Over in Atlanta, the Rev. Creflo Dollar Jr., seems to be doing even better. He and his wife, Taffi, entertain at another huge church, drive around in a Rolls Royce, and have a private $5 million jet to move them from one speaking engagement to another.

Mr. Dollar, like Mr. Osteen, believes in the power of God to move mountains, but they trust in the Almighty Dollar to smooth out the little foothills in their way. Last year, for example, Mr. Dollar sent 100 of the local Fulton County police officers checks for $1,000 each - a month after two traffic tickets the Reverend Dollar had received had been downgraded to warnings.

And back in the Lone Star State, Kenneth Copeland and his main squeeze, Gloria, have done even better - with 4 jets at their disposal. Mr. Copeland, the subject of a MoneyWeek article last month, is also said to have a parsonage the “size of a hotel,” probably more like a huge Motel 6 than a Crillon.

This might be just another part of the baroque spectacle that makes America such an amusing place. But there is more to the story, which is - as you might guess - the subject of today’s column.

Gibbon blamed the fall of Rome at least in part, on Christianity; it encouraged a retreat from the battle for money and power, he said. Now, Kevin Phillips, in a new book, Bad Money, charges the pentecostal wing of American Christianity with undermining the U.S. empire in the opposite way. He argues that the evangelicals pushed the Republicans down-market. There, the yahoo voters brought them temporal power - 30% of Republican voters identify themselves with an evangelical sect. But they also hollowed out Republicans’ traditional respect for sensible finances.

Among the many frauds of the Reagan-Bush II period, few were gaudier than the “prosperity gospel.” Preached in America’s gamy religious outposts, the concept does for religion what the neo-conservatives did to conservatism, what modern portfolio theory did for Wall Street, and what Keynesianism did to the economics profession - it a made a monkey of it.

In politics, the neos turned conservatism inside out. The old conservatives were wet blankets, do-nothings and naysayers. When news spread of Calvin Coolidge’s death, for example, people asked, “How could they tell?” But the new conservatives are the life of the party. It is said that George W. Bush “doesn’t even know the meaning of the word can’t.” (Of course, there may be other words he doesn’t know the meaning of.) And the neocons’ idea of political economy was similarly liberated from any residual notions of conservatism and common sense. “Deficits don’t matter,” said Dick Cheney, speaking for every wishful thinker since Caligula.

On Wall Street and the City, the old conservative doctrines were put away with top hats and spats. In place of prudence came derring-do. In the place of reasonable salaries came breathtaking bonuses. Mortgage lenders no longer studied a borrower’s finances to make sure he was a good credit risk; they didn’t even take his pulse. And they no longer seemed to care whether their takeovers, triple-A paper, and structured products made any real financial sense; it was enough that they paid a fee.

In economics, too, somehow, the world’s leading economists bent the figures into a preposterous new shape so appealing that even a teenager could love it. An economy can get richer by living it up, they said; and the purpose of central banking was to encourage consumption rather than capital formation.

Was it any wonder that the pulpits sank into the honey too? Along came Jim and Tammy Faye Baker with a sexy new religion - spreading the get-rich gospel over the TV waves. Then, poor Jim got sent to prison for fraud, and when he came out he renounced the new doctrine. But other couples - for some reason these preachers seem to work in husband and wife teams, like Juan and Eva Peron - picked up the tablets. Soon, they had convinced millions to give up the hard-benches of the old Calvinists and sink their plump derrieres into some of the cushiest seats in Christendom.

Churchgoers at Mr. Dollar’s World Changers church services wave envelopes full of cash, reports the Atlanta paper. On the big screen, they offer testimonial proof of the ‘financial blessings’ that came their way after they began sending the preacher 10% of their pre-tax earnings: “The congregants…yell in joy as ushers pass the white buckets down the row to collect the envelopes. After more singing, Dollar preaches… He relentlessly attacks the idea that Christians should limit material possessions. Christians have for too long let the ‘devil’s crowd’ get all the money, power and real estate, he says. Then he tells congregants to say, ‘I want my stuff.’”

“I want my stuff,” they repeat, laughing.

Politics, money, religion - the flim flam was the same everywhere. It was the promise of something for nothing, gain without pain, Easter without Good Friday. But with America’s housing prices falling and unemployment rising, the Pentecostals will find it harder to get their stuff than ever. Maybe God didn’t want them to be wealthy after all. On the evidence, maybe He just likes a good laugh, like the rest of us.

Enjoy your weekend,

Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning

Financial Experts?

Oversupply and Compression: How the Median House Price Will Fall from $215K to $70K

Massive Economic Disaster Seems Possible — Will Survivalists Get the Last Laugh?

Naomi Klein: Bush Sees Crises in Fuel, Food, Housing and Banking as Chance to Exploit Us More

Crude Awakening - The Oil Crash

What If US Collapses? Soviet Collapse Lessons Every American Needs To Know

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Today, the Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group III (CRMPG III or the Policy Group), a group chaired by former New York Federal Reserve President E. Gerald Corrigan, now Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, and Douglas Flint, Group Finance Director, HSBC Holdings, released a report, “Containing Systemic Risk: The Road to Reform,” featuring proposals that are, in theory, designed to prevent a recurrence of the kind of tectonic financial crisis that has unfolded over the past year or so.

As might be expected, the mainstream media seemed to swallow the notion — hook, line and sinker — that these “experts” know what they are talking about and that this was some sort of noble effort to address structural issues that had only come to light during the past year or so.

As far as I can tell, no one raised the possibility that this “initiative” was actually intended to deflect the blame for the crisis away from where much of it belonged: Wall Street. And no one asked the most pertinent question: How is that “senior executives” and “risk managers” who worked at Lehman, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase and HSBC — firms that have written down billions and billions of dollars over the past twelve months because of their lack of foresight and inability to control risk — now know what has to be done when they were utterly clueless before things started to unravel?

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to look at a few snippets from the report’s Introduction and offer up my two cents [in italics] on what they really mean:

The scope of the CRMPG III initiative was designed to focus its primary attention on the steps that must be taken by the private sector to reduce the frequency and/or severity of future financial shocks while recognizing that such future shocks are inevitable, in part because it is literally impossible to anticipate the specific timing and triggers of such events.

[By “specific timing,” do they mean a particular hour of the day? Otherwise, there were a number of individuals, including yours truly, who were warning about a brewing financial crisis within months of its beginning. In fact, it was clear to anyone who took the time to think about what was going on — excluding the highly paid experts on Wall Street, that is — that events leading up to the reckless orgy of speculation that occurred in the spring of last year were the set-up for a major financial earthquake.]

