Senator James Inhofe(Sociopath, OK)

While peak oil may threaten our civilization peak water threatens our species. Hydraulic fracking is seen by some to be the next solution to the fossil fuel shortage but what about it's impact on water resources.  While we are told that it can be done safely experience tells a different story.  This from yesterday:

Gas Drilling Emergency in Bradford County

Officials said thousands of gallons of fluid leaked over farm land and into a creek from a natural gas well in Bradford County.

This of course is just the latest example of contamination resulting from fracking.  Just hours after this latest contamination event Oklahoma's sociopathic senator, James Inhofe said this:

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) is perhaps Congress’ most reliable defender of dirty energy and evangelizer against the “hoax” of global warming. This morning, he took his message to Fox News host Brian Kilmeade’s radio show, where he extolled the virtues of hydraulic fracturing, a method of extracting natural gas known widely as “fracking.” Fracking is a relatively new and untested technique, but Inhofe insisted that there’s nothing to worry about, as he claimed fracking has “never poisoned anyone” nor ever contaminated groundwater:

Here's the audio:

Of course this is pure bull shit:

While fracking has the potential to create vast new American energy supplies, Inhofe’s claim that it is completely without risk is either stunningly ignorant or intentionally dishonest. Just yesterday, a blowout at a Pennsylvania natural gas well engaged in fracking spilled thousands of gallons of toxic chemical-laced water, “contaminating a stream and forcing the evacuation of seven families who live nearby as crews struggled to stop the gusher,” the AP reported. Inhofe referenced the Pennsylvania spill in his interview, but said that it has “nothing to do with fracking” because it was a stream, not groundwater that was contaminated.

But fracking has contaminated groundwater. As a recent New York Times investigation confirmed, waste from fracking has contaminated groundwater and even drinking water with toxic and radioactive chemicals. The process relies on pumping toxic chemicals deep underground to break rock, and between 2005 and 2009, “hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals” have been pumped into wells. Large amounts of radioactive material have been found in water supplies near fracking sites, many Pennsylvanians have gotten sick, the tap water in homes near fracking sites have caught on fire, and a home in Celveland, Ohio blew up.

It’s worth noting that the oil and gas industry has been Inhofe’s top contributor over his political career, giving him over $450,000 in the last election cycle alone, even though Inhofe wasn’t up for reelection. Inhofe’s single largest campaign donor is oil conglomerate Koch Industries.

Inhofe is a sociopath who will sell his soul to the highest bidder.  That of course makes him a Republican Christian.

But They Won't!

Matt Yglesias correctly points out that the Obama administration and the Democrats don't have to be held hostage when the rise in the debt ceiling comes up and he has a plan.

This isn’t a sudden “shutdown.” Nor is is true that we have to default on obligations to our bondholders. Rather, it means that government outlays are now limited by the quantity of inbound tax revenue. But for a while, the people administering the federal government (to wit Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner) will be able to selectively stiff people. So the right strategy is to start stiffing people Republicans care about. When bills to defense contractors come due, don’t pay them. Explain they’ll get 100 percent of what they’re owed when the debt ceiling is raised. Don’t make some farm payments. Stop sending Medicare reimbursements. Make the doctors & hospitals, the farmers and defense contractors, and the currently elderly bear the inconvenient for a few weeks of uncertain payment schedules. And explain to the American people that the circle of people who need to be inconvenienced will necessarily grow week after week until congress gives in. Remind people that the concessions the right is after mean the permanent abolition of Medicare, followed by higher taxes on the middle to finance additional tax cuts for the rich.

Of course this won't happen - because they really don't want to. Obama and the Democrats are owned by the same people that own the Republicans. We on the the progresive side used to say the Clinton was the best Republican president since Eisenhower. Well Obama has accepted the imperial presidency of George W. Bush which as I see it makes him the best Republican president since George H.W. Bush. While Clinton was to the right of Eisenhower Obama is to the right of Bush 41. He is owned by Wall Street and the military industrial complex. The most important paragraph in Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald's Crossing Zero is this:

By late 2009 it was clearer than ever that both Congress and the State Department had come to rely on the American military to set the policy agenda. In fact, it appeared that it might even be impossible for Washington to return to a civilian-orchestrated strategy of nation-building anywhere, after thirty years of militarily enforced privatized foreign policy schemes. An entire industry now existed to lobby against any efforts to reverse the trend, change the status quo or even to make private contractors accountable for the taxpayer money they received. A book by Allison Stanger, One Nation Under Contract, outlined the dimensions of a problem where the private sector had become a "shadow government" operating outside the law with billions of federal dollars, but little to no accountability for how or where the money was spent.

It's impossible for congress to reduce military spending because they depend on money from defense contractors get reelected - the best government money can buy. Of course the same thing can be said for the too powerful to fail banks. The plutocrats are in the drivers seat. If the Tea Party figures that out they may prove to be our salvation.

