Oil Companies Support Global Warming Hoax, Not Skeptics

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
November 3, 2009

Read Full Article Here

Outgoing Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (2nd L), her husband Todd (C) look on as incoming Governor Sean Parnell (2nd R) is sworn in by Supreme Court Justice Daniel Winfree (L) during the annual Governor's Picnic July 26, 2009 at Pioneer Park in Fairbanks, Alaska. Parnell' wife Sandy held the bible for the ceremony. Craig E. Campbell was sworn in as the new Lieutenant Governor.

Last July in Fairbanks, with Todd smiling at her side and Piper sitting in her lap, Sarah Palin watched Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell take the oath to fill out her term in office as Governor of Alaska. Then she vanished. For the past four months the Forty-Ninth State has seen neither hide nor hair of the woman. No speeches at chambers of commerce luncheons. No sightings on the street. No Sarah cheering on the sideline at Wasilla Warriors girls basketball games. No Sarah sitting in the pew on Sunday worshiping at the ChangePoint and Anchorage Baptist Temple evangelical mega churches. She’s been gone. Disappeared.

It now turns out that while Alaskans were hunkering down for winter Sarah was in San Diego working for a woman named Lynn Vincent, the ghostwriter HarperCollins hired to cobble together Going Rogue: An American Life, Sarah’s first person account of her it-only-would-happen-in-America rise from small town mayor to small state governor to Republican Vice Presidential candidate to popular culture icon.

Since Tuesday when Going Rogue was released nationwide copies of the book have been flying off the shelves at Barnes & Noble in Boise and Grand Rapids and not flying off the shelves in San Francisco and Seattle.

Since I already have enough to read, I had intended to give Going Rogue a pass until I had time this weekend to motor over to the Anchorage Barnes & Noble and give Ms. Vincent’s word-smithing a skim. But on Monday I learned that I’m in the book. Not surprisingly, that piqued my interest. And then yesterday a friend lent me a copy.

I’ve now read it. Here’s the review.

I usually begin reading a book that purports to be nonfiction by reading the index. But Going Rogue doesn’t have one. So I started with the acknowledgments section at the back of the book. In the first paragraph Sarah explains to her readers: “I’m very glad this writing exercise is over. I love to write, but not about myself. I’m thankful now to have kept journals about Alaska and my friends and family ever since I was a little girl. That practice allowed an orderly compilation over the past weeks and let me summarily wrap up at least some of my life so far.”

Sarah then thanks thirty-seven people (all but four only by his or her first name so that none of the rest of us have a clue who they are) before she thanks Lynn Vincent “for her indispensable help in getting the words on paper.”

If all that is read quickly, it leaves the veneer impression that Sarah wrote her book. But if read carefully that’s not what it says. “Help in getting the words on paper?” Too coy by half.

Decide for yourself when you do your own skim at your own local Barnes & Noble. But start to finish Going Rogue reads to me like Sarah sitting on the sofa in Lynn Vincent’s condo in San Diego, school girl diaries in her lap, talking hour after hour in her you-betcha patois into a computerized tape recorder like the ones court reporters use to record depositions. Then each afternoon when Sarah went off on her jog, Ms. Vincent would begin her real workday sitting at her computer editing and cut and pasting that day’s transcript of Sarah’s ramblings into a narrative.

I can’t prove that. But someone should ask Sarah if that’s how she “wrote” Going Rogue. Lynn Vincent would be a more reliable source. But, no surprise, her contract with HarperCollins contains a non-disclosure provision. Adam Bellow, Sarah’s editor at HarperCollins, also would know. But he for sure is not telling. At least until he has too much red wine during dinner at Elaine’s some night and lets the secret slip.

The book itself is a prosaic hagiography divided into three parts. Part one is Sarah’s autobiography from her birth in Sandpoint, Idaho, to her selection by John McCain as his running mate. Part two is Sarah’s story of her life on the road during the 2008 presidential campaign. Part three is a sanguinolent settling of accounts for the torment to which she was subjected in Alaska after the election – a torment so awful that it brought the operation of the entire executive branch of the government of the State of Alaska to a gridlocked halt and left Sarah no choice but to abandon her governorship in order to earn $5 million in four months talking into Lynn Vincent’s tape recorder.

If that three-part narrative has a unifying theme, the theme is that everything – and I mean everything – that has ever gone wrong for Sarah Palin was someone else’s fault.

Sarah’s lackluster performance during her interview with Frank Murkowski when she somehow made the short-list of candidates to succeed Frank in the U.S. Senate? That was Frank and his Attorney General, my friend Gregg Renkes’s, fault. The Troopergate scandal? Walt Monegan and the Democratic members of the Alaska Senate pulled that mean-spirited prank on a blameless Sarah. The nationally televised interview with Katie Couric that branded Sarah Palin as an ignorant and uneducated laughingstock? Katie sandbagged her. The fabulously disastrous Thanksgiving television interview when Governor Palin pardoned a turkey while in the background unpardoned turkeys were having their heads shoved down a funnel and their throats slit? Sandbagged again. That time by a local TV news cameraman.

Don’t take my word for it. Thumb through Going Rogue on your own. Page after page after page. It’s always someone else’s fault.

When discussing George Herbert Walker and Barbara Bush, Richard Nixon is reported to have said that George was a nice guy. “But his wife. That woman knows how to hate.” Since Dick meant that as a compliment, he would be impressed with Sarah’s penchant for settling scores. Because scattered throughout its content Going Rogue contains an enemies list as long as the list the nation’s Thirty-Seventh President and his henchmen compiled during the run-up to Watergate.

Sarah trashes Nick Carney (the Wasilla city councilman who recruited Sarah into politics), John Stein (Sarah’s predecessor as mayor of Wasilla), Anne Kilkenny (a Wasilla resident whose viral email educated the nation to Sarah’s lackluster record as mayor), an unnamed City of Wasilla librarian, Frank Murkowski (Sarah’s predecessor as Governor of Alaska), Gregg Renkes (Frank’s Attorney General), Lyda Green (the former President of the Alaska Senate), Hollis French (the chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the Alaska Senate), Steve Schmidt (John McCain’s campaign manager), an unnamed KTUU television cameraman [Scott Jensen], Walt Monegan (Sarah’s Commissioner of Public Safety), Randy Ruedrich (the chairman of the Alaska Republican Party with whom Sarah worked at the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission), Bill Allen (the corpulent head of the oil field services company VECO, a odious scum bag whose reputation as the bag man for Big Oil in the state capitol had been a matter of common knowledge in Alaska for a generation when Sarah went with her hand out to Bill for the campaign contributions she used to launch her statewide political career), Mike Wooten (Sarah’s ex-brother-in-law), unnamed executives of the Exxon-Mobil, British Petroleum, and Conoco-Phillips oil companies, Pete Rouse (a former Alaskan who was Senator Barack Obama’s chief of staff), Rahm Emanuel (President Barack Obama’s chief of staff), Kim Elton (a former member of the Alaska Senate who is Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar’s Special Assistant for Alaska), unnamed members of the McCain campaign staff who prepped Sarah for her television debate with Joe Biden, John Bitney (Governor Palin’s liaison to the Alaska Legislature), Levi Johnston (the hockey-playing, Playgirl modeling impregnator of Bristol Palin).

That’s not the complete list. There’s no index and I’m tired of typing.

Of all the individuals on the Going Rogue enemies list, the two firsts among equals are Andrew Halcro and Andree McLeod.

Halcro is a former Republican member of the Alaska House of Representatives who ran as an independent candidate against Sarah Palin in the 2006 Alaska gubernatorial election. After the election he started a website that he used to become one of Governor Palin’s most articulate and factually well-informed critics.

It was Andrew Halcro who broke the story that Governor Palin had fired Walt Monegan, her Commissioner of Public Safety, because Walt had refused to fire Mike Wooten, Sarah’s ex-brother-in-law, from his union job as an Alaska State Trooper. That news led to the Troopergate investigation of Sarah (and Todd) Palin’s misuse of the Office of the Governor. In the Troopergate report that Sarah touts as clearing her of wrong-doing, the investigator, a former prosecutor with whom (unlike the Legislature’s investigator) Sarah cooperated, implies that during his investigation either Walt Monegan committed criminal perjury or Sarah Palin committed criminal perjury. But the Legislature had no stomach during the remainder of Sarah’s tenure as Governor to determine whether she was the felon.

In Going Rogue Sarah describes Andrew Halcro as “a wealthy, effete young chap who had taken over his father’s local Avis Rent A Car, and he starred in his own car commercial. He would go on to host a short-lived local radio show while blogging throughout the day, all of which were major steps up from a previous job as our limo driver at Todd’s cousin’s wedding.”

Andree McLeod is where I come in.

I am an attorney by trade and an historian of modest reputation by avocation. In 1987 I briefly convinced an Alaska Superior Court that it was a violation of the U.S. and Alaska Constitutions for the State of Alaska to have a campaign finance system that allows individuals who are not eligible to vote for a candidate to influence the candidate’s election by making campaign contributions. In 1998 I came within one vote of convincing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to uphold the constitutionality of an amendment to the Oregon Constitution that would have mandated a similar result. Over the years since, I have frequently represented individuals for a reduced fee or no fee in cases in which I think the public policy benefits merit my effort.

For that reason, I was not surprised in September 2008 when a friend called to ask if I would have a cup of coffee with a woman named Andree McLeod. By that date, I had been active in Alaska’s (small state) political life for thirty years. But my answer to that query was, “Who’s Andree McLeod?” But I went for coffee and discovered that Andree McLeod is a quite amazing woman.

Short, smart, politically committed, and tenaciously energetic, Andree McLeod is a Republican political activist of Armenian heritage who had once been a personal friend of Sarah Palin’s, who Sarah had endorsed when Andree ran in the Republican primary for a seat in the Alaska House of Representatives.

When I went to her home in east Anchorage to have my cup of coffee I found Andree sitting at her dining room table surrounded by two-foot-high stacks of paper print-outs of several thousand emails that the Office of the Governor had given to her in July in response to a request she had filed in June pursuant to the Alaska Public Records Act. The request had asked for emails that had been sent to or received by employees of the Office of the Governor who Andree suspected had been engaging in partisan – i.e., Alaska Republican Party – political activities during their public employee workdays. Andree submitted her public records request three months before anyone other than those of us in Alaska had ever heard of Sarah Palin.

The reason I had been invited to meet with Andree was that one of the things she had discovered by reading the emails was that when Governor Palin assumed office she had set up a private back-channel email system so that she and her senior staff could communicate with each other about state business without the content of their communications being “captured” by State of Alaska computer servers, and hence being available for public inspection pursuant to the Alaska Public Records Act. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other national media would later report that story.

After researching the Alaska Public Records Act I concluded that, for reasons not worth detailing here, the private back-channel email system that Sarah had created was a violation of the Alaska Public Records Act. As a consequence, representing Andree McLeod, on October 1, 2008 I filed a lawsuit against Governor Palin in the Alaska Superior Court, the purpose of which is to obtain an order prohibiting state officials from using private email accounts to conduct state business.

The month after the McCain-Palin ticket lost the presidential election, again representing Andree McLeod, on December 8, 2008 I filed a second lawsuit against Governor Palin when a further review of the emails that Andree had been given revealed that the Office of the Governor had given to Todd Palin, a private citizen who was an employee of British Petroleum, copies of emails that it was withholding from public inspection on the ground of deliberative process privilege.

That litigation is ongoing. The legal questions of first impression that they present for decision are important enough that my expectation is that both lawsuits will end up in the Alaska Supreme Court.

What does any of that have to do with me and Going Rogue?

Prior to me agreeing to represent her in the two lawsuits above-described, Andree McLeod had begun filing what became a series of complaints against Sarah Palin with the State Personnel Board that alleged ethical transgressions unrelated to the lawsuits. Other Alaskans did the same thing. According to Going Rogue, those ethics complaints have driven Sarah Palin flat-out full-crank nuts.

