Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The Bankster Bailout:
Bloomberg News: Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion
"The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.
The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.
Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.
A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger..."
Raw Story: Kucinich: Federal Reserve has captured control of our government
"Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) called for the U.S. Federal Reserve to be reformed after Bloomberg reported the central bank secretly loaned nearly $8 trillion to financial institutions from 2007 to 2009...
...'Remember the great debate we had here over the 700 billion in TARP funds?' he said on the House floor Tuesday. 'There was no debate over the 7.7 trillion the Fed gave the banks.'
'Did Congress have a clue?' he continued. 'There is another game going on way over our heads, and our constituents are struggling while the banks with the help of the Feds have captured control of our government.'
'Now the rating services are threatening us, if we don’t come up with a deal they’ll downgrade U.S. debt. Could the threat to our national sovereignty be any clearer?'
Kucinich has proposed legislation, called the National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act, that would incorporate the Federal Reserve within the United States Treasury and thereby make it accountable to Congress..."
The Environment:
The Guardian (UK) - Report highlights Obama's broken environmental promises
"Barack Obama has been just as zealous as George Bush in stripping away environmental, health and safety protection at the behest of industry, it turns out.
Some environmental organisations were beginning to suspect this, after Obama over-ruled his scientific advisors and blocked stronger ozone standards. Now, a new report [pdf] from the Centre for Progressive Reform has dug up some key data revealing that the White House in the age of Obama has been just as receptive to the pleadings of industry lobbyists as it was in the Bush era. And it goes far beyond ozone.
Under Obama, a little known corner of the White House - known as the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, or Oira - has changed more than 80% of the rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency.
None of these were changes for the good, the report says.
'Every single study of its performance, including this one, shows that Oira serves as a one-way ratchet, eroding the protections that agency specialists have decided are necessary under detailed statutory mandates, following years — even decades — of work.'
Oira was set up by Congress with the purpose of performing a last review of government regulations to see how they would work once they were put into effect. Its current chief is Cass Sunstein, a friend of Obama from his days teaching at Harvard Law School..."
Bloomberg News: Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion
"The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.
The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.
Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.
A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger..."
Raw Story: Kucinich: Federal Reserve has captured control of our government
"Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) called for the U.S. Federal Reserve to be reformed after Bloomberg reported the central bank secretly loaned nearly $8 trillion to financial institutions from 2007 to 2009...
...'Remember the great debate we had here over the 700 billion in TARP funds?' he said on the House floor Tuesday. 'There was no debate over the 7.7 trillion the Fed gave the banks.'
'Did Congress have a clue?' he continued. 'There is another game going on way over our heads, and our constituents are struggling while the banks with the help of the Feds have captured control of our government.'
'Now the rating services are threatening us, if we don’t come up with a deal they’ll downgrade U.S. debt. Could the threat to our national sovereignty be any clearer?'
Kucinich has proposed legislation, called the National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act, that would incorporate the Federal Reserve within the United States Treasury and thereby make it accountable to Congress..."
The Environment:
The Guardian (UK) - Report highlights Obama's broken environmental promises
"Barack Obama has been just as zealous as George Bush in stripping away environmental, health and safety protection at the behest of industry, it turns out.
Some environmental organisations were beginning to suspect this, after Obama over-ruled his scientific advisors and blocked stronger ozone standards. Now, a new report [pdf] from the Centre for Progressive Reform has dug up some key data revealing that the White House in the age of Obama has been just as receptive to the pleadings of industry lobbyists as it was in the Bush era. And it goes far beyond ozone.
Under Obama, a little known corner of the White House - known as the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, or Oira - has changed more than 80% of the rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency.
None of these were changes for the good, the report says.
'Every single study of its performance, including this one, shows that Oira serves as a one-way ratchet, eroding the protections that agency specialists have decided are necessary under detailed statutory mandates, following years — even decades — of work.'
Oira was set up by Congress with the purpose of performing a last review of government regulations to see how they would work once they were put into effect. Its current chief is Cass Sunstein, a friend of Obama from his days teaching at Harvard Law School..."
The So-Called War On Terror:
Glenn Greenwald: Is Obama Fulfilling the Neocon Dream of Mass Regime Change in Muslim World?
