Matt Taibbi’s new piece in Rolling Stone explains how Financial Reform has been gutted

For those who don’t read Rolling Stone on a regular basis, Matt Taibbi is one of the better financial writers of our time.  He has done multiple pieces on the shenanigans that pass for legitimate business on Wall Street and their lackeys we know as politicians.

“It’s early May in Washington, and something very weird is in the air. As Chris Dodd, Harry Reid and the rest of the compulsive dealmakers in the Senate barrel toward the finish line of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act – the massive, year-in-the-making effort to clean up the Wall Street crime swamp – word starts to spread on Capitol Hill that somebody forgot to kill the important reforms in the bill. As of the first week in May, the legislation still contains aggressive measures that could cost once-indomitable behemoths like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase tens of billions of dollars. Somehow, the bill has escaped the usual Senate-whorehouse orgy of mutual back-scratching, fine-print compromises and freeway-wide loopholes that screw any chance of meaningful change.”

continued at Rolling Stone

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You can make your own conclusions after reading the entire article.  I have made mine.  I have no doubt that he gives us an apt description of how D.C. works.  Thus, it seems logical that if the system is unchangeable, then it is collapsing upon itself as we watch.  There is no other way to describe the aggregate of events.

Peak Oil is ending the growth assumption in the system.  If the system won’t adapt, then it will die.

The Facts about Organic Food

So recently I have had many discussions with friends about Organic foods.  This is mostly due to the popularity of documentaries such as Food Inc.

I had heard that Organics was a trumped up label put out by the Fed Gov to keep people from thinking while they shop.  I had also heard that the Organic standards in some countries were not as strict as ours.  So I decided to do a little digging.

I found this site….Organic Consumers Association, which seems to have a wealth of information on why it’s great to eat organic food.  So much info in fact, I will have to return to check out the large quantity of links and studies done on the health of our food.

I ran across this in the sources from Wiki:

“In addition to hops, the list includes 19 food colorings, two starches, sausage and hot-dog casings, fish oil, chipotle chili pepper, gelatin and a variety of obscure ingredients (one, for instance, is a “bulking agent” and sweetener with the tongue-twisting name of fructooligosaccharides).

The proposed rule would allow up to 5 percent of a food product to be made with these ingredients and still get the “USDA Organic” seal. Even hops, though a major component of beer’s flavor, are less than 5 percent of the final product, because the beverage is mostly water.”

from the Seattle Times.  The problem with things like the hops in that article was that it was grown with pesticides and fertilizers.

And a more recent Washington Post article criticizes the program saying:

“Under the original organics law, 5 percent of a USDA-certified organic product can consist of non-organic substances, provided they are approved by the National Organic Standards Board. That list has grown from 77 to 245 substances since it was created in 2002. Companies must appeal to the board every five years to keep a substance on the list, explaining why an organic alternative has not been found. The goal was to shrink the list over time, but only one item has been removed so far.

The original law’s mandate for annual pesticide testing was also never implemented — the agency left that optional.“

There are more and more mentions of Industry giants lobbying to bend the rules and the Government rolling over like a nice lapdog.  This is not encouraging my search for a food source I can trust.  The Wiki page on Organic Certification lists the countries that have laws and standards for Organics.  It says that all other countries get their certification through NGO’s and private companies.  This does not encourage my trust in the label.

At this point I will probably throw up my hands and just go to my local farmer’s market.  At least there I can talk to the person who grew that food.  I can find out if they use fertilizers, pesticides, antibiotics, growth hormones, genetically modified organisms (GMO), or anything else that might give me cancer, adhd, autism, or multiple sclerosis.

It also sounds like a lot more fun to build relationships with my local farmers.  This just happens to be where my family is at.  We certainly weren’t buying a lot of our food from markets even a year ago.  And until recently we were only able to buy during the summer.  Some farms will sell year round, but only if you go to them.  It’s all a process.  Babysteps.  Each one is new at first, like reading labels at the store, but soon becomes second nature.

If you don’t know about Peak Oil, then you might want to educate yourself…

Jeffrey Brown explains that Saudi Arabia has peaked, and will have slowly declining output from now on.

Which leads me to question whether that is true or not.  Then I stumble upon this article about the Saudi’s taking a serious look at Nuclear Reactors to power their capital, Riyadh.

Now, why would they be looking at Nuclear energy unless they are no longer able to increase production on a whim.  They probably want to be able to continue to sell their one major export to other countries.  This would indicate also that their domestic energy demand is rising.

We find more on that topic from none other than the Chief Executive Officer of Saudi Aramco, Khalid al-Falih.

