Journal: The Looming Rare Earths Train Wreck

02 China, 03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government, Intelligence (government), Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Chuck Spinney Recommends...

Does a Green Speed Bump Block the Road to Energy Independence?????? In this remarkable and remarkably unwelcome opinion piece, my good friend Robert Bryce, author of Power Hungry, explains why the subsidization of green technologies that are dependent on rare earth elements should not be justified as pathway toward energy independence, and in fact, could actually make the US more dependent on foreign energy related imports.

Chuck Spinney

October 29, 2010

The Looming Rare Earths Train Wreck

By Robert Bryce

Real Clear Science

During her trip to China this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will talk to Chinese officials about the world’s hottest commodities: rare earth elements.

Over the past few months, industry and government officials in the U.S. and Japan have been increasingly alarmed as China, which has a near-monopoly on rare earths, has reduced its exports of those elements by some 40 percent.  Adding yet more anxiety to the situation are projections about a possible shortfall in the supply of these elements. London-based Roskill Consulting Group, a research firm that specializes in metals and minerals, recently predicted that demand for rare earths could outstrip supply as soon as 2014.  Rare earths are important because they have special features at the quantum mechanics level that allow them to have unique magnetic interactions with other elements. A myriad of “green” technologies —  from electric and hybrid-electric cars to wind turbines and compact fluorescent light bulbs – depend on rare earths. And there are no cost-effective substitutes for them.

Clinton’s willingness to question China about rare earths is indicative of just how seriously the U.S. is taking the rare earths issue. But it also underscores a fundamental miscalculation by the U.S. and other countries when it comes the reconfiguration of their automotive fleets.

Over the last few years, a growing number of environmentalists and national security hawks have teamed up to denounce America’s dependence on foreign oil. Their solution: all-electric and hybrid-electric vehicles. Those vehicles, they insist, will help the environment while reducing oil imports from countries in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.

While that vision appeals to certain segments of the political class and to a myriad of subsidy-seeking corporations, the push to build more electric and hybrid cars will simply result in the U.S. trading one type of import dependence for another.

Those vehicles might cut oil consumption but they will dramatically increase America’s thirst for rare earth elements. And therein lies a crucial choice: We can continue to rely on the liquidity, price transparency, and diversity of the global oil market, the biggest market in human history. Or we can choose the “green” route. And in doing so, we will have no choice but to rely on the market for lanthanides, which is rife with smuggling, has no price transparency, and depends almost wholly on a single producer, China.

The Chinese control about 95 percent of the global market in rare earths, a group of 17 elements that includes scandium, yttrium, and the 15 lanthanides, the elements that occupy the second-to-last row of the Periodic Table. The most famous of the lanthanides is probably neodymium, a critical ingredient in the high-strength magnets used in motor-generators in hybrid cars and wind turbines.

Read rest of article….

Phi Beta Iota: This is a perfect example of what happens when a government is both ideologically driven and therefore not intelligence-driven, and when a government lacks a strategic analytic model that can clearly demonstrate how what might be good for one part of the system is bad for other parts of the system.  This is called system INTEGRITY.  Not only is the US bankrupt, according to the last Comptroller General to brief Congress on the subject in 2007, David Walker, but what the US government is borrowing and spending on in our name makes no sense at all from a public interest point of view.

Journal: US BODY COUNT–What Price Lost Jobs?

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Chuck Spinney Recommends

This is a really good argument

October 28, 2010

Globalism Comes Home to Roost

America's Jobs Losses are Permanent

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Counterpunch

Now that a few Democrats and the remnants of the AFL-CIO are waking up to the destructive impact of jobs offshoring on the US economy and millions of American lives, globalism’s advocates have resurrected Dartmouth economist Matthew Slaughter’s discredited finding of several years ago that jobs offshoring by US corporations increases employment and wages in the US.

At the time I exposed Slaughter’s mistakes, but economists dependent on corporate largess understood that it was more profitable to drink Slaughter’s kool-aid than to tell the truth. Recently the US Chamber of Commerce rolled out Slaughter’s false argument as a weapon against House Democrats Sandy Levin and Tim Ryan, and the Wall Street Journal had Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary, William S. Cohen, regurgitate Slaughter’s claim on its op-ed page on October 12.