"...GLENN GREENWALD: There was this speech that General Wesley Clark gave in 2007 to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in which he recounted meetings that he had at the Pentagon with people with whom he had close relationships — meetings he had at the Pentagon with people with whom he had close relationships in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and he talked about how, as he had done before, that he was told within a week or two after 9/11 that the Pentagon intended to attack Iraq even though no one thought that they were involved in the 9/11 attack. And he described an incident where he went back to the Pentagon a few weeks after he was told this, in October and November of 2001, and he asked his source, well, it looks like we’re going to attack Afghanistan, you told me we were going to attack Iraq. Are we still going to attack Iraq? And the source told him, oh, General, it’s actually much worse than this.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to play the clip of Wesley Clark.
GLENN GREENWALD: OK, good.
WESLEY CLARK: What happened in 9/11, IS we didn’t have a strategy, we didn’t have bipartisan agreement, we didn’t have American understanding of it. And we had, instead, a policy coup in this country, a coup, a policy coup. Some hard-nosed people took over the direction of American policy and they never bothered to inform the rest of us. I went through the Pentagon 10 days after 9/11. I couldn’t stay away from mother army. I went back there to see Don Rumsfeld. I had worked for him as a white house fellow in the 1970’s. All this is in the book. I said, am I doing OK on CNN? He said, yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. He said, I’m thinking about—-I read your book. And he said—-this is the book that talks about the Kosovo campaign—-and he said, I just want to tell you, he said, nobody’s going to tell us where or when we can bomb, nobody. He said, I’m thinking of calling this a floating coalition. What do you think about that? I said, well sir, thanks for reading my book, and well... He said, thanks, that is all the time I have got. Really. I went downstairs leaving the Pentagon and an officer from the Joint Staff called me into the office and said, I want you to know, sir, we’re going to attack Iraq. I said, why? He said, we don’t know. I said, well did they tie Saddam to 9/11? He said, no, he said, but I guess they do not know what to do about terrorism and so the—-but they can attack states and they want to look strong. So, I guess they think if they take down a state it will intimidate the terrorists. It’s like that old saying, he said, that if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem has to be a nail. Well, I walked out of there pretty upset, and then we attacked Afghanistan. I was pretty happy about that. We should have. And then I came back to the Pentagon about six weeks later. I saw the same officer. I said, why haven’t we attacked Iraq? We still going to attack Iraq? He said, oh, sir, it’s worse than that. He pulled up a piece of paper off his desk. He said, I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office, says we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years. We’re going to start with Iraq and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: That was General Wesley Clark. Glenn Greenwald, the significance of what he said?
GLENN GREENWALD: So, that seems like a fairly radical plan, and he’s talking about, what he calls, this neocon cabal that had implemented this extremist militaristic vision justified on the basis of 9/11. He actually goes on to describe how Paul Wolfowitz, ten years earlier, was talking about these things well before 9/11. But, what struck me in listening to that video just a couple of days ago is that if you go down that list of Seven countries that he said the neocons had planned to basically change the governments of, you pretty much see that vision, despite the perception that we have a Democratic president and therefore the neoconservative movement is powerless, is pretty much being fulfilled. I mean, the governments of Iraq and Libya and Lebanon, three of those countries, have been changed, including Libya this year by military force. You then look at Somalia and Sudan where the Obama administration in Somalia has, according to The Washington Post just this weekend, massively escalated it’s proxy fighting and drone attacks, we’re involved in trying to subvert and control Somalia in all sorts of ways. We have a modest deployment to the south part of Sudan. But, that’s another country where we’re now militarily active and trying to control. And then the most important countries on that list, Iran and Syria, are clearly the target of all sorts of covert regime change efforts on the part of the United States and Israel. That is clearly the goal the U.S. government has adopted for itself, is to get rid of the Iranian laws and the Assad regime in Syria. And so, if you look at what Clark described in a way that he intended to be very frightening an extremist, that the neocons wanted to do in these seven countries, it seems pretty clear to me that although we may not be doing it with as much of an overt war as the neocons would like, it’s just a slightly more subtle and different means of achieving the same end..."
Human Impact On The Climate:
Naomi Klein Capitalism vs the Climate
"...Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending and recognize our debts to the global South. Of course, none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process. That means, at a minimum, publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as 'people' under the law. In short, climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.