After trashing Andree McLeod at page 354 of Going Rogue Lynn Vincent aka Sarah Palin moves on to me. Here’s what Lynn and Sarah say:

We always suspected that someone was funding and directing
Andree’s efforts. During the spring of 2009, she was actually still
begging my administration for a job and led others to believe she
hadn’t worked for a couple of years. Yet somehow she had enough
time or money to turn harassment of the governor’s office into a
full-time vocation. Over time, the wording of her ethics complaints
became more and more sophisticated, and we later found out why:
prominent liberal attorney Don Mitchell was advising her. As early as September 2008, weeks before the presidential election, Mitchell had already detailed the ethics attack strategy in an article in the Huffington Post. Later he sat with Andree as her counsel at one of her hearings.

I wish my late mother was still alive. Because I know how proud she would be that I made the Going Rogue enemies list and have been mentioned by name in a book whose first printing is 1.5 million copies. (Because he is not named, the mother of the KTUU cameraman who posed Sarah in front of the turkeys can take no such pride.)

But my number is listed in the Anchorage telephone book. If that failed, Lynn and Sarah could have googled “Donald Craig Mitchell.” And if that had failed, since Meg Stapleton, the increasingly strange combination of Sancho Panza and Odd Job who works for Sarah, and I have mutual friends, Meg could have found me quite easily.

Had Lynn Vincent, Sarah, or Meg called me before Lynn had finished writing Going Rogue, I would have told her that in a single paragraph Lynn/Sarah got almost every one of their facts about me, other than that I am an attorney, wrong.

While I probably once was, I haven’t been a “prominent” attorney in Alaska in years. While I am a registered Democrat, my personal politics are hardly “liberal.” To the extent anyone cares, I am a social libertarian who is an Eisenhower era deficit hawk who agrees with Teddy and Frank Roosevelt that the principal responsibility of government is to save capitalism from itself. And while during the presidential campaign several of my ‘Governor Girl Reports‘ were posted by individuals other than me on the Huffington Post and Atlantic Monthly web sites, none of those musings “detailed an ethics attack strategy.”

But most importantly, not only have I never advised Andree regarding her ethics complaints, to the best of my recollection I have never read an Andree McLeod ethics complaint. Had Lynn, Sarah, or Meg called me, I also would have told them that neither Andree McLeod nor I have been paid a nickel by anyone for anything (although if I win either of my lawsuits I intend to send the Office of the Governor a bill for my attorneys fee, which under Alaska law I am permitted to do).

It is true, however, that, as Going Rogue reports, because she asked me to, I did accompany Andree to her interview with Tim Petumenos, the former prosecutor the State Personnel Board hired to investigate both the complaint Sarah filed against herself regarding the Troopergate affair and a complaint Andree filed against Sarah and Frank Bailey, Sarah’s Director of Boards and Commissions, for violating state civil service rules in order to give one of Sarah’s campaign supporters a job for which he was not qualified. Again to the best of my recollection, I have never read either complaint. And if he is asked, I think Tim will say that during his interview with Andree I pretty much just sat there.

It also is worth mentioning that the State Personnel Board found the ethics complaint that Andree McLeod filed against Frank Bailey meritorious.

Why should anyone care about any of that? The reason they should care is that if Lynn Vincent aka Sarah Palin got as many of the facts, asserted and implied, about me in Going Rogue as wrong as she did, what does that say about the validity of the many other, much more important, “facts” in Sarah’s book?

It’s fully fine by me that billions of federal tax dollars are being spent annually to invent an AIDS vaccine. But it is just as important to someday invent a Pinocchio serum.

If the world had one, before a faux celebrity like Sarah Palin writes a book, doctors from the CDC could roll up the celebrity’s sleeve and inject him or her with a jolt of the serum. And a serum also would have other important uses.

For example, on page 214 of Going Rogue Lynn Vincent reports that when the McCain campaign vetted Sarah, she confessed to Steve Schmidt, the manager of the campaign, that “the one skeleton I’d kept hidden in my closet” (my emphasis) was that she had gotten a D in a college course.

Had Sarah been shot up with Pinocchio serum prior to the vetting, the immediate growth of the length of her nose would have tipped off Schmidt that the more truthful answer to the one skeleton in the closet question would have been, as The National Enquirer subsequently reported with no push back from Team Sarah, “cuckolding Todd when he was working on the North Slope by hooking up with Brad Hanson, Todd’s business partner in the Polaris snow machine sales business Brad and Todd owned in Wasilla.”

Once perfected, Pinocchio serum also would be useful to find out whether Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell really supports health care reform and, before the United States sends more troops there, whether Hamid Karsai really is committed to rooting out corruption in Afghanistan. But before a Pinocchio serum can be widely used, the FDA would need to conduct a clinical trial. Shooting up Sarah while she’s still on her book tour would be a good first test of the potion’s efficacy.

Donald Craig Mitchell
The Huffington Post

The Blackberry addict & former Palin aide John Bitney, host Shannyn Moore, the town crank Anne Kilkenny, and the effete young chap Andrew Halcro. Courtesy of Moore Up North

It has already been established and is well documented that former Alaska Governor and losing VP Candidate Sarah Palin has a very hard time telling the truth in her book Going Rogue.

While she’s running around the country lapping up the adoration of the teabagger crowd, many in Alaska are crawling out from under the bus, while many are still under the wheels.

Voices from the Flats – Palin Critic’s Attorney on Being “Named” in Going Rogue:

Sarah trashes Nick Carney (the Wasilla city councilman who recruited Sarah into politics), John Stein (Sarah’s predecessor as mayor of Wasilla), Anne Kilkenny (a Wasilla resident whose viral email educated the nation to Sarah’s lackluster record as mayor), an unnamed City of Wasilla librarian, Frank Murkowski (Sarah’s predecessor as Governor of Alaska), Gregg Renkes (Frank’s Attorney General), Lyda Green (the former President of the Alaska Senate), Hollis French (the chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the Alaska Senate), Steve Schmidt (John McCain’s campaign manager), an unnamed KTUU television cameraman, Walt Monegan (Sarah’s Commissioner of Public Safety), Randy Ruedrich (the chairman of the Alaska Republican Party with whom Sarah worked at the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission), Bill Allen (the corpulent head of the oil field services company VECO, a odious scum bag whose reputation as the bag man for Big Oil in the state capitol had been a matter of common knowledge in Alaska for a generation when Sarah went with her hand out to Bill for the campaign contributions she used to launch her statewide political career), Mike Wooten (Sarah’s ex-brother-in-law), unnamed executives of the Exxon-Mobil, British Petroleum, and Conoco-Phillips oil companies, Pete Rouse (a former Alaskan who was Senator Barack Obama’s chief of staff), Rahm Emanuel (President Barack Obama’s chief of staff), Kim Elton (a former member of the Alaska Senate who is Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar’s Special Assistant for Alaska), unnamed members of the McCain campaign staff who prepped Sarah for her television debate with Joe Biden, John Bitney (Governor Palin’s liaison to the Alaska Legislature), Levi Johnston (the hockey-playing, Playgirl modeling impregnator of Bristol Palin).

That’s not the complete list. There’s no index and I’m tired of typing.

Of all the individuals on the Going Rogue enemies list, the two firsts among equals are Andrew Halcro and Andree McLeod.

Halcro is a former Republican member of the Alaska House of Representatives who ran as an independent candidate against Sarah Palin in the 2006 Alaska gubernatorial election. After the election he started a website that he used to become one of Governor Palin’s most articulate and factually well-informed critics.

It was Andrew Halcro who broke the story that Governor Palin had fired Walt Monegan, her Commissioner of Public Safety, because Walt had refused to fire Mike Wooten, Sarah’s ex-brother-in-law, from his union job as an Alaska State Trooper. That news led to the Troopergate investigation of Sarah (and Todd) Palin’s misuse of the Office of the Governor. In the Troopergate report that Sarah touts as clearing her of wrong-doing, the investigator, a former prosecutor with whom (unlike the Legislature’s investigator) Sarah cooperated, implies that during his investigation either Walt Monegan committed criminal perjury or Sarah Palin committed criminal perjury. But the Legislature had no stomach during the remainder of Sarah’s tenure as Governor to determine whether she was the felon.

In Going Rogue Sarah describes Andrew Halcro as “a wealthy, effete young chap who had taken over his father’s local Avis Rent A Car, and he starred in his own car commercial. He would go on to host a short-lived local radio show while blogging throughout the day, all of which were major steps up from a previous job as our limo driver at Todd’s cousin’s wedding.”

Andree McLeod is where I come in.

Short, smart, politically committed, and tenaciously energetic, Andree McLeod is a Republican political activist of Armenian heritage who had once been a personal friend of Sarah Palin’s, who Sarah had endorsed when Andree ran in the Republican primary for a seat in the Alaska House of Representatives.

When I went to her home in east Anchorage to have my cup of coffee I found Andree sitting at her dining room table surrounded by two-foot-high stacks of paper print-outs of several thousand emails that the Office of the Governor had given to her in July in response to a request she had filed in June pursuant to the Alaska Public Records Act. The request had asked for emails that had been sent to or received by employees of the Office of the Governor who Andree suspected had been engaging in partisan – i.e., Alaska Republican Party – political activities during their public employee workdays. Andree submitted her public records request three months before anyone other than those of us in Alaska had ever heard of Sarah Palin.

The reason I had been invited to meet with Andree was that one of the things she had discovered by reading the emails was that when Governor Palin assumed office she had set up a private back-channel email system so that she and her senior staff could communicate with each other about state business without the content of their communications being “captured” by State of Alaska computer servers, and hence being available for public inspection pursuant to the Alaska Public Records Act. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other national media would later report that story. To read more visit Alaskan site The Mudflats.

The month after the McCain-Palin ticket lost the presidential election, again representing Andree McLeod, on December 8, 2008 I filed a second lawsuit against Governor Palin when a further review of the emails that Andree had been given revealed that the Office of the Governor had given to Todd Palin, a private citizen who was an employee of British Petroleum, copies of emails that it was withholding from public inspection on the ground of deliberative process privilege.

That litigation is ongoing. The legal questions of first impression that they present for decision are important enough that my expectation is that both lawsuits will end up in the Alaska Supreme Court.

What does any of that have to do with me and Going Rogue?

Prior to me agreeing to represent her in the two lawsuits above-described, Andree McLeod had begun filing what became a series of complaints against Sarah Palin with the State Personnel Board that alleged ethical transgressions unrelated to the lawsuits. Other Alaskans did the same thing. According to Going Rogue, those ethics complaints have driven Sarah Palin flat-out full-crank nuts.

After trashing Andree McLeod at page 354 of Going Rogue Lynn Vincent aka Sarah Palin moves on to me. Here’s what Lynn and Sarah say:
We always suspected that someone was funding and directing Andree’s efforts. During the spring of 2009, she was actually still begging my administration for a job and led others to believe she hadn’t worked for a couple of years. Yet somehow she had enough time or money to turn harassment of the governor’s office into a full-time vocation. Over time, the wording of her ethics complaints became more and more sophisticated, and we later found out why: prominent liberal attorney Don Mitchell was advising her. As early as September 2008, weeks before the presidential election, Mitchell had already detailed the ethics attack strategy in an article in the Huffington Post. Later he sat with Andree as her counsel at one of her hearings.

I wish my late mother was still alive. Because I know how proud she would be that I made the Going Rogue enemies list and have been mentioned by name in a book whose first printing is 1.5 million copies. (Because he is not named, the mother of the KTUU cameraman who posed Sarah in front of the turkeys can take no such pride.)

But my number is listed in the Anchorage telephone book. If that failed, Lynn and Sarah could have googled “Donald Craig Mitchell.” And if that had failed, since Meg Stapleton, the increasingly strange combination of Sancho Panza and Odd Job who works for Sarah, and I have mutual friends, Meg could have found me quite easily.

