most important research this year. Summary: we're F%^&ked

back when I was a kid, I used to listen to
Greenpeace tell us how factory effluent and
raping of forests was going to kill us.

Then, the world created banksters. It seemed
that the environment didn't matter any more
because, once, we had lots of paper money,
and now we don't. So, we're on a paper chase
and haven't given two thoughts to the environment.

Canada's PM Harper is set on forcing uneconomical
tarsands oil on the US, so that it can leak out all
over Tex-Arkana and suburbs near you.

Idiots are ruining water tables with their fracking
juice just to get a bit of shale gas, while the earth
belches and shakes.

And, we can do nothing about these. Nothing short of
blocking their access by thousands of determined
people, 24/7 will work, and as I said, you and I
are too busy chasing paper.

In all this, we've forgotten the old demons.
Industrialists , at least those who can  get bank loans,
are busy using up Earth's resources at such a rate
that one scientist who actually looked at the data,
held a conference talk called :

Is Earth F%&ked?

His answer : More or less [Fucked , that is]

Enjoy your Black Friday trawl.
Hug a Black person, too. That would be a good thing.

checkit: New statesman

Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt

Is our relentless quest for economic growth killing the planet? Climate scientists have seen the data – and they are coming to some incendiary conclusions.

By Naomi Klein Published 29 October 2013 10:00

In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.

But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).

Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.

I've been trying to tell you, it's a planned crisis

If this were a banking crisis, banks would be paying.
So, it isn't a banking crisis, it's an oligarch coup.

They were waiting to install austerity and unchecked
financial behaviour for 3 decades provided just the
opportunity.
So. they planned it, they put in place the laws,
and now they're sitting pretty.

You're having a fantasy if you think the banks are
at all moral.

BOSS, The PLAN, THE PLAN, FUCK THE POOR

[0:41]
I always thought that Herve was saying "the plan, the plan"

checkit: rowan's blog

The secret plans for London - Why the financial crisis has in reality been a financial revolution

The financial crisis through which we have all suffered (by 'we' I mean the ordinary man and woman), will turn out to have been less of a crisis and more of a revolution.

Ironically, if you have been in a well-paying job, in banking, consulting, IT, head hunting, recruitment, or any of the adjunct functions which serve the City and the financial sector; or you have been in the professional classes, the law, auditing and accounting; or the tame and timid regulatory agencies, the financial crisis has not really caused much damage to you in the longer term.

Oh sure, you may not have drawn down quite such high bonuses as you were used to enjoying, but you have still been able to continue to live very comfortably. Interest rates have been the lowest they have been in any living memory, and they have remained at neo-negative rates for a long period of time. You have been enabled to trade up in your property purchases, borrowing significant sums of money, leveraged on your existing properties, and in so doing, you have enabled the property market to resist the ordinary impact of the crisis.

To a very large number of people however, the 'squeezed middle', those who are coming to the end of their immediate working lives, but who are still supporting elderly parents, as well as children who cannot find jobs; those who are still able to work and at the top of their skills ladder in terms of knowledge and experience, but who are deemed 'too old' to be employed by an ageist jobs market because they are over 55; those who have been made redundant at the wrong age and thus forcibly retired and who have been living on income from insufficient pensions, and who have watched while the government has squeezed the life out of community spending in the name of 'austerity'; those who work in teaching, nursing, policing, the fire service or any of the other vital municipal service provisions on which our communities rely so heavily, there is no end to the damage that the impact of the financial crisis is causing.

…

And the outcome has been to sweep the whole fucking mess under the carpet in a traditional British way of reconciling these scandals. Essentially, it has been decided that those responsible for the biggest banking crash in living memory, to say nothing of the resultant scams, frauds and other examples of financial skulduggery will not face any kind of scrutiny by regulators or government. The revolving door at the top will go round and former regulators will become bankers, accountants will become regulators, the most egregious will be allowed to slink away with their pensions and their pay-off's, while you and I will be ritually and righteously screwed!

