The cheapest source of money ever

This documentary offers important insights into the nature of what make economies healthy.  So pull-up a comfy chair, get the popcorn out of the microwave and settle in to find out about a revolutionary idea that is growing. It is being accepted as policy by political parties around the world and has been implemented in North Dakota for 70 years and Bristol(UK) more recently.

The 1% so grasping they take from themselves

First some good news, Californians to get living wage - eventually.



Jimmy is referring to this video when he mentions "the banned TED Talk".

When a random oil executive, or an ill-informed friend quotes the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change(NIPCC - a project of the shill group Heritage Foundation) to say carbon fuel emissions are no worse than nature, technically this is correct. However what they are not saying is that while they intend to burn 2 teratonnes of fossil carbon, we have already seen what 2 teratonnes of carbon in the atmosphere can do.

The last time 2 teratonnes of carbon belched into the air, it was released by an extended period of volcanic activity in Siberia. Over 10,000 years 90-95% of species died. That's high order predators like us, sea life, and plant life. Sea temperatures rose, oceanic oxygen levels fell and we are already observing these. That event is now known as the Permian Extinction, and it looks like big Carbon are dead keen to release PE2: (Permian Extinction 2) - The Triumph of Planned Obsolescence, this time it is commercial!



We've already seen bread basket crops fail in the US from droughts. Floods around the world. Oceanic oxygen levels have started to fall, this will mean smaller fish. Oceanic waters are 30% more acidic. 700 million people will be affected by the loss of water supplied from the Himalaya's glacier region.



So yeah our carbon pollution is no worse than nature, which means we are just as capable as nature is when it comes to causing our own extinction. But it takes a person with sociopathic, psychopathic or antisocial personality disorder to try it make it happen or try to profit from making it happen.

Politicians don't agree on very much, so getting 95% certainty anything means it as obvious as a polar bear raiding your fridge and interrupting your dinner to let you your out of seal fillets.



Jimmy's thinking is off here, prepare and work to mitigate, stop with the carbon now and maybe Earth will let us live. If we don't work to control our behaviour she's already has a plan to solve the problem without us. And the Earth will be with out us, no more NFL, AFL, NBA, and certainly no Jersey Shore reruns.

Carbon addiction, extinction, poison, totallitarianism...

The science is irrefutable, we have to change, we have to stop our hyper accelerated atmospheric carbon dumping.


Well, the long term picture is bleak enough, but something horrific is immediately before us.



The musling of the Canadian public sector science community and persecutorial auditing of environmental group is unacceptable in a liberal democracy. If tar sands are so good why doesn't Harper drink them?

But there is hope, Canadian's are standing up and environmental groups phones wont stop ringing because people are calling to find ways to resist, so far they have caused costly delays essential to making corporations lose interest in bad projects.
Last week over 100 people turned out the protest an international oil summit in Wellington, New Zealand, and two days ago about 15 people protested the Russian coast Guard's piracy of a Greenpeace vessel  in the Arctic.
There are signs in other places that some people, and even governments get it. India is developing enough solar energy that it's rapidly becoming competitive with coal. Clean energy investment is now larger than carbon energy investment, and divestment in fossil fuel is growing rapidly. Comments by President Obama appear increasingly like he's moving to veto Keystone XL, which will be just as for the Solar powered barn that has been on KXL's path. Dinosaurs never saw extinction coming, even though they tried to resist, it took them out anyway, so shall go the way of big oil, coal and gas.

The fossil fuel industries quest for carbon is as mad as an astronauts quest for freedom would be if it involved stepping through an air lock naked. But it's worse than that, he's rigged the safeties with the inner door jammed open and he's cranking the manual lock on the outer door. For those that need it spelt it out, this will vent the atmosphere of the station and kill the entire crew just like disrupting the dynamics of the climate will kill civilization. Either we stop these guys or we wave at each other from roof tops and floating refrigerators.

See also
   Biggest Coal Co turns to solar
   Solar to compete with coal - 2011
   Solar set reach grid parity - 2013
   Free the arctic 30

Big money, Big Carbon, piranha and chum.

It may seem like a stretch to say Big Money – banks, speculators would have such an adversarial relationship with big carbon – oil, coal gas as would be observed with piranha and livestock in blood filled water, but recent incidents have led me to think this may become a more accurate characterization as time goes by.

While neoliberal governments may not “pick winners” big money definitely does. Already investment in renewable energy exceeds investment in drilling mining and fracking.

Over the last couple of years the divestment movement has been picking up steam. With major church groups, and universities opting to divest from big carbon. This will depress the stock price of these industries. Most recently in New Zealand earlier this month the Synod of the Auckland Anglican Diocese voted to declare big Carbon an “industry of sin”and over the next two years will be routing carbon out of their investment port-folio. This decision came partly on the back of opinion in the Lancet that climate change will have the biggest effect on human welfare of anything seen before, but also with the business that big carbon is no longer the good investment it once was. Following on from that decision, the Catholic church of Auckland announced that it will be examining the issue at it's next Synod in 2014. Given the Pope's stated position this does not look good for carbon industry stock prices.

