Economic Uprising

April 11.  The oil boom in North Dakota is so hot that drillers just burn away millions of cubic feet of natural gas every day.  The picture above is an actual NASA photo of the section of the state which is home to the Bakken shale oil field. The lights, for the most part, are the flares, some of which are 30 feet high.

Natural gas is mostly methane.  When flared it releases carbon dioxide and some methane.  Methane is  is about 20 time worse than carbon dioxide in its greenhouse effects (though it doesn’t last as long as CO2 in the atmosphere).

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April 11.  Al Sharpton has risen to the top ranks of Obama advisers.  It was he who last year staged the ultra-tame tribute to the epic 1963 March on Washington.  He has his own daily TV show on the MSNBC (Love-the-Democrats-24/7) channel.  Tonight his “National Action Network” will host President Obama, and Attorney General Eric Holder.  Sharpton is at the pinnacle of influence with the 1% due to his ability to channel black anger into harmless paths.

This week, however, a website revealed that Sharpton has been an FBI informer in the ’80′s after having been threatened with arrest and then “flipped”.  The website is “The Smoking Gun” (TSG) and its findings have been taken seriously by The New York Times, USA Today and other media.

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Obama is crowing about the success of his health care plan saying more people signed up on his health care exchanges than predicted.  The number is over seven million.  Now not all of those who sign up will actually make payments and get insured. Experience shows the number to be 80%.  So figure 5.6 million.

Add to that 2.4 million who have gotten insurance through extended Medicaid in the Obamacare plan (through January) and 2.2 million young adults added to their parents plan and 500,000 who signed up for insurance without using the exchange. (see two week old Fact Check article here for figures in these paragraphs.)

So the total number is 10.7 million, or to be a little generous 11 million more people with health insurance. Bully!

The problem is according to census data in 2012 there were 48 million without health insurance.  That means roughly 37 million are without health insurance.

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April 2.  No, this is not a prediction of the ICPP on what will happen over the next few centuries.  It already happened.  In the 1600’s climate cooling caused a number of weather disasters which led to famines and war and wiped out about a third of humanity. Kingdoms that had lasted for centuries collapsed and men fought for a new order.  That’s from a 900 page book that came out last year by historian Geoffrey Parker called Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, I heard an interview with him on WBAI this morning on the program “Against the Grain”.

Climate cooling in the 17^th century was surely not man-made.  Parker says it had to do with a unique lack of sunspots, more frequent volcanic eruptions and changes to El-Nino.  The temperature dropped worldwide one to two degrees Celsius.

There were different reactions among the rulers of the world.  The main one was to deny anything was going wrong and to try to drown rebellions in blood.  Others saw the problem as sin against God.  Their solution was to burn witches and murder gays.  Some societies realized something special was going on in the climate and that the state had to take action.  Mogul India cut back on its building program (no second Taj Mahal) and fed many of the starving.

The best response was in Tokugawa Japan.  Their ruler decided there was in a real emergency and took action.  For instance no one could use rice for anything except eating (no saki wine).  Invitations to go to war were actually rejected.  The Chinese asked for help against the Manchus in vain.  The Dutch proposed a joint Dutch-Japanese invasion of the Philippines and this was rejected, too.  This approach was successful and Japan’s population doubled or tripled by 1700.

Obviously there’s a lesson here as our climate starts to heat up.  Climate catastrophe is going to cause more war.  Some say it’s already happened recently, giving Syria as the big example.  An expert on the Bill Moyers TV show talked about years of drought in Syria.  “75 percent of farmers in the northeast suffered total crop failure”. Millions left their homes and the Assad government did not handle the crisis.  The result was a social powder keg and finally an explosion.

More on Parker’s book here and here.

March 17.  You know how a company will put out an extravagant ad for job seekers even though they have just a few jobs to offer.  Or they may have no jobs at all and want to build up a cache of applications “just in case”.  The Nigerian government did this in spades over the weekend inviting 65,000 people to apply for 5,000 positions.  They told job seekers to come to a giant stadium in Abuja.  The stadium held only 60,000.  Once it was filled desperate job seekers tried to force their way, in.  (There are 41 million unemployed in Nigeria.)   The result was panic and a stampede and at least seven deaths.

