Money Makes the World Run Aground.

                                                   Money Makes the World Run Aground.

The World According to Pinheads.

"We'll show our readers how they can pull down a total $1 million in profits from America's energy boom before year-end".

 And from the same investment newsletter, which BTW, eschews deficit spending, and any government taxation of the rich or corporations:

"The government is collecting billions from a little-known investment opportunity we call “executive dividends.”

"The good news is this is NOT reserved solely for the U.S. Treasury. You too can cash in on this mysterious strategy."

They then advise their rich clientele to click and find out how to get free money from the Federal government, even though they're dead set against allowing that same government to give money to the unemployed, or foodstamps to the hungry, but to augment the revenue stream of the already-rich? They have absolutely no problem with that, despite the fact that just from a purely economic perspective, the latter would help create the much-needed demand the economy is, by all accounts, in desperate need of while the former, the one they're advertising targets, makes sure the money flows into yet another stagnant pool of hoarders' cash.

"Acidic Oceans ... Why we should care?"  LOL. Whether or not we should, the simple fact is we Don't, and we Won't.

 Want proof? Try this from The Oil Price Intelligence (sic) Report:

Curry (a paid-for scientist completely bought by the fossil fool industry) has also chimed in on climate-related policy issues, bemoaning that “it has never made sense to me for climate change to be the primary driver for energy policy.”

“Even if we believe the climate models, nothing that we do in terms of emissions reductions will have much of an impact on climate until the late 21st century. Energy poverty is a huge issue in much of the world, and there is no obvious way to reconcile reducing CO2 emissions with eradicating energy poverty.”

The story of coal speaks volumes on this incongruity.

The developing world—and indeed even Europe—are increasingly turning to dirty coal because they cannot afford natural gas. The economics simply are not the same as they are in the US, where a natural gas boom has ensured that coal can be sidelined. Energy poverty quite simply dictates that carbon dioxide emissions cannot realistically be cut in countries who can’t afford to get rid of coal.

As the US gets rid of coal, American coal producers need an outlet or they will collapse. The answer is to export it to coal-hungry Asia, which can get it cheaply. Environmentalists have a problem with this because it does nothing to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and just shifts them geographically (Wrong! It INcreases greenhouse-gas emissions because coal is expensive, energy-wise, to ship, because it's bulky, dirty, and heavy). The lobbying effort to keep American coal from being exported, though, ignores the energy poverty part of this equation and maintains a distinctly privileged Western viewpoint.

Note the new term you will be hearing a lot, "Energy Poverty". It's a phrase being bandied about so as to enrich the fossil fool industry by building infrastructures, such as coal-fueled ethanol processing power plants constructed by the hundredss in the Midwest during the Bush administration, that makes sure that an economy is impoverished once the coal runs out.

Meanwhile on the oil front,

"A new tax law granting tax credits to oil companies appears to have survived a close referendum battle on Wednesday, with partial vote counts in showing that efforts to repeal the legislation trailing behind. The legislation, Senate Bill 21, only narrowly made it through the Senate last year, advertising itself as a way to attract investment for new wells to produce more for the trans-Alaska pipeline."

As I've commented on previous  posts, Capitalism, whatever its virtues may be does not, as claimed, reward those who take risks but those who force others to take risks, albeit unknowingly, and so ipso facto, without their consent. As this blurb demonstrates, when good opportunities don't offer enough incentives for making money, they must instead come from the Government. Without tax incentives these investments, for which the public takes the risks, but receives none of the dividends, all of which go to the investors who would make no such investment unless its guaranteed by the very taxpayers they refuse to share the profits with. So, for example, the Romney claim that the rich, not the government, create jobs, WRONG! It's only the government guarantees that entice the rich to unclench their cold dead hands' grip on their hoard long enough for it to be put to use, otherwise, it remains in their vaults.

That same publication, answering a question regarding why we weren't seeing oil prices going down instead of up, offered this:

"The truth is, if not for the financial inputs into the oil market, we probably would.

But US investment banks are no longer the driving force in the oil trade the way they once were – almost every US bank has either sold their commodity desks or sharply curtailed them.  With that loss has come a slowing of commercial oil traders that the banks courted and relied upon and added sharply to the ‘bid price’ that financial oil developed.  Now that financial oil is overrun by large hedge funds, black box algorithms, independent marketers and conglomerate physical players like Glencore and Vitol, much of the independent trade that supported oil prices is for the most part, gone."

Yes, those commodity desks, which if you were to say as some (harrumph) did, in 2008, that they were deliberately manipulating the price of oil, using the exact same tactics as Enron did in the California Electricity markets in the state of California, for the exact same reason and would have the exact same results, i.e., causing an enormous spike in their profits and users' costs, followed by a crash, you would have been ridiculed as a conspiracy theorist, despite the fact that the sitting President and a large part of his staff had, in fact, been on the board of Enron or other Texas companies, such as, shall we say, Halliburton, whose CEO was in the Whitehouse, still collecting paychecks from them, at the time of California's dilemma and refused to get FERC to look into the obvious shenanigans that were being indulged in, because Texans in general, and the Gang from the Lonestar State in particular, see/saw the rest of the United States as a cash cow on which they, the entitled ones, are destined, by the will of God, to feed on.


But as we continue in our self-delusional denial, to strive desperately to pretend that no, nothing really happened in 2007/8; the much-vaunted Free-Market economy that is so good at letting us know when something is dreadfully, drastically, wrong, was instead, we've collectively decided, itself wrong, when it tried in the only way it could, by falling completely off a cliff, to tell us that the way forward is not along the path that, despite all signs telling us otherwise, we insist on, oh so casually, strolling.

But Market Forces, much like Air Forces, are quite adept at bringing ill-fated flights of fancy crashing to the ground when we insist on taking them places they should not be, buoying them up to heights they would otherwise, if left to their own steam, buoyed by their own lift, never attain, assuring, not their continued defiance of gravity, but instead, their insured (someone always makes sure they're insured) and assured plummet earthward, where they may euphemistically enjoy a soft, albeit unplanned, landing. But since the nature of the storms we head into are purposely ignored, much more likely a hard, otherwise called crash, landing would be the much more likely outcome.

But instead we'll indulge in ZIRP, and QE, and Channel stuffing and subprime auto loans, etc. etc., to keep this poor bird limping along, with its landing gear smashed and its tail feathers molting, nursing its crippled wing until it falls from the sky so we can once again regale each other in a rousing chorus of "Who could have, (amongst all of us that are collecting salaries and benefits that none of you poor slobs will ever see the likes of, in order to do exactly that), seen it coming?"