If the USA is currently in a recession, and PresidentObama was correct when recently he has been saying the recession was lifted and we were trending toward greater employment, business propserity, and economic growth; if all this, then we have entered into a second recession, insofar as the 59% say we are in a recession. Obama's second recession, becawz we lifted out of the first and now have fallen back into a second of a series of two recessions and maybe more. Or if you want to discount his first becawz he inherited it from a previous administration, then at least this one is a clearly an Obama Recession, sad to say.
— EconoMix, refWrite Frontpage economics and business columnist
Rasmussen Reports (May30,2k12)
—reposted here by EconoMix
Rasmussen Employment Index reaches h+est level in over 4 years
The Rasmussen Employment Index jumped eight points in May to 88.3, the highest finding since January 2008. The Employment Index is up eight points from the beginning of the year and is up 11 points from this time last year. In February, the Employment Index was at 87.7, the highest level in nearly three and a half years. The survey of 8,804 working Americans was conducted in May 2012 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 1 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC . See methodology .
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Religious Freedom: PoliticsUSA: Contraceptive Mandate
The Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance (IARFA)'s director, Dr Stanley Carlson-Thies, has written a letter he has signed and is holding so you can join him in sending it before the June 8 deadline. The IARFA letter is addressed to Katherine Sebelius, cabinet-level Secretary Kathleen Sebelius who heads the USA govt's Department of Health and Human Services.
I leave it to readers to examine Stanley's letter, and to decides whether or not to
Act Now !
— Owlb, refWrite Frontpage editor and columnist
— reposted here, with comment, by Owlb from IARFA's free email newsletter
I leave it to readers to examine Stanley's letter, and to decides whether or not to
Act Now !
— Owlb, refWrite Frontpage editor and columnist
— reposted here, with comment, by Owlb from IARFA's free email newsletter
|
Sunday, May 27, 2012
EconomicsBrazil: Language skills: Tourism industries suffer from lack of skilled English speakers
It's a persistent reality of life around the globe today that English is the leading language, especially in international trade, business professions, and many scientific, technical, and medical activities. It has largely displaced French as the leading language of diplomacy and statecraft between nations. And it is challenged in its leading role by Arabic, Spanish, and most of all by Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese particularly). Most trend analysts say the day when Chinese displaces English in the lead role linguistically, is not so far away.
In the interim, however, there's an economic aspect to the use or non-use of language that can affect a country's bottom line, it's balance of trade, and tourism, transport, and hospitality industries. Rachel Glickhouse recently provided her analysis of the gap Brazil is experiencing nowadays between the arrival of tourists and the ability of the mentioned industries to provide the services that many needs and expectations of visitors to the country from abroad increasingly seek. The same process will occur in North America as China's new middle-class begins to afford travel outside their homeland recreationally and wants to make a visit to Hawaii, California, or Toronto. Will we be able to make the changes necessary in order to accomodate them and obtain the benefits of their arrival? 8–)
-- EconoMix, refWrite Frontpage economics & business columnist
Christian Science Monitor (May24,2k12)
Ariticle by Rachel Glickhouse
— Excerpt reposted here by EconoMix
In the interim, however, there's an economic aspect to the use or non-use of language that can affect a country's bottom line, it's balance of trade, and tourism, transport, and hospitality industries. Rachel Glickhouse recently provided her analysis of the gap Brazil is experiencing nowadays between the arrival of tourists and the ability of the mentioned industries to provide the services that many needs and expectations of visitors to the country from abroad increasingly seek. The same process will occur in North America as China's new middle-class begins to afford travel outside their homeland recreationally and wants to make a visit to Hawaii, California, or Toronto. Will we be able to make the changes necessary in order to accomodate them and obtain the benefits of their arrival? 8–)
-- EconoMix, refWrite Frontpage economics & business columnist
Lost in translation: English in Brazil
Brazil is considered a 'low English proficiency' country, and ranks among the lowest in the world for workplace fluency, putting the emerging economy at a disadvantage, writes a guest blogger.