Interior Minister Abba Moro said the unemployed workers were responsible.  He said they “lost their lives through their impatience”.

Nigeria has enormous amounts of oil and the “growth” figures for the economy are supposedly  6%.  This has not amounted to many jobs.

On the other hand Nigerian Folorunsho Alakija is the richest woman in the world.  ”She returned to Nigeria shortly afterwards [1980's] to start Supreme Stitches, a premium Nigerian fashion label that catered exclusively to upscale clientele, including Maryam Babangida, the wife of Nigeria’s former military President Ibrahim Babangida. Leveraging on this proximity to power, she acquired an oil prospecting license – the basis of her enormous fortune today.”

This article by Stanley Heller published on Indian Country Today got over 1,700 shares.

While going to a program at the Yale University Art Gallery auditorium I came across a wall full of pictures of cancelled Andrew Jackson stamps. They had been blown up to five or six inches square, but a few were around a foot square. They were very heavily cancelled. Ha, I thought, a political statement about “Old Hickory”.

But I was wrong. The artist had come across a collection of a student’s stamps and was fascinated with the variety of cancellation marks. At least that was what I was told at the information desk.

I prefer my fantasy, that Yale was featuring an exhibit showing disrespect for Andrew Jackson—slaveholder, imperialist, constitution defiler, Indian killer and seventh U.S. president.

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For sure the U.S. and Russian 1% are each trying to see how much they can steal in the Ukraine.  The U.S. has spent billions to convince the Ukrainians that the European Union is paradise (Ask the Greeks or the Spaniards about the EU heaven).  The Ukrainian fascists are very powerful and were a big part of the shock troops who overthrew the elected president (who along with his family was busy enriching himself).   On the other hand the Putin regime and his billionaire buddies are no friend of the Ukrainians.  Stories about threats to the Russian base and the Crimea or threats to Russian speaking Ukrainian are just excuses for old fashioned Russian great power grasping.

On the other hand let’s not pretend that all that has happened is just a U.S. conspiracy.   Things were awful in the Ukraine.  Years of free market reforms let to permanent depression.  Corruption at the top was legend.  Huge crowds of people put up with freezing temperatures in the Maidan for months demanding change.   True, the change most of them wanted was the EU fantasy, but President Yanukovich was in no position to warn them of this as he had given the population a diet of cut-backs for years on advice of the great sages of capitalism while he lived in luxury.

A message for the U.S. 1%: Why are you looking down your noses at Russia?  Putin is what you wanted, not a reformed democratic Soviet Union, but an empire torn to pieces, replaced by aggressive no holds barred robber baron capitalism.  Putin and his friends are what you drooled for.

Important or Interesting articles about the Ukraine with My Comments

Start here.  I will add newer article to the bottom of the post as times goes on.

Panorama View of EuroMaidan Dec. 2013

Feb. 21, 2014.   On the Ground in the Ukraine.  How the fascists beat and barred the Left from the Maidan

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Dear Dr. Hansen:

You’ve asked for comment on your draft paper “Renewable Energy, Nuclear Power and Galileo: Do Scientists Have a Duty to Expose Popular Misconceptions?“

I think your explanation of the gravity of the problem is fine, but I think the paper is unconvincing when it calls for expansion of nuclear power through fast reactors.  I also disagree on what to do with the money raised by a carbon tax.

1. Consider the Monju fast breeder reactor near Kyoto, Japan.  It was built 20 years ago, cost around $10 billion and has produced about 1 hour of electricity in all those years.  There was an accident in 1995 when there was a massive leak of the sodium coolant and then a major fire.  This is a real problem with the fast breeders because they can’t use water for coolant and must use very dangerous materials like liquid sodium.  As of a few days ago the Japanese government announced that it most likely won’t ever use the plant  to generate power at all, but would use it for “research”

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Feb. 25. Just noticed this Jan. 10 article, but it hit 50 degrees in Pilbara  region of Australia on that day. This may not seem to be a big deal to those of us in the northeast U.S. who would kill for a day at 50 degrees Farenheit, but the Australian temperature was in Centigrade. So in our terms it was really 122! That’s very nearly the highest temperature ever recorded in that continent.

