Thought Bubbles of Carbon Nation: There Won't be a Green Piece Left.

The DT's: "We should just stay there and take the oil!"

As Our Cheerless Leader continues to spew more carbon pollution than the exhaust pipe of a 1950's Diesel bus, and Rachel Madcow continues her boring chomping-at-the-bit coverage of an exposé that couldn't be more blasé, MSNBC is now officially the fulmination station, supplanting Fox as the most biased Breaking Noise Program. And at least Fox tries to be entertaining, whereas the Madcow is all-self-righteous and Supercilious all-the-time. Her contempt for  her own audience is always on display with her, "I  Really, really, really, (as though two "really"s in a row weren't at least one more than enough) believe" condescension, as though her audience was composed of twelve-year-old girls. She completely eschews any coverage that could actually parse the news of the day, to cover a bug-a-boo ad nauseum. I wondered who her audience could possibly be, and  got my answer the other night.

As I sat in a friend's living room with one of the Harry  Potter movies playing in the background, his roommate came home and inquired about the Comfychair hearings, so we told him the earth-shattering news that the Bozo in the white house was, surprise surprise, a lying clown. He harrumphed and cast a disapproving look at our TV fare and went to his room where the monotonous drone of the Madcow could soon be heard. It counldn't've been five minutes later when I passed his room and heard the sounds of snoring emanating therefrom. "Yeah",  I thought, "Exactly."

And maybe a cup of Hannahtea isn't your beverage of choice, but at least he's somewhat aware he's not actually a journalist. But the Madcow really thinks she's doing cut-rate journalism with her night after endless night of beating the same dread dross about Russia and their interference or non-interference in the election. If she hadn't been so busy being an unprofessional journalist with her unwavering support of  a wavering candidate all during the election, perhaps she would have done some research and noted the vile venomous attacks against her candidate and the Rah-Rah support of Drumph that was on many sites that weren't Russian per se, but were in fact largely from the Russian emigré community, such as The Saker, who was featured quite often on Yves Smith's Naked Capitalism site. She would have been less surprised at the results had she known how viciously the Hillaried was being pilloried.

Not to propagate a Rachel slur, but Ms. Madcow is far more interested in having the limelight shine on her as the current embodiment of Woodward and Bernstein all rolled into one than in exposing the dark secrets of in-coutnry collusion and conspiracies with the Kock brother's, oil companies, via his appointment of T-Rex, and other Drumph Empire shenanigans.  Because despite the Oedipal-like blindness to the fact, the current White House is cut from the same cloth as the Bush White House before it. Its unabashed plan is to use the power of the culprit, so to speak, to enrich the Drumphamily. With Jared Kushner sitting at the center feeding insider information to Ivankakahead who has dinner with Drumph Enterprise owners who just happen to be her brothers. Divesting your interest in an enterprise to your sons is not divestment at all, it's a setup for collusion so that you all get fabulously wealthy by manipulating the prices of commodities such as oil, and greasing the wheels on activities such as arms trades while your insider-trading relatives do all the stuffing of the family mattresses and laundering of all the bribes and proceeds and sequestering of funds in whatever the modern substitute for Washington's Rigg(d) Bank currently happens to be (which a journalist would know, and subsequently, one would hope, report). They don't call it family values for nothing.

Now all that isn't to say that the influence of the Russian State was negligible in the last election. However, it's well known that it was Mrs Clinton's husband's electoral campaign that the go-ahead was given to include Poland in a NATO expansion. And that the reason for that was Wisconsin's Polish vote which they were afraid of losing. This is pandering to a select few and granting them a concession that broke the country's word to Russia that the dissolution of the Soviet Union would not result in any expansion of NATO. So the current desire that Russia would have for wanting to effect the election is a direct result of her husband's allowing the needs of another country to override the needs of the United States of America, of which he was President at the time. 

 Her husband was subsequently impeached, not for that, however, but for obstruction of justice because he wouldn't admit he got a blowjob from a harlot. But it was all theater. No one ever expected it would result in removal of Clinton from office, and no one expects that the current investigation, no matter what it's findings, will result in Drumph's removal either. It is, instead, what he would call  "Showboating", and he would be right. It is providing a distraction to the very real damage he is doing not only to this country, but, as  his withdrawal from the Paris Accords demonstrates, the world.

