A Drop of Rain

Reuters had this article today: Geithner plan will rob American taxpayers: Stiglitz

The U.S. government plan to rid banks of toxic assets will rob American taxpayers by exposing them to too much risk and is unlikely to work as long as the economy remains weak, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said on Tuesday.

“The Geithner plan is very badly flawed,” Stiglitz told Reuters in an interview during a Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong.

That about says it all, but read the rest if you want the details. Say good bye to the USA you knew, it’s gone now and will never be back.

The only real question is when Obama admits this, and when he starts to take actions that accord with this reality. Using more debt to escape debt is fools game.

Also make sure to read this week’s Full Commanding Denial article by Kunstler.

Everything that we’re doing right now is engineered to avoid reality, to sustain the unsustainable, to recover the unrecoverable, when the mandate of reality compels us to face our losses in order to move on to the next chapter of a collective American life. The next chapter would be a society that runs on a much more local and modest scale, centered on essential activities like growing food, requiring harder physical work, and focused attention — in other words, the opposite of a society lost in abstractions, long-range daisy chains of off-loaded responsibility, and incessant pleasure-seeking.

Excellent in-depth interview with Matt Simmons (43 minutes, flash video). That is on the oil drum, the actual Reality Check page requires some viewer or other.

This is one of the most comprehensive overviews of the entire oil production and peaking process I have ever heard, and Matt Simmons speaks extremely clearly, without the aid of the somewhat annoying powerpoint presentations he tends to favor.

This is a one on one interview that covers his writings and analysis over the past 16 years. As he says: what has amazed him most is just how wrong the mainstream views have been, and continue to be.

This guy knows what he’s talking about, with one glaring exception: his belief that the global economy can function when it’s paying producers more than 100 or so a barrel.
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I’m not going to quote this article, it’s too in-depth to really paraphrase, just read it: The Rolling Stone – The Big Takeover. It’s nice to see the Rolling Stone return to some top quality journalism. Hopefully investigative journalism isn’t something only practiced after the fact now though..

The global economic crisis isn’t about money – it’s about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

This is, in my opinion, almost certainly true. This is why you have high tax rates, by the way, it’s the only real way to stop these criminals from accumulating too much wealth, which then becomes power, which is then used to create new conditions to accumulate even more wealth, forming a cycle that can end only in full economic collapse, since greed knows no bounds, and will never restrain itself.

There’s a reason greed is one of the 7 cardinal sins.

And high tax rates do not mean 40%, they mean 90%. This is why, for example, Russia imposed very high oil tax rates on the oligarch’s oil companies as well, to stop the theft via overproduction of Russia’s finite resources. The sooner we begin to view these Wall Street parasites as oligarchs and non-productive, destructive, in fact, members of socieity, the sooner we will be able to restore some part of our failing system.

But one thing you can rest absolutely assured of: it will never be the same.

Also be sure to read The Asia Times recent article on AIG and the collapsing US economy and political system. I’m getting to like the Asia Times more and more, they have a distinctly cutting and non-corporate view that is absolutely refreshing nowadays.

Here’s one from www.worldenergy.tv, a 30+ minute talk by Matt Simmons, G’day America in Australia recently.

I think this one is worth watching in its entirety to get a sense of where we are, the economic situation, his view on the prices now, infrastructure, etc.

He’s probably missing a few things I suspect, especially with regards to the role of speculators and price, but his overall points don’t really depend on each specific being totally correct, so I don’t see that as much of a problem, the facts are there.

Pay special attention the US and European natural gas production information, that is something many people are not willing to even face up to, for obvious reasons, there are simply no replacements out there.

I’d embed the video, but I’m not sure about that site’s policies about embedding so just click the link above to see it.

Well, you may have heard the recent hubbub between Jon Stewart and CNBC analyst Cramer, Stewart rips into Cramer, after having ripped CNBC earlier re Santeli’s nonsense but March 12, Cramer actually came on to the Stewart show for an in-depth interview.

Any question about how good Stewart is should be removed immediately from your mind. These 3 are the entire interview:

Part 1:

The next two are under the fold, check them out, I have to say, I really have to respect Cramer here a little bit, although everything Stewart says is true, but Cramer comes out and calls a lot of big people ‘liars’. If only more core people would start coming out like this, even though it’s too little too late, but at least maybe we can start getting criminal fraud and racketeering convictions going against these self-entitled rich brats who have brought the global economy to its knees… which was going to happen anyway, but still…
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