Wind Energy News Round-Up - 1st half 2013

Offshore WINDPOWER: Move forward with the U.S. offshore industry
U.S. offshore wind energy development is picking up speed and momentum, based on recent, significant advancements by federal agencies, educational institutions, and private businesses. Attend AWEA Offshore WINDPOWER Conference & Exhibition to explore these advancements, meet federal and state agency reps, and make crucial business connections for forging strategic partnerships. Mark your calendars: The event takes place Oct. 22 and 23 in Providence, R.I. Registration will be open soon -- get more information.

Report: 2012 was a boom year for wind power
More wind turbines were installed globally in 2012 than ever before, bringing the world's wind power capacity to 3% of global electricity demand, according to a report by the World Wind Energy Association. Global wind power installations reached 45 gigawatts in 2012, taking the world's wind power capacity to 282 GW, the report stated. The U.S. and China were at the forefront of wind power investments last year, adding 13 GW of capacity each, the report showed. Deutsche Welle (Germany) (5/16)

Global wind installations reached 44,000 MW in 2012
Global wind installations last year hit a record high of 44,000 megawatts in new capacity despite policy uncertainty in leading wind markets, boosting the world's overall wind capacity to more than 280,000 MW, writes J. Matthew Roney of the Earth Policy Institute. The wind industry in the U.S. installed new facilities with capacity of 13,100 MW last year, raising the country's total wind capacity to 60,000 MW, he writes. New wind installations around the world are expected to decline to about 40,000 MW this year, Roney says, citing data from Navigant Research. Sustainablog/Earth Policy Institute (4/3), Energy Matters (Australia) (4/4)

AWEA: U.S. led the way in new wind projects in 2012
The U.S. became the foremost destination for new wind projects in 2012, according to the annual market report of the American Wind Energy Association. Wind power accounted for more than 40% of newly installed capacity in the U.S. last year, surpassing natural gas, which accounted for 32%, AWEA said. "We saw an uptick in every region of the country for new installations in 2012. ... Wind is making a big mainstream impact across the country," said Emily Williams, senior policy analyst for AWEA. FuelFix.com (4/11)

(70 more)

With choices like these, who needs enemies?

Let's look first at the Republicans. Commenting on the House of Representatives passing farm assistance legislation without a single penny included for food assistance for impoverished Americans, Paul Krugman wrote in his New York Times column: 

Something terrible has happened to the soul of the Republican Party. We’ve gone beyond bad economic doctrine. We’ve even gone beyond selfishness and special interests. At this point we’re talking about a state of mind that takes positive glee in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable...  Somehow, one of our nation’s two great parties has become infected by an almost pathological meanspiritedness, a contempt for what CNBC’s Rick Santelli, in the famous rant that launched the Tea Party, called “losers.” If you’re an American, and you’re down on your luck, these people don’t want to help; they want to give you an extra kick. I don’t fully understand it, but it’s a terrible thing to behold. 

By the way, Truthout last week carried an article by Jeannette Wicks-Lim, Undercounting the Poor, which detailed both how inadequate official government statistics are, and how important government programs are in lifting millions out of poverty.

So, now let's look at the Democrats. A few days ago, Barry Ritholtz wrote,

At a dinner last week laden with economists, our discussion turned to who will replace Fed Chair Ben Bernanke. The consensus was Janet Yellen was the front runner, Roger Ferguson was the long shot . . . and then Lawrence Summers’ name arose.

Is it actually possible that Larry frigging Summers is still a respected entity in the Obama administration or among Democratic Party lawmakers? Of course, Ritholtz doesn't say one way or the other that Summers is being considered by Obama. But the next day, Dean Baker warned that there are indeed reports coming from certain business media that there actually is a campaign "among Washington insiders" to make Larry frigging Summers the next chairman of the Federal Reserve System.

Ritholtz supplied a short list of Summers' blunders that should make Summers persona non grata anywhere near a policy making position. Correct that: a short list of Summers' many and massive blunders:

• He has consistently argued for privatization and deregulation of the financial sector;
• He oversaw the repeal of Glass-Steagall via the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act;
• He approved the (previously illegal) merger between Citibank and Travelers;
• He oversaw (and indeed encouraged) concentration in the financial sector, thinking bulked up banks are a virtue. This led to the rise of the TBTF institutions (formerly known as mega-banks).
• He successfully fought Brooksley Born, then chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to rein in financial derivatives;
• He oversaw passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, preventing ALL Federal regulation of derivatives; The CFMA also exempted derivatives from state insurance oversight and antigambling laws.
• Thanks to Summers, derivatives still have no minimum reserve requirements, no disclosure obligations, no transparency and no exchange listing / reporting requirements.

