nation's top problems, these surveys show that the general public now wants government reformed and a growing number want its power curtailed. With the exception of greater regulation of Wall Street, there is less of an appetite for government solutions to the nation's problems—including greater government control over the economy—than there was when Barack Obama first took office.

The public's hostility toward government seems likely to be an important election issue favoring the Republicans this fall. But the Democrats can take some solace in the fact that neither party can be confident it has the advantage among such a disillusioned electorate. Favorable ratings for both major parties, as well as for Congress, have reached record lows. Opposition to congressional incumbents, already approaching an all-time high, continues to climb.

The tea party movement, which has a small but fervent antigovernment constituency, could be a wild card in this election. On the one hand, its sympathizers are highly energized and inclined to vote Republican. On the other, many Republicans (28%), and Independents who lean Republican (30%), say the "tea party" represents their point of view better than the GOP.

Roll Call's richest members of Congress