Cap n' Trade's Cash Cow Pattie

(A Mel Toast Cap n' Trade Exclusive)

Will Cap 'n Trade Lower the Boom on Middle Class Americans?

-Pelosi Bribes Congress with Chocolate Covered Dove Bars, Rahm Whips Votes at White House Luau-

Breaking Wind News

Washington – Oh, what an (insider) party, indeed! Bribery, graft, and towel snapping never looked so good for the Democrats, who are carrying out the American middle class extermination plan with such an entertaining and efficient, deft hand to rival even the tragically deposed White Gloved-One or David Copperfield.

Read this excellent Canada Free Press article by Judi McLeod to learn more about the scheme's history and cast of characters, including Al “Cap n' Trade” Gore, George Soros, Maurice Strong and the cadre of Goldman Sachs alumni behind America's rapid descent into third-world status. (Note that this article was written back in September, 2008.) McLeod writes:

“With little media monitoring, Strong and Gore are cashing in on the lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.” (Canada Free Press, March 13, 2007). “Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”

From Napa to Annandale, champagne corks were popping last weekend as President Obama celebrated Al “Cap n' Trade” Gore's cow pattie otherwise known as the U.S. climate and energy change bill (with the help of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's brilliant scheme to bribe Congress by plying them with chocolate-covered dove bars) that slipped through a narrow passage last Friday in what public relations flacks are touting as an historical “landmark victory.” The Cap n' Trade bill's emphasis upon a “moral imperative to lead the world” in spearheading climate change woes would penalize U.S. polluters and pass along rising energy and manufacturing costs to U.S. Residents while overpopulous countries like India and China pollute the global ecosystem and laugh, and laugh and laugh. BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries that have traditionally resisted any notion of a common responsibility to make current polluters pay would do well to enlist in a carbon tax effort. But the real payday bonanza of Cap n' Trade's scheme has stitched a silver lined quilt for tech lobby and beltway insider elites in the form of creating new jobs not for educated middle class Americans but for the Chicago Climate Exchange, among other hedge-fund and teat feeders and assorted sycophants.

Is the Chicago Climate Exchange the place where all recently sacked and spanked, bad, bad mean and greedy old Wall Street insiders go for their second life?

Since Cap n' Trade's scheme would actually raise the costs of goods and services, on top of increased utility bills disproportionately to the poor and dwindling middle class, how did this sleight-of-hand get walked in through the back door?

McLeod also notes that while this “21 Century U.S. Civil war” on the middle class is curiously not calling groups like Code Pink to call off the troops, the MSM and blogorama propaganda is now at an all-time high:

“While middle class Americans have been busy putting their youngsters through school and college, pooh-bahs like Buffet, George Soros and his Canadian sidekick Kyoto architect Maurice Strong, who hangs out with the likes of Al Gore and “Now-I’m-a-Christian” Mikhail Gorbachev have been rearranging their lives for them. For all of those middle classers understandably ignoring a propagandist press, here’s the first hint: The pooh-bahs seem mighty gleeful that the U.S. is headed toward certain economic meltdown. Make that a meltdown with or without a $700 billion bank bailout.”

Is Cap n' Trade pulling for Americans? Oh, no, friends. Do you really want this ilk on your rowing team? Great, if you're idea of a seaworthy vessel is floating on a crumpled maple leaf without a paddle down the River Styxx...

Cap n' Trade has his gold-plated hook into your plebian tidy-whities and his CO2 emiting cash-cow is primed at the pump to emit trillions of gaseous offset$ to shore up his insider-only fleet of elitist blowhards who are set to fire-up the cannons straight at what's left of America's educated middle class. Oh no? How's that whole jobs for Americans and not imported labor thing working out? WHAT Single Payer? Show me the money!

McLeod ponders the ability of Americans (much less the Democratic Party cheerleaders) to, IMO, ever exceed the brainpower of the rank banana slug:

“As Henry Ford once said: “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. The one aim of these financiers is world control by the creation of inextinguishable debt.”

