Thanks to Ronald Reagan’s legacy and a legal miscalculation by leftist environmentalists, this week a California judge stopped the implementation of California’s Cap and Trade law: better known as Cap and Tax. This is the same type of carbon trading that Al Gore has hawked for years, but failed to get through the most radical Democrat Congress in generations. That’s how bad it was. Of course, that didn’t stop whacked out California from passing a Draconian version of the same job killing scheme.

To add insult to injury, the so called “republican” Governor Schwarzenegger signed the bill into law in 2006. It was opposed by the Chamber of Commerce and most sane taxpayers (admittedly, CA doesn’t have enough of those). The opponents claimed that the law would drive out business to other states and dramatically increase the cost of energy. Energy costs would, of course, be passed on, driving up the cost of everything else-in the midst of the nation’s worst recession.

The voters of California even had an opportunity last year to put the brakes on it at the ballot box with Proposition 23, but the environmental left spent millions fighting the proposition. It wouldn’t even have scrapped the whole law, but only would have suspended the Cap and Tax until state unemployment dropped below 5.5% for four consecutive quarters. The proposition was defeated overwhelmingly. Considering our unemployment rate is well over 12% here, the California voters essentially supported assisted economic-suicide of their own state.

It took two forces working together to finally defeat Cap and Tax: a group of radical Lefties and Ronald Reagan to put the brakes on this law.

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Yesterday’s  E&E News PM had an item, “LOBBYING: UAW joins labor-enviro alliance”, reading in pertinent part:

The United Auto Workers has announced that it will join the BlueGreen Alliance, a partnership of labor and environment groups pushing for policies that create green jobs….

The BlueGreen Alliance was formed in 2006 by the Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers. The group also includes the Communications Workers of America, Natural Resources Defense Council, Service Employees International Union, Laborers’ International Union of North America, Utility Workers Union of America, American Federation of Teachers, Amalgamated Transit Union and Sheet Metal Workers’ International Association.

Yes. Events in the early days of the Obama administration indicated it was only a matter of time before the UAW would join this enterprise seeking massive further expansion of the state. As I detail in Chapter 7 of Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America, “Obama’s “Baptists and Bootleggers”: Unions and Greens Selling Out America”, “Team Obama is teaming with big business, unions, and green pressure groups in an unholy alliance to advance an agenda relieving you of your wealth and freedoms, to their enrichment, in a collaboration designed to move decisions from individual producers and consumers to the Federal government. As part of this perverse game, the Left pulls for ‘green’ energy production and then blocks that very same production on environmental grounds or until it can use such projects to enrich favored unions and companies.”

Oddly, these groups are pushing for cap-and-trade, in addition to other mandates designed to make the price of energy “necessarily skyrocket”, as Obama so delicately put it.

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Our nation is in trouble and it goes far deeper than the current economic crisis of the past few years.  Nor, despite all the rancor and the loud shouting back and forth, is the problem attributable to any single controversial issue . . . albeit the important issues that are dividing us are clearly a symptom of our woes.

Since we are a nation of immigrants, there have always been tensions within our vibrant democracy from divisions along obvious fault lines:  race, religion, class, geography, national origin and even age.  But what has, from the beginning, distinguished our collective ethnic citizenry and made America wonderfully unique among the nations of the world was that, unlike virtually all of the countries from which we came, once we attained citizenship we were accepted, truly accepted, as Americans.   We have overcome many crises because, with the obvious exception of the stain of slavery, our constitutional system of division of power between the states and the federal government and the separation of federal authority among these distinct branches of government, has depended on, indeed even demanded, political compromise to advance policies with any semblance of shared goals.  But over the last two decades the notion of shared goals and the ability to fashion compromises have all but disappeared, widening the fault lines and leaving the nation polarized and government often paralyzed.

There is irony in this increased polarization given our preoccupation, sometimes to the point of absurdity, with political correctness.  Either we have become unbelievably thin-skinned as a people or our preoccupation with political correctness has led to a process of balkanization as each ethnic group sees the “national pie” as a zero sum game:  “we win, you lose.” This comes at the expense of putting America first.  The price has been high.

