Conflict of Interest at the White House

Posted by Lorren on May 5, 2010

If you regularly watch Glenn Beck, you may have seen his episodes on “Crime, Inc.” Now, I’m not sure if he’s dug up any actual crime (at least not that he’s released, yet), but I do see a HUGE conflict of interest here, so I thought that I’d share the information with you, in case you haven’t seen it.

Barack Obama and the U.S. government are trying to pass Cap and Trade legislation. This legislation would basically say that companies can have credits to create a certain number of pollutants per year. If they go above this amount, they will have to buy credits from a company that has credits and doesn’t use them. Obama has said before that this would make energy costs “necessarily skyrocket”. Great. I already keep my thermostat in the summer at 85 to 87 degrees in the summer, and my air conditioning bills are high enough. My thermostat doesn’t even go above 90. I know that I can’t really afford higher electric rates… can you?

Legislation of that kind might be okay, if you believed that that world was going to be destroyed from overheating and all that. However, global warming has been recently discredited. On the grand scheme of things, it hasn’t been that long since we recovered from the Little Ice Age that ended in the 1860s (it lasted about 500 years or so). Additionally, this legislation that Obama is pushing for introduces a major conflict of interest.

The Chicago Climate Exchange

Carbon Credits would be traded by the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). Barack Obama is from Chicago, isn’t he? That is more than a coincidence. The Chicago Climate Exchange was created by a grant from The Joyce Foundation. This wonderful foundation also funds John Ayers and the Tides Foundation. Who was sitting on the board from 1994-2002? Barack Obama. Valerie Jarret, one of Obama’s close advisors, was also sitting on the board of the Joyce Foundation; she was on the board from 2003-2008. The CCX started trading in 2003, but it was funded while Obama was sitting as a board member.

Other groups that have funded the CCX include Generation Investment Management, which was co-founded by Al Gore. Another person involved in Generation Investment Management include Davide Blood (formerly from Goldman Sachs). Goldman Sachs itself purchased 10% of the Chicago Climate Exchange.

The Cap and Trade legislation is supposed to be a $10 trillion/year market. To put that in perspective, the entire GDP of the United States is $15 trillion/year. I’m wondering where that kind of money is going to come from.

Anyway, as Barack Obama was involved in creating the Chicago Climate Exchange, wouldn’t there be a conflict of interest in passing Cap and Trade legislation? I’m not sure if he owns any actual CCX stock, but some of his friends do, and they could end up getting very rich in the process. If I made my friends trillionaires (or even billionaires), would you think that they might do something for me?

There are actually more connections, but I’m still trying to sort out what it means, so I’ll post more on that later.