After he helped to create the financial crisis and collapse, Summers found himself uniquely situated to help repair the damage he wrought. But that would have required an admission of error and responsibility; instead, he compounded his errors by pushing for a small, ineffective stimulus plan.

Note we have not even bothering with his issues with woman, his lack of collegiality, his inability to work well with others, his boorish head strong personality, and his other professional failings.

The mere idea of making Summers Fed chairman really should be causing massive hysteria among progressives and Democrats. There really are very few people who are more culpable than Larry Summers for the completely unnecessary destruction of our economy that past few decades, culminating in the financial crash of 2007-2008.

As Charles Ferguson, who created the web page building application Front Page, then sold it to Microsoft, and then used his riches to research and put together the Oscar-winning documentary film about the financial crash, Inside Job, wrote back in October 2010:

Summers is unquestionably brilliant, as all who have dealt with him, including myself, quickly realize. And yet rarely has one individual embodied so much of what is wrong with economics, with academe, and indeed with the American economy. For the past two years, I have immersed myself in those worlds in order to make a film, Inside Job, that takes a sweeping look at the financial crisis. And I found Summers everywhere I turned. (Emphasis mine.)

And we have not even begun to consider Summers' especially disastrous role as director of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers from January 2009 to December 2010. As detailed in Ron Suskind's latest book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, Summers was ruthless in suppressing any economic views he did not agree with from reaching Obama. Together with former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Summers made certain that no actions in the least bit punitive were directed against Wall Street. Thus was squandered a truly historic opportunity to fundamentally change the course of U.S. economic policy and history. By Larry frigging Summers.

It is no comfort at all that Democratic elites do not take the same perverse pleasure "in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable" like the Republicans do.

Brand magic

I usually don't get very interested in things like company names, logos, and identities.  But when I read in 1981 that Datsun was going to change its name in USA to Nissan, I was actually shocked.  How can a successful company do something so stupid? I wondered—aloud at times.

I have no problem understanding why a company whose name had been ruined by some product liability scandal, or similar, would want a name change.  But this was not the case here.  Datsun had a fanatically loyal following based on their 510 sedans which were both very inexpensive and reliable, and the 240 (260, 280) Z cars which would prove that the Japanese could build high-performace sports cars that regular people could afford.  This sort of brand loyalty was a LOT to discard over some corporate naming whim.  And to this day I have never read an account of how this happened that remotely considers the value of brand loyalty.

Not surprisingly, the customers were confused so Nissan spent millions over the next three years assuring folks that only the name had changed.  The dealers were pissed because it meant rebuilding a brand at the local level.  When Datsun became Nissan, they and Toyota had roughly the same market penetration in USA.  Now it's about half.

But "virtue" has triumphed.  Nissan is trying to build something very inexpensive for emerging markets like India.  And some genius in the corporate culture has decided to launch these ventures with a proven good-luck charm.  They are bringing back the Datsun name.  Oh, and the executive that presided over bringing back the Datsun name?  He's French.  Of course, the very idea that someone is devoting so much energy to making more cars for a world with WAY too many proves there is more market genius in this world than wisdom for resource planning.

The battle against slumlord thinking

We Swedes and Swedes-in-exile tend to admire the Germans.  The guy who invented our form of Protestantism (Martin Luther) was most certainly German and Sweden has been in the Hansa League economic orbit for centuries.  Swedish is in the Germanic family of languages. Etc.

But the main link is cultural.  We Nordics and the Germans admire each other because we admire the way we build.  And maintain.  I have trigger in me that is enraged by people who will not maintain their property.  I felt it when I did restoration work in St. Paul.  Yes, lousy tenants make keeping up the building much more difficult but the main cause for nice neighborhoods becoming dangerous slums stems from underinvestment in maintenance.  But I really got the I-hate-slumlandlord rage when a bridge over the Mississippi collapsed.