Had Lynn Vincent, Sarah, or Meg called me before Lynn had finished writing Going Rogue, I would have told her that in a single paragraph Lynn/Sarah got almost every one of their facts about me, other than that I am an attorney, wrong.

While I probably once was, I haven’t been a “prominent” attorney in Alaska in years. While I am a registered Democrat, my personal politics are hardly “liberal.” To the extent anyone cares, I am a social libertarian who is an Eisenhower era deficit hawk who agrees with Teddy and Frank Roosevelt that the principal responsibility of government is to save capitalism from itself. And while during the presidential campaign several of my ‘Governor Girl Reports’ were posted by individuals other than me on the Huffington Post and Atlantic Monthly web sites, none of those musings “detailed an ethics attack strategy.”

But most importantly, not only have I never advised Andree regarding her ethics complaints, to the best of my recollection I have never read an Andree McLeod ethics complaint. Had Lynn, Sarah, or Meg called me, I also would have told them that neither Andree McLeod nor I have been paid a nickel by anyone for anything (although if I win either of my lawsuits I intend to send the Office of the Governor a bill for my attorneys fee, which under Alaska law I am permitted to do).

It is true, however, that, as Going Rogue reports, because she asked me to, I did accompany Andree to her interview with Tim Petumenos, the former prosecutor the State Personnel Board hired to investigate both the complaint Sarah filed against herself regarding the Troopergate affair and a complaint Andree filed against Sarah and Frank Bailey, Sarah’s Director of Boards and Commissions, for violating state civil service rules in order to give one of Sarah’s campaign supporters a job for which he was not qualified. Again to the best of my recollection, I have never read either complaint. And if he is asked, I think Tim will say that during his interview with Andree I pretty much just sat there.

It also is worth mentioning that the State Personnel Board found the ethics complaint that Andree McLeod filed against Frank Bailey meritorious.

Why should anyone care about any of that? The reason they should care is that if Lynn Vincent aka Sarah Palin got as many of the facts, asserted and implied, about me in Going Rogue as wrong as she did, what does that say about the validity of the many other, much more important, “facts” in Sarah’s book?

It’s fully fine by me that billions of federal tax dollars are being spent annually to invent an AIDS vaccine. But it is just as important to someday invent a Pinocchio serum.

If the world had one, before a faux celebrity like Sarah Palin writes a book, doctors from the CDC could roll up the celebrity’s sleeve and inject him or her with a jolt of the serum. And a serum also would have other important uses.

For example, on page 214 of Going Rogue Lynn Vincent reports that when the McCain campaign vetted Sarah, she confessed to Steve Schmidt, the manager of the campaign, that “the one skeleton I’d kept hidden in my closet” (my emphasis) was that she had gotten a D in a college course.

Had Sarah been shot up with Pinocchio serum prior to the vetting, the immediate growth of the length of her nose would have tipped off Schmidt that the more truthful answer to the one skeleton in the closet question would have been, as The National Enquirer subsequently reported with no push back from Team Sarah, “cuckolding Todd when he was working on the North Slope by hooking up with Brad Hanson, Todd’s business partner in the Polaris snow machine sales business Brad and Todd owned in Wasilla.”

The Anchorage Daily News Reports today that one former Palin aide isn’t too happy about being referred to as a Blackberry Video Game Junkie who can’t seem to keep food off of his tie.

Portrayal in Palin book irritates former aide:

Former Gov. Sarah Palin’s book, “Going Rogue,” blames her first legislative director for moves early in her term that helped poison her relationship with state lawmakers. But the ex-aide, John Bitney, calls Palin’s account a fabrication and said he wishes his former boss would leave him alone.

“I’m just pilloried right and left and turned into the big bad wolf here for stuff I didn’t do,” said Bitney, who is now an aide to Valdez Republican Rep. John Harris. “It’s like I’m this fictional character that she’s decided to make me out to be this sort of incompetent slob.”

Palin’s lawyer, Tom Van Flein, responded in an e-mail that Bitney and others have been talking about “their perceptions of, and distortions about” Palin for more than a year, since after she was chosen as Sen. John McCain’s vice presidential running mate.

” ‘Going Rogue’ is Sarah Palin’s book to set the record straight. It is her right to speak about the events that occurred in her administration and neither Mr. Bitney nor anyone else has the right to stifle that speech,” Van Flein said. “The statements in ‘Going Rogue’ speak for themselves, and it is Sarah Palin’s turn to get the truth out there after a year of misrepresentations, half-truths and dissembling by her critics.”

Palin’s writing about Bitney is her most detailed description yet of incidents that helped shape her relationship with legislators. Her bad blood with top legislators of both parties began not long after she took office. By last spring, relationships with many lawmakers from both parties had soured to the point that feuds with the governor overshadowed much of the other legislative business.

Bitney joins a list of people slammed in the book who are calling it fiction, including McCain’s former campaign manager, Steve Schmidt. Bitney, though, has a far deeper relationship with Palin than the others. He was a high school classmate of Palin’s from Wasilla who played a key role as an adviser in her successful 2006 campaign for governor.

Palin’s dealings with Bitney are described on several pages of her memoir, although he is never named and there are no details of his work on her 2006 campaign. Palin refers to him as “my first legislative director” and he comes in for some of the harshest criticism of anyone in the book. That includes observations on his personal grooming, such as, “He turned out to be a BlackBerry games addict who couldn’t seem to keep his lunch off his tie.” Later, in describing one encounter to discuss the budget, Palin writes, “The fact that his shirt was buttoned one button off and his shirt tail was poking through his open fly didn’t exactly inspire confidence.” But Palin’s larger point is that Bitney bungled her relationship with legislators.

Bitney is now swinging back hard at Palin, agreeing to appear over the weekend on a television show hosted by one of the former governor’s most vocal critics in Alaska, blogger Shannyn Moore. Bitney was on a panel of others slammed in “Going Rogue” that included Palin nemesis Andrew Halcro and Anne Kilkenney, who wrote a long e-mail critical of Palin’s leadership in Wasilla that was forwarded around the country during the presidential campaign last year.

Moore asked Bitney if Palin is sane. Bitney’s response: “Is a sociopath sane?”

‘ADULT IN THE HOUSE’
One turning point between Palin and Alaska lawmakers came in 2007 after her first legislative session. Legislators complained that Palin blindsided them with the scope of her budget vetoes and she rubbed it in by saying there had to be an “adult in the house.” Legislators saw it as a slap in the face and the remark was not forgotten.

Palin writes that it was Bitney who advised her to tell lawmakers that they were in need of adult supervision. In fact, she writes, he told her, “Trust me, I know this stuff, they want to hear it.”

Palin writes that she followed his advice and had a “come-to-Jesus meeting” with legislators. But, as it turned out, that’s not what they wanted to hear. She writes that “when the fallout began after that meeting, I looked at the legislative director. He looked at the ground and shrugged as if to say ‘Wasn’t me.’ “

Bitney said in an interview that he joked with Palin in her office about how there needs to be an adult in the room when it comes to the state budget, but he said he never advised the then-governor to say it to anyone. He said Palin then made the comment in an interview with the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner editorial board — not in a “come-to-Jesus” meeting with legislators as she recounts in her book.

Bitney left the governor’s office in July 2007 in what Palin’s spokeswoman initially said was an “amicable” termination in which it was mutually agreed that he would leave his post for personal reasons. When reporters raised questions about it during the presidential campaign, the reason given by Palin’s office was “poor job performance.”

Bitney has told reporters he was fired after Palin was informed he was having an affair with the wife of a friend of Palin and her husband, Todd. Bitney, who has since married the woman, has said he was not forthcoming with Palin about it and understands why he had to go.

Palin’s only reference to that in her book is that “later we learned the legislative director had been too busy with his personal affairs to attend to much state business.”

‘LEAVE ME ALONE’
Bitney has influential defenders in the Legislature, including Sitka Republican Sen. Bert Stedman, who has been critical of Palin and said he won’t read her book because she is “entertainment and not news.” Stedman said Bitney is qualified and that he did a good job dealing with the Legislature for Palin. He said he told Bitney at one point to let him know if he was ever looking for a job.

Palin writes that she told Bitney to send a letter to legislators about what sort of spending she would approve but that he didn’t do it. She said he indicated lawmakers were fine with budget vetoes that were coming but it became clear otherwise when they howled about being blindsided. “It soon became obvious just how little the legislative director had done to inform the legislature this was coming,” she writes.

Bitney said it was another staffer in the governor’s office, not him, who was requested to send the letter. The letter asked legislators for suggestions on which of their projects to cut, Bitney said, and not surprisingly they did not rush to answer Palin.

Bitney said he did meet with the four co-chairs of the state House and Senate finance committees to tell them about the coming vetoes, and reported back to Palin that three of them felt that was her prerogative and only one became angry.

But Palin staffers had only identified about $100 million worth of cuts by that point, about half of the final total. Bitney said the following day was when his “troubles” with Palin began. He said he was pulled from the governor’s budget work, and fired soon after. In the meantime, he said, Palin staffers kept cutting beyond what he had told legislators but he didn’t have authority to talk to them about it.

Palin uses Bitney in the book to illustrate a point about government. Bitney had years of experience as a legislative staffer and lobbyist before joining her team. “So much for my idea that I needed to hire an ‘insider.’ Lesson learned,” she writes.

Bitney said he tried to be fair to Palin when national media kept “crawling up my backside” over the past year to interview him about her. But the book is too much, he said.

“I’ve had it. Enough. Just enough; leave me alone,” he said.

The Wealth Effet Young Chap Andrew Halcro’s take on his mention in Going Rogue.
Monday Comment: Digging Two Graves November 16, 2009:

On Friday after they received an advance copy of Sarah Palin’s new book, the Associated Press called me to get a response from the two hundred plus words that Alaska’s former 1/2 term governor dedicated to me.

My favorite passage as read to me by Rachel D’Oro at the AP was when Palin referred to me as an “effete chap.”

An effete chap? Who am I, Nick Carraway in the Great Gatsby?

And by the way, when did Palin start using 17th century Latin in her dialogue?

According to the brief excerpts I’ve heard, the book seems like it’s less about her and more about blaming everybody around her for all of her short comings. From her lack of intelligence to the word getting out about her pregnant daughter, no matter what the problem or criticism, it’s always somebody elses fault and never hers.

This in and of itself is rich in irony.

After all, how many real rogues complain about being hemmed in by the actions of others?

Isn’t that the antithesis of a rogue?

However, once the book is on the street beginning Tuesday, those throughout Palin’s 413 page pity party that suffer the wild blows of her imagination will come forward with guns blazing to refute the revisionist history Palin has penned.

From the brief passages that Palin has written about me in her book, the terms unmitigated lies, narcissistic delusions and libel came to mind first.

Obviously she never learned the timely Confucius warning:

“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”

Beginning Tuesday…the people whom Palin has attacked in her book will start reaching for their own shovels.

After perusing the articles on Andrew’s site I would feel confident in my assessment of what really bugs Sarah about Andrew…………….he’s smart, does his homework, works hard and cares about Alaska.

Alaskan Radio Host Shannyn Moore recently begin filming her new show Moore Up Northabout political and state issues. Moore Up North was taped before a live audience at Bernie’s Bungalow Lounge in Anchorage. Last weeks guests included: Rick Steiner, Anne Kilkenny, Andrew Halcro and John Bitney. As expected they discussed the Sarah Palin they know.

View the rest of the segments Moore Up North here.

by Jim Naughton, for The Harvard Law School Forum at Harvard Law School, November 18, 2009.

Robert Monks, a legendary shareholder activist and founder of ISS (which was later acquired by RiskMetrics) and The Corporate Library, recently gave a talk as part of the Shareholder Activism course here at Harvard Law School about the past, the present, and the future of shareholder activism.

Mr. Monks began his talk by emphasizing the importance of shareholders. He noted that in the absence of having an informed, motivated and powerful counter force to management, the corporation will always have the problem of autocrat who is answerable to no-one. The capital markets generate tremendous wealth. The key issue is who is entitled to this wealth…(continue reading)

Stories like this drive me crazy.

