"I know all that," Katzenberg interrupted. "Tell
me your business plan." At 60, Katzenberg, who stands 5-foot-5, cut a
lean and fit figure ("On background, he's incredibly buff," says a
friend of his), his clean-shaven face taut and tanned, with a disarming,
horsey smile. What remained of his graying hair was trimmed to a fine
stubble. He wore a V-neck sweater over a T-shirt, slacks, and
sneakers—his Hollywood CEO uniform—and he grilled the four operatives
with the same intensity he would a potential business partner. What was
their fundraising target, and how would they reach it? How would they
spend their money—on broadcast, cable TV, online? Who would be their
research director? Their ad maker? How much would they pay themselves?
What was their strategy?
The answer to that last one was simple: Destroy Mitt Romney. The
Republican primaries were nearly a year away, but the four politicos
believed that Romney would end up the nominee, so they would focus on
him and ignore the rest of the field. They would attack him using
the same approach
employed by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and other groups in 2004.
"Just as the conservatives took away Kerry's war record," Begala said,
"we're going to take away Romney's strongest asset: his business
record."
Katzenberg, who is worth an estimated $800 million, liked what he
heard. By the end of dinner, he pledged $2 million to the super-PAC,
later named
Priorities USA Action ,
and promised more money down the road—no strings attached. He also
offered to tap his network of wealthy friends and colleagues. And he
picked up the tab.
Begala had found his bell cow. "It was the most important meeting of
the entire campaign," he told me recently. "If you tell people,
'Jeffrey's behind this, Jeffrey's helping us,' man, that really helps."
Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg Prensa Internacional/ZUMA Press
Katzenberg's investment paid off big for Obama. Priorities zeroed in
on Romney's time at the private equity firm Bain Capital, cutting a
series of ads depicting him as a real-life C. Montgomery Burns. In one,
a union worker recounted
how he was ordered to build a stage at his Indiana paper factory; days
later, Bain executives strode across it to announce they were closing
the plant and firing everyone. It was rated the
most effective ad of the campaign; as Republican message maker Frank Luntz would say, "That ad alone has killed Mitt Romney in Ohio."
Katzenberg gave $3.15 million to Democratic super-PACs during the
2012 cycle—almost 30 times more than his total reported giving in 2008.
(There's no telling how much he might have given to other groups that
don't disclose their donors.) He steered millions more to Priorities—his
friend and business partner, Steven Spielberg,
gave
$1 million, for instance. He hosted numerous fundraisers for Obama and
raised more for the president than anyone else in California. All told,
Katzenberg gave or raised more than $30 million to reelect Obama,
helping Hollywood make up for Wall Street's plummeting financial support
of the president. And that's not counting the funds he marshaled for
other Democrats, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and California
Gov. Jerry Brown.
"It's hard to think of any other donor going back to the [1990s] or even further who did what he did," says Bill Allison of the
Sunlight Foundation . "He's like soy sauce in Chinese food: He's everywhere."
The deep-pocketed
kingmaker is a recurring character in American politics. William
McKinley might have lost the 1896 presidential election without
businessman Mark Hanna, the former US senator and master fundraiser.
Harry S. Truman won his first Senate race, in 1934, thanks largely to
"Boss Tom" Pendergast, the ruthless Missouri power broker later thrown
in prison for tax evasion. Today, conservatives love to demonize George
Soros, the liberal financier who gave a record $24 million to elect John
Kerry in 2004. But Soros, a longtime
supporter of campaign finance reform ,
didn't raise a dime for Obama in 2012 and didn't give to the Priorities
super-PAC until very late in the campaign. Katzenberg, who shuns sleep,
guzzles Diet Coke, and says his parents "didn't raise me to sit on the
sidelines," gave early and often. "No one in the United States did what
Katzenberg did," a fellow Obama fundraiser says. "He is in a class of
one."
Jim Messina, Obama's campaign manager, hails Katzenberg for his role in reelecting the president: "He's one of the best, if not
the best, fundraisers out there."
