Wednesday, July 1, 2009

• Dear Mr. President: Thanks Again For Cap And Trade

To The Office Of The President Of The United States,

Dear Mr. Obama

We are the heads of a few of your largest constituents, including Dow, GE and DuPont. This letter represents our sentiments in wishing to express our gratitude for your and Ms. Pelosi’s efforts on our behalf. We thank you, our shareholders thank you, and certainly all of us look forward to contributing to your Presidential Library, once you leave office, if we did not sufficiently contribute already prior to the election.

We can appreciate that neither yourself nor your dear friends in Congress have had time to read the new Bill that opens: “A BILL - To create clean energy jobs, achieve energy independence, reduce global warming pollution and transition to a clean energy economy.” This Bill is very, very, very long and boring. It is also very complex. We conceived it and structured it in such way that the fewer the readers, the less editing would take place. We therefore anticipate that its passage will be swift. The sooner that train leaves the station, the more impossible its progress will be to reverse. It would also not be advantageous if the irrationality, and fear surrounding humanity’s hand in the process of global warming were to subside. Now, is an opportune time to strike.

Attaching the name “Cap and Trade” to this whole business has been a stroke of genius. No one really understands what it all means, and the media believes everything you tell them, so keep plugging it, and keep promoting the “reduction in CO2” stuff. That works really well in LA. Have you seen the air out there? Terrible. Terrible, or "turbull" as Charles Barkley would say. We are all thrilled that you have successfully reconstructed the original intent of CO2 reduction, into an energy consumption reduction program. We knew you could do it.

The impact on consumption reduction will, in our view, be minimal, and fortunately, that is not our objective. We wish you much luck in managing this monster, and in building an administration capable of verifying such things as the veracity of corporately claimed offsets. This Bill is so complex that it will provide endless possibilities for abuse and excesses, and we can smell the fraud stinking up the air already. As you know, a transparent system such as a simple graduated carbon tax, paralleled with targeted caps on emissions, would not have been as financially beneficial for us. Not even close.

We are well aware that most of our smaller brethren in the business will get put out to pasture as a result of their inability to move off-shore quickly enough, or by the fact that they will not be able to afford the carbon pollution permits. We, on the other hand, already have unregulated facilities around the world to which we can reallocate resources at a moment’s notice. Our competitors will also not have our advantage of receiving significant Cap and Trade credits based on our being able to provide all necessary products supporting this bill, from solar panels to wind mills in the sky. Our smaller competitors will also be unable to sustain the sheer costs of managing the government’s bureaucratic intrusion into their affairs, as it deploys armies of newly hired climate science experts to distribute and oversee capping and trading of carbon dioxide emissions.

We anticipate much higher costs in the manufacture of many alternate energy sources, such as solar energy absorption cells, and this will impact the expansion of solar cell farms, but well, we have no choice.

The Bill will be very effective in rendering the cost of any carbon-based energy unaffordable through overwhelming taxation. That should help you refill the government coffers somewhat, although the hole you are digging for American taxpayers is becoming rather considerable. Households across the country will bear the brunt of the costs, through higher product prices and a heavier tax burden, but most people seem very accepting of a “price” for reducing climate change. Even if most don’t believe that they impact climate, they still feel that the air needs cleaning. We are unsure, however, how taxpayers will feel about being mandated into financing the adoption of efficient technologies overseas. They will probably not be thrilled with paying to prevent the clear-cutting of the Amazon, for example, at a time when many households are barely paying their food bills. We, on the other hand, will not be affected, whatever reactions surface on that front, although a couple of us feel bad for our buddies running operations like aluminum, or steel mills. They are in for some tough times.

We note that some of our other friends on Wall Street are very preoccupied, as we write this letter, coming up with new and extremely creative financial tools which they expect to launch upon the Bill’s passing. Those boys have amazing ways of getting in on any game with the potential of throwing off billions in cash. They look forward to a whole new set of opportunities opening up for them, replacing the ones eclipsed by the recent devastating financial compression. Listening to some of them, one might conclude that they have been holding séances with Jeffrey Skilling of Enron fame.

