Les Flaveurs Du Mal-Investments.

 I thought a Beau de Lair was a Man-cave.

(That's a Lair de beau, you idiot).

Is my Paris Spleen showing?



While rain forests burn and
heated seas churn
El Presidente jokes:
"Climate Change is a hoax".

Although the only one reviled ad nauseum in the press is The Wall, the current atmosphere is not only rife with plans to spend vast sums of money on other dubious "investments", they all come in various flavors of justification, none of which need mention what, if any, impact on furthering climate chaos they may engender.

As talk about economic growth and infrastructure investment abounds, perhaps the modern proponents of growth could stand rereading Trollope's The Way We Live Now, in which it's documented how schemes of financialization are undertaken. Because in this, as well as in any other truthful account of how modern economics works, the true nature of the Risk (or lack thereof) the rich undertake to further their holdings of the Nation's (and now the World's) wealth, is made manifest. Which is not to deny that Risk is involved, just that it is always pushed off on to those who stand to gain nothing but lose everything. The bulk of the money to be made has already swollen the accounts of the financially well-placed before a single spadeful of dirt is ever moved. The way that Enron accomplished this is the best illustration of a modern-Day version of the Way They We Live Now, as it did exactly that, while using the most illustrious of Walls St's banks and brokerage firms, along with Washington regulators and accountancy stalwarts to devise a scheme every American should recognize, but only Gingrich will remember (as he tried to pull it off on the entire country during the 2008 financial imbroglio) as mark to market.

 In this scheme, when Enron made a deal, no matter how fanciful, they pulled forward onto their current books all the deliberate overestimation of future profits that were to be made on that deal, pumping their assets up to ridiculous, unsubstantiated valuations (that the markets nevertheless applauded wildly over) so that, just as in The Way we Live Now, they could reap the unrealized profits of tomorrow today, so that the future success or failure of the project mattered not a jot to those who financed it: they already had their profits safely tucked away in offshore bank accounts and tax havens, while the workers of Enron were locked into retirement accounts that they couldn't withdraw from even as the Company imploded right before their eyes.

However, far from learning from Enron's spectacular and shuddering shuttering, the Fed and the Treasury, in order to finance a War the Bush administration made no provision for in the Federal budget, used it as a template to transform the entire economy to a carbon copy of Enron, pouring the public's money into  risky mortgage paper deliberately obfuscating the difference between gambling and investing in order to shield the speculators and "risk-takers" (of OPM, never their own money, always Other People's Money) so they would bear none of the liability, but reap all of the gains.

None of this is news, of course. Enron collapsed about fifteen years ago, and the accumulation of money into the bank accounts of those already-besotted with cash has only accelerated. And with that acceleration has gone the acceleration of the so-called Renewable Energy juggernaut, all financed by the same crooks and liars that brought us Enron, Tyco, and a slew of other accountancy frauds, yet the Free-energy advocates really really believe that the future they have planned will be green ... it won't. Unless the shade of green they're referring to is that of algal growth over-topping lakes and sucking out all the oxygen, leaving a green slime as the only vestige of life.

Toxic algal scum: Same color as the Currency.

Both Bernie and Trump called for infrastructure investments, but for what? New roads and bridges to drive the same fossil-fueled vehicles over? Oh, they'll be vehicles powered by the sun? or the Tides? or table salt maybe? how glorious. But there are currently (no pun intended, naturally) no auto plants in the world that run on either solar or wind, and in order to get to the place where even ten percent of the autos are EV's, would (there being a billion Internal combustion engines plying the world's byways at the moment, that 10% would be 100,000,000 vehicles, each of which would consume more energy in their production than they burn during their entire lifetime of use) do environmentally what Enron did financially: bring forward not only the amount of CO2 exhausted into the atmosphere, but also the exhaustion of resources and despoliation of habitat, becoming instead the cause of the acceleration of climate change rather than mitigating against it.

But, as the closing of Mall America is demonstrating, malinvestments don't stop there. They are rife throughout the economy, because the economy is built, not around the needs of humans, but around the needs of their machines. No autos, no malls. So autos must be forced into any plan for the future, regardless of their enormous front-and-center position as the entities most responsible for the destruction we see being indulged in in the name of creation. But since they foster growth, because they increase tax receipts, and as they can masquerade as being 'green', they get a green light, despite the ramifications of the dire future they condemn us to.