More than that, climate change implies the biggest political 'I told you so' since Keynes predicted German backlash from the Treaty of Versailles. Marx wrote about capitalism’s 'irreparable rift' with 'the natural laws of life itself,' and many on the left have argued that an economic system built on unleashing the voracious appetites of capital would overwhelm the natural systems on which life depends. And of course indigenous peoples were issuing warnings about the dangers of disrespecting 'Mother Earth' long before that. The fact that the airborne waste of industrial capitalism is causing the planet to warm, with potentially cataclysmic results, means that, well, the naysayers were right. And the people who said, 'Hey, let’s get rid of all the rules and watch the magic happen' were disastrously, catastrophically wrong.
There is no joy in being right about something so terrifying. But for progressives, there is responsibility in it, because it means that our ideas—informed by indigenous teachings as well as by the failures of industrial state socialism—are more important than ever. It means that a green-left worldview, which rejects mere reformism and challenges the centrality of profit in our economy, offers humanity’s best hope of overcoming these overlapping crises..."
Glenn Greenwald: Is Obama Fulfilling the Neocon Dream of Mass Regime Change in Muslim World?
"...GLENN GREENWALD: There was this speech that General Wesley Clark gave in 2007 to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in which he recounted meetings that he had at the Pentagon with people with whom he had close relationships — meetings he had at the Pentagon with people with whom he had close relationships in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and he talked about how, as he had done before, that he was told within a week or two after 9/11 that the Pentagon intended to attack Iraq even though no one thought that they were involved in the 9/11 attack. And he described an incident where he went back to the Pentagon a few weeks after he was told this, in October and November of 2001, and he asked his source, well, it looks like we’re going to attack Afghanistan, you told me we were going to attack Iraq. Are we still going to attack Iraq? And the source told him, oh, General, it’s actually much worse than this.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to play the clip of Wesley Clark.
GLENN GREENWALD: OK, good.
WESLEY CLARK: What happened in 9/11, IS we didn’t have a strategy, we didn’t have bipartisan agreement, we didn’t have American understanding of it. And we had, instead, a policy coup in this country, a coup, a policy coup. Some hard-nosed people took over the direction of American policy and they never bothered to inform the rest of us. I went through the Pentagon 10 days after 9/11. I couldn’t stay away from mother army. I went back there to see Don Rumsfeld. I had worked for him as a white house fellow in the 1970’s. All this is in the book. I said, am I doing OK on CNN? He said, yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. He said, I’m thinking about—-I read your book. And he said—-this is the book that talks about the Kosovo campaign—-and he said, I just want to tell you, he said, nobody’s going to tell us where or when we can bomb, nobody. He said, I’m thinking of calling this a floating coalition. What do you think about that? I said, well sir, thanks for reading my book, and well... He said, thanks, that is all the time I have got. Really. I went downstairs leaving the Pentagon and an officer from the Joint Staff called me into the office and said, I want you to know, sir, we’re going to attack Iraq. I said, why? He said, we don’t know. I said, well did they tie Saddam to 9/11? He said, no, he said, but I guess they do not know what to do about terrorism and so the—-but they can attack states and they want to look strong. So, I guess they think if they take down a state it will intimidate the terrorists. It’s like that old saying, he said, that if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem has to be a nail. Well, I walked out of there pretty upset, and then we attacked Afghanistan. I was pretty happy about that. We should have. And then I came back to the Pentagon about six weeks later. I saw the same officer. I said, why haven’t we attacked Iraq? We still going to attack Iraq? He said, oh, sir, it’s worse than that. He pulled up a piece of paper off his desk. He said, I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office, says we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years. We’re going to start with Iraq and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: That was General Wesley Clark. Glenn Greenwald, the significance of what he said?
GLENN GREENWALD: So, that seems like a fairly radical plan, and he’s talking about, what he calls, this neocon cabal that had implemented this extremist militaristic vision justified on the basis of 9/11. He actually goes on to describe how Paul Wolfowitz, ten years earlier, was talking about these things well before 9/11. But, what struck me in listening to that video just a couple of days ago is that if you go down that list of Seven countries that he said the neocons had planned to basically change the governments of, you pretty much see that vision, despite the perception that we have a Democratic president and therefore the neoconservative movement is powerless, is pretty much being fulfilled. I mean, the governments of Iraq and Libya and Lebanon, three of those countries, have been changed, including Libya this year by military force. You then look at Somalia and Sudan where the Obama administration in Somalia has, according to The Washington Post just this weekend, massively escalated it’s proxy fighting and drone attacks, we’re involved in trying to subvert and control Somalia in all sorts of ways. We have a modest deployment to the south part of Sudan. But, that’s another country where we’re now militarily active and trying to control. And then the most important countries on that list, Iran and Syria, are clearly the target of all sorts of covert regime change efforts on the part of the United States and Israel. That is clearly the goal the U.S. government has adopted for itself, is to get rid of the Iranian laws and the Assad regime in Syria. And so, if you look at what Clark described in a way that he intended to be very frightening an extremist, that the neocons wanted to do in these seven countries, it seems pretty clear to me that although we may not be doing it with as much of an overt war as the neocons would like, it’s just a slightly more subtle and different means of achieving the same end..."
Human Impact On The Climate:
Naomi Klein Capitalism vs the Climate
"...Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending and recognize our debts to the global South. Of course, none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process. That means, at a minimum, publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as 'people' under the law. In short, climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.
More than that, climate change implies the biggest political 'I told you so' since Keynes predicted German backlash from the Treaty of Versailles. Marx wrote about capitalism’s 'irreparable rift' with 'the natural laws of life itself,' and many on the left have argued that an economic system built on unleashing the voracious appetites of capital would overwhelm the natural systems on which life depends. And of course indigenous peoples were issuing warnings about the dangers of disrespecting 'Mother Earth' long before that. The fact that the airborne waste of industrial capitalism is causing the planet to warm, with potentially cataclysmic results, means that, well, the naysayers were right. And the people who said, 'Hey, let’s get rid of all the rules and watch the magic happen' were disastrously, catastrophically wrong.
There is no joy in being right about something so terrifying. But for progressives, there is responsibility in it, because it means that our ideas—informed by indigenous teachings as well as by the failures of industrial state socialism—are more important than ever. It means that a green-left worldview, which rejects mere reformism and challenges the centrality of profit in our economy, offers humanity’s best hope of overcoming these overlapping crises..."
Monday, November 14, 2011
Economics:
Without subsidies, these industries would be forced to pass on to consumers what their products & services really cost. Isn't that what free markets do?
Not if the 'market' for legal political bribery gives them options to buy legislation others cannot afford...
Joe Romm: Over Half Of All US Tax Subsidies Go To Four Industries
"Citizens for Tax Justice has analyzed corporate tax rates from 2008 to 2010. The report [PDF] examines over half of the Fortune 500 companies
Perhaps it’s no surprise that the richest industries get the biggest subsidies, starting with finance and Big Energy. That’s how the 1% operate.
'Notably, 56 percent of the total tax subsidies went to just four industries: financial, utilities, tele-communications, and oil, gas & pipelines.'
But hey, Solyndra got a $500 million loan and went bankrupt so that is story the media focuses on over and over again, rather than the big robbery in broad daylight."
...on the benefits of having an inside track:
CBS News: Congress: Trading stock on inside information?
"Washington, D.C. is a town that runs on inside information - but should our elected officials be able to use that information to pad their own pockets? As Steve Kroft reports, members of Congress and their aides have regular access to powerful political intelligence, and many have made well-timed stock market trades in the very industries they regulate. For now, the practice is perfectly legal, but some say it's time for the law to change..."
Huffington Post: The GOP's 'Uncertainty' Talking Point, Debunked
"With the economy in a slump for nearly four years, corporate executives and conservative politicians have repeatedly invoked 'uncertainty' as a major barrier to American job-creation. The 'uncertainty' jab is a go-to talking point for any congressional Republican looking to tag President Barack Obama as a tax-raising, regulation-obsessed foe of American businesses.
But according to banking data compiled by economic research firm Moebs Services, the uncertainty plaguing the American economy has nothing to do with government regulations or taxes on millionaires. It's an uncertainty driven squarely by consumers and small-businesses who are worried about their short-term financial prospects. And it's been going on since well before Obama took up residence in the White House.
Since the end of 2007, bank customers have pulled over $900 billion out of certificates of deposits at major U.S. banks, parking their money in checking accounts and money market deposit accounts. Banks pay customers interest to park their money in CDs, but pay out next-to-nothing for money market accounts, and still less -- usually nothing -- for checking accounts.
'These are enormous shifts,' Moebs Services founder and Chairman Mike Moebs told HuffPost. 'We haven't seen stuff like this since the 1930s,'...
