Chrysler is now owned by Cerbeus (?) with Dan Quayle as chairman of the board.

“It sho’ is a white man’s world.” — from the movie “Being There”

I’ve seen the result of coal plants in China. You can’t believe the pollution until you try breathing in Xi’an and Beijing.

We should sell them equipment to clean up their coal-burning plants!

The cost of retooling is high because tooling is mostly hand-made by high-paid and relatively rare labor, more or less one piece at a time. The work is very precise, and it takes a long time to train people how to make it. Much of it is manufactured here, by factories with older workers who have not had enough business to train their replacements.

Where’s the use of high tech computers in this?

Jay Hanson predicted this kind of thing many years ago. As the reality of Peak-Oil begins to bite, we are going to see an exercise in ad-hoc government at its worst. Our politicians will be pointing in every direction, saying “who could have anticipated this?” as they work hard to do what corporate power wants them to do in the moment. There will be no long-range planning, because long-range planning implies a certain amount of fore-knowledge, and that’s the LAST thing our politicians want to cop to.

This is going to be a long exercise in deniability. and when the wars for energy begin, as they inevitably will (as they already have) our politicians will continue to point in every direction and say “who could have anticipated…?” and “not my fault.” It’s already happening.

Survival of the most powerful and wealthy in these difficult times demands ad-hoc government. Government that considers only the most short-term gain and gain only for those who are already wealthy and powerful.

You can see it happening now, all around you, as Scarecrow’s article makes very clear. The ideals of the past–such as they were–are dead. We now have remorseless corporate power and its marching orders.

And fixing any of the grotesque prolems that confront us as a nation is NOT on the corporate agenda, unless such fixes benefit corporate power.

Our country has always lived in this tension. Right-wing ascendency for the last 40 years has finally resolved the tension in favor of absolute corporate power. Endless war is the final outcome.

Jackson finally got deposits transferred out of Biddle’s bank into state chartered banks, but not before Biddle restricted the money supply, causing a recession, which he blamed on Jackson.

Central bankers have been around and fucking this country for a couple of hundred years.