Slow-Melt Irony

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One of the great turds of the US political system, Sen. James Inhofe, yes, that silly-assed Republican from Oklahoma, displayed a most-marvelous bit of horror-irony this week as he tweaked the future and all those to come after us.
Inhofe is a major big-mouth-crybaby global-warming denier — appears a fairly ignorant man.
And with the Copenhagen climate talks coming up in a couple of weeks, the pecker-head, dim-witted Inhofe claims the world is safe as nothing good comes out of Denmark.
Via HuffPost:

And Inhofe had a message specifically for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) — “We won, you lost, get a life.”

Something terrifyingly-paradoxical there.

(Illustration found here).

Whether one wants to hear it or not, or even, whether you believe/know it or not, the near-future of the planet is way-grounded in the word, change.
There’s so much afoot nowadays aimed at a really-clouded and anxious tomorrow — weather, energy, food (all the basics) — that despite all of stinky-Jim Inhofe’s blubberings will affect/effect everyone in such a profound way it’s unfathomable here writing this morning.
Read the basics on weather/climate here.
And on energy here; the basic problem on food here.

Inhofe’s mouth-off last week was in response to news the full Senate won’t get around to a climate bill until this coming spring, months after the Denmark meeting.
Last summer, the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill (the American Clean Energy and Security Act), which called for cutting US greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, 83 percent by 2050.
The Senate’s slightly more ambitious bill calls for a 20-percent cut by 2020.
And from the clown who blubbered years ago climate change was “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” Inhofe continues to bluster hysterical about  the hysteria behind global warming alarmism:

I also said in Milan that the science is not settled.
That was an unpopular view back then.
But today, since Al Gore’s science fiction movie, more and more scientists, reporters, and politicians are questioning global warming alarmism.
I proudly declare 2009 as the “Year of the Skeptic” — the year in which scientists who question the so-called global warming consensus are being heard.
…
Of course, from the most memorable tidbit from my two-hour global warming speech in July of 2003 were my comments about the science behind global warming.
Now, six years later, and as I head to the next UN global warming conference, I am pleased by the vast and growing number of scientists, politicians, and reporters all over the world who are publicly rejecting climate alarmism.
When I made those comments on the Senate Floor, few people were there to stand with me.
Today, I have been vindicated and I am proud to share the stage with all those who now dare question Al Gore, Hollywood elites, and the United Nations.

Inhofe feels “vindicated” from what?
Barbara Boxer is head of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee — the EPW passed global warming legislation a couple of weeks ago by bypassing bowl-obstructed GOP members, thus eliminating their participation — the guys were being asshole-jerks, they’d boycotted the bill by stubbornly seeking more EPA analysis at an estimated (and additional) $140,000 cost.
Inhofe whined about it anyway: “In the history of this, we’ve not been able to find a time when a bill has been marked up without minority participation…”
However, he does seem to get the ever-changing last laugh –spine-lacking Harry Reid’s assertion of no Senate debate on climate-warming until the snow melts.
Read a view of the Senate version of the climate bill at Climate Progress.

And adding fuel to the skeptic/denier crowd were e-mails hacked this week from the UK’s Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and posted online — actually a bit to do about nothing, unless you’re scamming.
From Wired:

Global warming skeptics are seizing on portions of the messages as evidence that scientists are colluding and warping data to fit the theory of global warming, but researchers say the e-mails are being taken out of context and just show scientists engaged in frank discussion.

And one such e-mail from Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado:

But Trenberth, who acknowledged the e-mail is genuine, says bloggers are missing the point he’s making in the e-mail by not reading the article cited in it.
That article – An Imperative for Climate Change Planning (pdf) — actually says that global warming is continuing, despite random temperature variations that would seem to suggest otherwise.
“It says we don’t have an observing system adequate to track it, but there are all other kinds of signs aside from global mean temperatures — including melting of Arctic sea ice and rising sea levels and a lot of other indicators — that global warming is continuing,” he says.
…
“If you read all of these e-mails, you will be surprised at the integrity of these scientists,” he (Trenberth) says. “The unfortunate thing about this is that people can cherry pick and take things out of context.”

A good semi-insider response can be found at RealClimate.

Global warming and all its outlying complications are all too real — even a total mainstream source like National Geographic has a good interactive site on climate change — and Time magazine posed on Friday the consequences of a lame or near-non-existent agreement coming out of Copenhagen:

But there’s no getting around the fact that as the science of climate change grows more dire, the global political system seems increasingly unable to deal with that reality.
“We don’t want a global suicide pact,” said Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, a low-lying Indian Ocean nation that could be swamped by global warming-caused flooding. “We want a global survival pact.”
But the world’s most influential leaders still aren’t ready for that.

Ready for what? An event way down the road, a maybe-problem for some future generation?
Not so fast…
From the executive summary of a new study (pdf) commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund International (h/t Climate Progress):

This report models the ability of low-carbon industries to grow and transform within a market economy.
It finds that runaway climate change is almost inevitable without specific action to implement low-carbon re-industrialisation over the next five years.
The point of no return is estimated to be 2014.

Re-invent modern industry in five years?
You gotta be shittin’ me!

Just follow Jumping-Jim Inhofe’s advice: ‘Get a life.’