Debt in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as there are means for this country's citizens to pay for it and thrive. Same with trade (as long a “trade” is not in actuality human trafficking for cheap labor.) But handing away jobs to cheap foreign recruits, restricting access to quality healthcare and removing opportunities for prosperity from the mix is what smolders under the odious Cap n' 'Trade's scheme. As always, I invite anyone to prove me wrong.

Cordially,

Mel Toast

Allow the Chicago Climate Exchange & Goldman Sachs to Broker Your Gas

(Photo credits TreeHugger)

-Gas collection and control extraction well at the Tontitown, Arkansas landfill-

SOMEBODY Has to Broker Your Gas...

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. writes in The American Spectator how "Sanity from the Indian Subcontinent" is prevailing over the Obama Administration's proposed carbon limits.

LWOH reported last month how Hillary Clinton recently visited India where she apologized for U.S. “mistakes” and encouraged India to adopt our 'American Carbon Serfdom Act' otherwise known around here as cap-and-trade. She was, as we reported here, treated to a verbal dress-down by the country's Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, who dismissed her request for India to slow down their industrial development in order to protect the global environment. The Environmental Minister explained how this pressure to adopt emissions regulations such as the U.S. cap-and-trade bill is not in his country's best interest:

"There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have among the lowest emissions per capita, face to actually reduce emissions. And as if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours."

The article also describes our cap-and-trade bill, "which will not only impose economic costs (for Americans, $7.4 trillion in taxes, our largest tax increase ever)" but how it could start an international trade war by excluding imported goods from countries like India that reject our "environmental diktats." BTW, China and Brazil do too. (Maybe it's high time for the U.S. to put the brakes on imported goods from India, since their leading export has been in human trafficking with their citizens willing to work at U.S. corporations for a fraction of American prevailing wages.)

For those who missed Matt Taibbi's must read article The Great American Bubble Machine, here it is via way of Corrente. (What Matt left out were all of the juicy details about the same players and Democratic heroes caught up in the Tech Bubble, who are now knee deep in the climate change bubble. Maybe he'll get around to that in his next article...)

Why the frenzy, then, for the U.S. to impose a global carbon trading scheme? Who will benefit? LWOH offers a few of several answers here and here and here and here. Another answer is an overcrowded, global population competing for scarce resources who can breath clean air and drink clean water - but that answer is too pedestrian. The true benefactors of such a scheme are the global oligarchs who will invest and profit from a little known, emerging financial market whose citadel (with a global business plan) is headquartered not on NYC's Wall St. but in Chicago, IL and is called the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX).

Remember Obama's Goldman Sachs filled administration? Well, CCX is a safehouse for Goldman Sachs insiders like Hank Paulson, along with a host of other CCX founding members including American Electric Power (AEP), Dupont, Baxter International Inc., the City of Chicago, Equity Office Properties Trust, Ford Motor Company, International Paper, Manitoba Hydro, MeadWestvaco Corporation, Motorola, Inc., STMicroelectronics, Stora Enso North America, Temple-Inland Inc. and Waste Management,Inc.

Perhaps the least publicized yet famous carbon broker CCX founder is none other than President Obama, who served on the Joyce Foundation's board of directors. In 2000, the Joyce Foundation provided a grant through Northwestern University to conduct a feasibility study for a voluntary carbon trading pilot program. “The Joyce Foundation Named Barack Obama Of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland A Director.” (Chicago Sun-Times, 11/28/94). The Joyce Foundation’s Annual Reports list Barack Obama as one of the 12 members of the Board of Directors from 1998 until 2001. Wikipedia lists that Obama served from 1994 to 2002 on the board of directors of the Joyce Foundation.

In general, creating a new dragon to slay (climate change) brings with it all sorts of offset revenue generating solutions in the form of software, consulting, rebates and tax credits.