Lots of Scandinavians and Germans in Minnesota.  We are known for our propensity towards continuous improvement.  We understand how important regular maintenance is to living a decent life.  Take care of your stuff and it won't strand you on a winter's night when it -30°.  Make your car last 20 years instead of six, and transportation becomes almost affordable.  Best of all, if you have tools and know how to use them, there is a good chance you have neighbors who will lend from their tool collection.  And so a culture grows up around people who take great pride in not thinking like a slumlord.

So you might understand why I found the following article about GERMAN underinvestment in infrastructure so sad.  Neoliberalism is a major disaster if it can make even Germans think like slumlords.  This is not good.  For a long time, I have looked at the culture that builds Mercedes-Benz for inspiration.  I believe we can build a Green society because so many Germans believe it is possible.  THIS is what the neoliberals are wrecking.

Damn!  The experiment in crackpot economics simply must end.

Happy 4th

The one day when we get to celebrate folks who actually started a revolution over monetary policy (Franklin, etc) the principles of the enlightenment (Jefferson) the desire to invent a better society (Franklin, Paine, and many others) and just a general fuck you to the British (LOTS of folks.)

It's also a day when we get to hear the work of a fine Russian composer named Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky who understood that lots of folks get excited by loud noises.  So he wrote a tribute to the Battle of Borodino and called it the 1812 Overture (embedded at the linked page).  Goes great with fireworks!

Some toons for the day.

High finance and climate change

For many years now, I have wondered why the hell outfits like Exxon should think of themselves as an oil business.  Now, I understand that if you have been getting rich for 150 years trafficking in oil, it maybe a stretch to think of yourselves as being in the generic energy business.  After all, it takes enormous investment in real economy skills and tooling to get gasoline to your neighborhood station.  On the other hand, while the skill sets for running an offshore oil platform and maintaining a wind farm are quite different, they have much more in common than any overlap between these Producer skill sets and someone trading on currency spreads.

At one time, BP claimed to be interested in alternative energy but their heart was never in it and their investments never matched the expectations of their Beyond Petroleum ad campaign.  But at least they brought the subject up!

But over at Daily Kos, someone posted a dairy that claimed the reason the energy companies cling so tightly to their petroleum (and other fossil fuel) assets is because they have been leveraged and so must be exploited or a bunch of investors will be VERY unhappy—investors that include pension funds, etc.

Obama's Climate Action Plan

I want to cut Obama a little slack here.  If you are being told that you can talk about reducing greenhouse gasses but you cannot meaningfully address the problem because you will get no resources (or very few) and you must protect the interests of the legacy technologies, the result is inevitably the lame shit you proposed on the 25th.  These constraints explain why 25 years, scores of conferences, and thousands of papers later, we are in much worse shape than in 1988.

This is obviously not going to save us.  Not. Even. Close. Unfortunately, the establishment environmental organizations and the vast majority of the intellectuals addressing the climate problem accept the same constraints on their thinking.  It is why you get "50 Easy Ways to Save the Planet" thinking and Nobel Laureates in Physics suggesting weatherization schemes.  What is so insane about all this is that this country would never have been built in the first place if our grandfathers had exhibited such cramped and narrow thinking.

And now Brazil

Turns out that economics triggered Brazil's social unrest.  But how can that be—isn't Brazil the oft-touted model of an successful emerging economy?  Well that maybe true but even a successful economy is not immune from the global economic reality.  And the reality these days is that vast swaths of the world's economies are inhabited by people and governments who don't have money to spend.  And so Brazil's exports have crashed.  In the meantime, a successful economy has raised the incomes of many people.  So naturally, the petty real estate speculators are raising rent and property prices.  It's what they do after all.  So while their petty Predators raise prices whenever possible in an effort to mop up the country's middle-class income gains, the effect is to raise prices for everyone—even those who have never seen a bit of that income prosperity.

In the meantime, the Leisure Class mania for sport got Brazil into hosting the World Cup AND the Olympics.  The irony here is that football / soccer is popular in the poor areas of the world precisely because it is a sport that can be played without much expensive equipment.  Brazilians are crazy for sport because it designates social champions from the nation's slums.  And yet here they are, building hopelessly overpriced stadiums so that guys who travel by private jet will feel comfortable watching others play a game.  I have never been to Brazil but I can guess there are plenty of better places to spend $14 Billion for upgraded infrastructure.

