Boycott the Hummer

One of my favorite hobbies is uncovering and tracking the Master Manipulators--those characters who think they should be controlling the world. The Rockefellers certainly fall into this category, but most of the M&M’s prefer to remain in the shadows and out of public view. They only come out of the shadows every once in awhile when there is enough money on the table to be grabbed, and then just as quickly exit public view.

George Bush, Dick Cheney and the like are just the puppets of the M&M’s.

There’s roughly a billion dollars sitting on the table for one of these M&M’s, so he has ever so slightly come into public view. His name is Ira Leon Rennert. Rennert is owner of Renco Group, Inc., which in turn owns AM General Corp. AM General is the manufacturer of the Hummer. Three years ago, AM General sold the Hummer brand name and distribution rights to General Motors, but it continues to manufacturer them, including the new H2. But more than half of AM General’s revenues come from government contracts. To date, it has sold more than 150,000 Humvees (The military version of the Hummer) to U. S. armed forces and to more than 30 foreign nations. And now Rennert has come into public view as he tries to cash out and sell AM General.

He bought AM General in 1992 for $133 million. With rising demand for Hummers along with, as the New York Post put it, "greater demand for military hardware, thanks to heightened national security," Rennert wants to sell it for somewhere between $750 million to $1 billion. Talk about a war profiteer.

Among the top 50 companies listed as the major recipients of Defense Department contracts are the usual pigs at the trough: Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Boeing and General Electric, but AM General parent Renco is also on the list. It is not clear whether other parts of Rennert’s empire are beneficiaries of major government contracts or whether AM General is the major factor, but clearly the company this character keeps suggests he is up to all sorts of no good.

He has his corporate headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Center. His lobbying firm (Baker Donnelson) employs Henry Kissinger’s man Lawrence Eagleburger. Long before 9-11, he donated $100,000 to Rudy Giuliani’s senatorial campaign.

He is also on the list of about a half-dozen Americans who are known in Israel as "First Tier Donors," for giving more than $100,000 to Israeli political campaigns.

The environmentalists have been after this guy for some time. He is considered the world’s greatest polluter. And while the pollution issue itself is extremely complex with the lack of private property being at the core of the problem, Rennert clearly isn’t waiting for the issue to get resolved in debate. He is dumping big time now--though not in his back yard.

He has recently completed construction of the largest "single-family" residence in the United States. The house, located on Long Island and facing the Atlantic Ocean, cost $100 million to build and contains 62,000 square feet of living space (twice that of the White House). Rennert also apparently doesn’t have a constipation problem, either, as there are 42 bathrooms in the house.

But it is not Rennert’s house that I’m concerned about, it is the military-industrial complex that is the problem, and Rennert is right at the core. And now he is trying to extract a cool billion for his role. I’m not going to help him one tiny bit.

So there are no Hummers in my future. I’m not buying one, leasing one, and I will even refuse to ride in one. It is a child of the war machine. Its parent the Humvee--short for "High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle"--is everything I don’t want this government to be: highly mobile, multipurposed with wheels.

As for Rennert, he will probably grab his billion and crawl back into a hole, but he had to come out to grab the billion, and now he is on my list and should be on yours.

Boycott the Hummer and let’s keep an eye on this character.

back to Strike The Root