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.

A challenge to the law, based on other environmental laws, specifically CEQA, (the California Environmental Quality Act), finally prompted a judge to halt the law’s implementation. CEQA says that legislation that has an impact on the economy or the environment has to be analyzed for less destructive alternatives. Such an analysis was not adequately done according to the judge. CEQA was signed by then Governor Ronald Reagan.  (May he rest in peace.)

Ironically, the group that brought the legal challenge to the law was not the coalition of businesses that would be directly affected. It was a group of racist, enviro-whackos calling themselves, the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, abbreviated CRAP. This group claims to defend minorities from the ravages of the environment. The reason that CRAP filed the lawsuit is that they thought the legislation was too business friendly!

The judges ruling is now an opening for the business community to permanently defeat this law. The California Air Resources Board, one of the state’s largest and most unaccountable agencies has to now study and find alternative solutions to reducing green house gases.

Here’s an idea for the Resources Board: how about if California just continue on with its other destructive economic policies? Policies like: spending taxes it doesn’t have, treasury-busting unfunded pensions, high corporate and individual taxes, promoting the trial lawyer paradise and all the other anti-business regulations? Then you’ll be on track for carbon emissions like you’ve had before the industrial revolution-without the need for the complex Cap and Tax.

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.

This in turn prompted the Wall Street Journal to note that ” In addition to all the other economic harm, a cap-and-trade tax will make foreign companies more competitive while eroding market share for U.S. businesses. . . .The most harm will accrue to the very U.S. manufacturing and heavy-industry jobs that Democrats and unions claim to want to keep. . . . [Cap-and-trade] would be the greatest outsourcing boon in history.”

Which all only makes sense when you recall that the issue is not the issue. “Global warming” and “cap-and-trade” — now “clean energy” and “green jobs” after a poll done by Stanley Greenberg suggested this re-branding — is simply the latest vehicle to ride to Big Left’s desired state.

As I write in Power Grab.:

David Foster, spokesman for the “Blue-Green Alliance,” a labor greenie group, admitted how it is a union priority to use “the environment” as a way to organize society and divvy the spoils. “It is an economic restructuring bill for the global economy. We should not pretend that it isn’t.” No objections here. Possibly they hope to replicate the most recent success of intrusive government mandates making organized labor a partner of America’s automobile manufacturing industry, culminating in the federal takeover. Regardless, we see both labor and the greens echo the claim by Americans for Prosperity’s Phil Kerpen that the agenda creates “political jobs, designed to funnel vast sums of taxpayer money to left-wing labor unions, environmental groups, and social justice community organizers.” If nothing else, we know that an inarguable result of Obama’s general agenda as well as specific environmental “salvation” is a massive increase in the size of the state. And the Blue-Green Alliance spent more than a million dollars last year lobbying for the agenda. It even teamed up with Gore’s campaign for a national bus tour pushing their agenda.” (citations omitted)

The question is whether they can wholly pull this off as a matter of law before Obama’s avowed model, European social democracy, collapses. A hint of what the answer to this question will be will be on display in early November.

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.

Now, in place of the heroes of that and other devastating wars, and the citizenry who lived during that era and its immediate aftermath, we have a whole new generation who are not only unaware of, but eschew the concept of American exceptionalism.  This leads to our inability to consider the need for national consensus and the concomitant politicization of almost every political subject.  Instead of invoking the memories of those past heroes, and warning Americans of new threats to our very national existence, our president steadfastly clings to the absurdity of banishing from his Administration’s vocabulary the reality of the greatest danger facing us:  fanatical Islamic terrorism.

The President who, using his bully pulpit to roll back executive compensation he considered excessive, or to squeeze funds from a company like BP beyond its legal responsibility, has nothing to say privately or publicly about an Islamic organization’s plans to, of all things, build an Islamic center very close to ground zero. Demonstrating a stone-dead tone deafness to how offensive such a structure is to the innocent people and their families who lost their lives and loved ones on 9/11 and a misguided need to show the world that we are an open and tolerant society, and abandoning any semblance of common sense, New York public officials have approved this tasteless project.