Here's how garbage behemoth Waste Management does it with their methane flaring project in Tontitown, Arkensas. According to Treehugger, a BusinessWeek article raised questions about whether the methane flaring project "would have taken place even in the absence of offsets." The article explains selling carbon offset credits to customer, TerraPass here:

"Since 2005 Waste Management, Inc. (the credit seller) has sold over 15,000 tons of carbon offset credits related to the Tontitown to Chicago Climate Exchange (the broker) from which TerraPass (the customer) purchased them."

Great. But where are all the green jobs that were supposed to be created? (Per their website, San Francisco based Terrapass btw, like just about every "green technology" startup, has no job openings.) But Terrapass apparently does have a few employees, and from their website defines what they do here:

"TerraPass Carbon Management Services works with project developers to develop greenhouse gas reduction projects in a variety of industries. We have extensive experience working with farms, landfills, and wind power installations and have flexibility in considering other types of projects.

To begin, TerraPass helps owners and operators define changes they can make to reduce their emissions and to qualify their work for carbon crediting. Using proprietary modeling tools, we assess these activities against recognized third party carbon credit standards, and fund promising projects by contracting to purchase their carbon credits."

Just a side note here, but Terrapass, a privately held startup, sounds like it does a lot of the same stuff that the non-profit government body known as the EPA could do, you know, as part of the job of protecting the environment and all. Hmph. This has me wondering if, by the time the Obama administration is through with us, most government run programs including everything from the U.S. postal service (think Fed Ex) to public school education (think the Singularity etc.) to local law enforcement (think Xe) won't all be dismantled and taken over by a few well connected, for profit insiders who are adept at knowing which line to stand in for TARP-ish government subsidy handouts. Soon, we will have a country that is not governed and run by and for the people but by and for the self-appointed, no -bid contract Beltway and Sand Hill Rd. sycophants.

Moreover, should it not be a red flag when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) admits cap-and-trade won’t work without India and China cooperating?

So is carbon trading the new Darth Vader? If you forget about profits for a moment, the carbon trade market is not realistically expected to create a new industry where none existed before, but rathter serve as an incentive for those engaged in desirable outcomes (like clean air, water, etc.) to keep doing it and for a marginal number of those engaged in undesirable outcome behavior to consider switching over from the darkside. In its purest form, the model is admirable.

By encouraging companies that are already profitable to add revenue streams from carbon offsets, this would create other advantages that make offsets/credits worthwhile. Corporate programs can grow and profit through measuring, monetizing, and administrating carbon offset programs and a willingness to look beyond just one program to find the right fit. But the whole carbon credit/offset market house of cards is hardly sustainable without enforcement and geo-political buy-in. Tyrrell cites a global warming critic, Professor Plimer, who explains:

"When I try explaining 'global warming' to people in Iran or Turkey they have no idea what I'm talking about."

Tyrrell notes that "alarmists" like Gore and Clinton, and for that mater, President Barack Obama, are "a self-centered minority out of touch with human needs and with atmospheric conditions." He cites Plimer's observation:

"Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury," he told Spectator. "It's the new religion for urban populations which have lost their faith in Christianity."

I tend to agree with Plimer. Not over the debate on global warming and its acolytes, which, as a matter Lakoffian framing proportions, should emphasize the very real perils of global over-population's impact on global pollution. As much as credit should be given to Gore for spearheading the subject under the banner of "global warming", here is where I find the Gore, Clinton and Obama cabal suspect: If "global warming" were such an imminent threat, why have they and their insider pals not stopped their living the high life habits which they insist causes it?

Oh sure, they turn their AC down one degree and make their domestic staff buy cloth Whole Foods bags and keep a token Prius parked in the garage, etc. Those other bad, polluting habits like private jet travel, humongous, multiple dwellings, SUV transporation, and so on are only meant for the global oligarchs and their yes men? Is this what the new global climate exchange market supports? A means for a few global insiders to reap profits by exchanging lucrative, gov't. subsidized corporate credits through charging a tax on the heads of billions of "polluting" civilian units? (I am all for a global carbon tax that taxes polluting corporations but against this cap-and-trade scheme.)

