Category Archives: business/econ

Inmates Will Replace Migrants in Colorado Fields

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DENVER, March 3 — As migrant laborers flee Colorado because of tough new immigration restrictions, worried farmers are looking to prisoners to fill their places in the fields.

In a pilot program run by the state Corrections Department, supervised teams of low-risk inmates beginning this month will be available to harvest the swaths of sweet corn, peppers and melons that sweep the southeastern portion of the state.

Under the program, which has drawn criticism from groups concerned about immigrants’ rights and from others seeking changes in the criminal justice system, farmers will pay a fee to the state, and the inmates, who volunteer for the work, will be paid about 60 cents a day, corrections officials said.

[NYTimes]

Iraqi Oil Law Gives Cover for Corporate Profit

The U.S.-backed Iraqi cabinet approved a new oil law Monday that is set to give foreign companies the long-term contracts and safe legal framework they have been waiting for, but which has rattled labour unions and international campaigners who say oil production should remain in the hands of Iraqis.

Independent analysts and labour groups have also criticised the process of drafting the law and warned that that the bill is so skewed in favour of foreign firms that it could end up heightening political tensions in the Arab nation and spreading instability.

For example, it specifies that up to two-thirds of Iraq’s known reserves would be developed by multinationals, under contracts lasting for 15 to 20 years.

This policy would represent a u-turn for Iraq’s oil industry, which has been in the public sector for more than three decades, and would break from normal practice in the Middle East.

According to local labour leaders, transferring ownership to the foreign companies would give a further pretext to continue the U.S. occupation on the grounds that those companies will need protection.

[Alternet]

Digital ‘Fair Use’ Bill Introduced In Congress

Today, Reps. Rich Boucher (D-Va.) and John Dolittle (R-Calif.) introduced what they call the “Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship” (or FAIR USE) Act they say will make it easier for digital media consumers to use the content they buy.

The lawmakers seek to amend the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which content-makers, such as movie studios and record labels, fought to pass to protect their wares from getting stolen and pirated.

But that law goes too far, the lawmakers say.

“The Digital Millennium Copyright Act dramatically tilted the copyright balance toward complete copyright protection at the expense of the public’s right to fair use,” Boucher said in a statement. “Without a change in the law, individuals will be less willing to purchase digital media if their use of the media within the home is severely circumscribed and the manufacturers of equipment and software that enables circumvention for legitimate purposes will be reluctant to introduce the products into the market.”

[WashingtonPost]

Apple’s Jobs to record labels: Unlock your music, DRM not working

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs on Tuesday called on the four major record companies to start selling songs online without copy protection software known as digital rights management (DRM).

Jobs said there appeared to be no benefit to the record companies to continue to sell more than 90 percent of their music without DRM on compact discs while selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system.

“If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies,” he said in a statement posted to his company’s Web site.

Apple has been under pressure in Europe to make iTunes music compatible with players other than the iPod. On Jan. 25 Norway’s consumer ombudsman said Apple must open access to iTunes by Oct. 1 or face legal action.

“Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies toward persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free,” said Jobs about the European action.

[CNN Money]

Click to read the full text of Job’s statement, “Thoughts on Music

Cheney’s Fund Manager Attacks … Cheney

The oil-based energy policies usually associated with Vice President Dick Cheney have just come under scathing attack. There’s nothing remarkable about that, of course — except the person doing the attacking.

Step forward, Jeremy Grantham — Cheney’s own investment manager. “What were we thinking?’ Grantham demands in a four-page assault on U.S. energy policy mailed last week to all his clients, including the vice president.

Titled “While America Slept, 1982-2006: A Rant on Oil Dependency, Global Warming, and a Love of Feel-Good Data,” Grantham’s philippic adds up to an extraordinary critique of U.S. energy policy over the past two decades.

“Successive U.S. administrations have taken little interest in either oil substitution or climate change,” he writes, “and the current one has even seemed to have a vested interest in the idea that the science of climate change is uncertain.”

Yet “there is now nearly universal scientific agreement that fossil fuel use is causing a rise in global temperatures,” he writes. “The U.S. is the only country in which environmental data is steadily attacked in a well-funded campaign of disinformation (funded mainly by one large oil company).”

As for Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen, who appears everywhere to question global warming, Grantham mocks him as “the solitary plausible academic [the skeptics] can dig up, out of hundreds working in the field.”
[TheStreet.com]

US comptroller says taxes would have to double to pay for Bush budget in 2040

“The picture I will lay out for you today is not a pretty one and it’s getting worse with the passage of time,” said David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, in a Thursday morning hearing of the Senate’s Budget Committee. “Continuing on our current fiscal path would gradually erode, if not suddenly damage, our economy, our standard of living, and ultimately even our domestic tranquility and our national security,” he warned.

The head of the GAO also warned that if no action is taken now to control government spending, severe tax hikes could be necessary. He stated that, “balancing the budget in 2040 could require actions as large as cutting total federal spending by 60 percent or raising federal taxes to 2 times today’s level.”

Article via RawStory

House Passes Increase in Minimum Wage to $7.25

The House yesterday overwhelmingly approved the first increase in the federal minimum wage in nearly a decade, boosting the wages of the lowest-paid American workers from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour over the next two years.

The 315 to 116 vote could begin the process of ending Congress’s longest stretch without a minimum-wage increase since the mandatory minimum was created in 1938. In the past decade, inflation has depleted the value of the minimum wage to the lowest level in more than 50 years.

