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Daily Kos: Into the Future with Renewables: Q&A LiveBlog with German Green Party Energy Expert

This Q&A was organized to give members of DK an opportunity to ask questions and learn more about what Germany's energy policy really is about live and from a reliable source. There is a lot of misleading information being tossed around about Germany's energy policy, and criticism of that country for its alleged shortsightedness, even stupidity, in embarking on this challenging path into the future. I hope there will be a lively discussion that will spark ideas of how the United States may adopt some of Germany's policies to develop green energy sources and create thousands of jobs that can't be exported overseas. One size doesn't fit all, of course, but Germany is blazing a new trail in this area, and hopes to be an example to many of how we can put the brakes on climate change and leave the earth a better place for future generations.

Daily Kos: "Winter Deep Freeze Will Cause Breakdown of German Electric Grid"

Well, at least that is what pro-nuke advocates predicted when Germany shut down its eight oldest nuclear power plants last year and decided to drive towards a renewable energy future. The recent deep freeze in Europe has, however, proven that to be thoroughly untrue. Recently, it is, in fact, nuclear-dominated France that is having problems covering its electricity needs because of the severe cold snap.

"Scientists need to set a much higher bar for proposing policy measures."

Ganzouri said...that his government will not be swayed by US threats to cut off aid to the country.

Yet the amounts it has committed through a myriad of bailout programs are staggering.

We need to get away from the primary system because it is what is driving the divisive political positioning. Right at the moment I favor a series of ranking elections--each one basically a non-partisan open primary using a ranking system. That way you can gradually move towards a single candidate...

For decades , Asia has performed the role of diligent worker bee. Without a history of Adam Smith and free trade they saw how easy it was to game the free trade system. To this day, Koreans do not buy Japanese goods and Japanese do not buy Korean goods. Neither one will buy U.S. goods. The stuff they do want , like Hollywood movies, they just take. The U.S. took the brunt of the free trade economic carnage as over 50,000 factories have closed down in only the last ten years. No one can labor arbitrage and transfer price their taxes away like corporate America. We are still #1  in that game.

As the Fed printed money, giant speculative asset pricing bubbles occurred. The U.S. got lazy on their housing bubble and focused on the military industrial complex. Once mighty titans GE and GM became housing lenders with "old world" businesses attached to provide cash-flow for the financing sides of the business. Everyone drank the kool-aid.

Now drink this kool-aid, even printing money is no longer an option for the U.S. government. China will print to keep the RMB peg...and combined with the $3.2 trillion in FX reserves they could buy most of the S&P 500 companies. Japan is also printing money like there is no tomorrow. Facing economic carnage in their own country, they are bound to start acquiring Western firms to compete with China. The U.S. now faces defaulting on their debt quickly or becoming a sharecropper to Asia.

h/t max keiser

I lived in a precinct with a big university population, in Saint Paul MN, and was precinct chair for three election cycles, of course in the other party. Two of the three cycles we had maybe 25 people show up, but in 2004, with a presidential nomination up for grabs, it was ten times that, with lots of students showing up. Kerry took the state quite handily that year, but in my precinct, he was third, with Kucinich first, just beating Edwards, who if memory serves actually had dropped out of the race just hours before commencement of the caucuses that night. Kerry a distant third.

Students can really bias the caucus numbers, especially in a mostly rural country like Benton with a marginal concentration of students at its western extremity.  

Merkel and her government have struggled fiercely to create a fiscally united Europe of balanced budgets and "structural reforms"--a euphemism for lowering the cost of labor, including wages and benefits. It's her prescription for pulling the Eurozone out of the debt crisis. At the moment, her eyes are on the nightmare in Greece where even politicians are preparing for the "afterwards." Read.... Now Even Greek Politicians Are Taking Cover.

Sarkozy has been her most powerful ally during the debt crisis. Without him, she couldn't have pushed through her policies, which have been a resounding success, in Germany: in a recent poll, 64% of Germans have a favorable opinion of her, and 90% were satisfied with her crisis management.