The new climate change market (CCX) sadly may be our crumbling Empire's last rabbit trick in the hat to push towards inventing a revenue generating market out of thin air. One that is not useful to mankind but to enslave mankind, with the exception of a very few "extremist" zealots with too much money:

Tyrrell writes:

A timely explanation for their self-centered hysteria now comes from an unlikely source, Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and recently appointed to be Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Office of Management and Budget, by President Obama. In Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, he deposits his finding that "like-minded people tend to move to a more extreme version of what they thought" the more they talk with each other. The liberal Democrats who now dominate the Obama Administration have pretty much sealed themselves off from criticism. They have been talking with each other for years, reaffirming their prejudices and getting ever more extreme. Now on the environment they would impose on the whole world taxes and regulations that will suppress economic growth and conduce to trade wars. Fortunately they are running up against the enlightened Indians and Chinese, ex-socialists who have learned the benefits of growth. The surprise is on us."

Are the Indians and Chinese really "enlightened" as the author states above or just good politicians for now? It could be that the surprise will be on them, the next time a natural or man made economic and/or climate disaster hits them and they come calling to the U.S. hat in hand. After all, under the old "we're all one big global connected world" circus tent, if India and China don't want to pay their climate change eco-guilt dues, perhaps the first world for better or for worse will have no other choice than to show them how things are done Chicago style.

-2Truthy

Hizzoner Rahm Emanuel's Address to the Nation

A Message from Hizzoner Rahm Emanuel

Hey, Mother Fu#^ers,

Everyone and their retarded uncles have probably heard by now that I, Rahm Emanuel, White House Chief of Staff (on my way out the fu#^ing door) am supposed to run for Mayor of my home town, Chicago after Daley's sudden announcement that he's stepping down. Why is that? It really doesn't matter why his approval ratings are in the shitter or that the city is broke, or how any of that happened. So, for now, you can call me 'Hizzoner' until I decide whether I want the job or not.

What matters now is that the people of Chicago will need a strong leader to fill Daley's shoes and collect the dues. (I'm good at collecting dues, and don't DON'T even start talking sh*t about my height because I KNOW PEOPLE.) While that gravedigger buster Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart's name is making the rounds, believe me, I'm the guy around Chicago who knows where the bodies are buried. These other pansies in this poll called We Ask America haven't read We Ask Fu#^ing Rham, have they.

I'm not saying yet if I will or I won't run for Mayor, especially not to you fu#^ing babies at the Washington Post who make sh*t up as you go along, anyway. So, while you pussies are wondering why I might – might want to run for Mayor, don't forget that my man on the street (code for 'the smooth talking orator guy I walked into the White House') is also having his sorry ass handed to him in the Swamp for colossally blowing it on a long, long chain of undelivered, promised goods filed under the “hope and change” tab (haha) which will probably cost him 2012. It seems that the Inauguration was only yesterday.

Looking back, I think it was those disrespectful Scandinavian mother fu#^ers who pissed me off the most for refusing to cut the Chicago Olympics deal under Barry's watch - that's when the whole tuna can lid of this administration began to peel back. The rest is history.

Don't even get me started on peeking into Nate Silver's fu#^ing candy ass crystal ball for “predications”. F^CK YOU, Silver!

Did any of you people even consider that maybe I'm sick of being a political big, swinging, public servant dick and might want to switch hit over to the private sector? (No, you didn't, and don't try to tell me you assh*les did.) I know, the broke city of Chicago needs me to get back home and start kicking ass, even if I'm Mayor or not. And if nobody votes for me, boo-hoo, too fu#^ing bad because maybe I've got other, bigger, waaay bigger fu#^ing fish to fry. Like firing up the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) to name one not entirely half-backed scheme. I could even keep a seat warm for Barry by the time he gets back in 2013. Good times, all over again.

