Perhaps the most telling quote:

The problem is that tree hugging dirt worshipping obstructionists have convinced President Obama that the Ogallala Aquifer is much more important then the 200,000 construction and manufacturing jobs and generate more then 585 million in new taxes for states and communities.

(Hint:  Go look up the word “aquifer” in a dictionary)  So I googled and dipped my toe into the first hard-left looking article I could snag, http://kellylowenstein.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/andrew-nikiforuks-outrage-about-the-tar-sands-of-alberta/

And the line of reasoning went a little more like this:

The particular type of oil drilling involves digging deep into the tar sands and then separating the bitumen from the rest of the material that is extracted.    This is the equivalent to an environmental triple whammy, in that the land is destroyed and tremendous amounts of natural gas and water are required for the cleaning process.   The environmental consequences are just part of the problem, though…

At this point, my BS meter is beginning to tilt in a specific direction.  Shhhhhh, I won’t spoil the ending and tell which direction yet.  I wanted to see exactly what the “Athabasca Oil Sands” looked like, so I went to google, typed “Athabasca Oil Sands” in quotes, searched, and then clicked the google “images” button at the top:  Google Images.

We used to get our oil this way:

The Uncivilized Way

But we’ve gotten more efficient.  Now advanced technology allows us to do it this way:

Advanced Technology is Super Cool

But who am I kiddin’?  This is AMERICA.  You REALLY don’t want to read about EITHER side of this shit do you??   Work was hard today!  Just gimme my iPhone uplink, my hulu, and I’m golden, right??  Sorry about that.   Carry on.  This wasn’t directed at you anyway.  You’ve only got the baby Hummer.  (Oh dear God, I’m having flashes…today I literally saw some kid that looked like he was 12 driving mommy and daddy’s baby Hummer down a state highway in Georgia…Welcome to America.  Sing it with me, “And I’m Proud to be an American where at least I…know I can give my kid the keys to my Hummer so he can impress his little girlfriend….  Sing it LOUD.  Sing it PROUD.  THIS is your America.  This is precisely your America.)

Let’s step back and look, as much as possible at job creation over the past 3 decades.  Most of it continues to occur at small companies despite the fact that health care costs have increased disproportionately for small employers over that time-frame:

Prior work from the Ewing Marion Kauffman
Foundation has shown that, since 1980, nearly all
net job creation in the United States has occurred in
firms less than five years old.

But in America…if you have a family…if you want to cover your loved ones at a reasonable cost (nothing’s really reasonable these days, but comparatively speaking).  What is your only choice?  You are expected to suck it up and beg for a job at a big company that has been cutting back employment for 3 decades straight now.  Or more accurately to beg for a job at big companies that have been consistently shipping jobs overseas for 3 decades straight now.  And the insurance industry continues to insist that a system tied to big employers is better…Now why is that???

It angers me…absolutely infuriates me, that statistics comparing actual job creation are almost impossible to come by.   Do a Google on “large employers” “small employers” comparison, or similar.   Almost all links you find are comparisons on health care costs.  No comparisons on who (large vs. small)  is actually creating the jobs over multiple decades, over the very long-haul. Why is this information so difficult to find?  Because Robert Reich is substantially correct.  Corporations in America have taken death-grip stranglehold on Washington politics (and on press spin as well as collegiate research) with another result that any long-term unfavorable comparisons for corporations as a whole are largely avoided at all costs.

And all the while the health insurance industry obstinately insists on propping up its business at large employers:  Profitable and low-risk.

So here is the result:  The most experienced employees, the 40-somethings and 50-somethings, the ones with families sick of working 70 and 80-hour weeks just so they can beg for the chance to work another week and not loose their job to India,  THE EMPLOYEES WITH THE MOST PRACTICAL BUSINESS KNOWLEDGE THAT MIGHT CONTRIBUTE TO CREATIVE NEW COMPANIES AND HENCE TO BURGEONING JOB GROWTH:  These employees are terrified of looking for jobs where jobs are growing.  They are indentured servants to large corporations in America, held hostage by a health-care system that only makes costs reasonable to employees of large employers.  Additionally, because experienced employees tend to seek employment with large employers because of the benefits, large employers enjoy these employees at a comparative discount.  In essence since the health care benefit differential offers larger employers a “free pass” to cherry-pick the talent.  A perpetual, happily silent, convenient pass to rob small companies of smart employees.  That is NOT free market and that is NOT good for the economy under any conditions.  Larger employers should NOT automatically gain access to reduced systemic costs simply because of their size; because then they get access to talent without earning it by creating net new jobs with higher wages.

