Economic crisis: the farce goes on

Posted on Monday, February 16, 2009 by nosleepingdog

We stopped the TV for a few minutes just now on CNBC’s “House of Cards”, a “special” about the mortgage bubble. The program is denouncing and exposing fraud and greed on the part of mortgage companies, brokers, and, yes, some homeowners.

Whew! Sure glad we’ve put all that behind us, now we just have to recover and clear up the mess.

Then there’s a commercial. Guess who one of the sponsors is? DiTech, whose obnoxious ads over the past few years lured in many a homeowner or would-be homeowner, for shady loans. They’re baaaack!

And DiTech is run by GMAC, the General Motors financing arm founded to provide loans to purchasers of their cars. Could the huge losses which DiTech/GMAC must have sustained possibly contribute to the financial pickle General Motors is now in? and for which they are asking a taxpayer bailout?

I’m shocked, do you understand, shocked!

A short comment on the economic bailout

Posted on Tuesday, September 30, 2008 by nosleepingdog

So many bloggers and talking heads comment on big political issues that I have steered clear of them; believe me, I rant a-plenty in our living room! But in my lifetime only two other distinct events have stood out, at the time of occurrence, as of such great importance for the future. The first was the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the second was 9-11 (though most of the disaster that has followed it has been chosen and created by the Bush administration). And this is the third.

I’ll keep my comment short. Here’s the email I just sent to Nancy Pelosi.

Dear Madam Speaker,

My husband and I, lifelong Democrats, commend you for your courage and good judgment in standing against the bailout bill. I also heard your interview last Thursday on NPR and was well impressed with your arguments and articulate presentation. I wish we could vote for you.

But be assured that many out here agree with your position. I do not know if you share my belief, that our economic structure is not just tilted drastically in favor of big interests–everyone knows that–but is unsound at its core, based on speculation and unending growth that cannot continue. Hence a series of bubbles that burst. The citizen always gets hurt whether by mortgage foreclosures that can devastate a family for decades, or by inflation, paying for bailouts, increasing the national debt, and so on. The war may be a distraction, as one of its purposes, from all this.

There is no “free market” when the biggest players set the rules and then are bailed out when they break them. At this point in history a free market is neither desirable nor possible. Let’s start changing it to a market that benefits the majority of people (not just by providing low-wage jobs) and benefits the planet and our succeeding generations.

Respectfully,

[me]

rural southern Oregon

Rumor has wings, Truth doesn’t

Posted on Tuesday, July 1, 2008 by nosleepingdog

A lie travels round the world (with winged sandals) while truth is putting on her boots.

And that proverb dates from before radio, television, or the internet!

This is a topic getting a lot of discussion lately with reference to Obama’s campaign (see Doonesbury) but lately I’ve had local instances.

I’m on a couple of local e-lists where a single person forwards items of interest to the area. One’s pretty much limited to prevention of wildfires & news about nearby fires; the other is more freeform, and occasionally includes forwarded emails of the sort that spread across the net like wildfires.
One of those caught my eye last week. It had to do with the Bakken formation oil deposit in Montana and North Dakota, and the gist of it was that the formation contains 503 billion barrels of oil which we shouldn’t let anyone prevent us (as Clinton allegedly did, in the 90’s) from extracting right away to solve our high gas prices.

For the net-savvy and many others, I think the subject line should have been a clue: “Where is the oil? Take time to read this one!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Another clue was that various specific numbers were given, references were made to government reports–even described as being online, yet there were no links to see the originals. Not even any complete footnote-type citations. In an apparent gesture of bona fides, the author said he/she had googled this information and invited the reader to “(GOOGLE it.) I did, and again, this BLEW my mind.”

Photo: Hermes/Mercury lacing up his winged sandals. For this discussion, he represents Rumor–he was both the fleet messenger of the gods and a thief and maker of mischief. Sculpture by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, 1744. Photo from Encarta.

In well under five minutes I’d established to my satisfaction that this was one lie after another. Wikipedia and Google both helped me find out that the Bakken formation is a shale-oil formation which does contain a lot of oil. But the amount of “technically recoverable” oil, in the latest report [3 to 4.3 Billion Barrels of Technically Recoverable Oil Assessed in North Dakota and Montana’s Bakken Formation—25 Times More Than 1995 Estimate. U.S. Geological Survey (April 10, 2008)], is less than 1% of the 503 billion barrels hysterically described in the email. To put this in perspective, the US in 2007 imported 3.6 billion barrels of crude oil according to the US Energy Information Administration.

In addition, recovering oil from oil shale requires temperatures of at least 1000° F. and/or solvents, and is much more damaging to the environment than good old oil wells. Not to mention greenhouse gases from mining, extraction, and use.

Squeezing oil from stone is not an easy proposition. Photo of oil shale from US Dept. of Energy.

I put all this into an email reply to the list-person, beginning with a sincere thanks

I really appreciate your local emails and the time you take to provide them.

But for non-local stuff, the email-o-sphere is just full of sensationalist misinformation. Some of it is “disinformation,” deliberately scattered to serve some political agenda. Please take time to check emails before forwarding them. If you check online you’ll find that…

Then I suggested that he might forward my email to the list, giving him permission to do so over my name as long as the entire thing, which wasn’t too long, was included.

The reply I got back was brief: “Thanks for the information.” In the week since then, nothing has appeared on the list about his previous forwarded post, nothing even suggesting there might be another point of view.

In rural areas such as ours there’s already heavy distrust of the government, so I figure the appeal of the false information will be strong. Politicians who deny that

a recent technological breakthrough has opened up the Bakken’s massive reserves… and we now have access of up to 500 billion barrels. And because this is light, sweet oil, those billions of barrels will cost Americans just $16 PER BARREL! That’s enough crude to fully fuel the American economy for “41 years straight”.

are going to be condemned as part of a conspiracy to rob the American people through high oil prices. Of course there may well be such a conspiracy, but it probably has more to do with the Iraq War and Cheney’s closed-door energy-policy meetings that he is trying to keep secret from Congress. See, I can be a conspiracy theorist too, and frequently I am! But I do like to have a little factual basis for my paranoid fantasies. Like these news stories about no-bid oil contracts being granted by the Iraqi government to US companies like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. These contracts are short-term but are widely expected to give an advantage, to those who receive them, in planned later bidding. With oil prices like these, the Iraqis are giving no-bid no-auction contracts? Oddly, an article from al-Jazeera doesn’t jump on the bandwagon of condemning the US, but quotes Iraqi officials as saying that companies in other smaller countries will also participate (how much? token participation?) and that the big American companies want a share of the profits, not just a fixed fee, which may be a deal-breaker for the Iraqis. (Brief general background here.) Anyway, that can be my conspiracy for today.