Oh look "centrist" must be corrupt and stupid because "Cap and Trade" is the centrist solution. Let's get this straight, cap and trade is a monetary swindle, it is like banks printing paper money and promising to back it with gold that they don't have in the old days.

Carbon is money. We live in the era of black gold money, and must move to the era of white air. Cap and trade already is a swindle that is swindling billions, and all this would do is put it into practice. It creates a rent where by the people who pollute now, and are causing the damage now get to determine who gets into the economic system, and a black hole to "cap and trade" with entities that don't cap. In short it puts people who made the mess in charge of fixing it, and gives them enormous profits while doing it. The historical track record of robber barrons ending highway robbery, is not good.

Unlike cap and trade of specific pollutants, it is virtually impossible to do anything without generating carbon. You tell me you want to build a wind farm? I can tell you how much carbon emission it takes to put it up. And while you are doing that, someone else will build a crushed coal plant in china, generate fake credits to filter it a little bit, and get electricity for 1 cent over tariff, while you are paying triple the going rate for the US wind farm. But who has credits? Why people who are already making things and are thus rich. Congress ladels out rents, and private entities collect them. That is what this is.

Mr. And Mrs. Public, this is a naked attempt to rob you blind, legally. If this passes you will never, ever, ever, ever, ever be free again, but will be slaves of the carbon monopoly.

Let's go over this straight up, unlike previous "cap and trade" deals, carbon is not avoidable. You can't drive to the store and buy a loaf of bread without generating carbon - the street is carbon intensive, the store is, the bread is, your car is. Carbon spewed into the air at every step. Previous cap and trade targets were pollutants that were incidental to economic activity, the question was merely how to most efficiently trade off the expense for scrubbing them or avoiding them - and then to give incentives to research. In some cases it was found that avoiding the pollutant was cheaper. In short there was no barrier to entry, because new technology did not suffer from the defects of the old anyway.

Carbon is different. And cap and trade of carbon is the past stealing the future. Stealing. Stealing. Stealing. The word steal is the correct one. This is because the damage of global warming falls on every one. The right to make money by spewing carbon is, then, one that should be determined, not by a rent handed out to people who are already doing it, but by a monetary system which builds the cost of carbon into every step and starts charging them for it. But they don't want to pay the cost of the spewing they are doing, they want to charge you to stop doing it. This is the same deal that a violent mugger offers - he won't beat you to a pulp, rape your girlfriend and then shoot you both, if you give him all your money and go over to that nice shiney atm and max out all your withdrawals. Maybe. But he has the gun.

Cap and trade has another black hole - simple trade with countries that don't cap. China for example. You have a factory in Germany, tell the cap and trade system you traded with a factory in China for it to buy from a cleaner coal plant. The crushed coal plant isn't shut down mind you, it keeps chugging along, and in fact, it lights the homes of the people who work in the factory, instead of the factory. Net carbon reduction? Negative, the Chinese use their part of the swindle to pave a bigger road to the factory.

These games should be familiar to anyone who studies monetary history. Whenever there is a shift in the organic basis of the economy, those who profitted from the old one try to simply declare that the new economic basis belongs to them, because, well, everything belongs to them anyway. It doesn't work, because the solutions to new economic problems will not be found by the people who created them.

One of these examples is the conversion from a coal and rail based economy to a petroleum based economy. In the US, the holders of key rail rights could borrow gold money, and use it to speculate, knowing that, at the end of the day, they had the right to extract gold money from everyone who wanted to move. Absent a road system capable of competing with rail, there was no choice. If you wanted to move, you had to use water, which was slow and cumbersome, or rail.

What changed this was, first electricity and the telephone - allowing organization without using transportation. And then, the road system. Suddenly the barrier to entry was a cheap, personally affordable, piece of capital. Trucks are in many ways less efficient than rail, but anyone can buy a truck. The suggestions to nationalize the rail system died, because the solution was to end run it.

The same thing is true here, the people who own the chokehold want, in effect, trillions of dollars of free money - that is not having to pay for the damage of global warming that is happening now and will accelerate. They want to charge you for every bit of ammelioration done.

Make the poor pay, it is the battle cry of the neoconservative age. And we must end it if we are ever to be free again. America is a progressive America now because the poor can't pay any more, they have been robbed into the grave. To be a liberal America again, we have to pry the future out of the dead hands of the past.