Fracking extraction companies have been very busy, annoying unprecedented groups of people with the range of damage done to farms, water tables and human health. But also producing such an over supply of gas there is now a glut, and stock prices for gas companies have tanked.

The international price for coal has sunk to around $1/tonne. The effect has been that coal mines have become uneconomic, causing them to shut down. In New Zealand we have the example of Solid Energy. It was so bad that even though our government has a huge hard-on for extraction industries, not even they could pump life back into west coast mining operations near Greymouth.

So the chum is in the water for big carbon, let's see how the big money piranha are responding. During the last Bush administration a system of credits was introduced to encourage the addition of ethanol to America's fuel supply. The credits are given to companies adding ethanol to fuel. These credits can be traded and the intent was that companies not dealing with ethanol could at least encourage those that do by buying these credits. But last year speculators cornered the market for these credits, then offered them back to oil companies at hugely inflated prices.

So now the big money piranha are taking chunks out of their old cash cow. As demand for carbon fuels is falling, as renewable and clean energy technology is romping onto the global stage, it appears the striped hook has caught Big Carbon by the neck and is dragging their musical fart act off the Earth's Got Talent stage.

But in terms of the relationship between big money and big carbon, the only question is will these piranha leave bones.

See Also
   Solid Energy collapse "unavoidable"-  Min Finance
   Wall Street gouges Fuel industry on ethanol - NYT
   Anglicans spurn Carbon
   Going clean and green is a better deal - Forbes
   "The bottom has dropped out of the [coal] market"- Think Progress

The biggest fraud in two centuries

The Secret of Oz

Author L Robert Baum author of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, wasn't simply penning an entertaining children's story, he also authored a political allegory to highlight the biggest scam perpetrated upon the American nation.
The characters of the book were representations of political forces and players involved. Dorothy's shoes in the original story were silver, but were change to ruby in he movie to take advantage of the new Technicolor process, but the change also lost much of the symbolism of Baum's work. The brainless scarecrow represented the American farmers, who without college degrees understood the basics of economics. The tin woodsman represented the American worker who has been dumped into unemployment because of a lack of capital in industry. The cowardly lion represented William Jennings Bryan who railed against perpetrators of the biggest fraud ever seen but after two failed presidential runs withdrew from the movement that was trying to reign in the den of vipers.
The phrase “den of vipers” may seem strong, hardly even presidential. However it was the language of President Andrew Jackson, before one of the vipers assassinated him. But may not have been the only time this den of vipers struck at the power of the people to undo their ruse. Abraham Lincoln created the Greenback to return prosperity to the economy for which he as paid back with assassination at the hands of John Wilkes Booth.
The great fraud lies in the notion that private banks are the best institutions to control the money supply. This despite the “business cycle” tanking economies and destroying lives. How do they consider regular working people? Their language should tell us something, “inferior social strata”, so perhaps like a child looking down on ants and pointing the focal point of a magnifying glass in the sun at them.
You can no more borrow your way out of debt than can governments. Yet to “save” the “too big to fail” banks the US Government borrowed nearly one trillion dollars to give back to the same banks to “prevent collapse”. Indeed, while Republican scoffed at the idea of minting a trillion dollar coin to avoid the sequester, it may actually be the best way out of the untenable position of the rocky need for monetary injection in to the US economy and the hard place of having to pay back with interest any money borrowed from banksters.
The most pervasive part of the fraud is that government cannot be allowed to control the money supply, and yet history is replete with examples of governments successfully managing the money supply. To perpetrate this fraud there is the knee jerk reaction “governments can't print money because that would drive inflation.” And yet every few years the banks triple the money supply through mortgages and other lending.
North Dakota has a bank that is a bit different, it offers low interest loans, backed dollar for dollar by monetary reserves it actually holds. This bank has contributed hugely to the stability and prosperity of the state. And they've been doing this for over 90 years.

Ron Paul is a shill

Ron Paul's calls for a return to the gold standard simply plays into the agenda of the banksters, The gold standard, is simply a means to controlling the money supply favour by the banksters. It is a mechanism that has been used to promote the wealth of the money lenders / banksters and in the process has destroyed governments and civilisations.
It gets worse, it has been reveal that the libertarian movement was started by business interests as a pro-business fake grass roots movement in the 1970's and David Koch even ran as a presidential candidate on the libertarian ticket in 1979.

There has to be a better way.

Well yes there is. Nationalising reserve banks and keeping control of the money supply at arms length from politics and private banking interests in order to provide a moderated supply of money allowing for economic grow to a level of prosperity. At the same time requiring banks to have the assets to back the loans it issues.
Managing the transition is important, the first thing governments can do is create money to pay off the debts it owes. As they do this over time they increase the required level assets backing lending. Thus, you and I would not notice very much in banks operates towards us. But we would over time notice that business were hiring, new business were starting up and hiring, our pay checks would grow, poverty would shrink, to levels not seen in forty years.
The fact is no government is really in danger of running out of money. All they have to do to get out of banksters cuffs is grease them with cash they create. The very definition of sovereign goes back to the notional of governmental authority to control the money supply. In this sense the governments of the United States is no longer a sovereign state it is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street.