Home the Buck

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Home is not the castle so trumped years ago — now it’s nothing more than a file in the immoral portfolio of US banking’s financial system.
A system that’s so skewed you can’t tell the front door from the back.

McClatchy has another story on that ugly, nasty piece of shit called Goldman Sachs.

Goldman spent years buying hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages, many of them from some of the more unsavory lenders in the business, and packaging them into high-yield bonds.
Now that the bottom has fallen out of that market, Goldman finds itself in a different role: as the big banker that takes homes away from folks such as the Beckers.
The couple alleges that Goldman declined for three years to confirm their suspicions that it had bought their mortgages from a subprime lender, even after they wrote to Goldman’s then-Chief Executive Henry Paulson — later U.S. Treasury secretary — in 2003.
…
Joining other Wall Street firms that bought millions of subprime mortgages, Goldman companies have gone to courts from California to Florida seeking approval to foreclose on the homes of middle-and lower-income Americans who couldn’t keep up with their loans’ soaring monthly payments.
Some borrowers were speculators or homebuyers who exaggerated their incomes on loan applications, thinking they’d always have an escape hatch because housing prices would keep rising.
Others, however, were victims of fast-talking mortgage brokers who didn’t explain that the loans’ interest rates could rise to as high as 15 percent.
Many borrowers who defaulted on their mortgages may never qualify for a home loan again.

And for in-depth background, read Matt Taibbi’s most-excellent comprehensive piece in Rolling Stone from last July about Goldman Sachs: The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Problem, though, is the very system itself.
On Bill Moyers’ Journal, James K. Galbraith, on why the financial future sucks:

The fact is, the economy — production is going to turn around, has started to recover.
But it will be six months in before a strong growth of production leads to new employment.
And the question is, will that growth of production continue, after six months?
The problem here is that we have a stimulus package, which is helping now, but it will be over with at the end of next year.
Will there be a basis for another strong, privately financed expansion at that point? I don’t see the evidence for that now.
And that seems to me to be something we should be worrying about.
…
“That’s the point about the crisis, is that it could have been prevented.
The people in authority two, three, five years ago, knew how to prevent it.
They chose not to act, because they were getting a political and an economic benefit out of the speculative explosion that was occurring.”
…
The overwhelming emphasis, in the administration’s program, I think, has been to return things to a condition of normalcy, to use a 1920s word, that prevailed five and ten years ago.
That is to say, we’re back to a world in which Wall Street and the major banks are leading and setting the path… Do you want to have a financial sector dominated by a small number of very large institutions, very difficult to manage, practically impossible to regulate and ruled by, essentially, the same people and the same culture that caused the crisis in the first place.

Of course, Galbraith is speaking of President Obama’s people like Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and so forth.

Recommendation: Get a big mattress.

Ponzi’s Glad Tidings

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Beware of feel-good economic news…


(Illustration found here).

Even as the US stock markets post some high gains, even as the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, which has risen over the past six sessions, also finished Monday at its highest level in a year, and even as those infamous banks appear to slowing on losses — all just a figment of fantasy.
The Dow is “flirting” with the 10,000 level this morning after opening, based primarily on JP Morgan’s huge $3.6 billion reported earnings in the last quarter, and there is festive fun for everyone!
A total financial-only gravy-train: Bigger than prior to September 2008′s Wall Street meltdown — Workers at 23 top investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and stock and commodities exchanges can expect to earn even more than they did the peak year of 2007…
And from the New York Times yesterday:

In recent decades, layoffs were the standard procedure for shrinking labor costs.
Reducing the wages of those who remained on the job was considered demoralizing and risky: the best workers would jump to another employer.
But now pay cuts, sometimes the result of downgrades in rank or shortened workweeks, are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression.

In the face of the official line on the economy — US Federal Reserve boss Ben Bernanke’s blubberings last week helped fuel higher expectations and: “At some point, however, as economic recovery takes hold, we will need to tighten monetary policy to prevent the emergence of an inflation problem down the road.” — the reality is covered up by an artificial band-aid for this so-called period on ‘down the road.’
Prepare to duck, or maybe tuck-n-roll when banks use its earning in a strategy called Delay-and-Pray.
What’s to be expected, however, when the federal government is once again trying to stop financial suck-hole AIG from paying out $198 million in bonuses promised to employees of its trading unit — same shit from the same ass from last spring to the same assholes.
WTF!

Yes indeed, WTF.
Lester R. Brown, normally an environmentalist and also an early voice on global warming, has compared the world’s economy, and especially with the US, to a giant “Ponzi Scheme” that’s about to collapse around our collective ears.
In his book published earlier this month, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Brown asserts that too much of modern life is entangled in a vast overstretching of just about everything, and the planet just can’t sustain itself much longer.
The book’s first chapter, “Selling Our Future,” can be found here.
A few snips:

As recently as 1950 or so, the world economy was living more or less within its means, consuming only the sustainable yield, the interest of the natural systems that support it. But then as the economy doubled, and doubled again, and yet again, multiplying eightfold, it began to outrun sustainable yields and to consume the asset base itself.
In a 2002 study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists concluded that humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980.
As of 2009 global demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable yield capacity by nearly 30 percent. This means we are meeting current demands in part by consuming the earth’s natural assets, setting the stage for an eventual Ponzi-type collapse when these assets are depleted.
…
The larger question is, If we continue with business as usual — with overpumping, overgrazing, overplowing, overfishing, and overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide — how long will it be before the Ponzi economy unravels and collapses?
No one knows. Our industrial civilization has not been here before.

