Energy Fictions (sub)

Here is the underlying reality: A nation that uses one-quarter of the world’s oil while possessing less than 3 percent of its reserves cannot drill its way to happiness at the pump, much less self-sufficiency. The only plausible strategy is to cut consumption while embarking on a serious program of alternative fuels and energy sources. This is a point the honest candidate should be making at every turn.

What the NY Times fails to mention is that the they and the rest of the MSM have always been quick to skewer any candidate honest enough to make such a point.

Jonatha's feisty like Ani DiFranco - but nowhere near as angry.

Linger - Jonatha Brooke

Linger with Lyrics

West Point - Jonatha Brooke

A college girlfriend had Michael Franks - The Art of Tea, and I've kept up with him ever since. He was just as crisp in concert as on his recordings.

The Art of Love - Michael Franks

Antonio's Song - Michael Franks

Under the Sun - Michael Franks Chuck Loeb Eric Marienthal (live 1991)

Your Secret's Safe With Me - Michael Franks Chuck Loeb Eric Marienthal (live 1991)

Your Secret's Safe With Me - Michael Franks (1985 video)

When Sly Calls - Michael Franks

Annie can sing anything:

Love Song For A Vampire - Annie Lennox

Sing - Annie Lennox

Every Time We Say Goodbye - Annie Lennox

Improvisation - Django Reinhardt

Tears by Django and Stephane - Bireli & Phillip

I looked for Ani and found Dennis:

Ani DiFranco talks about Dennis Kucinich and plays

Dennis Kucinich and Ani DiFranco in Boston

Ani DiFranco - Hypnotized

Ani DiFranco - Shy

They're trying to privatize Social Security and they're already in line for tax-free proceeds from Corporate-Owned Life Insurance (COLI, also known as Dead Peasants Insurance or Janitor Insurance) policies on employees, but they want more. Now Wall Street Wants Your Pension, Too

The Treasury Dept. on Aug. 6 offered a blueprint for lawmakers on Capitol Hill to allow "financially strong entities in well-regulated sectors" to acquire pension plans, after the IRS ruled that the concept needed legislative approval. "The Administration's proposal says these deals should only be permitted when the acquiring entity has a higher credit-rating than the seller," says Charles Millard, director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC), the federal insurer of last resort of corporate pension plans. "Such a transaction creates greater security for retirees and the pension system." The issue will now, no doubt, move to Congress after the election.

Political Animal
The Pickens Plan

A lot of folks see Pickens as some sort of energy savior. Kevin Drum takes a look at how Pickens shops with government money:

Well, as near as I can tell, here's the story. Pickens wants to build his electricity transmission facilities on a strip of land 250 feet wide and 250 miles long that starts at his farm in Roberts County, Texas, and terminates in Dallas — and that's a strip of land that would normally be pretty hard to acquire. But Pickens managed to get the Texas legislature to use its power of eminent domain to hand it over to a little water district he created with his wife and a friend. Pickens plans to use it to pipe water at enormous profit from his land to Dallas (apparently he's been buying up massive water rights from the Ogallala aquifer), and as long as he's got all this cheap land, he figures he might as well build electricity-transmission towers on it too.

More questions about Agriprocessors after the INS raid in Postville:

Dark Meat

You see, there is precedent for declaring something nonkosher on the basis of how employees are treated. Yisroel Salanter, the great 19th-century rabbi, is famously believed to have refused to certify a matzo factory as kosher on the grounds that the workers were being treated unfairly. In addition to the hypocrisy of calling something kosher when it is being sold and produced in an unethical manner, we have to take into account disturbing information about the plant that has come to light.

The affidavit filed in the United States District Court of Northern Iowa, for instance, alleges that an employee was physically abused by a rabbi on the floor of the plant. If true, this calls into question the reliability and judgment of the rabbi in charge of making sure the food was kosher.

Comic-Con attendees asked how they'll vote. Lou Ferrigno make me angry.

Gold bugs certainly have an interest in playing Chicken Little, and Peak Oil sites draw invest-in-gold ads like bugs to honey. Catherine Austin Fitts site features gold bars and coins on her masthead, but her article on collateral fraud is provocative:

Housing Bill

After I began researching HUD fraud in the last 1990s, I would be contacted by people with experience with HUD fraud. They insisted the same home was being used to create ten or more mortgages that were placed into different pools. They alleged that Chase as the lead HUD servicer and the other big banks were implementing such systems. This was why we would see the same house default two, three or four times in a year, they claimed. You needed to churn the FHA mortgages through multiple defaults to generate the cash to keep all these fraudulent pools afloat. This, they insisted, was all going to finance various secret government operations and private agendas.