It has been done before.

I've already mentioned the Greenback, there are many other examples including tally sticks created by an English king to Scrip created in collonial America. In New Zealand, during the 1930's the 1st Labour government created the state house building programme, this program was funded by debt free money created by the government. The injection of money into the economy led to a great period of prosperity not seen since.
I can almost hear the off key whine buy tories/GOP pudits say “but they failed”. Technically they are correct, but these things did not fail before they met and unnatural sticky end. Successive National governments watered down the state house build programme and reverted to bankster borrowing and whinged about how it was so expensive, and eventually started selling off the state house stock. Government issued currency in the US got killed along with two of its presidents.
In Adams Smith's time, their was a quaint way dealing with speculators, the had them executed. Smith himself had little time for banksters, writings make it clear that banks must be strongly regulated.

“Though the principles of the banking trade may appear somewhat abstruse, the practice is capable of being reduced to strict rules. To depart upon any occasion from those rules, in consequence of some flattering speculation of extraordinary gain, is almost always extremely dangerous and frequently fatal to the banking company which attempts it.” - Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, PART III. Of the Expense of public Works and public Institutions, ARTICLE I.—Of the public Works and Institutions for facilitating the Commerce of the Society.

When banksters and their shills say such method failed, what they really mean is these methods didn't create the socio-economic separation they feel they need to feel superior to everyone else. Or the point to economic collapses started by policy changes friendly to their interests, such as recalling the Greenback or repealing Glass-Stiegal, they never blame these collapses on these changes of course. They even call the 2008 collapse “natural” but indeed there is nothing natural about it. A steady supply of money from government would ensure a steady economy, indeed economies are struggling today under austerity precisely because money is being vacuumed out of economies through taxes to pay back loans that governments can never pay in a system where money only comes from borrowing from the lenders they are paying.

See also
  Libertarian party history

Darkness descends on Wellington

Last night a weather that dropped snow on Otago and Southland moved and soaked Wellington with cold driving rain.  This morning, temperatures were around 7 deg C, there was a 9 metre swell and wind gusts of 122km/h. In literature, and movies this is not a good sign. indeed the ascension of Narnia's ice-queen might well be heralded similar weather. But the ice-queen is fiction, however the agents of darkness visiting Wellington are far from products of a creative imagination.

Following on the theme, it seemed sensible to say with a smile "With crap weather like this, there must be Anadarko executives in town." While shopping, few a people responded well to this comment, it seems Wellingtonians are well informed on the issues surrounding deep ocean drilling, Deep-Water Horizon.

Later this month Anadarko expects to start drilling in the Pegasus basin some 40Km from the southern cost of Wellington/Wairarapa. This week Anadarko executes will be having a summit with government officials in preparing for drilling.  Or is it for delivery of the final instalments on the bribes to John Key. Who can really be sure?

Much as the chill in today's weather was uncomfortable it not as uncomfortable as silence that will be created if changes to Resource Management Act are inacted to make drilling non-notifiable.  Protestors today visited parliament with noise makers and wearing tape over their mouths. The tape symbolized the silence of the public that will be created the amendments that the government is aiming to pass.

While some point to the far future and the effects on climate, there are far more immediate concerns. Exploration is the dangerous phase of extraction, indeed Deep-water Horizon was an exploratory well when it blew out. In short, when sit down to home made fish pie, fish fingers or terakihi fillet, it would be rather desirable for it to not taste like shit. If you have got a whiff of crude oil, you know that is what smells like, and will taste like. Better than that I'm pretty firm on the idea that collapsing and having seizures as a result of eating contaminated sea food is really something I'd rather avoid. Sadly, many American's have not been so fortunate. Lessions have appeared on gulf sea life, and in the people that have consumed it. Some lessions appearing in brain tissue causing seizures after swimming in gulf water.

We don't need this here.


See Also
    Today's protest for protesting - 3news

Boulder's genius power play.

Residents of Boulder, Colorado organised, petitioned and lobbied to create a local power authority. Their  plan, to develop generation from roof top solar to replace coal fired generators. Needless to say the reaction from incumbent mostly coal fired power companies was far from complementary. They out spent this grass root movement 5 to 1. Now that they lost fight against the creation of the municipal utility, they are flooding boulder with money to confuse the public and walk back this brilliant plan, to meet the energy needs of the city without  fuelling changes that will see crops fail and major coastal cities flooded.

If there is one large corporates must fear and loathe it would be and effective democracy. Because when the people make up their minds to move against them, there is nothing they can do to stop them. Which is why they put so much effort into propaganda or for lack of a better word - "bullshit".

See also
  Huff Post
  Upworthy