An example question: The $3 per gallon cost of gas in mid-2009 — layered with even higher costs (finding the oil, pumping it, refining it into gasoline and delivering it)?

These indirect costs now total some $12 per gallon.
In reality, burning gasoline is very costly, but the market tells us it is cheap.

So, this literal house of cards, what’s its future?
Reading tea leaves can be a bit tricky, but sometimes You don’t need a weather man To know which way the wind blows.

One guy who has been making accurate economic-related predictions for nearly 30 years, Gerald Celente, views another massive, maybe even worse downturn as just around the corner — or maybe even closer than the nearest corner.
Considered the most extraordinary forecaster/herald this side of Nostradamus, Celente has been right on the money with all kinds of future readings, calling 1987′s global-market-crash, the infamous “Black Monday,” to the rise of the Internet, all kinds of other shit, to nowadays and the current economic predicament: In November 2007, Mr. Celente also told UPI a massive devaluation of the dollar was coming and that some Wall Street giants were headed for total collapse. He called it “The Panic of 2008.”
In an interview last week with the San Francisco Examiner, Celente said people need to wise up:

“We want to make it very clear that the policies leading to the decline of ‘Empire America’ have been long in the making,” he said.
“What has happened in the Obama Administration is that they have taken policies far beyond even what Bush took with the TARP program; for example, with his stimulus package, with the buyouts, with the bailouts, the rescue packages, these are unprecedented in American history.”
“Never before has so much phantom money been printed out of thin air, backed by nothing, producing practically nothing,” Celente continues.
“You don’t even have to be a student of history to know the outcome of this.
All you have to do is have your eyes open, and start thinking for yourself.”

Celente claims nasty shit is about to hit the swirling fan: He wrote in July about what will happen within the next two years — By 2012, even those in denial and still clinging to hope will be forced to face the truth. It will be called “Obamageddon” in America. The rest of the world will call it “The Greatest Depression.”

Don’t panic — yet.
Once the panic does arrive, however, the following suggestions are suggested (from SatireWire):

  • Eat your young. “It seems barbaric, but trust me, if you don’t do it, someone else will, and you’ll end up kicking yourself.”
  • If you live in Manhattan and hear somebody sing “It’s Rainin’ Men,” don’t hum along. Jump out of the way.
  • Diversify your portfolio. Always sound advice, no matter the economic climate.
  • Set aside 10 percent of your pre-tax income for firearms.
  • Will your online broker be there in a market panic? Maybe it’s time you switched to a Schwab One account. (paid advertisement)

And always carry a pencil — you just never know.

Crude Bubblin’ Bust

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A few short years ago, anyone who discussed subjects like “peak oil” were considered a crank (not to be confused with, for instance, ‘Will my car crank without fuel?’) or a nutcase or just a plain worry-wart-conspiratorial fruitcake (not to be confused with a Dick Cheney), but nowadays there’s enough evidence from authentic sources to ignite water.

The latest report outlines a “significant risk” of oil running out in a decade, another from Germany’s Deutsche Bank which spell the end of the oil era and from San Francisco, “the end of the world as we know it.”

(Illustration found here).

Peak oil, of course, is manacled hand-and-foot with global warming/climate change, though, it’s hard to tell which will seriously erupt first — coal and oil fueled the engine for an industrial society (advanced civilization) that seems about to eat itself.
A classic creation-destroying-the-creator scenario.
Peak oil is also tied to economics — when there’s no money, consumption drops and there’s less demand.
Some even ponder $6-a-gallon gas as making life better.
Catastrophic results of peak oil appear further on down the time-line, although who’s to really say about a future so entangled with so many varying variables.

This week, a gaggle of peak oil “theorists” will gather in Denver, also the HQ of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas-USA (ASPO), to swap figures, statistics and hopefully seek solutions on how best to handle the inevitable.
According to denverpost.com:

“Up until now, technology has delivered dazzling results to America and the world economy, in delivering oil from all around the world despite increasingly challenging environments,” said Dave Bowden, ASPO’s executive director.
“The harsh reality is, despite the best efforts of amazing technology, they’re not finding as many of these big fields anymore.”

ASPO and others of its ilk push wind, solar and ocean-wave power, along with hybrid cars and use of better technologies to extract more oil — a bandage on an gut shot.
Last May, the US Energy Information Administration released its International Energy Outlook 2009 and a large oil-gulping sound could be heard: World marketed energy consumption is projected to increase by 44 percent from 2006 to 2030. Total energy demand in the non-OECD countries increases by 73 percent, compared with an increase of 15 percent in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries.

And in Alaska, peak oil and climate change collide.
From MSNBC:

Oil companies scouring the coastline of Alaska’s North Slope for new production sites are converging on the same territory as hungry polar bears trying to escape shrinking and thinning sea ice.
Polar bears have not attacked any workers recently, but oil companies are reporting four times as many sightings as they did last decade.
…
“What this appears to be is bears looking for another option because their traditional habitat is not as healthy as it used to be,” said Steve Amstrup of the U.S. Geological Survey. This summer, Arctic sea ice shrank to its third-lowest area on record.