We'll make a new start trading carbon futures and bring a whole new meaning to the “Hookers and Blow School of Economics” where derivatives beasts rule and greenbacks are old school. Frame THAT, you fu#^ing babies without an inside clue. Talk about future book deals, baby... “Barry and Me: Building a Bridge Out of Fu#^ing Thin Air to the Hog Butcher of the World” is one title I'm already floating.

Maybe I'll even drive to DC to pick up Barry in my new Fisker, only I'll have to get the thick smell of bacon and grain spirits out of the backseat upholstery first. By all means, the prospects are so mother fu#^ing exciting, I've got to go take a cold shower.

Here's the important thing. If you forget all about how Chicago's public schools are one big, fu#^ing mess or that whole Renaissance 2010 stinker Barry cooked up with Arne Duncan is another frothy house of cards that needs filthy lucre that doesn't exist to run on, or that the fu#^ing teachers union contract is rolling around and they're in no mood for any more cutbacks and Charter Sch$ol sh*t, the city of Chicago is gonna need an Enforcer the size of Goliath. That would be me.

IF...if I run.

Later, maybe,

Hizzoner Rahm Emanuel

**********

-2Truthy

Tom Friedman Blows Green Smoke Up Joe Taxpayer's Pantlegs

The Price of Supporting American Job Outsourcing and In-shoring

It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.

Elitist champion of American job outsourcing/in-shoring, flat, hot, smelly and overcrowded Flat One Worlder, Tom Friedman, writes in this NY Times article entitled “The Price Is Not Right” that he doesn’t expect much from the G-20 meeting this week, and wishes “the leaders of the world's 20 top economies would commit themselves to a new standard of accounting — call it "Market to Mother Nature" accounting.”

Hmm. Does anyone hear another disastrous sales pitch in the offing? Why yes! Carbon taxation is Tom Friedman’s latest mantra!

Yours truly completely believes that solid green energy products and technologies have the potential to be better both for our environment and to stimulate our economy by providing American jobs at all levels. Certainly, no one can accuse champions like Al Gore of not being passionate about the challenges that climate change present. So why would anyone listen to Tom Friedman, who gets it wrong every time – he supported the Iraq War, he supports handing over American white collar jobs to India -- and now he is hustling yet another get Joe Taxpayer to cough up more dough scheme to once again benefit his crony insiders on our dwindling dime? Ben Smith’s blog at Politico offers a few insights here into the ehm, crony conflict of interest details in Friedman’s latest sales pitch on carbon taxes and cap and trade schemes.

To better understand the conflict of interest details, here is a background refresher on this administration’s few elites (also proponents of outsourcing or human trafficking) with beltway ties can capitalize on man-made global warming, which some investigative journalists have exposed as “a money-generating hoax,” with “Obama working feverishly to push the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme through Congress.”

In Friedman’s latest promotion piece to further disregard the growing numbers of unemployed and underemployed taxpaying Americans who will not profit from said carbon taxes, (who have also just come off of eight disastrous Bush years of subsidizing Halliburton & Co. in their murderous war on Iraq combined with the sociopathic push to hand American white collar jobs to India) corporate welfare mouthpiece-salesman, Tom runs a fast hustle by equating the financial system “meltdown” with what he refers to as “the climate system meltdown.”

Got that? Financial meltdown = climate system meltdown.

How is that? Because Tom Friedman said so.

Two stated problems: “financial” and “climate.” Huh? Matt Taibbi wrote a terrific article here in his hilarious assessment about how this corporate welfare megaphone makes it up as he goes along… how this

“porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 114,000 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.”

After proclaiming the two stated problems, Friedman then calls in and quotes a couple of experts, at least one whose expertise just so happens to be in the lofty, flat-worldish field known as outsourcing or human trafficking. (See below).

