Archived material from historical editions of The Generator
Centennial Coal’s Chairman, Kenneth Moss, did not only have to allay shareholders’ concerns about the fact more than $310 million had been wiped from the coal producer’s market value in just over a week. He also had to face about six Greenpeace protesters breaking into what Centennial had been told was the “most secure room Continue Reading →
Dollar Dethroned By Red Ink
Paul Craig Roberts
01/02/06 "Information Clearing House" — — Will Congress allow President Bush to waste another year on his Iraq misadventure while serious problems overwhelm the United States?
During 2006 while the US government focused on the deteriorating situation in Iraq, the US dollar declined sharply against many currencies. By December China’s central bank was expressing its concern that the massive US trade deficit could lead to a run on the dollar and to an international financial crisis.
Since WW II the US dollar has been the world’s reserve currency, the currency in which oil is billed and international trade accounts are settled.
The low US saving rate means that Washington’s budget deficits must be financed by foreign lenders, who are awash in US Treasury bonds. The massive US trade deficit means that foreigners acquire US assets as payment for US consumption of goods made abroad.
Foreigners are worried about their large dollar holdings, because there is no indication that the US can reduce either deficit. The war against Iraq has run up the US budget deficit, and the practice of US corporations of producing offshore for their US markets has increased the US trade deficit. Every time a US company moves its production abroad, domestic output is turned into imports.
The laptop could one day cost as little as $100
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The scheme is hoping to put low-cost computers into the hands of people in developing countries.
Ultimately the project’s backers hope the machines could sell for as little as $100 (£55).
The first countries to sign up to buying the machine include Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan and Thailand.
The so-called XO machine is being pioneered by Nicholas Negroponte, who launched the project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab in 2004.
Test machines are expected to reach children in February as the project builds towards a more formal launch.
Wind, almost everybody’s best hope for big supplies of clean, affordable electricity, is turning out to have complications.
Engineers have cut the price of electricity derived from wind by about 80 percent in the last 20 years, setting up this renewable technology for a major share of the electricity market. But for all its promise, wind also generates a big problem: because it is unpredictable and often fails to blow when electricity is most needed, wind is not reliable enough to assure supplies for an electric grid that must be prepared to deliver power to everybody who wants it — even when it is in greatest demand.
In Texas, as in many other parts of the country, power companies are scrambling to build generating stations to meet growing peak demands, generally driven by air-conditioning for new homes and businesses. But power plants that run on coal or gas must “be built along with every megawatt of wind capacity,” said William Bojorquez, director of system planning at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
The reason is that in Texas, and most of the United States, the hottest days are the least windy. As a result, wind turns out to be a good way to save fuel, but not a good way to avoid building plants that burn coal. A wind machine is a bit like a bicycle that a commuter keeps in the garage for sunny days. It saves gasoline, but the commuter has to own a car anyway.
by Eric Margolis
On my first visit to Iraq in 1976, so-called "Israeli spies" were being hanged in front of my Baghdad hotel.
While covering Iraq just before the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein’s secret police threatened to hang me as an American/Israeli spy.
I always considered "President Hussein," who was hanged Friday, a sadistic bully and a loathsome megalomaniac.
No one can accuse me of sympathy for Saddam or his fellow thugs who terrorized Iraq. But I was thoroughly disgusted and ashamed by the kangaroo court created and stage-managed by the U.S. that condemned Saddam.
It was a disgraceful farrago of Soviet-style show trial and judicial circus. Washington, which claimed to be bringing the fruits of democracy to the benighted Arab World, put on a sinister legal farce worthy of, ironically, Saddam’s courts.
by Somini Sengupta, NY Times
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| Farmers at work in West Bengal State, India. On the horizon, a fence marks land the state acquired to turn over to The Tata Group for an auto plant. |
Just beyond the city limits, a patch of land where an auto factory is planned amid a sprawl of potato fields and rice paddies has become the battleground for the world’s longest-running democratically elected Communist government.
This government, of West Bengal State, plans to turn over 997 acres of fertile farmland to one of the country’s largest industrial conglomerates, The Tata Group, for a factory that will produce a fleet of small, low-cost cars for India’s growing middle class.
How the land was acquired is a matter of red-hot contention, igniting crippling demonstrations, hunger strikes and occasional violent conflicts. The government says most of the landowners consented, but opponents charge coercion.
Land is one of India’s scarcest resources. So how this fight plays out is likely to teach far-reaching lessons to India as a whole, as it tries to balance the demands of industrial growth with the needs of those who rely on agriculture. Across the country, steel mills, power plants, roads, ports and hundreds of so-called Special Economic Zones are planned, all of which will require state governments like this one to acquire vast swaths of land.