When our president feels that apologies are necessary to improve our relationships with long- time allies and to reset our relationships with others, including those who have, for many years, been hostile to the United States; when an American ambassador, by his mere presence, implies an American apology for the awful devastation visited upon the victims at Hiroshima, without any acknowledgement by the Japanese government, after more than 60 years, that it was an imperialist Japanese government that was responsible for bringing war to the Pacific with their unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor, we diminish the noble cause for which over one-half million Americans gave their lives. The Japanese are certainly entitled to convene in memory of those who lost their lives at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it is their national day of remembrance. Our presence was neither called for nor appropriate. They and we have gotten past that dark and deadly time.  We are, today close allies and trade partners.  The last war-related joint ceremony in which we participated with the Japanese was in 1945 on the deck of the US Missouri in Tokyo Bay.   We should have left it there.

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There is little debate that the leadership of the House — lead by Nancy Pelosi — has successfully convinced vulnerable Democrats to walk the plank on issues like the government takeover of our health care system, trillions in wasteful spending, bailouts and even cutting food stamps to funnel tax dollars to the teachers’ unions.  But for some members, it is the Cap and Trade tax that may turn out to be the anchor around their electoral necks.  Look no further than Ohio and Reps. Zack Space and John Boccieri.

Reps. Space and Boccieri voted with Nancy Pelosi and against their districts by supporting the Cap and Tax bill and are now paying the price.  A reader just sent us a copy of this incredibly effective ad that is now running in two districts in Ohio:

The ad reminds voters of the issues at stake — the budget, securing our borders, reckless growth of government and the cost of the Cap and Tax bill – and in Ohio Cap and Tax is a huge liability. Ohio is already experiencing some of the highest unemployment rates in the country (10.4%) and Cap and Tax would send upwards of 100,000 Ohio jobs overseas.  The bill would damage the state so much that even the State Senate has gone on record opposing the bill.

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The news about China overtaking Japan as the world’s second-largest economy is actually quite relevant to the US climate and energy policy debate, which promises to continue despite the scientific scandal and evaporation of political will to associate with a “global warming” or cap-and-trade legislation.

Thanks to a poll by Stanley Greenberg, the measure has been re-branded as “green economy” and “clean energy”.  But whatever you call it, and lame duck or otherwise, this latest excuse for central planning will be with us until it is unavoidably tied to serious political costs, like its forerunner the 1993 BTU energy tax, which according to Al Gore in a 2006 interview with the Financial Times led to the Democrat’s loss of Congress. Instructively, that experience originally prompted the re-branding to cap-and-trade.

Now, about  the relatively fading Japan, it is important to note that although it has been a persistent economic basket case, it nonetheless serves as one of President Obama’s models for stimulating an economy with “renewable energy” mandates (as we’ve documented in this space on numerous occasions, he’s not always the best-informed about these matters).

China’s relevance to our current policy debate is in part due to the ritual “but, China’s doing it…” line of — for lack of a better word — “argument” for why the US should impose all manner of global warming policies on itself. That deserves scrutiny.

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Last week’s national unemployment numbers demonstrated that the economic recovery President Obama promised us is still a ways away.  In Pennsylvania the unemployment rate increased last month hovering just above 9%.

Given these numbers, the last thing Washington politicians should be doing is supporting legislation that would cost thousands more jobs. But that is exactly what my very liberal opponent, Congressman Joe Sestak, is doing.

Not only did Congressman Sestak sponsor and vote for a cap-and-trade energy tax, he argued that the tax did not go far enough!

A cap-and-trade energy tax would impose an onerous indirect tax on the production and consumption of carbon-based energy. It would cap the amount of carbon dioxide businesses could emit, impose a penalty when the cap is exceeded, and would require that carbon emissions be cut by 20 percent of 2005 levels by 2020.

Independent studies have found that this would cost the country millions of jobs, but in an industrial state like Pennsylvania, the cap-and-trade tax would be even more harmful than elsewhere. Our state’s coal, natural gas and manufacturing industries would be especially hard hit.

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You may have missed President Obama’s euphemism for massive wealth transfers involved in his “green economy” — central planning rebranded — that he said last week he will seek to use the Gulf oil spill to impose. That euphemism was:

“When I was a candidate for this office, I laid out a set of principles that would move our country towards energy independence. Last year, the House of Representatives acted on these principles by passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill –- a bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.”

