The Cap & Trade bill just passed in the House by a slim margin of 219-212. It still needs to pass in the Senate, but if the senators are crazy enough to pass this scam of a bill it will impose the largest tax in American history. Our congressman claim this bill will reduce carbon emissions by 80% in the next four decades, but that is wishful thinking. Several environmental groups came out against the bill because it didn't do enough to reduce the carbon footprint, including Green Peace, the Sun Light Foundation, and Friends of the Earth. This bill will require energy producers to buy carbon credits at carbon exchanges at a cap level. If they need more they will have to trade someone for those additional credits. What it boils down to is the carbon exchange could turn into a derivatives Ponzi Scheme the likes of Enron, and drive up energy costs drastically resulting in those costs being passed on to the consumer by substantially increasing the price of all goods including food. Manufactures who can't support the increase in production costs will simply leave the country for China or India where they have no Cap & Trade laws, causing more lost jobs. So who will benefit the most from this bill being passed? The Robber Barons Goldman Sachs! Goldman Sachs owns three of the Carbon Exchanges, they helped write the bill, and they spent over $3.5 million lobbying congress to ensure that it was passed.
If you don't know who Goldman Sachs is let me begin to familiarize you with this vampire on our nation. The greatest shift of wealth in world history just occurred, and most people don't even recognize this astonishing fact. Americans lost on average 40% of their retirement. The money lost did not evaporate it went somewhere. That somewhere is to a very select group of elite bankers who have been manipulating the markets to their advantage for decades only to make their pockets deeper, and leave the American people wiped out of their wealth. The hijacking of Washington by Wall Street can be lead straight to the doors of Goldman Sachs. Our last two Treasury Secretaries Paulson and Rubin were CEOs of Goldman Sachs. Matt Thain, the former CEO of the failed Meryll Lynch, worked for Paulson at Goldman Sachs. Ed Liddy, the man appointed by Paulson to take over AIG after the TARP infusion, used to work for Goldman Sachs. Get the picture? So these pariahs infiltrated Washington, influenced and pushed for the deregulation of the banking markets which eventually led to the Tech bubble and the Housing bubble. The Housing Bubble incidentally is the biggest bubble every created in world history, and is the reason for our devasting collapse.
In Matt Taibbi excellent Rolling Stones piece "The Great American Bubble Machine", he details how this American Market manipulator, Goldman Sachs, has stripped the wealth of the American people with the aid and consent of Washington.
"The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere - high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth - pure profit for rich individuals"So what is the most audacious bubble yet that Goldman Sachs can't wait to get their greasy fingers on? It's none other than Cap & Trade. They knew they had to get their man into office to accomplish this coup d'état so they greased the coffers.
"They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s - and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet."
Fast-Forward to today. It’s early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs – its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign – sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.I encourage you to read the whole article. Cap & Trade is nothing but a scam disguised as a do good energy bill. We still have time to stop this monster from passing in the Senate, and killing the dreams of Goldman Sachs from becoming the kingpin of another disastrous bubble. Pass this article on to others, and hound your Senators to vote NO on this Goldman Sachs Cap & Trade Ponzi Scheme.
AS ENVISIONED BY GOLDMAN, THE FIGHT TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING WILL BECOME A "CARBON MARKET" WORTH $1 TRILLION A YEAR.
Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits - a booming trillion-dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. [Snip]
Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they're the profit-making slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank's environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson's report argued that "voluntary action alone cannot solve the climate-change problem." A few years later, the bank's carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that cap-and-trade alone won't be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that 'Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, "We're not making those investments to lose money."
The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utah-based firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There's also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in green-tech ... the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energy-futures market?
"Oh, it'll dwarf it," says a former staffer on the House energy committee.
Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe - but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.
Read the whole article at this link or go buy the current Rolling Stones magazine.
Friends of the Earth Describing Carbon Trading as a Cautionary Tale
Below is an incredible statement by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, former US Assistant Treasury Secretary, regarding who Timothy Geitner works for.
At the tale end of the video Max asks a very pertinent question, “Who does the Treasury Secretary work for, the people or the banking system on Wall Street?
Robert’s reply, “He works for Goldman Sachs.”
You can't get any more blatant than that. Washington is working for the Banksters and not the people.
Former US Assistant Treasury Secretary: "Geitner Works for Goldman Sachs"
Cap and Trade Tax Ditty