Yet, like his predecessor GW, he comes into office, despite all the bluster about keeping his promises (because everyone knows how serious a serial bankrupt is about keeping his word), with but one real mandate, which he is busily setting the stage for fulfilling: To get the price of oil to rise, and to get it to rise, in all appearances, from "Free Market Forces", forces, as Reagan/Bush and Bush/Cheney demonstrated so successfully, that can be manipulated via the geopolitical machinations of the administration and its allies to enable the Sadist Arabians and other GCC countries to fulfill their fiduciary obligations and increasingly burdensome interest payments on the bonds issued to cover present expenses with future profits, profits which must come from oil and which at current prices is what's necessitating all that borrowing in the first place, having assumed the obligations at an assumed dollar per barrel approximately double that at which they currently sit. 

This implies the current administration's adoption of the same dynamic as the GW administration's of persuading citizens their future is rosy, in order to get them to buy on credit the big-ticket, fuel-guzzling SUV's to whisk them out to their suburban McMansions, while manipulating a rise in price of the very fuel needed to get them there for the simple expedient of enriching themselves. Because the faster the Saudis drained Ghawar, the better able they were to afford the expensive US arms the Bush regime's cronies were peddling. Capitalists are fond of thinking of themselves as inventive, but it is just part of their mythology. Nothing succeeds like success, and, there being no extra profits derived for originality, the OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) rule applies: follow along an already well-proven path to riches; that strategy is always favored over a more creative, and therefore intrinsically more risky, endeavor (Hence, Iran and No. Korea, are bad, but we're in bed with the Decapitation and medieval-minded flogging nation of Sadist Arabia).

That is the reason for the Koch brothers' support of The Don in the first place, he is beholden to no political entity, only to commercial and corporate interests that go hand-in-hand with his own. There is however a fly in the ointment as pointed out by Wolf Blitzer's article, at Wolf Street, Wall Street Wakes Up to Carmageddon, in which he points out: 

"Already last year, there were big signs that the boom cycle was beginning to spiral down. Yet, Morgan Stanley’s version of the downturn still cannot shake its optimism entirely. It had been projecting 18.3 million vehicle sales in 2017. That would have meant a 4.2% increase from last year’s 17.55 million total sales. (What were they thinking?!) Now that sales have fallen for five months in a row, and that the goal of 18.3 million vehicle sales has moved ludicrously out of reach even under wildly optimistic scenarios, Morgan Stanley flipped to projecting a 2% decrease, to 17.3 million vehicles."

But the situation a la the consumer was fairly dire when GW took office as well. It took sitting back and ignoring all the warnings that a national catastrophe was about to take place coupled with the Federal government's active participation in the largest racketeering scheme since John Law to pull the economy out of its doldrums by convincing the public to "pull out" the equity in their homes and use it to buy boats, a car, home improvements that were completely non-enterprising so that the only way the increase in the mortgage payment could be paid was to sell off the only valuable asset most people owned. And the ensuing feeding frenzy in dicey financial instruments peddled as AAA, and well, you know the rest of the scheme all too well, or you should, as we're still paying the costs.

So another bankrupt Republican President, (Yes, GW was a bankrupt as well. As they use to say about his Oil company, Hawken Oil, "Every time Bush drills another empty hole, the Saudis fill it with cash"). But instead of using the PNAC as his guide to power, Drumph seems to prefer as his blueprint for the “New Middle East" Ralph Peters’ 2006 “Blood Borders wherein he states:

"the Gulf eventually undergoes a geopolitical re-engineering just like “Syraq”, Turkey, and the Balkans are slated to do as well. All in all, the fracturing of the region into a myriad of internationally recognized and de-facto statelets is expected to facilitate the prolongation of American hegemony in the broad interconnected space that the late Brzezinski described as the “Eurasian Balkans,” while simultaneously creating major complications for its Russian and especially Chinese rivals’ access to this geostrategic pivot space at the heart of Afro-Eurasia."

First inking contracts to sell each of the statelets you've prodded into military action a plethora of high-tech weaponry and intelligence services, like Bush senior's weapons sales to Iran, via Israel, during the Reagan administration while feeding Iraq's Saddam classified information as to where that weaponry was most likely to be deployed.

But at the heart of the duplicity of The Fiefdumb and Drumph Core is the Exxon/Rosneft pact to drill in the nownotso  permafrosted Siberia and out into the once icelocked Arctic even as the Alice in Wonderland claim of "Climate Change is a hoax" is maintained. However, it is only because of the rapidly accelerating effects of the very Climate changes he denies that provides the slightest possibility of realizing the Siberian and Arctic drilling envisioned and being invested in by Secretary of State's Handinthe Tillerson's Company, Exxon. You know, the one with the deal inked with a Russian Company. One, which, like Lukoil, is one of THE Russian companies. Rosneft has more government connections and is much more closely aligned with government interests than even, well, EXXON! (Although even Lukoil can't get one of its CEO's appointed as Secretary of State, that level of corruption is only possible in a PetroState that has promised its citizens a level of exogenous energy-enabled living it can't possibly deliver).