This is his fourth high-profile use of the phrase “finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy”, most recently his State of the Union speech. I addressed this in Chapter 6, “Green Eggs and Scam: The Wholesale Fraud of ‘Green Jobs’” from Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America:

That is the objective of various “green jobs” schemes: make everything else so expensive as to give life to the uneconomical. But that is incredibly economically harmful.

Also, note what President Obama said in his September 2009 UN “global warming” speech, a comment that should strike anyone who ever took an economics course or simply possessed the capacity for critical thought:

“Most importantly, the House of Representatives passed an energy and climate bill in June that would finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy for American businesses and dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

The key word there is that lawmakers passed a scheme to make inefficient projects “profitable”, not “cost-effective”. That’s corporate welfare. These mandates and subsidies would , however, add value to the investment portfolios of many leading lights among Obama’s allies, such as George Soros who, by chance, soon revealed plans to sink one billion dollars into “green jobs” schemes. Lo and behold, another of his investments, the Center for American Progress, furiously pushes “green jobs” schemes.

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One way or the other, one of us is going to go down. President Obama, by insisting that he will go to the mat on his “green jobs” agenda, which is simply central planning with a coat of green paint, indicates he will risk his presidency on getting the cap-and-trade, gas tax and windmill mandate through the Senate (with a stranglehold on domestic energy production to boot), then through the House again on a conferenced bill.

If he succeeds he will have doomed us; if he fails, politically the effort will have finally, fully exposed him for what he is: a Power Grabbing Statist whose economics are recklessly dogmatic while at the same time ignoring those societies he claims are his model.

Obama reminded us how as a candidate he set out what he called a set of principles, which he acknowledged were passed by the House, in a vote almost precisely one year ago today.

Here is what he said then about cap-and-trade, which the House passed. This discussion occurred in the apparent context of how to mount his and his team’s big-ticket agenda items:

“The problem is, can you get the American people to say this is really important, and force their representatives to do the right thing. That requires mobilizing a citizenry…And climate change is a great example.”

You got it: this is the community organizer, refusing to allow a crisis to go to waste, but instead seeking to use it to do what he’s trying to do.

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For those of you who watched “Hannity” on Fox News last night and wondered why an “eco-entrepreneur” was left to address President Obama’s claim that the Gulf spill just means we need his cap-n-trade scheme, with no other guest, it was because a storm here in Central Virginia had me all made up pretty and sitting in the chair with the satellite connections fried out.

That was global warming, of course. Or George Bush.

But here is essentially the rejoinder that you would have heard:

Obama’s argument made in Pittsburgh goes that, with BP having been reckless and the administration incompetent…if you carry the 1 and tally it up it means a massive new tax increase on all of us to make energy more expensive.

This just makes sense in the land of never letting a crisis go to waste.

Which should remind us how to know there’s no good reason for an agenda: when the reason for the agenda, or rather the excuse, keeps changing. Now the global warming tax, which was then a climate change tax, then somehow a job-creation energy tax is now an energy tax to show how engaged and angry President Obama is at BP’s oil spill.

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This week, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) will host a press conference announcing the fifth reinvention of “cap-and-trade” global warming legislation since 2003, the “American Power Act”. Call it the American Power Grab Act, instead, for reasons that will become obvious momentarily.

The orchestrated spectacle, with a cast expected to be in the dozens and which all involved appear convinced will persuade you of the justness of their cause, is in fact a manifestation of all that is wrong with Washington and what Americans have become increasingly enraged by.

At this press conference, Sens. Kerry and Lieberman have both already indicated, they will insist that their scheme isn’t “cap-and-trade” because they aren’t going to use that term this time around. Kerry has even said that “this is not an environment bill.” It seems that the public aren’t buying that argument, either, so it’s really about whatever appeals to you. Just not what it was about the previous four times they’ve tried to slip this Power Grab past you. Except I’ve seen a copy of the bill. Yes it is cap-and-trade. And worse.

For this latest effort to hide an enormous tax and wealth transfer — a unilateral move that guarantees jobs will be shipped to China, India, Philippines, Mexico and elsewhere — – these lawmakers will be surrounded by numerous representatives of Big Green. That includes not just the wealthy pressure group industry but many among “Big Business”, numerous of whom are the benefactors enabling those pressure group chiefs’ huge salaries and vast PR budgets to scare you into accepting an agenda that uses the state to, oddly enough, enrich these same companies. Huh.