If the Katzenberg story has a prequel, it is the story of
Lew Wasserman ,
the canny, irascible, and ruthless mogul who in the 1950s and '60s
transformed the Music Corporation of America (MCA) from a middling
talent agency into a mighty studio. Wasserman, a lifelong Democrat, saw
the advantages to having friends in power, so he built Hollywood's first
real political machine, a network of performers, business partners, and
studio bosses who gave generously to his handpicked candidates. By the
1990s, he was one of the Democratic Party's all-time biggest donors.
Wasserman and his wife, Edie, spoke of US presidents like they were
cousins—Jack and Jimmy and Ronnie and Bill; once Wasserman slept in the
White House when he couldn't find a DC hotel room. And when he saw a
headline that read something like, "Lew Wasserman Controls Hollywood.
Does He Control Washington Too?" he offhandedly said, "Of course I do."
Wasserman withdrew from politics in the late '90s, leaving a gaping
hole in the Democrats' fundraising machine. The entertainment industry
still rallied behind Al Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. But the marquee
donors of that period—movie producer Steve Bing, Power Rangers creator
Haim Saban—couldn't get Hollywood to fall in line like Wasserman could.
After a ban on unlimited, undisclosed donations to parties—so-called
soft money—went into effect following the 2002 campaign, showbiz
donations to Democrats fell off. (The industry's Republican giving,
paltry as it was, held steady.)
Then came
Citizens United ,
dismantling limits on political giving and paving the way for
super-PACs—and a new kind of kingmaker arose. So, in 2012 megadonors
like Katzenberg and casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson demonstrated just how
far some 1-percenters were willing to open their wallets. "There's now a
whole range of opportunities for donors that didn't exist before
Citizens United,"
says Bill Allison. And that's not even accounting for the fact that the
Supreme Court could lift what restrictions remain on individual giving,
allowing donors to give millions directly to campaigns and parties.
Katzenberg is savvy about which candidates he backs and when he
gives, often cutting checks before other donors who are wary of placing
the wrong bet. He relishes the nitty-gritty of politics—he's the rare
contributor willing to spend hours on the phone pitching rich people
when others would rather stab themselves in the eye. "I don't know
anyone—
anyone—in Hollywood that says, 'Give me a donor list,'"
says Donna Bojarsky, a political and philanthropic adviser in Los
Angeles. "Except Jeffrey." And he's not bashful: "Jeffrey has no problem
asking you for, like, way too much money," Will Smith quipped at an
Oscars
ceremony honoring Katzenberg .
"Jeffrey has no problem asking you for, like, way too much money," joked Will Smith.
Obama officials say they respect Katzenberg not only for his
fundraising, but also because he has no specific "ask"—no ambassadorship
to Switzerland, no regulatory tweak, no nights in the Lincoln Bedroom.
Even so, being Hollywood's liaison to Washington has its perks: Obama
takes Katzenberg's calls, and he and his political adviser, Andy Spahn,
visited the White House almost 50 times between them during Obama's
first term. (Not all of Spahn's visits had to do with Katzenberg.) It
has also left him well positioned to advocate for his industry's and his
company's interests in China's booming film market.
Katzenberg and Adelson have cast themselves as leading men in a new
campaign finance picture, where small groups of wealthy donors wield
even greater power, cutting monster checks that reshape the parties'
primaries. "It'll be wealthy people getting together and picking horses
and riding those horses through a primary process and maybe upending the
consensus of the party," says a Democratic strategist. "We're in a
whole new world."
Adds Paul Begala: "Every Democrat who has presidential ambitions is
now going to beat a path straight for Jeffrey's door. Or they're too
dumb to be president."
Imago/ZUMA Press
Katzenberg has made a president before. On February 10, 2007, Obama
announced his first presidential bid. Ten days later, some 600 guests crowded into a ballroom at the Beverly Hills Hilton for the
first major fundraiser
of Obama's campaign, including Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Eddie
Murphy, and the studio chiefs from Universal, Paramount, Disney, and
20th Century Fox. At one point, Obama adviser David Axelrod wound up
standing behind Jennifer Aniston. "I probably lost my ability to fix my
place in time as a result," he recalls. Later that evening, a handful of
donors who'd raised $46,000 each gathered at the home of DreamWorks
cofounder David Geffen for an intimate dinner with the Obamas.
