Blogs

OPEC agrees to cut production back to March levels, oil prices spike 14%

At their meeting in Vienna on Wednesday, the member nations of OPEC agreed to cut their oil production by 4.5% for a period to run 6 months, effective January 1st.  The amount of oil output each member is expected to forgo is generally based on their October production, although for some countries, such as Iran, the baseline for the output cut has been adjusted for special factors.   Libya and Nigeria, whose recent production has been disrupted by civil conflict, will be exempt from the cuts.

Tom Friedman Is Now Another Angry While Male

It was not a good year from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. One of the major themes in the election was tightening up trade policy, with the candidates of both major parties promising action in that regard. This has to rankle on a prominent trade evangelist like Friedman. But even worse, the much more strident of the two candidates on trade issues is the one that prevailed. Ouch! He is now lashing out, warning Trump voters that The Donald will abandon them.

15 Million Fracking Jobs at Risk; 12 Million Export Jobs Could Also Be Lost

On Friday, the US Chamber of Commerce released a report, apparently timed for the weekend before the election when a number of fracking initiatives are on the ballot nationally, which alleged that "14.8 million jobs could be lost, gasoline prices and electricity prices could almost double, and each American family could see their cost of living increase by almost $4,000" if fracking were banned in the US.

Mother Jones Our Hats Are Off To You

How many Americans know that America has privatized prisons, the shares of which are listed on stock exchanges?  Free market ideologues provided cover for corrupt Republican politicians to divert taxpayers’ hard-earned money to favored political insiders with the false claim that prisons run by private owners are more cost effective.  A Mother Jones reporter took a job as a private prison guard and found that private prisons are places of unimaginable violence.

The enemy is us.

Your government is on red alert: between 2006 and 2014, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), an agency of the Department of Agriculture, spent nearly $4.8 million to purchase shotguns, propane cannons, liquid explosives, pyro supplies, drones, thermal imaging cameras, and more.

Ignoring Economic Reality

Trump and Hillary have come out with the obligatory “economic plans.” Neither them nor their advisors, have any idea about what really needs to be done, but this is of no concern to the media.

The presstitutes operate according to “pay and say.” They say what they are paid to say and that is whatever serves the corporations and the government. This means that the presstitutes like Hillary’s economic plan and do not like Trump’s.

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