John Kerry's Big Business Buyoff - Cap & Tax

Deals and more deals, where is the deal for the American taxpayer? Our government is broken and the only way to fix it is to get rid of those in Congress and the White House that don't protect our rights and liberties, and who, through their inflated egos, think they know better.

And you probably thought the redistribution Obama talked about was directed toward those in need. Al Gore has invested heavily in companies that will control the carbon credits and Obama's cronies in Chicago have set up the exchanges for these credits. What do you want to bet that he gets a piece of it after he is out of office? The executives of these companies will benefit greatly if this bill goes through, and, who will pay, you the consumer of gasoline, home heating and cooling and electricity and almost any other product that requires energy to produce.

Excerpt: Kerry recently unveiled another climate bill, the American Power Act, and the doublespeak this time is truly impressive. Instead of a "cap-and-trade," the bill has a "global warming pollution reduction scheme"; out with the "gas tax," in with a "linked fee" for transportation fuels. Yet the words don't obscure the plain fact that the act would raise the price of energy.

To help sell the act, Kerry has lined up several industrial strength energy suppliers and users. Their support forms the basis of Kerry's claim that the American Power Act is good for the economy. But why do big businesses support a bill that will increase the costs of doing business in this country? Kerry and his new Barbara Boxer, Senator Joseph Lieberman, would have you believe that these companies are motivated by the need for "regulatory certainty." The truth is simpler and cruder than that. These businesses stand to make a killing if the bill passes.

* General Electric helped write portions of the bill to tilt the market in its favor.

* Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other Wall Street firms long have lobbied for climate legislation because they would reap huge fees in brokering the trade of energy-rationing coupons

* Exelon, America's most valuable utility, is such a staunch supporter of climate legislation that it split from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the Chamber's opposition to cap-and-trade. Exelon relies on nuclear power, and the American Power Act fulfills every aspect of the nuclear industry's wish-list. The Huffington Post unearthed an internal Exelon memo estimating that climate legislation would add $700 to $750 million to the company's annual revenues for every $10 per metric ton increase in the price of CO2 allowances.

* British Petroleum and Conoco Phillips opposed cap-and-trade legislation enacted by the House of Representatives because they thought it was insufficiently generous. In the Senate, they got a better deal. Senator Kerry said that he's "been working very closely" with BP and C-P, and the lobbying has paid dividends.

* Chemical manufacturer Dupont, for business reasons, phased out the use of HFC-23, a chemical gas that happens to be thousands of times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The American Power Act allocates 1 percent of the carbon credits from 2013-2015 to companies that performed "early action" policies to mitigate climate change. The company could reap hundreds of millions of dollars, just for doing business as usual.

This is just a sampling of a larger group of businesses whose woolly rhetoric is designed to mask their own-self interest -- at the expense of the American economy as a whole. Big business spokesmen for cap-and-trade claim they are trying to save the planet and achieve regulatory certainty. But the only certainty they're after is guaranteed profits. It's comforting, in a way, to know that their eyes are always firmly fixed on the bottom line. John Kerry's Big Business Buyoff