Never mind the fact that a NY Times Op-Ed propagandist (oops journalist) like Tom Friedman also said we should just all go shopping, which really means “should all go to hell” to save the economy - despite the fact that Tom supports importing Indians to take our jobs -- and this hate-thy-neighbor, sociopathic example of what America offers for journalism is a slap in the face to every citizen in this country as Friedman channels his inner man-crush by quoting an executive from one of the biggest human traffickers, Infosys, responsible for America’s disappearing jobs:

"When the balance sheet of a company does not capture the true costs and risks of its business activities," and when that company is too big to fail, "you end up with them privatizing their gains and socializing their losses," Nandan Nilekani, the co-chairman of the Indian technology company Infosys, remarked to me.”

Splendid! Who knew that the self-appointed climate expert could learn all about the financial crisis from an Indian outsourcer?

In addition to this “financial meltdown”, expert Tom also proclaims there is a simultaneous “climate” meltdown and hints that somebody (in the U.S.) has to foot the bill for both orchestrated problems so hey, why not devise a solution to a couple of problems that were cooked up by a few elitist insiders to line their pockets with taxpayer dough and then really, really stick it to these sorry-assed American taxpayers?

Quoth the expert protagonist of American Job Killing:

…"the reason we're experiencing a simultaneous meltdown in the financial system and the climate system is because we have been mispricing risk in both arenas — producing a huge excess of both toxic assets and toxic air that now threatens the stability of the whole planet.”

And, right as rain, Frank, the kind of “toxic air” Friedman is blowing amounts to more smoke up the gre$n pants legs of a few well connected insiders chomping at the bit to make a fast return on the stated carbon problem that Tom equates with the AIG mess:

“Just as AIG sold insurance derivatives at prices that did not reflect the real costs and risks of massive defaults, oil companies, coal companies and electric utilities today are selling energy products at prices that do not reflect the real costs to the environment and real risks of disruptive climate change (so future taxpayers will end up paying the difference).”

Hey Tom, you know something about AIG, eh? Well, here is Something Worse Than AIG: IBM Seeks Federal Stimulus Money While Outsourcing Jobs From The Hudson Valley to India.

Then, Friedman continues to profess that if products are “mispriced” and do not reflect “the real costs and risks” associated with their usage, people go to excess. “And that is what happened in the financial marketplace and in the energy/environmental marketplace during the credit bubble."

Bubbles? Oh really, Tom? You want to start talking bubbles? How about the dot.com bubble where your pals assigned themselves boatloads of tech stock options in all kinds of dogs of startups and made a clean sweep at the trough? Think the same thing can’t happen all over again with the same Chicago Climate Exchange cronies promoting a public rip-off funded by Obama before he was even POTUS?

Even as man-made global warming is being exposed as a money-generating hoax, many investigative journalists report that Obama is working feverishly to push the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme through Congress, and who better than Friedman to wind up throwing out this corporate sales pitch? While our nation’s “financial” problem can be tempered by employing our own citizens so they can start spending again, Obama his Economic Advisors have pledged to keep handing over American jobs to India anyway, and no amount of carbon taxation is going to stop the bleeding of our jobs which is eroding our economy and our society. But guys like Friedman don’t care about human beings, only human trafficking.
And does Friedman actually expect anyone to believe that by taxing carbon offenders, they won’t find loopholes, i.e., more business as usual?

“Our biggest financial-services companies, some of which came to be seen as too big to fail, engaged in complex financial trading schemes that did not adequately price in the costs and risks of a market reversal. And our biggest energy companies, utilities and auto companies became dependent on cheap hydrocarbons that spin off climate-changing greenhouse gases, and we clearly have not forced them, through a carbon tax, to price in the true risks and costs to society from these climate-changing fuels.”

Re: above – large and small corporations know how to work tax cuts and loopholes, so carbon taxing is still “taxing” a bunch of lawyered-up insiders who will exploit those loopholes, the same way that Friedman’s outsourcing pals exploit human beings in the form of labor. Read Citizen Carrie’s post here about Wachovia employees being forced to train their foreign replacements.