Quoting the Guardian Newspaper:

“Little Teodoro, as President Teodoro Obiang Nguema’s son is known at home, appears to spend as little time as possible fulfilling his duties as the minister of agriculture and forestry in the west African state. Instead he flits between South Africa, France and the US, pursuing business ventures such as a failed rap label while acquiring property and a fleet of Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Bentleys – all made possible by the discovery of oil in Equatorial Guinea’s waters a decade ago.”

further ahead…..

“President Obiang, who has ruled since seizing power in 1979, has decreed that the management of his country’s $3bn a year in oil revenues is a state secret.”

According to the CIA factbook:

Per capita GDP of Equatorial Guinea (PPP) is 37,300. Obiang (the elder) spends a paltry 0.6% of his country’s GDP on education. Almost two thirds of the country’s 633,400 people live below the poverty line. Meanwhile, Obiang – whose kleptocratic leadership has plagued Equatorians since he staged a coup against his own uncle (and then executed him) in 1979 – managed to win a seven year term in 2002 with over 97% of the vote. The next elections will be held in 2010.

TOTAL INSANITY.

John Mack snuggling with his pump

Inside the comfortable landscape of Rock Creek Golf Club in Fairhope, Alabama, life is undoubtedly serene, a far cry from the bustling city of Houston across the Gulf where Doug Terreson, a former Morgan Stanley executive, used to reside. Less than a mile and a half from Terreson’s relocated home on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, the price of regular gasoline at the local BP hovers around $4 per gallon––a constant reminder of the burden that Wall Street and Congress created to bolster their earnings and pad their coffers.

For Terreson––at first an unwitting, then ultimately unwilling accomplice––it is an experience he seems anxious to forget. Perhaps that’s why the high-level investment company executive has packed it all in, far away from the corner offices that contributed to the current implosion on Wall Street.

But while it is clear that the American economy is in deep trouble, there’s one part of the puzzle that still lies in a place as murky as the water surrounding the refineries in the Gulf of Mexico: the Wall Street-oil connection.

We’re all paying the price. It now costs just as much in America for a gallon of milk as it does for a gallon of gas. There are now 9.4 million Americans out of work. High fuel prices have all but sacked the airline and auto industries. Pressures on food production created by fuel subsidies and climbing oil prices may mean that the number of malnourished people worldwide could climb to 1.2 billion by 2025. You don’t have to be lectured on how tough times are.

In case you’re feeling sorry for yourself, or the world, consider the plight of Doug Terreson’s former boss, John Mack. His company had to artificially jack-up oil prices to record levels just to balance out its financial woes. To Mack, it must seem like just yesterday that he received a $40 million bonus as chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley-the largest ever given on Wall Street at the time.

But that was at the end of 2006, a veritable lifetime ago in the financial world, and things are much, much different now. Continued fallout from the credit crisis in the U.S. has forced Morgan into a corner and Chairman Mack against a wall. It could be worse. He could have run Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns.

Luckily, John Mack is an oil man. In every sense of the word. How so, you say? Under John Mack, Morgan Stanley has amassed a formidable group of companies involved in every aspect of oil, from refineries to home heating oil. Mack has thus far been able to navigate through a storm that has brought three of the biggest American investment banks to their knees. And the whole world picked up the tab. By exploiting regulatory loopholes and throwing caution and conscience to the wind, Morgan Stanley, along with Goldman Sachs, has artificially thrust oil prices to record levels.

They don’t call him “Mack the Knife” for nothing.

There Will Be Blood

As one of the greatest economic disasters in modern history is unfolding before our eyes, hidden deep within is a shocking scenario that spans 16 years and three presidents and has left millions of starving and poverty-stricken people in its wake. The architects of the scheme are some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world. Their names read like a Who’s Who of the financial sector and the American government: Clinton. Mack. Gramm. Paulson. Bush. All are deeply involved in this scandal, which history surely will view as one of the most impactful on the nation and the world economy.

Economists and theorists have already named the economic period that is ending as of this writing. It is being referred to as the era of cheap oil, a time when multinational companies thrived on the global market as never before. Things are changing now: Oil prices remain high and the cost of doing business––in every industry-continues to rise. While it may be true that oil will never be cheap again, inconsistencies abound as to why.

Prior to the turn of the millennium, there were a few givens that had an effect on the cost of oil and energy in the world-mainly war, weather, supply and demand. The latest Russian aggression in Georgia, hurricanes in the Gulf, and the spectacular display at the Beijing Olympics that placed China on the world stage would normally have put prices through the roof.

If nothing else, China’s grand coming-out party exhibited the largesse of the Chinese economy and population. This alone should have caused a spike in oil prices. Instead, they have fallen from their stunning highs during the summer. This counterintuitive behavior in the market indicates that a significant portion of oil prices is determined by financial speculation and not just traditional forces of supply and demand.

Still, oil prices are outrageously high compared to just a few years ago, and are a topic of conversation in every American household. No one is escaping the impact of high prices at the pump or the supermarket. But we have been spoon-fed lies about demand from China and India and are expected to simply go along with the madness.

But not everyone is fooled. As the world seeks to shield itself against the crushing economic blow delivered by the skyrocketing cost of energy, many are beginning to take note of the roots of the crisis and point fingers at those responsible for the economic mess that we’re in.

In stark opposition to the oil crisis of the 1970s that left Washington in a state of panic and Americans lined up at the gas pumps, the seeds of the current condition may well have been planted not in the Middle East by the OPEC nations, but right here at home, by the very lawmakers now scrambling to undo what they set in motion.

One of the central villains in the story has become an all-too-familiar symbol of corporate malfeasance. The ghost of Enron, the defunct Texas-based energy company and its now-deceased former president, Kenneth Lay, still haunts the market today. Most are familiar with how Enron preyed on financial loopholes in the marketplace to fabricate a phantom energy market and create false gains on its balance sheet throughout the 1990s.

Enron’s grip on the energy market created spastic and turbulent movement in the marketplace resulting in events like the rolling blackouts in 2000 in California. By December 2001, when everything was unraveled, Enron was out of business, its accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, was no more and Washington lawmakers issued a slew of promises to change the regulatory environment.

Devils In The Details

During the final months of Bush 41’s White House in 1992, Wendy Lee Gramm, wife of Phil Gramm, who was then the Republican senator from Texas, was the head of the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Wendy Gramm is an unabashed free-market advocate once described in 1999 by The Wall Street Journal as the “Margaret Thatcher of financial regulation.” She now sits as a distinguished senior scholar of the conservative think tank Mercatus Center at George Mason University, in Virginia. Mercatus is a policy center on Capitol Hill that boasts board members such as Ed Meese-a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal as attorney general under President Ronald Reagan-and Charles Koch, of Koch Industries, who has been investigated for stealing oil from federal property and tribal Indian lands, indicted for environmental crimes and fined $30 million by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for numerous spills throughout the United States.

The CFTC oversees the commodities market and applies the regulations set forth under the 1936 Commodities Exchange Act (CEA), a measure enacted by Congress to prevent another collapse on the scale of the 1929 crash. One of Wendy Gramm’s final acts as chairwoman in January 1993 was to create an exemption that allowed Enron to trade energy futures contracts and essentially hide these trades from the CFTC itself; an energy futures contract is an agreement to deliver energy commodities such as oil or natural gas at a set price in the future.

Gramm left the CFTC, and five weeks after creating this exemption, she became a board member of-you guessed it-Enron. In return for her work deregulating the market for Enron to exploit, she racked up millions as an Enron board member prior to the company’s collapse.

Wendy and Phil Gramm were just getting warmed up.

Under the cloak of darkness at the end of President Bill Clinton’s second term and the waning days of the 106th Congress, it was then-Sen. Phil Gramm’s turn to dust off a bill, now commonly referred to as the “Enron loophole,” and attach it to an 11,000-page appropriations bill on December 15, 2000. The bill had previously died on the House floor, but Gramm resurrected it, found a new sponsor, became a co-sponsor, changed the bill number and turned it into an amendment. That’s a lot of work for one little loophole.

As a rider to a much larger bill, the Commodities Futures Modernization Act was no longer subject to the normal vetting process in Congress that a stand-alone bill would receive. Lawmakers, undoubtedly feeling the pressure of the holidays and lacking the time to thoroughly review the voluminous document, quickly approved the bill for the president’s signature.

On December 21, 2000, on a cold and blustery Washington evening, the bill with the Enron loophole rider was signed by President Clinton. Gramm’s amendment came to life and deregulated all energy futures trading. For Lay and Enron, the rest is history. But it would take another six years, another President Bush and a new Congress to open the floodgates of rampant speculation and really give it legs.

Phil Gramm? Does he sound familiar? Well, you might recall that he has been Sen. John McCain’s top economic adviser. You know, the one who called America “a nation of whiners.”

Commodities Explained

The easiest way to think about commodities is that they are things-physical things that can be measured in size, quantity or volume. Fruit. Oil. Grains. Metals. Currency. All these have unique characteristics and trade against one another on commodities exchanges throughout the world. For example, one barrel of oil might equal three bushels of corn, which may equal six bushels of wheat, and so on.

It is a complicated system that’s not for the faint of heart. Only a select few traders on Wall Street have the acumen and desire to deal in this sector, an exchange that had been efficiently regulated by the CEA since 1936. In an interview with the Press, Michael Greenberger, an outspoken critic and former employee of the CFTC, described these as “backwater markets,” but ones that recently have become “as important to understand and regulate as the securities and debt markets are.”

Commodities traders were highly specialized in their fields and their discipline was so narrow that it was largely misunderstood. Because it represented such a small portion of the vast economic market of debt and equities, it existed in the shadows of the global marketplace.

An important aspect to the commodities market is that there has always been a ceiling to the transactions and every investment made in the United States, for example, must be overseen by the CFTC. This market cap and theory of transparency kept the commodities market in relative obscurity against its much bigger counterparts, the stock market and the bond market.

But in January 2006, the CFTC, under President George W. Bush’s administration, would upend the regulatory practices held in place since the ’30s and create a virtual frenzy by recognizing a new commodities exchange-ICE Futures-that had been formed in 2001, primarily by investment banks and oil companies.

On May 20 of this year, Michael Masters, the managing member of Masters Capital Management LLC, a hedge fund that invests in private equity, testified before the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. His testimony is now widely quoted by the antispeculation critics who decry the lack of oversight created by the Enron loophole.

“Commodities futures markets are much smaller than the capital markets, so multibillion-dollar allocations to commodities markets will have a far greater impact on prices,” Masters stated.

Essentially, introducing investment banks and hedge funds that have deep pockets and no one looking over their shoulders has the singular ability to move the entire market. It’s like allowing professional athletes to compete in the Olympics. It’s what Masters referred to as “demand shock.”

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs: the mechanics behind high oil prices

Two primary tools have restrained zealous speculators in the commodities markets since the CEA’s adoption-transparency and position limits. The transparency came from federally regulated markets like the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), which tracks and oversees the transactions of commodities. Position limits were enacted under the CEA to keep any one investor, or group of investors, from overwhelming the exchange and flooding it with money.

The Enron loophole essentially permitted the trading of energy futures on over-the-counter markets, thereby allowing a new set of investors-hedge funds and investment banks-to trade energy futures. But the U.S. exchanges still saw relatively little activity as compared to their European counterparts, where the oversight was far more lax.

Because commodities trade in real time and U.S.-based companies have the most money to invest, the investment banks and hedge funds were still slow to drive great sums of capital into the market. What they needed to really make this thing soar was the ability to invest serious capital within the United States, like their counterparts could on the London Exchange, for example.

