Cornhead reports on Tom Steyer
Intrepid “Cornhead” (aka Dave Begley) reports on Tom Steyer’s visit to Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Excerpt:
By all accounts Tom Steyer is a billionaire. He’s also running for President. He has no chance of winning. So why is he running? Why is he spending millions of his own money? Answer: He wants to get his message out. What is his message? Impeach President Trump and adopt some form of the Green New Deal with his Climate Justice plan…
Steyer is a smart guy and very rich, but I was astounded by some of his statements. I gasped when he said that his campaign to impeach President Trump was no different from his dad’s prosecution of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg…
Steyer has a hidden agenda or his a fine example of the proposition that knowledge is quite specialized.
There are a lot of things that the bull markets of these three financial bubbles enabled, apparently including Tom Steyer; but many of them will be lost or returned. The current financial extreme, which seems to be reversing, played a big but unsung role in building our political and social extremes — between the envy and frustration on one side; greed and overoptimism on the other; as well as plenty of crossfertilization among those categories. Now that could be unwinding, and we can only guess at how the civic climate will change under such a major reversal.
Kai Akker,
Three financial bubbles, and “reversing”? Please briefly itemize.
Steyer is out to enrich himself at the expense of the hundreds of millions who can’t afford the cost of living increase they’ll suffer and the money they’ll lose for the sake of his self-enrichment.
Steyer seems to be a True Believer in AGW, converting, of course, after he made his fortune in coal. Maybe he’s projecting his perceived guilt on the rest of us.
Good job, as usual, to Cornhead for punishing himself by going to see these leftists as they appear in his area. Trump is like the Nazi war criminals? Really, Mr. Steyer?
A dangerous man with his own money to spend.
Lynn:
But I got two free beers (Shiner Bock) out of the deal.
Kate,
Steyer may just be “talking his book.” Which is to say, promoting those things he’s already financially invested in. Which is maybe what OlderandWheezier is suggesting. Would he invest in something he didn’t believe in? Sure, if he felt the momentum would be on his side for some period of time.
OlderandWheezier… I had to laugh at your moniker. 🙂
Roy Steyer – I was curious about this bit about him at the war crimes trials. Came across his name as, apparently, the author of the first draft of a trial brief on Count One of the indictment, the one having to do with the invasion of Poland, or more exactly the planning thereof. “Roy H. Steyer, Lt. (jg), USNR” on the cover. I felt the need to reassure myself that Tom Steyer wasn’t simply spinning tales.
Steyer seems quite invested in solar, and China. So it’s easy easy easy to hate Trump, who is fighting back against China, finally.
Plus, all the rich Dems hate Trump, or say they do, even when Trump’s success at making America more successful is mostly making them all richer, based on increasing the values of their American investments.
(less value if their investments are outside of the US).
Plenty of Dems really believe, and say, that Trump is Hitler.
It’s crazy.
Crazy sad.
Dave, thanks again for taking on attending these events so that the rest of us don’t have to. And, again, your reporting is excellent. You have a great feel for providing needed context. For example, when noting Steyer’s assertion that Trump knows nothing of farming, you wrote, “The city guy [Steyer] who ran a hedge fund later said that President Trump had no understanding or feeling for farmers. The lifelong urbanite knows agriculture because he now owns grass-fed cattle; certainly a hobby farm that isn’t subject to the strict economics that real ranchers face.”
From your article:
That is rich, of course. From
https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/minority-health/population/afriamer-pop.htm
we learn that the black population in Wisconsin that is old enough to vote totals 225,000. (The website doesn’t say that expressly, but math leads to that conclusion.) So Tom Steyer would have us believe that 100000 out of 225000, or just under 45%, of Wisconsin’s blacks were prevented from voting. He’s just full of yucks.
Tom Grey writes, “Plenty of Dems really believe, and say, that Trump is Hitler.”
Of course, and so the Dems started what they call the “Resistance” once their candidate Hillary was defeated. This of course goes back to the ethics question people have been toying with since the end of WWII: Suppose you meet a 6 year old kid that you know for an absolute certainty would grow up to be another Hitler if he were allowed to survive into adulthood: Do you kill that kid???
So, for the Dems, because they dislike all Repubs, they formed the anti-Hitler Resistance. And, anything they (i.e., the Dems) do, regardless of how unethical or otherwise immoral, is justified because they are resisting Hitler.
Ira:
The comparison of Trump to the likes of Hitler and Goering is not only absurd on a factual and moral basis but just bad persuasion and rhetoric. The speaker is either an idiot or thinks his audience is composed of idiots. I’m guessing that Steyer thought his audience were Trump haters and idiots.