Case in point: Forget the word “carbon” for a moment, and take the case of an outsourcing shop “headquartered” in North Carolina, Synechron, that specializes in the outsourcing or human trafficking of cheap, imported labor to the U.S. from India to take jobs away from Americans.

Rather than Tom taking his puffed up journalistic backside down to North Carolina to interview the fired locals from Wachovia who have lost their jobs because of the legalized, Indian cheap labor lobby that Friedman triumphs, he instead is content to dispense quotes from officials at companies like Infosys who are complicit in this war on America’s white collar middle class.
Friedman goes on to proclaim that we need new banking regulations that reins in the leverage and speculative trading that big banks and insurance companies can undertake. Fair enough. But THEN he displays his salesy, bag-of burning rats in a meth lab, pseudo analysis here:

“And this is ALSO why we need a tax on carbon — so we and our power utilities don't become permanently addicted to cheap coal that makes for lower electricity prices today but spits out toxic greenhouse gases that have to be paid for by future generations tomorrow.”

Huh? Coal is bad. Check. Let’s tax all those American hillbillies who rely on coal to heat their dreadful shanties. Check. Let’s tax Utility companies that don’t do business with businessman Al Gore’s portfolio companies. Check. Let’s tax every effing body in this country, while we’re at it – to subsidize all of that other gre$n stuff that Gore’s VC firm is pushing. Check!

And just when I thought I would never, ever agree with anything this guy has to say, Friedman ejects this gem:

“This capitalist engine doesn't need to be discarded; it needs some fixes. For starters, we need to get back to basics — accountable lending, prudent saving, reasonable leverage and, most important, more engineering of goods than just financial products.”

Yay, Tom! I couldn’t agree with you more. I also want to see our capitalist system restored with some good, old-fashioned, non-sociopathic regulation and a stop to selling American jobs to India to end this human trafficking once and for all.

But wait…he resorts AGAIN to more pap by quoting a tank of hot air, finding another ‘expert’ on this mind-blowing, newly plucked from the nether region, stealth term called “destructive creation”:

“Some of our biggest financial firms got away from their original purpose — to fund innovation and to finance the process of "creative destruction," whereby new technologies that improve people's lives replace old ones, said Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, in an interview in The American Interest. Instead, he added, too many banks got involved in exotic and incomprehensible financial innovations — to simply make money out of money — which ended up as "destructive creation."

Gee whillackers, Mr. Hooper... By now, just about every Joe Blow on the street knows that “to simply make money out of money” has kind of put us in deep doo-doo, but I suppose Tom needed to quote an expert anyway…

“Destructive creation”, indeed. For this complicated, exotic term, to guys like Tom, in the end, translates to ‘kill American jobs by handing them to Indians AND get American taxpayers to support us greedy elites in every scheme we can pull out of our patooties and get these deplorable American plebes to subsidize.’

By now, it is plain to see that Thomas L. Friedman is every corporate welfare queen’s biggest proponent of the Cash Cow of Indian Outsourcing and mega-propagandist in this war on America’s educated middle class destructively created by them.

-2Truthy

Shell Pushes for "Unfettered" Cap and Trade

Cap & Trade or Carbon Tax?

Silicon Valley – It's the Derivatives Beast, Stupid! Get over yourselves and embrace the politics of eco-guilt and its elitist fraternal twin, cap and trade.

Climateer Investing reports that Shell Oil is pushing for an “unfettered” carbon trading market, along with BP Plc. Both support cap-and-trade, while Exxon Mobile Corp. prefers a more environmentally and consumer friendly carbon tax scheme. LWOH readers will recall that even the world's flattest and not-so-hottest NYT opinionator trashed cap-and-trade BEFORE he was for it. As yours truly has suggested, when former billionaire Tom Friedman is following the money, it's time to take a closer look at who's behind the next bubble. After all, if the U.S. can't keep its intellectual property safe from the Chinese or make stuff here anymore, what do Americans do for jobs? Time to tap George Soros and trot out the Goldman Sachs investment bankers. So...

