If you think the housing and credit bubble diminished your financial security and your community, or the bailouts, or the rising gas prices did as well, hold on to your hat. The worst may be yet to come. Carbon trading is gearing up to make the housing and derivatives bubbles look like target practice.
Here are some comments on H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009:
“economic colonization of the heartland”
-Rep. Geoff Davis (R-Kentucky)
“a scam”
-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-California)
“massive transfer of wealth”
-Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin)
“Carbon markets can and will be manipulated using the same Wall Street sleights of hand that brought us the financial crisis.”
-Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio)
And from Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker interview with James Hansen, NASA’s climate expert:”Hansen pointed out that the bill explicity allows for the construction of new coal plants and predicted that it would, if passed, prove close to meaningless. He said that he thought it would probably be best if the bill failed…”
The best description to date can be found in Matt Taibbi’s wonderful article, “The Great American Bubble Machine: From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression – and they are about to do it again.”
Taibbi describes recent bubbles including “The Housing Craze,” “$4 a Gallon,” and “Rigging the Bailout.” He goes on to predict that Goldman’s extraordinary investments in lobbying to create a new carbon-credit market which will be rewarded with the biggest bubble so far.
Given Goldman’s historical dependency on their lead counsel, Sullivan & Cromwell, and their ties to the intelligence community, whatever Goldman is engineering, there is a deeper story worth contemplating. The de-industrialization of the United States is well underway and a reorganization of North American society is beginning.
Will thousands of people committed to relocalization jump into the carbon credit bubble and increased depedency on corporate profits and Wall Street-Washington rigged schemes? Indeed, it is possible.
Meantime, Al Gore is apparently denying Goldman’s leadership in the newest bubble. Given Gore’s historical ties to Goldman and what is emerging here in Al Gore’s home base here in Tennessee, I’m a sceptic.