(h/t The Oil Drum)

Mad Max, a damn dog and polar bears.

Work is Job One

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Today one year ago, Hank Paulson and his boys ignited TARP — Troubled Asset Relief Program — the $700 billion bank bullshit bailout that has done nothing to relieve the economic woes of US peoples.
An example of fighting symptoms and not the cause of disease:

“If you get a very expensive treatment that saves your life, but you don’t sort out the underlying problem, it may not come back for awhile, but it will come and get you again,” said Simon Johnson, professor of global economics and management at MIT.

(Illustration found here).

This little misfire has indeed already come back around to get us again.
For the first time in my lifetime, there’s more people about to loose it all.
According to Bloomberg:

The chart of the day shows the average duration of unemployment is now 26.2 weeks, longer than the 26 weeks of state benefits normally provided to workers who lose their jobs.
It’s the first time that has occurred since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping records in 1948.
The jobless rate rose to 9.8 percent in September, while payrolls fell by 263,000, a Labor Department report showed today in Washington.

Which leads on to personal bankruptcies, which has soared this year to 1,046,449 in the first nine months, compared to 773,810 in the same period of 2008 — and in September alone there were 124,790 filing, a 41 percent increase over the same month last year.
And those people out hunting for jobs will have to stand in a long, long line as employers will only keep cutting jobs, not adding any, and most “experts” predict a 10.2 percent unemployment rate for next year.
Since December 2007, the US economy has lost 7.2 million jobs — “This recovery looks like roadkill,” said Christopher Rupkey, economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi. “The heavy layoffs have stopped, but there are simply no new jobs available, and the harder the jobs are to get, the harder and longer this road to recovery is going to be.”
When one adds those poor souls who have quit seeking work, and those working part-time, but would work more and those still looking, the unemployment rate is a whopping 17 percent.

The US taxpayer is expected to loose some $200 billion out of the TARP fiasco, and banks still keep failing, except of course all those Wall Street assholes, who are only getting fatter — where did the cash go?
In Paulson’s original version of TARP no one would know: Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

And it’s worse than the numbers.
According to the financial site Calculated Risk:

Instead of 7.2 million net jobs lost since December 2007, the preliminary benchmark estimate suggests the U.S. has lost over 8.0 million net jobs during that period.
Even before the annual revision, the current employment recession was already the worst recession since WWII in terms of percent of job losses.
The benchmark revision shows this recession was even deeper.
The revision will be reported in February … just something to remember over the next few months.

And the banks?
Three were closed Friday, bringing the total to 98 bank failures this year with an average of 10 a month, the highest level since 1992 — This year’s failures have reduced the FDIC’s insurance fund to $10.1 billion from $45 billion a year ago.

And where are we going from here?
Paul Krugman says down:

Stocks are up. Ben Bernanke says that the recession is over. And I sense a growing willingness among movers and shakers to declare “Mission Accomplished” when it comes to fighting the slump. It’s time, I keep hearing, to shift our focus from economic stimulus to the budget deficit.
No, it isn’t. And the complacency now setting in over the state of the economy is both foolish and dangerous.
…
Wait. It gets worse.
A new report from the International Monetary Fund shows that the kind of recession we’ve had, a recession caused by a financial crisis, often leads to long-term damage to a country’s growth prospects. “The path of output tends to be depressed substantially and persistently following banking crises.”

And so it goes…


Cash-n-Go: TARP Gone

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Naomi Klein talked with Michael Moore on his new documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story.”
The interview in The Nation online examines the lust-for-dollars.
Says Moore:

“Well, people want to believe that it’s not the economic system that’s at the core of all this.
You know, it’s just a few bad eggs.
But the fact of the matter is that, as I said to Jay, capitalism is the legalization of this greed.
Greed has been with human beings forever.
We have a number of things in our species that you would call the dark side, and greed is one of them.
If you don’t put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control.
Capitalism does the opposite of that.
It not only doesn’t really put any structure or restriction on it.
It encourages it, it rewards it.”

Hear, hear!

And away the money goes.
Yesterday from HuffPost, an interview with Neil Barofsky, who tracks last September’s big-ass bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.
Some Barofsky observations:

1. He found hundreds of banks capable of tracking their use of the TARP money – despite claims by the U.S. Treasury that the task was impossible.
2. If the purpose of the TARP rescue was to increase lending, it has failed.
3. The U.S. financial system, now dependent on bigger and fewer banks, is shakier than ever.