In 2000, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and British Petroleum became the primary founders of a little-known exchange based in Atlanta, Ga., known as the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). A year later, it purchased the London-based International Petroleum Exchange (IPE), and was renamed ICE Futures. It was an acquisition that was fairly straightforward until 2006, when the CFTC-seemingly out of nowhere-officially recognized the ICE as a foreign-based exchange because it had purchased the IPE.

Even though the ICE is based in Atlanta, backed by U.S. banks and now traded publicly on the New York Stock Exchange, the CFTC somehow decided to treat it as if it were based in London and thereby no longer subject to federal trading regulations. Now the investment banks could trade every type of commodity, especially crude oil, without any spending limits or federal oversight. Greenberger calls it one of Wall Street’s “most successful ventures,” because the ICE was now “competitive to NYMEX.”

It was here that the wheels began to fall off the commodities market.

Mack’s Morgan

John Mack, the chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley, has had an illustrious career, holding some of the most lucrative and prestigious positions on Wall Street.

Nicknamed “Mack the Knife” because of his hard-edged, no-nonsense approach and hardcore cost-cutting measures, Mack ran Morgan Stanley through the ’90s before accepting the job as co-CEO of Credit Suisse First Boston, a leading investment bank, in 2001. Mack left CSFB in 2004 to pursue options outside the large investment banking world but was wooed back to run Morgan Stanley in 2005. Upon his return, Mack’s Morgan Stanley went on an aggressive oil-buying spree-but not necessarily the kind you might expect.

On May 24, 2006, Morgan oil analyst Douglas Terreson announced that integrated oil equities were “15 percent undervalued” and in a research report, he wrote that “Independent refining and marketing remains the largest sector bet in the global model energy portfolio.” Soon after, on June 18, 2006, Morgan Stanley acquired TransMontaigne, Inc. and its subsidiaries-a half-billion dollar group of companies operating in the refined petroleum business.

How convenient… after their oil analyst decides that this portion of the industry is looking up, Morgan Stanley gets into the oil business and buys a refining company. However, it did not take only 25 days to conceive and work out the TransMontaigne transaction. This had to be a long-planned, well-thought-out takeover. One that worked for the great benefit of Morgan Stanley’s future oil plans.

This type of freewheeling environment, with little separation between the proprietary desks at the banks and their investment analysts, has been the subject of much scrutiny and concern of late.

“[There must be] a verifiable and hardened wall between analysts and the investment entities,” Greenberger says-it’s the only way to maintain integrity. And this is essentially what the CFTC was dismantling, right under everyone’s noses.

Morgan’s investments in the oil business continued aggressively over the next year into the far corners of the industry. In short order it closed the circle of the supply chain by acquiring Heidmar, a shipping company, and various stakes in foreign-based energy supply companies. It even snagged a contract from the U.S. Department of Energy to store 750,000 barrels of home heating oil at its corporately owned terminal in New Haven, Conn. Morgan Stanley, which was at the time the largest trader in oil futures, was now a serious international oil company.

Speculation Takes Centre Stage

It was the Masters testimony that brought speculation into the light and sent shockwaves through the halls of Congress. Masters was able to simplify the exchange and put the issues in a context that lawmakers could grasp. One of the telling examples he gives is that “Index speculators [companies such as Morgan Stanley] have now stockpiled, via the futures market, the equivalent of 1.1 billion barrels of petroleum, effectively adding eight times as much oil to their own stockpile as the United States has added to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the last five years.”

This essentially squashed the claims of the investment banks that demand from parts of the world such as China and India was solely responsible for the increase in oil futures prices. However, there are some theorists who still vehemently deny that this is the case.

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and creator of the popular blog Clusterfuck Nation, believes that the effect from the speculative market is “basically witch-hunt stuff.” A peak oil theorist, Kunstler, on the phone from his home in Saratoga Springs in upstate NY, says he believes that the root of the problem lies more in our global dependence upon a commodity that is quite simply disappearing.

American scientist M. King Hubbert predicted in the 1950s that American oil production would peak by the early 1970s. He was right. His predictive model was the basis for peak oil theory, which, when applied to the global market, indicates that the world may hit peak oil production within the next 20 years or sooner. Kunstler says that “the biggest thing that’s going on right now is the oil export problem or crisis.

“What that means,” he adds, “is the countries that we depend on for imported oil are less and less able to send it out and they’re using more of their own oil even as they’re in depletion. Two of the biggest cases of this are Mexico and Venezuela.”

While America imports the vast majority of its oil from Mexico, Venezuela and Canada––not the Middle East-and there is evidence to support the peak-oil predictions in some of these areas, it seems to speak more to the long-term crisis that mature and developing countries face. But it doesn’t fully explain away why oil prices would increase exponentially during the summer months and then decline shortly thereafter.

“Instead of oil going up,” Greenberger says, “oil is going down. Has India and China dramatically cut back? Nothing has changed and, in fact, the supply-demand factor has probably gotten worse because of Russia’s aggression [and] the severe weather, but oil is sinking, sinking, sinking. How can that possibly be?”

So if oil prices could be so easily manipulated, why didn’t it happen more severely and immediately when restrictions were lifted in 2006? While oil prices did indeed climb between the time the ICE was created in Atlanta and the regulations were lifted in January of 2006, they didn’t skyrocket until late in 2007.

Enter Douglas Terreson.

The Terreson timeline

Douglas Terreson, the Morgan Stanley analyst who said that independent refining and marketing companies were undervalued, was the bank’s chief oil analyst. The award-winning, nationally recognized Terreson had fielded questions in relation to oil prices and futures since the mid-1990s. On March 14 of this year, he said that oil would settle in at around $95 per barrel for the remainder of 2008. Moreover, Terreson also concluded that oil would retreat to around $83 per barrel for 2009.

This would be Terreson’s last forecast for Morgan Stanley.

Two short months later, Dow Jones Newswires reported that Terreson had been ousted in a round of layoffs. Two weeks after that, Richard Berner, Morgan Stanley co-head of global economics and chief U.S. economist, issued a statement saying that crude oil could easily reach $150 a barrel.

This speculation set off a round of speculative fervor never before seen in the market. Goldman Sachs immediately followed suit by forecasting oil to roar beyond $150, saying it could hit $200 a barrel in the near future. Oil prices were off to the races, with the investment banks in full lobbying mode while pointing the finger at China and India.

On September 19, 2007, Morgan Stanley’s stock price was $67 and oil was at $78. This was the day that Morgan Stanley began to trickle out the bad news. The worse the news was coming out of the investment banks, the higher oil prices would climb. By the time Morgan announced that Terreson was gone, Morgan’s stock was at $41 and oil was at $134.

In retrospect, the turning point appears to be Morgan’s $150 forecast by Berner. It fuelled the apprehension of the media and Wall Street alike. Americans were quick to do the math and knew that the spike would mean $5 per gallon at the pump. Maybe more. Suddenly everyone recalled the 1970s, and new terms such as “stay-cation” were on everyone’s lips.

So, where did this $150 number come from? Who better to answer that question than Richard Berner, the man behind the proclamation?

Unfortunately, a spokesperson for Morgan Stanley tells the Press that Richard Berner “doesn’t do interviews on oil stuff.” In fact, “he doesn’t deal in oil” at all, says his assistant matter-of-factly. That’s because for more than a decade this had been the exclusive domain of Terreson. Yet a month after the report that Terreson had been laid off, Morgan Stanley issued a statement claiming that Terreson voluntarily left his position at Morgan for the promise of higher pay from a hedge fund.

Not so, according to a Morgan Stanley employee familiar with the circumstances surrounding Terreson’s departure, who asked not to be identified in this story. Taken aback by the confusion surrounding Terreson’s reason for leaving, he says, “I knew they had a rightsizing, but he said he was retiring. He was getting ready to head off into the sunset.” And, just like that, Terreson was gone.

Morgan Stanley no longer has a spokesperson for oil. Nor are they willing to comment on the decision to forecast crude oil futures at $150 per barrel by someone who “doesn’t deal in oil.”

Terreson, once an integral part of the Houston community and a rising star in the financial sector, seemingly disappeared from the city altogether. His home phone has been disconnected. His former co-workers were unsure of his whereabouts. And almost no one from the firm at which he spent years as a superstar in his field wants to discuss why.

When the press finally reached Terreson at his present residence in Alabama, he simply offered, “I’m retired. I’m not with Morgan anymore and can’t talk about any of this.” When asked for a brief comment on current oil prices, Terreson responded, “I don’t feel comfortable talking about it,” and hung up the phone.

The smell coming our way

Still, the question persists: If the market conditions surrounding the price of crude oil futures remained unchanged, why were the analysts at the world’s largest banks determined to drive up the price of oil at a historic pace?

Was it merely dumb luck that this rampant speculation occurred at a time when the major investment banks were reporting record losses and write downs due to the sub-prime mortgage meltdown? It is Greenberger’s assertion that “a lot of people were very upset that they were in a sense humping their own product-not only their physical holdings but their future holdings.” What he’s referring to is the fact that Morgan Stanley doesn’t just trade oil futures; it’s also very much in the business of oil. This is a fact that is “unseemly,” according to Greenberger and many onlookers of the financial markets. One such observer is Gary Aguirre, a former staff lawyer and investigator for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), who has testified several times in front of Congress and is widely considered a leading authority on financial markets.

“The way it ran up had all the earmarks of manipulation,” says Aguirre from his office in San Diego. “It looked like somebody was playing a game. I don’t know what the game was or how they did it but that was…the smell drifting my way.” As far as Morgan Stanley and Mack are concerned, Aguirre knows firsthand just how powerful the Wall Street tycoon is.

In 2005, Aguirre headed up an investigation into an insider trading claim involving Mack and a hedge fund named Pequot Capital Management. Mack’s involvement came during the period between his tenure at Credit Suisse First Boston and his return as chairman of Morgan Stanley. There were allegations of insider trading on the part of Mack by the SEC, but just when the investigation seemed to be gaining momentum, Aguirre was told to back off by his bosses at the SEC. After a glowing review from his superior, Aguirre went on vacation. When he returned, he got a pink slip, not a raise.

Aguirre insists that his own experience is merely part of a larger and much scarier problem running rampant on Wall Street.

“What we have are the markets highly leveraged, highly speculative and without any regulation, effectively, of the abuses,” he explains. “In short, it’s not much different than it was just before the crash in 1929.” This sentiment is echoed throughout Wall Street and the Beltway as the news from Wall Street grows more desperate with each piece of bad press about the economy.

The cozy relationship between oil companies and the U.S. government is nothing new to people like Aguirre who are familiar with the system. Aguirre explains the “you scratch my back” culture in monetary terms by saying, “These people are sponsored by the industry. Paulson’s straight out of Goldman. We have the fox guarding the henhouse.” (He’s referring to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who was chairman of Goldman Sachs until June 2006.)

This was certainly true for Wendy Gramm, leaving the CFTC for the Enron board, and for her husband, who received nearly $100,000 in financial contributions from Enron while in office.

“These Enron traders were highly sought after,” says Greenberger. “Enron showed in its dying days how you could make a lot of money trading unregulated energy futures products.”

The real price of oil

A report titled “Double Jeopardy: Responding to High Food and Fuel Prices,” issued by the World Bank on July 2 of this year, estimates that “up to 105 million people could become poor due to rising food prices alone,” with “30 million additional persons falling into poverty in Africa alone.”

The report links the effect of high food prices directly to rising energy and oil costs-but stops short of blaming speculators, claiming that commodity investors and hedge fund activity appear to have played only a “minor role” in the increase of food and fuel prices. The report’s source: The CFTC.

The eye-opening May testimony from Masters was a scathing indictment of the CFTC’s thinking. In it, he claimed, “The current wheat futures stockpile of Index Speculators is enough to supply every American citizen with all the bread, pasta and baked goods they can eat for the next two years.”

As far as the much maligned “corn for ethanol” program that has environmentalists and lobbyists alike backing away, Masters contends that “Index Speculators have stockpiled enough corn futures to potentially fuel the entire United States ethanol industry at full capacity for a year.”

