Reasons to be Impossible

The time may have come to start hoarding tins of baked beans, wearing furs and running around in a post apocalyptic landscape:

Germany has been considered a safe haven of financial stability amid the ongoing euro crisis -- but that may be changing. Growing mistrust from investors seems apparent after what has been described as a "disastrous" government bond auction on Wednesday. Just two-thirds of the German bonds sold, leaving analysts concerned but not panicked[Spiegel].

I suggest now is precisely the time to panic, while the analysts are being cautiously worried. If we leave panicking till everyone is doing it, we'll have to fight for those tins of beans with our teeth.

The fucking Germans cannot borrow money! the country that escaped recession, the one that is still growing, the one that has been bailing everyone else out. Now, the Spiegel article suggests this may be a lack of confidence in the Eurozone as a whole, and of some of the fundamentals in the German economy; but it also has an expert suggest:

"Because of the low rate of return in Germany, some investors are now cautiously going to countries that they had recently avoided," he added. "In France, or even in Ireland, chances for returns are certainly promising."

that's right, it's more profitable to lend to risky countries because you get more interest. There is the cause of this mess in the first place: it's more profitable to lend to people who a less able to pay back (until the day they actually default that is, at which point you own their soul).

More to the point, though, this seems to me to reflect that there may not be as much money floating around generally: surely, normally, someone, someone, would want to pick up safe, unprofitable low hanging fruit.

Start breaking out the old family blunderbus: the apocalypse is here.

Labels: 339.7, Bond markets, Debt, Economic crisis, Eurozone, Germany

OK, so, clarification time. I didn't want to give the impression that I was against the #Occupy movement, or even thought it was just the usual suspects: my point is that our obligation, and even my own inclination, is to raise the issue of challenging for political power; and that unless the movement spreads into something that reaches into every street, then it will be smothered -- one way or another.

Let's put it this way, the image of Tahrir Square, and the Arab spring on which it is modelled were very dramatic. But the substance of the Arab spring happened the other week, with the election of the new government, the final grasping of the levers of political power by the new Ennahda Government in Tunisia (and the same old military in Egypt).

The old Trotskyist image of the steam and piston comes to mind: the popular protests were the steam on which the piston of the Islamist/Military parties came to power. Doubtless that image is still motivating Trotskyists here.

What I hope for, though is that we all become not steam, but small cogs, wielding a share in a precision mechanism in which we all can fine tune and control (and which we can brake by our refusal). Note how quietly the elections have gone, but how oh so determining they were in the future direction. The devil is in the detail.

Of course, in Oakland the protest has spread and taken the form of a "General Strike" -- lets hope our can do the same come N30; but I'm going to keep banging the tedious drum for the necessity for political action.

Labels: #Occupy, 329, Arab Spring, N30, Partyism, Political action, Strikes, Trade unions

According to the BBC:

The Earth's surface really is getting warmer, a new analysis by a US scientific group set up in the wake of the "Climategate" affair has concluded.
[...] Funding came from a number of sources, including charitable foundations maintained by the Koch brothers, the billionaire US industrialists, who have also donated large sums to organisations lobbying against acceptance of man-made global warming.
[...]Since the 1950s, the average temperature over land has increased by 1C, the group found.

Although there are caveats -- the work hasn't been peer reviewed, for example -- because its claims are not extraordinary, and corroborate previous studies, this suggests to me that this is copper bottomed science. Now, the scepticism about AGW -- whether this change is driven by humans or by sun spots -- will remain, but it has fewer boltholes to run into.
Whatever one's politics, one will have to take climate change into account, and responding to it will become the governing imperative of the century. Hopefully now no-one (especially a front rank politician) will be able to dispute climate change science with any credibility.

Labels: 551.58, AGW, Berkeley Earth Project, Climate change

OK, so - time to get grumpy. The occupy thing is cute. It's reaching out, and getting people to take notice; but it's not enough.
I was at Occupy LSX last weekend, and it struck me that the easy way to occupy the stock exchange is:

Win the elections.

Send the riot police to occupy the stock exchange.