Why?

Because I am slowly beginning to realise it is becoming clearer that the aftermath of the financial crash and its attendant outcomes was not just an accident waiting to happen. It was carefully thought-through by a group of powerful elites who realised that they could use the implications of the mess left behind by Gordon Brown and Ed Balls.

They could begin to dismantle the benefit culture ethos which had undeniably been allowed to spread like a virus under Brown. Brown believed that the City was bringing in the money because he wanted to believe the bullshit the City told him. He, in turn, extolled their actions in after-dinner speeches at the Mansion House, while spending public money like a man with no arms, until even he was forced to realise there was nothing left in the pot, as Liam Byrne so eloquently reminded his successor in post!

By driving out the poor, the indigent and the work-shy and relocating them to other useless towns and cities in the Midlands and the North, they would free-up a workforce in London who would be willing to work for limited or minimum wages and zero-hours contracts, made up very much of European immigrants driven to the UK by the awful financial conditions at home, ready and willing to service the new post-crisis economy planned for the new London.

…

London houses and apartments are a form of money.

The reasons are simple to understand. In 2011, at the height of the eurozone crisis, citizens of the two countries at the epicentre of the cataclysm – Greece and Italy – bought £400m of London bricks and mortar. The Italian and Greek rich, fearing the single currency would collapse, got their money out of euros and parked it some place where government was relatively stable and the tax regime was gentle – very, very gentle. Considering that tax evasion in Italy and Greece was a significant contributory factor to their debt problems, it just seems grotesquely cynical to encourage this kind of behaviour.

But that's what Britain in general, and London in particular, does. The city is essentially a tax haven with great theatre, free museums and formidable dining. If you can demonstrate that you have a residence in another country, you are taxed only on your British earnings.

And the savings on property taxes are phenomenal. The property taxes on New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's $20m London home come to £2,143.30 a year. That's $3,430. Clearly, the mayor bought in at the right time. The Google executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, is reported to be house-hunting here – he's looking in the £30m (about $48m) price range. Yet he will pay a similar amount in property tax as Bloomberg does.

Co-op got done New York mafia style

I thought perhaps that Co-op has been having problems
because the British oligarchs set them up. I'll explain in
a sec. The other side of this take-down is the fact that
the Co-op and the Britannia Building Soc used
NY banks as consultants.
It's now well known that those banks collude when
it comes to scamming muppets.

So, when the Co-op was to buy the Britannia, Goldman
Sachs and JPMorgan were the consultants.
That's another strong reason why the bank deal went
through even though Brit was in sorry shape.
The Co-op Board: RUBBERSTAMP. all good, cuz
JPM and Goldman said so.

However, I stand by the belief that Flowers was put in
place at Co-op by the oligarchy to take Co-op down,
just in case JPM and Goldman couldn't fleece them
badly enough.

So, they had a guy in their dungeons name Flowers
who had indecent exposure claims against him, pedo
file accusations, a record of wasting expenses and
knowing nothing about banking.
And yet he was fresh as a mountain lily when he was
presented to the Co-op to be rubberstamped.

checkit: theguardian.com,
Eight questions the Co-operative Bank needs to answer
Patrick Collinson

