August 26, 2009

August 26, 2009
11:37:48 MDT

http://www.canyoncountryzephyr.com/newzephyr/august-september2009/pagespdf/au09-2-3.pdf ――――――――――>>>>>>

Jim Stiles puts it straight-forwardly. Both industrial factories are similar. It is the readiness of the privileged-classes of Americans that make one distinction or another regarding what it is that is ‘acceptable’ to them.

********************************************************************************************

http://www.hcn.org/issues/40.20/who2019ll-clean-up-when-the-party2019s-over/article_view?b_start:int=4&-C=

“Other critics argue that the BLM needs to demonstrate that it’s able to heal industrialized lands before it considers new development. “I don’t think we’ve seen enough successful interim and final reclamation that would justify using it as a wide-scale management approach,” says Nada Culver of The Wilderness Society’s Rocky Mountain regional office in Denver.

But the BLM is increasingly using the promise of reclamation to justify opening up ecologically sensitive areas. Last May, BLM National Director Jim Caswell said that his agency and the industry now have the means to carefully develop millions of additional acres of energy-rich public lands currently off-limits for environmental reasons. “With the means to make energy development a temporary use of the land, we don’t have to choose between energy security and
healthy lands,” he said.

As an example, BLM officials point to plans for energy development on Western Colorado’s Roan Plateau. Although environmentalists criticize the agency’s plan for allowing drilling on the top of the plateau, it does limit surface disturbance to 350 acres at any one time.

That effectively forces operators to reclaim parts of well pads while they’re still active before moving on to the next area. The BLM has adopted a similar approach for southern New Mexico’s Otero Mesa, home of one of the few remaining intact expanses of Chihuahuan grasslands.”

Does the plan call for mitigation― on say ½ acre of current drill pad― therefore, set in motion the creation of a new road and accompanying bull dozer for another 20 ac. pad to be disturbed?
I believe this policy is skewed in favor of the large corporations. And back to my friend Stiles’s dispute regarding the swapping of one industrial form on the landscape for the other.
Seems to me these are the very folks that remember to bring the ubiquitous plastic-re-usable sack to the grocery store- under pretenses to ‘save the environment’ only to fill said sack with mostly throw-away packaging. My opinion again, is that they somehow justify “FEELING” better about their selves and therefore bally-hoo and herald the wind farm scenario as opposed to the methane drilling-rig reality.

Either way the animals lose!

We must really have our priorities screwed up.

