October 23, 2009

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) says openly that Wall Street speculators will profit from “climate legislation”
by Bill Levinson

Senator Gillibrand’s own words, from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, show that the real purpose of Barack Obama’s climate change legislation is to give Wall Street speculators yet another tulip bulb scheme to replace the mess (mortgage backed securities) for which we are still paying with a $750 billion stimulus package, various bailouts at the taxpayers’ expense, and ten percent unemployment.

We encourage our readers to circulate this article, and Senator Gillibrand’s own words, as widely as possible to show that Barack Obama’s cap and trade agenda has very little to do about protecting the environment and everything to do with lining the pockets of fat-cat Wall Street speculators, the same kind that gave us the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, at the expense of the American people. It is especially important to convey this message to the working people who make up the Democratic Party’s base. We also remind our readers that General Electric, which stands to benefit enormously from cap and trade, raised almost half a million dollars in bundled contributions to elect Barack Obama.

Kristin Gillibrand wrote,

In this turmoil, it may seem hard to imagine a financial market poised to deliver significant growth. However, a rising number of investors and financiers see one in the trading and reduction of carbon. According to financial experts, carbon permits could quickly become the world’s largest commodities market, growing to as much as $3 trillion by 2020 from just over $100 billion today. 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.


If Congress establishes proper oversight of a carbon market, New York’s financial talent, expertise and institutions are uniquely suited to provide the tools and innovation for a new commodities market of this size. Firms wishing to invest over the long term will need to turn to our financial sector to create the emerging products and provide the capital that would allow them to make green energy investments.

In other words, Senator Gillibrand says openly what we have said for quite some time: the real purpose of cap and trade is not to protect the environment, but to line the pockets of fat-cat speculators who cannot produce goods or services that are of genuine value to society; the same kind of speculators who, even a year ago, told us how much money we could make by “flipping houses.”

An infrastructure is already 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. There are nearly 100 funds already focused on green investments.

Excellent. Kirsten Gillibrand has just put it on record that the Democrats are no longer the party of working Americans, they are the party of the New York Stock Exchange, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs. This could be the leverage we need to utterly destroy Barack Obama’s wing of the Democratic Party. The Democrats have no defense whatsoever against this argument because Senator Gillibrand, as opposed to the Republicans or a conservative talk show host, put it in writing where millions of people could read it. Now she digs herself and her party in even deeper:

As a member of the Senate Environment, Agriculture, and Foreign Relations Committees—all of which will have a lead role in the development of climate change legislation—I am focused on several core principles to ensure effective oversight of this new market and help New York seize this opportunity.

Kirsten Gillibrand says openly that her agenda is not to do what is good for the United States, or even for the people who elected her, but for fat cat speculators who produce nothing of value to society; the same kind of speculators who just crashed our economy, wrecked our retirement accounts, and put millions of Americans out of work. We shed few tears for Lehman Brothers because it had exactly the same agenda of making money by trading in meaningless commodities like “carbon credits.” AIG, which received bailout money, also was on board with this agenda.

Senator Gillibrand does call for regulations to make sure we do not “repeat the mistakes of the past”–in other words, this latest tulip bulb/ dot-com/ house-flipping scheme will have to be run properly. That is not much of an endorsement for it.

New York and the U.S. have a lot to gain from our efforts to combat climate change, and a lot to lose if we fail.
—Ms. Gillibrand, a Democrat, is a U.S. senator from New York.

Goldman-Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase are not the United States. They are for-profit corporations that do business in the United States, and Senator Gillibrand has just put it in writing that the Democrats are now the party of corporate special interests.