The background to this effort is, of course, the chain of events that is now properly labeled the credit market crisis of 2007 and 2008. In retrospect, these events clearly stand out as the most severe financial shock we have witnessed in decades with visible damage not only to the financial sector but extending to the real economy as well. Indeed, the cost of the credit market crisis in economic, financial and human terms has already reached staggering proportions and, even after 12 months, substantial vulnerabilities remain.

The write-downs experienced by large integrated financial intermediaries – especially in the United States and Europe – are also of staggering proportions. It is probably fair to say that, as late as the summer of 2007, virtually none of us would have imagined that, as of July of 2008, financial sector write-offs and loss provisions would approach $500 billion, even as the write-off meter is still running. Fortunately, the starting capital positions of the affected institutions were relatively strong and, even more fortunately, most of these institutions have been able to raise very large amounts of additional capital in recent months.

[Since “none of {the people who put this report together} would have imagined that…financial sector write-offs and loss provisions would approach $500 billion,” my question is: Why are they qualified to write the report? Shouldn’t it have been written by those who actually anticipated those sorts of losses, including people like Nouriel Roubini, Dean Baker, Mike Shedlock — and, again, yours truly?]

Even with the benefit of hindsight, there exists a large and troubling question as to the manner in which events unfolded beginning in the July to August interval of 2007. Namely, why were so many, in both the official and private sectors, so slow in recognizing that we were on the cusp of a financial crisis of the magnitude we have experienced? The list of possible explanations is long. For example, it could be that the underlying complexity and risk characteristics of certain financial instruments were so opaque that even some of the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world and their supervisors were simply caught off guard. A much more plausible explanation lies in the fact that the preceding eight to ten years had witnessed multiple financial disturbances with multiple causes – all of which resolved themselves with limited damage and negligible contagion. These experiences undoubtedly gave rise to a false sense of security that the emerging problems of the summer of 2007 would also resolve themselves with little or no systemic damage.

[In effect, the preceding paragraph seems to be saying that not only was most of Wall Street utterly clueless about what a few thoughtful individuals saw coming, these wheeler-and-dealers were also risking corporate funds on products and strategies they didn’t understand and apparently took the fidicuiary duty they owed to shareholders with a grain of salt.]

Much has been written and said about the underlying causes of this systematic failure in financial discipline. For that reason, the Policy Group does not wish to repeat that litany in any detail, but it does see some value in briefly highlighting what it considers the most critical of these underlying causes of the credit market crisis:

First: for several years running, global financial markets had been awash with liquidity. This condition reflected in part the recycling of (1) excess savings from Asia in general and China in particular and (2) excess cash from energy producing countries. It may also have reflected the phenomenon of an extended earlier period of very low interest rates, especially in the United States. These factors are also related to global economic and financial macroeconomic imbalances that have long been recognized as potential sources of instability.

[If “these factors are…related to global economic and financial…imbalances…that have long been recognized as potential sources of instability,” why weren’t they taken into account by the firms that employed the individuals who wrote this report?]

There can be no doubt that ample financial market liquidity and relatively low interest rates were an important driving force behind the pervasive “reach for yield” phenomenon of recent years and that the “reach for yield” phenomenon was, in turn, an important factor in driving the surge in demand for and supply of highly complex structured credit products.

[”There can be no doubt…” — huh? Up until about a year ago, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, administration officials and sundry others seemed to have no doubt that the rush into “highly complex structured credit products” was anything but a good thing.]

Second: reflecting in part the forces discussed above and the intensity of competitive factors in the financial marketplace, it is clear that credit risk had been mispriced for some time. The evidence of this is clear in the terms and conditions of credit extensions in the subprime mortgage market, in the leveraged finance sector, and in the willingness of market participants to acquire highly leveraged structured credit products whose attractiveness relied on a continuation of benign credit conditions for an extended period of time. More generally, the extraordinary tightness of credit spreads across virtually all classes of credit products was widely seen as unsustainable. In these circumstances, it was recognized that, sooner or later, credit spreads and credit terms would inevitably adjust. However, it was all too easy for many, if not most, market participants to conclude that when the correction took place it would be gradual and orderly. Obviously, that conclusion was wrong.

[If “the extraordinary tightness of credit spreads…was widely seen as unsustainable,” why did so many Wall Street firms end up with billions of dollars of mispriced securities on their balance sheets? Otherwise, history clearly shows that “corrections” have rarely been “gradual and orderly.” Tell me again: Why are people who work for firms that don’t understand how the financial world works writing reports about how Wall Street should work?]

Third: for a variety of reasons – some structural, some technological and some behavioral – contemporary finance has become incredibly complex. We see this in the speed and complexity of capital flows, we see it in the complexity of many classes of financial instruments (some of which contain significant embedded leverage), and we see it in the extraordinary complexity faced by individual financial institutions in their day-to-day risk management activities and in their policies and practices related to valuation and price verification for some classes of financial instruments. Needless to say, the complexity factor is an issue as it pertains to the capacity of the international community of supervisors and regulators to discharge their responsibilities.

The key issue here is not complexity per se but rather the extent to which complexity feeds on itself thereby helping to create or magnify contagion risk “hot spots” that may have systematic implications. Thus, we are faced with the pressing need to find better ways to manage and mitigate the risk associated with complexity, a subject that will continue to challenge the best and the brightest among us.

[Ahem. I seem to recall regulators, policymakers and financial industry executives claiming for years that “the best and the brightest” on Wall Street knew exactly what they were doing. Was that a lie? Or was it simply another layer of incoherence and incompetence?]

Fourth: reflecting in part the forces described above, the current crisis has witnessed patterns of contagion the speed and reach of which are different in degree, if not kind, from that which we have witnessed in earlier periods of financial instability. The list is long: asset-backed commercial paper, conduits, structured investment vehicles (SIVs), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), quantitative funds, auction rate securities, monolines, and hedge funds. To a considerable extent, the “hot spots” where contagion forces have emerged share at least three common denominators: (1) the contraction in market liquidity, which has been largely driven by a huge shift from risk taking to risk aversion, was itself driven by the fear of the unknown and a limited ability to anticipate with confidence the sensitivity to loss in many financial instruments; (2) greater leverage in balance sheet terms and in the use of off-balance sheet vehicles and the presence of embedded leverage in certain classes of financial instruments; and (3) risk mitigation cushions which were either too thin or were at least partially neutralized by basis risk developments.