Obama was the star of the show, but the night's other breakout was
Katzenberg, who, with Geffen and Spielberg, had had the political savvy
to bet on the young senator. Katzenberg and Spahn had hoped to raise a
half million dollars that night; as the demand for tickets soared, they
doubled their target. The final haul was $1.3 million, an eye-popping
sum that infuriated Hillary Clinton and her campaign aides, who had
believed that Spielberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen—SKG in showbiz parlance
and former Bill Clinton donors all—would choose her. Clinton's campaign
even demanded Obama return Geffen's $2,300 donation after the mogul
bad-mouthed Hillary to the
New York Times'
Maureen
Dowd. Unfazed, Obama went on to raise $25 million in the early months of
2007, proving he could compete with Clinton in the so-called money
primary.
For decades, Katzenberg had been a reliable, if less recognized,
Democratic donor. Now, he had stepped onto center stage, signaling to
Hollywood's donor class which way SKG was leaning. "What put Barack
Obama on the map was that first-quarter fundraising total," says Rufus
Gifford, the campaign's head fundraiser. "The February event was a huge
part of that."
Katzenberg's personality was central to the event's success. He knows
how to navigate Hollywood's minefield of egos, eschewing mass emails to
potential donors in favor of personal calls—which few can refuse. Those
who give receive a handwritten thank-you note. Meanwhile, Spahn, his
consigliere, counts among his friends Axelrod and former White House
chief of staff William Daley (Spahn calls him "Billy"); Spahn and Rahm
Emanuel, another ex-Obama chief of staff, appeared in each other's
weddings. "There are a lot of people Jeffrey can get to that political
candidates or their campaigns can't," says John Emerson, a Los Angeles
banker who co-chaired Obama's Southern California fundraising team.
Other industry players "assume that he's researched the candidates,
knows the issues, and there's a level of due diligence."
Even so, being Hollywood's liaison to
Washington has its perks: Obama takes Katzenberg's calls, and he's
welcomed at the White House.
Katzenberg is a political operative's dream, with little interest in
attention for himself—through Spahn, he declined multiple requests to be
interviewed for this story—and no ideological litmus tests. He didn't
complain when Obama the lofty-minded candidate gave way to Obama the
pragmatic politician. And even as the Priorities super-PAC struggled to
get traction, and at least one donor called Katzenberg to try to
convince him the project was a waste of money, he stuck with it.
A few days after Katzenberg's $2 million donation showed up in Priorities USA Action's monthly disclosure records, a
New York Times editorial scolded the group for "abandoning the high ground" and choosing to "raise millions of their own secret dollars." The
Times singled out Katzenberg by name.
Begala shuddered as he read it at his suburban Maryland home. He knew
big donors hated seeing their name in print, let alone in the Sunday
Times. Katzenberg was the CEO of a publicly traded company, with a reputation to worry about. What if the piece
scared away their bell cow? He had to call Katzenberg and do damage control.
Begala stepped outside. If the call got nasty, he didn't want the kids to hear.
"Did you see the editorial?" he asked.
"What editorial?" Katzenberg said.
"The one in the
Times."
"Oh yeah, I read it last night."
And?
"That kind of thing doesn't bother me."
Begala felt both stunned and relieved. "He's the first donor I've
ever met who could shake off a really tough editorial in the Sunday
New York Times," he later told me.
Katzenberg had been called a lot worse.
Before he was Jeffrey—never
Jeff—he was Squirt. The son of a Wall Street stockbroker and an artist,
Katzenberg grew up on Park Avenue and attended the prestigious Ethical
Culture Fieldston prep school in the Bronx's leafy Riverdale enclave. In
the summer of 1965, having been kicked out of the exclusive Camp
Kennebec in Maine for gambling with M&M's, he volunteered on
Rep. John Lindsay 's
mayoral campaign. A charismatic, blond, blue-eyed, patrician Upper East
Sider, Lindsay was a rare breed even in his own time, a liberal
Republican who opposed the Vietnam War and marched in civil rights
protests. Katzenberg was 14 when he joined Lindsay's campaign but looked
12, thus the nickname. "If you needed six cups of coffee at three in
the morning, Squirt could get them," Lindsay said years later.
