[Updated, 3/18/11: Fred Upton also likes his generous donors the Koch Brothers (thanks to Benton Harbor, MI, local social activists at BANCO, for posting the Feb. 2011 article from the LA Times on Upton and the Koch Bros.]
Fred Upton is a millionaire grandson of Whirlpool founder Frederick Upton, a fact that Congressman Upton, of Michigan’s Sixth District, doesn’t mention in his bio on his Congressional website. He is the 26th richest member of the U.S. House of Representatives, up from 29th in 2004 (acc. to OpenSecrets.org). That’s inside the top 6% richest mark. Go Fred, you are winning the rich politicians race!
Fred Upton likes luxury golf courses in his back yard. He likes to golf with his neighbor, Jeff Fettig, CEO of Whirlpool. Fettig has leveraged Whirlpool money and resources to build a luxury golf course in their backyards, justifying it on the business side because it will “help the company attract and retain talent.” Apparently Whirlpool needs talented golfers on its payroll. (Maybe they’ll help him improve his golf game?)
Another friend in the family that Fred likes to play golf with (now granted, I’m just assuming he likes to play golf with them) is Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy, real estate developer, and husband of Fred Upton’s cousin. McClendon is also uber-rich: he was the best compensated CEO of 2008–despite his company losing 60% of its stock value; last year he fell to #3 best compensated, with $114 million (More on Chesapeake in a bit.)
When you like golf, power has its perks. You can get prime lakefront public park land requisitioned to build your exclusive private golf resorts, and get hundreds of millions of tax breaks for its development. Good going, Fred, Jeff, and Aubrey, way to leverage those assets! That is some good teamwork! Still, when Aubrey doesn’t get his way, he likes to sue. (He also likes to insult the state of Michigan. And driving small towns into “state receivership.”)
(Thanks to Eartha Jane Melzer of the Michigan Messenger for her crack reporting.)
Fred Upton is good at leveraging his power for personal gain and to protect his private–and his friend’s private–interests. He’s also good at the politician’s fine art of making it sound like his actions have other, more noble, public-spirited, or at least ideological motives.
Fred Upton is good friends with his in-law McClendon of Chesapeake Energy. Public financial disclosure statements speak loud and clear as to Fred and Aubrey’s friendly loyalties. In 2008 poor Aubrey had to sell 31 million shares of Chesapeake stock at fire-sale prices to cover loan payments being demanded by banks. Poor Aubrey apparently lost something like $1.5 billion in stock value compared to the price a few months earlier. The company helped make up the loss a bit by giving poor Aubrey a $75 million bonus on Dec. 31 (nice Christmas surprise!). But that huge stock sell-off itself drove the price down a bit more, leaving Chesapeake in a good price position as an investment.
That’s just what Fred Upton did, buying somewhere between $10,000-$50,000 dollars in Chesapeake stock on Dec. 19, 2008. Upton currently has by far the greatest private investment in Chesapeake Energy of all members of Congress. In turn, Chesapeake has contributed to Upton’s campaigns ($9800 in the recent cycle). Obviously there is no implication of impropriety, or God forbid conflict of interest (what a quaint notion) in any of this. This is how things work. Friends helping friends. Honi soit qui mal y pense. They are all honorable men.
And money flows to those in the right positions. Upton’s greatest donor is the energy industry, followed second by the telecoms (source):
As the Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, this courting of favor makes sense (and cents). And Fred Upton is now richly rewarding both sectors through his committee powers, taking vigorous action to strip the EPA of regulatory authority over green house gases, and overstepping the FCC’s industry-negotiated rules on Net Neutrality to clear the way for an internet “free and open for business.”
Upton boasts that they have “bipartisan support” for the FCC assault. The letter has a total of 5 signatures. The two Democrats are Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Dan Boren of Oklahoma. The committee is calling the FCC’s rules–predictably, but with no evidence to support the hyperbole– a “government takeover” of the internet, which must remain “open and free.” Not allowing giant telecom companies to charge websites for speed of access by users is exactly the “open and free” internet that Net Neutrality rules are designed to ensure. The same letter can barely conceal its own contradictions, citing a 1999 speech by then FCC Chairman William Kennard who “rebuffed calls to force open access.”
So the internet should be “open and free” by “rebuffing calls to force open access.” Open and free for whom, exactly? The answer is obvious, open for business and free from government intrusion (Pro-Business GOP ideology), not open to everyone and free access regardless of ability to pay (Net Neutrality).
