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I was scheduled to record an interview with Dmitry Orlov today, and we did speak for a bit, but Dmitry lives on a sailboat, and while he was below deck, the wind was still blowing against his cell phone mic. I'm sure you've had the experience of talking to someone who was outside in the wind. It's very distracting. Dmitry closed the hatch on his boat, and that stopped the wind noise, but then it got unpleasantly hot inside the boat. Hardly ideal conditions for an interview, so we've re-scheduled. In the time we were talking, Dmitry did mention that an essay by Michael T. Klare called Portrait of an Oil-Addicted Former Superpower has just been published in the Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel. Here's a sample: From the end of World War II through the height of the Cold War, the U.S. claim to superpower status rested on a vast sea of oil. As long as most of our oil came from domestic sources and the price remained reasonably low, the American economy thrived and the annual cost of deploying vast armies abroad was relatively manageable. But that sea has been shrinking since the 1950s. Domestic oil production reached a peak in 1970 and has been in decline ever since -- with a growing dependency on imported oil as the result. When it came to reliance on imports, the United States crossed the 50% threshold in 1998 and now has passed 65%.
Though few fully realized it, this represented a significant erosion of sovereign independence even before the price of a barrel of crude soared above $110. By now, we are transferring such staggering sums yearly to foreign oil producers, who are using it to gobble up valuable American assets, that, whether we know it or not, we have essentially abandoned our claim to superpowerdom.
(...)
The managers of these (sovereign wealth) funds naturally insist that they have no intention of using their ownership of prime American properties to influence U.S. policy. In time, however, a transfer of economic power of this magnitude cannot help but translate into a transfer of political power as well. Tags: peak oil, swf
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Well, it's only taken me 94 episodes to get the C-Realm Podcast listed in the iTunes podcast directory, so up till now, nobody trolling iTunes for podcasts on their iPhone has had the opportunity to stumble upon the C-Realm Podcast. Johan, the C-Realm web wizard, thinks that traffic will increase quickly now that C-Realm is on iTunes. Well, here's a snapshot of recent traffic trends for the last 90 days to use as a basis for comparison:  Where do these folks come from? Most, I guess, either subscribe to the RSS feed by one means or another (and subscribing through iTunes via the PodOMatic page has been an option since the beginning), or they navigate to the C-Realm Podcast PodOMatic page directly to download new episodes, but I can see that some listeners come to the C-Realm Podcast from links that other people have so considerately provided:  If you are responsible for any of these incoming links, thank you. Tags: c-realm podcast
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link: http://www.arthurmag.com/magpie/?p=2825Riding Out the Credit Crisisby Douglas Rushkofffrom Arthur Magazine No. 29/May 2008 Here's a really excellent rundown of what lead up to the credit crisis for those people (like me) who aren't already self-made scholars on the topic. In short, there was a surplus of credit in the system. Americans were encouraged to borrow in the form of mortgages, which created demand for the credit banks wanted to sell. In many cases the credit itself wasn’t even real, but leveraged off some other inflated commodity that the bank or investor may have owned.
Banks and mortgage companies invented some really shady and difficult-to-understand mortgage contracts, designed to get people to borrow more money than they could . Banks didn’t care so much about lending money to people who wouldn’t be able to pay it back, because that’s not how they were going to earn their money, anyway. They provided the money for mortgage companies to lend, and in return won the rights to underwrite the loans when they were packaged and sold to other people and institutions.
So a bank might provide the cash for a bunch of loans, but then get it back, plus a huge commission, when those loans were packaged and sold to someone else. Douglas Rushkoff appears in C-Realm Podcast 29: Corporatized.  Tags: credit crisis, douglas rushkoff
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