Christian Science Monitor (May24,2k12)
Ariticle by Rachel Glickhouse
— Excerpt reposted here by EconoMix
One of the main challenges leading up to Brazil's mega-events – including the Rio+20, the World Cup, and the Olympics – is a shortage of English speakers in key sectors, including tourism, transportation, and hospitality. For those who spend lots of time in Brazil and speak Portuguese or hope to become fluent, this is actually an advantage, which can allow for more immersion. But for one-time visitors or those dependent on English as their only language or the only other way to communicate outside of their native language (such as Chinese, Russian, etc), it can prove to be a problem.
On global English rankings, Brazil does not fare well. EF, a global English education company, released its international English proficiency index for 2011, showing that Brazil ranked as a country with "low English proficiency." Though it was among the lowest ranking countries, Brazil scored above the "very low proficiency" countries such as Panama and Vietnam. Released in April, the GlobalEnglish CorporationBusiness English Index ranked Brazil among the lowest in the world among countries with the least amount of English fluency in the workplace, which puts the country "at a disadvantage." An Economist Intelligence Unit report released this month indicated that Brazil is one of the countries that struggles the most with the language barrier in international business; nearly three-quarters of Brazilians surveyed said their company had experienced “financial losses as a result of failed cross-border transactions.”
Saturday, May 26, 2012
EconomicsUSA: Bank Fraud: Is flagship of American banking up to dirty tricks?
The main issue at stake in the JPMorgan bank case in the news in America for the last several days, is simply Was that bank's recent losses of over $3 billion a result of fraudulent activities and cover-up structured-in from the outset?
The bank obviously is so entwined with President Obama's régime that we have to wonder whether JPM's chief executive officer, Jamie Dimon, was so uniquely and charmingly disengenuous that the Prez was simply bamboozled by him; or, whether the Prez was so uniquely and charmingly naïve that Jamie Dimon needed no special knack to bamboozle the Prez.
Then, there's the important s+d issue of how much govt regulators at JPM were obstructed (and charmed) by this stellar entrepreneur-manager that no laws, even those enacted by Congress and s+nd by the Prez (the Dodd-Franks Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act), no law coud simply net the slithering eel at the bank's helm.
— EconoMix, refWrite Frontpage economics & business columnist
— EconoMix, refWrite Frontpage economics & business columnist
Bank regulators under scrutiny
in JPMorgan loss
New York Times (May25,2k12)
by Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Ben Protess
— reposted in part, with comment by EconoMix
Scores of federal regulators are stationed inside JPMorgan Chase’s Manhattan headquarters, but none of them were assigned to the powerful unit that recently disclosed a multibillion trading loss.
Roughly 40 examiners from theFederal Reserve Bank of New Yorkand 70 staff members from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency are embedded in the nation’s largest bank. They are typically assigned to the departments undertaking the greatest risks, like the structured products trading desk. Even as the chief investment office swelled in size and made increasingly large bets, regulators did not put any examiners in the unit’s offices in London or New York, according to current and former regulators who spoke only on condition of anonymity.
Senior JPMorgan executives assured the bank’s watchdogs after the financial crisis that the chief investment office, with hundreds of billions in investments, was not taking risks that would be a cause for concern, people briefed on the matter said. Just weeks before the trading losses became public, bank officials also dismissed the worry of a senior New York Fed examiner about the mounting size of the bets, according to current Fed officials.
The lapses have raised questions about who, if anyone, was policing the chief investment office and whether regulators were sufficiently independent. Instead of putting the JPMorgan unit under regular watch, the comptroller’s office and the Fed chose to examine it periodically.
The bank pushback also suggests that JPMorgan had sway over its regulators, an influence that several said was enhanced by the bank’s charismatic chief executive, Jamie Dimon, long considered Washington’s favorite banker.
Now, as regulators scramble to determine whether the chief investment office took inappropriate risks, some former Fed officials are asking whether the investigation should be spearheaded by the New York Fed, where Mr. Dimon has a seat on the board. Some lawmakers and former regulators also have reservations about the comptroller’s office, which is investigating the trade and was the primary regulator for JPMorgan’s chief investment unit.
“The central question is why Jamie Dimon was able to so successfully convince both its regulators that there was nothing to see at the chief investment office,” said Mark Williams, a professor of finance at Boston University, who also served as a Federal Reserve Bank examiner in Boston and San Francisco. “To me, it suggests that he is too close to his regulators.”
