Ruminations - 31may12

George Rebane

As a continuous lament on these pages, the country’s lack of technical talent is now reaching new lows.  We hear that “On college campuses these days, the top nerds are getting a taste of what it's like to be star jocks.  Companies big and small are going on school campuses to hire undergraduate tech majors, offering outstanding compensation packages and stock (more here).  Meanwhile tens of thousands of PhDs holding degrees in latino studies and women’s public policy are on the dole, with more arriving daily.  All of this is lost on the country’s liberal contingent.

Sex selective abortions are giving those feminists who understand things a bit of a problem.  There’s a bill in the House that would prohibit such abortions done for the sole purpose of getting a kid with specified outside plumbing.  It turns out that minority women are in the overwhelming majority who request such government sponsored genocide services.  Since such killings are the most basic form of gender bias, what’s a dyed-in-wool leftwing feminist to do?  Opposing the bill would be blatant hypocrisy, yet supporting it would deny the federal dole to clinics that do this kind of thing.  And it didn’t help that someone made a video of a woman having a very understanding interview with a worker in one of those abortion clinics.

The descendants of Lenin’s “useful idiots” are still parroting the denial of government worker pensions as the main cause of fiscal failures of local jurisdictions in America.  Now we hear that Mayor Rahm Emanuel has finally seen the brick wall after having gone splat against it in Chicago.  As the WSJ reports, in Illinois “Many teachers don't pay a penny toward pensions but can retire at age 60 with an annuity equal to 65% of their final salary plus a 3% annual compounded cost-of-living increase. The state's pension bill, which has quadrupled in five years, consumes all $7 billion of additional revenue from last year's income and corporate tax hikes. Even so, the pension funds are projected to go bust in a decade.”  So now that he has executive responsibility, the former Obama chief of staff is singing a different song titled “Illinois pensions are breaking my city.”

Meanwhile, panning more to the left we see that the Sierra Club has picked a new target with which to hamstring the country – banning natural gas for power generation.  Now natural gas is beyond plentiful on the North American continent, and many times cleaner than coal.  But converting coal fired power generators to gas and building new ones will not help to bring the country to its knees fast enough to suit these Agenda21 types.

Their new “battle plan is called "Beyond Natural Gas," and Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune announced the goal in an interview with the National Journal this month: "We're going to be preventing new gas plants from being built wherever we can." The big green lobbying machine has rolled out a new website that says "The natural gas industry is dirty, dangerous and running amok" and that "The closer we look at natural gas, the dirtier it appears; and the less of it we burn, the better off we will be." So the goal is to shut the industry down, not merely to impose higher safety standards.”

This is a serious threat because the deep-pocketed Sierra Club is funded by legions of good hearted, light thinkers.  Through their lobbyists and lawyers they can do to natural gas what they have done to nuclear power.  It is a terrible thing to mix government and religion.

Finally, those readers who discounted RR predictions of Geece’s default on sovereign debt, may next ignore what the markets are saying about Spain.  The markets – both equity and bonds – are roiling about the potential effects of the on-again-off-again eurozone domino effect.  Spain’s 10-year bonds hit north of 6.41%, while the relatively risk-free German equivalents are paying 1.36%.  (That’s less than the 10-year US Treasuries paying 1.74%; what does that tell you?)  Putting the Spanish and German numbers into our little probability of default formula, we calculate that the markets believe that a Spanish default within the year is 99.4% probable.  Stand by for ram.

Comments

[Russ Steele]

I wonder if the Beyond Natural Gas campaign is an attempt of the Sierra Club to recover their reputation after this:

Now the biggest and oldest environmental group in the U.S. finds itself caught on the horns of that dilemma. TIME has learned that between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry, mostly from Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy—one of the biggest gas drilling companies in the U.S. and a firm heavily involved in fracking—to help fund the Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.

However, I think that green energy companies with billions invested in wind and solar are trying to kill very cheap natural gas which is growing cheaper by the day, as more shale gas is discovered and extracted. My guess these green energy investors are funding this current Sierra Club effort to destroy the reputation of natural gas. They have demonstrated they can take money under the table to destroy the coal industry, why not to destroy the natural gas industry.

[Russ Steele]

The Commerce Department released its second estimate of economic growth in the first quarter, and as expected, the number got revised downward. The advance report a month ago showed Q1′s annualized growth number at 2.2%, down from 2011Q4′s 3.0%, a significant drop, but the second estimate pegs Q1 growth even lower at 1.9%:

[George Rebane]

And job creation continues at an anemic 120K a month when 250K is required to keep (un)employment steady. Obama's only hope for reducing the unemployment rate is to make the economy so dissuasive that people quit looking for work in droves. I believe that is their Plan A.

[David King]

Russ said:

"My guess these green energy investors are funding this current Sierra Club effort to destroy the reputation of natural gas. They have demonstrated they can take money under the table to destroy the coal industry, why not to destroy the natural gas industry."