I sent a letter to the Wall Street Journal, but the editors were not interested in what a former associate editor and columnist for the paper and President Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy had to say. The facade of lies has to be maintained at all costs. There can be no questioning that globalism is good for us.

Cohen told the Journal’s readers that “the fact is that for every job outsourced to Bangalore, nearly two jobs are created in Buffalo and other American cities.” I bet Buffalo “and other American cities” would like to know where these jobs are. Maybe Slaughter, Cohen, and the Chamber of Commerce can tell them.

Last May I was in St. Louis and was struck by block after block of deserted and boarded up homes, deserted factories and office buildings, even vacant downtown storefronts.

Continue reading “Journal: US BODY COUNT–What Price Lost Jobs?”

Journal: Putin to Obama–Stay in Afghanistan + RECAP

02 China, 03 India, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Corporations, Government, History, Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace Intelligence, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy
Chuck Spinney Sounds Off....

Mikhail  Gorbachev, who has been neutralized by the succession of Russian rulers, especially Putin) has just advised President Obama to get out of Afghanistan.  Jonathan Steele suggests here (also attached below) that Obama ought to heed that advice, because Obama is in a similar albeit somewhat worse position than Gorbachev was in 1985-6.

Analogies are dangerous, because they can capture your thinking and take you off the cliff.  But here goes.

If Steele's analogy is accurate, it suggests some pregnant ramifications that are not addressed directly by Steele:  Russia (Putin and Medvedev) appear to be helping US/Nato in Afghanistan with training programs and by providing access routes for northern logistics lines of communication.  This cooperation serve both parties by improving relations in the short term, but it also helps US/Nato stay on its disastrous course in Afghanistan.  Are there other reasons why would Putin, an ardent nationalist, would what the US to remain stuck in Russia's backyard?

Russia needs help in staunching spillover of Sunni radicalism into its Moslem areas and its Central Asian sphere of influence (a variation of the original reason USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979).  The US war on the Taliban serves that interest. So from Putin's point of view, keeping US/Nato bogged down in Afghanistan serves Russian national interests for free.

Putin, a former member of the KGB and an ardent nationalist, certainly knows the US fomented Sunni extremism in Afghanistan to sucker the Soviets into invading Afghanistan with the aimed of bogging the USSR down in its own VietNam-like quagmire (a policy proudly acknowledged by President Carter's National Security Advisor,Zbigniew Brzezinski in his notorious interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, January 1998). Putin must also know that the US/Nato engagement in Afghanistan, is (1) a huge resource drain that is weakening US economically and militarily, as well as  (2) weakening the bonds giving the US political control over its Nato allies.  From his point of view, these two outcomes would certainly improve Russia's relative power with respect to Europeans (especially Germany) and in the world, at the expense of the US.  Moreover, in Putin's eyes, these outcomes might seem to be justified as payback to the US.  After all, did not the US unleash the Islamic radicalism with its efforts to maneuver the USSR into Afghanistan in 1979 and did not the US humiliate Russia by the exploiting Russia's economic misery and military weaknesses, after Gorbachev had done the the US and the West a huge favor by precipitating collapse of the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War without bloodshed?

So, who should Obama and his advisors listen to?  Putin the nationalist and go for a short term political gain at expense of remaining stuck in the quagmire that serves Russia's interests, or Gobachev the statesman who advises Obama to bite the bullet and absorb short-term political pain to gain long term benefits of exiting a quagmire that is weakening the US economically and militarily?

Of course the war advocate could counter by saying this is based on an analogy run amok.  We are not making the gross mistakes the Soviets made in Afghanistan, and besides, it is cutting and running that weakens us.  After all, Gobachev is just an old man who refuses to see that his time has past and is struggling futilely to remain relevant.

Russia's Afghan agenda | Jonathan Steele

guardian.co.uk 10/27/10 10:00 PM Jonathan Steele

Gorbachev has valuable advice for the US on the war in Afghanistan that Putin would rather he keep to himself

The surprise in this week's reports that Russia is planning to help Nato in Afghanistan by training Afghan helicopter pilots is that people are surprised. Memories are short, it seems, for the shift in Moscow's line came as early as July last year during Barack Obama's first summit in the Kremlin.