And this (via ABC News) from Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP:

“In the last year, the apprehension that pervaded this country has turned into something else: frustration and anger. Today’s fragile stability has come at an enormous cost to the American people.”
…
“The toxic assets remain on the books of the banks…
“The commercial real estate mortgages are a coming crisis. Small banks are continuing to fail. We were talking a year ago about too big to fail.
We are now facing an industry that’s more concentrated than it was a year ago and too big to fail is up on us now in a much larger sense.”
“Until we get down to dirt, to something that’s solid, that we can put our feet on, our financial institutions are standing in a secure place, we can’t rebuild and know that we are safely past this crisis,” Warren said.
“The question about how we’re going to get these toxic assets out of here at a time when the real estate mortgage market is still in trouble and the commercial real estate mortgage market may be getting into more and more trouble — I’m not hearing the plan,” she said.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch.
Via the financial factoid site,  footnoted.org, on the employment contract for Freddie Mac’s new CEO includes:

annual compensation of $3.5 million (this includes $675K in salary, $1.6 million in something called “additional annual salary” and $1.1 million in a target incentive
a $1.95 million signing bonus
immediate buyout of Kari’s house (or perhaps houses)
reimbursement for travel between Washington D.C. and Kari’s residences in Ohio, Washington and Oregon
…
Needless to say, none of this — and certainly not the ridiculous sounding additional annual salary — was included in the press release that Freddie put out earlier this week…
…
Still, you don’t have to be a tea-bagger to wonder why something like Freddie, which is being propped up by the government to the tune of billions of dollars, is able to hand out such a generous welcome package to a new executive.

Ain’t all this shit just a giant pisser?
We’re all F.U.C.K.ed.

Clueless Shock

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As the economy tanks, the more wealthy of us are also going down the drain, albeit in slower, easier fashion.
From the New York Times yesterday:

But economists say — and data is beginning to show — that a significant change may in fact be under way. The rich, as a group, are no longer getting richer.
Over the last two years, they have become poorer. And many may not return to their old levels of wealth and income anytime soon.
…
Last year, the number of Americans with a net worth of at least $30 million dropped 24 percent, according to CapGemini and Merrill Lynch Wealth Management.
Monthly income from stock dividends, which is concentrated among the affluent, has fallen more than 20 percent since last summer, the biggest such decline since the government began keeping records in 1959.
Bill Gates, Warren E. Buffett, the heirs to the Wal-Mart Stores fortune and the founders of Google each lost billions last year, according to Forbes magazine.
In one stark example, John McAfee, an entrepreneur who founded the antivirus software company that bears his name, is now worth about $4 million, from a peak of more than $100 million.
Mr. McAfee will soon auction off his last big property because he needs cash to pay his bills after having been caught off guard by the simultaneous crash in real estate and stocks.
“I had no clue,” he said, “that there would be this tandem collapse.”

Clueless is the cue.
Former Fed honcho Big Al Greenspan also had no clue:

“In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Waxman said.
“Absolutely, precisely,” Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

Enough to make a grown man cry.

And Big Al’s replacement also keeps the shock pity flowing.
The US and the whole-wide world have arisen from the ashes of fiscal foolishness:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the global economy is “beginning to emerge” from a recession after “aggressive” action by central banks and governments.
“After contracting sharply over the past year, economic activity appears to be leveling out, both in the United States and abroad, and the prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good…”

Be afraid, be very afraid…
Big Ben blubbered last summer — June 9, 2008, to be exact: “The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so.”

I’m just plain shocked…

Coke-Dust Dollars

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A fiscal reflection of the age.
From CNN:

Research presented this weekend reinforced previous findings that 90 percent of paper money circulating in U.S. cities contains traces of cocaine.
“When I was a young kid, my mom told me the dirtiest thing in the world is money,” said the researcher, Yuegang Zuo, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. “Mom is always right.”

Not only directly from drugs, doing drugs, buying and selling drugs – contamination comes from bank currency-counting machines.

Although the contaminated bills do not affect health, Negrusz said, they could cause a false positive drug test if a person, such as a law enforcement officer or banker, handles contaminated currency repeatedly.
“Imagine a bank teller who’s working with cash-counting machine in the basement of the bank,” Negrusz said. “Many of those bills, over 90 percent, are contaminated with cocaine.
There is cocaine dust around the machines. These bank tellers breathe in cocaine. Cocaine gets into system, and you can test positive for cocaine. … That’s what’s behind this whole thing that triggered testing money for drugs.”

The US led the world for tainted money.
Canada followed with 85 percent and Brazil with 80 percent. China and Japan had the lowest, with 20 and 12 percent respectively.

Interesting about China:

Actually, we were surprised to find cocaine in Chinese bank note,” Zuo said after analyzing 112 samples from China.
After the Communist Party took over, the country was relatively free of drugs from 1949 until the 1980s because of harsh punishments against substance use, he said.
Two years ago, Zuo collaborated with Beijing scientists on testing bank notes and didn’t find any contamination with cocaine.
“In the last year, 2008, we found trace amounts of cocaine,” he said.

Drug pollution in the communist-cocaine netherworld.

Beyond There Lies Their Lies

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Still more grim news, but today’s particular sack of shit is more ethics and morals than anything else.
Three stories that reflect our times — strange/bad and getting worse — and how lopsided situations have become as if a giant screw is being tightened down.

The first item concerns a near-invisible US horror — coal ash dump-ponds, of which there are 1,300 nationwide, some up to 1,500 acres, holding tons of toxic mush full of arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium.
Last December, one such ash pond at the Kingston Fossil Plant, about 40 miles west of Knoxville,TN, busted and spilled “5.4 million cubic yards, or enough to flood more than 3,000 acres one foot deep” of toxic sludge.