Fred Upton has the same blinkered, one-track mind when it comes to Energy and the EPA. First, he is part of the climate-change deniers club. On this general topic he and his friend and neighbor Aubrey McClendon must have plenty to talk about. McClendon is in the business of denying science of all kinds. It’s a job liability, since he’s in the natural gas extraction business–the fragging or fracking business as it’s come to be called–in fact Chesapeake is a major pioneer in this industry. To get at all that liquid gold underground they’ve had to develop their own unique plan of attack, to get around the consequences for the environmental disasters they are creating and leaving behind–literally pumping back into the ground to “cover it all up.”
McClendon is in the business of simply denying obvious facts. Like pretending that chemicals which in small amounts kill cows dead are nevertheless safe for humans and pose no risk to groundwater. McClendon’s Chesapeake brags on its website that it has won the “21st century land rush.” They’re the main player in the hydraulic fracturing that has been controversial everywhere they have been (see Gasland film). They boast on their website that they have now turned their attention to “the manufacturing-like process of drilling tens of thousands of wells in these areas to develop some of the largest natural gas fields in the world.”
They then move from disturbing euphemism to delusional doublespeak: “Chesapeake believes natural gas can become the primary solution to many of our country’s and our world’s most challenging environmental and energy issues.”
Aubrey McClendon’s millions are based on the self-delusional idea that extracting and burning fossil fuels is the “primary solution” to environmental and energy problems. But the plain and simple truth is that extracting and burning fossil fuels is THE primary environmental and energy problem. Again, denial seems to be an occupational hazard here.
After pumping high-pressure toxic cocktails into the ground to crack the bedrock and get at the gas, the company has now come up with the ingenious–or evil genius–solution of pumping all that waste-water (which they somehow still claim poses no health hazard to anyone or anything) back into the ground. In Arkansas where this has been going on there have dramatic increases in earthquakes–100 earthquakes in seven days!–so much so that the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission asked them to halt the waste-water pumping. They’ve done so and the earthquakes have slowed.
McClendon likes just to deny basic physical facts: “Chesapeake Energy has said it does not believe there is a connection between the injection wells and the area’s seismic activity.”
Based on what? If you pump millions of gallons of water into the ground, do you not expect that it will have impacts of some kind on the ground? Are not earthquakes a perfectly reasonable and predictable sort of geophysical consequence?
And now I’ve finally begun to make sense of another facet of Fred Upton’s recent campaign contributions. I noticed it when I started writing this post, but I couldn’t really make sense of it. The fact is this: Upton has received the most of any Congress member from the Waste Management sector in the recent cycle. In 2010 he received $39,800, double what anybody else received–and double what he received in the previous cycle. Now his good friend and neighbor McClendon finds himself faced with the sticky problems of his lucrative and destructively extractive industry’s wastes. It is clearly part of McClendon’s next move, in his “21st century land race,” either to gut any regulatory arms and laws that might impact his business–like the EPA, which CLEARLY HAS THE AUTHORITY TO REGULATE GROUNDWATER CONTAMINANTS–or to forestall any new measures against him.
Aubrey McClendon needs to keep up the “open” season on easy profits and a “free” pass on pollution, earthquakes, ground subsidence, dead cattle, exploding and fiery home water faucets (again, see Gasland), cancerous towns, and any other obviously scientific corollaries to the entire noxious M.O. of hydraulic fracturing and underground waste-water disposal.
Good thing, then, that poor Aubrey McClendon, with all his problems and occupational hazards, has his good friend in very high places, the honorable Congressman Fred Upton of Michigan’s 6th District. Keep up the good work, Fred! You aren’t doing your nation proud, or keeping the interests of most of your neighbors in mind, but at least you’re being good to your friends and uber-rich golf buddies. And isn’t that what really counts?
March 16, 2011 at 8:48 pm
Nicely done! Think how awkward it must be for poor Fred to keep all this straight — who to agree with, to win which golf game, to keep which donors happy, and so forth.
In his confusion, Upton has earned the dubious distinction of being one of the only members of Congress to 1) publicly state that he understood and agreed with the science proving climate change, and then 2) deny his entire previous understanding.
Note that one of Fred Upton’s old staffers, Al Pscholka, introduced the legislation that will empower Führer Snyder’s soon-to-be-hand-chosen Gauleiter to sell off the rest of Benton Harbor’s waterfront, public water supply, or whatever else the GOP masters have a hankerin’ for: http://blog.nexcerpt.com/2011/03/12/snyders-oversight/
March 18, 2011 at 1:30 pm
Thanks for the reply. I noticed that too! He seems to have gone from climate moderate to outright skeptic awfully quick. Now I wonder why that could be? Thanks for the Al Pscholka mention, and your blog write-up link.