...Moebs runs calculations that correspond to a measure of the total supply of money that the Federal Reserve ceased to cover during the Bush years, once known as the 'M3' metric. The metric aggregates the currency in peoples' pocketbooks, checking accounts, CDs, money market accounts and other assets that were viewed as highly liquid prior to the current recession. And according to Moebs, that supply of money has gone from $10.6 trillion in 2007 to $11.3 trillion in the first quarter of 2011 -- an increase of less than 2 percent per year. That compares to an increase of more than 9 percent over the course of 2007 alone.
This kind of uncertainty -- a lack of consumer confidence -- can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When consumers pull their money out of longer-term investments, banks are reluctant to make longer-term loans, which in turn can hamper businesses, which become reluctant to hire without access to credit. The government can, in fact, take steps to alleviate the kind of uncertainty by boosting demand in the economy -- essentially, spending government money. But with congressional Republicans vilifying government spending on a regular basis, this prospect has been unlikely for years.
'It's really a function of the liquidity trap,' said Josh Bivens, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think-tank. 'We have way too little spending in the economy, which is why we have low interest rates across the board. But then once you see interest rates piling up near the zero-bound, uncertainty is going to drive people to cash.'
The Federal Reserve, however, has options. The Fed has kept interest rates low for years, and resorted to exotic maneuvers to encourage consumers and companies to spend money and boost the economy. But since 2008, the Fed has actually paid banks to park their excess reserves at the central bank, rather than lend them out into the economy. If the Fed wanted that money to make its way to consumers and businesses and stimulate job growth, it could simply reverse its policy -- instead of paying banks interest on excess reserves, it could charge them fees. At present, banks can actually make money by doing nothing with their money. If there were a penalty for doing nothing, banks would work harder to find good loan candidates.
'The money doesn't end up going out into the marketplace,' Nomi Prins, former managing director for Goldman Sachs, said. 'It would make sense to reverse the policy.'"
...what about playing 'fair' in Business?
Raw Story: The top 10 military ‘psy-ops’ corporations admit to using against Americans
"Environmental activist Sharon Wilson showed up to an oil industry event in Houston last week and caught a startling glimpse into how the fracking industry approaches residents in towns where they drill.
Wilson recorded industry insiders confirming they hire military psychological operation veterans, and use procedures pulled straight from the Army’s counterinsurgency manual."
Technology:
"It can't be done!" Or can it?
Dvice: Canadians get a la carte cable, U.S. providers bury heads in sand
"I'll bet you never thought you'd be jealous of Canada (of all places), but cable companies there have started offering packages where you can pay for only the channels you watch. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., cable providers are still covering their ears and loudly yelling that doing this exact same thing is impossible..."
WIRED: New Hybrids Will Pump it Up
"In the future, some hybrids won’t use batteries and won’t look like almonds.
Several companies are developing hydraulic hybrid drivetrains that bring the benefits of hybrids to heavy-duty vehicles like buses. The technology, which uses pressurized fluid instead of electricity to turn the wheels, promises significant fuel savings at lower cost than traditional hybrids.
Altair Product Design recently unveiled what it says is the world’s first series hydraulic hybrid transit bus and says it delivers twice the fuel economy of a conventional diesel bus. UPS has experimented with hydraulic hybrid delivery trucks, and even Chrysler is getting in on the act with a hydraulic hybrid minivan that could deliver a 60 percent increase in fuel economy during city driving.
The Environmental Protection Agency has joined several firms, including Chrysler, in a push to test the tech. The agency says hybrid hydraulic vehicles could cut fuel consumption by one third, which is significant when you consider a diesel bus gets around 3 mpg...
...“Primarily it has to do with power density,” said Tim Smith, director of design engineering at Altair. 'The best diesel-electric hybrid can only recover 25 percent of the braking energy. The limitations are that you just can’t charge the batteries fast enough to take all the potential energy that’s available in a braking event. You can charge them at maximum rate and the rest of the energy goes out as heat.'
In some applications, such as a city bus that is constantly slowing and accelerating, a hydraulic system allows for greater, and faster, accumulation of energy.
'With hydraulic, we’re able to recover 75 percent of the braking energy to be utilized for the next launch event,' Smith said.
That’s especially true in large, heavy vehicles that make lots of stop-and-go trips, like buses, trash trucks and delivery vans. That’s why you’re seeing this technology applied to heavy-duty vehicles. An Atlanta-area school district is using a hydraulic hybrid bus to transport students, and Peterbilt has a hydraulic hybrid garbage truck. The EPA is working with drivetrain manufacturers such as Parker Hannifin, FEV and Eaton to develop the technology, sharing patents and funding with government labs and private manufacturers.