Designed to press the “reset” button after east-west tempers flared over the war in Georgia, the meeting ended with several agreements, the most dramatic of which was Russia's nod for the US to send military supplies across Russian territory to its forces in Afghanistan. Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin wanted to give Obama a reward for taking a calmer view of Russia than George Bush, in particular for accepting Georgia's share of blame in the South Ossetian crisis and for cancelling the most provocative aspects of Bush's missile defence scheme which Moscow viewed as a threat.

Read rest of Jonathan Steele's article….

See Also (RECAP)

Continue reading “Journal: Putin to Obama–Stay in Afghanistan + RECAP”

Greg Palast, Big Oil, & PBS (Petroleum Broadcast System)

03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, Commerce, Corporations, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Media, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

The Petroleum Broadcast System Owes Us an Apology

by Greg Palast for Truthout/Buzzflash
Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Tonight, my dog Pluto and I watched the PBS ‘Frontline' investigation of BP, “The Spill.”

PBS has uncovered a real shocker:  BP neglected safety!

Well, no shit, Sherlock!

Pluto rolled over on the rug and looked at me as if to say, Don't we already know this?

Then PBS told us – get ready – that BP has neglected warnings about oil safety for years!

That's true.  But so has PBS.  The Petroleum Broadcast System has turned a blind eye to BP perfidy for decades.

If the broadcast had come six months before the Gulf blow-out, after the 2005 BP Refinery explosion in Texas, after the 2006 Alaska pipeline disaster, after the years of government fines that flashed DANGER-DANGER, I would say, “Damn, that Frontline sure is courageous.”  But six months after the blow-out, PBS has shown us it only has the courage to shoot the wounded.

Continue reading “Greg Palast, Big Oil, & PBS (Petroleum Broadcast System)”

Journal: Faux-Libertarian $6 Billion Anti-Government Fear Fund & Network, Corporate Media Fully Integrated

03 Economy, 04 Education, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Analysis, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Chuck Spinney Sounds Off....

Poor Goebbels, if only he had access to DVDs and the internet, he could have run a fear mongering operation as effective as the one described so brilliantly by Pam Martens here (also attached below) — a thought which suggests a question: Is 21st Century American Crony Capitalism merely a way station on the road to real fascism (as distinguished from the oxymoronic soundbyte of Islamofascism)?  After all, in addition to fear mongering, Mussolini and Hitler enlisted the corporate class to weaken the working class to gain and retain power.  To wit, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Mussolini, banned all Marxist organizations and replaced their trade unions with government-controlled corporatist unions. Until he instituted a war economy in the mid-1930s, Mussolini allowed industrialists to run their companies with a minimum of government interference. Despite his former anticapitalist rhetoric, he cut taxes on business, permitted cartel growth, decreed wage reduction, and rescinded the eight-hour-workday law. Between 1928 and 1932 real wages in Italy dropped by almost half. Mussolini admitted that the standard of living had fallen but stated that “fortunately the Italian people were not accustomed to eating much and therefore feel the privation less acutely than others.”

Although Hitler claimed that the Nazi Party was more “socialist” than its conservative rivals, he opposed any Marxist-inspired nationalization of major industries. On May 2, 1933, he abolished all free trade unions in Germany, and his minister of labour, Robert Ley, later declared that it was necessary “to restore absolute leadership to the natural leader of the factory, that is, the employer.” Nazi “anticapitalism,” such as it was, was aimed primarily at Jewish capitalism; non-Jewish capitalists were allowed to keep their companies and their wealth, a distinction that was made in the Nazi Party's original program and never changed. Although Hitler reduced unemployment in Germany, most German workers were forced to toil for lower wages and longer hours and under worse conditions than had been the case during the Weimar Republic. His solution to the unemployment problem also depended on the recruitment of thousands of men into the military.

But of course any analogy to the United States is absurd.  After all, since 1980, deregulation, union busting, a lower standard of living, lower wages, longer working hours, and using of the military and its industrial complex as a jobs program have not been accompanied by a rise in the politics of fear in the United States. … Oops.

There is one difference however, given Congress's and the Supreme Court's supine complicity in promoting these trends (by representing the interests of the Crony Capitalists at the expense of the masses), the President will not need a Reichstag Fire to keep the program moving.