At least high oil prices have us thinking about alternative energy, right? According to Kunstler, it’s a case of too little, too late: “No amount of alternative fuels is going to allow us to run the stuff we’re running the way we’re running it, and we have to get hip to that. We’re not going to run the interstate highway system and Wal-Mart and Walt Disney World on any combination of ethanol, solar, wind, nuclear or chicken fat. We’re going to have to make other arrangements for daily life, and it’s the one thing we’re not talking about.”

Kunstler has very little faith that we can afford the new technology, let alone old fossil fuel technology. “The ‘whoosh’ that you hear in the background is the sound of capital leaving the system,” he muses. On this, most everyone agrees: Kunstler, Greenberger, Aguirre and Masters all come from diverse backgrounds, but all point out that our financial system seems to be hanging by a thread and that the corrupt regulatory system is mostly to blame.

The fallout

Given the recent government bailout of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and AIG, the collapse of companies such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and political unrest in the far reaches of the globe, there is always the possibility that the banks prolonged the collapse of our financial system. Skyrocketing oil prices have also highlighted our complete dependence and addiction to oil and brought the debate to the surface in the upcoming presidential election. For better or for worse, people are talking about oil, and not in favorable terms.

When Terreson’s oil price forecast was less than what Richard “Doesn’t-Deal-In-Oil” Berner believed it to be, his career at Morgan Stanley ended abruptly. When Berner predicted $150 oil, the entire world market responded to this claim. Was Terreson tired of shilling for Morgan and thus decided to retire at the tender age of 46? Or was he unceremoniously axed after refusing to alter his forecast on oil prices? Then again, was he part of the game all along and paid handsomely to “ride off in the sunset,” as one co-worker described?

Regardless of the reasons behind Terreson’s departure, there is still the question of motive.

Why drive oil prices beyond practical limits?

Let’s say for a moment that you run Morgan Stanley. Over the past few years you made a couple of bad deals. OK, so it was more than a couple, but not as many as your friends at Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Thankfully, you have remarkable control over the price of oil-just by forecasting it. Heck, you don’t even have to “deal in oil” or do interviews “on oil stuff,” you just have to pick a number and watch the market actually try and hit it.

Not to mention you also own companies that operate refineries. You control shipping routes. The government has handed you a contract to store 750,000 barrels of home heating oil for the Northeast United States. You founded and are still an owner in a public exchange that handles energy trades that no one can really see. Win. Win. Win. Win.

It’s not difficult to see how America got here. The worst part is, it was all legal. The federal government, beginning with Wendy and Phil Gramm, cleared the way for tremendous systematic abuse in the financial markets to fatten the Gramm family bank account with blood money-Wendy Gramm’s multimillion-dollar take as an Enron board member and Phil Gramm raking in more than $335,000 in campaign contributions from the securities and investment industries.

Instead of being punished for these now well-documented actions, Wendy Gramm is still influencing Capitol Hill at the Mercatus Center and Phil Gramm has been advising McCain, the man who might be our next president.

People are beginning to contemplate peak oil and imagine that while the world may have flattened out for a while, it’s getting a whole lot rounder again. Kunstler proclaims, “Globalism was a product of a certain time and place and special circumstances, namely, a period of very cheap oil and relative peace between the great powers.” It’s what he calls the “end of the happy motoring era.”

Still, one can’t help but think about how quickly the end of this era may be arriving and for what reason. The “demand shock” that Masters speaks of also created a hunger shock that reverberated around the globe. Perhaps the analysts and speculators were acting to save their own banks in the short run––lest they wind up like Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers.

But it seems awfully easy to manipulate the markets when you control so many pieces of the puzzle. Does saving a bank and focusing our daily discussions on renewable technology really equal thrusting millions of people into poverty and pushing price increases on the global food markets?

Congress has the ability to seize control of these markets even before the upcoming presidential election. The new president will decide whether we drill or not, but this decision has nothing to do with restoring the oversight and stability that existed in the commodities arena from 1936 until 2006. If it weren’t for federal oversight and regulation, Morgan Stanley-which was created in 1935 from the ashes of the 1929 crash-wouldn’t even exist. But history is often forgotten, or ignored, by greedy corporate raiders who are therefore destined to repeat it.

Sidebar:
How They Roll

Energias de Portugal (EDP) is the national energy producer for Portugal. For insight into how Morgan Stanley conducts its investments on the open market, the following are excerpts from a release by EDP announcing the sale of stock to Morgan Stanley subsidiaries. We have highlighted the different corporations, in case you lose track. See if you can follow along:

• “On April 21, 2008, Morgan Stanley notified EDP that as a result of a share transaction concluded on the 16th of April 2008 and in accordance with article 20 of the Portuguese Securities Market Code, it became [sic] to hold 79,157,462 ordinary shares of EDP, which represent 2.16% of EDP share capital and 2.16% of the voting rights and 16,745,810 convertible bonds into EDP shares, which represent .46% of the EDP share capital and an imputation of .46% of the voting rights.”

OK. Fairly straightforward. How did they do it? Take a deep breath and read the following sentence out loud.

• Morgan Stanley & Co. International – which is owned by Morgan Stanley UK Group, which is owned by Morgan Stanley Group (Europe), and this is owned by Morgan Stanley International Limited, that is owned by Morgan Stanley International Holding Inc that is owned by Morgan Stanley – holds 68,334,088 ordinary shares of EDP, which represent 1.86% of EDP share and capital and 1.86% of the voting rights and 16,745,810 convertible bonds into EDP shares, which represent .46% of EDP share capital and an imputation of .46% of the voting rights;

But wait, there’s more…

• Morgan Stanley & Co. Incorporated – which is owned by Morgan Stanley – holds 9,485,622 shares representing .25% of the share capital and .25% of the voting rights;

• MSDW Equity Finance Services I (Cayman) Ltd – which is owned by MSDW Offshore Equity Services, which is owned by Morgan Stanley – holds 1,000,000 shares corresponding to .02% of the share capital and .02% of the voting rights;

• Morgan Stanley Capital (Luxemborg) S.A. – Which is owned by Morgan Stanley International Holdings Inc, which is owned by Morgan Stanley – holds 316,552 shares representing .00% of the share capital and 0.00% of the voting rights;

• Bank Morgan Stanley AG (Zurich) – which is owned by MSDW Equity Finance Services I, which is owned by MSDW Offshore Equity Services, which is owned by Morgan Stanley – holds 21,200 shares corresponding to 0.00% of the share capital and 0.00% of the voting rights.

Whew.

Personally, when this investment in the Iraqi Dinar comes to fruition by the end of this year, I will be retired at 21. Seems like a load of bull, until you do the research, that is. Just think about it: a nation with the third largest supply of oil in a world where alternative energy is nowhere near ready for mass usage. The rest of the world (with America being the number one consumer) simply has to tap into that supply, but it can’t be touched because the currency of Iraq is so worthless right now their economy would be crushed. Iraq (with it’s American economic advisers) has to rapidly revalue its Dinar before they can hire people to work the oil fields, drill and sell the oil. Exxon Mobil has already been assigned its portion of the oil fields that it will drill. The clock’s ticking…

Link para ver o filme

Link para o site oficial do filme

A dupla arrojada: Andy Bichlbaum e Mike Bonanno, fazendo-se passar por alter-egos da indústria e mundo corporativo, expõem as pessoas que lucram com o furacão Katrina, as caras por detrás do desastre ambiental de Bhopal e outros eventos chocantes.

Corporações/Organizações mencionadas:

Dow Chemical/Union Carbide, AIG, Exxon Mobil, AEI (American Enterprise Institute), CEI (Competitive Enterprise Institute), The Center for Homeland & Global Security

Algumas pérolas ditas neste filme:

“Nós estávamos confusos! Quando éramos crianças, aprendemos que fazer algo mau, dava castigo. E se fizéssemos algo bom, éramos recompensados. No entanto, quando nós anunciámos que a DOW iria fazer algo bom, o mercado deu à DOW umas valentes palmadas no rabo. Assim sendo, como poderemos fazer com que as corporações façam o que está certo? Precisamos de duas coisas: governo e regulamentação. O problema é que as corporações estavam a beber o refresco do mercado livre de Milton Friedman” – os The Yes Men

“O aquecimento global é ridículo, não é um assunto sério. CO2, eles chamam-lhe poluição, nós chamamos-lhe vida” -CEI (financiado pela Exxon)

“O que produziu todo este progresso que vemos? Foi interesse próprio, ou ganância se preferirem. Para produzir algo com que se possa ganhar um dólar.” – Milton Friedman

“Apenas uma crise, real ou percepcionada, produz verdadeira mudança” – Milton Friedman

“Quando o governo fez o que estava certo (os Yes Men fizeram-se passar pelo governo), as corporações também fazem o que está certo, mesmo que lhes custasse algum dinheiro” – os The Yes Men

Dou a este filme 9 em 10 esqueletos de ouro!

The drums are beating....will you heed the call at Malcolm X Park at 10 AM this Saturday? It's bigger than hip-hop.

Click the picture for some edutainment.

We are one month away from the international climate change conference that will be taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark. While there have been numerous meetings since Kyoto in 1997, Copenhagen is the main follow-up to what global standards were put in place with the Kyoto Protocol.

We will be following the news coverage leading up to and during Copenhagen, but we also felt it was important to post several stories about different aspects of climate change and climate justice. These articles will look at the current data, climate deniers, what the US government is doing legislatively and an analysis of what local groups are doing to address or not address climate change.

Climate Deniers

Part of the struggle for climate justice and the fact that there are numerous entities – think tanks and corporate front groups – which deny that global warming is even an issue. These groups are so aggressive with their anti-global warming message that many news stories still include the opinions of climate deniers.

In 2004, Fairness and Accuracy in reporting conducted a study on major US media reporting on global warming and found that “53 percent of the articles gave roughly equal attention to the views that humans contribute to global warming and that climate change is exclusively the result of natural fluctuations.”

Since their 2004 study, FAIR also found that there are several national news pundits who also deny global warming, such as John Stossel (ABC), columnist George Will and Glenn Beck (CNN & FOX).

With Climate Deniers being legitimate news sources and some national media pundits denying global warming, no surprise that more and more people in the US are questioning the near-consensus in the scientific community that human actions are contributing to global warming.

Two weeks ago the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press published the finding of a survey they conducted on the current trends amongst Americans on global warming. As the chart here shows there is a significant percentage of people who don’t believe global warming is an issue and the number of those who think that has risen since 2006.

In addition, there are organizations, which deny global warming, primarily because they represent business interests, which would be negatively impacted from policies that sought to curb human actions that contributed to global warming. One group, the Global Climate Coalition, which no longer exists, was made up of oil companies and other industries, which are arguably some of the biggest contributors to global warming.

These front groups are numerous and tend to be funded by big oil companies like Exxon-Mobil. Exxon-Mobil has spent between $17 – 23 million dollars to fund groups that deny global warming, according to the research done by Exxpose Exxon. Exxon Mobil funded global warming deniers have even come to Grand Rapids. In 2007, Media Mouse reported that the local far-right think tank the Acton Institute brought a global warming denier speaker to town representing the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

This brief look into some of the forces behind climate change denial and how it impacts public perception should give us all concern for how this issue will be dealt with politically in the US and internationally at Copenhagen next month.

by Jessica Shambora

Yesterday we told you that Google (GOOG) tops the list of heavyweight stocks in terms of “market capitalization per employee.” There’s $8.6 million in stock-market value riding on every Googler who works for the company.

It’s an odd metric, yes. The post generated some amusing comments. David Emery in Reston, Virginia wrote, “This seems to be a good justification for Google’s well-known investment in/pampering of their employees. Happy employees generate value-per-employee, I suspect.”

Another reader noted that Gilead (GILD) beats Google on this particular metric. The biotech company, with $40 billion stock-market value and 3,400 employees, boasts an impressive market cap/employee of $11.7 million. The power of pharmaceuticals.