comment regarding McDonald's book

August 11, 2009 Flagstaff, AZ
20:20:06 MST


Excerpt: 'A Colossal Failure of Common Sense'
by Lawrence G. McDonald
Lehman Brothers, like the great city beyond the massive glass windows, never slept. When the trading bell sounded on the New York Stock Exchange at four o'clock in the afternoon, a lot of equity guys packed up because there was nothing more for them to do. Bank debt and high-yield debt often went till seven o'clock or later. And there were always people waiting for late calls, often from the West Coast.
Those guys were there for dinner, working until ten o'clock. But the key moment in the trading day came around 6:00 p.m., when all the traders had to present their profit/loss numbers to the pit bosses — in my case to Larry and Richard Gatward. Most days the traders had normal-looking balance sheets, not too drastic one way or the other. But losses were not loved at Lehman. And if you turned in a sheet with a drop of $500,000 on the day, that was trouble. The Lehman hotshots would be aware of that in a New York minute.
In a way, Lehman was run by a junta of platoon officers. They'd all learned the basics, but they'd also spent a lot of time in combat. I think of them as battle-hardened, iron-souled regulars, guys like Larry and Alex Kirk, Mike Gelband, Peter Schellbach, Richard Gatward, and Christine Daley. My new commanding general was missing, however. Not missing in action, you understand. Just plain old-fashioned missing, locked in some rarefied war room on the thirty-first floor, an unseen but apparently malevolent presence. His name was Richard S. Fuld Jr. As one of his new troop commanders, I looked forward to meeting this famous CEO. When I mentioned this possibility to Larry McCarthy, I recall him laughing, a touch sardonically, which was not all that unusual for him.
"That probably is not going to happen, buddy," he said. "I've never met him myself."
Huh? A managing director, the head of distressed-debt trading, had never met the CEO? Beat the hell out of me. But slowly in the coming weeks I learned about several unorthodox aspects of Fuld's character. I spoke to a few people who met him a couple of times a year. But there were a few guys who had never even seen him.
When Lehman's CEO arrived by limousine in the morning at a VIP entrance at the back of the building, his driver had already called ahead alerting the front desk in the lobby of his majesty's imminent arrival. The front-desk attendant then hit a button programming one of the elevators in the rear bank to go directly to the thirty-first floor. A security guard would then hold the elevator until Fuld's arrival. This was Fuld's private transport to the heavens, the one that preserved his godlike existence. Into this rarefied capsule he slipped silently, and was, in a way, beamed up to his somber mahogany-paneled office, far from the madding crowd. He left the building the same way, which was not, I thought naively, much of a way to keep your finger on the pulse.
"I hear he's a very defensive guy," said Larry.
"You mean he's paranoid?"
"Paranoid? Hell, no. He just thinks everyone's out to get him."
Which was, in case you hadn't noticed, vintage McCarthy.
There was, it seemed, no doubt that our spiritual leader and battlefield commander was an extremely remote and watchful character, surrounded by a close coterie of cronies, with almost no contact with anyone else. And I suppose that was fine so long as the place was chugging along without civil war or mutiny breaking out, and continuing to coin money, which is after all the prime objective of the merchant bank.
But I sensed there was something deeply disquieting about his strange wraith-like presence, this oddball demigod who ruled everyone's lives. Quite simply, people were afraid of him, even though they couldn't see him. And this was a fear based upon reputation, because through the years Fuld had fired many, many people, for a thousand different reasons. Popular local intelligence, however, suggested that the most prevalent way of incurring his rank displeasure was to be so clever that you threatened his power base. He worked within a tight palace guard, protected from the lower ranks, communicating only through his handpicked lieutenants. And as the years went by, Dick Fuld had tightened his circle, shutting out more and more key people from the downstairs floors where the daily action seethed, where the trading battles ebbed and flowed, where more critical information flew around than anywhere else in the city. That was the place from which he had, to all intents and purposes, removed himself. In the process, he had become separated from the most modern technology and the ultramodern trading of credit derivatives — CDO (collateralized debt obligations), RMBS (residential mortgage-backed securities), CLO (collateralized loan obligations), CDS (credit default swaps), and CMBS (commercial mortgage-backed securities).
Stories about long-departed commanders were legion. There were mind-blowing tales of the Fuld temper, secondhand accounts of his rages, threats, and vengeance. It was like hearing the life story of some caged lion. Tell the truth, I ended up feeling pretty darn glad I wasn't meeting him. There was something of the night about this guy, and it all dated back to the early part of the 1980s, when he and his chief cohort had not quite covered themselves in glory. In fact, he had been instrumental in one of the biggest screw-ups in Lehman's long history, and not surprisingly, there was a touch of Prince Machiavelli about the whole episode.
Excerpted from A Colossal Failure of Common Sense by Lawrence G. McDonald. Copyright © 2009 by Lawrence G. McDonald. Excerpted by permission of Crown Business. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Very good book, finished it today. Could hardly stand to put it down for more than a few minutes except to sleep. Decent education regarding financial instruments the bankers package to move debt around and how they make it look as if these instruments are actual assets rather than liabilities… taking from Peter to pay Paul. Every undergrad program in economics needs to have at the least, this one book on the ancillary reading list whether entry-level or upper-division.

McDonald gives a well-vetted account similar in depth to Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty in telling the unadulterated truth. This time, about the current melt-down of the so-called ‘global’ economy’. Praise to McDonald for exposing in every day language the colossal failure of common sense of those at the helm of a venerable merchant bank and the reason for its recent demise.