"Dr. Evil" Turns Out to be "Dr. Silly"

Jim Hightower Author, Commentator, America’s Number One Populist

Imagine a political campaign against environmentalists that's so negative, so ridiculously slanted and downright dirty, that it actually repulsed executives of some of America's biggest fracking corporations.

Wow – it's got to take a big wad of ugly to gag a fracker! But in the gross world of political rancor, few cough up hairballs as foul as those produced by Rick Berman. He specializes in taking secret funding from major corporations to publicly slime environmentalists, low-wage workers, and anyone else perceived by his corporate clients as enemies.

So last year, Berman was in Colorado Springs, at a meeting of Big Oil frackers about his down and dirty plan to smear and ridicule the grassroots enviros who've dared to oppose the fracking of Colorado's land, water, people, and communities. Dubbing the campaign "Big Green Radicals," the Berman team revealed that their PR firm had dug into the personal lives of Sierra Club board members, looking for tidbits to embarrass them. Gut it up, Berman cried out to the executives, "You can either win ugly or lose pretty." The Little Generalissimo then urged them to pony up some $3 million for his assault, saying they should "think of this as an endless war," adding pointedly, "and you have to budget for it."

Unfortunately for the sleaze peddler, one appalled energy executive recorded his crude pitch and leaked it to the media. "That you have to play dirty to win," the executive explained, "just left a bad taste in my mouth." Even Anadarko, an aggressive fracking corporation with 13,000 fracked wells in the Rockies, publicly rejected Berman's political play, telling the New York Times: "It does not align with our values."

Berman likes to be called "Dr. Evil," but he's so coarse, strident, bombastic, and clownish that he's become known as "Dr. Silly."

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This has been reposted from Jim Hightower's website.

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks. Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower believes that the true political spectrum is not right to left but top to bottom, and he has become a leading national voice for the 80 percent of the public who no longer find themselves within shouting distance of the Washington and Wall Street powers at the top. He publishes a populist political newsletter, “The Hightower Lowdown.” He is a New York Times best-selling author, and has written seven books including, Thieves In High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country And It’s Time To Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There’s Nothing In the Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos. His newspaper column is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate.

Posted In: Allied Approaches, From Jim Hightower

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