Drinking from a firehose

Crackpot realism.  When I first read C. Wright Mills in 1969, his name for the madness that had allowed a country teetering on the edge of true greatness, to be swept into the cesspool that was USA's war against the Vietnamese people, was so powerful, it was beyond my comprehension.  Little did I know that if I understood crackpot realism, there was really little else about sociology that I would have to understand.  What I did know was that whatever he called what he did, I wanted to be like Mills.

What makes crackpot realism relevant to economics is that the phenomenon describes much of what goes on in the lofty reaches of the economics profession.  I mean, nothing describes the austerians such as Rogoff and Reinhart better.  This is the reason the Institutionalists claimed Mills as one of their own.  Their claim was not at all unreasonable—at one time, Mills studied under the legendary Clarence Ayres at the University of Texas (Austin).  Ayres will probably best be remembered as the teacher who best explained Veblen.

So I took much joy in discovering a writer who used Mills' great idea to discuss the recent revelations about the NSA.  Talk about crackpot realism.  American "intelligence" somehow believes that an infinity of information will lead to a greater understanding of the threats that menace us.  And because it is now possible to record all the metadata produced by the world of digital communications, that's what they set out to do.

Remember here, the bombing of the Boston Marathon was the work of two Chechen brothers the Russian secret service had specifically warned the USA about.  But because crackpot realism reigned supreme in the salons of the most serious crackpots, and they believed that the Chechens were the good guys and so much more reliable than Russian intelligence, they dismissed a clear warning—one that was seriously better than some warning generated by an algorithm combing though the metadata of the globe's electronic communications will ever be.

So yes, the NSA can and probably will collect their Zetabytes of data.  The question is, what can they possibly do with this towering mountain of bytes without a clear understanding of what they are looking for?  In the world of  crackpot realism, such an understanding is so far outside of the conventional wisdom, it is taken as a threat to the social order.  So while the NSA builds its storage facilities in a jobs program for the computer industry, the crackpots will ensure that they most they can ever "accomplish" is further damage to the idea of free citizens and their right to be left alone.

The idea that NSA can or will stop any serious attempts at low-cost violence by the millions of economic left-behinds is simply ludicrous.  Trying to distill anything useful from the torrent of data generated by billions of people living their lives is already as insane as trying to drink from a firehose.  But it is utterly impossible if the folks who are looking for that important information must first commit themselves to the security world's crackpot realism as a condition for their employment.

School's out for summer

It's pretty clear I need to scale back my efforts here at real economics. I am weary and NEED something like a sabbatical.  Grinding out a reasonably coherent post every day is a lot of work.  But lately, I have also been playing nursing assistant to a partner who broke her right arm near her shoulder.  So now the work load in my life is becoming a threat to my health—and I have four stents in my heart already.  If someone else was making me work this hard, I would be organizing a revolution.

Don't worry.  I am not going anywhere.  If there is an interesting story, I will be sure to cover it.  But I am not going to try to get a post up every day.  I have proved I am a good Protestant—now I am going to try to be more reasonable.

I also have Producer Class projects that need doing.  This house we moved into last summer is cute, has beautiful trees, and a large expansive lawn that was obviously well-tended by the previous owner.  Unfortunately, it has the weather protecting qualities of a tent.  It a long way from hopeless, but it is also a long way from energy efficiency.  Besides, construction projects like this are good for the thought processes.  I am hoping designing and executing some weatherization strategies will recharge the old brain.

But the big change is that I want to write about what the people who can build better societies need to do politically to get us out of the current cesspool of ignorance and corruption that seems to prevent us from accomplishing those tasks necessary for survival.  I don't intend to re-invent the wheel so this effort will borrow heavily from the strategies employed by the Non-Partisan League in the second half of the 1910s.  Think NPL manifesto meets TED presentation.  I have a pretty good start on this project but now I need the time and energy to finish it.  I'll probably post some progress reports as they become relevant.

Wish me luck.  And if you have any suggestions for my NPL / Producer Class "manifesto," please send me an email or add a comment to this post.

Saturday toons 8 JUN 13

Solar panel trade war

Well, it happened.  The EU slapped some tariffs on Chinese PV cells.  The reason is obvious—the Chinese ARE dumping.