“Saudi Arabia’s long-standing status as a swing producer of crude oil could be drawing to a close according to the head of national oil company Saudi Aramco.

Global oil exports from Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer alongside Russia, will start to wane in the coming years as domestic demand surges and spare capacity drops…“

It seems the evidence for Saudi’s Peak is stacking up fast.

This is not good news folks.  If this is true, then we have passed World Peak for Oil production.  This would also explain alot about the crunch happening in the Global Economy.  This would also mean that there is not going to be any kind of substantial recovery.  We are in store for a slow slide down the available energy curve.  Less and less energy available per capita.  Trillions of dollars lost in the stock market.  In short…..the Greatest Depression.

This is the Oil Age, Historical/Future Oil Consumption, with some perspective to human history:

This is the Population curve, which will eventually match the Oil = Available Food curve above:

If you have questions or would like to know more you should start with the LATOC link in my blogroll.

Peak Oil: The End

This is a great transcript from an interview with Matt Simmons about Peak Oil, a topic not covered very often in the MSM.  If you want to understand the root of the Financial Crisis and why it is not going away, then start researching this topic.

http://jutiagroup.com/2010/05/14/peak-oil-the-end/

“Welcome back to Turning Hard Times into Good Times. I am your host, Jay Taylor, and I am very pleased to have with me Matthew Simmons. He is the founder and now chairman emeritus of Simmons & Company International. Mr. Simmons is a prominent oil industry insider and one of the world’s leading experts on the topic of peak oil.

Mr. Simmons was motivated by the 1973 energy crisis to create an investment banking firm catering to oil companies, and in his capacity, he served as energy adviser to U.S. President George W. Bush. Matthew Simmons is a member of the National Petroleum Council and the Council on Foreign Relations.

He believes careful assessment of Saudi Arabian oil reserves to be the most significant issue, shaping petroleum politics, and he is the author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.

His examination of oil reserves’ decline rates really was very, very significant in his work and so we are going to ask him more about that. Welcome, Mr. Simmons, to Turning Hard Times into Good Times.”

GOM Oil Leak Larger than Previous Estimates…..and E.T.’s

We now have the WallStreet Journal question about a 25,000 Barrel per day leak not being denied:

Here and first printed Here

And now some scientists are saying leak is between 56,000 and 84,000 Barrels per day:

NPR and CNN

This would mean that it dwarfed the Exxon spill a week or two ago.  More evidence that the Gov. Corp. is lying to us.

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On a completely different subject:

Retiring State Congressman Henry McElroy Jr. makes a suprising admission

This is a must watch video, even if you think this stuff is tin.

Big Banks Can’t Lose

You know what they say about the House in Vegas.  The House never loses.  Well, the four largest banks in America just pulled off that trick here in the 1st Quarter of 2010.  They went a full 61 days without a loss.  Not even one day.  Zip.  Nada.

That’s like going to the race track and winning every day.

“Their remarkable 61-day streak is one for the record books. Perfect trading quarters on Wall Street are about as rare as perfect games in Major League Baseball. On Sunday, Dallas Braden of the Oakland Athletics pitched what was only the 19th perfect game in baseball history.” reports the New York Times.

If you have any money left in the Rigged Casino called Wallstreet,  you might consider getting it out.

This is not financial advise.  I am not a financial advisor.  But did you see how fast they can make the market fall on May 6th?  Some of the brightest economic minds have been telling us the game is rigged and that the actual financial situation is insolvency for quite a few years now.  People like Peter Schiff, Ron Paul, Jim Sinclair, Jim Rogers, and Marc Faber.

The only way to stop banks from looting your money is to Use Cash in as many transactions as possible.

Ron Paul says we are Broke!

He is on with Jack Cafferty.  We are broke and will be unable to pay back the huge debts we have:

Honesty is rare on TV these days.

“The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.”

                                                                              -John Locke

The Invisible Bread Lines of the Greatest Depression

Here’s the hard numbers:

http://www.frac.org/data/FSPparticipation/2009_10.pdf#page=2

We are up to 37.9 Million on Food Stamps now.  For some states this is a year over year change of about 50%.  The only state that reduced rolls is Texas. 

As this depression becomes more engrained, the question becomes how long can this trend continue before the system collapses under it’s own weight.

Yes, I am referencing this guy….

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke

He wrote some pretty profound ideas down that have all but been forgotten.

“All mankind… being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.”

“Government has no other end, but the preservation of property.”

“I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”

“It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.”

“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without anyother reason but because they are not already common.”

I would like to invoke the spirit of his ideas, that they might spread like wildfire on the tongues of men and women again.