Category Archives: oil
Trump’s Animal Spirits
James Fallows, in the October Atlantic, says Jane Goodall told him that Donald Trump reminds her of a chimp:
In many ways the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals,” Jane Goodall, the anthropologist, told me shortly before Trump won the GOP nomination. “In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position.”
Animal Spirits
The elite made a monkey of Trump before the election. But since then he’s released the stock market’s animal spirits. Oil and the dollar dig The Donald too.
Many 401-k investors are bullish because stocks have hit record highs. But Clinton Foundation investors – not so much.
Well, at least one Clinton supporter has done ok. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is up 8% since the election.
No Clinton Foundation Access for Benghazi Dead
An AP story says 85 of 154 meetings Hillary Clinton had regarding private interests, when she was Secretary of State, were with Clinton Foundation donors.
Clinton Foundation Access Fit For A Prince
Some of those donors represented foreign interests too. Politico reported that the crown prince of Bahrain used his Clinton Foundation connection to get a meeting with Secretary Clinton. That was after he struck out going through “normal channels. So Clinton Foundation executive Doug Band emailed Huma Abedin with the request:
“Cp of Bahrain in tomorrow to Friday[.] Asking to see her[.] Good friend of ours,” Band wrote Abedin on her State Department email address on June 23, 2009.
Abedin responded the same day, a Tuesday, that the crown prince had asked to see Clinton through “normal channels” on Thursday and Friday.
“I asked and she said she doesn’t want to commit to anything for thurs or fri until she knows how she will feel. Also, she says that she may want to go to ny and doesn’t want to be committed to stuff in ny [sic],” Abedin wrote via her State account, following up that she meant “stuff in dc.”
Band responded to the first message, “Cool.”
Two days later, on June 25, 2009, Abedin wrote Band: “Offering bahrain cp 10 tomorrow for mtg [with ] hrc[.] If u see him, let him know.”
“We have reached out thru official channels,” Abedin added in the same message.
Band responded: “Nice[.] Abdullah is his guy[.] He’s great[.]”
Crown Prince Salman had committed $32 million to scholarships through the Clinton Global initiative.
Feeling the Bern in Venezuela
Hugo Chavez used to give heating oil to poor Americans through Joe Kennedy’s Citizen’s Energy Corp. Now the mayor of Caracas tweets that Venezuelans are hunting cats and dogs for dinner.
Regular blackouts shut down hospital respirators for hours in Venezuela according to the NYT. Glenn Reyonolds, at USA Today, says socialism doesn’t help poor people. It creates them.
The Bern in Venezuela
Bernie Sanders says he’s for Denmark style socialism. Danes aren’t pleased. T.D. Tuccille, in Reason, quotes Bernie Sanders giving a shoutout to Socialism’s ability to make people equally poor:
“Sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing,” Sanders told interviewers in 1985. “In other countries people don’t line up for food; the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
The Venezuelan elite aren’t eating their pets. Chavez’s daughter is believed to have a net worth in the billions.
End of Coal
Two stories lured me off from the campaign trail for today.
Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest coal company, filed for bankruptcy. President Obama promised to drive the coal industry into bankruptcy. As it happens, the fracking industry is driving coal into bankruptcy. Natural gas is cheaper and cleaner than coal. Obama hoped to replace coal with renewable energy.
The other story is that, SunEdison, world’s biggest renewable energy company, is also preparing to file for bankruptcy.
Isis Oil Crisis
President Obama is so green it’s tough to get him to take his own side in a fight.
Former CIA Director Michael Morell told Charlie Rose the reason President Obama refused to bomb ISIS oil facilities was to save the environment.
Really.
Obama was also reluctant to bomb ISIS oil trucks because he didn’t want to harm the drivers. When the trucks finally were bombed, we gave 45 minutes advance warning by dropping leaflets telling the drivers to run away.
Dick Morris thinks this is “loony”. ISIS pays its jihadis with the $2 million a day it makes in oil sales. Here’s what Morris had to say about the environmental cost of putting a stop to that:
This kind of environmental fantasizing was in vogue during the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein’s destruction of all of Kuwait’s oil fields was thought to be likely to cause huge damage. Paul Crutzen, a noted atmospheric scientist, predicted that a “nuclear winter” might ensue with a cloud of smoke covering half the Northern Hemisphere for at least 100 days. Carl Sagan argued that the effects of the destruction of Kuwaiti oil fields could be comparable to the explosion of the volcano Tambora in 1815, which produced “a year without summer.”
It never happened.