 But the Democrats, by pretending that the enormous harm the Bush era did to the world lies only in its War-Mongering, indeed miss the point. Because the War-Mongering was merely the precursor for  Trump's theatrical strategy, and had the same intention: diversion from the true calamity they bring down around our ears, as they fashion scenarios that will take the blame for the inevitable denouement their own policies have set the stage for and place them squarely on the shoulders of those who struggled to impede their implementation. 

Like Bush before him, with Trump we are seeing the acceleration into Madness of stoked economic activity, even though we know, and I don't believe, as I didn't during the financial euphoria, that people don't know .... on the contrary, their deafening silence on the issue speaks the volumes they refuse to utter, of an increasingly perilous balancing on the edge of the abyss and I don't mean only economically, but, Economics, Environment and Energy being inextricably entwined, the abyss of energy shortage and environmental catastrophe as well.

The Greens, or perhaps more accurately, the techno-fantasy Greens, have shown their hand in the Onion-like, as in the newspaper, not the bulb, lawsuit against the fossil fuel companies: the only thing that matters is that we can blame someone else. When ground zero for environmental degradation, reckless energy use and economic chicanery has the bare-faced audacity to turn around and demand that billions be paid to it (billions that will be reaped from the billions paid by others for access to the resources New York, the home of the most self-proclaimed astute minds in the nation, claims they have been duped for more than two centuries; flim-flammed into enriching themselves at everyone else's expense), then how is it possible you have the slightest doubt that you are being duped over and over again right now? The logic is unassailable. If New York has been being duped, then so have the rest of us, and if they were duped then, then, nothing having been changed, they and the rest of us are still being duped now.

Instead of taking what that implies and running with it, we let this frivolous lawsuit proceed and act as though somehow that'll make things OK. We can continue to pretend that there is a difference between Bush/Obama's, "The American Way of Life is Not Negotiable", and Trump's, "Make America Great Again" (there isn't ... at their heart they are saying the same thing), or that Obama's idea for the USA of, "Winning the Future", suggests anything other than "Making America Great Again". It doesn't. Because exactly who are we Winning that Future from than the ROW? The intent of which would be what? Yes, that's right, to make America greater than the ROW, as they are who we would be winning that future from. The implication that they would therefore be losing it is simply not mentioned, but its barely disguised underlying message is, "Tomorrow belongs, Tomorrow belongs, Tomorrow belongs to ME.

But as long as the so-called Resistance concentrates on doing the same as New York, blaming their failures and their intoxication with cheap energy from seeing their own culpability for, not only the state of the planet, but the result of the election they so fervently rail against, then the acceleration in the CO2 content of the atmosphere, and the increased role methane now plays in the trend of global heating, will continue unabated (The latter's being the result of NatGas's victory over not only coal, but reality).

Natgas is always talked about as though it were not a fossil fuel, so that an entire ginormous industry, representing billions upon billions of dollars in malinvestment, dedicated to shipping vast quantities of US energy resources to China and the ROW via LNG terminals, has been built and implemented right under our noses with barely a peep of protest, as though it were a renewable energy darling, whereas, more than anything mentioned thus far, it is the penultimate in malinvestment, as all those billions can only be recouped by assuring all those NYC hedge funds, designed to do to everyone else what New York is shamelessly claiming has been done to them (the enormity of this hypocrisy is just too big for me to wrap my mind around), that all those trillions of cubic feet of gas safely stored in the ground will be unearthed, and burned (and not by any oil company: Oil Companies don't burn oil: YOU do) adding to the already carbon-saturated atmosphere (and adding as well to the ever-increasing quantity of methane that is vented, unburned, into the troposphere).

None of which is for domestic consumption, and much of which must be used to first frack, then liquefy the NatGas, then ship it and then deliquefy it, adding greatly to the US carbon pollution yet not benefiting US citizens in the least. Unless raising the price of Natgas, one of the stated intentions of the backers of LNG, is considered beneficial. And the more EV's and solar plants and windmills you add to that mix, only brings the day of reckoning that much closer, that much faster. Because the CO2 savings are as far off in a nebulous future as Enron's profits were, whereas the CO2 venting from their manufacture, shipping and installation is all being poured into our air right now.

But you go ahead. You keep blaming Donald Trump for The Way We Live Now. It makes you feel so much better, and, like New York's lawsuit so childishly claims, it's only how You feel that matters. The rest of the world is only a bystander, waiting on the sidelines for you to rape.