Cap and trade offers limitless profits for big banks Commentary William A. Levinson
June 28
Genuine Democrats do not drive up the middle class' cost of living to enrich Wall Street investment banks …
PROPONENTS OF so-called "climate legislation" argue that regulation of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas will somehow create green jobs. "Green jobs" is a euphemism for green(backs) for Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase, and jobs for India, China and other offshore locations.
"Greenbacks for Goldman Sachs" is straight from cap-and-trade supporter U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who apparently forgot that the Wall Street Journal circulates to people other than the climate profiteers whose interests she represents. According to Gillibrand's 2009 commentary "Cap and Trade could be a Boon for New York":
with thousands of firms and energy producers buying and selling permits to emit carbon, transaction fees for exchanges and clearing alone could top nearly half a billion dollars. …An infrastructure is alre ady beginning to form, as entities like the New York Stock Exchange, J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and the new Green Exchange are developing carbon trading platforms or expanding their environmental trading desks.
Genuine wealth consists exclusively of the products of mining, manufacturing and agriculture. Permits to emit a gas we all exhale every few seconds are, in contrast, the modern equivalent of indulgences for sins, the sale of which enriched countless itinerant parasites in medieval times.
Indulgence peddlers, along with the rainmakers and snake oil salesmen of the late 19th century, could rely only on ignorance and superstition – as opposed to force of law – to make people pay them for phony products. this is why the firms that Sen. Gillibrand named, along with the late but unlamented Enron and Lehman Brothers, want or wanted the government to use force of law to compel energy users to buy carbon indulgences so they can profit from tra nsaction fees as described above.
Opensecrets.org shows that employees of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase bundled $1.6 million in campaign contributions to help elect Barack Obama, and they covered all their bases with another half million for cap-and-trade supporter John McCain. Sen. Gillibrand received $100,000 in bundled contributions from J.P. Morgan Chase and another $45,000 from Morgan Stanley, which has a stake in the European Climate Exchange.
this covers the greenbacks for Goldman Sachs, and now let's look at the purported jobs that working Americans will get in exchange. as reported by Business Week's "BP's Solar Retreat Signals Exodus of U.S. Renewable-Energy Jobs," BP recently closed its solar panel plant in Maryland, discharged its American workers and will now make these products in India and China. "Tempe, Arizona-based first Solar Inc. plans to do 71 percent of its manufacturing hiring in Malaysia after getting $16.3 million in federal funding to hire 200 people at an Ohio plant," the article stated. In other words, the Obama administration has spent taxpayer money to create jobs in other countries when millions of Americans are desperate to find work.
Genuine Democrats do not drive up the middle class' cost of living to enrich Wall Street investment banks, destroy working people's jobs by encouraging energy-intensive manufacturers to move offshore or spend American tax money to create jobs in other countries.
Democratic members of Congress from coal and industrial states, including Rep. Chris Carney of Susquehanna County, deserve recognition for voting against the Waxman-Markey cap and trade legislation. any member of Congress from either party who wants to work for climate profiteers at the expense of the country as a whole should be let go in November to pursue that opportunity full time.
William A. Levinson, a Wilkes-Barre resident, is the author of "Henry Ford's Lean Vision: Enduring Principles from the first Ford Motor Plant."
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Cap and trade offers limitless profits for big banks Commentary William A. Levinson
