Energy - and Economy - Politics May 2008
The topic on everyone mind is the seemingly ever increasing price of oil and the raising cost of food.
So much so, that every news report seems to start out with a chart of the cost of gallon of gas and the ticker of the price of oil per barrel, followed by what airlines are doing to deal with this issue, and what car manufacturers are being forced to change their "focus" to.
I am beginning to wonder if this is yet another example of the government using the media to push the public into an hysteria which will be solved by yet another government solution.
The sort of fear and uneasiness we are all feeling is surly going to get everyone to think in terms that our government with it power should be able work out a solution to this trouble and get our economy and energy issues taking care of. There is already talk about Government to take back control of the airlines, back to the levels before deregulation.
A slippery slope that would be but I am reminded of a truth which I read a few years ago, by Dr Ravi Batra. That is people tend to not make the same mistakes their fathers did,but they do tend to make the same mistakes their grandparents did. It was in the era of our grand parents which started all the large social reforms which attempted to bring control to an seemingly uncontrolled economy. All of the new deal reforms and putting regulation into airlines, the starting of Social Security. Not just in this country but in the UK and many other parts of the world big social programs were all the rage... The biggest of which was the USSR, but to other degrees just about everywhere in the world people wanted controls and accepted big government as their Saviour from market economy's
Obsiously starting in the 1970's & 1980's that all started to change, with Poland, Czech Republic Margret Thacher Ronald Regan, The Berlin wall and so on.
If you recall the tiger economy's as they were called. Japan, Korea Thailand all had huge economic booms pushed along by foreign investment and then shortly thereafter crashes. The crashes were followed out by bailout and world bank controls put on their banks to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
Bailout came from mainly US Dollars
Now what. Our economy did the same thing. Under Greenspan credit was loosened to spur growth, and greed took over. Mortgage company's / Banks and anyone who wanted in the game all borrowed WAY too much .. putting lots of Cash on the street. The prices of houses rose and as long the prices went up, the banks, mortgage companies and the investors couldn't loose
This is the sort of bubble growth we all saw happen in with southeast asia 15 years ago, but no one put two and two together and thought it was possible that we needed to reign in our unchecked rapid increase in wealth. (maybe we needed to fund the war or something ??)
Back to my point
Are we experiencing a made up crisis ? Where the only hope is more government controls which will stabilize prices at the expense our more personal and business freedoms ? It has been proven though the years that big government programs which try to set prices and controls all fail and overall bring higher prices due to lack of innovation and competition.
Ill close with a few interesting points.. We know that people need transportation. Even if we work at home, we do need go shopping, or to the beach. Our government pushed along a public funded program to buy 30,00 ethanol-capable trucks This has caused their gasoline consumption to rise by more than 1.5 million gallons. A Postal Service study found that
the new vehicles get as much as 29% fewer miles to the gallon. Are large public funded solutions the answer, or does the answer lie in free market solutions like the 300 MGP Car like the
Aptera or the
230 MPG VW While we appear to be held captive to those countries who have oil and the prices which get set for the product by the greed of wallstreet speculators ...I think the answer is in changing the question, by keeping an open mind rather than moving backwards to the mistakes of our forefathers and asking for tighter controls.
Encourage innovations like IBM come up with
solutions which tap into solar power 23,00 times more effectively than ever before, all using existing well known technology.
Ill end with this
We have all heard about Hillary and McCain being flip floppers Following up on a comment I heard about Obama pushing for Capital Gains tax's to be pusehd back to the % 28 level. Obama had
this to say.
I guess they are all polished politicians who know how to clearly warp their words into saying something which is impossible to hold them to.
Bob Lee
McCain Green ? Dollar, Euro and Gas Prices / Are they Connected ?
This week John McCain stressed his
green initiative when he was visiting the pacific northwest trying to get some play with voters who are undecided. I love the comment
"
Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring"
It would be so easy tear this comment apart, word by word.. but Ill let that my readers.
I don't mean to pick on McCain any more than Obama or Clinton. The both support the BioFuel mess we find ourselves in..
Interesting news out of Saudi Arabia
Bush flew to Saudi Arabia to personally negotiate a deal whereby we give nuclear technology to the saudia's in exchange for increased oli production, and by proxy bring down the ever increasing gas prices we are all seeing
This
article was published before the visit Then after the visit.. we all know Bush was not able to get any more production out of the Saudi;s and
article after
article don't mention the nuclear issues, only that bush was not able to get more oil produced. On the surface it appears as Bush suffered a very public loss to to all powerful Saudia's but what was said, was that price of oil is more complex than just pushing out more production.
This got me to thinking. A few years ago I read that the real non stated reason we invaded Iraq was that Saddam was threating to change the currency of oil to the Euro.. and Bush didnt want that to happen. We had to keep the major currency of the world to be the US Dollar and if one Rouge state was able to change the currency of their oil to be the euro others would follow and soon the US dollar would no longer be dominant currency and our banks and the fed would end up loosing power.
I didn't pay too much attention to that warning but in light of recent developments with the fall of value of the us dollar and increase in price of oil... I want you to look at a chart my brother and I created today.
The chart is for the past year.. with the price of oil per barrel and the value of the Euro vs the dollar.
It appears to my uneducated eye that there is some sort of relationship. I wish I new the price of gas in Germany or France.. I wonder if they have been experiencing anything like we have in the past year with the price of petrol going through the roof. ?
