Cap and Trade like Health Bill

I just wrote about the unfortunately compromised Health Care bill passed by the House. It is a bill that started out with the intention to help the American people and by the time it was done the health care lobbyists had turned it into something much less. It is not like there are no good things in the bill and that it isn't an improvement over what we had previously but it is still weak.

It has been weakened by corporate lobbyists. So instead of getting bill that will actually work we get some kind of weird half measure that does as much for the corporate interests involved as it does for the American people. We can't win anymore.

The proof is in the other half measure legislation being put forward in the form of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill passed by the House. I just did a story at OhMyGov about a couple of EPA attorneys who have done a fantastic You Tube video called "A Huge Mistake." They argue that cap and trade can't work because the corporate interests involved always find a way to get around the new rules and actually turn it around to make a profit from it.

A seemingly innocuous part of the bill called carbon offsets are actually giant loop holes that the corporate interests are ready and anxious to jump through. An example provided by Laurie Williams and Alan Zabel, the two attorneys involved, is "suppose that a landowner is paid not to cut his forest so that it can continue capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Purchasing this offset allows owners of a coal-fired power plant to burn extra coal, above the cap."

The problems with this, says Williams and Zabel, is that somebody like Weyerhauser will just cut down a different forest and somebody else gets to spray more carbons in the air with the offset. It is "untrackable shifting economic activity and perverse incentives such as these are inherent problems for carbon offset that cannot be solved by certification or verification processes."

In some countries where carbon offsets are happening, like Great Britain, corporations actually lobby for them because they've managed to make them profitable without having to give up a thing. In fact, the carbon offsets give the pollutant actual value thus creating an incentive to produce it. Personally, I'm pretty sure that was not the original intention of the legislation but what emerges after it's been modified by corporate interests.

It is a pretty simple equation for the rest of us: Politicians + Corporate Lobbyists = Profits/Campaign funds for both of them. Not much for us but a weak bill that pretends to be something that it isn't.

And the reality is.........................

There are a lot of progressives out there right now who are pretty darn disappointed at the direction the health care bill has taken. They seem to have the impression that they handed the Democrats a majority in the House and Senate and that now, finally, we would be able to take the country in a different direction. Now they can't help wondering how it is that such a weak, corporate and GOP friendly bill is being put forward.


It isn't as if we all didn't just witness a Republican administration without a majority in the last four years still manage to get pretty much whatever it wanted. All they had to do was threaten to call a Democrat unpatriotic and they crumpled like tissue paper. The tax breaks for the wealthy were retained, nobody was ever investigated for ever and ever more obvious crimes, and the beat went on.

The reason is because the Bush administration and his GOP cohorts in the House and Senate never put anything forward that wasn't extremely popular with Corporate America. And if they like it then they'll find Democrats who like it too.

So, why can't the Democrats with a popular President and a super majority in the Senate do the same thing? The truth is that they could if they wanted to. The reality is that they are as deeply owned by corporate interests as their colleagues in the Republican party.

They talk a good game to their constituents and MSNBC but when push comes to shove they are going to take into consideration the interests of the lobbyists who are in their face with money and information 24/7 more than us. We are being given excuses like they just didn't have the votes because the blue dog Dems wouldn't budge. Ever hear that kind of rubbish from Tom Delay?

Personally, I think that Nancy Pelosi is one of the most capable Speakers we've had for a long time but she's not going to challenge the entrenched powers. Perhaps we are expecting too much. This is big legislation after all. Sometimes we get this crazy idea that we actually might have some kind of relevant opinion but we really don't. Not in Corporate America.