So, what are the biggest U.S. companies by market capitalization?

It’s fascinating to see that Apple (AAPL) — which, due to strong earnings and new-product excitement this week, rose to the top five — stands a chance to eclipse Wal-Mart (WMT) in stock-market heft. Apple, though, is still a long way from touching mighty Exxon Mobil (XOM).

The 10 largest U.S. companies by stock-market capitalization are:

1. Exxon Mobil: $353.23 billion

2. Microsoft: $249.9 billion (MSFT)

3. Wal-Mart: $194.3 billion

4. Apple: $183.88 billion

5. JP Morgan Chase (JPM): $179.84 billion

6. Google: $175.93 billion

7. Procter & Gamble (PG): $167.3 billion

8. Johnson & Johnson (JNJ): $166.2 billion

9. General Electric (GE): $161.42 billion

10. IBM (IBM): $159.08 billion

P.S. Besides Gilead, do you know any companies that beat Google’s stock-market value per employee: $8.6 million?

I do anticipate the monthly arrival of National Geographic in my mail box, hermetically sealed in plastic, financed by a clutch of slick, green-scrubbing petrochemical adverts. I gladly sublimate such thoughts for the fantastic photos, and for the rare well-written article, which, on occasion delves below the surface of its subject and triggers a trip to the internet, or even the library…

Every now and then, however, the dissonance of NG’s media-empire slaps me in the face with its facile petro-techno worship:

Yes, all hail the immanent arrival of the supersonic car, capable of speeds beyond 1,000 miles per hour. Faster, apparently, than a speeding bullet. We’ve been waiting for you…

[The] Royal Air Force pilot who’ll also helm the [supersonic car], says the $15-million vehicle—funded chiefly by corporations and universities—isn’t just for joyrides. It’s also a lure for students. “If we want a low-carbon world,” he says, “we need to grow more engineers.” Britain’s government agrees. It’s allotting a million dollars for schools to study the sound-barrier buster’s advanced systems.

Certainly no joy-rides here! Listen up readers: If you want a low carbon world, you’ll help us build gas-guzzling, 1,000 mile-per-hour cars, otherwise, what idiot would want to bother becoming an engineer? That’s why GM’s engineers, thus far, have led the way to a low-carbon economy, right? Imagine if communist, islamo-fascist, greenies like Obama weren’t using our tax dollars to hold GM out of bankruptcy and forcing them to build hybrids? Well, we’d be just a few thousand Hummers away from low-carbon utopia!

I can’t wait to out run the bullets of those freedom-hating idiots in my Bloodhound, as I search for a suitable desert in which to drive it forever!

Who knew carbon-free could be so f&cking cool! Thank you National Geographic and your petro-grubbing, cap & trade blocking sponsors!

The Piceance Basin in northwest Colorado contains trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. ExxonMobil has been operating in the basin since the 1950’s, producing modest amounts of gas that was easy to recover. The majority of the natural gas is in scattered pockets deep underground in very dense rock. These “tight gas” deposits up to 16,000 feet deep have been known for decades, but have been too difficult and expensive to recover.

ExxonMobil engineers are using proprietary fracturing technologies to recover the gas and reduce environmental impact. Rio Blanco County is the home of ExxonMobil’s Piceance project. The project covers an area larger than 3,000 square miles and according to ExxonMobil holds a potential resource of more than 45 trillion cubic feet of gas. ExxonMobil uses a proprietary Fast Drill process and Multi-zone Stimulation technology to access up to 50 gas-bearing zones in one well. They can drill up to 9 to 10 wells from a single pad. Each well can recover gas located across 20 acres below ground.

ExxonMobil announced in June the completion of new field processing capacity at its Piceance Project. The new facilities have the capacity to handle up to 200 million cubic feet per day of natural gas. ExxonMobil is currently producing about 100 million cubic feet per day. Enterprise Products Partners LP constructed the new plant and pipeline facilities to provide compression and treating services for the produced natural gas.

Commentary – ExxonMobil has been running more than five drilling rigs for more than two years and as of July, they were running seven rigs despite the current low natural gas prices. ExxonMobil’s new facilities includes a system that collects and reuses water that is produced with the natural gas production, reducing the use of fresh water in the drilling and fracturing process by about 80%. The claims made by ExxonMobil as to the potential seem very optimistic. If you take 200 million cubic feet per day (the maximum for their facilities) and assume they produce the maximum for 40 years, you only recover about 3.0 trillion cubic feet of natural gas or only 7% of the potential. I am assuming that their estimate of 45 trillion cubic feet must include other areas or formations that are not currently being developed.

Many companies are taking note of the recent surge in socially responsible investing (SRI), which is swiftly making the business case for corporate responsibility and sustainability.  Essentially, socially responsible investors recognize that companies’ impacts on the environment, society and the economy are all valid components of investment decisions.

Demonstrating the power of SRI:

Chevron Corp. recently became the first major U.S. oil company to announce that it would track and report on the carbon content of its products.  As a result of the decision, The Sisters of St. Dominic of Caldwell, N.J., a faith-based institutional investor, withdrew its greenhouse gas emissions shareholder resolution against the company, in addition to praising Chevron’s efforts to reduce its carbon footprint.

The Sisters of St. Dominic consists of a group of 16 investors and is a member of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (a coalition of nearly 300 institutional investors representing over $100 billion in invested capital). The Sisters of St. Dominic filed a proposal on the carbon content of Chevron’s products earlier in 2009.

Chevron’s competitor, Exxon Mobil Corp., may now be under more pressure to reduce its own carbon footprint.  The investors group criticized Exxon directors for asking their shareholders to vote against a similar proposal.

A growing market:

The SRI market currently comprises an estimated $2.71 trillion out of $25.1 trillion in the U.S. investment marketplace today.  In order to capture the growing SRI market, Dow Jones, NASDAQ and S&P (among others) have all launched Sustainability Indices to show how companies compare in terms of sustainable practices.

SRI works to the financial benefit of companies that consider and address their environmental, social and economic impacts, while delivering more long-term returns to shareholders that understand the link between sustainable corporate practices and the ‘sustainability’ (read: longevity) of the companies themselves.

Patricia Kelley, an investment consultant of UBS Financial Services, Inc., stated, “We believe a solution to the current credit crunch is a greater focus on sustainability.”  She explained the current credit crunch as a catalyst of the cultural paradigm shift towards sustainability and corporate responsibility.

She continued, “The fact that a burgeoning number of investors care about corporate responsibility builds the business case for companies to deepen their focus on integrating sustainability into the core of their operations.”

Resource:

UBS Financial Services, Inc.’s Non-Financial Criteria for Investing

1. Products and Services
   • Favor companies that offer products and services that provide societal or environmental benefits.
2. Environmental Impact
   • Favor companies that conserve natural resources, reduce waste generation and proactively address major environmental challenges, such as climate change.  Why: Too costly to invest in companies with environmental problems, because of increased risk of future litigation and costs.   
3. Workplace Conditions
   • Favor companies that encourage workplace diversity and work-life balance, respect workers’ right to organize and enforce labor standards throughout their supply chains.
4. Community Relations
   • Favor companies that have positive relationships with local, indigenous and underserved communities.
5. Corporate Governance
   • Favor companies with governance structures that promote board leadership and responsiveness to shareholders.

*Still need more proof of the global increase in SRI despite the economic downturn?  Click here to read about the 31% increase of signatories for The UN Principles for Responsible Investment.

From TALKING POINTS MEMO:

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) is blocking an EPA nomination because he wants the agency to delay establishing safety procedures for formaldehyde. Meanwhile, major emitters of the dangerous chemical have been generous contributors to the senator’s reelection campaign.

Vitter met yesterday with EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, who sought, unsuccessfully, to convince him to remove the hold he had placed on Paul Anastas, who has been nominated to be the EPA’s assistant administrator in charge of its Office of Research and Development, reports the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

No one has a problem with Anastas, who served in environmental posts in the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations. Rather, according to the Times-Picayune, Vitter wants the EPA to let the National Academy of Sciences review EPA’s assessment of the risks posed by the chemical formaldehyde.

Original DVD cover

Formaldehyde has been classified as a probable human carcinogen by the EPA, and has been linked to nasal, lung, and brain cancer, as well as leukemia. EPA says it’s been studying the issue since 1997, and it’s now time to issue a risk assessment and establish safety standards.

Vitter presents his position as one of concern about the risks of formaldehyde, dangerously high levels of which were last year detected in FEMA trailers housing Katrina evacuees, forcing FEMA to relocate some people to “safer housing.”

…snip…

But Vitter’s stance on the issue is identical to that taken by the Formaldehyde Council Inc. (FCI), a trade group of formaldehyde producers. The group told TPMmuckraker in a statement that “an NAS review of formaldehyde has been a long-standing policy goal of the industry,” and added that “FCI believes that the scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows that formaldehyde and formaldehyde-derived products are safe when used appropriately.

…snip…

It’s perhaps not surprising that Vitter’s and the formaldehyde industry’s positions on the issue would correspond so closely. Many of Louisiana’s top emitters of the pollutant are contributors to Vitter’s 2010 re-election bid. According to FEC records examined by TPMmuckraker, the Louisiana senator has received $9000 from Dow Chemical’s political action committee, $5000 from Monsanto’s, $4000 from Exxon-Mobil’s, and $2500 from the American Forest and Paper Association’s. Dow, Exxon, and Monsanto are all among the top formaldehyde polluters in the state, EPA data examined by TPMmuckraker show, while both Dow and the American Forest and Paper Association are members of FCI.

The True Face of the Brazilian Pre-Salt

Article about the “pre-salt” # Whataheal University | Email this article
Published – Saturday, September 19, 2009.

The True Face of the Brazilian Pre-Salt

Regulatory Framework LULA GOVERNMENT DOES NOT WARRANT THE NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY

Judging from the flurry of venture-capital deals, big oil company investments, and attention from politicians on startups creating biofuels from algae, it might seem like the world has fallen in love with the technology to power vehicles with pond scum. But after all of the algae euphoria this summer, we’ve started seeing a few signs of an algae fuel backlash, with several prominent investors publicly questioning the economics of algae fuel.

At the AlwaysOn’s GoingGreen conference, outspoken cleantech investor Vinod Khosla said his firm has aggressively been looking at algae technologies, but hasn’t found one viable plan after looking at “maybe two dozen.” “The economics of algae don’t seem to work,” he said.
(You can watch the video here by clicking on “Renewables at Scale.”)

In contrast, Khosla has been investing millions into biofuels made from cellulosic biomass. His sentiments also seem to be a change from the rhetoric just last year, when Khosla said at the Algae Biomass Summit that algae could “be a solution” and play a significant role in replacing oil.

Khosla isn’t the only one warning against too much optimism where algae fuel is concerned. At the EmTech conference this week, Jim Matheson, a general partner at Flagship Ventures, said he doesn’t think the costs calculate out either. “We just don’t believe in the economics,” he said, and added that he isn’t sure that “algae is going to come down the cost curve,” according to Technology Review.

At the same event, Technology Review also reported that David Eyton, head of research and technology at BP, which has invested in algae startups Synthetic Genomics and Martek Biosciences, questioned the viability of different types of algae technology, and more specifically the kind that Exxon Mobil recently invested $600 million in. “We don’t think that [technology] will ever reach the kind of cost or supply that we think people are prepared to pay,” he said.

Is the algae-fuel backlash snowballing into a full-on trend? Well, algae has always had its skeptics. As far back as three years ago, companies like Imperium Renewables were stating that producing significant amounts of algae for biodiesel was further away than cellulosic ethanol. “It’s not about whether algae can produce oil, but about whether it can meet a standard quantity needed for fuel,” then-CEO Martin Tobias said at ThinkEquity’s Greentech Summit in San Francisco back then. “It’s going to take longer than anyone wants to say at an investor’s conference.”