I am single.  I have two daughters.  My wife died.  She had a preexisting condition.  No one would cover her.  The last three years of her life were a substantially fear-driven ride straight through Hell.   We played by the rules until we finally ran out of Cobra…paying ridiculous costs WHILE UNEMPLOYED.   I will never work for another large company as long as I live.  They are culturally by and large the most disloyal enterprises I have ever contemplated when viewed over the past 30 years.  I am finished begging for a job with fucking big companies just so I can cover my family.  Done.  Any income from this day forward will be at my own companies.  If it puts ME into the grave.  So be it.  I worry for my family…but this system has proven it will not create a stable employment condition for me.  I’ll work for myself.

So when you insist that tax breaks are needed for job creation…I’ll grant the discussion may be worthwhile with regard to small companies; but if you think any large companies will behave substantially differently than they have on the balance since 1980; then you are stupid.  They have displayed the pattern for 30 years.  Tea Partiers: Stop pandering to corporate America.   Stop demanding tax breaks for companies that don’t increase wages OR jobs over the long-haul and stop propping up the health insurance industry by clinging desperately to a band-aided system that is collapsing.  Stop kissing the asses of the likes of the Koch Brothers, Tea Partiers.  Stop kissing big oil’s ass, health insurance’s ass, stop kissing the corporate ass.  Then we can chat together as friends.  But as long as you continue to behave with all the vision of a myopic Pitt-bull who only foams at the mouth over taxes…We have nothing to talk about.

Kill the link between insurance and large companies before that link kills America.  If you start there, other meaningful solutions will follow.  That link is far more insidious and destructive than a federal deficit.  WWII debt was far far higher than today…and the 50′s wound up being one of our most profitable decades ever.  The insurance/corporation link…is progressively eroding America’s capacity to shift talent to where it is needed most.  There is a hard brake, a very hard resistance, on getting smart people to small companies where they belong, creating jobs.  Get a clue, Tea Party.  It’s not about taxes and it’s not about the deficit.  It’s about the link between corporations and Washington and between corporations and insurance.  And you…you just rock right on sniffing Koch butt.  It’s all you can do to focus on one thing.

So on Meet the Press…David what’s-his-name lets Reince Priebus get away with responding that David Ditter is “old news.”  Mmmm.  “OK,”  David says, “Old News…Good enough for me.  Let’s get back to bashing David Wiener.”

That is total bullshit.  That is the useless press for you.  David Ditter BROKE THE LAW.  He’s a damn criminal and he should resign.  The “American Idol” spectacle that the press has turned Anthony Wiener’s escapade into is pathetic.  His constituents wanted him to stay.  Who gives a shit about constituents?  Gee, “Let’s use the Twitter pictures for the highest ratings we can get for a couple weeks and get back to peddling Washington to corporations.  I think next the Supreme Court should rule that corporations are MORE human than humans.  Now that they ruled in 2010 that corporations should have the same rights as individuals.  Maybe we can find a conservative enough justice on the next round.

Middle Class, bend over and kiss your arse goodbye.  The media and the Republican Party are hell-bent on doing you in.  As long as there are far less expensive middle class workers in India and China…corporations will forcefully continue to siphon off and sell overseas any value generation schemes you can create.  Don’t kid yourself.  Ditter thinks family values are a joke.  He’s totally for sale; and this whole Wiener thing is about gutting the loudest liberal voices in DC whenever and wherever possible.

Each consumer of upstream goods and services must consume, therefore, fossil fuels burned at those previous stages indirectly while simultaneously adding their own consumption metrics onto the top (Even if that only means keeping the lights, phones, and computers on for a service enterprise).

So there must be, then, a “multiplicative effect” to fossil fuel consumption. Consuming oil and coal at one place increases the likelihood that oil and gas was consumed at another place.

Multipliers are often used in economics to communicate reverberative knock-on effects. Think of unemployment insurance as economic stimulus, for example. Unemployed are more likely to spend money because they have to. And so the vast majority of economists with an adequate supply of gray matter consider unemployment insurance a generally productive form of economic stimulus. Economists tell us for each $1 spent on unemployment we get $1.63 in economic benefit. How is this possible? The $1 is spent immediately (because the recipient is unemployed) and then the $1 proceeds to turn through multiple pockets. The recently unemployed fellow buys food from the grocer who buys 1/3 gallon of gas for his mower from the gas jobber who rents a movie from Redbox and so on. A similar theory is applied to the expansion of the money supply based on borrowing. Oil consumption works much the same multiplicative way.

So what would be the real cost reduction if we were suddenly able to shift to renewable energy entirely as an economy. What if fossil fuels were trimmed out of the costs of every economic endeavor? Renewable energy costs are only high at this stage because they have to compete with oil and coal. What if we could flip the switch and move to renewable energy entirely tomorrow? What would that do to economic costs across the board?  Every economic endeavor burns energy.   Compressing energy costs as close as possible to zero, therefore, promises the greatest productivity increases for generations to come.

Just ask John Doer and Bill Gates (re: American Energy Innovation Council):

“Americans spend more on potato chips every year than energy investment”.

- John Doer, Kleiner Perkins

…..Damn It!  Too late….

God, this reminds me of that time in college.  Come to think of it it reminds me of that time my daughter….”

I’m sorry, Sarah; but your tennis-racket-sized spectacles can not solve the type of myopia you’re trying to cope with.  People who are not environmentalists are just stupid.  They are just very very dumb, short-sighted people.  And there is no fix for that.  You, John McCain, and…dare I say?   Sorry Barack, but you screwed up too.

Let us briefly weigh the major legislative concerns and problems of early 2009.   Health care: Needed.  An entitlement?  Maybe.  Let’s hypothesize for a moment that overblown entitlements bankrupt the country, siphon economic impetus, and drive us into another Great Depression.  How long did it take Japan to recover from WWII?  (With a little help from the U.S.)

So the count is still out on the knock-on effects of health care coverage economy-wide; but lets continue the conservative approach and hypothesize that the reform bill causes serious economic damage.  How long will it take to recover from that economic slip?

Now compare: How will that recovery compare with the knock on effects of major environmental mis-steps like the recent gulf hemorrhage?  How long, do you think, it will take major global fisheries to recover if we continue making these….ooops…little petroleum slips?  How long will it take the gulf to recover?  Can the gulf recover?

Non-environmentalists are stupid, stupid, people.  We live in a democracy; and unfortunately, most people vote their pocket books, not their grand-children’s mouths.  I used to be optimistic about human nature; but I am so tired of this shit.  People are selfish and it is a shame.

Their job is this:  They are supposed to pass laws.  That’s it.  That’s all they’re supposed to be doing for the most part.  5 days a week.  They get off weekends.  Occasionally they get to do sound bites about Presidential appointees and hearings.  On a very busy year, legislatively speaking, they’ll probably get off only two weeks like the rest of the planet.  On a slow year they’ll get over 100 days out of session (yup….6 figures for  taking off more than a fourth of the year).  Did I mention their job?  They’re supposed to pass laws.  That means they negotiate until they come to an agreement.  That means they work toward mutual understanding.  Down here in Georgia, though, they all seemed to be spending most of their time hosting tea-tele-townhall-meeting-thons.  That’s where they have automated dialing machines call up constituents right in the middle of dinner to invite them to listen live to an electronic tea-party masquerading as a town-hall meeting.  They wouldn’t dare give up control of the forum.  So they carefully screen all questions.  Ain’t technology grand?  They most definitely were not interested in reaching any sort of mutual understanding.

As for the Democrats?  Two weeks ago Pelosi was saying the House would not compromise on a bill.  One lost Senate seat in Massachusetts…and the entire Democratic caucus is running around in circles like few hundred Chicken Littles.  And Pelosi has now declared health care an Obama failure for the time-being…How convenient.

Did I mention their job?  It’s to pass laws.  We paid them $93 million to figure out how to stop having Americans pay twice on average for health care what British, Japanese, Germans, Taiwanese, and Swiss pay.  Switzerland has great chocolate.  Chocolate is supposed to have great health benefits.  Maybe that’s their secret.  Or maybe they just have a better health care system.

If you’re a Republican and you took a hard line against health care?  Bully for you!  You just helped lock in continued growth of an annual health tab that already stacks up at over 15% of our gross domestic product.  Maybe you think all our economic growth will come from health care?  I don’t know.  Maybe you think keeping your own personal taxes ultra low is going to somehow feed you for the next 10 years.  Whatever you’re thinking you haven’t a clue that Americans are paying more than 15 cents out of every dollar into health care now.  That is not a secure macroeconomic scenario.

If you’re a Democrat waffling on the bills after the Massachusetts Senate loss, you’re a loser.  You’re pathetic.  All you had to do this year was point your finger across the Atlantic Ocean at other major industrialized capitalist economies, but you don’t even know how to Google.  And you sure don’t know how to communicate with your constituents.

My answer?  Vote out every single incumbent now in office.  Vote out the Republicans.  Vote out the Democrats.  Get somebody else in there who can swing a better bat.  I can not believe we just paid $93 million to 535 people for this kind of disarray and confusion.  And keep your checkbook handy; because you will be paying 1 out of every 6 dollars you make to insurance, big pharma, doctors, and medical devices.  Actually, you’re already paying 1 out of every 6.  It’s growing fast.  Very soon you’ll be paying 1 out of every 5.  Congratulations, Tea Baggers.  You win.

In Bernanke’s defense, rapid and drastic action was needed.  But Ben had to become a snake handler to get the job done, and frankly he wasn’t very good at handling snakes.  It was part the job description and he flubbed it miserably.  Geitner, too.  The New York Times recent piece on coming bonuses just reaffirms what we already knew:  Wall Street could care less about rebuilding the economy.  The saying goes that Americans are furious at Wall Street for paying record bonuses while America is hurting.  That’s not really it, though.  It’s that Wall Street  egregiously misdirected financial resources needed to stimulate the economy.  Those monies should not be funneling into bonus checks.  They should be funneling into businesses needing liquidity.  Wall Street found a quick way to legally steal tax money while reinforcing it’s inflated bonus ethos. The moral compass to direct money where needed is non-existent.  Pay attention Congress.  Wall Street has no moral compass.  It never did.

What remains to be seen is whether Congress does its job.  It needs to fire Bernanke for negligence.  Sorry, Ben, times up.  Congress also needs to ratchet up bank regulation to pre-1980 levels.  And, lastly, it needs to publicly censure every Wall Street player who has paid big bonuses…and publicly call for their resignations for the historic record.

In short, Congress needs to become a better snake handler.  Wall Street will always defend its actions as an imperative of free markets with archaic, ritualistic, Smithian prose (as in Adam) masquerading as a moral compass.  But technology and better record keeping have told us that Wall Street does not always foster economic efficiency.  Sometimes, often even, Wall Street drains the economy in order to drive its cut (The house always wins).  It may take decades to fully understand our failures today; but for now somebody needs to muzzle The Street, fast.

Congress, do your job.

Recent bank mergers generally did not improve relative operating performance or produce positive abnormal returns to acquiring bank shareholders. We examine the relationship between mergers and CEO compensation during 1986-1995, a period marked by overcapacity and frequent mergers. We find that mergers have a net positive effect on compensation, mainly via the effect of size on compensation. Compensation generally increases even if mergers cause the acquiring bank’s stock price to decline, as is typical after a merger announcement. The form of compensation affects merger decisions, since CEOs with more stock-based wealth or compensation were less likely to make an acquisition.

Catch that subtle little twist at the end? Bank execs paid in stock are less likely to go after other banks….Hmmmm, isn’t that curious?

Look, the pattern is crystal clear. Big bank c-levels are all about cranking up frothy bonus cultures because that justifies their own bonuses. Simple as that. They’re damn good spin doctors, and they’ve snowed half America into believing their capitalist function will be damaged if pay is limited.

This is getting beyond the “too big to fail” problem. It’s becoming a truth about overly-aggressive financial sector executives chopping up and shifting companies around so they can make a cut. They’ve proven it with their own sector: Performances don’t improve because of bank mergers.

I’ve been through a bank merger, from the inside. It requires a colossal burn of internal resources that lasts for several years. The net effect? If a merger doesn’t improve performance then by default it must, temporarily at least, drain performance…and in so doing makes the American economy less competitive.

What I am hypothesizing here is that our financial sector could very well have reached a stage of aggressiveness that detracts from the competitiveness of our economic engine as a whole. If the Babson/FRB Chicago research is accurate and unbiased at all, then it fully stands to reason that similar metrics might very well extend to the economy as a whole. Why would this happen? To feed the inflated bonus culture of Wall Street. The low-hanging fruit is gone, so Wall Street resorts to churning other sectors to keep their own plates full. It would be well worth additional research: Do businesses in general improve in performance as a result of Wall Street-driven mergers?

MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan did a brilliant piece summarizing the situation.  Posted on Youtube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0XIF84AtYg&feature=player_embedded#

Hearings are going on right now…so the time is ripe to…WRITE YOUR CONGRESS PEOPLE.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=9572877

http://www.kroger.com/company_information/community/Pages/haiti_relief.aspx

There is one airport runway in and out of Haiti.  The only way to meaningfully help for most of us is to give financially; and we need to know that the organization we’re funneling our charity through is reputable.  If Kroger ever picked a worthy cause offer its resources to, this is it.  As I purchased a couple of gallons of milk and some eggs yesterday, I was politely offered the opportunity to round up.  It’s programmed onto all their registers and ready…THANK YOU KROGER!!!