October 26, 2010

Koch Footprints Lead to Political Powder Keg

The Far Right's Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive

By PAM MARTENS

Counterpunch

A secretive libertarian nonprofit with ties to Charles Koch bankrolled what was widely perceived to be a fear mongering effort to throw the Presidential election to Senator John McCain in 2008. Until now, where the money came from has been a hotly debated mystery.

Seven weeks before the Presidential election of 2008, approximately 100 newspapers and magazines in the U.S., including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, and St. Petersburg Times, distributed millions of DVDs of the documentary, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.”  The DVDs were included in the Sunday editions.  Altogether, including a separate direct mail campaign, 28 million DVDs flooded households in the swing voter states.

– – – – – – –

CounterPunch can now report what this race-baiting, fear-mongering campaign cost and where the money, at least nominally, came from…..

Continue reading “Journal: Faux-Libertarian $6 Billion Anti-Government Fear Fund & Network, Corporate Media Fully Integrated”

Journal: Tea Party Manipulated, Idle Angry Minds Being Exploited…

04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Chuck Spinney Recommends

The author of attached article in the Guardian, George Monbiot is a pious Global Warming enthusiast. He probably despises the Koch brothers because they are funding anti-global warming efforts.  But setting the writer's biases aside, as well as his somewhat condescending tone, his report (which is based primarily on the New Yorker’s brilliant expose of the Koch brothers and the new documentary “(Astro)Turf Wars,”) is an excellent summary of how behind-the-scene manipulators are funding the Tea Party movement and are shaping and energizing the Orientation of Tea Party’s collective OODA loop — i.e., the lens thru which its members Observe the world, interpret their all-to-real problems,  provides focus to their anger, and thereby shapes the Decisions guiding their Actions.

The strategic leverage gained by shaping a group's Orientation ought be self-evident at this point: it unleashes and focuses the free-wheeling energy of the individuals to enthusiastically work together for the well being of others without requiring the coercive and ultimately revealing and self-defeating effects of top-down control.

The following quote (near end of article) provides an excellent statement of the strategic aim guiding those shaping efforts.

“Most of these bodies call themselves “free-market thinktanks”, but their trick – as (Astro)Turf Wars points out – is to conflate crony capitalism with free enterprise, and free enterprise with personal liberty. Between them they have constructed the philosophy that informs the Tea Party movement: its members mobilise for freedom, unaware that the freedom they demand is freedom for corporations to trample them into the dirt.”

On the other hand, any strategy grounded in deception must be wrapped in a protective cloak of ambiguity, because a deception builds into the OODA loops of the ‘deceived' the seeds of a crucial vulnerability: Once the ambiguity is penetrated, and the scam is exposed and its effects appreciated, the Orientation of the ‘deceived' will flip and their rage will be energized and focused on the deceivers by the desire for vengeance.  Which is why the passive or active connivance of the mainstream media in the US (most of which is owned by crony capitalists) in supporting the manipulation is central to keeping the game going.

The Tea Party movement: deluded and inspired by billionaires

By funding numerous rightwing organisations, the mega-rich Koch brothers have duped millions into supporting big business

George Monbiot

guardian.co.uk, Monday 25 October 2010 20.15 BST

The Tea Party movement is remarkable in two respects. It is one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has seen – and the biggest Astroturf operation in history. These accomplishments are closely related.

A “must read” piece of solid British analysis….

Phi Beta Iota: A new set of unwitting fools–no offense intended, but that's the story….those elected under the Tea Party banner will caucus with the Republicans, and that is the truth-teller.

See Also:

Journal: Tea Party “Booboisie”

Review: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

2008 ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig

Review: Shooting the Truth–The Rise of American Political Documentaries

Review: Grand Illusion–The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

Review: Selling Out

Journal: 22% Real Unemployment, 1 in 34 Zip $ in 2009

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
GETTY Photo

New Figures Detail Depth Of Unemployment Misery, Lower Earnings For All But Super Wealthy

One out of every 34 Americans who earned wages in 2008 earned absolutely nothing — not one cent — in 2009.

The stunning figure was released earlier this month by the Social Security Administration, but apparently went unreported until it appeared today on Tax.com in a column by Pulitzer Prize-winning tax reporter David Cay Johnston.

It's not just every 34th earner whose financial situation has been upended by the financial crisis. Average wages, median wages, and total wages have all declined — except at the very top, where they leaped dramatically, increasing five-fold.

Read balance of article….