Several thousand miles to the east in Queensland bats were dying because of the heat. An estimate is that 100,000 have fell out of the sky to their deaths. “Residents near Athol Terrace lookout in Boonah said they have been agonizing over the smell of dead bats for four days.”

Feb. 19.   The government numbers and press releases sound good.  The “Unemployment Rate” slowly but steadily has been going down, now to just 6.6%.  So everything should be hunky-dory, right?  Funny thing though the public thinks unemployment is the most important problem facing the country today.  That’s the finding of the Gallop poll taken earlier in February.

The lack of jobs was thought to be the #1 worry by 23% with another 20% saying problems with the economy was #2.  Lack of confidence in government leaders was #3.

Gee, does the average person know something the politicians don’t?

Feb. 17.  In his State of the Union, the president said the U.S. had cut carbon emissions “over the last eight years” more than any other country in the world.  Carbon emissions for 2004-2012 fell from 5.853 billion metric tons to 5.490 billion metric tons.  We were on the right track! Or were we?

In 2013 U.S. carbon pollution went up, by 2%.  The Washington Post got this from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The reason the Washington Post said was because the “shale fracking boom had pushed natural gas prices to unsustainably low levels.”  Prices of natural gas went up a lot and many companies switched back to coal.

How could they go back to coal?  Well, electric power companies can just throw their most dangerous garbage (carbon dioxide) into the air when they burn it  and never have to pay to clean it up.  There is no nation carbon tax so why not go back to coal?  All that matters is profit, right?  Climate worries are for sissies.

Now here’s an interesting tidbid from the same Washington Post article.  “The EIA is only counting carbon-dioxide emissions from energy sources like coal, natural gas, and oil. This makes up about 84 percent of all of America’s greenhouse-gas emissions. But it leaves out other potent, heat-trapping gases like methane, which can leak out of natural gas operations, landfills, and farms.”

So we don’t even know if they Obama claim about 2004-2012 was true.

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Feb. 17. Tomas Edsall wrote a piece in the NYT about what is now an old idea on how to reduce inequality and get workers more enthusiastic in the companies they work for, ESOP, an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. It’s been a law for 50 years giving companies tax breaks if they formally give their workers stock in the company. Some 12,000 companies do so.

Ronald Reagan loved the idea. It’s supposed to make workers love the company and become more “productive”. Supposedly it makes every man(/woman) a capitalist, and is a “win/win” situation.

Sorry, just because you own some stock you’re not a capitalist. You’d have to make most of your living taking advantage of workers to be in that class. You wouldn’t say that Bob Cratchit was a capitalist just because Scrooge used some of the company profits to give Cratchit a goose on Christmas.

An ESOP may give you back a little bit of the money the boss has gouged out of you, but that’s it. You’re not the partial boss of an ESOP. They have rules that keep you out of the running of the company. That’s for “professionals”. As Robert Shaffer of Appalachia said in his comment posted to Edsall’s article, “ESOP participants do not have any say when the company decides to move its operations out of this country. They may not even tell you until the day it happens. Been there, done that, have the T-shirt.”
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Feb. 15 VIDEO – While the world heats Obama brags about how much fossil fuel he is digging up

Bill McKibben ripped into Obama about this on Democracy Now! this week

Feb. 17   Update.  Here’s what Trumka said about climate change and jobs at a “Good Jobs, Green Jobs”conference on February 11.  He said that merely saying that things should be shut down “poisons the well politically”.  He didn’t utter the words “Keystone XL”, but what else?  He was complaining that climate activists wanted Keystone XL shut down.