That is -- political action will get results. Now, I'm not saying the grumpy leftist thing of: "we need a programme". Not at all. What I'm saying is simply that a political party (or parties - hell, why doesn't someone register 'Occupy the Council' as a party name?) is an effective outcome.
Look, it costs nothing to contest a council seat (OK< if you want to print leaflets it'll cost a hundred quid) -- but if the occupiers can turn themselves into nominators then that is something.
An absence of policies is a good thing, a determined movement of 'Vote the scoundrels out' will send shock waves through the political elite like no bugger's business. Once we've occupied the seats of power, then lets debate what to do -- in a way compatible with the democratic impetus of the #Occupy movement. But, but but. Political action is needful, elst it turn into simply pleading with the powerful.

Labels: #Occupy, 329, Political action

Clue 1
Clue 2
Clue 3

The answer? Pink washing - all are promotional pieces taken from the JP Morgan Chase - the financial collossus: not that you're know it from looking at their website. You'd think they were a charitable foundation. The most significant bit of charity, though, is:

From the end of 2010 through the first quarter of 2011, JP Morgan Chase donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation, in the form of 1,000 new patrol car laptops, security monitoring software in the NYPD's main data center, other technology resources, and funding. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple.

Very charitably, they have strengthened the hand of the state. of course, this is what happens when the capitalists are against paying taxes - they have to pay directly for their protection. The good citizens of New York will have the clear pleasure of knowing that the police on the streets are the paramilitary wing of JP Morgan Chase.

So, when they volunteer to help us out, and fix the problems of the market, we need to remember they do so on the basis of protecting the market. Charity is private property trying to treat the ills of private property.

Labels: 364, Charity, JP Morgan Chase, Police

So, according to Oxfam, there is a land rush on in Africa:

It says up to 227m hectares (560m acres) have been sold or leased worldwide since 2001.

Half of all deals that have been verified are in Africa, amounting to an area the size of Germany - 35m hectares, Oxfam says.

The example given for 227 million hectares is the area of the entire of Western Europe. That is, there is an ongoing agrarian revolution, driven by the market. Now, some of that is uprooting some pretty unfair land distributions in any case: but, as some writers, from Charlie onwards have noted, Capitalism is the agrarian revolution. Dissolving peasant economies and turning land over to market use is what capitalism does. Of course, Oxfam wants peasants to stay peasants, whereas what will happen to them is that they will become proletarians - with all that that entails. Given the parlous state of the world economy, some of that entailment is starvation. of course, given the parlous state of the world economy, investment in land seems a very good idea.

The report's abstract says:

Oxfam’s research has revealed that residents regularly lose out to local elites and domestic or foreign investors because they lack the power to claim their rights effectively and to defend and advance their interests.

The report states in its executive summary:

The recent rise in land acquisitions can be explained by the 2007–08 food prices crisis, which led investors and governments to turn their attention towards agriculture after decades of neglect.

Of course, biofuels get a mention, but then, and this will be a fillip to vegetarians:

Across the globe, diets are changing towards more land-intensive products, such as animal proteins (meat, dairy, eggs, and fish) and convenience foods.

Labels: 332.6, Accumulation by dispossession, Agricultural revolution, Primary accumulation

Whoop! Whoop!

US researchers say they have demonstrated how cells fuelled by bacteria can be "self-powered" and produce a limitless supply of hydrogen.

[...]

In their paper, Prof Logan and colleague Younggy Kim explained how an envisioned RED system would use alternating stacks of membranes that harvest this energy; the movement of charged atoms move from the saltwater to freshwater creates a small voltage that can be put to work.

As they say, it isn't economic - but then, no technology is when it's first invented. All economics tells us is how easy something is to achieve with the current technology/infrastructure. Changing that means that costs fall, and new processes become economic. Hopefully, this could develop faster than Fusion: after all, we're already at the proof of concept stage here, and the input costs will be lower than building a fusion plant. Energy from sea water. Wow. From their abstract:

There is a tremendous source of entropic energy available from the salinity difference between river water and seawater, but this energy has yet to be efficiently captured and stored. Here we demonstrate that H2 can be produced in a single process by capturing the salinity driven energy along with organic matter degradation using exoelectrogenic bacteria.

Labels: 662.7, Biotechnology, Fuel, Hydrogen, Microbes, Microbial fuel cells