Despite the hu-hum reaction of corporate media, on Saturday, Nov 7, Congressional Democrats scored a victory for principle of Government "FOR THE PEOPLE" and against the Corporate Lobbyists Party assignation with the Powerful to maintain "Government for the corporations" (Corporate Fuedalism, also known as the Fascist form of government).

It was a significant battle Saturday. Arrayed against us were the menacing minions of the for-profit Health Insurance industry. Brandishing all their weapons of demogoguery: propaganda, distortions of reality, fearful fantasies, and outrageous lies. Surely Josef Goebbel's spirit moved among the lobbyists of the legislative body. With menacing maws frothing malevolent attacks on the Democrats' efforts to fix a broken health care system, the fearful onslaught had begun. The Corporate Lobbyist Party was again on the move, intent on protecting the prerogatives of profit and power. But the Democrats held forth armed only with the facts .... and an enduring faith that government should serve the people and not corporations. The fact that most of the people want Health Care Reform was of no importance to the Health Insurance industry's mercenary army. They were bent upon strangling this hated movement of reasonable health care access for all, merely because it threatened insurance companies' profit horde.

The outcome of this battle was very much in doubt. Corporate media talking heads were all nodding in agreement and had declared, as one, the Democrat's Health Care reform plans were dead. The weapons of disinformation and hysteria are powerful and certainly the American Taliban of the Corporate Lobbyist party are consummate practitioners of punk politics, propaganda and The Big Lie. They are always ready to menace the system with destruction (i.e. paralysis) if they don't get their way. But in the end, after the dust had settled and the smoke had cleared, the vote was taken and against all odds government FOR THE PEOPLE had prevailed.

..... But this victory took a heavy toll. The principle of separation of church and state had to be sacrificed to win this battle. And while the right of citizens to access to adequate, affordable health care was affirmed, the right of women to make their own health decisions became a casualty of this war. Some would say it was too heavy a price to pay. Most would agree it was certainly a costly compromise, a heavy ransom to pay.

And now the battle is to be joined in the Senate, where the American Taliban say with confidence, they will KILL Health Care reform for good. This is no idle threat. The American Taliban are fully experienced in killing progress, at subverting good, sensible causes. Again the outcome is in doubt. The Democrats won a great victory for the American people, but now they have to do it all over again. This war is far from won. Being on the side of what's right (and even what's practical) means nothing to the American Taliban(the Becks, the Limgaughs, the Bachmans and the Boehners). Ignorance is their friend and ally. Their ultimate weapon is the threat of anarchy and chaos. The 'Party of NO', knows how to turn a community into a mob, a nation into an internecine battlefield.

Tomorrow the battle begins anew.

65,000 iles of interstae highways

With a grass width of 52 feet, and 5,280 feet to the mile, we find that we have about 6.35 acres of tillable land for each mile of interstate.

65,000 miles times 6.35 acres gives you 4.1 million acres. At the second link (above) they talk about planting swichgrass for making ethanol (not yet commercially feasible) but you could plant a fast growing variety of tree there and harvest it (and replant of course) and they could be used in ethanol production or other industrial applications which are starting to use bio-mass as a fuel source.

An acre of Tulip trees (Liriodendron tulipifera) planted in New York, stores about 12,826 lbs (or 5,830 kiloGrams) of CO2 per yr so the 4.1 million acres would store 567 Billion lbs of CO2 per year (or 283 million tons).

According to the Environmental Defense Fund transortation emissions of CO2 comes to 302 million metric tons of CO2 per year, which I believe translates into 332 million English/American (2,000) tons.

NOte 283 million tons of CO2 stored each year by the tree plantings along inter-states as caculated above comes to about 85% of the total transportation emissions per year. And that works out to about 4% of the World's total carbon emissions.

Hm-m-m-m-m. IF my calculations are right this sounds promising.

Why? Because they still regulated the banks ... the regulators, unlike during Bush regime actually regulated their banks.

Clinton was for modernizing banking in U.S. as everyone at that time was worried about competition to Wall Street coming from big banks in Japan and rapidly proceeding modernization (particularly in terms of electronic trading) of the London financial markets. Many people, in and out of government in the 90's were concerned about Wall Street losing it's competitive advantage to these competitors. Clinton was for allowing INvestment banks and Commercial banks to combine but he expected that they would be regulated. He was naive in this beleif. But we now know, while intellectually very bright, Clinton was particulaly clueless when it came to what can be called 'Street smarts'.

Also, and this is a biggie, the banks in Canada were sensible enought to NOT GET INVOLVED WITH DERIVATIVES. The attitude of Canadian banks managers was, if they didn't understand them (Derivatives) they weren't going to risk money on them.

What U.S. could learn from Canada's banks (ranked the safest in the world) - REGULATE.


That notwithstanding, we should still put back in place the wall separating Commercial banks from investtment banking. We cannot be sure Republicans will get into power again to impair or stop regulators (by putting anti-regulation True-believers in control of regulating agencies) from doing their jobs.

Commercial banking should be done by sober individuals with a long term view and an in interest in banking - not gambling to make a quick buck. Keep those idiots out of the major economic function of providing cash to people and businesses with practical, productive economic objectives in mind when they are borrowing money. Bankers should be averse to risk, not seeking to make a 'killing' by taking on huge risks and pyramiding that risk by using excessive leverage on a throw of the dice. Anybody seduced by get rich quick schemes or by using massive leverage is NOT A BANKER. He's a confidence man. (basically different only in degree from Bernie Madoff).