The path forward for this administration is one easily foreseen, as it is the one that promises the most enrichment to those least in need of it, displaying at the highest level of finance what The Conscience of a Dribble calls The Paradox of Thrift, which maintains that should each individual do what's best for themselves and save as much as they can of their hard-earned income against a rainy day, it would be bad for the overall economy which, if everybody follows this pecuniary path, would be starved of the demand necessary to provide that same job that pays wages high enough above your everyday expenses for necessities, to leave enough excess to allow for anything even approaching the concept of "disposable" income (hey, just throw that shit away, man, there's always  more where that come from. Don't matter WHAT you but, just THAT you buy).

By the Rich bulldozing their groaning piles of corruption-enabled hoards into offshore havens from the hordes they whored themselves to rob blind, they set the economy up for the future Credit Crunch, as they are effectuating the same dynamic as The Paradox of Thrift, except, instead of taking the money out of the consumer economy, they remove it from the economy in toto. Because it goes not into any domestic bank (hence the term offshore). So, unlike the savings of the thrifty which is usually the target of disparagement when the phrase Paradox of Thrift is used, the robbing of the National Economy of Trillions a year from nefarious activities by a population turns the economy into an albatross from their cash's flight: while in seemingly effortless flight it glides along like a thing of beauty, once brought to the ground, it is hard-pressed, overburdened by the very disproportionate thing that gives it superiority in flight, wings, in the case of the albatross, debt, in the case of an economic system, leaves it floundering helplessly when it is abruptly brought back to earth, increasing its difficulty in getting off the ground again. But this is never commented upon. Yet its negative consequences are regularly visited upon us by collapse.

Which the FED knows, too:

When people and businesses increase their saving, economic theory goes, they reduce investment and increase savings. If everyone does this, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that will pull down the velocity of money, and the economy with it. But because economists are basically apologists for the Rich, they never mention that engineering the financial system so that it increases the hoards of those who only want to pile up mountains of cash to hand over to their heirs who have done da nada, zero, nothing, to earn it, has the same effect. It slows the velocity of money by decreasing the amount of cash in circulation.

But because we have enshrined "family values" into our psyche as sacrosanct, the fact that this behavior causes a vast sea of humanity to have nothing is immaterial (literally). By succumbing to the siren song that only your offspring matter, you give over the running of the economy to families who are far more powerful than yours and who agree with you: except it's only their children that matter; like your income, your children are disposable, a dynamic you signed onto when you decided your offspring are more important than the neighbors'. And the Rich's children shouldn't have to work like your's must. They should be able to live in Crystal Palaces, waited on hand and foot, and come of age to have a fortune handed to them to create bankrupt companies that then suck money from the rest of the economic system, as our last two Republican Presidents, the same ones who lecture the public about self-sufficiency and bootstraps, did. That's what bankrupts do. They further enrich themselves by convincing others they know what to do with their money, and then, their personal fortune stashed behind the laws of incorporation that protect it from the consequences of their defalcations, fail spectacularly, burning not only their investors' cash, but the taxpayers' as well, as they avoid future taxation by deducting "their" losses (even though it was other peoples' money they lost), from their own tax liability, necessitating that you and the rest of us schmucks make up the difference, meanwhile castigating the very government that covered their losses as a "swamp", into which they slither to hide the slime clinging to their own reptilian carcass.

That's what tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, withdrawal from the Paris accords, etc, are all designed to do: Concentrate an ever larger share of money into even fewer hands, thereby precipitating a collapse, as it always does, a well-known fact among economists (because the fewer hands such vast wealth is concentrated in, the more their spending (or lack thereof) habits, not the spending habits of the hoi pollio, which increasingly becomes a non-issue, since those dollars become dwarfed by the gargantuan holdings of the Aridstockracy's hoards) and government and business planners, who allocate their own, and their clients', funds to weather these inevitable financial storms leave everyone else with nothing but a lean-to that'll blow down in the first gale.