Regulators, for their part, say they cannot micromanage a bank or outlaw its risk taking and did not bow to bank pressure when assigning examiners. William C. Dudley, president of the New York Fed, has said that JPMorgan’s losses did not pose a threat to the bank’s viability. In a statement on Friday, the comptroller of the currency, Thomas J. Curry, said, “I am committed to ensuring this agency provides strong supervision for all of the institutions we oversee.”
Regulators are not typically stationed at divisions like JPMorgan’s chief investment office, which are known as Treasury units. The units hedge risk and invest extra money on hand, and tend to make short-term investments. But JPMorgan’s office, with a portfolio of nearly $400 billion, had become a profit center that made large bets and recorded $5 billion in profit over the three years through 2011.
Officials of JPMorgan declined to comment on its relationships with regulators.
Read the whole NYT article.
EnviroGlobal: Theory: Science of Doomsday Apocalyptic?
I'm rather skeptical about doomsday scenarios, especially when all garbed up in the religion of the age (the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist) — which nowadays is scientism and vampirism, the hyper-rational devoted to its polar opposite the biting irrationalism in movies, on TV, in goth culture and styles of fashion. Yet I'm not dismissive of science in its various disciplines, either. So, the thesis of a new book and its tradition of scientific doomsdism now nearing the tipping point does get my interest. Nevertheless, my l+f has been so impacted by a personal sense of doom — my father had a deadly stroke when I was 3 1/2 and my brother just born, he was killed by lightning when 18 (I was 21), my mother committed suicide when she was in her early fifties and I was 30 — that the doomsday threateners (echoing the apocryphal book, I Enoch), even their threats from the lock-step phalances of marching scientios, is often way off somewhere in the emotional distance for me personally.
Well, dear reader, I thawt nevertheless I shoud pass on to you a few paragraphs from Scientific American, written by, appropriately named, Madhusree Mukerjee. You can click the link just below to go to the full online article "Apocalypse Soon: Has civilization passed the environmental point of no return?" I recommend it as an excellent version of the type "science journalism" that dominates much science discourse to which the public is exposed these latter days.
One specific from Mad's text: "Population will increase, albeit slowly, to a maximum of about eight billion near 2040. Eventually, however, floods and desertification will start reducing farmland and therefore the availability of grain." Actually the process of reduction of the topsoil on planet Earth has been continuing apace for a very long time, and with it the destruction of the farming peasantry thru-out the globe. I'm not in favour of permanentizing the peasant class (Marx hated them, I don't at all). But change does come, and they are being pushed from the land they tilled, planted, and harvested — from time immemorial. Where do they go? To favelas, to urban-garbage dumps, and (in the cases of some) to upward mobility as plantation day-labourers, or as industrial factory workers, or as migrants to massive mining operations, etc. It's not so much doomsday that speaks to me (no matter how scientifically garbed), rather it's the human pain, confusion, casualities, and fear-ridden psyches of "all ye who labour and are heavy-laden." It's these people to whom Jesus extended his invitation "Come unto me. And I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28).
A first responder to Mad's doomdism is Harry Dale Huffman. His comment is:
— Owlb, refWrite Frontpage enviro columnist
Scientific American (May23,2k12)
Some paragraphs by Madhusree Mukerjee:
Well, dear reader, I thawt nevertheless I shoud pass on to you a few paragraphs from Scientific American, written by, appropriately named, Madhusree Mukerjee. You can click the link just below to go to the full online article "Apocalypse Soon: Has civilization passed the environmental point of no return?" I recommend it as an excellent version of the type "science journalism" that dominates much science discourse to which the public is exposed these latter days.
One specific from Mad's text: "Population will increase, albeit slowly, to a maximum of about eight billion near 2040. Eventually, however, floods and desertification will start reducing farmland and therefore the availability of grain." Actually the process of reduction of the topsoil on planet Earth has been continuing apace for a very long time, and with it the destruction of the farming peasantry thru-out the globe. I'm not in favour of permanentizing the peasant class (Marx hated them, I don't at all). But change does come, and they are being pushed from the land they tilled, planted, and harvested — from time immemorial. Where do they go? To favelas, to urban-garbage dumps, and (in the cases of some) to upward mobility as plantation day-labourers, or as industrial factory workers, or as migrants to massive mining operations, etc. It's not so much doomsday that speaks to me (no matter how scientifically garbed), rather it's the human pain, confusion, casualities, and fear-ridden psyches of "all ye who labour and are heavy-laden." It's these people to whom Jesus extended his invitation "Come unto me. And I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28).
