Texas Fred has a Saturday post where he calls for every Conservative to flood DC and local political offices with every manner of communications, to insist their Senators do not vote for the upcoming Cap & Trade bill.
My Congressman, Tom McClintock, voted against HR 2454 — as I would have expected. He’s an actual Conservative.
On the other hand, in Fornicalia, my two Senators, Boxer and Feinstein, are the poster children for Leftists and Socialists. I certainly won’t be convincing them of anything.
I should like you to read, however, this special order speech presented Friday by Congressman McClintock, who has seen the equivalent of “cap & trade” help to tear my state, Fornicalia, apart. He said:
I had a strange sense of Deja Vu as I watched the self-congratulatory rhetoric on the house floor tonight, and I feel compelled to offer this warning from the Left Coast.
Three years ago, I stood on the floor of the California Senate and watched a similar celebration over a similar bill, AB 32. And I have spent the last three years watching as that law has dangerously deepened California’s recession. It uses a different mechanism than Cap and Trade, but the objective is the same: to force a dramatic reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.
Up until that bill took effect, California’s unemployment numbers tracked very closely with the national unemployment rate. But then in January of 2007, California’s unemployment rate began a steady upward divergence from the national jobless figures. Today, California’s unemployment rate is more than two points above the national rate, and at its highest point since 1941.
What is it that happened in January of 2007? AB 32 took effect and began shutting down entire segments of California’s economy. Let me give you one example from my district. The City of Truckee, California was about to sign a long-term power contract to get its electricity from a new, EPA-approved coal-fired electricity plant in Utah. AB 32 and companion legislation caused them to abandon that contract. The replacement power they acquired literally doubled their electricity costs.
So when economists warn that we can expect electricity prices to double under the cap and trade bill, I can tell you from bitter experience that in my district, that’s not a future prediction, that is an historical fact.
Gov. Schwarzenegger assured us that AB 32 would mean an explosion of new, green jobs — exactly the same promises we’re hearing from cap and trade supporters. In California, exactly the opposite has happened. We have lost so many jobs that the UCSB economic forecast is now using the D-word – Depression – to discuss California’s job market.
M. Speaker, the Cap and Trade bill proposes what amounts to endlessly increasing taxes on any enterprises that produce carbon dioxide or other so-called greenhouse gas emissions. We need to understand what that means. It has profound implications for agriculture, construction, cargo and passenger transportation, energy production, baking and brewing – all of which produce enormous quantities of this innocuous and ubiquitous compound. In fact, every human being produces 2.2 pounds of carbon dioxide every day – just by breathing.
So applying a tax to the economy designed to radically constrict carbon dioxide emissions means radically constricting the economy.
And this brings us to the fine point of it.
When you discuss the folly of the Hoover Administration – how it turned the recession of 1929 into the depression of the 1930’s, the first thing that economists point to is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that imposed new taxes on over 20,000 imported products.
Waxman Markey is our generation’s Smoot Hawley. In fact, it’s worse because it imposes new taxes on an infinitely larger number of domestic products on a scale that utterly dwarfs Smoot-Hawley.
Let’s ignore for the moment the fact that the planet’s climate is constantly changing and that long term global warming has been going on since the last ice age. Let’s ignore the fact that within recorded history we know of periods when the earth’s climate has been much warmer than it is today and others when it has been much cooler. Let’s ignore the thousands of climate scientists and meteorologists who have concluded that human-produced greenhouse gases are a negligible factor in global warming or climate change.
Ignore all of that and still we are left with one lousy sense of timing. In the most serious recession since the Great Depression – why would members of this house want to repeat the same mistakes that produced that Great Depression? Watching how California has just wrecked its economy and destroyed its finances, why would they want to do the same thing to our nation?
M. Speaker, this is deadly serious stuff. It transcends ideology and politics. This House has just made the biggest economic mistake since the days of Herbert Hoover.
If this measure becomes law, two things are certain.
