As the Administration’s push for alternative fuels grows stronger, Congress is set to consider H.R. 1380, which would create very generous tax credits to manufacturers who retrofit existing work vehicles to run on natural gas rather than on that terrifying global menace known as oil, and very generous subsidies to natural gas vehicle consumers: $7500 per car and a whopping $64,000 for heavy-duty trucks and 18-wheelers. It’s common knowledge in DC that Texas hedge-fund operator and natural gas-magnate T. Boone Pickens is the force behind this bi-partisan, pork-laden legislation, possibly because his natural gas empire would greatly profit from the sudden influx of billions of taxpayer dollars in the form of subsidies listed in the bill.

But hidden behind the scenes is another multi-billionaire, one with a much more sinister motive than mere profit. A man who’s vast fortune of nearly $7 billion is being used to subvert nearly every American institution to conform with his dream of a worldwide socialist utopia.

George Soros.

According to the website GuruFocus, which tracks the investment habits and portfolio trends of some of the world’s richest people, George Soros has made some intrigiung investments into alternative fuel companies of late, specifically those at the forefront of natural gas. This would not be so troubling except that, as GuruFocus points out, Soros has accurately predicted both economic bubbles and quickly growing industries. As a result, Soros’s funds have turned out a 30% return on investments since their inception.

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Health insurance company CEOs will apparently be spared the public thrashing planned for April 21 by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Hollywood). Waxman notified committee members of the cancellation in a memo released Wednesday.

The memo implies that the companies which had been asked to appear – Verizon, Caterpillar, AT&T and Deere & Co. – were being less critical of the new healthcare law, but there is nothing to support that implication.

The memo says that, “…several companies and their representatives expressed the view that the new law could have beneficial impacts on large employers if implemented properly.”  But the memo appears to back away from the accusatory letters and press releases which preceded it.

The hearing – the sort of public lashing that the Energy and Commerce Committee became famous for under Waxman’s predecessor, John Dingell (D-Mi) – was called because Waxman wanted to bash the companies for making (legally-required) financial disclosures of huge expected losses to be incurred due to Obamacare. (Caterpillar alone expected to lose $100 million in 2010, according to its financial filings).

In his demand letter, Waxman had demanded that the companies produce an enormous quantity of potentially proprietary (and some legally-privileged) documents.  This demand was apparently canceled along with the hearing.

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Democrats understand that passage of Obama’s healthcare “reforms” will probably hurt them in November, so they’re doing everything they can to dampen the anger directed at them and turn it against someone – anyone – else.

Anger-dampening was built into the bill, postponing the tax increases and other burdens Americans will feel directly until after the 2010 elections (and some until after 2012). Obama and the congressional Democrats are out bragging about the rainbows and unicorns they’ve produced.

But now several major American companies – AT&T, Verizon, Deere & Co. and Caterpillar – are spoiling the carefully-planned narrative by saying that they will incur huge losses (impliedly causing job losses) because of the costs they will incur under the Obamacare plan.

As a result, congressional Dems are planning a public punishment of the heretics.

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Last week, Democrats in Congress rammed through a wildly unpopular healthcare bill before heading out of town to celebrate the accomplishment. As it turns out, not all Americans are celebrating.

In the few short days since, a growing wave of U.S. employers have come forward to denounce the massive new costs, hidden problems and bureaucratic hurdles contained in the recently passed healthcare legislation—costs that will choke off job creation and be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices on a wide array of goods and services.

Under one deeply misguided provision in Speaker Pelosi’s health overhaul legislation, for example, companies will face a costly new tax on prescription drug benefits they provide to retired workers. Those benefits ensure high quality drug coverage for retired seniors and spare the taxpayer the full cost of covering these individuals under the Medicare program. Due to the healthcare bill, though, employers will now face massive new costs, while retirees stand to lose their prescription drug coverage.

The legislation hits Illinois particularly hard.

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In modern day America, if you criticize the government you are now fair game to be called upon to explain yourself in front of it.  As Byron York reported in a recent Washington Examiner column, Rep. Henry Waxman sent letters to executives of major corporations such as Verizon and Caterpillar, requesting their testimony at hearings of the Subcomittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, chaired by none other than Rep. Bart Stupak, as each of the companies “announced that provisions in the [healthcare] law could adversely affect” their “ability to provide health insurance.”  AT&T for instance had disclosed in an SEC form that changes in the tax treatment of a Medicare subsidy would lead to a $1 billion write-off in earnings from the first quarter of 2010, and said it was considering changes to the health care benefits it provides for its employees.