What was the reaction from the crowd? There’s wasn’t one “boo”.  Not one person shouted out “what about the pipeline?”.   Pathetic.  In addition Trumka didn’t say anything about phasing out coal burning plants and finding new work for coal miners.  The ex-coal miner president just digs in his heels and defends the status quo.  Mostly he talked about trade agreements.  Bizarrely at 38:36 he called for a “working and middle class climate”.  A WHAT?  Final point, looking at the list of sponsors there were a lot more corporations than climate activists.

Feb. 8.  Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO President, may not be in the 1%, but he’s close behind. He made a salary of $272,000 last year along with nearly $16,000 of “other disbursements”. If he retired tomorrow he’d get 60% of that as a pension for his 14 years of “service” as a top AFL-CIO officer.

I have the gall to connect his exalted position to his recent decisions to help destroy the climate.

In These Times reports, “On a recent conference call with reporters, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka endorsed two initiatives reviled by green groups: the Keystone XL pipeline and new natural gas export terminals.” ITT says he said, “There’s no environmental reason that [the pipeline] can’t be done safely while at the same time creating jobs.”

He’s talking the same way as the State Department report, talking only about the safety of the pipeline itself and ignoring the catastrophic danger of pouring umpteen gigatons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
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Feb. 7. The jobs picture is confusing. The number of new jobs created in January was a lot less than predicted, but somehow there seem to be a lot more people working. The economists had expected 180,000 jobs to be created, but the labor department said there was a gain of only 113,000. Federal jobs even fell by 12,000.

When the federal jobs report came out the stock market then went up a bunch.

The reason was there were other parts of the job report that were quite good. E-pop, the most accurate employment rate (employed was a percent of the population) went up from 58.6 to 58.8. Another rate called the “participation rate” went up by a similar amount. The number of workers who said they were working part-time because of lack of full time work dropped 500,000. The result was a whopping increase of 600,000 people who were employed. How? Who knows.

Back to the negatives. Paul Krugman writing in the New York Times mentions that the level of long-term unemployment is far above average. He writes, “long-term unemployed — those out of work for 27 weeks or more — have usually been between 10 and 20 percent of total unemployment. Today the number is 35.8 percent. “ Half the long-term unemployed (the LTU) are non-Hispanic whites. The LTU have a special problem, employer prejudice, the belief that these people must have something wrong with them because they’re out of work so long.
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Click here: for a very fine satire on You Tube.

Here’s the Forbes article that is based on Davos statistics. Take a look at it and see the breathtaking increase in the wealth of the U.S. 1% during the reign of “socialist” Obama.

Biting satire in of all places the New York Times.

Here’s the whole speech.

You won’t find these words or phrases there:

racism….. mass incarceration ….. civil rights ….. Trayvon Martin …..

New Jim Crow ….. affirmative action…..

labor unions ….. card count ….. collective bargaining ….. strikes…..

mountain top coal removal ….. increase social security payments …..

billionaire ….. the 1%…..

soup kitchen ….. deportations ….. Cristian Avila ….. TPP ….. fast track…..

human rights ….. hunger strike ….. forced feeding ….. Edward Snowden …..

Egypt ….. coup …..

Gaza siege ….. Bahrain ….. our Al-Majalah massacre in Yemen …..

Saudi Arabian nuclear program …..

nuclear energy ….. nuclear waste ….. military-industrial complex ….. PTSD …..

Keystone XL ….. global warming ….. fracking ….. 400 ppm …

Indian ….. native American ….. Pine Ridge ….. Leonard Peltier…..

Nelson Mandela ….. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki ….. Pete Seeger

words and phrases that were there and emphasized:

middle class ….. energy independence ….. natural gas ….. American dream ….. reform…..

Jewish state …..

terrorism ….. terrorist

The number enrolling in the exchanges for Obamacare medical insurance is up to 3.3 million and some officials think they may hit their March goal of 7 million.

In addition 6.3 million have been deemed eligible for Medicaid. Some of that is because the new health care law makes it easier to qualify, but most is because more people are now aware that they could have qualified all along.

On the other hand at the end of 2012 there were 48 million without insurance, so by mid-year there should still be 35 million without coverage.