As someone who believes in managed trade, I think this decision is probably a good thing.  First of all, why the hell are the Chinese manufacturing solar cells for Europe when there are so MANY needs for them in China? (this is so obviously an economic distortion of neoliberalism!)  And right behind is the question—what is accomplished in terms of carbon reduction when you ship panels all over?  Finally, it is probably a good thing when panels are built for local conditions.

Since PV cells were invented, the goal has been to increase the rate of conversion from sunlight to electricity.  But as these things mature we will see PV panels optimized for other things such as ease of maintenance, enhanced durability, and targeted operating temperature (my brother is discovering that his panels work much better in April than July because of lower ambient temperatures in April.)  Because PV panels represents a dispersed energy system, their market will more imitate the markets for construction materials.  (As someone who had been watching this phenomenon over most of a lifetime, I have noticed that building methods don't travel all that well.  Different building methods—different building supplies.)

Japan's solar market grows up

Back in 1989 when I wrote Elegant Technology, I was quite certain that Japan would become a leader in green technologies—mostly because they COULD become a leader.  It has taken awhile, but it looks like this prediction will come true.  Go Japan!

53°C / 127°F—hot enough for you?

For a Nordic man from Minnesota, even the thought of 127°F is enough to make me cringe—I start wilting about 85°F.  In Pakistan, they are seeing these sorts of temps in major cities.  One wonders how many climate change deniers there are in Lahore these days.

Will Portugal leave the Euro?

While the Portuguese government is probably horrified that someone is out getting famous trashing their Euro membership, the subject is probably gaining traction by the day.  The reason is simple—the Euro is destroying their economy.  Portugal really cannot afford to stay.

But man, this must piss off the Portuguese elites.  Membership in the Euro means much more than some petty economic advantage that they may be a part of.  No, this is about being in a a very nice club—the kind of club folks from small nations rarely get to join.  This dynamic is at work in other little countries—some of whom are still trying to join the Euro even with all its problems.

They owe us

In all the history of truly vile ideas, the idea that the banksters—who have destroyed much of the real economy, corrupted our governments, turned serious subjects like economics into a sick joke, reduced our communication systems below well-written soap operas, attacked honest science, and all those other corruptions of the human potential in the name of naked greed—are not only NOT going to jail or facing execution, they are to be rewarded in perpetuity every scrap of wealth a society can generate.  Presumably for their good work in managing an economy that can no longer even maintain its systems.

Takes some serious gullibility for that reality to sound like a good idea.

When I was a kid, I was shown many examples of extreme human credulity.  Got to believe a lot of bullshit to be religious—especially if you are a fundamentalist who thinks the Bible is true down to "the last jot and tittle."  My absolute favorite example came at a Bible camp.  One featured speaker was an old China hand.  With their successful revolution in 1949, the Chinese made it a priority to get rid of western missionaries.  The missionaries, who thought themselves the good guys, were NOT happy to be expelled.  Post 1949, China policy in USA would be largely created by pissed-off missionaries and their representatives who were give a permanent platform at Time Magazine by Henry Luce (who was born in China to Presbyterian missionaries.)  Our Bible camp speaker was a long way from being Luce, but he had carved out a minor traveling salvation show that warned folks of the nature of the evil we faced in Chinese Communism.  Not content to explain how the Communists had turned their good Chinese friends against them, Bible-camp guy had to make some extra claims about the evil forces he encountered in China.  It seems that he had a sideline in casting out demons which he recounted in Exorcist-like detail.  The whole idea of his message was that if the power of God could cast out the devil himself, why golly-gee we should be able to cast out those godless communists in China.

How many people actually believed his rap, I have no idea, but there were enough of them to keep his "ministry" afloat.  The last time I heard him, he had diversified and was peddling the Hoover / FBI smears against Martin Luther King.  As this was a pet project of the John Birch Society, Bible-camp guy probably had open ties to them.  After all, John Birch himself was a Protestant missionary in China who was shot by the Communists in 1945.  They accused him of being a USA intelligence agent.  (He was.  Just remember, missionaries may have had some whacky views of China, but they were the only folks who knew anything at all about the middle kingdom.  Most missionaries were debriefed about their knowledge of China by USA intelligence coming and going.  Most of them cooperated enthusiastically.)

I am reminded of this because the bug-eyed craziness of a man who believes we should resort as a nation to whatever means (including a nuclear standoff and the Vietnam War) it required so he could go back to performing exorcisms on poor Chinese peasants, is really quite similar to whatever bullshit it requires to make us believe that after all they have cost us, we still owe the banksters more of our wealth.