Heavy haulers are especially good testbeds because they’re large enough to carry the pumps and tanks the system needs to run..."
Vimeo: Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS
Amazing video - make sure you watch it in HD!
Without subsidies, these industries would be forced to pass on to consumers what their products & services really cost. Isn't that what free markets do?
Not if the 'market' for legal political bribery gives them options to buy legislation others cannot afford...
Joe Romm: Over Half Of All US Tax Subsidies Go To Four Industries
"Citizens for Tax Justice has analyzed corporate tax rates from 2008 to 2010. The report [PDF] examines over half of the Fortune 500 companies
Perhaps it’s no surprise that the richest industries get the biggest subsidies, starting with finance and Big Energy. That’s how the 1% operate.
'Notably, 56 percent of the total tax subsidies went to just four industries: financial, utilities, tele-communications, and oil, gas & pipelines.'
But hey, Solyndra got a $500 million loan and went bankrupt so that is story the media focuses on over and over again, rather than the big robbery in broad daylight."
...on the benefits of having an inside track:
CBS News: Congress: Trading stock on inside information?
"Washington, D.C. is a town that runs on inside information - but should our elected officials be able to use that information to pad their own pockets? As Steve Kroft reports, members of Congress and their aides have regular access to powerful political intelligence, and many have made well-timed stock market trades in the very industries they regulate. For now, the practice is perfectly legal, but some say it's time for the law to change..."
Huffington Post: The GOP's 'Uncertainty' Talking Point, Debunked
"With the economy in a slump for nearly four years, corporate executives and conservative politicians have repeatedly invoked 'uncertainty' as a major barrier to American job-creation. The 'uncertainty' jab is a go-to talking point for any congressional Republican looking to tag President Barack Obama as a tax-raising, regulation-obsessed foe of American businesses.
But according to banking data compiled by economic research firm Moebs Services, the uncertainty plaguing the American economy has nothing to do with government regulations or taxes on millionaires. It's an uncertainty driven squarely by consumers and small-businesses who are worried about their short-term financial prospects. And it's been going on since well before Obama took up residence in the White House.
Since the end of 2007, bank customers have pulled over $900 billion out of certificates of deposits at major U.S. banks, parking their money in checking accounts and money market deposit accounts. Banks pay customers interest to park their money in CDs, but pay out next-to-nothing for money market accounts, and still less -- usually nothing -- for checking accounts.
'These are enormous shifts,' Moebs Services founder and Chairman Mike Moebs told HuffPost. 'We haven't seen stuff like this since the 1930s,'...
...Moebs runs calculations that correspond to a measure of the total supply of money that the Federal Reserve ceased to cover during the Bush years, once known as the 'M3' metric. The metric aggregates the currency in peoples' pocketbooks, checking accounts, CDs, money market accounts and other assets that were viewed as highly liquid prior to the current recession. And according to Moebs, that supply of money has gone from $10.6 trillion in 2007 to $11.3 trillion in the first quarter of 2011 -- an increase of less than 2 percent per year. That compares to an increase of more than 9 percent over the course of 2007 alone.
This kind of uncertainty -- a lack of consumer confidence -- can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When consumers pull their money out of longer-term investments, banks are reluctant to make longer-term loans, which in turn can hamper businesses, which become reluctant to hire without access to credit. The government can, in fact, take steps to alleviate the kind of uncertainty by boosting demand in the economy -- essentially, spending government money. But with congressional Republicans vilifying government spending on a regular basis, this prospect has been unlikely for years.
'It's really a function of the liquidity trap,' said Josh Bivens, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think-tank. 'We have way too little spending in the economy, which is why we have low interest rates across the board. But then once you see interest rates piling up near the zero-bound, uncertainty is going to drive people to cash.'
The Federal Reserve, however, has options. The Fed has kept interest rates low for years, and resorted to exotic maneuvers to encourage consumers and companies to spend money and boost the economy. But since 2008, the Fed has actually paid banks to park their excess reserves at the central bank, rather than lend them out into the economy. If the Fed wanted that money to make its way to consumers and businesses and stimulate job growth, it could simply reverse its policy -- instead of paying banks interest on excess reserves, it could charge them fees. At present, banks can actually make money by doing nothing with their money. If there were a penalty for doing nothing, banks would work harder to find good loan candidates.