So the more-interesting this found at HuffPost:

Just how bad has the coal ash situation gotten in the United States?
So bad that the Department of Homeland Security has told Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) that her committee can’t publicly disclose the location of coal ash dumps across the country.
The pollution is so toxic, so dangerous, that an enemy of the United States — or a storm or some other disrupting event — could easily cause them to spill out and lay waste to any area nearby.
There are 44 sites deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency to be high hazard, but Boxer said she isn’t allowed to talk about them other than to senators in the states affected.
“There is a huge muzzle on me and my staff,” she said.
“Homeland Security and the Army Corps [of Engineers] have decided in the interests of national security they can’t make these sites known,” she said.

Odd, huh?

And this a view on the validity/reality of those US government stats concerning the current financial/economic meltdown — a look at that set of principles known as the Pollyanna Creep.
From SmartMoney:

If the theory has a chief architect, it is John Williams, a semi-retired grandfather of five living in Oakland, Calif.
The son of a chainsaw importer, Williams sold the family business in the 1970s and began consulting for corporations, recalculating government economic data to arrive at what he says were more reliable measures, and with them, truer forecasts.
Today Williams runs Shadow Government Statistics from his home.
For $175 a year subscribers get economic data and analysis adjusted to back out the accumulated effects of what Williams has dubbed the Pollyanna Creep — Pollyanna being the orphan protagonist of the 1913 children’s book who learns to play the “glad game” to find cheery perspectives on life’s sorrows.
In other words, he provides figures he feels are properly miserable, to offset government ones he says are too prettied-up.
If Williams is right, unemployment is over 20%, gross domestic product is shrinking by 8% and consumer prices are jumping by nearly 7%.
His forecasts border on apocalyptic.
The government is creating so much new money, he says, that the all but inevitable result is hyperinflation, where “your highest denomination, the $100 bill, becomes worth more as toilet paper than money.”
Buy physical gold, he advises.

And finally, a bit on the double standard imposed by the US on the “rest of the world” in times of trouble.
A post from BoingBoing:

Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz contrasts the American response to its economic crisis with the measures it shoved down the throats of poor countries during their crises, and discusses why rich-world double-standards (“Buy American/European” provisions in bailouts that only discriminate against poor countries) contribute to a global disillusionment in the values that the rich world nominally espouses: democracy, transparency, and so on.

“Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw.
During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures — even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving.
America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks — and demanded that the government not bail them out.
What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.
The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed.
To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero.
Banks are being bailed out right and left.
Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis.
Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?
Many in the developing world still smart from the hectoring they received for so many years: they should adopt American institutions, follow our policies, engage in deregulation, open up their markets to American banks so they could learn “good” banking practices, and (not coincidentally) sell their firms and banks to Americans, especially at fire-sale prices during crises.
Yes, Washington said, it will be painful, but in the end you will be better for it.
America sent its Treasury secretaries (from both parties) around the planet to spread the word.
In the eyes of many throughout the developing world, the revolving door, which allows American financial leaders to move seamlessly from Wall Street to Washington and back to Wall Street, gave them even more credibility; these men seemed to combine the power of money and the power of politics.
American financial leaders were correct in believing that what was good for America or the world was good for financial markets, but they were incorrect in thinking the converse, that what was good for Wall Street was good for America and the world.

Shit.
Toxic waste, assets and ethics.

Oil-A-Goner

Filed Under Environment, Finance, Technology | Leave a Comment

Just as I get my Jeep Commache finally running right and back on the road — a near-two-year traumatic odyssey — fuel prices at the pump are starting to go up again, rising 20 cents in less than a month.
Here in northern California, we’re now paying $3.25 a gallon, well above the national upwardly-mobile US average of $2.63 a gallon.

This particular increase, however, has reportedly started to act oddly beyond the summer supply/demand bullshit, and gas-pump prices might be finally reflecting the affects of what’s termed “Peak Oil.”
Crude oil closed at near $73 a barrel today, its highest point since last October.
The planet’s biggest oil fields are past peak production, declining 6 to 7 percent a year, and the end of easy, cheap fuel is near-about finished.
And the end has been a-coming awhile.
US oil production peaked in 1970, has dropped ever since and now imports about 60 percent of its oil.
The UK gushed with oil from the North Sea in the 1970s, but the field started to bust flat without warning in 1999, knocking the Brits from global oil producer to importer.

A most-excellent observation on this quickly-approaching energy disaster is from Michael Klare, author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The Geopolitics of Energy, proclaiming the official end of cheap oil in a piece today at tomdispatch.
Klare says word comes from the US Department of Engery’s annual International Energy Outlook (IEO) report — bad moon rising.
A few snippets from Klare’s post:

Very simply, it indicates that the usually optimistic analysts at the Department of Energy now believe global fuel supplies will simply not be able to keep pace with rising world energy demands.
For years now, assorted petroleum geologists and other energy types have been warning that world oil output is approaching a maximum sustainable daily level — a peak — and will subsequently go into decline, possibly producing global economic chaos.
Whatever the timing of the arrival of peak oil’s actual peak, there is growing agreement that we have, at last, made it into peak-oil territory, if not yet to the moment of irreversible decline.
Until recently, Energy Information Administration officials scoffed at the notion that a peak in global oil output was imminent or that we should anticipate a contraction in the future availability of petroleum any time soon.
“[We] expect conventional oil to peak closer to the middle than to the beginning of the 21st century,” the 2004 IEO report stated emphatically.
…
For example, any significant increase in biofuels use — assuming such fuels were produced by chemical means rather than, as now, by cooking — could substantially reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, actually slowing the tempo of future climate change.
On the other hand, any increase in the production of Canadian oil sands, Venezuelan extra-heavy oil, and Rocky Mountain shale oil will entail energy-intensive activities at staggering levels, sure to emit vast amounts of CO2, which might more than cancel out any gains from the biofuels.
In addition, increased biofuels production risks the diversion of vast tracts of arable land from the crucial cultivation of basic food staples to the manufacture of transportation fuel.
If, as is likely, oil prices continue to rise, expect it to be ever more attractive for farmers to grow more corn and other crops for eventual conversion to transportation fuels, which means rises in food costs that could price basics out of the range of the very poor, while stretching working families to the limit.
As in May and June of 2008, when food riots spread across the planet in response to high food prices — caused, in part, by the diversion of vast amounts of corn acreage to biofuel production — this could well lead to mass unrest and mass starvation.

Read Klare’s entire post here.

Cultural Chassis

Filed Under Finance, Musings, Technology | Leave a Comment

In 1956, there were less than 170 million US peoples, unemployment was at less than 5 percent, a first-class postage stamp cost less than a nickel.
And Dinah Shore was hawking the Chevy brand.

In the illustration at left (found here), she is seen with her national, prime-time TV pitch-line, “See the USA in Your Chevrolet,” in a promotion for a chance at winning one of three corvettes, America’s only true sports car.

Four years later, the ‘vette would become a cultural prop for the popular TV show, Route 66, in which a couple of wankers/drifters traveled around “in a Corvette on an existential odyssey in which they encountered a myriad of loners, dreamers and outcasts in the small towns and big cities along U.S. Highway 66 and beyond.”
America in them days of ‘small towns and big cities‘ was crawling with optimism — most likely the height of the US experience occurred between the early-1950s to the late-1960s — fuled by the multi-faceted drumbeat of General Motors, then the biggest company in the whole-wide world:

Entering the 1950s, no corporation even came close to General Motors in its size, the scope of its enterprise or its profits.
GM was twice the size of the second biggest company in the world — Standard Oil of New Jersey (forefather of today’s ExxonMobil) — and had a vast conglomeration of businesses ranging from home appliances to providing insurance and building Chevrolets, GMCs, Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, Buicks, Cadillacs and locomotives.
It was so big that it made more than half the cars sold in the United States and the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division was threatening to break it up.

The year 1956 was also GM’s real beginning of the end — the retirement of Alfred P. Sloan, who had led the company for 30 years.
Even in the midst of the Great Depression, GM increased car sales (1936) and by 1955 profits had reached $1.2 billion ($8 billion in today’s dollars).

By the end of the ’60s, however, and into the early 1070s, GM started to tank under the weight  of its own greed: As GM goes, so goes the country:

The decline of GM is a testament to how poor strategic decisions over the course of decades will ultimately lead to collapse.
The United States has followed the GM model of failure for the last three decades.
The U.S. has too much debt, too much bureaucracy, too many government supported industries, too many agencies, too many employees, and $53 trillion of unfunded future liabilities.
See any similarities to GM?
Can the U.S. avoid the fate of GM, or is it too late?
If we can learn the important lessons of the GM decline, it may not be too late to reverse our course.
Or, we can continue on the current path and follow the advice of Will Rogers: “If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?”

And GM’s nefarious bankruptcy filing this week was just another up-chuck of the Great American Dream, that continual fantastical principle both inherited and highly-fueled by Baby-Boomers, which includes me.
So on a personal level, I’d somewhat culturally-foreseen GM’s demise long, long ago in switching part my success=automobile/woman aspirations (triad foundation of my own well-researched version of America’s great hope and dream) from America’s macho-iconic corvette to sleek and lean foreign machines — the success and women stuff remained intact until I got older and realized a lot of such things are not worth the trouble.
In the late 1960s, the neatest cars started to carry names like Jaguar and Porsche.
And later, Honda and Toyota.

Developed through GM’s Chevrolet marque since 1953 (work started on the project in ’51), the corvette has gone through at least six generational revisions — cheesy cool to neat cool to not-so-cool to You Suck!

In the primitive cheesy cool, a good many ‘vette people believe the 1956 corvette, shown at left (illustration found here), is the best of the lot.

Although the original 1953 model was basically a 1952 Chevrolet under a radical fiberglass body, by ’56 the ‘vette had morphed into a true sports car with the introduction of a 265 cubic inch, 195 hp V-8 engine and 3-speed manual transmission.
Even as a dumb-ass kid in the late ’50s, I felt the ‘vette then looked bulbous and a bit pretentious, a car for older people — parents of today’s Republicans, maybe.
Only with the introduction of the “sting ray” version in 1963 did I become emotionally involved with the car.

(Illustration found here).