The New Confederacy

Dennis G. at Balloon Juice has a must read post, Making money the Confederate way. There are to ways to create wealth - you can create it or you can steal it. There are those who say the Civil War was not about slavery and in a sense they are right.

150 years ago the Confederacy launched the Civil War to protect an economic systems based on the theft. Slavery was the most obvious example, but the system also exempted the rich from taxes and the burdens of war. It also refused to support innovation, invention or infrastructure as tools to generate wealth. It was a Kleptocracy.

One of the Confederacy’s biggest gripes against Lincoln was that Old Abe wanted to invest Federal money in Education, railroads, ports, and other physical improvements. Worst from their POV was that Lincoln also wanted to invest in people and protect the rights of workers. Lincoln’s desire to limit the amount of wealth the elites could steal was why the South started the war.

That brings us to to Paul Ryan's budget plan:

Case in point is Paul Ryan’s very “serious” wealth redistribution plan. At its core it is a plan to steal the labor, savings and wealth from most Americans and redistribute it to the elites. It is just another plan—in an endless series of plans—designed to steal money while passing along the cost of social and environmental destruction to others. It is just theft, plain and simple.

And like the Confederates of old, Ryan and his fellow eunuchs of the the elites are against any Federal involvement in wealth creation through innovation, invention or infrastructure spending. That might create new winners and losers and we can’t have that in their Galtian wonderland.

Ryan’s plan is distinctly Confederate, but then again that could be said about almost everything offered by the Republican controlled House. All of their policies are an effort to turn the clock back to some time before the Civil War and recreate a distinctly Confederate economy—an economy controlled by an elite handful of old white guys who could steal anything they wanted and below them a mass of poor folks struggling just to survive.

Thom Hartman has said that the goal of the Koch brothers and their Republican lawmakers is to turn the United States into Charles Dickens' England. I think Dennis G's analogy is better. As conservative Clive Crook points out Ryan's plan will do nothing to reduce medical costs and in fact will not even reduce the deficit problem. What it will do is to further redistribute the wealth to the elites at the expense of the middle class and the poor - the Confederate model.

Dennis G's post is one I wish I had written but I didn't so go read the entire thing here.

The Black Hole Economy

Richard Heinberg has a great analogy for the world economy - it used to be a star but it has collapsed and is now a black hole.

Maybe it is more accurate to think of the economy itself as the black hole. At its heart is a great sucking void created in 2008 by the destruction of trillions of dollars’ worth of capital. The economy used to be a star, spewing out light and heat (profits and consumer goods), but it imploded on itself. Now its gaping maw will inevitably draw all surrounding matter into itself.

You can’t see the black hole, of course; it’s invisible. It is composed largely of unrepayable debt in the form of mortgages, and of toxic assets (mortgage-backed securities and related derivatives) on the books of major financial institutions, all of which are carefully hidden from view not just by the institutions themselves but by the Treasury and the Fed. Added to those there is also a growing super-gravitational field of resource depletion—which is again invisible to nearly everyone, though it does create noticeable secondary effects in the form of rising energy and food prices.

As I noted here:

The world economic system is credit based and requires constant growth. That constant growth is dependent on cheap oil.

Peak cheap oil was already here but the events in the middle east have accelerated the rise in prices.

The trillions of dollars of toxic debt and the end of cheap oil are drawing the world economy into a black hole. What will we find on the other side? It won't look like anything we have now.

Tribal Warfare and the Budget Kabuki Dance

Nearly 60% of Americans are in favor of a government shutdown to reduce spending, but of course Americans are painfully ignorant of where the money in the budget goes. As I noted here the Tea Party wants to cut the budget but they really don't want to cut anything that really matters. What they do want to cut are some rather insignificant budget items they don't like. The current budget fight is not about balancing the budget, it is tribal warfare. There is little or no talk of cutting military spending, the Republican base likes bombing brown people and Muslims and the Military Industrial Complex would not stand for it. There is little or no talk of cutting Medicare, many of the Tea Partiers are on Medicare and the Medical Industrial Complex depends on Medicare for much of it's revenue.

I leave Social Security out of the budget equation because it is not a budget item. Unless you object to repaying the Treasury Bonds you and I have been buying for over thirty years Social Security does not contribute to the deficit anymore the repaying any of the other treasury bonds.

The Republican party is the party of corporate America and corporate America does not like regulations that make the water and air clean - so they are on the chopping block. And then there is the war on the truth - the measly five billion dollars a year NPR receives is a target. The truth is not a friend of conservatives. Planned Parenthood equals abortion to the base which puts it in the cross hairs. When you look at the budget these programs represent a few grains of sand in a large bucket.

If you really want to reduce the deficit you have two choices:

1. Slash Medicare and defense spending

or

2. Raise taxes

None of these are on the table so the present discussion is little more than tribal warfare - a political Kabuki dance. And yes, it is bi-partisan.

Back in Business?

I am going to start cross posting all of my Newshoggers and The Moderate Voice posts here. There won't be any original content but I would like to have a little more control. Continue to visit the above linked sites.