Instead of reminding the American people about the sheer decency and compassion of our own country and the sacrifices we have made for the good of the world, the president seems consumed by the need to convince the world that we are a good and decent people.  If the “rest of the world” doesn’t know that by now, his apologies for saving the European continent from despotism three times in the 20^th century are totally irrelevant and an insult to the memories of those who sacrificed, and precisely the wrong message to send to today’s generation who think freedom comes without cost.

Similarly, on substantive political issues, the current Administration has virtually ignored the value — indeed the imperative — of finding commonality of purpose, which, in a democracy, requires both compromise and consensus.  The Obama Administration, has confused a large Congressional majority for a license to cram down our collective throats, legislation that a substantial majority of the people do not want . . . and, when the White House can’t get its programs passed notwithstanding their bloated majorities, they have resorted to government by fiat, causing an unprecedented loss of respect for the federal government, and forcing individual states to attempt to enact their own policies on what are assuredly national issues.  This is a prescription for serious trouble and the further fraying of the ties that bind us as a people.

Item:  Senate Majority Leader Reid recently pulled from the floor the Cap and Tax legislation regulating carbon emissions.  He knew there was neither a majority nor even a semblance of consensus, for this bill, which would likely cause a major dislocation of the American economy.  So what did the Administration do?  It used the EPA to issue a finding that carbon emissions threaten human health, and thereby arrogated to an unelected administrative agency, a huge expansion of authority without the kind of democratic consensus necessary to support such a profound change to our economy.

Item:  The president and his acolytes in Congress used deception and political bribery to pass health care legislation, which a majority of the American people opposed, and which will bring about the most profound and expensive change to the delivery of health care in America since Medicare.  Moreover this massive piece of legislation is grounded in an unprecedented expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which is now being challenged in the courts by the attorneys general of 20 states.

Item:  Notwithstanding that BP might well have deserved it, the President, without even a scintilla of legal authority, strong-armed BP to create a $20 billion escrow fund, even though existing law (wrongly) sets a much lower liability limit. There is little doubt in our minds that BP would have, more than likely, agreed to such a request or that such an escrow requirement could have sailed through Congress, but the President made a show in his oval-office speech of demanding the $20 billion escrow fund hours before the meeting with BP.  We certainly have no tears to shed for BP, but nor do we have any cheers for this oval office theater.

Item:  In the bailout of General Motors, the Administration used raw federal power to subordinate the priority rights of bondholders (those who loaned money to GM) in order to give a huge equity stake to the United Auto Workers.  “Greedy bondholders” the president called them.  What this might portend for the capital markets and the trust they have in making investments in our economy is not yet known, but it is hard to distinguish this confiscatory action from those taken by the likes of the governments of Venezuela and Argentina.  We carry no brief to bail out creditors who made loans to a failing enterprise since that was the risk they voluntarily took, but those creditors were uniformly denied their priority rights in what amounted to a total corruption of the nation’s bankruptcy laws. Perhaps many feel that the ends justified the means, but we either are, or are not, a nation of laws.

To be sure, when the Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, they did, essentially, nothing to promote compromise and consensus.

It is time to consider the obvious:  democratic government is more than mere number counting.  Often, when it involves transformative policies, it requires more than a simple majority, something more akin to a national consensus is called for.  This requires honest and open debate and the practice of persuasion, not legislative bullying, trickery, deceit and backroom deals.  A president needs to be in touch with the feelings of the people if he is to govern effectively.  He needs more than intelligence, charm and a gift of gab.  He needs to be intuitive, to have a fingertip feel for the sentiments of the body politic; kind of like political Braille.

We are witnessing a usurpation of power, an unlawful exercise of power, by the executive branch, of those powers clearly delegated by the Constitution to Congress or the states.  This, over time, can become the proverbial death of a thousand cuts to the Federalism created by the founders. How different in result is this from the heavy handed actions of the thugocracies we deplore when democratic values are sliced away like salami to the point where the will of the people is reduced to irrelevance.  As the November elections approach, early indications are that the American public is in revolt (thankfully peacefully) at the excessive intrusion by government in our lives. There is a fear that a Pied Piper is leading us into financial extremis, and a general, but ever-growing concern that the current Administration is abdicating its most important job, keeping us safe so they can “reset” relations with those who wish us ill. Tyranny or authoritarianism doesn’t necessarily have to arrive by violent Soviet-style revolution  or mimic Mubarak’s Egypt, Castro’s Cuba or Chavez’s Venezuela.  At the end of the day, if democracy is eroded away does it matter whether we lose it through a coup or the accumulation of self inflicted wounds?