Bend Over, Here it Comes Again! This from Climateer:

“Remember, just as economists using the tools of science (mathematics) doesn't make economics a science, artificial constructs like cap-and-trade using the tools of markets doesn't make the racket "market based".”

For more LWOH cap-and-trade market analysis, there are also voluntary cap-and-trade programs such as the one operated by the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), whose inbred and humble roots began with the current POTUS along with an all-too familiar, all-star caste.

As yours truly has also noted here, even Al Gore expressed the downside of cap and trade, preferring the more sensible carbon-based tax system which would create direct incentives to develop and use less carbon-intensive fuels and more energy-efficient technologies. Avast, me hearties! The Derivatives Beast waits for no one.

In other exciting news, Al Gore's Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers VC funded 25 or so person start-up Hara Software, which came out of stealth mode a few months ago, has been described as a “hot commodity.” Their product is meant to track the carbon footprints of large corporations and to identify or police “a business' entire environmental impact from laptop to long-haul truck.” Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers invested $6 million in venture capital with recent follow on investments from JAFCO Ventures and Nth Power. Fast Company explains Hara's noble rot or “low-hanging fruit” identification scheme:

“Hara CEO Amit Chatterjee says the software, "is focused on understanding organizational metabolism, the input and output of natural resources and energy."  Hara--"Fresh green" in Sanskrit--tracks use of electricity, water, chemicals, and gas, and compares it to outputs of waste water, greenhouse gas, and solid waste. The software identifies the "low-hanging fruit", or the simplest ways to cut energy use and waste, along with longer-term goals.”

Hara has also managed to attract Rupert Murdoch to help his media company, News Corp clean up their emissions, or whatever it is that they drag around in their canvas bags for lunch. News Corp go carbon neutral by 2010. It's one thing to ask the local steel mill to go all carbon neutral, but an office full of self-satisfied, upwardly-urban, literate neophytes? Aren't these people already heeding the climate change memo by wearing more sweaters in the winter, turning the lights off, recycling  their empty ale bottles and cooling it on the A/C during hot summer days like the rest of the world's eco-serfs?

News Corp’s manager of Energy Initiatives, Vijay Sudan, said in the company's report that News Corp had looked “at numerous solutions” and chose Hara “due to the intuitive nature as well as the breadth and depth of the Hara solution.” Given the sheer size of News Corp, Hara has bagged a very large win for such a small, newbie firm. Back in 2007 Murdoch described the impact of News Corp going carbon neutral as similar to “turning off the electricity in the city of London for five full days.”

There we have it. In a million, climate change wracked years, London would not ever stand for the electricity being turned off for a five full days. And with Hara's low-hanging fruit detection technology, let's hope that Murdoch's noble soldiers on the front lines will not end up losing the war on climate change, and that a good time will be had by all. After that, at least a few investors will collect their checks and go back to their country houses or Westminster flats.

Elaine Meinel Supkis at Culture of Life News offers signs of intelligent life in the blogosphere on the subject of cap and trade, as she reports how hackers released private global warming emails:

“The obvious hysteria of the people pushing us into the fatal carbon trading market scheme has alerted many people who already are not prone to trust bankers, into digging in heels over global warming.  And thus, we are set on the path to another mega-confrontation that will not be based on science by EITHER side of the issue but will be mostly emotional.”

About those emails, while one can reasonably conclude that although the science of global warming is real, a current cooling trend is here. One of the emails indicated that one scientist had to hide and bury the current cooling trend in the data INSTEAD of explaining or clarifying it with regards to “global warming.” Supkis correctly points out that the emails do not disprove global warming, but rather show that “scientists can be stupid or difficult like other people.” She truly understands the science behind global warming and the political and economic motivations prompting the urgency going into Copenhagen:

“Global warming was NOT embraced by the ruling elites until it was connected to the Derivatives Beast. Then and only then, did it take off like a rocket. Only, the sun didn’t cooperate, did it?”

-2Truthy