A first responder to Mad's doomdism is Harry Dale Huffman. His comment is:
This article is insane. As I have noted on my own blog today (May23,2k12), "...in fact, the 'debate' on both sides is insane, and everyone knows why–1) the emotional (not scientific) intransigence of the individual ego, multiplied over the millions of individuals who are invested in the consensus, 2) the ideological (not scientific) linking of the idea of 'runaway global warming' with a reasonable concern for the environment, and 3) the political (not scientific) assumption of tight control over the people of the world, on the basis of fraudulent, wrong-headed 'scientific consensus'."Now there's a nay-sayer for you. But his nay-saying against the doomdists seems to be in the tradition of Immanuel Velikovsky's World's in Collision (in some respects), while (in other respects) he seems to draw on his own version of Intelligent Design (Earth, he seems to say, is designed). Do I hear also some thematics of Mormonism's scifi religious mythology? of Isaac Asimov's scifi? of Scientology's David Hubbard's scifi religious mythology? Let's stick to science/s, yet not get stuck. Theories and speculations, becawz facts don't interpret themselves. They, all of them, require presupposed points of view that ask the questions which, according to the l+ts of each, bring facts into view always in one or another certain way. Thank God, Jews and we Christians have our respective Bibles and canons and traditions of interpretation to give us a rudder in this mad age of simultaneous uncertainties, bringing upon us hyper-rationalism and hyper-irrationalism at one and the same t+m.
— Owlb, refWrite Frontpage enviro columnist
Scientific American (May23,2k12)
Some paragraphs by Madhusree Mukerjee:
Remember how Wile E. Coyote, in his obsessive pursuit of the Road Runner, would fall off a cliff? The hapless predator ran straight out off the edge, stopped in midair as only an animated character could, looked beneath him in an eye-popping moment of truth, and plummeted straight down into a puff of dust. Splat! Four decades ago, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer model called World3 warned of such a possible course for human civilization in the 21st century. In Limits to Growth, a bitterly disputed 1972 book that explicated these findings, researchers argued that the global industrial system has so much inertia that it cannot readily correct course in response to signals of planetary stress. But unless economic growth skidded to a halt before reaching the edge, they warned, society was headed for overshoot—and a splat that could kill billions.
Don't look now but we are running in midair, a new book asserts. In 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years(Chelsea Green Publishing), Jorgen Randers of the BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo, and one of the original World3 modelers, argues that the second half of the 21st century will bring us near apocalypse in the form of severe global warming. Dennis Meadows, professor emeritus of systems policy at the University of New Hampshire who headed the original M.I.T. team and revisited World3 in 1994 and 2004, has an even darker view. The 1970s program had yielded a variety of scenarios, in some of which humanity manages to control production and population to live within planetary limits (described as Limits to Growth). Meadows contends that the model's sustainable pathways are no longer within reach because humanity has failed to act accordingly.
Instead, the latest global data are tracking one of the most alarming scenarios, in which these variables increase steadily to reach a peak and then suddenly drop in a process called collapse. In fact, "I see collapse happening already," he says. "Food per capita is going down, energy is becoming more scarce, groundwater is being depleted." Most worrisome, Randers notes, greenhouse gases are being emitted twice as fast as oceans and forests can absorb them. Whereas in 1972 humans were using 85 percent of the regenerative capacity of the biosphere to support economic activities such as growing food, producing goods and assimilating pollutants, the figure is now at 150 percent—and growing.
Friday, May 25, 2012
PoliticsHungary: Constitution (Basic Law): Is the country a dictatorship?