By Hal Gershowitz and Stephen Porter

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.

Some third party groups often put up issue ads that do more harm than good.  This is not the case.  Take the ad and send it around.

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.

For example, my representative, Tom Periello (D) — who in some circles is famous for insisting that mandating economic redundancy and inefficiency will “grow the economy”, a specific case study in economic illiteracy out of which I get some mileage in “Power Grab” — justified his then-recent vote for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill by telling a local Charlottesville radio station that we are hemorrhaging jobs to India and China because they’ve already done it.

Yeah. That was my reaction when hearing him say that, too. I was as surprised as the Indians and Chinese.

This was surely Mr. Periello taking more than a bit of rhetorical license with the fact that China is installing windmills as it seeks to get every conceivable joule or megawatt of energy it can to feed its emergence from poverty. But whatever the merits of the silly claims of lessons to be learned and followed from this — and please note that China is installing windmills because Brussels and EU member states are paying them to under Kyoto, to get “credits” in lieu of actually cutting European CO2 emissions — you might recall they are doing so without cap-and-trade.

So if our green advocates mean that we, too, can let Europe pay us to employ a bunch of windmill installers in these tough times, well, ok, let’s do what China did.  But otherwise China is not really relevant to the cap-n-traders who nonetheless invoke the Middle Kingdom at every turn, apparently for lack of any material argument.

With one exception. That is that China is growing economically thanks to increasingly providing access to reliable, affordable energy (neither of which terms describe wind or solar power, incidentally). China has been building a coal-fired power plant a week, a nuke a month, and plans a new coal mine every three months. They aren’t playing absurd global warming energy rationing games with their future and security other than a little fun on the side fleecing the frivolous Europeans, like a kitten with a ball of string (and, they hope, soon us as well).

So, upon reflection, is “China’s doing it!” really an “argument” you “green economy” and cap-n-traders would like to wed yourself to? Because I’m all for it. Let’s have that discussion.

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.

Pennsylvania is the fourth-largest coal-producing state in the country and coal plays a major part in the commonwealth’s economy and electricity production. Coal accounts for more than half of all electricity produced in Pennsylvania. According to a National Association of Manufacturers’ study, coal production would fall by about 85 percent and electricity production by about 21 percent as a result of a cap-and-trade bill voted for by Joe Sestak and passed in the House.

Pennsylvania is also home to the Marcellus Shale, one of the largest unconventional natural gas reserves in the world. It has the potential to turn our state into a major producer of clean energy and create thousands of jobs. But the new energy tax could doom this budding industry before it has a chance to develop.

The manufacturers’ study finds the House cap-and trade bill would cost Pennsylvania more than 70,000 jobs in the years ahead. But that’s not all. In just six years, it would increase gasoline prices by 6 percent to 8 percent, oil prices by 6 percent to 12 percent and natural gas prices by 14 percent to 21 percent.

The cap-and-trade energy tax is so devastating, it has garnered bipartisan opposition across Pennsylvania and the country.  In Pennsylvania alone, a majority of the congressional delegation – including both Republicans and Democrats – are opposing this disastrous tax.

We can and must support commonsense policies that protect our environment, but that goal can be achieved without abandoning 70,000 or more Pennsylvania jobs and imposing higher gas and electricity prices on all Pennsylvanians. A focus on renewable energy, conservation, low-carbon energy like natural gas, nuclear energy and cleaner-coal technology are all part of the solution. But as unemployment climbs toward 10 percent, protecting our hard-working families must be our first priority.

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.

Recall the sage from Team Soros, Mr. [Andrew] Light, who assures us that these mandates are “gonna spur new innovation, which is gonna reward smart investment, and which is gonna make alternative energy sources competitive” with things that actually work. No. The laws of physics remain undefeated. All they will do is impose the agenda admitted to by Van Jones and his Blue-Green allies, and seize your wealth to reward the purely speculative among Obama’s Wall Street supporters underwriting the green campaign.