how about me for some of that political loot

The Democratic Party is buying carbon offsets so as to pretend that their big national convention boozefest will be "carbon neutral." But they're buying the offsets in a thoroughly discriminatory manner, favoring only Native Americans indulgences, I mean offsets.

The Democratic Party won't be buying any offsets from Italian Americans like me because we don't qualify as members of a "minority group" even though we are a group and we are in the minority just like Native Americans. Also we don't have a well developed mechanism for funnelling loot to politicians.

The net is that I can't hope to sell any indulgences to the Democratic Party, even though I have plenty of indulgences that I could sell if ordinary schnooks were allowed to take advantage of the game. I have, for instance, been partly heating the house with home grown and home cut wood for three decades. And I have been letting much of our lawn grow into high grassland during the summers for at least a decade. And I have a bit of woodland on which the trees are patiently sequestering carbon each year. That, you see, is what offsets are about. A person like me who arranges his life so as to use less fossil fuel sells his savings in carbon emissions to a porcine like Al Gore who arranges his life so as to emit more CO2 than twenty or thirty ordinary people. A person like me could do that if he was of a mind to kick back a nice fat envelope of Benjamins to the right people.

Al Gore gets some of the money he uses to buy his indulgences by flying around the world on private jets giving speeches and writing books about why everyone should emit less CO2. And Al, like the Democratic Party, also gets his share of Benjamin filled envelopes from people and companies who want to pollute like pigs, as he does, but who don't want to be mentioned in his speeches and books and movies. Not that there's anything in the least illegal about this. I'm utterly sure Al is a careful enough man to ensure that any Benjamins that find their way into his pockets have passed through a special kind of laundry which turns dirty Benjamins into clean Benjamins.

Al Gore and the folks who are arranging the Democratic Convention are well aware of a simple fact known to The Godfather. "A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a thousand men with guns."