Scratchpad: Sun. 30 Sept. 2007

How many persons in the States of the Neo-Confederacy celebrate John Wilkes Booth’s Birthday?

Take a wild guess.

It’s just another thing they do but don’t talk about down in Dixie.

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Slow news day? That’s good. You want things to move slow…and peaceful.

Trouble comes soon enough.

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Supreme Court Justice David Souter hates computers. He doesn’t have a cell phone. He likes reading by natural light. However, he does drive a car, so…

A semi-Luddite? Anyway…it sure beats pubic-hair on coke cans jokes…

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Bill Clinton said Kyoto or something like it wouldn’t hurt the US economy.

He believes it would spark a massive drive for the creation of alternative energy sources, storage and distribution requiring new jobs for millions of workers.

But don’t expect a bunch of Oil Men and their cronies who prefer War to Progress to push for such things. Or even think of such things. Unless they can somehow get a stranglehold on the Sun.

(Although it would still be a good idea to rescind NAFTA. And repeal Taft-Hartley.)

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Ooops! Speak of the Devil…

A group representing some of the world’s leading banks will urge the United States and other industrial nations this week to move quickly to introduce a lightly regulated system for trading carbon emissions permits.

Permit-trading systems offer banks a potentially vast new business. For it to grow, leading economies — particularly the United States — will need to set limits on the quantities of greenhouse gases that can be released and to allow companies in other parts of the world to buy emissions permits.

“Where politicians opt to implement carbon constraints, then it should be cap-and-trade,” said Imtiaz Ahmad, head of emissions trading at Morgan Stanley in London and vice president of a lobbying group called International Carbon Investors and Services, which is being created to represent the banks.

The banking companies, which include Citigroup, Lehman Brothers Holdings and Morgan Stanley, are giving strong signs that Wall Street wants Washington to open the way to reduced emissions using a trading system based on the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement the United States did not ratify, rather than by enacting carbon taxes.

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The idea of price caps has been floated by Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who has suggested a so-called safety valve provision to prevent the price of carbon trading from rising too high.

Carbon traders say emissions permits could become the world’s largest commodities market if developed economies agree to take part in second-phase Kyoto negotiations, to be held in Bali, Indonesia, in December.

[ Source: Banks Urging U.S. to Adopt the Trading of Emissions ]

Further comment: So things are changing. If not by one door then by another. Therefore…Pay attention…!

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That jerk Tim Russert--in the spirit of the cynical all-White Male "journalist" political horse-race mentality-- referred to Barack Obama as a thoroughbred in the stable. I'm surprised the King Kong analogy hasn't been applied yet. (Please tell me there were no deliberate Don Imus-Bill O'Reillyesque undertones there?)

What really got me immediately was how everyone at the table with the exception of Tavis Smiley was perfectly comfortable with the tack of the conversation. (Of course, the omnipresent Patrick J. ‘I Never Met a Nazi War Criminal I Didn’t Like’ Buchanan is exempt from this criticism. Since being damnably rehabilitated the received wisdom on the subject matter is: “O well you know. It‘s just Pat…” Yeah…Just Pat…Your neighborhood friendly rightwing reactionary bigoted SOB…! )

I really wish the official unofficial Corporate Media Apparatchiks Club would raise the level of their commentary...or else just shut the hell up!

If time appears to be going backward that's because it is in the interests of the Dominant Class to keep some trends going in that direction. If you really remember, the retrogressive Reagan 80s were in many respects the Return or the Revenge of the 1950s.

Maybe John Carpenter's They Live isn't so far from the truth...

BTW--Can somebody please wake me when we get to the 21st century...? Thx

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