This issue of collateral fraud was repeated in other markets. As I started to learn more about precious metals and the commodities markets I would hear story after story about precious metals arrangements in which investors really had a bank credit there was no real bullion behind the arrangement.

I have come to believe that the allegations of mortgage collateral fraud are true - not just for FHA and Ginnie Mae at HUD, but across the board throughout the mortgage markets.

Oh, Christ, I thought you was dead! Well don't stand there - I got the damn AC running. Damn this heat! You can sit next to the dog. Name? He ain't got no name. Naw, he won't bite - he'll just swallow you whole. Haw haw - just kiddin'. Yeah, he scratches a lot. Licks it, too.

I got some chew. Better not smoke - she's tryin' to quit again. Been about two hours now. She's watchin' her stupid soaps in there, so keep it down. Some moron was in here before you, whinin' about his problems, then makin' sure I wouldn't tell no one. I'm not one to blab, not for free anyway, but I could put that prick back in the joint right now if I wanted. But he owes me money. I told him damn straight don't come back without it.

Yeah, money's the name of the game these days.

So what happened to your eye?


(with apologies to MM)

One of the justifications given for selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was to punish the speculators by driving the prices down. Well, who are these speculators? Some are professional traders that react very quickly to changing trends. Some are hedgers, trading to lock in fuel prices for airlines and other fuel-intensive businesses. Some are investment managers, who have been taking the money from retirement plans out of an overvalued stock market and putting it into commodities, like oil, because they seemed less likely to lose value.

I can't see the professional traders getting hurt. The hedgers and their clients will either pass along higher costs to customers or go out of business, as many small airlines have already done. Ultimately it might be that people with money in retirement plans are the speculators that will be punished by lowering oil prices.

McCain floated a gas tax holiday, Bush encouraged more drilling, McCain & the Reps jumped all over drilling, the Dems wanted to punish speculators, T Boone Pickens wants everyone to buy into his wind and natural gas. ;-)  Obama proposed some drilling in exchange for a balanced energy package, windfall profits and sipping from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.  But Congress adjourned without doing anything but talk about Energy.

Yet, oil prices are headed down. What happened?

I see two, no three things:
1 - The Bush administration stopped threatening war with Iran, and even sat down at the table with them. That eased speculative investing in high future prices.
2 - Americans responded to higher prices and cut back on their driving. Lower demand lowers prices.
3 - We didn't do any of the stupid things that were proposed in the heat of a campaign.

The problem is that refrained from some stupid behavior, we didn't do any of the smart things either. We still aren't building a decent rail infrastructure. We still might throw public money at nukes.

We've got to elect the better candidate and hope he doesn't do too many stupid things.

The Grasshopper and The Ant

Apparently in the Republican version of the fable, rather than admitting that he'd been short-sighted and reckless in not preparing for the winter, the grasshopper pretends that there's actually a winter's worth of food located just beneath his feet and that the only thing keeping him from digging it up is that damn ant.

Anonymous Liberal's version is amusing, but in terms of using fossil fuels, most of us are grasshoppers.

I know Obama is trying to be pragmatic, but using the Strategic Petroleum Reserve makes about as much sense to me as McCain's gas tax holiday.

Patrick Cockburn: Iraq better? With three wars going on?

When the US and Britain invaded Iraq, they started three wars. The first is the insurgency in the Sunni community against the American occupation; the second the struggle by the Iraqi Shia, sixty per cent of the population, allied to the Kurds, to take control of the Iraqi state, previously controlled by the Sunni; and the third a proxy war between the US and Iran about which of them is to have predominant influence in Iraq.

As Andrew Sullivan notes, the first two are not over and the third has barely started. Yet McCain makes headway claiming that the surge has worked.

I just ran across the Wordle site and is it ever fun:

TPM KFC Wordle

Barack Obama Wordle

Hess to McCain Wordle

Life After the Oil Crash Wordle

Even borrowers with good credit are starting to fall behind, and when the ARMs start to flip, there will be wailing and gnashing in the exurbs

Housing Lenders Fear Bigger Wave of Loan Defaults

Homeowners with good credit are falling behind on their payments in growing numbers, even as the problems with mortgages made to people with weak, or subprime, credit are showing their first, tentative signs of leveling off after two years of spiraling defaults.

The percentage of mortgages in arrears in the category of loans one rung above subprime, so-called alternative-A mortgages, quadrupled to 12 percent in April from a year earlier. Delinquencies among prime loans, which account for most of the $12 trillion market, doubled to 2.7 percent in that time.