Last year he admitted America is addicted. Well we are too in Canada :( Appears to be some relapse. Begging the drug dealers to make the prices cheaper, and offering some goodies.

Someone call his sponsor. Get him back in the 12 step program.

Watch him put on the robes and hold hands with the man.  Not that there's anything wrong with that?!?  I still think duuuhby was the result of a saud in the bush family woodpile.  Put a burka on Babs and she would look like any other saudi gal.  Neehawww!

Multinational corporate power now owns the Canadian tar sands, your government can no longer regulate the resources that belong(ed) to the public.

Thanks to the neoconman manipulated administration the US has been sold to the corporations based in the oiliest and slave laborist nations, it's the "free' market in action.  It's corporate libertarianism for the lot of US!

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Remember that what goes up must come down, and capital movement is one of the few places that really does behave according to classic economic theory.  (More supply = lower price, etc.)  Money will flood in from the Saudis today, but that will  help keep our interest rates low, stimulating US economy and driving benefits for all and - as this example shows - driving cash back into US coffers that will put us on top in the next cycle.  

Think of it the other way: if the US was piling on cash and investors chose to invest in Saudi Arabian infrastructure, would that be bad?  One could certainly make the argument that such a situation would be creating high quality jobs in Saudi Arabia even as we are losing those jobs in this country, much in the same way as the China bashers did when US businesses were investing in Chinese manufacturing facilities.  This is essentially the opposite of that, with us getting Saudi dollars (exported from a petro state with a real dearth of quality jobs, I might add) to bolster banks that will help keep the costs of homes down, invest in US businesses (and, of course, invest overseas as well).  So as the inverse of the "bad" exported dollars example, is this then good?  Ultimately, it is neither.  It just is.  But what is good is that money can move.

Crazy fact I learned last week: Illinois coal mines are exporting their product to China.  Why?  Because the collapsing US $ makes it more competitive for the Chinese to buy dollar-denominated US coal than yuan-denominated chinese coal.  How's that for globalization?

But as you say, the global economy is just what it is, and there is little that a president or king can do about it. Taken in that scope, it was laughable that Bushie-Boy even tried to ask the House of Saud to increase oil production so as to lower the price of liquid fuel energy. As has been told by the House of Saud to our Bushie-Boy several times, America has failed to reform its internal woes with respect to consumption, efficiency, distribution, conservation, and vast energy supplies of its own.

I can't put my finger on it, but somehow I detect a fundamental mis-reading about what is happening today with globalization, energy, and food. Part is the answer is painfully obvious and some seems elusive, perhaps an issue that you are just starting to raise, Sean.  Thanks for your post.
-sammie

Onward through the fog

Getting on disability or winning the lottery or death is the only way out.  A big Walmart smiley face to ya!!  Hehey.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

One final point, only because you raised it.  Is it me, or is the whole mexican-tortillas-are-a-sign-of-globalization-and-farm-policy-run-amok a little goofy.  I'm not defending corn ethanol, but  it does bear keeping in mind that the run up in corn prices has put a lot more money "on the farm" than there used to be.  And last I checked, even at $4/bushel, being a corn farmer isn't a free pass to millionairedom.  So what's worse: poor farmers and cheap food or (less poor) farmers and (less cheap) food?  I'm not sure it's so clean, but the conversation ought to at least acknowledge that there is a seller for every buyer and therefore wealth transfer isn't a zero-sum game.

Amazingdrx:

I think you greatly oversimplify.  There is bad that comes from globalization just as there is bad that comes from religion, but there is also good and painting with too broad a brush on either side of that divide isn't fair.  Yes, there is a process of running away from regulation in one country or another (be it from higher taxes or lead paint standards).  And that can be bad, but isn't always.  After all, if you can run away from regulations that would otherwise line your local dictators pockets, you are not only letting smart people succeed, but also putting pressure on your local regulations to reform.  And yes, there are real environmental consequences associated with shipping things half way around the world instead of producing them locally, but this has to be balanced against the competitive pressure that puts on efficiency.  After all, no globalization means no Prius in America.  It also means no 1979 Honda CVCC and the other small Japanese cars that transformed the US auto industry.  Yeah, they got shipped over in boats initially, but I think those benefits outweigh the costs.

Or here's another interesting consequence.  Our company is doing a project at an US orange juice producer.  One of the interesting dynamics of their plant is that the run up in corn prices has suddenly made orange peels really valuable as cattle feed.  And because of the weak US dollar, they're shipping it to feed Italian cattle.  This solves a waste disposal problem at the plant, displaces higher priced corn in Italy and enhances agricultural economics on both sides of the Atlantic.  As against that, they are shipping peel across the ocean.  Good or bad?  On balance, I think quite good, because it means the economy works, which is vastly better than the alternative.  Wastes are being converted into something useful, ag price increases are being tempered as new products come to market and there's a little more money in local agriculture, somewhere helping a farmer meet a mortgage payment rather than sell his land to a condo developer.  Certainly downsides as well, but the alternative is a completely insulated economy that never lets it's citizens benefit from things developed elsewhere (see: 1000 years of Chinese history, or any company with a "not invented here" culture.)

