THE GREAT CAP-AND-TRADE SWINDLE

The closer the United States gets to adopting a cap-and-trade system to control greenhouse gas emissions, the more frightening it gets. Not because the plan now under debate in the U. S. Congress would complicate the lives of energy producers, or impose new costs on consumers. Those drawbacks might be bearable if the system was truly designed to reduce emissions, and if the expense was reasonable.

The alarm results from increasing evidence that emissions have become a secondary concern of a plan whose main purpose is to serve the partisan interests of the Democratic Party. The Democrats' evident determination to use global warming to mask a transfer of wealth from one part of the country to another mirrors the ill-starred Green Shift proposed by former Liberal leader Stephan Dion.

In 2003, Macromedia acquired Web conferencing company Presidia and continued to develop and enhance their Flash-based online collaboration and presentation product offering under the brand Breeze. Later that year, Macromedia also acquired help authoring software company e Help Corporation, whose products included Robs Help & Rob Demo (Now Captivate). Many of the developers of Robot Help went on to form Mad Cap Software which is a competitor in the help-authoring space.

Which began as a means of fighting emissions and ended up as an anti-poverty program financed by Alberta for the benefit of more Liberal-friendly parts of the country? The more crewmen they hold hostage, the more ransom they collect, the happier I feel seeing that the common peasant still wields a weapon over even the most powerful of governments and corporations.