So here's to the They Owe Us movement.  Make this idea stick and you will have accomplished much.

Losing our dirt

Anyone who has tried to get an apathetic friend concerned about Peak Oil or Climate Change has but a TINY appreciation for the problems of getting public policy to address the loss of topsoil.  Because even though the loss of arable land is easily as serious a problem as the destruction of the oceans, the dwindling supplies of fresh water, or the end of the age of petroleum, it rarely gets mentioned in the same breath because, after all, we are talking about dirt—you know, the stuff that made your mother scream at you when you got some on your clothes or hands.

Of course, because farmers (peasants) are the folks who must work with dirt and are the quintessential examples of Producers, this is a subject that also suffers from class animus.  For many, many Predators, farming is just another impediment to their favorite activity—real estate speculation.  So the folks in these articles are not only doing difficult work, they are doing work that gains them Leisure Class scorn.  This in no way alters the fact that care for the planet's dirt is literally a matter of life and death.

Euro economic crises rolls on

I have been spending a lot of time lately wondering why the USA left is so freaking hopeless when it comes to economic and environmental matters.  It is not a topic that makes me happy.  To have a President from the Democratic Party who will not defend Social Security is really quite devastating.  Now it can be argued that the Democrats were never all THAT left, but compared to the unabashedly bourgeois Republicans, they were sort of left.  And even though they are but a handful, there are even some Democrats who are reminders that theirs was once the party of FDR, Francis Perkins, and Ken Galbraith (etc.)

But compared to the collapse of the European Left, ours has held up amazingly well.  So I wonder what killed the Euro left.  After all, they were are lot "lefter" than we would ever be, were theoretically much better grounded, and more importantly, held power in important governments for significant periods of time.  But, watching someone like Gerhard Schroeder sell out German workers was enough to make folks forget that Hitler once considered the Social Democrats so dangerous, he had many of them murdered and many more sent to concentration camps.  Seeing an überwienie like Hollande in action, it's hard to remember that the Socialists once preached armed struggle.

Even worse, it seems that former leftists become the most enthusiastic neoliberals.  The intellectual journey from Marx and Gramsci to neoliberalism seems especially short.  I have theories for why this is so, but they are not so important as the fact that it IS so.  Then there is the problem that Marxism was such a notorious failure so flogging that horse back to life looks especially impossible.  Once you have lost your economic playbook, the only thing a Marxist has to offer is an annoying authoritarianism. The obvious solution would be to turn to other progressive strategies such as was invented by the left Populists in North America.  After all, the USA Pops were confronting corrupt banksters so the application is ideal.  But the Euro establishment has turned populism into a swear word and Euro scholarship doesn't even begin to understand the historical underpinnings of left Populism.

Debunking the economics "profession"

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” John Maynard Keynes

Of all the scams, none is so pernicious as the one that claims economics is a science.  The discipline has some scientific moments, to be sure, but the way it is practiced has MUCH more in common with theology.  The recent saga of Rogoff and Reinhart should serve as a permanent warning that even the most highly credentialed economists are at best, sloppy theologians, who have at most, only a vague and passing interest in the rigors of scientific research. (See the April 25 coverage of this story here at real economics.)

Of course, the scandal here is not that a couple of arrogant academics mailed in a study that should have embarrassed a freshman, the scandal is that anyone treated it seriously because it was obvious from the outset that this paper was nothing more than a hack job turned out to please some stupendously stupid rich client(s).  So now that the work of Rogoff and Reinhart has been discredited, the attack on them has turned into an attack on the folks who have been paying their bills.  Krugman even seems to believe this is the beginning of the end for the whole austerity movement R & R were such a part of.

We can only hope he is right.

Protests are back (Turkey)

Here in Minnesota, winter lasted for-freaking-ever so it seems like it just turned spring.  And as history teaches, spring is a good time for protests.  Because the global economy is still being mostly run by stupid sociopaths, the protests could happen almost anywhere—even in places where they are relatively rare.  Nothing tops economics as a reason to get people into the streets.  This time it's Turkey and the supposed reason is about a re-development of a popular park—the destruction of a public place for the gain of a handful of well-connected real estate speculators.  So the connection of this protest to economics is pretty direct.

Saturday toons 1 JUN 13