by Tina Grazier
History is replete with gentlemen familiar with the con. Bernie Madoff recently made a name for himself as one of the top ten all time con men. His name will go down in infamy with Charles Ponzi who fashioned the scheme that bears his name. These men and others pop to the surface from time to time to remind us that we need to be smart about how we spend and invest our money. They also remind us that people can be incredibly bad even when they look good, are well known, or seem to be doing something positive. Things aren’t always what they seem.
And speaking of crooks and liars, Al Gore comes to mind. The Global Warming guru has much to celebrate. The legislation he desperately needs to cash in on the GW scam passed in the House yesterday. The Waxman/Markey bill squeaked through with a 219-212 vote. Gore has worked tirelessly for years as the front man for this grand scheme. Global political will has been his life’ mission winning him awards from the elite crowd and kudos from a mass following of compromised scientists and well meaning dupes. Yesterday marked a major victory. The New York Times reports him as saying, “This bill doesn’t solve every problem but passage today means that we build momentum for the debate coming up in the Senate and negotiations for the treaty talks in December which will put in place a global solution to the climate crisis. There is no backup plan.”
Well gee, Al, maybe that’s because there’s no real need for a backup plan.
In fact the only plan Al really backs is the one he and his pals have constructed to take advantage of cap and trade…the one that will make him big piles of our cash. Human Events reported back in 2007 that his involvement, and those of his many friends, is decidedly personal:
** Al Gore is chairman and founder of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM). According to Gore, the London-based firm invests money from institutions and wealthy investors in companies that are going green. “Generation Investment Management, purchases — but isn’t a provider of — carbon dioxide offsets,” said spokesman Richard Campbell in a March 7 report by CNSNews.**
But Gore isn’t alone in this scam. Human Events also reported in that same 2007 article the following:
** Still, other participant member groups facilitate, finance and market carbon-offset projects to “sequester, destroy or displace” greenhouse gases. CCX aspires to be the New York Stock Exchange of carbon-emissions trading. *** Along with Gore, the co-founder of GIM is Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson. Last September, Goldman Sachs bought 10% of CCX shares for $23 million. CCX owns half the ECX, so Goldman Sachs has a stake there as well. *** GIM’s “founding partners” are studded with officials from Goldman Sachs. They include David Blood, former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM); Mark Ferguson, former co-head of GSAM *** Clearly, GIM is poised to cash in on carbon trading. The membership of CCX is currently voluntary. If the day ever comes when federal government regulations require greenhouse-gas emitters — and that’s almost everyone — to participate in cap-and-trade, then those who have created a market for the exchange of carbon credits are in a position to control the outcomes. And that moves Al Gore front and center. *** CCX owes its existence in part to the Joyce Foundation, the Chicago-based liberal foundation that provided $347,000 in grant support in 2000 for a preliminary study to test the viability of a market in carbon credits. On the CCX board of directors is the ubiquitous Maurice Strong, a Canadian industrialist and diplomat who, since the 1970s, has helped create an international policy agenda for the environmentalist movement… has described himself as “a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology.” His former job titles include “senior advisor” to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, “senior advisor” to World Bank President James Wolfensohn and board member of the United Nations Foundation, a creation of Ted Turner. **
Goldman Sachs, you recall, was one of the banks to receive TARP money. According to Open Secrets the Center for Responsive Politics, Goldman Sachs advises and invests in industry affected by federal legislation and has been closely associated with Democrats:
** Goldman Sachs, one of Wall Street’s most prestigious investment banks, was also among the many banks in 2008 and 2009 to receive billions of dollars in taxpayer money to help it stay afloat. Like others in the securities industry, Goldman Sachs advises and invests in nearly every industry affected by federal legislation. The firm closely monitors issues including economic policy, trade and nearly all legislation that governs the financial sector. It has been a major proponent of privatizing Social Security as well as legislation that would essentially deregulate the investment banking/securities industry. The firm tends to give most of its money to Democrats. A number of high-ranking government officials in recent years have spent part of their careers at Goldman Sachs **
Business as usual you say? Well, not entirely. Most business people try to offer a good product or service at the best possible price. Most business people compete fairly and suffer the slings and arrows of market (and natural) forces. Those who sell a pig in a poke don’t stay in business very long, unless…unless…they can arrange a way to get the full force of government(s) behind them. Something as big as a global crisis might do it. Something that threatens our very lives would surely do it. War is out. War threatens life but it’s messy, destructive and eats resources. But a crisis that can also offer hope, that makes people feel good…like they have power to “make a difference”…a crisis like saving the planet from our own greed and consumption? Wow! Now that will hit the right emotional buttons and work to generate the political will needed for a giant global con. Everybody cares about our planet and the perfect villianis stanfing in the wings …oil! We’ve laid the groundwork with previous scares, the ozone and the rain forest thing, now we’ll up the stakes. It’s a crisis that literally screams for government legislation and regulation in every country all across the planet. Perfect!
Al Gore’s first book, Earth in the Balance, was published in 1992 but Gore was on this mission to gather political will for a decade or more before that. The marketing tools he has developed, from his lectures and presentations to his movie and books, are meant to invoke alarm and a strong survivalist desire to participate:
** Civilization and the earth are increasingly in conflict *** The effects of global warming on polar ice are significant. *** Global warming is a strategic threat. *** Global Warming is a clear & present threat; but preventable. *** The world must unite to save the environment. **
Twenty some years or more this man has invested in perpetrating a lie which until recently was accepted by much of the world despite warnings that the science was not definitive. Investors Business Daily offers the latest effort to debunk, and hopefully collapse, the entire house of cards:
** A suppressed EPA study says old U.N. data ignore the decline in global temperatures and other inconvenient truths. Was the report kept under wraps to influence the vote on the cap-and-trade bill? *** On Friday, the day of the vote, the Competitive Enterprise Institute said it was releasing “an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency.” *** In the release, the institute’s Richard Morrison said “internal EPA e-mail messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.” *** Reading the report, available on the CEI Web site, we find this “endangerment analysis” contains such interesting items as: “Given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.” **
“NO PARTICULAR REASON”
Crooks and liars will always be with us but we live in a country that still responds to the will of the people. It’s time to make a big fuss. This bill will kill what’s left of our economy. It will place a heavy financial burden on every single household, it will leave old and retired people and the poor shivering in the cold, it will place an unsustainable burden on many businesses. Jobs will be lost…BUT…it will not do a single thing to reduce carbon dioxide in the air. It is a ponzi scheme, a Burney Maddoff rip off.
Please keep the following in mind as you prepare to call your Senators for the next round of votes:
Greenhouse gases make up a tiny 2% of the total atmosphere. ** 3.62% of those greenhouse gases are CO2. ** Only 3.4% of that small portion is caused by human activity.
And there’s more: Daily Tech reports scientific evidence of global cooling:
** Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on. *** No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously. **
We can stop cap and trade from passing in the Senate, but that won’t be the end of it. We will always need to keep a sharp eye out for the next go around on the same scam. We will always need to be weary of new cons and con artists. Crooks and liars will always be with is and are always cooking up something.