This important article by Andrew Arato is both informative factually and offers considerable wisdom. It's the best analytic piece on Hungarian political-legal developments of which I have knowledge. Yet, I remain a wee suspicious and feel that a hermeneutics of suspicion needs to be brawt to bear on the subject matter upon which Arato here discourses. My reason for suggesting more attention needs to be focussed on his contribution is that in some earlier materials on the topic at hand, I thawt I cawt wind of a better attention to sphere-sovereignty (Protestant) or subsidiarity (Roman Catholic), for instance regarding the family, in the new Basic Law (Constitution) of Hungary. I don't mean that the law is couched in either of the Christian political philosophies just mentioned, as undoubtedly humanists of both atheist and agnostic varieties are also embraced as much as possible. But the example of the status of the family is one best explained in terms of a creation order than by either humanist ideologies of communism, socialism, or individualism (Arato refers to the latter by way of the usages in North American or British political terminology today).
Our special interest in and concern for Hungary is related to the fact that it is the home of one of the largest Reformed and reformational faith-communities in the world, principally thru the Reformed Church of Hungary with its membership of some 2.4 million souls (about 1,500 churches). The Hungarian Reformed Church — like its smaller Hungarian-speaking sister churches in Romania (750,000 members, 800 churches), Ukraine, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia — suffered and experienced all the contradictions of enticement and suppression under the Communist régimes of those countries. The Reformed Church of Hungary considers itself both a folk church and a confessional church; in its recovery from the Communist era, it is being renewed by the Holy Spirit and restored to its most immediate mission, the 20% of the nation's population who are of Reformed background, some of them coming in from the cold of the former official state doctrine of Communist atheism.
— Politicarp and Lawt
Comparative Constitutions email newsletter (May17)
Books and Ideas.net (May11,2k12)
— Reposted here with comment, by Politicarp,
refWrite Frontpage politics columnist
Dr Arato's text:
It may seem like a scholastic question: is the current Hungarian regime a dictatorship (or an autocracy) in light of the changes made by the Constitution of 2012, the so-called Basic Law? Does answering this question make a difference for those seeking to reverse or replace the regime? My answers are no to the first, and yes to the second.
The Rise of FIDESZ
First a little history. FIDESZ, the right-wing, leadership-oriented, in part anti-European, current governing party led by Viktor Orban,
has received over two thirds of the parliamentary seats with 52.7% of the vote in the elections of 2010. Since 1990, no party has received as high a percentage in the first electoral round, but the gap between votes and seats was still a function of the mixed electoral system’s disproportionality that, in each election so far (except one), has rewarded a much larger number of seats to the winning party than their portion of the vote. Most obviously the electoral result happened because the previous governing party, the Hungarian Socialist Party (or MSZP, the successor of the earlier monopolistic state party) and its former leader Ferenc Gyurcsany were totally discredited during the previous cycle. The outcome is connected with several, deeper factors, but especially, in my view, with the failure of the new parties which came out of the regime change of 1989-1990 to stabilize: most notably, the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) that won the first free elections, and Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) which was the inheritor of the great democratic opposition of the 1980s— FIDESZ (Alliance of Young Democrats) being here the exception.
Read more ....
Our special interest in and concern for Hungary is related to the fact that it is the home of one of the largest Reformed and reformational faith-communities in the world, principally thru the Reformed Church of Hungary with its membership of some 2.4 million souls (about 1,500 churches). The Hungarian Reformed Church — like its smaller Hungarian-speaking sister churches in Romania (750,000 members, 800 churches), Ukraine, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia — suffered and experienced all the contradictions of enticement and suppression under the Communist régimes of those countries. The Reformed Church of Hungary considers itself both a folk church and a confessional church; in its recovery from the Communist era, it is being renewed by the Holy Spirit and restored to its most immediate mission, the 20% of the nation's population who are of Reformed background, some of them coming in from the cold of the former official state doctrine of Communist atheism.
— Politicarp and Lawt
Comparative Constitutions email newsletter (May17)
Books and Ideas.net (May11,2k12)
— Reposted here with comment, by Politicarp,
refWrite Frontpage politics columnist
Dr Arato's text:
It may seem like a scholastic question: is the current Hungarian regime a dictatorship (or an autocracy) in light of the changes made by the Constitution of 2012, the so-called Basic Law? Does answering this question make a difference for those seeking to reverse or replace the regime? My answers are no to the first, and yes to the second.