[Weren’t most, if not all, of these shortcomings known in advance? If so, why didn’t anybody do something about it before the bubble burst? If not, what the heck were these “senior executives” and “risk managers” doing while leverage was increasing and “risk mitigation cushions” were being compressed? Shopping online for Porsches and Ferraris?]

Fifth: it is likely that flaws in the design and workings of the systems of incentives within the financial sector have inadvertently produced patterns of behavior and allocations of resources that are not always consistent with the basic goal of financial stability. Often, when the issue of incentives is discussed, the focus is on compensation and, especially, executive compensation. Consistent with the priorities of this Report noted earlier, the Policy Group has chosen not go into the subject of executive compensation in any detail. Having said that, the Policy Group recognizes that more can be done to ensure that incentives associated with compensation are better aligned with risk taking and risk tolerance across broad classes of senior and executive management. Accordingly, and respecting the role and responsibilities of the board of directors in matters relating to executive compensation, the Policy Group believes that compensation practices as they apply to senior and executive management should be (1) based heavily on the performance of the firm as a whole and (2) heavily stock-based with such stockbased compensation vesting over an extended period of time. The long vesting period is particularly important for high risk, high volatility lines of business where short run surges in revenues and profits can be offset if not reversed in the longer term. In broad terms, the Policy Group recognizes that this philosophy of compensation is hardly new, but its importance looms especially large given the events of the past twelve months.

While the linkage between incentives and compensation is obvious for large integrated financial intermediaries, the incentive question has much broader – and no less important – implications. For example, the framework of incentives at the level of individual firms should help to balance business imperatives by ensuring that the resource base and the recognition/reward system for the support and control functions are such that critical tasks, such as risk monitoring and price verification, are performed in a manner that protects the financial integrity and professional reputation of the institution.

[Go on. Admit it. Stop with the euphemistic talk already. When you say “incentives,” you actually mean pure, unbridled greed. Otherwise, my question is: What are the incentives that led to the writing of this report? Might the letters “CYA” have something to do with it?]

There’s much more, but I have a headache.

Oversupply and Compression: How the Median House Price Will Fall from $215K to $70K

Massive Economic Disaster Seems Possible — Will Survivalists Get the Last Laugh?

Naomi Klein: Bush Sees Crises in Fuel, Food, Housing and Banking as Chance to Exploit Us More

Crude Awakening - The Oil Crash

What If US Collapses? Soviet Collapse Lessons Every American Needs To Know

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

By Charles Hugh Smith

I am constantly amazed (yes, I know I shouldn’t be) by how many otherwise intelligent people expect housing to “recover” next year. I shouldn’t be surprised, of course, because fantasy and hope are the key traits of all post-bubble busts. Thus we had analyst after analyst in 2001 and 2002 calling “the bottom” in the Nasdaq, even as it fell from 5,000 to 3,000 to 2,000 and then finally to 1,000.

Massive Economic Disaster Seems Possible — Will Survivalists Get the Last Laugh?

Naomi Klein: Bush Sees Crises in Fuel, Food, Housing and Banking as Chance to Exploit Us More

Crude Awakening - The Oil Crash

What If US Collapses? Soviet Collapse Lessons Every American Needs To Know

The Credit Crisis Is Going to Get Worse

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

They used to be paranoid preparation nuts who built bomb shelters for a place to duck and cover during nuclear dustups with communist heathens, but their tangled roots go back to the Great Depression for a reason. If you want to get sociological about it, survivalism started out as a response to economic catastrophe. And now, with a cratering stock market, a housing meltdown that has devalued everything in sight, and skyrocketing prices for food, gas and pretty much everything else, survivalists are preparing for — and are prepared for — the rerun. In fact, they may be the only people in America feeling good about the prospects of a major crash.

And the interesting thing about the once-fringe movement at this moment in history is that survivalism has now gone green — at least in theory.

From peak oil and food crises all the way to catastrophic payback from that bitch Mother Earth, there are more reasons to hide than ever. Conventional society as we know it is already undergoing some disastrous transformations. Ask anyone ducking fires in California, floods in the Midwest or bullets in Baghdad. Maybe it didn’t make sense to run for the hills, stockpile water and food, grow your own vegetables and drugs, or unplug from consumerism back when America’s budget surplus still existed, its armies weren’t burning up all the nation’s revenue and its infrastructure wasn’t being outsourced to a globalized work force.

But those days are gone, daddy, gone.

What’s coming up is weirder. Author, social critic and overall hilarious dude James Kunstler tackled that weirdness, otherwise known as an incoming post-oil dystopia, in his recent novel, World Made by Hand, which has since become one of a handful of survivalist classics. And as Kunstler sees it, whether you are talking about gun nuts or green pioneers, at least you are talking.

“At least they’re aware that we’ve entered the early innings of what could easily become a very disruptive period of our history,” the Clusterfuck Nation columnist explains. “Most of them are responding constructively rather than just defensively. They’re much more interested in gardening and animal husbandry than firearms.”

Not that the gun nuts have gone away. Their ranks have just diversified.

“The gun nuts have been on the scene longer than the peak oil argument has been in play,” he adds. “They were initially preoccupied with Big Government and its accompanying narrative fantasy of fascist oppression, which is why they adopted a fascist tone themselves. But peak-oil survivalists are different from the Ruby Ridge generation. They don’t think that a bolt-hole in the woods is a very promising strategy. We have no idea at this point what the level of social cohesion or disorder may be, but if the rural areas, especially the agricultural centers, become too lawless for farming, then we’ll be in pretty severe trouble because there will be nothing for us to eat.”

That’s not on the to-do list of author and SurvivalBlog owner James Rawles, who has been getting asked more and more questions by a mainstream press finally waking to the consequences of disaster capitalism, climate crisis and the hyperreal dream of bottomless consumption. He has fielded questions from the New York Times, and he has taken an online beating from conscientious pubs like Grist, but he hasn’t gone Hollywood. The times, which are a-changin’, have caught up to him.

“There is greater interest in preparedness these days because the fragility of our economy, lengthening chains of supply and the complexity of the technological infrastructure have become apparent to a broader cross section of the populace,” Rawles wrote to me via e-mail (but only after asking how many unique monthly visitors AlterNet commanded). “All parties concerned may not realize it, but the left-of-center greens calling for local economies and encouraging farmers markets have a tremendous amount in common with John Birchers decrying globalist bankers and gun owners complaining about their constitutional rights. At the core, for all of them, is the recognition that big, entrenched, centralized power structures are not the answer. They are, in fact, the problem.”