'The money doesn't end up going out into the marketplace,' Nomi Prins, former managing director for Goldman Sachs, said. 'It would make sense to reverse the policy.'"
...what about playing 'fair' in Business?
Raw Story: The top 10 military ‘psy-ops’ corporations admit to using against Americans
"Environmental activist Sharon Wilson showed up to an oil industry event in Houston last week and caught a startling glimpse into how the fracking industry approaches residents in towns where they drill.
Wilson recorded industry insiders confirming they hire military psychological operation veterans, and use procedures pulled straight from the Army’s counterinsurgency manual."
Technology:
"It can't be done!" Or can it?
Dvice: Canadians get a la carte cable, U.S. providers bury heads in sand
"I'll bet you never thought you'd be jealous of Canada (of all places), but cable companies there have started offering packages where you can pay for only the channels you watch. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., cable providers are still covering their ears and loudly yelling that doing this exact same thing is impossible..."
WIRED: New Hybrids Will Pump it Up
"In the future, some hybrids won’t use batteries and won’t look like almonds.
Several companies are developing hydraulic hybrid drivetrains that bring the benefits of hybrids to heavy-duty vehicles like buses. The technology, which uses pressurized fluid instead of electricity to turn the wheels, promises significant fuel savings at lower cost than traditional hybrids.
Altair Product Design recently unveiled what it says is the world’s first series hydraulic hybrid transit bus and says it delivers twice the fuel economy of a conventional diesel bus. UPS has experimented with hydraulic hybrid delivery trucks, and even Chrysler is getting in on the act with a hydraulic hybrid minivan that could deliver a 60 percent increase in fuel economy during city driving.
The Environmental Protection Agency has joined several firms, including Chrysler, in a push to test the tech. The agency says hybrid hydraulic vehicles could cut fuel consumption by one third, which is significant when you consider a diesel bus gets around 3 mpg...
...“Primarily it has to do with power density,” said Tim Smith, director of design engineering at Altair. 'The best diesel-electric hybrid can only recover 25 percent of the braking energy. The limitations are that you just can’t charge the batteries fast enough to take all the potential energy that’s available in a braking event. You can charge them at maximum rate and the rest of the energy goes out as heat.'
In some applications, such as a city bus that is constantly slowing and accelerating, a hydraulic system allows for greater, and faster, accumulation of energy.
'With hydraulic, we’re able to recover 75 percent of the braking energy to be utilized for the next launch event,' Smith said.
That’s especially true in large, heavy vehicles that make lots of stop-and-go trips, like buses, trash trucks and delivery vans. That’s why you’re seeing this technology applied to heavy-duty vehicles. An Atlanta-area school district is using a hydraulic hybrid bus to transport students, and Peterbilt has a hydraulic hybrid garbage truck. The EPA is working with drivetrain manufacturers such as Parker Hannifin, FEV and Eaton to develop the technology, sharing patents and funding with government labs and private manufacturers.
Heavy haulers are especially good testbeds because they’re large enough to carry the pumps and tanks the system needs to run..."
Vimeo: Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS
Amazing video - make sure you watch it in HD!
Friday, November 04, 2011
Campaign 2012 - Follow The Money:
Lee Fang: The Koch Brothers’ Connection To Herman Cain’s Campaign Finance Scandal
"Herman Cain’s presidential campaign has taken heat for relying on a private corporation to pay for a plethora of campaign services, potentially in violation of federal campaign finance law. According to documents obtained by Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Cain chief of staff Mark Block set up a compnay called Prosperity USA and used it to pay for 'tens of thousands of dollars in [campaign] expenses for such items as iPads, chartered flights and travel to Iowa and Las Vegas.'
In the New York Times today, another look at the documents obtained by Bice shows that the corporation is financially linked to Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party group financed by the billionaire petrochemical brothers David and Charles Koch..."
Lee Fang: The Koch Brothers’ Connection To Herman Cain’s Campaign Finance Scandal
"Herman Cain’s presidential campaign has taken heat for relying on a private corporation to pay for a plethora of campaign services, potentially in violation of federal campaign finance law. According to documents obtained by Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Cain chief of staff Mark Block set up a compnay called Prosperity USA and used it to pay for 'tens of thousands of dollars in [campaign] expenses for such items as iPads, chartered flights and travel to Iowa and Las Vegas.'
In the New York Times today, another look at the documents obtained by Bice shows that the corporation is financially linked to Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party group financed by the billionaire petrochemical brothers David and Charles Koch..."
