Memnison Journal

With huge numbers of people unemployed, and more rolling into the offices, the states are running out of money to pay benefits.  Like 30 out of 50 states.
Drill-baby-drill just went *choke*, as oil companies are suddenly unwilling to finance new exploration.   Existing wells are being shut down as uneconomical to operate, and forecasts are [...]

Beginning in 1992, a series of tax laws combine to create large tax credits for certain Hummer buyers. By 2002, the New York Times reports that, thanks to changes in the tax code during the Bush administration, an eligible buyer can deduct $34,912 of the $48,800 base price of the Hummer.
July 2002: The Hummer [...]

Joe Klein in Time on Bush’s last months in office:
This is a presidency that has wobbled between those two poles — overweening arrogance and paralytic incompetence.
The latter has held sway these past few months as the economy has crumbled. It is too early to rate the performance of Bush’s economic team, but we have [...]

He also mooted the possibility that the Russian government would buy some of its metal products to shore up falling demand.
At under $50 a barrel, the Russian government is taking a beating, because their Big Ticket was oil and gas.   The entire economy was not based on industrial production, but in raking in petrodollars.   [...]

So here’s my ideas, half-baked:

Make the deal comprehensive, and mostly a take it or leave it scenario.  This sucker has been a political football for decades, and this ends here right now.
All three companies essentially go into a central, nationalized receivership corporation.
The equity in these businesses is pretty much gone, in any event.  [...]

I’m actively interested in your poisition on this matter.  Feel free to sound off inside *politely*.
My own struggles on this:

NYT: Tesla Motors is laying off workers and putting off its car another year or two.
He blamed the worsening financial crisis and the credit crisis for the upheaval. “It’s not an understatement to say that nearly every business will be impacted by what has unfolded in the past weeks,” Mr. Musk wrote. The cutbacks come [...]

Robert Reich, the former Labor Secretary and one of my favorites on economics, writes:
After the market closed today, Bank of America announced a significant deterioration in people’s ability to repay credit-card and other consumer debt.  The central fact is this: consumers in the real economy are coming to the end of their capacities to keep [...]

Bush officials at the Department of Interior’s Denver office that were ‘overseeing’ oil company royalty payments to the government and taking all sorts of goodies from the oil companies - sex, drugs, hot bubble baths, frat house beer setups, and par-tay par-tay.  Then they tried to rewrite the ethics rules to permit them to do [...]

In Alaskan politics, you have to remember that the main support of the state revenue system is the tax-on-oil-stuff coming out of the north slope…and that all Alaskans get a cut back from the state of around $1700 a year in ‘reverse taxes’.  So EVERYONE supports drilling in ANWR in Alaskan politics.  Otherwise, they’d have [...]

The first thing you have to understand on Big Oil is that they have had this whip-hand on the United States in particular and the world oil market in general for a very long time.    They are not interested in giving that sort of level of economic or political control up to anyone.
And to be [...]

I’d pay attention to the Georgia / Russia if I were you guys.   There’s more than you think at stake.

NY Times story that reviews the oil and gas drilling situation in the USA West, and finds that oil is very much secondary to drilling for natural gas. The reason is simple; that’s what is more plentiful.  And the oil production in the USA is dropping because things are getting pumped out.
Dusty Horwitt, a senior [...]

The concept - how to get old polluting clunker cars off the road? One possible solution that’s going on in Canada and a few other places is to have a government buy-out of old clunker cars to retire the things for scrap and pay off the owner for the thing something that would act [...]

NY Times story on the major advances of LED lighting in commercial use - but that the prices are not quite down to what the consumer wants for what the consumer is getting.
Here at the Marmotage, we use compact florescent bulbs everywhere *except* in outdoor applications.  Our weather simply is too cold to handle it. [...]