The Rise of FIDESZ
First a little history. FIDESZ, the right-wing, leadership-oriented, in part anti-European, current governing party led by Viktor Orban,
has received over two thirds of the parliamentary seats with 52.7% of the vote in the elections of 2010. Since 1990, no party has received as high a percentage in the first electoral round, but the gap between votes and seats was still a function of the mixed electoral system’s disproportionality that, in each election so far (except one), has rewarded a much larger number of seats to the winning party than their portion of the vote. Most obviously the electoral result happened because the previous governing party, the Hungarian Socialist Party (or MSZP, the successor of the earlier monopolistic state party) and its former leader Ferenc Gyurcsany were totally discredited during the previous cycle. The outcome is connected with several, deeper factors, but especially, in my view, with the failure of the new parties which came out of the regime change of 1989-1990 to stabilize: most notably, the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) that won the first free elections, and Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) which was the inheritor of the great democratic opposition of the 1980s— FIDESZ (Alliance of Young Democrats) being here the exception.
Read more ....
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
ViolenceMexico: Veracruz, Monterrey: Zetas gang drives people out of civic life
I had been hoping to encourage scholars and others from three countries — Mexico, USA, and Canada — to assemble for a multidisciplinary reformational conference — for the purpose of evaluating the North American Free Trade Treaty to which our nations are signatory. It woud be a first-ever convocation for reformational economists, business people interested in discussing their own interests and the prospects for helping this Hispanic country, and Christian laboir leaders — exploring together a structurally-important relationship that woud h+l+t civic connections between the poorest of the three and our co-witness as reformational Christians in North America.
Sadly, the project seems to have become nearly impossible in the present situation of drug-gang violence.
— Lawt
Christian Science Monitor (May13,2k12)
Sadly, the project seems to have become nearly impossible in the present situation of drug-gang violence.
— Lawt
Christian Science Monitor (May13,2k12)
Forty-nine bodies have been dumped on a highway in northern Mexico – and by the time the world wakes up Monday morning, the harrowing image will have been beamed across the globe.
Mexico's drug violence has been a public relations nightmare for President Felipe Calderon. The crime scenes inevitably make world news, scaring off would-be tourists and causing foreign investors to think twice.
But imagine being a resident of one of the cities where violence is playing out, with the misfortune to witness the mayhem not on a television set but firsthand.
That is what happened to Carolina Gomez, a young teacher who happened to drive past a similar scenario in her home of Veracruz, in eastern Mexico, when 35 bodies were left under a highway overpass in the middle of rush hour traffic last September. She had been on her way to a tutoring job after school.
The Monitor profiled her family in a cover story about the ways that violence is impacting Mexicans not directly swept up in it.
The dumping of the bodies was a tipping point for the city of Veracruz, but also in the personal story of Ms. Gomez. As a teacher, she had heard cases of parents kidnapped, and even seen a corpse left outside of her school. She had to take security training on what to do in the case of a shootout. And she never left home – including on this day – without checking Twitter first to map out safe routes.
But this scene caught her off guard. And it forever changed the way she viewed her city. It was the afternoon. It was on a heavily trafficked thoroughfare. It was next to an upscale mall and movie theater. “It made me feel like no place was safe,” she told the Monitor.
In this most recent case, the victims, who were first mutilated and included six women, were found near Monterrey, on a highway that heads to the US border. The identity of the victims is not yet known. The scenario fits the patterns of drug trafficking rivals, though the Nuevo Leon state Attorney General Adrian de la Garza told the Associated Press the victims could also be migrants who were en route to the US. The deadly Zetas gang, also behind the surge of violence in Veracruz, purportedly took credit for the act in a banner left at the scene.
As was the case in Veracruz, where hundreds of commuters passed by the scene, surely public officials and first-responders were not the only ones to bear witness.
Both incidents – while among the worst in President Calderon's six-year war on drugs – is sadly not isolated. In this month alone, 23 bodies have been either strewn or hanging off bridges and underpasses in the border city of Nuevo Laredo. Across the country, in Guadalajara, 18 more were also found on a highway. Police officers have been killed and piled up on public roads in Michoacan. The list could take up this entire space.