That the legislation would negatively affect the earnings of these corporations and potentially hamper their ability to provide healthcare is for Rep. Waxman “a matter of concern,” as the “new law is designed to expand coverage and bring down costs.”

But I wonder, for whom are the negative effects of this legislation really a concern?  For Rep. Waxman and his fellow Democrats who already forced the egregious bill on the public?  For the private enterprises pummeled seemingly on a daily basis by these same politicians?  Perhaps for the American people faced with all kinds of economy-crippling unintended consequences as a result of the legislation, on top of the higher costs and worse healthcare they will ultimately receive?

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You think Obama has been a nightmare? You ain’t seen nothing yet. That was just the preview.

American business, the motor of the global economy, was dealt a deathblow by the Marxist putsch that the Democrat Party delivered in the form of the healthcare bill. Why wasn’t this made public before the vote? The numbers are staggering. It was revealed Friday that AT&T, the largest telephone company in the country, will take a one-billion-dollar hit in the current quarter as a result of this economic attack on America. The farm-equipment company Deere is looking at $150 million in new healthcare-related charges this quarter, and Caterpillar is facing  $100 million.

Who do you think will pay for this? We will pay. According to Reuters, “Verizon Communications, the second biggest U.S. phone company, told employees that tax burdens under the new law would likely filter down to employees.” Business is not something in the abstract, or the evil force the leftists and the communists deceptively smear it to be — business is work, business is people, it is jobs, it is production. When business pays, we pay. Jobs pay. Consumers pay.

And we will pay for more than that as well. Have you seen the commercials yet for people who have maxed out their credit cards, and have loans over ten thousand that they can’t pay back, urging them to apply for stimulus dollars? Are you one of those who played by the rules, worked hard, did the right thing? If so, you’re screwed. The man has you and your wallet and your kids’ wallet by the throat. Welcome to the era of the degenerate: they will be sucking your blood and your children’s blood and your children’s children’s blood for decades to come, or however long America lasts.

Notice how Obama bad news always drops on Friday nights. But the Democrats will not forever be able to keep quiet the reality and the consequences of Obama rule.

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The president’s health care bill isn’t going to come cheap for us as taxpayers or employers. In fact, the latest estimate from Caterpillar is enough to make you want to climb into a cocoon.

Dow Jones reports: “Caterpillar Inc. said the health-care overhaul legislation being considered by the U.S. House of Representatives would increase the company’s health-care costs by more than $100 million in the first year alone.”

As LaborUnionReport says over at RedState: “The sucking sound that will be heard will be more UAW jobs”

What would Saul Alinksy do?

In the wake of defeats for the Obama administration last month both with Scott Brown’s stunning Senate victory in the bluest of blue states and the Supreme Court Citizens United decision that will let thousands of groups speak more freely about candidates positions’ in the 2010 elections and beyond, that’s the question President Obama and his allies are probably asking. It’s also the question that proponents of limited, constitutional government and free enterprise must be asking in order to anticipate the organized Left’s next moves.

Alinksy was the father of left-wing community organizing. He wrote the book Rules for Radicals and other primers, which explained to would-be leftist organizers how to “search out controversy” and “fan the latent hostilities.” Seeing the world as a never-ending conflict between the “haves and have-nots,” Alinsky wrote In Rules for Radicals that “in war, the end justifies almost any means.”  One community organizer who took Alinsky’s words to heart was a young Barack Obama, who worked for an offshoot of Alinsky’s network of organizations in Chicago in the 1980s. Throughout his career, according to the Washington Post, Obama has “embraced many of Alinsky’s tactics.”

And one tactic in Alinsky’s arsenal dovetails almost perfectly with Obama’s new focus on so-called “financial reform” and his bashing of Wall Street to score political points. One of Alinsky’s most important rules for radicals was that “you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.” In this case, the “moral garment” is the supposed interest of shareholders.

Obama and Democrats are pushing legislation they claim would empower average investors against powerful corporate executives. They propose requiring a shareholder vote on everything from CEO pay to – in a move to limit the freedoms in the Citizens United decision — companies’ weighing in on political candidates.

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