Free marketeers will claim that "free" markets in currency "hedge" risk for all of us.  The reverse is actually true, this kind of manipulation puts us all at greater risk.

Without it, bushco could not keep borrowing money to keep this war going.

In reality, Italian cows, just like Wisconsin cows, do much better, provide better food, and generate more profit with rotational grazing.  Oh well, that interferes with "free" global markets in stolen standards of living.

Better to have an isolated economy than one that is pulled out from under working families as this one has been.  Another tripling of national debt under this bushwacking.

Export the corporatarians.  Go west I say!  Plague US no more.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Rotational grazing would be better everywhere.  Forget the so-called advantages of globalization, I'm just not seeing any.  I'm becoming a classic isolationist I guess.  

Time to emigrate to Canadian wilderness?  Hehey.  Sorry for being cranky on this topic, I know your cogeneration business is doing great things.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

As far as moving stuff all over the globe, eventually, I don't know if 70,000 cargo ships plying the oceans all the time is going to survive the decline of fossil fuel prices -- much less cap-and-trade or efforts to mitigate global warming, since, as I posted here, it accounts for about 5% of emissions.

1. This isn't about cogen - it's about access to capital and the ability of all good ideas to prosper if they have same.  I have a specific idea that certainly benefits from access to global capital, but my arguments in favor of global currency flows are much more general.

2. Unless I'm misunderstanding your post, I think you are conflating two, separable issues.  We ought to push as hard has we can for an economic system free of subsidies that includes all externalities, precisely for the reasons you mention.  But the reason we ought do so is that this will then encourage the efficient allocation of (global) capital.  The fact that doesn't have to pay the costs of overgrazing / greenhouse gas emissions / any of a zillion other externalities is really important, and really critical for us to change.  But it is not, at core an issue related to globalization, except insofar as globalization exposes those inefficiencies.  (Witness the angst over whether or not the US can "afford" to join Kyoto if China and India don't join, lest the differential costs cause industries to flee to those countries.  While I personally find that argument specious, it is an argument for full externality pricing, not for blocking trade with China and India.)

Corporate libertarian blathering helped this disaster occur.  Blather on.  A few years from now corporatarian boosters might understand why they are living in a cardboard box in a bushberg (hooverville).

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Re: shipping.  Completely agree.  Much is made of the environmental consequences of shipping stuff all over the globe, but most fuel chain analyses I have looked at (and done, back in my consulting days) suggest that the environmental impacts of shipping are pretty tiny relative to upstream and downstream processing/consumption activities.  This isn't to say that shipping consequences should be ignored, but rather that if you really want to lower the carbon impacts of a given good, you are often more well served to boost efficiencies and/or change feedstocks for some other element of the chain.  An obvious example is ethanol, where we would probably lower carbon by importing sugar cane derived ethanol from Brazil than by making corn-derived ethanol in the US.  The latter has lower shipping related costs, but the former has much less carbon associated with the crop and the production process, and those vastly offset the relatively small carbon increases associated with shipping.  (I don't mean to gloss over the deforestation issue here - simply making a point about shipping, and that moving goods around the globe needs to be considered on a more holistic basis than just "emissions from shipping are bad".)

At core, we are in violent agreement on the changes we want to see - my point is simply that the demon here isn't markets, but their absence.

But we are in a ridiculous global structure -- and Bernanke has even discussed this, although in my last post I lambasted him -- but anyway, the structure is this, which I have never seen in any economic textbook or even advocated by anybody as some sort of rational economic system:

"Every region of the world has a trade surplus with one particular region (obviously, the U.S.).  the importing region only exchanges it's currency (dolalrs) for the surplus goods, so that there is a continually growing pile of dollars -- oops -- currency of the importer in the other regions of the world.  The people in the importing country have a higher standard of living because everybody else keeps giving them goods in exchange for their currency."

I've heard pro-globalization arguments, but they never sound like that.  This is a long way of saying, the Chinese are going to get stuck with those dollars anyway.  And by the way, "all" that needs to be done, is not new trade barriers, but just have the Chinese let their currency float, i.e., be market-driven -- not that that will happen anytime soon.

So basically, the U.S. will eventually have to rebuild the manufacturing base, because we can't keep importing half of our manufactured goods forever.