We are anxious to be in receipt of our free Trade Allowances, but most of all, we are excited with the anticipation of enjoying astronomical growth for many years. In passing, we should thank you for having allowed, and fuelled with cash, firms like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley to become even bigger, and more powerful than they were before the financial down-turn. This action set a tremendous precedent we look forward to duplicating in our industries. If you thought “too big to fail” applied to these giants before the crash, wait until you see how big a few of us get in the next five years.

We have one last request if we can be so bold. Could you repeat as often as possible to the Nation that this Bill will not cost over $3,000 per household each year, and that much like the national objective of being carbon neutral, so too the cost will be, … “neutral.” Explain to America that it is just a methodology for keeping track of excessive energy consumers, and polluters. Perfect, don’t you think? They’ll all buy it. The media will promote that theme for you.

We will continue to postulate assertively on the need for battling global warming, and look forward to your persistent oratory on getting this momentous Bill passed into law.

Sincerely.
Your Friendly Benefactors

5 comments:

  1. Please forward this to Washington State Senators Cantwell and Murray!!!

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  2. It is truly (darkly) humerous listening to the Obama administrations predictions on costs and impacts of the Cap & Trade and healthcare bills. They talk about jobs added and cost in $'s as if they actually have a clue what will happen when these bills pass. If there is one constant throughout US and history is that government will completely underestimate cost and not consider the collateral damage and externalities of new legislation.

    As with all budgetary shortfalls, the current administration claims that the entire burden of paying for this mess will be bourne by the upper 5% of taxpayers. At some point, this taxpayer group will be paying the bill for the entire country. When we reach this point, will we still be derided as "not paying our fair share?"

    I don't know why DuPont, GE and Dow would bother to go to the effort of making money; it will just be hoovered out of their employees, executives and shareholders pockets anyways.

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  3. Wapners PC,

    Well said. Obama is being successful at convincing a majority, that the top 5% income earners will pay for his out of control fiscal profligacy.

    Saddest of all is that the MSM seems hellbent on supporting whatever he says or claims, yet every single day, he makes a speech and lies. For a while, it was cute, and expected, but now it is becoming disconcerting.

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  4. RotLB

    You have had some good posts in the short time I have been tuning in. For your next piece, why not sound off on medical tort reform? Obama and his congressional deciples have established their primary position as the protector of the masses from unjust enrichment and exploitation by the rich and greedy.

    There has been absolutely no discussion of medical tort reform in the national heathcare debate. None. Obama says he is against it and that was the end of the matter. It is hard to make a case that massive tort gifts are not undue enrichment.

    The theory is that the tort system protects Americans from malpractice and bad healthcare outcomes. It is a deterrent. If that is the case, why is there not less malpractice over time? Why do most studies on national health outcomes put the US at or near the bottom of the rankings?

    The US has the most active and prolific medical tort system in the world. By far. If the deterrent theory was correct, we would have the best healthcare system in the world, not the worst. The obvious reason why there is no adminstration push to rein in the tort lawyers is that he took a huge amount of campaign money from them.

    There needs to be some public discussion of this. With the mainstream media under the white houses direct control, the word has to come from the blogosphere. Our burden under the new healthcare bill is going to be large enough without the billions in higher high insurance premiums and higher taxes that the tort sharks will steal from us all.

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  5. I like you insight on this, and I believe you have hit one particular nerve on the Mr. I Have A Gift position toward lawyers. Expectedly he has spent much teleprompter time attacking drug companies, which, although sometimes deserving, is misdirected finger shaking.

    My first shot at this topic was aimed at the model that has been used in the past few years, ... the Canadian system. Canada's Breaking Health Care System - http://pacificgatepost.blogspot.com/2008/05/canadas-breaking-health-care-system.html .

    Stay tuned. :-)

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