Monday 17 June 2013 19.05 BST
Co-op Bank inherited a mountain of bad debts from its merger with Britannia building society.
1. What were the commercial loans that caused so much misery?
Co-op Bank has been laid low by 12 big loans which together account for £900m of the £1.7bn of 'impaired' loans on its books. But who were these loans to? Small investors who have lost half the money in their PIBS (permanent interest bearing shares) rightly want to know where their money has gone. Defunct shopping centres? Collapsed property developers? Co-op Bank has never revealed the recipients of its loans, although other 'ethical' banks such as Triodos make much of the transparency of their lending decisions.
2. Were the problems really just at Britannia, the building society the Co-op Bank took over in 2009?
Co-op Bank inherited what turned out to be a mountain of bad debts as a result of its merger with Britannia building society in 2009. Apart from the dodgy commercial loans, it is also suffering arrears on its £7.5bn-worth of "Optimum" mortgages that a subsidiary of Britannia known as Platform sold through intermediaries. But is it convenient for the management of Co-op Bank to distance itself from problems at the group by blaming the Britannia rather than themselves?
3. Who at Britannia was paid to oversee lending and risk controls?
The chief executive of Britannia was Neville Richardson, who went on to become chief executive of Co-op Bank. He quit the group in 2011, and a year later it was revealed that he was paid a total of £4.6m, including £1.4m as "compensation for loss of office" and a lump sum pension of £2.1m.
The non-executive chairman of Britannia in 2009, Rodney Baker-Bates (paid £101,000 a year), proclaimed in the society's 2008 report and accounts: "We remain financially strong during these difficult times." In the same report, Richardson said the Platform loans, even the 'self-cert' type, were "low risk" with the "right risk profile and right pricing".
The group finance director at the time was David McCarthy, who was previously finance director of Bank of Ireland UK. He joined halfway through the year and was paid a basic salary of £128,000 for six-and-a-half months' work. The accounts for Britannia were audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Savers whose permanent interest bearing shares have now been all but wiped out must now be asking why these highly paid officers of the society were unable to see the impending impairment risks, especially as by the time of the merger, Northern Rock had already collapsed and the financial crisis was deepening.
4. The merger took place in 2009, with the financial crisis in full swing. Couldn't the advisers spot the problems then?
The risks were virtually invisible among the back-slapping statements in the press release issued by City PR firm Brunswick at the time of the announcement in 2009. The merger would create a "super mutual" which would be "strongly capitalised and with scale and strength in product, distribution and service."
Citigroup Global Markets were the investment bankers who advised Britannia, led by Chris Williams, an ex Goldman Sachs banker who previously worked on RBS's takeover of NatWest. Co-op Bank's advisers were JP Morgan Cazenove (JPMC), led by Tim Wise, who is now the company's chairman. In 2008, JPMC paid bonuses of £85m to senior staff, but after it was fully acquired by JP Morgan in 2009 its bonus figures are subsumed under the group's overall figures. The fees paid to advisers have not been disclosed, although Co-op Bank's report and accounts include a figure of more than £50m for 'strategic change initiative' costs in 2009 and 2010....

nukes. the epitome of short-sighted development

If you knew something was going to kill you and
most every other human, and the likelihood
increases with each year because of the danger
of explosions, terrorism or just leaky barrels,
would that scare you enough to find another
solution to our energy needs?
ANSWER: I wish I were able to find an alternative
that would make consumers happy.
As it stands, we're sticking with the solution
that will end humanity, at some day.

On the one hand, the Powers say we need
regular power supply for factories because
how else is anybody supposed to have a job?

On the other, we've got people who want
the same power. None of them have considered
the options of getting off the grid, or cutting
consumption, even though nukes pose a huge risk,
every day, and a potential huge cost afterwards
that you can't ignore, or else BOOM.
It's called DECOMMISSIONING an old plant.

Isn't anybody scared enough to want to push
for a new solution to our energy needs?
You'll still be saving humanity.

This piece is about the futility of human existence.
Things have been going so well that people can be
found who will risk wiping out all human existence
just to turn on a light bulb.

The Nukers are at the top of the list.
As we know, governments have to bankroll anybody
who builds a plant because the banks don't want
to lend 10 billion for 10 years before they see any
payments back.
Then, these companies, because we're not talking
about government agencies, don't have plans past
the end of the use of the plant. What about
decommissioning? Sellafield will cost 70 billion
to fix. Who's paying? you and me

So the want to put another plant in Somerset, right
by the Severn waterway. This is instead of cheaper
solar which does not pollute, and surely better
than charging big wasters.
Or heaven forbid they should actually be scared
to death of the potential disaster of nukes enough
to discover a new technology that would save us.

