Martin Weiss : Banking Survival Guide

You probably want this information, has a list of the strongest and weakest banks and thrifts in the United States.

There’s a really good, fairly long, and very in-depth overview of global oil production and discovery numbers

Oil Field Discoveries

This table really says it all in my opinion. But there’s a lot more information in the story, about pretty much every part of the industry you might be curious about.

Just so you understand it, with most global oil fields in decline, at around 5-7% yearly rates, that means, globally, we need to put online about 4-7 million barrels new production per day. Yet, as you can see from this chart, we have added almost no significant new production in the 2000s. This is not a small problem, it’s a very serious issue, and it’s the dead give-away that global peak oil production has almost certainly hit us, now. And what’s left is hard to extract, expensive, and lower quality.
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Amazing stuff, if you don’t listen to much, please check out this very long interview with two of the most serious individuals involved in oil field analysis, peak oil, etc. When two guys like this get together, they aren’t doing it to have fun or

Our fun times are coming to an end very soon, if these guys are as right as they have consistently been. One key point is new data released by a newly reorganized IEA (International Energy Agency)

Please give the interview a listen (direct stream)

The following are some random quotes from the interview:

The biggest story.. is supply destruction, but that’s not getting the same coverage as the current demand destruction…

(the IEA) is saying we are in TERRIBLY serious trouble… At some point somebody needs to stand up and say we have a fire in the theater.

Oil has been on a production plateau since about 2005

The game is over…

We are having trouble explaining this to people who do not understand…

We are already on the downhill slide…

The oil industry is now panicked (because of the current economic collapse).. they are laying down rigs.. we’ve already laid down about 20% of North American’s rigs, within six months we’ll be 30% down

I think we have a week or two before we shot ourselves in the kneecap

We’re heading for a train wreck.. we’re sliding downhill without any brakes.

The only fix is to drop our current oil consumption levels.. there are no quick fixes.

The time to act is now.. and need to act is urgent

(the prevailing public feeling that) renewables will solve all of our problems and that is just PLAIN WRONG

This is a no-holds barred interview, and the news is all bad. They discuss new IEA (International Energy Agency) research and management which are showing that all previous assumptions were grotesquely optimistic.

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Thom Hartmann reminds us once again of the big smelly secret that the current corrupt political system and corporations do not want you to know: We can fix our society in many ways by simply blocking the ability of corporations to take advantage of the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution to engage in political activity.

This solves, instantly, some very core problems that are making our society fall victim to a form of corruption that can be quite easily removed, corporate lobbyists and political contributions, money, that is.

But today corporations are asserting that they — and only they — should stand side-by-side with humans in having access to the Bill of Rights. Nike asserted before the Supreme Court last year, as Sinclair Broadcasting did in a press release last month, that these corporations have First Amendment rights of free speech. Dow Chemical in a case it took to the Supreme Court asserted it has Fourth Amendment privacy rights and could refuse to allow the EPA to do surprise inspections of its facilities. J.C. Penney asserted before the Supreme Court that it had a Fourteenth Amendment right to be free from discrimination — the Fourteenth Amendment was passed to free the slaves after the Civil War — and that communities that were trying to keep out chain stores were practicing illegal discrimination. Tobacco and asbestos companies asserted that they had Fifth Amendment rights to keep secret what they knew about the dangers of their products. With the exception of the Nike case, all of these attempts to obtain human rights for corporations were successful, and now they wield this huge club against government that was meant to protect relatively helpless and fragile human beings.
Is Wal-Mart a Person? Thom Hartmann Tells Why It Is–Kind of–But Not Really

So next time you read an article about how great Phil Knight is, keep this in mind. The individual persons in a corporation, the humans, may or may not be decent people, but the overall enterprise itself imposes its own logic, and that logic tells it that if it can get away with x or y, then it must try, since profit is its only legal requirement.
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