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It’s appreciably more difficult for Washington politicians to amaze Americans who paid any attention at all to what has been transpiring in Washington. And that number is growing. But the Democrats are giving it their best shot.

Read this just out from Politico, explaining that the Senate’s committee process simply must be suspended to jam through Obama’s energy/cap-and-tax Power Grab, because it is so expansive that it would invoke the jurisdiction of six Senate committees. These include the tax-writing Finance Committee, because cap-and-trade and the new gas tax (styled by some cheerleaders who think you’re stupid as a “carbon-linked fee”).

So, again, Harry Reid is going to write a couple of thousand pages — and try to buy off the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with revenues taken from you — in closed-door, back room deals. The ability to do so is one reason the bill in its House version grew to 1,400 pages, bigger and bigger with each closed-door deal. There are so many ways to design this takeover and the wealth transfers and lost freedoms involved, and to hide and target the hurt.

If that sounds like the health care takeover, it should. It’s the same thing. As the perpetrators admit to Politico. So possibly C-SPAN might ask to be involved. Surely the White House can come up with a better response than last time.

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This Tax Day I’m sure we’ll all raise a glass to our friends at the IRS.

After all, their ranks are only growing. While the private sector is still struggling, with unemployment hovering just under 10 percent and real unemployment (including those who have quit looking for work) estimated at over 16 percent, this is a boom time for hiring at the IRS. Come to think of it, it’s always a boom time for government hiring in general.

All the tax increases in the health care takeover legislation – more than $500 billion – and the new enforcement mechanisms required to make sure every American is purchasing health insurance mean thousands upon thousands of new IRS employees.

But there’s more on the tax front. Almost another $1 trillion in tax increases are heading our way on December 31, 2010, when the Bush tax cuts expire. I don’t think Americans are ready for this massive tax hike. They’ve forgotten it’s coming. They’re still having trouble finding new jobs, or getting their mortgages in order. They’re not ready for higher capital gains taxes, a return of the death tax, and a tax penalty slapped on married filers.

And with President Obama and Speaker Pelosi still looking to “spread the wealth around” as part of their radical liberal agenda, we’re looking at additional tax threats in coming months. First, there’s the cherished Holy Grail of Al Gore’s nutty environmental movement: cap-and-trade, with its crippling new energy taxes.

Gas is already headed back toward $4 a gallon, but the environmental movement and President Obama want to take us to European levels with $6- or $7-a-gallon gas. I was in Copenhagen for the U.N. “Climate Change” conference last December, and we shot a video at a local gas station where gas was the equivalent of $7.50 per gallon because of their cap-and-trade energy tax.

Now prominent economic names like Paul Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman, are getting behind the idea of a Value-Added Tax (VAT). It’s grossly misnamed, because it doesn’t add value to anything you buy – it only adds cost. How many new IRS workers would we need to implement and enforce a new tax like the VAT that would hit every good produced at every step of the production process? I shudder to imagine.

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This week (March 3, 2010) was the deadline Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) set for Mark Crisson, President and CEO of the American Public Power Association (APPA), to explain why APPA is urging Senators to support Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s Congressional Review Act resolution to veto the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. The Senate may vote on the Murkowski resolution as soon as next week.

Now, aside from the merits of the issue, which I’ll get into in a moment, Waxman and Markey’s behavior is out of line. Waxman and Markey (W/M) are Members of the House of Representatives. What business is it of theirs if the APPA lobbies Senators about a bill pending in the Senate? Senators can conduct their own inquiries without any assistance from W/M. And why didn’t W/M copy Sen. Murkowski or at least Senate Energy Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) on their Feb. 25 letter to Mr. Crisson? Failure to “cc” any of the principals in the Senate flouts one of the most basic rules of legislative courtesy.

Besides being busybodies, Waxman and Markey are bullies.

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For the Tea Party movement, 2009 was about coming together, meeting our brothers and sisters in arms, and standing athwart socialism, yelling, “Stop!”  It worked. President Obama entered office promising socialized medicine, card check, and cap and trade all before the August recess.  He went 0 for 3 thanks a grassroots uprising that came together like spattered quicksilver.

In our desire to fix things, we also launched a lot of legislative initiatives.  These initiatives included various sovereignty amendments in the states, petitions for Constitutional Conventions, petitions for redress of grievances, petitions of right, and state laws exempting states from any national healthcare legislation.  Each of these was a bold and important step, and such laws, amendments, and petitions should continue.  Next year.