Fair enough. But that broad brush fails to recognize the complexities of the very community it is purporting to try to establish. Indeed, difference is what survivalists seem to be running from, whether it is historically the difference between blacks and whites, secularists and true believers, or simply the haves and have-nots. It is that latter crowd that the survivalists seem most worried about. Their separation from society at large is arguably a retreat from community rather than a striving toward it.

“I’d say that survivalism is indeed a celebration of community,” Rawles asserts. “It is the embodiment of America’s traditional can-do spirit of self-reliance that settled the frontier.”

But that’s also a generalization, especially when one considers that the word “settled” is a coded reduction for a “near-genocidal wipeout of the frontier’s native populations,” most if not all of whom were perfecting a survivalist ethic by maximizing their skill sets and living in symbiosis with the land that provided them what they needed in food, tools and medicine. In fact, those settlements would have been hard-pressed to exist without what Rawles earlier described as a “centralized power structure,” known as the expansionist United States government and its military, paving the road forward. Each self-reliant mythology carries within it grains of complicity in the community at large, which is a fancy way of saying there’s nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide.

This is especially true today in our hyperreal, hyperconsuming 21st century, where survivalism has become more of a gadget fantasy than an earnest grasp for community.

“It seems a natural human impulse that we are hard-wired to follow as circumstances require,” Kunstler says, “although it is constrained by social and cultural conditioning. To some degree, in our consumer culture, survivalism is related to the gear fetishism you see in popular magazines that purport to be about sporting adventures, but are really about acquiring snazzy equipment. America in 2008 has become a cartoon culture of Hollywood violence that promotes grandiose power fantasies of hyper-individualism and vigilante justice. Add guns and economic hardship, and spice it up with ethnic grievances, and the recipe is not very appetizing.”

This future cultural, environmental and geopolitical miasma is where the survivalist and the mainstream converge in agreement. Both camps, pardon the pun, are convinced that we’re screwed down the road.

“The next Great Depression will be a tremendous leveler,” Rawles prophesies. “If anything, life in the 22nd century will more closely resemble the 19th century than the 20th century. Sadly, the 21st century will probably be remembered as the time of the Great Die-Off.”

“I don’t consider it a total wipeout,” Kunstler counters. “It’s a very big change, but people are resilient and resourceful. Look, imagine if you were a person who had survived the Second World War in Europe, and you were walking around Berlin in the spring of 1946, a year after the end of the war. A once-magnificent city has been reduced to rubble. Your culture is lying in ashes. Yet, people pick up and rebuild.”

That is, if they’re sticking together. If they’re scattered and fending for themselves, and taking armed retreat defense tips from SurvivalBlog, that makes rebuilding a bit more complicated. Which, in the end, is where survivalism is most ambiguous. Is it a growing population of forward-looking realists who are smartly preparing for the die-off brought on by climate crisis and economic collapse, so they can pick up themselves and their people, and rebuild with that “can-do” spirit, as Rawles calls it? Or are they simply gadget-fascinated fundamentalists afraid of change and challenge, so afraid that they’d rather hide and hoard than join the fight?

The jury is still out. But, according to Rawles, it will soon have its diversity mirrored by survivalism’s changing demographic.

“I think that in the next couple of decades,” he explains, “we will witness the formation of some remarkable intentional communities that will feature some unlikely bedfellows: anarchists and Ayn Rand readers, Mennonites and gun enthusiasts, Luddites and techno-geeks, fundamentalist Christians and Gaia worshippers, tree huggers and horse wranglers. We welcome them all. Because the threats are clearly manifold: peak oil, derivatives meltdowns, pandemics, food shortages, market collapses, terrorism, state-sponsored global war and more. In a situation this precarious, I believe that it is remarkably naive to think that mere geographical isolation will be sufficient to shelter communities from the predation of evildoers.”

[Via - AlterNet]

Crude Awakening - The Oil Crash

What If US Collapses? Soviet Collapse Lessons Every American Needs To Know

The Credit Crisis Is Going to Get Worse

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

As the country and the world reel from crises ranging from skyrocketing oil prices and global food shortages to housing and climate change, how best to understand the government policies being pushed through? Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman interviewed Naomi Klein, author of ‘The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism‘.

Amy Goodman: President Bush has lifted an almost two-decade-old executive order banning offshore and natural gas drilling. With prices at the pump over $4 a gallon, Bush has been pushing to allow more drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf and the Arctic Wildlife National Refuge, amidst strong opposition from environmentalists.

The executive drilling ban was issued by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. His son’s lifting of the ban yesterday is largely symbolic, because a separate congressional ban has prohibited offshore drilling since 1981. Speaking on the White House lawn Monday, the President urged lawmakers to lift the ban.

President George Bush: The failure to act is unacceptable. It’s unacceptable to me, and it’s unacceptable to the American people. So today I’ve issued a memorandum to lift the executive prohibition on oil exploration in the OCS. With this action, the executive branch’s restrictions on this exploration have been cleared away. This means that the only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil resources is action from the US Congress. Now the ball is squarely in Congress’s court.

Goodman: In President Bush’s final months of office, the economy is at the top of the agenda. Oil prices now exceed $140 a barrel, more than double $70 a year ago. The high cost of oil has helped exacerbate the global food crisis that threatens to push over 100 million people below the poverty line due to rising food prices. This all comes amidst an ongoing housing crisis, with the US Treasury and Federal Reserve unveiling sweeping steps to possibly bail out the nation’s two largest mortgage lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Amidst these multiple crises, how best to understand government policies being enacted? Naomi Klein is the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The book is out in paperback this month. It was first published in September, and in some ways, much of what Naomi writes about in the book is more relevant today. … Food, fuel, housing, climate change — talk about these crises. First, start with oil.

Klein: There really is a kind of a tsunami of shocks facing not just the economy but people’s lives, people’s real lives. They’re all intersecting. They’re making each other worse. And I think we really are seeing some very live examples of what a write about in the book, which is how there is a strategy. And this is what I mean by “the shock doctrine.” There is a clear political strategy, and has been for several decades, to exploit these moments when people are desperate for quick-fix solutions and more inclined to believe in a kind of a magical cure, to push through very, very unpopular policies that don’t actually solve the crisis at hand, that don’t actually help people, but are incredibly profitable for multinational corporations.