ON Friday Oct 30, ABC News (ABC is owned by Disney) did it's part as part of the Rights Echo-chamber in misrepresenting the effectiveness and cost of President Obama's stimulus package.

They were reporting on the news out Friday that the economy had actually GROWN 3.5% in the third quarter. This actually is news worth celebrating. This was a greater rate of growth in GDP than most economists had expected, given the magnitude of the Economic Destruction wrought by the Republican DEREGULATION DISASTER which brought the World's economy to the brink of the Second Great Depression. But ABC, like the rest of the Right's Media Echo chamber had to find some way to present this very positive news in as negative a light as possible, even if they had to create a fallacious statistic to it.


ABC's Jake Tapper turned this report into a down-beat message focusing on how the number of job created was not that great (echoing the sentiment of John Boehner, of 'the Party of NO' (who also said: "but where's the jobs?"). But Mssrs Boehner and Tapper express disdain at the stimulus results EVEN THOUGH EVERY ECONOMIC SCHOOL OF THOUGHT ASSERTS AND EVERY ECONOMIST IN THE KNOWN WORLD HAS SAID THAT WHEN RECOVERING FROM A RECESSION JOB GROWTH ALWAYS FOLLOWS AN UPTURN IN ECONOMIC GROWTH (GROWTH IN GDP) BY SEVERAL MONTHS. So ABCs SUGGESTION that the stimulus is a disappointment and not working is patent GOP PROPAGANDA.

Tapper focused on the jobs number and said that the cost per job created was $160,000 per job based on dividing the 1,000,000 direct and indirect jobs (that the administration said were created) by $160 billion "allocated for stimulus jobs as of the end of September". But 'Allocated' is a long way from committed to projects by states - and ABC knows that. Looking at the Recovery.com website: (http://www.recovery.com/home.aspx ) which was set up by the Obama administration so citizens could track dollars spent under the Recovery program you can see that the estimated total value (at completion) of projects under way is $116 Billion.

But if you click on the "for Taspayers" tab and then click on "Graphs: Spending by Program for Each State" you can look at money actually spent on jobs by state and then click on "Graphs: Estimated Jobs Created by State" to see jobs created in each state - estimated by the states (not the Obama administration).

I looked at seven states and put the results in the spreadsheeet at the link below. I used the seven states as basis for an estimate of actual costs in stimulus money for each job created (including indirect jobs) and calculated it on an annual basis. The jobs figures are based on hours expected to be worked in a quarter (because these projects are all of varying lengths) to obtain equivalent full time jobs for a quarter. I multipied these quarterly numbers by 4 to arrive at a cost for a full year of full time work. This results in the cost to create a full time job for a full year to be about $80,000 which is half ABCs number. (note that the actual job may not cost that much because the project may not last a full year. But to evaluate the cost for a years worth of work it was necessary to convert the cost for a quarterly full time job to an annual full-time job).

Note that this figure also includes money spent on raw materials and amortized cost of equipment used for construction jobs, so it's not ALL for labor. The actual figure for labor may be something like $50,000 per job. That's a very reasonable figure. But at any rate, even my number of $80,000 (without adjusting for raw materials and equipment costs) is HALF the ABC news number.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ag...


IF you are going to come up with a statistic ABC, you should try to come up with a legitimate number. But then, if your in the business of disinformation ,who wants a legitimate number, RIGHT?

Jake Tapper finished his bit of bull-shit by saying the stimulus was supposed to create jobs "but at $160,000 a job...at what cost?". Well, your number was double what it really is, but even so, ABC, what would have been the cost of doing nothing? What cost would a Great Depression II be? How do you cost out 20% unemployment?

Actually, I would say the stimulus did MORE than what these numbers show. Without the stimulus, businesses would have 'tightened-up' even more than they have and laid off even more people and we would have been in much worse shape than just an additional million jobs lost. I'll bet it would have been much worse. Actually, The White HOuse is being quite conservative in just counting the jobs the states can point to as paid for by the stimulus package (plus the indirect jobs created). Things would have been far worse without the stimulus bill.

http://www.foodandfuelamerica.com/#st=e%3D...

WHAT'S THIS?.....HERESY IN THE HALLS OF CONGRESS!


A new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that supermarket prices for food have climbed by 128 percent since 1982 – four times the increase in crop prices for farmers.


The new GAO report found that since 1982, farmers have generally received higher monthly prices for their commodities, but these prices have increased less than food prices and inflation in the broader economy.


So exactly how does ethanol lead to higher food prices?


It doesn't.HERESY! VILLAGERS, MAN YOUR TORCHES.


As we've long said here, consumer food prices are largely driven by costs after the farm costs---labor, energy, transportations, marketing AND profits.


And a Senate committee found earlier this summer that recent higher commodity costs were driven by speculators. Again, not by ethanol policy or farmers.

http://www.foodandfuelamerica.com/#st=e%3D...

A new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that supermarket prices for food have climbed by 128 percent since 1982 – four times the increase in crop prices for farmers.


The new GAO report found that since 1982, farmers have generally received higher monthly prices for their commodities, but these prices have increased less than food prices and inflation in the broader economy.


So exactly how does ethanol lead to higher food prices?


It doesn't.


As we've long said here, consumer food prices are largely driven by costs after the farm costs---labor, energy, transportations, marketing AND profits.


And a Senate committee found earlier this summer that recent higher commodity costs were driven by speculators. Again, not by ethanol policy or farmers.