Yep, hydro too! Condit dam was to be replaced by a gas fired power plant...stay tuned!

[Douglas Keachie]

Damn, I didn't even know the Geece had any form of government, beyond flying in formation....

[Ryan Mount]

Hi Spain, I'd like you to meet Greece. Portugal, you might want to start drinking with Spain. Them Spanish sure know how to party. And while you're at it, Italy wants to join in. And there are rumors of Ireland wanting another round. Damn Irish.

And now that we're all so interconnected, for example we're all fans of Baywatch, how long before this fiscal bird flu reaches our shores? Or as a rhetorical question, is it already here?

[Russ Steele]

Gas rebranded as green energy by EU

Energy from gas power stations has been rebranded as a green, low-carbon source of power by a €80bn European Union programme, in a triumph of the deep-pocketed fossil fuel industry lobby over renewable forms of power.

In a secret document seen by the Guardian, a large slice of billions of euros of funds that are supposed to be devoted to research and development into renewables such as solar and wave power are likely to be diverted instead to subsidising the development of the well-established fossil fuel.

The news comes as a report from the respected International Energy Agency predicted a "golden age for gas" with global production of "unconventional" sources of gas (notably shale gas extracted by hydraulic fracturing or 'fracking') tripling by 2035.

The resulting drop in gas prices though risks stopping the development of renewable energy in its tracks, unless governments take action to support renewable technologies such as solar and wave power. "Renewable energy may be the victim of cheap gas prices if governments do not stick to their renewable support schemes," said the IEA's chief economist, Fatih Birol.

The insertion of gas energy as a low-carbon energy into an EU programme follows more 18 months of intensive lobbying by the European gas industry, which is attempting to rebrand itself as a green alternative to nuclear and coal, and as lower cost than renewable forms of power such as wind and sun. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/29/gas-rebranded-green-energy-eu?newsfeed=true

I think the Sierra Club is on the losing end of this stick.

[billy T]

Appears they are leap frogging over Greece and Portugal and drawing a imaginary line in the sand at Spain....no, its Italy which is too big to bail. No, its France. Feel sorry for some of those Eastern Bloc countries like Romania that have Greece as a major trading partner. Who cares if Spanish bonds fetch you 6.6%? The default insurance on Spain's Sovereign Debt is 5% if you can find someone stupid enough to insure the bonds. The big boys are beginning to shrug away from offering any default insurance. Burn me once... Remember when Iceland was the first to show signs of going down. Well, Iceland did the austerity thing, felt the pain, and now has come out on the other side. Shake the trees and get the rotten fruit on the ground. Every human that has ever loved the soil knows you got to prune back the dead weight so new growth will emerge. In other news, this is what happens when you give people a choice: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05/31/wisconsin-unions-see-ranks-drop-ahead-recall-vote/?test=latestnews

[Russ Steele]

It’s not just the US, which is a point that Barack Obama will likely seize in the same manner a drowning man clings (bitterly?) to a life preserver in a storm-tossed ocean. The EuroZone hit a 17-year high unemployment rate this spring at 11%, and the rate in the larger European Union rose to 10.3%

[George Rebane]

With today's double whammy news on the economy, we should all keep in mind a 'magic number', which is that our educational system annually disgorges 4.3M young people. The overwhelming number of these will/should be looking for work as they start their lives. That is where the government and economists come up with their 250K jobs per month generation requirement for the economy, and that is just to keep pace with the workforce growth. Specifically, growing at 250K jobs/month does NOTHING to reemploy the current 20-48M workers un(der)employed.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303552104577440023931752902.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories

[Russ Steele]

DETROIT (Reuters) - General Motors Co will cut nearly a quarter of its U.S. pension obligation by transferring the management of its pension plans for 118,000 white-collar retirees to a third party and offering lump-sum buyouts.
The two moves unveiled on Friday will cut $26 billion from the automaker's massive U.S. pension liability of nearly $109 billion. GM's pension overhang is a top concern for investors. It was one of a handful of issues left untouched during GM's U.S.-financed bankruptcy restructuring three years ago.

[George Rebane]

RussS 531pm - Good tie in to my tomorrow's post on the big news about GMC that somehow again missed the lamestream because of the ineptness of the Obama administration.

[Michael Anderson]

Looking forward to your GMC post tomorrow George, should be a doozy. I'll be bringing up Doug LaMalfa and my own critique of farm subsidies in general, which you might find me to actually be to the right of your beliefs.

I'm also not an Aanestad fan, and this year we have this no-party voting experiment. I do like how it is making the Democrats and the Republicans equally upset.

[George Rebane]

I always look forward to your comments Michael.

[billy T]

Some folks look at things different than Obama does: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-02/merkel-rejects-debt-sharing-as-obama-urges-end-to-crisis-cloud.html