Cornhead (italics added):
I disagree with the part of what you wrote that I put in italics. The leftist hive mind (or Borg Collective for those of us who remember Star Trek: The Next Generation) has been working to have regular Americans viewed as subhumans or an evil or both. Thus, Hillary Clinton characterized us as “deplorables.” She was preceded by many, including Obama who said we “cling to guns or religion” as if that were bad. Now, Trump is Hitler (even if Dems don’t actually use that name) and he and his supporters are and evil that must be “resisted.” So, the Dems to which Tom Grey referred are not idiots. Do they think their fellow American’s are idiots? Well, I think they do think that they are persuadable. Thus, Andy McCarthy’s article that neo linked to today.
Damn it!! I wish the editing function were working. The part of Cornhead’s quote that I wanted to italicize is this: “he speaker is either an idiot . . . .”
Ira:
That goes back to neo’s “knave or fool” question.
Ira – I found out that you have to use BOLD to emphasize words that are within blockquotes, since the words within the block manifest as italicized.
IOW, You can’t italicize italics.
Steyer’s solar investments and his political crusade dovetail, and which came first, who knows, nor does it matter. But those investments are relatively recent — since selling Farallon in 2012, if the published chronology is correct. But Steyer’s wealth was built by the 26 years prior to that sale, during which time he bankrolled exactly what he is crusading against now. Coal-fired energy plants? So it’s his own past that revolts him, the past that made him wealthy. Throw in the Nuremberg references he makes, and this guy sounds like a mental case built around a lot of guilt. Though he directs those references at Trump and all similar opponents, Steyer sounds like he may be driven at least as much by some internal crusade against himself and his method of wealth generation, on some level. If so, that’s a crusade that can be satisfied only by destroying that wealth. Which he is also clearly doing, in part.
The market may do the rest of it. The three bubbles we’ve just gone through are the technology bubble of 1998-2000, the credit bubble of 2005-07, and the most recent Federal Reserve bubble of 2011-18, or whatever specific years apply best. American stocks are selling at the highest economic multiples ever, in some categories, and very close to the extremes of 2000 in a few others. When looking at long-term earnings (the 10- and 12-year p/e calculations of Robert Schiller and all his successors), price-to-sales ratios, the Q ratio — only three periods have reached these extremes, and they are 1929, 2000, and today. We’ve left the 2007 levels in the dust. So, as history shows, these ratios will regress to the mean and eventually well below the mean, and that means a lot of price destruction for the stock market. The broad market already peaked back in January of 2018, as shown by the NYSE composite, and now it appears that the other averages are beginning to unwind as well.
“…and that means a lot of price destruction for the stock market.”
If true, Hillary’s and Paul Krugman’s (et al.’s) prayers will finally—FINALLY!—be answered.
Oh praise the Powers That Be!! Halleluya!! Halleluya!! (That is, if the Powers That Be get the time line right…. But what happens if they don’t?…e.g., “Hey, don’t blame Me: you NEVER said you wanted the market to crash and burn BEFORE the 2020 election!!”)
File under: The Power of Prayer (and its limitations)….
Barry, the ’70s are sometimes given by Democrats as a time when income and wealth inequalities were less extreme than today. Because capital assets were all down in value during that long bear market period until Reagan and Volcker woke up the bulls in 1982. The ’20s were a previous case of inequality “extremes.” We know what the cure was then. File under: be careful what you wish for, Democrats.
The market may do the rest of it. The three bubbles we’ve just gone through are the technology bubble of 1998-2000, the credit bubble of 2005-07, and the most recent Federal Reserve bubble of 2011-18, or whatever specific years apply best. American stocks are selling at the highest economic multiples ever, in some categories, and very close to the extremes of 2000 in a few others. When looking at long-term earnings (the 10- and 12-year p/e calculations of Robert Schiller and all his successors), price-to-sales ratios, the Q ratio — only three periods have reached these extremes, and they are 1929, 2000, and today. We’ve left the 2007 levels in the dust.
1. The salient datum is the trailing p/e ratio, and no, we have not left previous periods ‘in the dust’. Trailing p/e ratios are lower today than they were at the beginning of 2018, than they were throughout the period running from 1998 to 2004, and then they were during the period from 1992-94.
2. There is no ‘Federal Reserve bubble’ of 2011-18. The median value for the trailing p/e ratio over the last 45 years has been 18.07, which wasn’t exceeded by the market until 2014.
3. That asset prices go up and down is of modest consequence. It turns into a crisis when those assets were commonly purchased with borrowed money and the asset price implosion has been large enough to put people underwater. Real estate prices are, in relation to nominal incomes, disconcertingly high (about what they were in 2002).
Thanks, AesopFan!
Thanks Kai Akker,
I would have guessed your third bubble was the current bond bubble, and while that is strongly connected to the Fed and other developed nation central banks, your version is a bit different.
Just put on my *free* Tom Steyer shirt. Very expensive material. There’s a great big “union made” label on the front. I’d bet there was no union labor at his overseas coal-fired power plants. Hypocrite.