Gore’s conveniently amassed fortune

Otherwise, his environmental investments have prospered thanks to government handouts and mandates. His Current TV, in the process of being sold to al-Jazeera, attracted a minuscule audience in its seven-year existence. It averaged just 42,000 viewers per evening last year. Yet the payday coming to Gore will be between $US70 million ($67m) and $US100m, depending on which estimate you prefer.

We never subscribed to the theory regarding success in life that "it's not what you know but who you know". We may have to rethink.

What Current had going for it was Gore, who would drop in on media moguls and explain why it was in their political interest to put Current on their networks and dun subscribers 5c or 10c a month for a channel they never watch. Saying no just wasn't worth it to companies that must run a daily gauntlet of Democratic regulators in Washington.

Not to oblige Gore would be to face, at every congressional hearing, the likelihood of some legislator lambasting them for "censoring" a progressive voice.

So the industry became habituated to transferring $US100m a year in what might otherwise be its own profits to owners of a cable channel nobody watched. These carriage agreements were Current TV's sole valuable assets. And the fact that nobody watched was probably not unrelated. If you're not pleasing the viewer, you're pleasing somebody else - usually in a way that makes for dreary programming. Living on the sufferance of cable moguls certainly didn't help Current put on rollicking liberal TV in the manner of MSNBC, which justifies its existence by actually attracting viewers.

But all gravy trains must come to an end: in a world of Netflix and cord-cutting, an extra nickel or dime is no longer so easily slipped past cable subscribers. Time Warner Cable was the first to bid good riddance, dropping the channel from its lineup once the sale was announced. Gore is clearly getting out just in time, though not before extracting one last political rent in return for using his famous name to help al-Jazeera expand in a sceptical US media marketplace.

Don't look for us, however, to milk the irony of Gore, warrior against climate change, pocketing a fortune from Middle East petrocrats. Gore has been in cash-in mode for a while. What's more, his style of entrepreneurship is the rising thing in our world, so respect must be paid.

Which brings us to last week's other news: Microsoft still tries to make money selling consumers products they want, though it has launched some stinkers: the "Kin" cellphone line comes to mind. But its latest stinker was more up Gore's alley: a multi-million-dollar investment in trying to foment a government anti-trust crackdown on Google.

That effort went conspicuously bust on Friday (Australian time) when the Federal Trade Commission let Google go with token remonstrances about its business practices. Given the elastic principles of anti-trust, there was nothing terribly far-fetched about Microsoft's effort to frame Google as a public utility that must be closely regulated. Many stranger things have passed muster in the intellectual cult of trust-busting.

Where Microsoft went wrong was in failing to orchestrate the multiple points of pressure to convince five commissioners of the FTC that their own interests would be served by bringing a case.

The media wasn't clamouring for a Google crackdown. Congress was less than enthusiastic. The Obama White House, known to be close to Google, was disturbingly mute.

Anti-trust is supposed to be entirely about clinical economics but never is.

FDR's anti-trust chief Thurman Arnold once said anti-trust was a collective squeal of resentment against businesses that annoyed us with their success.

Google hasn't been sufficiently annoying.

Notice, by the way, that the astute Arnold went on to found Arnold & Porter, one of the great Beltway law firms - and as much a model in its time of Beltway influence-peddling as Al Gore is today.