...

With her intervention in the French election, Merkel has created the impression that preventing Hollande from becoming president has morphed into a government policy, and it doesn't necessarily enhance Germany's image abroad. Already, its reluctance to pay ever more to bail out the Eurozone has made it a global punching bag. Yet the amounts it has committed through a myriad of bailout programs are staggering.

If there is no income replacement system, then people have to work at regular full time jobs until they keel over. The idea that "we don't do manual labor any more so we can do it until age 75" or "people live longer now so they can work longer" are disconnected from reality. Increasing life expectancy by reducing the neonatal death rate, which is what is happening, has little to do with people working longer.

After seeing people in Athens burning the german flag I must stress that it is not Germany or a germanic model failing, but the austerian, blind monetarist model that is failing. Perhaps a theme for a another diary, austerianism starts to feel as the greatest enemy of Federalism.

One of the largest companies that provided home foreclosure services to lenders across the nation, DocX, has been indicted on forgery charges by a Missouri grand jury -- one of the few criminal actions to follow reports of widespread improprieties against homeowners.

A grand jury in Boone County, Mo., handed up an indictment Friday accusing DocX of 136 counts of forgery in the preparation of documents used to evict financially strained borrowers from their homes. Lorraine O. Brown, the company's founder and former president, was indicted on the same charges.

Employees of DocX, a unit of Lender Processing Services of Jacksonville, Fla., executed and notarized millions of mortgage documents for big banks and loan servicers over the years. Lender Processing closed the company in April 2010, after evidence emerged of apparent forgeries in these documents, a practice now called robo-signing.

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Mr. Koster said his office's investigation was continuing. This suggests he may hope to persuade Ms. Brown to cooperate in his investigation of the parent company. If convicted, Ms. Brown could face up to seven years in prison for each forgery count. DocX could be fined up to $10,000 for each forgery conviction.

....

According to the indictment, Ms. Brown acted "knowingly in concert with DocX and its employees" to mislead and defraud the Boone County recorder of deeds. The documents central to the indictments were deeds of release, which eliminate a previous claim on an asset. Such releases are typically issued when a mortgage has been paid off.

I will leave it to Chris Cook, our resident expert on the difference between 'systemic' and 'systematic' fraud to suggest which, if either of these words would be most appropriately combined with the word 'fraud' in this case. But I am SO glad to see a state AG bringing criminal charges in this matter. Lorraine Brown, potentially facing over a millennium in jail time, if convicted on all charges and sentenced for them to run consecutively, should hope that Koster offers her witness protection services if she has had any direct dealings with Wall Street firms, especially if she can document such possible dealings.

It may be such suits as these that derail the bruited multi-state AG settlement led by Tom Miller of Iowa. Leaks have suggested that the proposal is to fine the banks involved $25 billion in return for relief from liability in mortgages that total close to $13 trillion in face value. Even if only a third of the mortgages in that $13 trillion are involved in some kind of robo-signing and even if the average loss involved only 30% of the face value that is still $1.3 trillion.

But what the hell! What is another $1.3 trillion to Bernanke and Geithner. Just create the money already and give it to those affected. THAT would actually help the economy, unlike the ongoing QE, which only seems to help the banks.

Dec. 29 when the authorities raided 17 NGO offices.

The list includes those used by the Washington-based National Democratic Institute (NDI), International Republican Institute (IRI), Freedom House, and the International Center for Journalists, as well as Germany's Konrad-Adenauer Stiftung.

Several Egyptian NGOs, including the Arab Centre for the Independence of the Judiciary and Legal Profession and the Budgetary and Human Rights Rights Observatory, were also raided.

getting out and about, mixing with others, having contact with young children in some way would probably prolong people's lives.

one just cannot depend on the free market to take people's frailties into account, because it exploits them, it doesn't work around them.