Nobody so far has been able to produce algae cost competitively in large quantities, and – in spite of all the promising ideas — it’s still unclear whether that will happen. Matt Horton, CEO of Propel and a principal at @Ventures, said his view of algae hasn’t changed in the last few years. “It’s one of the most promising opportunities in the liquid fuels arena, but the timelines for true commercialization are still years down the road,” he said. It’s tough for a company like Propel to work with algae companies at this point because it’s difficult to predict – with any certainty – when algae-based fuels might realistically be delivered.

When a technology like algae fuel gets as much attention as it has this summer — with politicians visiting algae fuel startups on a weekly basis — it becomes an easy target for the skeptics. What the industry needs right now is less hype and more proof that the pond scum can really come down in cost to reach mass commercialization.

Image courtesy of NREL.

Most everyone has come to understand that the U.S. rulers’ invasion of Iraq was all about oil. But not even the oil barons knew just how much was up for grabs. Now it’s revealed that Barack Obama has 8.2 million reasons not to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq anytime soon. That’s how many barrels of oil companies like Exxon Mobil claim they can pump every day — if it ever becomes safe for them to operate there.

Stunning production targets emerging from Iraq’s ongoing oilfield licensing talks with major firms put it on a strategic par with oil kingpin Saudi Arabia. The rising stakes underlie the recent upsurge in Iraqi factional violence and guarantee not only a permanent U.S. military occupation but future deadly “surges” to help Exxon & Co. realize their goal. Production today stagnates around 2.3 million barrels a day (mbd).

Invading Iraq was the brainchild of U.S. Big Oil. Occupation plans took shape in a high-level joint project of the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the James A. Baker Institute, imperialist think-tanks both closely linked to Exxon Mobil and J.P. Morgan Chase. Just before the 2003 invasion, the CFR-Baker cabal issued a report, “Iraq: The Day After,” promising that “U.S. and allied military forces will quickly occupy, control, and protect oil fields” in order to “achieve more significant increases — say, to 6 mbd by 2010.”

When the Bushites bungled the invasion by sending too few troops, the liberal, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists blamed renegade neo-cons like Cheney and Rumsfeld for launching a misguided “war of choice.” But U.S. imperialists cannot afford to walk away from the 8 mbd windfall that new technology makes possible.

Saudi Rulers Unreliable Allies for U.S. Rulers

Controlling 8 mbd of Iraqi crude would sharply reduce U.S. dependence on shaky Saudi Arabia as the world’s sole “swing producer,” meaning a country having enough spare capacity to adjust production in an economic or military crisis.

But Saudi royals rule a powder keg. Though they profit from the most lucrative long-term deal in capitalism’s history, serving as Exxon’s biggest oil supplier, their 30 million subjects receive nothing from this bonanza. They sympathize more with al Qaeda and Hamas than with Washington. Prince Turki al-Faisal, former chief of Saudi intelligence, in an op-ed piece in the NY Times (9/13/09), said it would be unwise for his country to normalize diplomatic relations with U.S. ally Israel. The prince fears that Saudi workers’ anger at Israel’s concentration-camp treatment of Palestinians may dethrone his oily dynasty.

So Exxon Mobil-led groups have bids in for 6.3 mbd, or almost four-fifths of Iraq’s potential [See Table]. Meanwhile the U.S. war machine remains ever poised to invade Saudi Arabia to prop up its ruling princes if the masses were to rebel. The Pentagon has massive bases to the north (Iraq), to the east (Bahrain and Qatar), to the west (Djibouti) and to the south (Diego Garcia).

However, Exxon & Co. shouldn’t start counting their Iraqi chickens just yet. Iraq still has no national law governing oil contracts. And no sooner had Iraq held its first oilfield auction in June, “the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government condemned it as unconstitutional.” (Energy Intelligence, 9/7/09)

More ‘Surges’ On The Agenda?

Fighting among rival Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and attacks on U.S. bases have intensified since the oil projects were revealed. The NY Times (9/13/09) suggests that U.S. troops may have to seize the streets again: “After the withdrawal of most American combat forces from Iraq’s cities on June 30, violence has remained a constant, with attackers able to plant and detonate bombs….seemingly with impunity.”

U.S. rulers and their allies are ready to worsen an already sickening equation: over one million dead Iraqis and more than 4,000 dead GIs “in exchange for” eight million daily barrels of crude.

We need a sharpening fight against U.S. imperialism — in the shops and unions, the communities and churches, among GIs, and in all mass organizations — to mount militant battles against the U.S. bosses’ deadly goals. Out of these class struggles, tying the mountainous racist and economic attacks on the working class to the need to exterminate the profit system, we can build a mass PLP that can lead a communist revolution to destroy capitalism and its endless oil wars.

Men still outnumber women in science and engineering fields. Would a science-loving “Hannah Montana” type change that?

Ride says girls' interest in science slides by middle school. Photo: Sally Ride Science

At Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit last week I facilitated a conversation called “Making Science Cool.” Specifically, we gathered to talk about making science cool for girls and young women as they contemplate areas of study and potential careers.

The discussion was led by Marissa Mayer, vice president search products and user experience for Google (GOOG), and Maria Siemionow, director, plastic surgery research at Cleveland Clinic. (Dr. Siemionow is perhaps best known for leading the surgical team that performed the first face transplant.)

For an hour more than a dozen women, including some pretty impressive scientists and engineers, shared their thoughts on how to make the sciences more appealing to girls.

It turns out girls, young ones at least, rather like science. Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space, weighed in with some interesting statistics. Ride noted that in fourth grade 68% of boys and 66% of girls report that they “like” science. (Many of the stats used by Ride, and citations, can also be found in this handbook, produced by Ride’s company, Sally Ride Science.)

Yet by eighth grade, twice as many boys as girls show an interest in science careers.

The reason, Ride and the other participants agreed, has nothing to do with aptitude — and everything to do with society’s attitudes. Girls get the subtle message that science is for boys, and that certain careers are more appropriate for girls.

Where are the role models in popular culture?

More than one woman suggested the lack of role models in media and entertainment didn’t help. Where, one asked, were the women scientists on television and in movies? If Disney’s Hannah Montana had a secret life as a physicist — or if Zac Efron’s character in the “High School Musical” movies had a crush on a girl in a lab coat — quipped another speaker, girls’ interest in the sciences would go through the roof.

What’s the big deal if science doesn’t appeal to girls? It means fewer adult women in science fields, of course. (I’m not a scientist, but I understand cause and effect.) According to Ride’s handbook, women make up 49% of the college-degreed workforce, but only 25% of the science and engineering workforce. Google’s Mayer said that as she prepared for the science discussion, she started taking notice of the number of work meetings she attended at which she was the only woman in the room. The answer? A lot.

The roundtable participants moved into solutions mode, offering examples of educational programs and mentorships aimed at helping girls and underprivileged kids get exposure to sciences and scientists. Ride’s company offers science camps just for tween girls. Exxon Mobil (XOM) hosts an annual Girls in Engineering Festival in Houston at which girls meet women scientists and participate in team- and skill-building exercises.

Some of the freshest ideas were more grassroots. Laurie Yoler, managing director of GrowthPoint Technology Partners, says she hired a scientist from a local science museum to teach a class and do experiments with her kids and their friends.  Every weekend her garage becomes a lab, with 8 to 12 kids participating, she says. (“The kids in my garage ended up designing, testing and then building a huge trebuchet and launching watermelons in a nearby park,” Yoler tells me in a recent correspondence. How’s that for cool?)

After the roundtable discussion, Yoler confided to me that her son much prefers to hang out with the girls who come to the labs than, say, those who aren’t as serious about science. Sounds like a potential plot for the next installment of “High School Musical.”

Dewey Whetsell a longtime commercial fisherman, veteran fire fighter and fire chief, jazz musician, and poet from Alaska penned a very nice retort to all of those who would say Sarah Palin isn’t the real deal, a true leader.

Those who follow Alaska politics know these stories well, but the rest of America should understand this as well.

You can check out Dewey Whetsell’s website here, the man has a very interesting life’s story.

Here is Dewey’s letter:

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“The last 45 of my 66 years I’ve spent in a commercial fishing town in Alaska. I understand Alaska politics but never understood national politics well until this last year. Here’s the breaking point: Neither side of the Palin controversy gets It’s not about persona, style, rhetoric, its about doing things. Even Palin supporters never mention the things that I’m about to mention here.

1- Democrats forget when Palin was the Darling of the Democrats, because as soon as Palin took the Governors office away from a fellow Republican and tough SOB, Frank Murkowski, she tore into the Republicans Corrupt Bastards Club (CBC) and sent them packing. Many of them are now residing in State housing and wearing orange jump suits. The Democrats reacted by skipping around the yard, throwing confetti and singing la la la la (well, you know how they are). Name another governor in this country that has ever done anything similar. But while you’re thinking, I’ll continue.

2- Now with the CBC gone, there were fewer Alaskan politicians to protect the huge, giant oil companies here. So, she constructed and enacted a new system of splitting the oil profits called ACES. Exxon (the biggest corporation in the world) protested and Sarah told them don’t let the door hit you in the stern on your way out. They stayed, and Alaska residents went from being merely wealthy to being filthy rich. Of course the other huge international oil companies meekly fell in line. Again, give me the name of any other governor in the country that has done anything similar.

3- The other thing she did when she walked into the governors office is she got the list of State requests for federal funding for projects, known as pork. She went through the list, took 85% of them and placed them in the when-hell-freezes-over stack. She let locals know that if we need something built, well pay for it ourselves. Maybe she figured she could use the money she got from selling the previous governors jet because it was extravagant. Maybe she could use the money she saved by dismissing the governor’s cook (remarking that she could cook for her own family), giving back the State vehicle issued to her, maintaining that she already had a car, and dismissing her State provided security force (never mentioning, I imagine, that she’s packing heat herself). I’m still waiting to hear the names of those other governors.

4- Now, even with her much-ridiculed gosh and golly mannerism, she also managed to put together a totally new approach to getting a natural gas pipeline built which will be the biggest private construction project in the history of North America. No one else could do it although they tried. If that doesn’t impress you, then you’re trying too hard to be unimpressed while watching her do things like this while baking up a batch of brownies with her other hand.

5- For 30 years, Exxon held a lease to do exploratory drilling at a place called Point Thompson. They made excuses the entire time why they couldn’t start drilling. In truth they were holding it like an investment. No governor for 30 years could make them get started. This summer, she told them she was revoking their lease and kicking them out. They protested and threatened court action. She shrugged and reminded them that she knew the way to the court house. Alaska won again.

6- President Obama wants the nation to be on 25% renewable resources for electricity by 2025. Sarah went to the legislature and submitted her plan for Alaska to be at 50% renewables by 2025. We are already at 25%. I can give you more specifics about things done, as opposed to style and persona . Everybody wants to be cool, sound cool, look cool. But that’s just a cover-up. I’m still waiting to hear from liberals the names of other governors who can match what mine has done in two and a half years. I wont be holding my breath.

By the way, she was content to to return to AK after the national election and go to work, but the haters wouldn’t let her. Now these adolescent screechers are obviously not scuba divers. And no one ever told them what happens when you continually jab and pester a barracuda. Without warning, it will spin around and tear your face off. Shoulda known better.

As we have been saying for a long time, Sarah Palin was an incredibly effective Governor, and a true servant of the people. The kind of woman who isn’t afraid of whatever challenge that faces her. As she has shown in the past few weeks, she is more than ready to take on big government, like she has big oil. And if Sarah Palin could tame Exxon-Mobil, I’m sure she will make quick work of D.C.!

BTW, even though she has given Exxon-Mobil absolute fits, they were more than happy to sign on as a partner in the Trans-Canada natural gas pipeline, her crowning achievement as Governor, that Dewey mentions in his letter.

People, like myself, who have followed Sarah for some time, understand the greatness of this woman. Sarah Palin is an American leader who has what is sorely needed today: The ability to get things done, good things for the people.

As it’s Saturday, I’ll leave you with this awesome video: