I wish I'd been paying closer attention to this, because now I have a whole lot of questions that weren't there before I read Matt Taibbi's latest story for Rolling Stone: "How Goldman Sachs took over Washington by engineering every major market manipulation since the Great Depression."

But first, the "good" news:

WASHINGTON -- Landmark legislation to curb U.S. greenhouse gas emissions was approved by the House of Representatives in a close vote late Friday, securing a hard-fought victory for a cornerstone of President Barack Obama's agenda.

After months of negotiations, the Democratic-controlled House has narrowly passed sweeping legislation calling for the nation's first-ever limits on pollution linked to global warming. Stephen Power explains the bill's implications.

The 1,200 page bill—formally known as the "American Clean Energy and Security Act"—will reach into almost every corner of the U.S. economy. By putting a price on emissions of common gases, such as carbon dioxide, the bill would affect the way electricity is generated, how homes and offices are designed, how foreign trade is conducted and how much Americans pay to drive or to heat their homes.

Talking about how very deeply Goldman Sachs is embedded in the investors that will profit from cap-and-trade, Taibbi says:

Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe - but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.

"If it's going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it," says Michael Masters, the hedge-fund director who spoke out against oil-futures speculation. "But we're saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That's the last thing in the world I want. It's just asinine."

Cap-and-trade is going to happen. [Ed. note - this was published yesterday.] Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees - while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.

It's not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there's a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can't really register the fact that you're no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you're no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you still sort of feel things that are no longer there.

But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework until the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can't be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going.

RS hasn't put it online but really, I strongly recommend buying the issue to support this kind of journalism.

You can read some comments on the piece here, here and here.

Oh, and you can read a related Taibbi piece here.

In an apparent attempt at cuteness, the NYT’s Thomas Friedman wrote a column written as if it were an “Iranian National Intelligence Estimate of America” to Ahmadinejad from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence

It included this bizarre assertion:

True, thanks to Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. Congress decided to increase the miles per gallon required of U.S. car fleets by the year 2020 — which took us by surprise — but we nevertheless “strongly believe” this will not lead to any definitive breaking of America’s oil addiction, since none of the leading presidential candidates has offered an energy policy that would include a tax on oil or carbon that could trigger a truly transformational shift in America away from fossil fuels.

Therefore, it is “very likely” that Iran’s current level of high oil revenues will last for decades and insulate our regime from any decisive pressures from abroad or from our own people.

Except, as Kevin Drum explained, Friedman has it backwards.

All three of the leading Democratic candidates have proposed cap-and-trade plans that auction 100% of their CO2 permits. This is, economically speaking, the same thing as a carbon tax.

If Friedman is aware of this, he should say so. If he’s not, he should get his facts straight.

Here's Mittens, back in 2007.

From Grist, further evidence that Mitt "Etch-A-Sketch" Romney is/was the the moderate, Northeastern Republican that haunts the dreams of the party's extreme fringe — otherwise known as the Republican leadership. Now, while I'm always happy to catch a Republican with his ideological pants down, in this case, it may not work to the Democrats' advantage. Because the more moderate Mittens appears in the eyes of the true believers, the more pressure there will be to pair him with an extremist personality like Paul Ryan or Eric Cantor to excite their base and get them to turn out:

A new document has surfaced [PDF] showing Mitt Romney’s strong support for regulating carbon dioxide in 2003, when he called cap-and-trade “an effective approach” to combating global warming.

The comments were made in a letter from Romney to New York Gov. George Pataki (R) about a regional cooperative system for regulating greenhouse gases. In the letter, Romney agreed with Pataki on the need to “reduce the power plant pollution that is harming our climate.”But today, in trying to align himself with conservative political backlash against climate science, Romney says “we don’t know” whether humans are warming the planet, and that doing something about the problem “is not the right course for us.”

Here’s the full letter [PDF] from Romney to Pataki:

Thank you for your invitation to embark on a cooperative northeast process to reduce the power plant pollution that is harming our climate. I concur that climate change is beginning to effect on our natural resources and that now is the time to take action toward climate protection. Furthermore, I share your interest in ensuring that the economic and security contributions made by our electricity generating system are not negated by the impact of emissions from that system on the health of our citizens.

As you may know, the commonwealth is making major strides to reduce the environmental impact of our power plants. Specifically, I am making good on my pledge to clean up the six oldest and dirtiest power plants in the state and bring them up to new plant standards for NOx, SOx, mercury and CO2. We are the first state to enact a cap on CO2, implementing regulations that, by 2008, will reduce these emissions by 10%, removing 6,750 tons of Co2 per day. Furthermore, Massachusetts, along with the other New England states and Canadian provinces, has a target of reducing greenhouse gases and improving the efficiency of the grid substantially over the next 20 years.

I believe that our joint work to create a flexible market-based regional cap and trade system could serve as an effective approach to meeting these goals. I am ready to have my staff work with yours to explore how we might design such a system — one that would keep the cost of compliance as low as possible, diversify our fuels, encourage energy efficiency and renewables, and keep our energy dollars in the region. Thank you for your initiative in proposing this project.

Even though he's done everything but demand drilling on every block in America to make up for it, Republicans are still suspicious that Mittens is, deep down, a sensible sort. And in the modern Republican party, we can't have that!