Katzenberg lured his Fieldston classmates to the campaign office with
free pizza and soda, then enlisted them to stuff envelopes. When
Lindsay became mayor, Katzenberg started showing up at City Hall after
school, sitting in on meetings, quizzing staffers. "Nobody quite knew
what his role was," says Sid Davidoff, a former Lindsay aide and friend
of Katzenberg's. But he devoured politics, proving to be a quick study
and tenacious worker. "It was always, 'What's the next thing we gotta
do?'"
After graduation, Katzenberg dropped out of college to work at City
Hall. Dick Aurelio, a Lindsay campaign manager who also served as a
deputy mayor, remembers him as an eager, loyal aide fascinated by
campaign strategy, ad rates, and the inner workings of politics. One day
in April 1970, Aurelio got a phone call while dining at a downtown
steak house. His daughter, Jodi, who was being treated at Mount Sinai
Hospital after a riding accident, had slipped into a coma. He needed to
get to the hospital right away. "Before I know it," Aurelio says, "I was
in Jeffrey's car and he had a siren—I don't know where he got it
from—that he was holding to the top of his car with one hand and he was
driving with the other." They raced uptown, picked up Aurelio's wife,
and ran every red light. Otherwise, "I would have never seen her before
she died," Aurelio told me.
Davidoff enlisted Katzenberg as his deputy, and when a window got
smashed at a volunteer office, or when Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies
staged an anti-war protest in the middle of Second Avenue, Davidoff and
Katzenberg were dispatched to deal with it. On calmer nights, they took
in midnight screenings of cartoons and B movies at a seedy theater on
42nd Street, sitting among the junkies and loners up in the balcony,
until their pagers beckoned them back to City Hall. "He always loved the
animated stuff," Davidoff recalls.
On Lindsay's 1969 reelection campaign, Katzenberg served as an
advance man, carrying a suitcase with as much as $100,000 in campaign
cash. In 1972, when Lindsay became a Democrat and sought the party's
presidential nomination, Katzenberg signed on; after the ill-fated
campaign, he bounced between gigs as a professional poker player and a
maître d'.
Aside from politics, Katzenberg nurtured a love of arts and movies,
often chattering away about some new record or a pop art show between
hands at Aurelio and Davidoff's weekly poker game. His mentors connected
him with the producer David V. Picker, who was looking for a new gofer.
Katzenberg jumped at the chance.
After a year with Picker, he moved to Paramount Pictures to work
under chairman Barry Diller. Despite his youth and inexperience, he gave
as good as he got. The first time Diller chewed him out, as the
Hollywood Reporter's Kim Masters wrote in her book on Michael Eisner,
The Keys to the Kingdom ,
Katzenberg, then 26, stormed into Diller's office, slammed his hands on
the desk, and said, "This is the first time and the last time that you
will ever talk to me that way while I work for you. If you do not want
me here, I will leave. If you ever do this again, either start with
'You're fired' or end with 'You're fired.'"
Encounters like that, combined with a manic work ethic, served
Katzenberg well as the brash, go-anywhere-do-anything lieutenant to
Diller and Paramount CEO Michael Eisner. He moved to Los Angeles in
1977, and eventually rose to head of production at Paramount.
New York magazine
called him Paramount's "golden retriever." One colleague said, "The
problem with working with Jeffrey is there's no job too low he won't do
himself."
Eisner had grown up a block or two away from Katzenberg, and the two
sons of Park Avenue privilege forged one of the industry's most
formidable partnerships when they took over the ailing Walt Disney
Company in 1984. Eisner, a failed playwright, was seen as the
controlling, creative half, and Katzenberg as the workhorse. The stories
of Katzenberg's aggressive management style spread fast in
Hollywood—the 6 a.m. meetings, the 200 daily phone calls, the
back-to-back-to-back business breakfasts, the prodigious amounts of Diet
Coke. Eisner put him in charge of Disney's film studio, including its
stale animation company, and Katzenberg poured everything into the task.
He wore the same outfit again and again, and kept a new Ford Mustang on
blocks so that when the one he was driving died he wouldn't have to
think about buying a new one.