And I think we are seeing a very vivid example of this with this speech from George Bush yesterday, where he is taking a very real crisis, which is demanding complex and profound changes in the way we live, in the way we organize our economy, but particularly in the need to diversify our energy sources. And I think there’s a tremendous actual amount of support for this idea from the public. And he comes in — and I call him in my recent column the “extortionist-in-chief.” Basically what he’s saying is he’s holding the country ransom. He’s not taking any of these long-term policy routes to dealing with climate change, to dealing with high oil prices. It’s just let us drill, or, you know, nobody can go on summer vacation. And he’s selling a myth, which is that by allowing drilling, the price at the pump is going to go down, which is really interesting, because just yesterday, in response to Bush’s announcement, oil went up, and oil futures went up. And so, the price of oil is going to keep going up.

Goodman: What would — how long would it take the oil drilled offshore, if he succeeds in getting his father’s ban reversed, to get into the supply?

Klein: Well, first of all, I think it’s really important for people to understand that we are being subjected to an incredibly aggressive media campaign sponsored by the oil and gas industry. And, you know, it’s to the point where it really is impossible to tell the difference between the paid advertisements, which we’re being bombarded with on cable news from the oil and gas industry, talking about how they can solve the problem of high prices with more drilling, and all of these commentators, from Larry Kudlow to Sean Hannity, repeating these talking points, and not to mention Dick Cheney, who just propagated a complete lie, saying that China was drilling off the coast of Cuba, and the Vice President’s office actually had to retract that. It turns out his source was George Will, who also had to issue a correction. China is not drilling off of Cuba. And so, there’s a very aggressive campaign going on.

The reality is, it would take between five to ten years to see any of that oil. Everybody admits this. Everyone knows this. You have to do the exploration, then you have to build the rig, which takes a huge amount of time. So it takes — we’re talking about as long as a decade to see any of this oil.

So when you press people who are selling this drill in ANWR, more offshore oil drilling, also drilling into the shale in places like Montana, what they actually say is that the reason why it will lower prices at the pump, you know, soon, this summer, is because it will send a message to the stock market, it will send a message to the oil speculators that more supply is on the way. So, essentially, what they’re saying is, let’s play the market, let’s collectively play the market.

And that’s why it’s significant that yesterday, in the face of Bush’s announcement — and it was a significant announcement, because it was a real indication of the seriousness of this administration to really make this their, you know, final push in office, and they could well win, because this media campaign is really bringing public opinion on side, and we know that the Democrats are pretty weak in the face of that public opinion, and the only thing that they could fight this with is with real commitment to green policies. And, you know, don’t hold your breath.

Goodman: What does this offshore drilling, lifting the ban — how would you relate this to what’s happening in Iraq right now and what’s happening at the Oil Ministry and the pushing through the permanent occupation that the Bush administration is pushing hard for?

Klein: Well, I think we’re seeing the Bush administration in its final months just handing out a series of gifts to the oil and gas industry, both at home, pushing for opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and then in Iraq, the prize, the biggest prize of all, which is allowing foreign multinationals to gain control of Iraq’s oil fields. And we’re seeing a two-stage process now, and it isn’t over yet, where first there was the service — the short-term service agreements, no-bid contracts, that were announced. They haven’t been signed yet, but they’re going to the big oil companies that were kicked out of Iraq in the ’70s. They’re coming back.

Goodman: Explain how that works, these no-bid contracts, how it is — who’s signing these contracts?

Klein: OK. Well, at the moment, Iraq does not have an oil law, so Iraq can’t sign long-term exploration agreements, although they are doing it in Iraqi Kurdistan, and we’ve heard about this with Hunt Oil. But that’s — those are illegal contracts. They’re very precarious. There could be future expropriations. It’s really risky to go that route, because there isn’t a law. And we know it’s been a major push of this administration to get the Iraqi parliament to accept a US-backed oil law. This has been sold as a symbol of Iraqi unity. That’s not the way it’s seen in Iraq.

In Iraq, the reason why it has been years in resisting this oil law is because nationalizing the oil in Iraq was the centerpiece of the anti-colonial struggle, as it was in neighboring nations throughout the Arab world. And it is not just a pro-Saddam idea. It is not just a Baathist idea. It’s the core of Arab nationalism. And that victory is being protected by many political forces in Iraq, and most notably by the oil workers’ unions in Iraq, who said, “We don’t need these foreign multinationals to get the oil out of the ground. We can do it ourselves. We can bring in technical support without giving away management control, without giving away ownership control.”

And, I mean, but let’s stress here that unlike the oil offshore, unlike the shale, this is very difficult oil to extract. It’s extremely — it requires a huge amount of technology. It requires a huge amount of investment. And that’s part of the problem with what the Bush administration is selling. These — actually, they — the oil companies need the price of oil to stay high in order for it to be economically viable to do these — to get oil out of solid rock, for instance, which is very hard, very expensive. Offshore oil drilling, also very, very expensive — you have to build the rigs and so on. Iraq, no. Iraq, stick a straw in the ground and suck. I mean, this is incredibly accessible oil. And Iraqis actually know how to extract this oil themselves. So this idea that they need these foreign multinationals to come in is yet another myth.

And not only have companies like BP and Texaco been offered these no-bid contracts, but what’s strange about it is that they’re service contracts, and these are not oil service companies. So what’s significant about these contracts is that they appear to be giving these oil companies the right of first refusal on future, more significant contracts. So, one week after these smaller service agreements were announced, the Iraqi Oil Ministry announced that they also will be handing out longer-term management agreements, which will give oil companies the ability to manage existing fields in Iraq and hold onto 75 percent of the worth of those contracts and leave only 25 percent for Iraqis, which is absolutely unheard of in the region, where 51 percent for the country is the baseline for new exploration, for new fields. These are existing fields. They’re already working. The technology is already there. And these foreign companies are going to be taking 75 percent of the worth of those existing fields in Iraq. So it’s daylight robbery. It’s armed robbery, actually.

Goodman: How is it that the oil prices are, well, among the highest they have ever been, and yet so are the oil company profits — ExxonMobil, Chevron — why?

Klein: Well, they have a captive market, and the fact that the price is high means that they are earning more profits.

Goodman: But supposedly the price is high because it’s harder to get, not to give them more money.

