Fighting a losing battle… last month Humayun Kabir watched as his 100-year-old ancestral home was washed away. Boats now sail where his home once stood.

It’s not just the rising oceans with tides that now inundate villages, increased temperatures in the Himalayas mean vastly more melt-water. And then there are the increasing number of of more powerful storms.

The United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change predicts rising sea levels will devour 17 per cent of Bangladesh by 2050, displacing at least 20 million people.

The social, political, and economic implications of that are scary. Where will they go and how will they eat?

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Nine major banks will recapitalize via preferred stock from Treasury. They were not given a choice. And there will be compensation restrictions.

Right or wrong, the hammer just came down. The only question: How hard?

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The oracle that is the Internet Anagram Server returns the following for “John Sidney McCain”

John Is Mendicancy
Achy Demonic Jinns
Cosmic Ninny Jehad
Comic Hyena Djinns

All of which makes about as much sense as the McCain campaign these past few days. Let’s see if I have this right. McCain was going to release a major new economic proposal today until he wasn’t. Then he said he would “whip [Obama's] you-know-what” in the debate Wednesday and promised a respectful campaign as they kept running smear ads about Bill Ayers. Most bizarrely, he hallucinated today that being ten points behind in the polls three weeks before the election means “we’ve got them just where we want them”

While watching this campaign self-destruct is fun, now is the time to double and redouble efforts to get Obama elected. Yesterday, Biden said this was the most important election in decades. He’s right. The neocon agenda has corrupted and poisoned this country for eight years. Wars based on lies. Torture. Billionaires profit while everyone else gets poorer. McCain would be a continuation of those policies. Obama is a centrist moderate. And a rational non-ideologue. His presidency will bring a return to the center for a country that desperately needs it.

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When Iceland’s economy crumbled in 2008, so went the leisurely party lives of thousands of young Icelanders. They are called “The Cuddly Generation” (Krutt-kynslotin in Icelandic), and they need your help.

That’s why you need to Adopt an Icelander now.

Meanwhile, US stock market had a ginormous day up, a combination of a relief rally from hugely oversold conditions, short covering, and some jumping in thinking last Thursday was the bottom.

Most financial blogs and analysts I follow think this rally will last a bit longer, but do not think we’ve seen the bottom yet.

Meanwhile the youth of Iceland can no longer fly to England and party because the Brits will no longer accept Icelandic currency. Your help is urgently needed.

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Heck, I didn’t even know there were shrimp farmers in the Arizona desert. But one of them, Desert Sweet Biofuels, is transitioning to creating biofuel. Why?

It is indeed remarkable that years of work and experimentation in the art of growing shrimp in the Arizona desert gives us a tremendous head start in the commercial production of algae. An old saying in the shrimp business is that “shrimp farmers don’t raise shrimp, they raise algae”

So, they’ve decided to create biofuel from the algae rather than shrimp.

Earth2tech has more.

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Andrew Sullivan in the Sunday Times explains how Obama uses rope-a-dope tactics brilliantly, first against Hillary Clinton, now against McCain.

Beep, beep: Road Runner lets McCain blow up
Barack Obama’s strategy of calm is provoking his rival into fatal errors

They become enraged, attack Obama and then, like the coyote, go flying off the cliff.

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Excerpts from an interview with George Soros by Bill Moyers. The Big Picture has the full written transcript. Read the whole thing. Video on PBS

How to revitalize the world economy

GEORGE SOROS: You see, for the last 25 years the world economy, the motor of the world economy that has been driving it was consumption by the American consumer who has been spending more than he has been saving, all right? Than he’s been producing. So that motor is now switched off. It’s finished. It’s run out of — can’t continue. You need a new motor. And we have a big problem. Global warming. It requires big investment. And that could be the motor of the world economy in the years to come.

This idea is increasingly being championed by business as well as greens. Upgrade the grid. Make it smart. Go to renewable energy. Long run, it will save money and create a multitude of new jobs in the process.

On neocons and socialism. (Soros lived under both fascism and communism and has little use for ideologies, including those of the free marketers.)

GEORGE SOROS: These market fundamentalists are making the same mistake as Marx did. You see, socialism would have worked very well if the rulers had the interests of the people really at heart. But they were pursuing their self-interests. Now, in the housing market, the people who originated the houses earned the fee.

And the people who then owned the mortgages their interests were not actually looked after by the agents that were selling them the mortgages. So you have a, what is called an agent principle problem in socialism. And you have the same agent principle problem in this free market fundamentalism.

BILL MOYERS: The agent is concerned only with his own interests.

GEORGE SOROS: That’s right.

So how do we protect against a small entrenched minority running countries based primarily on their own narrow self-interest? It happened in the USSR, and is happening now in the US and China.

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