First, our planet will continue to warm and cool as it has been doing for billions of years.
Second: Congress will have delivered a staggering blow to our nation’s economy at precisely that moment when that economy was the most vulnerable.
I’m proud to live in Mr McClintock’s district. And he’s absolutely correct. America stands literally on the precipice of another Great Depression. And America’s politicians seem only so ready to push my country directly into that yawning chasm of economic doom.
BZ
Well, aren’t YOU the lucky one.
I was going to call MY congressman, but it’s WAXMAN “Do NOT vote for your awful bill!”
I DID send him a note…and it wasn’t a love note, TRUST me. (*$&)$&*(#
Wow, sounds like Mr. McClintock may be the nearest thing we have to a statesman. God Bless him, & you, BZ.
At this point, you have a choice; either pay the new taxes or don’t. Frankly I am considering the latter option. Enough is enough. This just ain’t right. Our elected representatives do NOT represent the will of the people; only their misguided self interest.
I try to think that the world will be a better place for my son than it was for me. But that is pure delusion. The biggest question is what action can we take to ameliorate this madness? Does the American citizenry have any more power?
To ARMS.
To ARMS!!!
American Patriots, TO ARMS I SAY!!!
My congressman also voted against it, but with Levin and Stab-em-now as my Senators it’s a wasted effort. It’s political suicide but I just hate the fact that the bullet in the gun they’re holding to their own heads is going to pass through us first.
My two Senators, Webb and Warner, are shills for BHO. I’ve communicated with them numerous times — and gotten softly-worded reproofs in return. Those reproofs make it clear that both Webb and Warner are following BHO’s agenda, no matter what.
I’ve never felt so disconnected from my govnernment. Never!
Addendum:
Texas Fred is right to urge us on. I just hope that enough people who understand the dangers of Cap and Trade will be able to convince their Sneators to defy BHO.
Z: Your Waxman and my Boxer and Feinstein. No WONDER we’re in the Hellhole.
David: thank you. I can only invite you to check out his websites and check out his voting and his quite plain philosophy.
Mahndisa: when you have a policital power such as Mr Obama, aided and abetted 24/7 by the MSM, further aided and abetted by those who voted emotionally for Mr Obama, aided and abetted by those who couldn’t care less about politics, wholly indifferent.
TF: I’m shaking my head in wonder. And wonderING.
Shoprat: yes, and isn’t it ODD how every aspect of OUR lives are pusposely AVOIDED in THEIR lives and that Congress purposely EXEMPTS themselves from hordes of laws WE must obey.
AOW: I know TF will, some day, be proven prescient. That’s what frightens me. No one is yet listening.
BZ
My Senators are Inhofe and Coburn. They will vote against this legislation. My Representative is John Sullivan. He voted against.
Excellent post and a really, really interesting statement from McClintock.
I did a short post with a snippet from McClintock and linked back to you. Everyone needs to hear what McClintock had to say.
Maggie: thank you EVER so kindly for the link! McClintock’s words will be proven fateful.
BZ
The cartoons are great with a serious message. I suspect thousands of years ago when the first paleo-indians crossed into what is now Alaska and continued on down into the United States they were quite startled to see the great glaciers of that time melting and fearing the onrushing water of the great seas and lakes they dimmed their campfires and eventually seeing no results the resorted to sacrifice to the old gods. Now some 15,000 years later again the new cave-dwellers of the vast canyons of the sprawling urban areas are again calling for the dimming of the campfires to stop the rising waters. And I’m sure given enough time will again call for the sacrifice of a virgin to appease the gods of science. Now where to find a virgin may present an entirely new problem. The Chicken Little’s of the world will always be with us.
“TexasFred said…
To ARMS.
To ARMS!!!
American Patriots, TO ARMS I SAY!!!”
Right, go shoot yourself and do us all a favor.
Anonymous: open wide sir; here comes the pablum. Mmm, good!
BZ