Klein: There’s a speculative bubble going on right now, and this market is being played. I mean, I think this is really the new bubble. Actually, it’s replacing the housing bubble. And, you know, any time anything bad happens in the world, that’s the indication for speculators to drive the price up. It happened yesterday. Bush announced that he would be opening up to offshore oil drilling, but at the same time, there was an oil strike in Brazil, so the price of oil went up. So everything drives the price of oil up. I think it’s really a classic bubble. Certainly, there are some supply issues, but I actually don’t think that that is the main reason why the price of oil is going up.

Goodman: You’re from Canada. Talk about Canada being the major supplier of oil to the United States. I think most people in this country would not understand this. And I also want to talk about ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Klein: Well, it’s really striking, because in all of these discussions — and we heard this just now from President Bush — it was, we need to drill offshore to get away from our dependence on foreign oil, and there is still an overwhelming perception that most of the oil in the United States is coming from countries like Saudi Arabia. There has been, since the invasion of Iraq — and this is the period where the price of oil has skyrocketed — this has already changed. The number one supplier of oil to the United States is not Saudi Arabia, it’s not Mexico — it’s Canada.

And it has all of the elements that these new initiatives that are being proposed — offshore, ANWR, shale — possess. It’s close. It is an absolutely secure source of oil for the United States, and the reason for that is because locked into the North American Free Trade Agreement, locked into NAFTA, is a clause that we Canadians are really not very pleased with, which actually makes it illegal, impossible, under NAFTA, for Canada to turn off the tap, even if we face an oil crisis and are not able to supply oil for our citizens. We have to keep supplying the United States. So it’s a legally binding agreement that this tap will stay open. So Canada is now the number one supplier.

And the other that it holds in common is that it’s ecologically devastating, what’s going on in Canada, because the majority of this new oil coming to the United States is coming from the Alberta tar sands, which are often called the “oil sands.” We call them the “tar sands,” because it’s a more accurate description. And this is another oil industry talking point, to get you to stop calling it the “tar sands” and start calling it the “oil sands.”

But essentially, the oil in Alberta is very linked to the high price of oil, which is to say that when oil was at $30 a barrel, the tar sands, this huge oil deposit, was not counted as part of the global oil reserves. And the reason for that is that it was so expensive to process this very, very thick tar-like substance into liquid oil. It costs between $25 and $30 a barrel, so it just didn’t make sense to count it as part of the global oil reserves, because who was going to make the investment required if they were obviously not going to get a return on their investment? So once the Iraq war started and the price of oil started skyrocketing, oil was discovered in Canada. Everyone knew it was there, but it became part of the global oil reserves. More than that, it is now counted as the largest oil deposit in the world. These are the tar sands.

And, you know, I would argue that this oil should be left in the ground. Environmentalists are calling for a moratorium on the tar sands, because it takes three times the amount of fossil fuels, of burning fossil fuels, to process one barrel of oil from the tar sands as it does to process the kind of oil that they have in Iraq, for instance, which is already in liquid form.

Goodman: So you dramatically increase emissions.

Klein: It’s why Canada has become a climate renegade, along with the United States, because our emissions are increasing because of the tar sands, because it is so carbon-intensive and water-intensive — which is another issue — to do this very, very dirty processing of this tar-like substance into liquid form. So the argument is that it should actually be left alone.

But the other argument that we see is that even with this huge boom going on in Canada — and this is the reason why our economy is actually doing better than the US economy, because of the tar sands — is that it in no way has affected the price of oil. So, here you have a paradigm to look at of what is being proposed right now with ANWR, what’s being proposed with offshore, what’s being proposed with shale. We can see it right now in Canada. And as this huge boom is taking place, the price of oil has gone up month after month after month, and it has had absolutely no effect on the price at the pump.

Goodman: You’ve been writing a lot on a number of issues. One of them is about what you call Obama’s Boys.

Klein: Obama’s Chicago Boys. I just want to add one more point, and I just want to take this opportunity, because I feel like people are being so bombarded with these oil industry talking points, and it really is changing public opinion. I mean, people need to know this. There’s — polls are being commissioned that are finding that 67 percent of Americans support offshore oil drilling, because they think it’s going to lower the price at the pump.

What’s actually going on is the oil companies may not even bother drilling. What they’re doing is they’re stockpiling leases. And what that means is that the oil companies will have a much greater control over the oil supply. When the oil companies have a much larger control over the oil supply, they can turn it on and off. They can control price. They can fix the price. So, in fact, what this is doing is the opposite of what they’re saying. It’s actually giving the oil industry much more power to drive the price of oil up by controlling supply, by just giving them all of these leases. And we keep hearing, well, they have all these leases already, and they’re not using them, and they want more. Why? Why do they want all these leases? Because that is what gives them control over supply. That’s what allows them to fix prices.

Goodman: In fact, this has united you with people across the political spectrum. You’ve been invited on a number of right-wing radio talk shows, because everyone is deeply concerned about the price of oil. They just have different solutions for what should happen.

Klein: Right. But, you know, there was this little window, Amy, where even Bill O’Reilly was talking about the obscene profits of the oil industry — it was like three days — where people were — where the logic of the situation was just so glaring, where, you know, you have Shell reporting $7 billion in profits in one quarter. People are very concerned about climate change. And it just makes sense to take some of those profits in the form of a windfall profit tax or some other measure and — because these are the companies that have created this crisis for us — and using this moment.

And let’s remember that this is what countries around the world are doing. They’re using this moment of high oil prices to invest in alternative energy and alternative infrastructure. The way to make solar and wind work, you know, is not just to do venture capitalism for startup solar and wind companies. These companies need major investment, need states to make major investments in infrastructure that can carry these new energy sources, new grids. This can only be done by the public sector. And this is actually a moment of opportunity, when there is such high prices, when people are so angry at the oil companies, to actually take some of this money and invest it in the public sphere, so that alternative energy becomes viable.

And there was a moment where there seemed to be some agreement about that, even on the right. And then, it just shifted because of this very aggressive barrage coming from the oil and gas industry, which is selling this false hope of “drill now, pay less.”

Goodman: Naomi Klein, Obama’s Chicago Boys, who are they?

Klein: Well, one of them is Obama. Obama spent ten years teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, which is a very conservative law school. You know, I wrote a column recently talking about how conservative Obama’s economic roots are, with his ties to the University of Chicago.