His motto was "If you don't come to work on Saturdays, don't bother
to come in on Sunday." Yet he let his employees take risks, too. "He'd
say, '80 percent of the time you'll make the right decision, and 20
percent of the time you won't, but we'll figure it out,'" a former
colleague recalls. With Katzenberg and Eisner at the helm, Disney
underwent a renaissance, churning out box office hits like
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,
Aladdin,
The Little Mermaid, and
Beauty and the Beast.
Disney bagged dozens of awards, and, under Katzenberg, became the
industry's most profitable studio, raking in $800 million in 1994—four
hundred times what it had earned a decade before.
On the lot, Katzenberg could be charismatic in one meeting and
imperious in the next. The animators bristled at his micromanagement and
copious production notes. In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter
Isaacson quotes Katzenberg telling a roomful of artists: "Everybody
thinks I'm a tyrant. I
am a tyrant. But I'm usually right."
Katzenberg has mellowed a bit since his time at Disney, friends and
former colleagues say. He once said that while working for Eisner he saw
himself as a "mercenary soldier. Someone else wrote the music, and I
marched to their tune. And if someone poked me in the chest, I would hit
them with a baseball bat. And if they hit me with a bat, I would blast
them with a bazooka."
Eventually, Katzenberg would turn that bazooka on his boss. After
Disney CEO Frank Wells died in a 1994 helicopter crash, Katzenberg
believed Eisner had promised him the job. Eisner disagreed. A few months
after Wells' death, Eisner summoned Katzenberg to his office and handed
him a draft resignation announcement. "I was disappointed, sad, angry,
scared, philosophical, sad, vengeful, relieved, and sad," Katzenberg
would say years later. He
eventually sued
Eisner and Disney, seeking $250 million in unpaid bonuses. Katzenberg
settled out of court for a sizable sum believed to be close to his
initial demand.
On October 12, 1994, flanked by Spielberg and his longtime friend and
mentor Geffen ("my dream team," he called them), Katzenberg unveiled
DreamWorks SKG, Hollywood's first major new studio in 60 years. It would
churn out live-action movies, animated films, music, video games, and
more. "There's an opportunity for us to have a revolution," Katzenberg
said. The threesome raised an unprecedented $2.7 billion for their
launch and went on to produce
American Beauty,
Saving Private Ryan, and
Gladiator,
all Oscar winners. And yet DreamWorks was never able to match the heft
of a Warner Bros. or a Universal. In 2004, its wildly successful
animation studio, riding high after
Shrek, was spun off into a
publicly traded company; Katzenberg went with it as CEO. Paramount
Pictures snapped up the rest of DreamWorks for $1.6 billion.
SKG may have failed to create the next great studio, but in political
circles, their brand grew stronger. During the DreamWorks years, all
three men reliably donated to Democratic candidates. While Katzenberg
was close enough to President Clinton to host him at his homes in Malibu
and Park City, Utah, he was overshadowed by Geffen in the SKG
triumvirate. It was Geffen who rallied Hollywood donors and gave $20
million of his own to Clinton and the Democrats; he was rewarded with
sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom.
On October 18, 2006, Oprah Winfrey
interviewed
the young Sen. Obama on her show. Afterward, Katzenberg's wife,
Marilyn, told Jeffrey she wanted to meet this rising Democratic star.
Spahn, who first introduced Obama to LA's donors when he was a state
legislator running for the Senate, had no trouble setting up the
meeting, and Katzenberg, too, was taken. He was reminded of one of his
earliest mentors: John Lindsay was "very much about hope and about
engagement and change," Katzenberg says in a public-television
documentary on Lindsay released in 2010. "All the things we hear today
were things he represented in 1965." Obama, in turn, was impressed with
his new acquaintance, and sought Katzenberg's support as he mulled a bid
for the White House.
Years later, in the final weeks of the 2012 campaign, Obama came to Los Angeles and
hailed the couple during a $25,000-a-plate fundraiser ,
a rare, heartfelt shout-out from a president not known for his warm
relationship with donors. "Jeffrey and Marilyn Katzenberg have been
tireless and stalwart and have never wavered through good times and bad
since my first presidential race, back when a lot of people still
couldn't pronounce my name," he said. "I will always be grateful to
them."