No, that's too risky. We're capitalists. We want the
sure thing. Let's build that nuke boiler.

checkit: 1  Mike "Mish" Shedlock

    At the 44 US nuclear reactors that have already received license extensions, 60 is the new 40. And even when those reactors reach the end of their working lives, they may not be able to move on to the final stage. According to a recent article in The New York Times, the operators of 20 US nuclear reactors -- including some with licenses that expire soon -- do not have sufficient funding for prompt dismantling. If these reactors can't keep working, their owners "intend to let them sit like industrial relics for 20 to 60 years or even longer while interest accrues in the reactors' retirement accounts."

    Is it crazy for someone to delay his retirement past the age he can expect to live? Sure, but that's essentially what the nuclear industry plans to do with many of its reactors. And it should not come as a surprise that the NRC has no problem with this plan. After all, we're talking about a regulatory agency that issues 40-year licenses for a process that creates a radioactive waste problem lasting tens of thousands of years.

Crazy to Plan Retirement Past Life Expectancy?

Dawn says "Is it crazy for someone to delay his retirement past the age he can expect to live". Sorry Dawn, that's not crazy at all. If you have insufficient money, you need to work. Some want to work because they like what they are doing.

If you are seeking crazy, try these:

    What is crazy is to expect social security to take care of all your retirement needs.

    It's also crazy to expect to receive defined benefits even if you are not in a defined benefit plan.

    Finally, it's crazy for public unions to think they are going to get all of their promised benefits when it will bankrupt cities and states to do so.

Economic Craziness

If you are looking for more craziness, Dawn wants a "carbon tax to lift job prospects".

Here is another crazy idea: Dawn talks of  "forcing people to save more and protect retirement savings from the vagaries of the financial markets".

Yikes!

Nuclear Craziness

One point I happen to agree with Dawn on.  It's crazy to issue "40-year licenses for a process that creates a radioactive waste problem lasting tens of thousands of years" and have no plans for anything but the first 40 years.

2 naked capitalism
Who Will Pay for Nuclear Power Plant Cleanup?

Yves here. Holy moley, the cost estimates focus the mind! And the little mishap recounted below isn’t encouraging either.

By John Daly, a non-resident scholar at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and chief analyst at OilPrice. Cross posted from OilPrice

Many of the civilian nuclear power plants built in the US. and Western Europe during the halcyon days of the Eisenhower administration are coming to the end of their operational lives as their operating licenses expire.

The looming deadlines leave their operators with two stark choices – apply for a license extension beyond the original forty years, or decommission.

A bad choice, however you look at it. For a license extension, aging NPPs must upgrade, while decommissioning raises the primordial question sidestepped since the dawn of the civilian nuclear age – what to do with the radioactive debris?

The British imbroglio.

The predicted cost of decommissioning Sellafield nuclear facility in Cumbria, Britain’s largest nuclear complex, is now estimated at an eye-watering $104.3 billion over the next three decades, a figure that inexorably year by year continues to rise and represents over $1,546 for every man, woman and child in the British Isles.

Sellafield is a nuclear reprocessing site, close to the village of Seascale on the British coast of the Irish Sea in Cumbria, England, a subsidiary of the original nuclear reactor site at Windscale, which, along with neighboring Calder Hall, is undergoing decommissioning and dismantling of its four nuclear power generating reactors.

Now, the aging facility, one of the first established under the Eisenhower’s administration’s civilian “atoms for peace” program, is due for decommissioning.

So, where to store the nuclear waste?

The decision follows in the wake of a 30 January meeting of three local authorities which have yet to decide whether to agree to further investigation of the possibilities of an underground store in their districts. After local authorities in Kent passed on the proejct, Cumbria county, Allerdale and Copeland are the British councils still expressing interest in the possibility of hosting a nuclear dump site. Sellafield remains a massive local employer, with over 9,000 people directly employed there....

Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/02/who-will-pay-for-nuclear-power-plant-cleanup.html#UPhf6uS7B1mpAE0g.99