The Mexican government takes great pains to explain to the world that violence is, in most ways, contained. They say the far majority of victims are rival drug traffickers, not innocent victims. And the violence tends to play out in hot spots, not in the humdrum communities of Mexico, and especially, they say, not in places that tourists would want to go, such as Cancun.
But events like that in Monterrey make it hard for Mexico to erase its image, no matter how many statistics are thrown out there. And the numbers mean next to nothing to those who are living in the violent context. In a national survey headed by Mexican researchers last year, 61 percent of Mexicans said they stopped going out at night; 30 percent say they no longer drive the state or national highways because of fear of drug trafficking violence; 22 percent said they stopped going to public events like concerts or sport events.
If there is an upside to living where the streets no longer feel safe, it is a sense of community that has formed where there was once none. Gomez said she walked into her student's home pale-faced last September, and was handed a glass of water. She quietly told the child's mother what had just happened – away from young ears– and the mother, whom she barely knew, offered her a ride home so that she wouldn't have to drive alone. It was a small act of kindness but one that she remembers months later. “Strangers have turned to one another for help because of all of this,” she said.
Related stories
Monday, May 14, 2012
EnviroUSA: Shale Oil Deposits: Vast resource on Fed land revealed in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming
GAO: Recoverable Oil in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming 'About Equal to Entire World’s Proven Oil Reserves'
Rock Springs, Wyo. (BLM Photo)
(CNSNews.com) - The Green River Formation, a largely vacant area of mostly federal land that covers the territory where Colorado, Utah and Wyoming come together, contains about as much recoverable oil as all the rest the world’s proven reserves combined, an auditor from the Government Accountability Office told Congress on Thursday.
The GAO testimony said that the federal government was in “a unique position to influence the development of oil shale” because the Green River deposits were mostly beneath federal land.
It also noted that developing the oil would have an environmental impact and pose “socioeconomic challenges,” that included bringing “a sizable influx of workers who along with their families put additional stress on local infrastructure” and “making planning for growth difficult for local governments.”
“The Green River Formation--an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming--contains the world's largest deposits of oil shale,”Anu K. Mittal, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment said in written testimony submitted to the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment.
“USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions,” Mittal testified.
“The Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that 30 to 60 percent of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered,” Mittal told the subcommittee. “At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world's proven oil reserves.”
In her oral statement before the subcommittee, Mittal said that developing the shale oil would create wealth and jobs for the country, but also challenges for government.
“Being able to tap this vast amount of oil locked within this formation will go a long way to help to meet our future demands for oil. The U.S. Geological Survey, as you noted, estimates that the formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil of which half may be recoverable,” she said.
“As you can imagine having the technology to develop this vast energy resource will lead to a number of important socioeconomic benefits including the creation of jobs, increases in wealth and increases in tax and royalty payments for federal and state governments,” she said.
“While large-scale oil-shale development offers socioeconomic opportunities it also poses certain socioeconomic challenges that also should not be overlooked,” she testified. “Oil shale development like other extractive industries can bring a sizable influx of workers who along with their families put additional stressed on local infrastructure. Development from expansion of extractive industries has historically followed a boom-and-bust cycle making planning for growth difficult for local governments.”
In her written testimony, Mittal noted that three-fourths of the Green River shale oil is under federal land.
“The federal government is in a unique position to influence the development of oil shale because nearly three-quarters of the oil shale within the Green River Formation lies beneath federal lands managed by the Department of the Interior’s (Interior) Bureau of Land Management (BLM),” she testified.
The GAO also cited potential environmental impacts from producing oil from the Green River shale that included the need to draw large amounts of water, possible harm to water quality, and temporary degradation of air quality and the clearing of large amounts of vegetation.
"Developing oil shale and providing power for oil shale operations and other activities will require large amounts of water and could have significant impacts on the quality and quantity of surface and groundwater resources," Mittal said in her written testimony. "In addition, construction and mining activities during development can temporarily degrade air quality in local areas. There can also be long-term regional increases in air pollutants from oil shale processing and the generation of additional electricity to power oil shale development operations. Oil shale operations will also require the clearing of large surface areas of topsoil and vegetation which can affect wildlife habitat, and the withdrawal of large quantities of surface water which could also negatively impact aquatic life."
- Like
- Dislike
- and 105 others liked this.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)