When David Geffen hosted
fundraisers for Clinton, he did not fuss over seating arrangements. But
Katzenberg does. In the spring of last year, as he was planning a
major Obama event
at George Clooney's house, he told the campaign that he wanted
something grander than the usual pep-talk-plus-photo-op. He wanted Obama
to hang out, to mingle. Each table would have 10 donors and 11 chairs;
Obama or a top aide would sit in the spare one and chat, before moving
on to another table. The campaign was reluctant to sign off on a night
of political speed dating, but Katzenberg insisted.
Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Phil Roach/ZUMA Press
He and Spahn also suggested raffling off tickets to a couple of
low-dollar donors, raising an extra $7 million before the first guest
arrived. The night of the event, Obama worked a crowd—Salma Hayek, Jack
Black, Barbra Streisand—cheered by his announcement the day before of
his support for gay marriage. Katzenberg milled around, leaning on his
friends to open their checkbooks. The total haul: $15 million, making it
one of the most lucrative fundraisers in history. "I've been around
this business for a long time, and I've never seen anything like that,"
says Dick Harpootlian, a longtime Democratic operative who earned a
ticket.
Obama aides say they sought out Katzenberg and Spahn for guidance on
messaging and outreach to wealthy Democratic donors at every turn. Rufus
Gifford, Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaign fundraising chief, says, "I
knew that from the moment I took this job I would call Jeffrey for
advice: What should I do? How would I go about doing it? They were a
couple of our greatest allies." Jim Messina, Obama's campaign manager,
says he was talking to Katzenberg as early as 2010 about how to make the
reelection the most technologically adept campaign in American history.
Katzenberg has said he wants nothing, personally or professionally,
in exchange for his support of the president, and DreamWorks' DC agenda
is hard to glean: The studio has no lobbyists and is not part of the
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Yet it is hard to deny
that he—along with Hollywood as a whole—has benefited from his
connections. In the 2012 fiscal-cliff fight, for instance, the White
House insisted Congress preserve a $430 million
tax break
for film studios that keep production jobs in the United States. But
nowhere are the benefits to Katzenberg clearer than in his company's
efforts in China.
The industry's expansion into China's $2.7 billion film market, which
is expected to supplant the United States' as the world's largest in 5
to 10 years, hasn't been without obstacles. Several studios, including
DreamWorks, are under federal investigation for potentially violating US
anti-bribery laws in China. And until recently, the Chinese government
would allow only 20 foreign films to screen in its theaters each year,
and kept a greater cut of ticket sales than Hollywood thought was fair.
In 2009, the United States won a World Trade Organization ruling urging
China to open up, but to no avail.
In July 2011, ahead of a trade visit to China, Vice President Joe
Biden met with industry leaders who asked him to press their case.
Biden, too, returned empty-handed. Seven months later, Xi Jinping, then
China's leader-in-waiting, made his first official visit to America. On
hand to greet him was Katzenberg, who scored a seat next to Xi at a
State Department luncheon.
Later that week, Xi and Biden traveled to Los Angeles, and Katzenberg
joined them for lunch with Gov. Brown. Biden spent the day pushing Xi
on the film quota and profit sharing disputes. The White House wanted to
bump the studios' portion from 13 percent to 27 percent, but as the
negotiations intensified, Biden asked Katzenberg and Disney CEO Bob Iger
what they could live with. Then Biden made Xi a new offer: 25 percent.
Xi agreed, and he also said China would let in 14 more foreign-made 3-D
and IMAX movies each year.
Katzenberg was simultaneously working on a $350 million deal to open
Oriental DreamWorks, a new animation studio in Shanghai—and it couldn't
happen without Xi's approval. That same day, at a US-China economic
forum held at a downtown LA hotel, Katzenberg officially unveiled the
project—and proudly announced that it now bore Xi's personal
endorsement. "It's hard to overestimate how big a deal this is for
DreamWorks Animation," he
told the Financial Times .
