1. Is The Administration Going to Use GM to Distract from Solyndra?

2. #OccupyWallSt: Just A Saturday Stroll Through The Park…

3. Hubbert’s Peak or Yergin’s Plateau?

1. Is The Administration Going to Use GM to Distract from Solyndra?

Many people call it Government Motors these days. General Motors has been a government slush fund to reward unions and other Democratic loyalists since the Obama Administration arrived in Washington. Now there are signs the Obama campaign and DNC intend to use GM to distract from Solyndra.If you’ll remember back in 2010, General Motors rushed out an ad campaign that claimed it had paid back all of its government loans before the November 2010 election. But a freedom of information act request filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute found that (A) General Motors had not actually paid back its loans and (B) had coordinated the ad campaign with the Obama Administration.According to CEI at the time, “Documents released last week by the U.S. Treasury Department indicate that General Motors and the Obama administration coordinated their PR strategy regarding GM’s much criticized 2010 ad campaign, in which the car maker misleadingly claimed to have repaid all its government loans.”The advertisement campaign GM ran with included the “Chevy Runs Deep” series of commercials portraying a feel good attitude toward GM and its essential “American-ness”. Just in time for the 2012 election season, GM wants to rev back up that ad campaign as it did before the November 2010 elections.You will not be surprised to learn that there is a series of coordinated efforts between the Obama Administration and General Motors.Please click here for the rest of the post.

2. #OccupyWallSt: Just A Saturday Stroll Through The Park…

“On the 17th of September, we want to see 20,000 people to flood into lower Manhattan, set up beds, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.”Instead, as they say about the best laid plans, it was something entirely different. It was, frankly, a stroll through a park—Zuccotti Park, in lower Manhattan, to be exact.A Non-Union Non-EventOver the summer, on the heels of Arab Spring, an anti-capitalist group called adbusters established a campaign to occupy Wall Street, beginning on September 17th. Whether coincidental or not, September 17th also happened to be Constitution Day. While there had been some unfounded unfounded speculation a few weeks ago that the SEIU’s Stephen Lerner and ACORN founder Wade Rathke were behind the OccupyWallSt movement, there were never any signs that the Marxist-Anarchist protesters had any formal union backing—nor has there been anything posted on union websites about the occupation of Wall St.On Sunday morning, the protestors did, however, call for “revolution”.Please click here for the rest of the post.

3. Hubbert’s Peak or Yergin’s Plateau?

In 1956, Shell geologist M. King Hubbert correctly predicted that oil production in the United States would reach a peak around 1970. Since his Peak Oil theory fits so well with the Malthusian worldview of “Progressives”, anti-capitalists and anarchists, Hubbert has become a posthumous hero to the Left, an unusual role for a scientist polluted by the filthy lucre of the oil industry.Peak Oil’s fundamental assumption is that the supply of oil is finite and fixed. The peak of the oil production curve is reached when half of the total resource base has been produced, so rate vs time exhibits a symmetric bell-shaped curve. Post peak, rate declines rapidly. Hubbert demonstrated a peak for oil production in Texas, and he extended his theory to correctly predict the time (but not the rate) of the peak for the U.S. World oil production is supposed to have peaked in the last five years or so.But Daniel Yergin, chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, argues in a WSJ.com Saturday Essay that Peak Oil theory has a fatal flaw, which is rooted in Hubbert’s blind spot: economics. (H/T to Mark J. Perry and his excellent Carpe Diem blog.)Please click here for the rest of the post.