His first response to the mortgage crisis, let’s remember, was he was worried about the government taking action to keep people from being evicted from their homes, because that would create moral hazard. And he was not talking about the big companies, the big mortgage lenders; he was talking about individual low-income people being thrown out of their homes. He was worried about moral hazard. That’s a very University of Chicago take on the situation.

And one of his — his chief economic adviser was Austin Goolsbee, this University of Chicago economist. And, you know, now his chief economic adviser is Jason Furman, who is not a University of Chicago-affiliated economist, but is certainly on the right of the economic — Democratic economic spectrum, has defended Wal-Mart, has attacked critics of Wal-Mart, saying that they’re doing more harm than good, that actually Wal-Mart is a progressive institution that is helping low-income people with their low prices, and that living wage campaigns, for instance, are actually hurting low-income people. So these are pretty conservative ideas, and I think it is important for people to understand that this is who Obama has chosen to take his advice from.

Goodman: This is very interesting, because, of course, he really slammed Hillary Clinton when it came to her tenure on the board of Wal-Mart. And he said he wouldn’t shop there.

Klein: It’s true. He said both of those things, and it is a political campaign, and we’re seeing a lot of double talk on these issues. Austin Goolsbee, for instance, got himself into some trouble after he met with Canadian consulate officials. And they left that meeting with the distinct impression that he had told them that they shouldn’t listen to what Obama’s saying about NAFTA and renegotiating NAFTA for labor and environmental standards, because it’s just an election campaign. So it would seem that perhaps we should take Obama’s Wal-Mart comments in the same spirit. But, you know, my message on –

Goodman: And yet, you have him speaking — Obama himself being quoted in Fortune magazine, after he had said that that whole — well, what became a sort of little scandal there, with Goolsbee going to the Canadian consulate at the time when he was going through the states where labor was stronger, where he was really slamming NAFTA, saying this wasn’t true, that he was telling them, “Don’t worry. It’s just overheated rhetoric.” And then he said that precise thing, Senator Obama himself, in Fortune.

Klein: That it was overheated rhetoric. Exactly.

Goodman: That he supports NAFTA and free trade.

Klein: And it’s — you know, it’s shades of Bill Clinton’s first campaign, where he also campaigned very actively about labor and environmental standards and NAFTA. NAFTA had already been signed, but it hadn’t come into law. And then there was a turnaround, and there was a turnaround in the transition period, after the election but before he took office, where there was a sort of fateful meeting.

And I think the fear is that some of the same people, like Rubin, responsible for, you know, Rubinomics, which turned into Clintonomics, which was, you know, the Democratic full-scale embrace of the ideology of privatization and so-called free trade, that this same sort of group of people are following — are now surrounding Obama. And Jason Furman is a Rubin protg and worked with him at the Hamilton Project, which is a sort of sub-think tank of the Brookings Institution, which emerged a few years ago to prevent the Democratic Party from embracing what they saw as populist economic policies, the centerpiece of which would have been a reexamine of the ideology of free trade, which is being discredited around the world.

Goodman: So, you have Obama on NAFTA, people perceiving that he’s changing his position. And then you have the major issue of FISA, where even on his own website — and many say –

Klein: Well, just to be clear on economics, I mean, I think what we actually saw with Obama is that he started pretty much at a conservative point on economic policy, and Clinton — and the campaign with Clinton, because she was moving so far to a populist position, he then moved. And as soon as she dropped out of the race, he moved back. So I think there are some real points of disagreement, and I think that there are some places to point to much more progressive outlook in Obama’s roots, particularly on foreign policy, but I don’t think economic policy is one of them.

Goodman: He had called the free trade agreement, in the debates with Hillary Clinton and with John Edwards, “a mistake.” He called it “an enormous problem,” but now, with Fortune, said, “Sometimes during campaigns rhetoric gets overheated and amplified. My core position has never changed. I’ve always been a proponent of free trade,” which you say actually is true.

Klein: And he appointed Jason Furman the day after Hillary dropped out of the race. So, it was — as I said, I really think he’s moving back to actually where he started, with his first reaction, as I said, to the subprime mortgage crisis being, well, we can’t keep low-income people from being evicted, because we have the moral hazard of encouraging them to make bad loans, essentially blaming them for having been — having accepted these mortgages in the first place.

Goodman: So now you have FISA, and you’re suing on this issue. But on December 17th, a press release from Obama’s Senate office read: “Senator Obama unequivocally opposes giving retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies and has cosponsored Senator Dodd’s efforts to remove that provision from the FISA bill. Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. Senator Obama supports a filibuster of this bill, and strongly urges others to do the same.” Ultimately, of course, he supported the bill, and it just passed, and the telecommunications companies got the retroactive immunity that they had sought.

Klein: I think we should see this as part of these parting gifts that the Bush administration is handing out to their cronies in the oil and gas industry and also in the telecommunications industry. And we really see the priorities of this administration. It’s a tremendous disappointment.

The lawsuit that you mentioned is, I think, a really forward-looking initiative from the ACLU, where they’ve been anticipating, hoping that this wouldn’t happen, that there would be a legal defeat of this — of the bill in Congress and the Senate. But, of course, they were realistic and knew that there was a good chance of a cave, and so the ACLU has been preparing a lawsuit, and I think it’s really the ACLU at its best, which is defending the law when the lawmakers decide not to.

And they’ve brought together coalition of human rights groups, different NGOs, who do a lot of international work, as well as journalists, who — and we’re all saying — I’m one of the complainants on behalf of The Nation, me and — Chris Hedges and I and The Nation are named in this lawsuit, and we are all saying that the fact that our communications with international sources, with international colleagues, are now open to absolute, free surveillance, with no restrictions whatsoever, severely limits our ability to do our job.

And I think the most disappointing thing about the way in which Obama and other Democrats have defended their reversal on this law is that there’s a tremendous amount of dishonesty about what is in the law. I mean, they’re having to say that they’ve gotten all of these improvements, that it’s much better, that there’s much less to worry about, in order to justify their, I think, deeply immoral position. And so, there’s a lot of misunderstanding now about just how bad this law is.

And it’s just as bad as we feared, not just on the immunity for the telecoms, which is a disaster, but, more importantly, the fact that there, you know, is no burden of proof, except to say that the party being put under surveillance is outside of the United States. So if I’m communicating — I’m in the United States and I’m communicating with somebody in Argentina, they don’t — the government does not have to prove that they have reason to believe that that person in Argentina is affiliated with a terrorist group, is a suspected terrorist, has information about terrorism. All they have to prove is that they are not an American.