Eighty-two Republicans joined 233 Democrats to approve the increase. More surprisingly, 54 Republicans abandoned their leadership and voted with the Democrats on a procedural motion that would have forced House leaders to add business tax breaks to the bill.

via Washington Post

EU plans ‘post-industrial revolution’ – binding energy targets

The European Commission has urged its members to sign up to an unprecedented common energy policy, unveiling a plan to diversify the bloc’s energy sources.

Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said it was time for a “post-industrial revolution” which would see Europe slash greenhouse gases by 20% by 2020.

EU vulnerability as an oil importer was thrown into sharp relief this week when Russia’s row with Belarus hit supplies.

There are three central pillars to the proposed integrated EU energy policy.

  • A true internal energy market
  • Accelerating the shift to low-carbon energy
  • Energy efficiency through the 20% target by 2020

In addition to the 20% of all EU energy that should come from renewable power by 2020, 10% of vehicle fuel should come from biofuels, said EU energy chief Andris Piebalgs.

The EU wants to make these targets to be binding for the first time, he said.

via BBC News

The spoils of war: How the West will make a killing on Iraqi oil riches

The Cover story from Sunday’s Independent (UK):

Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. “So where is the oil going to come from?… The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies,” he said

Read the rest of the article

Report blasts ExxonMobil for misleading public on climate change, funding psuedo-science

The Union of Concerned Scientists released a report today arguing that oil giant ExxonMobil has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.

“ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer,” said Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Director of Strategy & Policy. “A modest but effective investment has allowed the oil giant to fuel doubt about global warming to delay government action just as Big Tobacco did for over 40 years.”

The report said that a task force that Exxon Mobil helped create on global climate science in 1998 included someone who had led a nonprofit organization called the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, “which had been covertly created by the tobacco company Philip Morris in 1993 to manufacture uncertainty about the health hazards posed by secondhand smoke.”

This report comes on the heels of an unprecedented step by the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, which in September 2006 wrote the oil giant to demand that the company withdraw its support for dozens of groups that have “misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence”. The scientists also strongly criticised the company’s public statements on global warming, which they described as “inaccurate and misleading.” (see article)

Exxon Mobil raked in $10.5 billion in net earnings in the third quarter of 2006– a near record in American corporate profits that was second only to the $10.7 billion it recorded for the fourth quarter of 2005.

See the Union of Concerned Scientists Press Release
Read the whole report:
Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil uses Big Tobacco Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science” (pdf)

With the dollar in trouble, the euro is poised to become the world’s favorite currency

Coming on the heels of announcements by Venezuela and Iran that they may ask buyers to pay for oil in euros rather than US dollars comes news that the value of euro notes in circulation is set exceed the value of circulating dollar notes, according to calculations by the Financial Times.

Yesterday, the United Arab Emirates anounced that it was switching 8% of the nation’s foreign exchange reserves from US dollars to Euros. According to the Bank for Internaional Settlements, the share of foreign-exchange deposits held in dollars by OPEC fell to a two-year low of 65% during the second quarter of 2006.

Perhaps more troubling is the announcement by China in November that it would look to diversify its foreign-exchange reserves, the largest in the word at $1trillion (US), away from the US dollar. China holds a large portion of US debt.

In August, Italy announced it was selling off a large portion of its dollar reserves and instead buying British pounds. Recently, the US dollar hit a 14-year low against the pound sterling. Indonesia is also moving towards the euro and away from the dollar.

maybe it’s time to buy some gold bars…

Euro notes cash in to overtake dollar‘ via Financial Times

Report: Iran oil profits could dry up by 2015

WASHINGTON (AP) — Iran is suffering a staggering decline in revenue from its oil exports, and if the trend continues income could disappear by 2015, a National Academy of Sciences analysis found.

Stern’s analysis, which appears in this week’s edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, supports U.S. and European suspicions that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons in violation of international understandings.  But, Stern says, there could be merit to Iran’s assertion that it needs nuclear power for civilian purposes “as badly as it claims.”

He said oil production is declining and both gas and oil are being sold domestically at highly subsidized rates.

At the same time, Iran is neglecting to reinvest in its oil production.

peak oil?

Story via CNN.com

Russia Pressuring Neighbors with Gas prices

Russia is continuing to exert pressure over its neighbors with natural gas prices as it tries to bolster its influence and power in the region. After halting all gas supplies to the Ukraine last year, Russia has been accussed by many in the international community as using energy as a political weapon. Russia insists the new prices simply reflect market rates, and that the former Soviet republics cannot continue to expect subsidized prices.

Gazprom, Russia’s state natural gas monopoly, threatened neighboring Belarus on Monday over its refusal to agree to tough conditions on a price increase, saying its supplies could be at risk on Jan. 1. In exchange for a smaller price increase, Gazprom has proposed taking a major stake in Beltransgaz, the Belarusan transport network whose pipelines handle a significant part of Russia’s exports of gas to the rest of Europe.

On Friday, an hour after Gazprom thereatened to cut off supplies entirely, Georgia agreed to pay $235 per 1,000 cubic meters, almost double the current price. Georgia has until then refused to accept the demands, saying it was being punished for political reasons, and had announced that Azerbaijan would be its main gas supplier for 2007. Russia and Georgia have been in a diplomatic row since Georgia arrested four Russians for espionage in September, to which Russia responded with a blockade on the country, among other measures.

Now, Georgia is in the final stages of negotiations with Azerbaijan for a substantial amount of natural gas as it seeks to hedge against Russia by diversifying its energy suppliers. Azerbaijan, which is rich in oil but still imports gas from Russia, has also threatened to stop importing Russian gas as it accused Moscow of ‘Commerical Blackmail.’
via Washington Post, BBC News, Bloomberg