March 17, 2011 at 11:15 am
He presides over an area of the country with some of the most serious and oppressive racism in the US. The Berrien County Court regularly imprisons teenagers and innocents from Benton Harbor, Mich. Law enforcement harasses, sexually and otherwise, and sets dogs on residents. It’s a desperate existence which Fred Upton and Whirlpool Corp. are in complete control of. bhbanco.org
March 18, 2011 at 1:28 pm
Thanks for the reply. And keep up the fight!
March 18, 2011 at 3:19 pm
Thanks again. I updated the post with a cross-link to the LA Times article that you pulled out for notice on your blog.
MF
March 18, 2011 at 11:23 am
I worked with a young man who was investigating an earmark that Fred attached to a bill giving $5 million to Benton Harbor for low income housing. The check was issued by HUD to the City of Benton Harbor, and they turned it over to Whirlpool’s nonprofit, the Cornerstone Alliance, because those poor black folk don’t know how to spend their own money.
Since HUD funds must be open to public inspection, this young man went to the Conerstone Alliance and asked to see their books because no money had been spent on housing. Instead of showing him the books, they said no, and hired a major law firm specializing in “crisis management”.
He speculated that the money was used to take over Jean Klock Park. He also investigated the geology of the land that they now control supposedly to put a golf course on and found that it sits on one of three deep well aquifers in the State of Michigan. If Aubrey McClendon destroys all our drinking water using his fracking method to drill for natural gas, then the only clean water around will be controlled by the Whirlpool group.
March 18, 2011 at 1:16 pm
Thanks for the reply! This is a fascinating angle, this Cornerstone Alliance. Thank you. Wow. This looks like an important issue to pursue.
April 21, 2011 at 10:41 am
Whirlpool corp pays no federal corporate income tax and has not and wont for years due to a loophole they lobbied for and received. The made $618M in profit in 2010 and didn’t pay a dime. That does not prevent them from applying for and receiving federal grants, like the one they got for the Yakima wash call center in 2007 which just closed. I have written the local paper website 4 times to point out whirlpools contribution to the federal budget; the 1st one got in, the others were screened out and not posted.
July 22, 2012 at 1:54 pm
Thanks James. (And ditto, sorry for the slow reply.)
December 13, 2011 at 4:11 pm
Thanks for the enlightening journalistic work. I’d like to add another piece to the mix. We are a small business that has been in Benton Harbor for 90 years, employing 100 people in one of the nation’s most unemployed city. Harbor Shores has stolen our land, built around us, and has many ways of putting the pressure on us. Not that an automotive supplier needs more pressure, thank you! Here’s a site describing the problems: http://www.WhatIstheBigSqueeze.com.
This site doesn’t even touch on all the political forces that affect us. We are having difficulty seeking a tax abatement, that has been quite easy for other businesses ($300M in tax incentives to Whirlpool this year). Large incentives have been given to businesses to move to Benton Harbor, like Intermet, a direct competitor. Whirlpool has carved up a new district, Benton Township, with a wealthy tax base, land donated by Benton Harbor, and a new water plant bent on destroying the “undesirables” of Benton Harbor.
We welcome your comments on our site and support on Facebook. The louder we are, the less they are able to squeeze us out of business.
July 22, 2012 at 1:53 pm
Thanks “Big Squeeze”. And sorry for the epically slow reply.
May 28, 2013 at 3:42 pm
[…] And more: Aubrey McClendon is the CEO of Chesapeake Energy. His relative and golf buddy, Congressman Fred Upton, is the Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. And Fred Upton is trying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases. Natural gas obtained using hydraulic fracturing, as McClendon’s company does, has recently been found to emit more greenhouse gases than coal. More on the close ties between McClendon and Upton at the Blind Eye’s great blog Who is Fred Upton (R MI-6)? […]
March 18, 2017 at 1:14 pm
I move around a lot and ended up in his district, southeastern corner of it. Have been bugging his offices with phone calls, letters, petitions of like-minded groups of a liberal/progressive bend that I endorse the works of.
Thought I’d try my meager web skills to seeing what I could find about ole’ Fred which led me here.
So I’d just like to thank you for the illustrious history of this character. Mostly confirms & goes beyond what I’d already discovered or suspected. And Kudos for the indie journalism. Got to keep it real.
April 30, 2018 at 12:57 pm
thanks – I haven’t been on my blog for awhile, which is why I didn’t see/approve your comment before. Good luck with activism!