Cap and tax passes quietly in Congress

The mammoth 1,500 page cap-and-trade bill passed quietly in Congress on Friday amidst the talk of health care and the death of a pseudo-pop star. Most members of the 111th Congress never read the bill which includes the largest tax increase in American history.

Once the Senate takes up the bill after the summer break, staffers are expected to unearth regulations that could place a stranglehold on all U.S. businesses causing massive new taxes.

Speaker on the House, Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. scrapped together just enough votes (219-212) to get the cap-and-trade legislation to the Senate. Speaker Pelosi set herself up on this bill as the creator of “jobs, jobs, jobs.” This bill won’t allow the placement of solar panels in California’s Mojave Desert or wind turbines in the waters off the Kennedy compound.

Republicans quietly let the Democrats have this so-called victory. Looking forward to the 2010 elections, the Republican Party will be able to enlighten the public on the woes of the Waxman/Markey global warming bill.

Proponents of the bill need to look no further than Spain, where the cap-and trade concept has sent unemployment to the 20 percent mark and with every one “green job” created, they have lost 2.2 jobs. Not exactly a success story.

Another aspect that no one is talking about is the fact that Pelosi, Markey and Al Gore are positioned to make a lot of money through investments of at least $50 thousand or more in companies whose stock is worth nothing now, but will increase dramatically if cap-and-trade is passed in the Senate and signed by President Obama.

Gore is positioned to become the first global-warming billionaire. He owns multiple companies that would track carbon footprints of businesses.

The real losers here are the American people. This huge bill would tax everyone in the country and in known by insiders as the “light switch tax.” The President himself has admitted the “electricity and energy costs would necessarily skyrocket.”

In an attempt to back stop portions of the bill, Republicans tried and failed, to add three amendments: a suspension of the bill if gas hits $5 per gallon, suspend the bill if electricity prices rose more than 10 percent and suspend the bill if unemployment jumped past the 15 percent mark. All were turned down in the Democratic-written bill.

The core of the legislation is meant to play to the environmentalist lobby who has been trying for years to slow down global warming. However, the Waxman/Markey bill doesn’t get the stamp of approval from the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, or Green Peace.

The winners of this legislation would be companies like, AIG, Goldman Sachs and GE, all stand to make billions by buying, selling and trading carbon derivatives. All these companies have been in the center of the recent financial meltdown which has sent the economy crashing.

The mood in Washington D.C. this week was spirited. According to Darrell Issa, R-Calif, most Republicans didn’t like cap-and-trade. He also admitted he talked to some Democrats who avoided the White House’s luau picnic this week, in order to avoid President Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

“They didn’t want to be ushered into a back room and pressured to vote on cap-and trade,” Issa said.

The reduction of CO2 emissions, which is the goal of this bill, will most likely fail to happen due to the fact that India and China will continue to sit on the sidelines. Many environmentalists contend that without the world’s participation, the U.S.’s reduction will amount to little to no change.

Getting back to the jobs issue, House Minority leader, Mitch McConnell-R-Kentucky said, “I don’t think sending rising electricity costs is a good idea. It is only increasing the business of living in America. It is a job killer.”

He continued to say, “Putting clamps on an economy when China and India are not is wrong.”