Goodman: [Let’s] talk about Iraq, both Obama and McCain.

Klein: Well, on Iraq, Obama does not have a plan to end the occupation; he has a plan to downsize the occupation slowly. He’s been clear that he wants to keep the Green Zone intact. You’ve covered this extensively on the show. And that means, as Jeremy Scahill has made clear, that means that they have to keep Blackwater in Iraq.

So, I think that the point of this is not just to bash Obama. I mean, what I’ve been trying to — the point I’ve been trying to make is that Obama needs more than super fans. He needs pressure from his base, because he has all the energy of the antiwar movement and the antiwar infrastructure. I mean, you’ve got groups like MoveOn that really built their infrastructure out of the huge anger and desire for change around Iraq, and now the infrastructure of the antiwar movement largely is going to support Obama, but there aren’t clear demands being made of him to deserve that support.

Goodman: He’s now calling for 10,000 more troops to go to Afghanistan.

Klein: And, you know, the corporations who are funding Obama’s campaign, one of — somebody who I referred to as one of Obama’s Chicago Boys, I was talking about Ken Griffin, who is a Chicago hedge fund manager who used to be a Bush campaign pioneer, was a Republican, and has switched to Obama, basically because he’s run the numbers and he believes Obama is going to win.

But I think what we have to understand is, with all the Wall Street money coming to Obama, with the weapons money coming to Obama, with the hedge fund money coming to Obama, these players have leverage. They can go to the Republicans. And so, what’s the leverage of the antiwar movement? You know, what’s the leverage of the grassroots supporters of Obama who have given him their trust, because they want change so badly on the environment, in Iraq, on domestic economic policy?

Goodman: Well, isn’t the alternative, McCain says a hundred years in Iraq?

Klein: Well, that’s the alternative. And I think, you know, this is part of the problem of this two-party system. And, you know, I saw Ralph Nader recently, and he said, “You know, progressives and liberals don’t know how to play poker. There has to be somewhere to go.” And, you know, I think that’s part of it. But I don’t think it’s just about third parties. It’s also about having independent movements that provide conditional support to candidates and not this sort of blank check, rock star, we’ll support you no matter what.

Goodman: Well, of course, people do have some place else to go, which is — we’ve seen it over and over — the American people have made it very clear: stay home.

Klein: Stay home. That’s true, and that’s a credible threat. But I think Obama needs to hear a much more conditional, much more critical, much more demanding kind of support from his base, because his base is far to the left of the types of policies that we’re seeing and that we’re talking about here, whether it’s the mortgage crisis, whether it’s NAFTA, or whether it’s Iraq.

Goodman: Food crisis now around the world.

Klein: Well, this is another example of how the shock doctrine, the strategy that I document in the book of using a crisis, using a situation of desperation, often a situation where developing countries need foreign aid, because they’re facing a disaster, to leverage very, very unpopular pro-corporate policies. Now, you know in the book the examples that I give are, for instance, how the tsunami in Asia was used and the fact that countries like Sri Lanka needed aid, and in that moment you had international lenders coming in and saying, “Oh, well, we’ll give you aid, but we want you to privatize your water, your electricity system, hand the coastline over to resorts.”

Well, we’re seeing a version of this. We’re seeing a version of disaster capitalism in the context of the food crisis, where you have that same desperation, you have a need for aid, for debt forgiveness, for new policies, and now we’re hearing another sort of echo chamber response from the World Bank, from the US State Department, from the agribusiness companies, and that refrain is, the cause of the food crisis is that too many of these countries don’t allow genetically modified foods, and genetically modified crops can feed the world and solve the food crisis, so trying to use this crisis to break through a legislative barrier that exists for good reason, just as domestically in the United States the oil crisis is being used by the Bush administration to try to break through the bans on offshore oil, on ANWR.

So now we have this other talking point that we’re hearing again and again, which is genetically modified foods can feed the world. There is no scientific evidence for this. Quite the opposite. Genetically modified seeds do not increase yields for crops. They increase profits for agribusiness companies. They simplify farming. But they don’t increase yields, and in many cases they decrease yields.

Goodman: Because?

Klein: Because this is actually not what they’re genetically modified to do. I mean, if you think about Roundup Ready, I mean, what it’s genetically modified to do is be compatible –

Goodman: You mean the soy and the fertilizer?

Klein: Yes, to be compatible with Monsanto’s [herbicide]. It’s not about increasing crop yields. And they haven’t actually figured out the technology for how to increase crop yields.

One of the things that I find really worrying is that companies — and similar to the oil crisis, Amy, we’re seeing record profits from Monsanto, from Cargill, from all the big players, in the context of the food crisis. We’re also seeing something else, which is that these companies are buying up hundreds of patents on seeds that they claim are “climate-ready.” “Climate-ready” is — we’ve heard about Roundup Ready, which means they’re ready for roundup [herbicide]; now, the new phrase is “climate ready,” which means they’re ready for climate change, which means that these seeds apparently can grow in the context of drought, can grow in the context of highly salinated earth because there’s been a flood. And Monsanto and Syngenta, other of these big biotech companies, have bought up hundreds of these patents.

And this is worrying on many levels. I think it’s worrying, because, once again, we’re seeing a disincentive to actually get us out of a future of climate chaos, because we see ways to profit. But then, when we look at how aggressively we know a company like Monsanto protects its patents, when it comes to their Roundup Ready seeds, the suing of small farmers, the surveillance of farmers — there was an incredible story recently in Vanity Fair about the heavy-handed legal tactics and use of private security, just harassing farmers who dare to save their seeds from one growing season to the next, breaking Monsanto’s patent. So if they really are developing seeds that are climate ready and they’re also patenting them and buying them up, then really what we’re seeing is not a future of feeding the world, but once again a future of a kind of climate apartheid, where it becomes less accessible and more expensive to have the crops that will grow in this future.

And so, I think people need to identify this right away, and the discussion needs to be about the right to food, about food being a human right. This is far too important to allow players like Monsanto to privatize the future of the crops that can grow within a context of climate change.

Read the final part of the interview at Democracy Now!

Musical Video Tutorials As A Business

Put-In-Cups As A Business

Trash Bucks

Cool Bicycle Niche Business

How To Get Media Attention? Just Say ‘Green,’ ‘Sex,’ ‘Cancer,’ ‘Secret’ Or ‘Fat’

Bookmark It