Matt Taibbi on Goldman Sachs. He lit the fire with his Rolling Stone article.
Glenn Beck: Why Goldman Sachs Is The Evil Empire. Yes, Glenn Beck. Because this isn’t a left-right issue.
Zero Hedge is all over this with multiplearticles. They also helped pull the trigger on Goldman.
CIT to be bailed out by Goldman and JP Morgan
So the government and FDIC will not touch CIT, but Goldman and JPM which have tens of billion in dollars owed to the FDIC via the TLGP can bail them out and make it seem like a private bail out? Red pill please.
[Gills Onions] The nation’s largest processor of fresh onions, will debut today an anaerobic digester system at its Oxnard, California location, whereby 100% of its onion waste and juice is transformed into electricity, heat and cattle feed.
Wow. No waste. Thus, they’re turning an expense (trucking away the waste) into a new source of income. And saving $700,000 a year in electricity costs. This is how cleantech and renewable energy will really become mainstream. When companies see financial reasons for doing so.
That’s what a senator quoted her as saying at a hearing. The FDIC demurs a bit, saying no estimate was given on the number of banks that could fail.
Note that FDIC is not even remotely being perky here or saying bank failures won’t happen. Nor are they making any attempt to contradict that up to 500 more banks might fail.
Today is Bank Failure Friday again. The FDIC generally seizes banks after the close of business on Fridays and posts the details on their failed bank list.
Matt Taibbi’s “The Great American Bubble Machine” in Rolling Stone is now online. His oft-quoted opening paragraph has probably already passed into the public lexicon.
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
And even Clusterstock, who has been rather incessantly defending Goldman, now appears to be getting on the clue train.
What’s wrong with Goldman isn’t that is evil or even uniquely evil. What’s wrong is that it is pocketing money that it is making, in part, because it isn’t subject to market discipline. It is close to a pure play government arbitrage firm these days.
The new Harry Potter movie starts off with a stunning open sequence but then meanders all over the place with no real plot coherence. Even the opening sequence, which shows Death Eaters attacking London, has no apparent relevance to the rest of the movie and is never mentioned again. That’s what I mean by no plot coherence.
As for the Half-Blood Prince, you finally do get to know who he is, but just barely. Sue, who has read all the books, says the Half-Blood Prince is explained much better in the book - as is most everything else. The book was exciting, and the dialogue was already good, she says. So why did they change it? And produce this uninspired mish-mash instead.
The whole thing just seems a build up for the final movie, where we’ll see the final battle between Harry and Voldemort. At least that might be exciting.
This is about as cleantech as it gets. A New Mexico firm plans a power plant to use renewable energy power like wind and solar to create hydrogen to run turbines. The big advantage here is the hydrogen can be stored and then used on demand to create electricity.
The 10-megawatt New Mexico plant would be designed to smooth the natural variability of the energy created by wind and solar generators, creating enough electricity to power about 6,000 homes and businesses.
WSJ explains how current algae-to-biofuel R&D is focused on genetic engineering to coax the algae to secrete the biofuel naturally rather than having to manually squeeze it out.
The only factions still cheer leading Goldman Sachs are the U.S Congress and government. Because the financial world no longer is. And that is a massive sea change.
(I’d much rather blog about cleantech snd renewable energy, and all the positive, optimistic developments there, rather than all this financial slime. But not many left blogs cover financial matters. Sue says, maybe that’s because they don’t really understand it. So, I’ll continue keeping an eye on the slime pit for you.)
Apparently the MSU method of accounting isn’t always the best of ideas after all
Madoff’s accountant, David Friehling, will probably plead guilty to various charges of Making Sh*t Up due to his fantasy audits of Madoff’s businesses. Prosecutors aren’t saying that he knew about the Ponzi scheme, but rather that he did virtually nothing but “rubber-stamp statements he didn’t verify.” He got paid, as I recall, $150,00 a year, which is comparative chump change.
Madoff played him like a violin, didn’t he? Chump. But now it seems he’ll be singing like a birdie.
Seems like too much of the liberal and progressive media spends an inordinate amount of time attacking, mocking, and / or being morally outraged by Palin. Why not just ignore her instead?
In an innovative plan, a California waste water plant is using anaerobic digestion to convert food waste into energy and compost. Rather than dumping it in a landfill, the East Municipal Bay Utility District is currently recycling 90 tons of food waste per week and plans to increase that to 200 tons per week. They are the only such facility in the country. Imagine the benefits if municipalties everywhere did this.
We already have most of the solutions we need for a renewable energy, low carbon, cleantech future. All we have to do is do it.
How are organized crime loan sharks supposed to compete against this? This is yet another example of how our damn meddling government destroys small businesses.
Earth2tech details the big money going into algae biofuel R&D, including from oil companies and the US government. Yeah, there’s been some busts here, but this technology is still in its infancy, so give it time. My guess: sooner or later algae biofuel will be competitive with petroleum-based fuel.