I know in Venezuela their pump prices have not gone up..They still pay $ 0.15 per gallon
Refineries seem to be at capacity in the US. I wonder, if what we are seeing now.. is not so much of price increase but a currency adjustment aftershock based on our own subprime meltdown ? It has been widely reported that the EU banks give better interest than US banks which is causing many large international investors to move their money from the US to Europe.
Did bush really get rebuffed (buzz word of the day) or did he really just negotiate with the wrong parties. ?
Should he really be working with our own FED and bankers in the EU to devise a way to strengthen the good old dollar. I wonder if that might make the difference at the pump that we all need ?
Torrent pick of the night is
Peep Show Season 5 episode 2. Funnier than the IT Crowd.
Comments always welcome.
Bob Lee
Bio Fuel, Global Warming, High Prices on Gas and Food.
Everyone today is talking about the price of GAS and the increase price of Food.
Its not surprising to anyone that the price increase of either. Gas due to OPEC not increasing the number of barrels in order to keep the price high. This was in response to Bush's stated and very public move to get people off their dependence of imported OIL.
Bush about 2 years ago abruptly changed his stance on Oil and started pushing towards using Bio Fuel. He traveled the country in a very public push to get people to think Bio Fuel, especially corn or soy based ethanol. In order to push this ..finger in the face of the Arabs he subsidized corn based bio fuel to make is cheep for the US to export it Europe! Now the EU producers cant really compete with the price they get from US Corn Based Ethanol.
So what did this very political move do.
- Got OPEC to stick to their guns and not produce, drill more barrels a day (which they could and bring the price down)
- Now many farmers in the US are growing Corn and Soy for Bio Fuel. They make higher profits.
- With the not shortage of Corn and Soy and the squeeze of crude oil.. now both food and Gas are rising, and rising fast.
What did having Bio Fuel do for you or I ? Nothing... We dont have cars which really run on them. We prevent Brazil from importing their bio fuel into our market..
The actual coast of creating bio fuel is not a cost savings, and does not help the enviroment. Actually it takes more enegery to create a gallon of bio fuel than 1 gallon of enegey it creates.
Ever feel like a pawn in Bushs badly played chess game ?
Onto Global Warming.. now called Climate change (Thanks to some very smart PR Firms)
The theory is pretty simple and we can all pretty much repeat it without thinking by now. Everybody knows.. That humans use carbon based fuel, which leaves in our atmosphere the deadly gas CO2 .. The more CO2 in our atmosphere the earth begins to develop a greeenhouse effect and keep all our plants warmth stuck, and thus there is going to be in the very near future melting of glaciers, rising sea levels ... change in the gulf stream flows and so on.. Everyon has seen the video an inconvenient truth.
But in the past few years there has been a groundswell of scientists who not only question the finding of Al Gore Inc. The body of evidence is just not there to support the Global Warming Myth..
I urge you to view this video.
http://www.discovery.org/v/30While it was not produced by hollywood and has none of the flash that Al Gore had.. its basis is in facts.. Facts which dispute the theory in a very convincing way.
The document and sources can be downloaded here.
http://www.oism.org/pproject/
This peer reviewed document now has 19,000 Scientists who agree with the premise and have signed the document in protest of the public push of this misinformation.
Why would anyone want to push misinformation about the climate is pretty simple.. If GAS were thought of as bad for the planet.. and killing us all. no major country would fund third world countries use of Coal to burn it... They say things like alternate source of energy is what is needed.. like.. Ethanol (ya right) or Wind.. or geo thermal.. but what comes into the mind.. is Nuclear .. yes Nukes somehow sound not nearly as bad as burning coal which kills the planet !!
Nukes are clean.. if we can only find someplace to get ride of the waste.
I hope my readers don't expect me to find a solution to these political / economic issues, I just honestly hope that you don't ever accept what is being pushed on you by our media or government. Their motives and goals are often times at odds to yours and mine. We the people really don't have news media which does their job. All too often our news media just read press releases given to them by corp or governments and our news media, because who funds them really can't question what they are saying. We have in our own population become happy ignorant slobs, but feel that our free speech rights are being upheld, and by reading or watching the nightly news we are being informed. While in truth we are being force fed mis-information disguised as news. Another blog, another day will give clear examples of that process, and until that day I remain.
Bob Lee..
Comments always welcome
Vocabulary lesson / words you should know MYKA & WOOT
MYKAis a Recently announced new product called Myka. While the product wont be out until summer, it appears to be just what us torrent addicted television watchers need.
Its a TV Receiver in a box, but its not. Its BitTorrent in a box compete with hard disk, USB, a nic card and wifi, for input and it pumps out in HDMI /composite RCA and digital sound.
For me I have media player which does the video processing, but I still need a laptop or server to download the media. With this little all in one unit... Thats all you need It has a bit torrent client built in.
For under 500 bucks for a 500 gig drive, media player, and installed Torrent/linux machine. What better way to blow your tax refund or economic stimulus check than a device will enable you to cancel your NetFlix and Cable Accounts. !!! Forever.
Google it I can tell you that if this thing was for sale back in 2004, I would have got it, not the IO Data and media server.
Woot What is woot. Its daily listing of something for sale at usually ridiculous prices .I have seen a 2 gig sd card for 5 bucks, Today they have 14 speed blender for 19.00 , yesterday was mini remote control helicopter for 10 bucks.
Check for your woot every day.. Never know, you might find something you just too good to pass up.
Bob