Spahn insists Katzenberg had no discussions with "anyone in the Obama
administration" about the Shanghai project, and denies he had any role
in the WTO resolution. But those wins did more than show the perks of
having friends in high places; they put Katzenberg's deal-making savvy
on full display. At the end of Xi's visit, all parties walked away as
winners: The White House rushed out a press release celebrating the WTO
agreement as a "breakthrough" in trade relations. Xi got a Hollywood
ending to his trip. And the entertainment industry—including DreamWorks
Animation, which has invested heavily in 3-D—won more access to a
booming film market.
Even when show business is on the losing side, Katzenberg knows how
to work the angles. In January 2012, Chris Dodd, the powerful former
senator who'd recently taken charge of the MPAA, was feverishly working
to get the
Stop Online Piracy Act
passed as a safeguard against illegal downloading. Silicon Valley and
the netroots saw SOPA as an attempt to muzzle free speech online, and
Dodd began hearing rumors that Obama would also oppose the bill. So he
asked Katzenberg to get a firm read of Obama's thinking, and to urge the
president not to dismiss SOPA. "It was kind of mortifying for the MPAA"
to rely on Katzenberg, Masters says—especially given that DreamWorks
isn't in the association.
Ultimately, even though Katzenberg wanted SOPA as much as the other
studio heads, he declined Dodd's request. But he knew that any White
House opposition to SOPA could do real harm to Obama's relationship with
Hollywood—there was even talk of boycotting the president's
fundraisers. So a few days after the White House finally came out
against the bill, Katzenberg called Obama and suggested he and his top
aides reach out to the studio chiefs to soothe their egos and shore up
their support. Barry Meyer, the CEO of Warner Brothers, received one of
those calls; he and his wife went on to raise more than $500,000 for
Obama's reelection campaign. In the end, Katzenberg chose to help Obama
win over his industry rather than helping his industry win over Obama.
For people in
fundraising, the campaign cycle never stops. Days after Romney lost,
2016 Republican hopefuls including Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell courted
Adelson , the casino mogul, during a trip to Las Vegas.
Political adviser Donna Bojarsky says an already common question in
Democratic fundraising circles is "Who is SKG going to support?"
Katzenberg and Spahn are set to cohost a big fundraiser for Newark Mayor
Cory Booker's 2014 Senate bid; they also met with Messina about
Organizing for Action, the nonprofit group aiming to raise $50 million
to advance the president's second-term legislative agenda. Spahn told me
he and Katzenberg have heard from many 2014 House and Senate hopefuls
looking for Hollywood money. Katzenberg has even been active in Los
Angeles, raising more than $150,000 to elect Wendy Greuel, a former
DreamWorks employee running for mayor. "This is a very long effort for
[Katzenberg], a lifelong effort," Paul Begala says. "My sense is this is
not just about one election."
He would know. On November 6, 2012, Begala was at CNN's Washington
bureau, readying for a long night of parsing election results, when his
cellphone buzzed. It was Katzenberg. The network had just called the
election for Obama.
The two men traded congratulations. Katzenberg thanked Begala for the
work he and the Priorities team had done. Then he asked, "So what's
next on the agenda? What comes next?"
"Jeffrey," Begala answered, "I haven't even gotten time to get drunk yet."
According to a study that was just released by Boston Consulting Group, the wealthiest one percent now own 39 percent of all the wealth in the world. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent only own 1 percent of all the wealth in the world combined.
The global financial system has been designed to funnel wealth to the
very top, and the gap between the wealthy and the poor continues to
expand at a frightening pace. The global elite continue to hoard wealth
and heap together enormous mountains of treasure in these troubled days
even though the economic suffering around the planet continues to
grow. So exactly how have the global elite accumulated so much wealth?
Well, one of the primary ways is through the use of debt. As I have
written about previously,
there is about 190 trillion dollars of debt in the world but global GDP
is only about 70 trillion dollars. Our debt-based global financial
system systematically transfers wealth from us and our governments into
the hands of the global elite. And of course the gigantic banks and
corporations that the elite control are constantly gobbling up
everything of value that they can find: natural resources, profitable
small businesses, real estate, politicians, etc. Money, power,
ownership and control are becoming very, very tightly concentrated at
the top of the food chain, and that is a very dangerous thing for
humanity. When too much money and power gets into too few hands, it
almost always results in tyranny.
