Bill Clinton’s latest bad idea: Goldman Sachs trading “carbon credits” on Wall St.
When he was president, Bill Clinton lobbied for, and signed into law, NAFTA and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Both acts were advertised as being liberal and progressive—NAFTA because by removing tariffs and promoting “free trade” it would raise everybody’s standard of living; and, getting rid of Glass-Steagall would increase everyone’s freedom and prosperity by allowing saving banks to become investments banks.
NAFTA has, of course, proven to be a disaster. Ross Perot was correct when he said it would lead to the exporting of our manufacturing economy, and destroy our middle class. Given that NAFTA did not require Mexico to abide by our labor or environmental laws, that is exactly what happened. When China, with even less labor and environmental laws than Mexico, became regarded as a cheaper place for multinational corporations to make their products, Mexico was abandoned by them. (Now there’s a civil war going on there.)
Has Clinton ever taken responsibility for the failure of NAFTA, and for all the subsequent “free trade” agreements that were modeled on it? See for yourself.
When combined with NAFTA, Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall created the 1% and the Crash of ’08, which—proved by the EU’s continuing failure to keep the Euro afloat—isn’t over.
Has Clinton ever taken responsibility for the failure of his repeal of Glass-Steagall to produce the results he promised it would? See for yourself.
The apologies of Bill Clinton, who is simply an inside member of global 1%, are really beside the point, aren’t they? The results of his poor leadership are the world we’re living in, and his apology won’t change anything. If he was attempting to act on his apologies, and lead a global reform movement to undo every destructive force he unleashed, that would be a different story. But he is not leading any movement to reverse “free trade” or “financial deregulation.”
Instead, he’s trying to position his personal political-financial industry—the Clinton Foundation—so that it profits enormously from yet another destructive idea, the trading of pollution credits on Wall St, that he is marketing under the “environmentalist” label.
Here: take a look at the London stockjobber corporation that the Clinton Foundation has hired to sell its “carbon credits”:
London Carbon Credit Company is currently in advanced negotiations with the world renowned Clinton Foundation to be sole UK provider of carbon credits produced from the Clinton Climate Initiative’s Carbon Capture and Forestry projects. Carbon is set to be the world’s biggest commodity market and, according to James Cameron of Climate Change Capital, could become the biggest market of them all.
Clinton buys forests in “3rd world” nations at bargain-basement prices, and the amount of carbon these forests can absorb is sold to polluters, who can continue polluting b/c they have “offset” their pollution. Being the deceiver he is, Clinton takes credit for saving forests, and gets tons of fake “green investment” $$$$$$$ for it;
you see, he’s not saving the forests b/c he thinks forests have intrinsic value (think of our National Parks); he saves forests b/c they are, under the carbon-trading system, a way of letting dirty multinational-corp industries remain dirty.
Trading pollution credits will not curtail the emission of global-warming gases, because only stopping those emissions will do that. By allowing dirty industries to persist, the next generation of cleaner, greener industries and ways of life do not get funded or developed. Clinton is actually holding back our evolution out of the fossil-fuel economy that is causing global warming in the first place. That’s why Shell loves the Clinton Foundation.
In other words, Clinton is not saving forests; he is using forest-preservation as a greenwash to mask what he is actually doing: keeping the fossil-fuel economy alive as long as possible.
He and the rest of the neo-liberals that surround him, argue that since the GOP will not allow the passing of legislation that will cut the emission of global-warming gases, “carbon trading” is the best approach. Welcome back to Clinton’s 3rd way, his machiavellian strategy of appeasing the 1% by energetically advertising a fake-progressive solution to global warming that will profit $$$$$ him immensely, at the same time he makes it politically impossible to pass laws that will end the dirty economy that gives us global warming. Carbon trading is a bad and hopeless substitute for fighting the good fight, and enacting laws that will stop polluters.
Once upon a time, nations set aside forests because they are intrinsically valuable. The Clinton Foundation sets them aside because they are valuable on Wall Street.
Think about it—will the putting of a price tag on biomes save the biomes?
Or is just the opposite true: will the evolving beyond the putting of a price tag on biomes—and learning the science that reveals how our bodies are consanguineous with them—save the biomes?
And us?
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