Let’s not fool ourselves. While the Tea Party movement has been very effective, it has been effective only when focused on a very narrow set of compelling causes.  Our quick responses to card check and cap and trade convinced the White House to suspend those initiatives until we weren’t looking. Our overwhelming attack on ObamaCare took the last bit of energy and time from each Tea Party patriot.  We left it all on the field.

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After the bruising health care policy fight in America left moderate Democrats battered, they could get fried if leading big-government-type politicians keep pushing cap and trade energy rationing and taxes.

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On November 11, David N. Farr, Chairman, CEO and President of Emerson Electric Co., announced at the Baird 2009 Industrial Conference in Chicago that President Obama has succeeded in chasing his multi-billion dollar industry right out of the U.S.A. Why? Onerous regulation, high taxes, and the over $1 trillion Obama debt should be reason enough for any business to consider shutting down U.S. facilities and seeking greener pastures overseas says Farr.

The federal government is “doing everything in [its] manpower [and] capability to destroy U.S. manufacturing,” says David Farr, chairman and CEO of Emerson Electric Co., in a presentation at the Baird 2009 Industrial Conference in Chicago Ill., on Nov. 11. In comments reported by Bloomberg, Farr added that companies will continue adding jobs in China and India because they are “places where people want the products and where the governments welcome you to actually do something. I am not going to hire anybody in the United States. I’m moving. They are doing everything possible to destroy jobs.”

During his slide show on the state of Emerson’s business, Farr noted that the “unprecedented job loss experienced in this recession will result in a much slower U.S. recovery” and the federal government is making matters worse. The slide reports that the job loss this time is by many magnitudes worse than previous recessions. Noted are job losses from several recessions: 1980 with 1 million jobs lost; 1982 with 2.8 million; 1990 with 1.5 million; 2001 with 2.7 million. Finally Farr notes that we’ve seen a whopping 7.3 million jobs lost thus far (and climbing) in this 2008-2009-2010 recession.

And the culprit? Obama’s government interference. Farr’s presentation noted the following:

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One learns a new language upon first wading into the world of ,what’s favorably called by the Al Gores and Jacques Chiracs of the world, “global governance”. That term, used in all seriousness and intended as a compliment, means the web of international agreements (typically in the name of the environment), committing the prosperous world to agree to  do things it would never enact via its own democratic processes. New words such as “subsidiarity” and “additionality” are forged and tossed around like Mardi Gras beads at earnest negotiating sessions and in deathless texts. It’s Esperanto for the bossy jet-setters racked with guilt over your lifestyle.

Another of my favorites is “capacity building”, which means wealth transfers to prepare a poor society to receive a larger wealth transfer in the future. You see, certain among those societies our green superiors are trying to hector into behaving in a certain way – which is all of them – are not yet able to deal with the financial windfall due them from the Kyoto Protocols of the world. These international agreements frankly are more about redistribution than anything else. For example, Kyoto is in no way about actually reducing “greenhouse gas emissions”, but instead it creates a Ponzi-like scheme of paying other countries to sell you pieces of paper saying that you reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

And a good thing, too, because those few countries who are covered by Kyoto have all – like the rest of the world – increased their actual emissions since agreeing to this “historic emissions reduction pact.” Still, as we approach the December deadline for agreeing to a successor, Kyoto will be nonetheless be hailed for its accomplishment. Maybe by this they mean the recent cooling.

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A little cartoon to brighten your day, even as Senate Democrats seem Hell-bent on trying to hit the dimmer switch on our economy.

Read more here and here.

I was pleased to see the two colleagues either chosen to flank, or who elbowed their way up front to surround, Sens. John Kerry and Barbara Boxer when they introduced their “cap-and-trade” energy rationing scheme on Capitol Hill today. This Senate answer to the House’s California-Massachusetts Axis seeking to divine the nation’s future economic policy by means of environment policy — Beverly Hills’ Henry Waxman was the House bill’s co-author, along with Ed Markey — were boxed in by none other than one of the more intellectually and politically open members of that august body, self-styled Socialist Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Ben Cardin (D-MD).

Mr. Sanders’ high-profile support for the program moving individual energy use decisions from producers and consumers to the benevolent state requires no commentary. But it is Mr. Cardin who caught my eye, for reasons relating to his own candor.

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