And it is these dynamics that real  journalists would be investigating and warning us about: where are the dollars going, what's being prepared for the fall the entire economy is being set up to take, why is the FED once again, as in 2007, raising interest rates in the teeth of falling monetary velocity? You know the answer. You've seen this picture before. Having set the trap in the years prior to 2007, when "The Maestro" himself (he didn't get that name for nothing) was mocking people who didn't take out Adjustable Rate Mortgages, then setting out on a series of rate hikes that would trap them in their only asset while it was hemorrhaging value, even as their payments were being ratcheted up by the very entity that encouraged them to structure their finaces that way, as their wages were stagnating because of the faltering economy that was stalled by that same process of raising interest rates (look it up, that's why the FED raises rates, to slowdown a too-robust economy): purposely creating the financial equivalent of nuclear ARMs. Thereby, the "independent" Fed set the stage to enrich its Chairman and his cronies while throwing the rest of the public to the wolves of Wall St.

The Froth Estate could easily have saved millions of US citizens millions of dollars, their homes, their very lives, had they been reporting on what was going on in the economy pre-2007, as Mike Shedlock, Doug Noland, Yves Smith, Wolf Richter, and so many other on-line analysts were doing ... literally dozens (yet if the lying Fed Chairman at the time, Benron Bernanke, is to be believed (Lol), even with a board that rakes in millions of taxpayer dollars to pay their bloated salaries, they never once bothered to think it might apear a tad unseemly if it were discovered that their lazy over-paid sinecured asses never bothered to scope out a sight called Naked Capitalism, never had the intellectual curiosity to wonder what a sight entitled Zerohedge, might have to say; yet it was those sites that DID see it coming, they were the "nobodies" Benron was referring to). But they weren't/aren't reporting on this. They didn't/don't care. Although the economy is now headed on the same trajectory, with the Fed once again raising rates in the teeth of falling velocity engendered by a purposely engineered concentration of the money supply into the hands of a cadre of charlatans who are, once again, in full view of everyone, setting themselves up on Easy St while preparing for another Slaughter of the Innocents because their Field of Dreams is the Make a Killing Field on which they shamelessly swagger, where they, the entitled ones, the insider traders, the crony capitalists, having installed their avatar in the position to ensure they will never be held responsible for the misery they inflict, maul the finances of the entire country, the entire globe, for no other reason than sport.

But Ms.NBC won't be talking about any of this. Because Revenue Dollars from advertising, not professional journalism, is what drives the networks. This is what Rumsfeld called a known unknown. Everybody knows it (although I doubt that this is what he had in mind when he used that phrase) but nobody knows they know it. Most are easily reminded, since the evidence of the fact is blared into their faces on a nightly basis, but they do in fact need to be reminded. All news shows are Corporate news shows, paid for, owned, censored, and therefore reflecting the opinions of, Corporations; which may align with your own (LOL), but probably don't.

Just as they need to be reminded, but never are, au contraire, that, to the world, the USA looks much like California looks like to the rest of the USA. To whit? California and its tall watt governor, Solar Ray, like to fancy themselves the epitome of progress, futurity and political correctness, yet all those myriad industries, from agriculture to Google, that they hold up to the sunlight, are fueled by its largest: the Fossil Fuel industry. Unknown to most of its citizens (which fact alone is evidence of the horrendous job Corporate media does of keeping the public informed of even the most basic, yet vital, foundation of their livelihood), California is second only to Texas in its production of fossil fuels. It is the most car-addled and automaton'd state in the union, its exploitation of cheap immigrant labor unsurpassed, despite its cherished vision of itself as green and clean, it is quite Brown and Dirty under the hood.

Similarly, the USA, for all its protestations that it needs to cut down on fossil fuel use, is one of only three Carbon Nations in the World: Saudi Arabia, Russia and The USA. The Carbon Nations are all characterized by their complete dependency on Oil, its discovery, extraction, refining, transport, and combustion. Yet the Nation that has done the most to spread the Gospel according to Carbonation from one side of its mouth is the same one that denies the inevitable climate change it causes from the other.

Just as Bush had all his cronies lined up to profit from the destruction he planned to wreak in Iraq: Halliburton, KBR,  Blackwater, Parsons, Fluor, Shaw, Bechtel, CH2M Hill; Trump Enterprises, which is to a far greater extent an All in the Family Affair, is similarly being preened to vacuum up the fallout from the disaster that is Drumph.

The press, specifically MS. NBC, should be, like Naomi Klein,  preparing us for the shocks the fulfillment of Borderwall Jackshit's campaign promises guarantees to inflict on both the US economy and its citizenry instead of continuing the same undeniably uninteresting unfair and unbalanced all-Drumph-all-the-time programming that has continued for more than a year now, in complete denial to this day of their reliance for ad revenues on the very man that bears the name they use to generate those capital inflows ... and, not coincidentally, their salaries.