The “sting ray” configuration lasted just four years — 1963 to 1967 — and the car captured my mental image of the man’s manly car, neat-cool and quick.
Slick little blisters on the fenders created a sense of even more clean, clear speed.
The ultimate Sting Ray was the 1967 — the year I graduated from high school — and it not only looked the neat-cool, but it could haul ass, listing a L-36 427-390 engine and carried a sophisticated sense even with all the muscle, keeping somehow that spartan, independent notion.
I spied one on a sales lot in the fall of ’67 and although I could not afford it, the image stayed burned in my fantasy life for years and years.
And like a lot of other shit, GM couldn’t leave well enough alone and the following year, 1968, redesigned the ‘vette into the beginning of You Suck!

In many ways, 1968 was indeed a watershed year — the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, the Chicago riots, Nixon elected US president etc., etc. — and GM’s introduction of the “Shark” version of the corvette, as seen at left (Illustration found here).
Life started to suck.

The corvette’s life was all but finished — the style looked awkward, and carried that not-so-cool finish.
Instead of nimble, the ‘vette also began a move into a kind of mutant luxury/sports car category.
GM’s Chevrolet encountered such problems the debut was delayed a year.
The 1968 was also the year I eloped — an idiot 19-year-old — which swiftly-launched the end of childhood.
The ’68 ‘vette was in similar circumstances, tossing aside cool for cold-hard cash, or just get bigger and bigger.

(Illustration found here).

By the mid 1980s, the corvette had fattened down into a two-seat Ford Thunderbird — like that big, ugly piece of shit shown above — and began to reshape itself into a high-ticket, exotic automobile geared for people loaded down with disposable income.
From Consumer Guide on the 2007 model:

Our Best Buys are the BMW Z4 and Chevrolet Corvette. Our Recommended picks are the Jaguar XK Series and Porsche Boxster, and Porsche Cayman.

Unfortunately for GM, however, people chose the BMW.

And what of the ‘vette with the GM bankruptcy?
The brand will live on, but the value is in the past.
A co-owner of The Corvette Center in Newington, Connecticut, on the future of the ‘vette:

“They’re a great car. They’re built really well. They last a long time. We’ve got cars here from the 50′s and 60′s that are still on the road, still running. Value tends to be a big part of it. Some of these old cars that were a couple-thousand dollars way, way back right now could be a-hundred-thousand dollars right now. So there’s that mystique about it. The car’s fast, its fun, its efficient. It’s a good car to own.”

The original concept.

Eco Samurai-Zombies

Filed Under Finance, Media, Orwellian | Leave a Comment

Interesting view of the worldwide financial meltdown.

The global economic crisis is like a Samurai movie, quips Dennis Meadows co-author of the 1970s eco-doom report, ‘Limits to Growth.’
In a Samurai film’s inevitable finale, sword wielding hero and villain clash in a flurry of steel.
The two halt and glower at each other before one, always the miscreant, collapses to the ground dead.
The baddy was “already dead, but didn’t know it,” Meadows explained …
The same is true in the current crisis for glowering corporate giants such as carmakers.
They “will take some time to fall over, but they are dead,” says the professor emeritus.

Pessimism for the future of mankind might be Meadows’ specialty.
(Illustration found here).

He headed a research team for the 1972 study, “Limits to Growth,” which forecast humanity was headed for doom by 2100, and although the work was a best-seller at the time critics claimed it was too much in the mode of scaremonger and didn’t give enough weight to technology.
Now 30-plus years later, Meadows and his crew probably hit the hard nail on the head.
The study said earth/humanity is in an “overshoot” situation — “human demand exceeds nature’s supply” – creating both an abundant oversupply of goods while sucking up all the planet’s resources — way more shit is produced than is consumed.
The current gorge is a hyped-up version of a supposedly 50-year glut cycle first identified by Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev, but this time around there’s more greed-fed market manipulation.
The last time this cycle bottomed out was the 1930s.

Last week, Meadows was awarded the Japan Prize, that nation’s top science award (also with $500,000 in cash) for “transformation towards a sustainable society in harmony with nature.”
During a press conference in Tokyo, however, Meadows, a professor at MIT, didn’t paint much of a harmonious picture for the near future.
From Agence France-Presse:

“In 1972, our projections suggested growth would end in this 21st century, and that still seems inevitable to me.
“If demand against the planet rises above its carrying capacity, the carrying capacity will decline,” he said.
“Growth will not end gradually and peacefully in the distant future. It will end soon and suddenly through overshoot and collapse.
…
Speaking in Japan, a country heavily impacted by the global economic crisis, Meadows said that “until recently, it seemed impossible that individual human action could damage the global economy.”
“Now the unfolding collapse of the global credit markets and the precipitous decline in production threaten all nations,” he said.
Yet Meadows argued that the key lessons have not been learned, and that the search for solutions to the crisis remain based on “trust in the markets and the current faith in technological advances.”
“Indeed, the most common policy for solving current economic problems is a desperate effort to get the growth of the physical economy back onto its historical, exponential track,” he said.
“I know this policy will not work.”

According to Meadows, the next twenty years will be a period of intense transformation.
The current crisis is just the start.
Make the wrong choices, he predicts, and we will wind up with a fortress society of small bands of wealthy people barricaded away from a world of miserable poverty.

Heads I win, tails you lose.

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