Maligned Fossil Fuels, Engine of Economy

According to the Congressional Research Service, overall energy consumption has tripled in the U.S. since 1950, per capita consumption increased 50 percent, and electricity consumption increased even more rapidly. The heaviest energy user, the industrial sector, grew the slowest. From 1973 to 2010, “the consumption of electricity remained close to 0.4 kwh per constant dollar of GDP.” Annual power generation now is ten times larger than in 1950.

“Renewable sources (except hydropower) continue to offer more potential than actual energy production, although fuel ethanol has become a significant factor in transportation fuel. Wind power has also grown rapidly, although it still contributes only a small share of total electricity generation.” (Carl E. Behrens and Carol Glover)

The reality is simple: renewable energy is not sufficient to power the largest economy any time soon. I am yet to drive a wind or solar powered car. Electric cars, if they do not “brick” themselves (the engine dies and must be factory rebuilt for $40,000), do not go very far between charges. Hybrids do not get the mileage per gallon claimed and their batteries are toxic to the environment.

The pie-in-the-sky wind energy can be expensive. Windmills are noisy, people nearby complain of headaches and insomnia from the constant hum, propellers kill thousands of birds, particularly endangered species, and nobody wants wind farms in their own back yards.

The maligned fossil fuels are the engine of our economy. Gasoline provides transportation and electricity generation. Natural gas provides home heating, industry and electricity generation. Cars, vans, trucks, and buses can be retrofitted to run on natural gas. Coal generates electricity exclusively and so do nuclear and hydroelectric power plants.

Since 1950, crude oil provides 40 percent of U.S. energy. In spite of political fear mongering, we are not running out of oil as we were told since the 70s. We have discovered new reserves in deep-sea waters, Mexico, oil sands in Canada, and heavy oil in Venezuela.

Different sectors of the economy consume different types of fossil fuels. Many products that hypocritical liberals use abundantly are made from petroleum, yet they support green energy.

Diesel fuel is used in many transportation sectors. Railroads utilize diesel and diesel-electric power. Marine transportation, large commercial trucks, and some cars use diesel. Most of the food brought to the American table is ferried by eighteen-wheelers. Aviation uses 99 percent jet fuel. Some airlines are advertising the use of bio-fuels. (U.S. Energy: Overview and Key Statistics)

The Keystone pipeline was nixed by this administration, bent on increasing the price of oil, making energy skyrocket, and bankrupting the coal industry. The Arab Winter turmoil interfered with Libya’s oil production. We freed Iraq but it is selling oil to China. President Obama is cutting back on domestic oil production with every opportunity by imposing a moratorium on domestic drilling in the Gulf and using EPA’s regulations to prevent new oil leases on federal lands and sometimes on private lands.

According to Joe Miller, “Obama’s State Department is giving away seven strategic, resource-laden Alaskan islands to the Russians. The seven endangered islands in the Arctic Ocean and Bearing Sea include one large island the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined.” The Russians are going to get Wrangel, Bennett, Jeannette, Henrietta, Copper Island, Sea Lion Rock, and Sea Otter Rock and “tens of thousands of square miles of oil-rich sea beds surrounding the islands.” Estimates by The Department of Interior include billions of barrels of oil.” (World Net Daily)

The Joint Ocean Commission Initiative recommended that the United States give its oceans to the regulatory power of the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) which would control oceans, connected waterways, and any oceanic economic activity including passage, fishing, mining, and exploration of fossil fuels.

“Obama’s plan is still in draft form. It calls for an executive order to be issued for a National Ocean Policy that will determine how the ecosystem is managed while giving the federal government more regulatory authority over any businesses that utilize the ocean.” The executive order will draw on Obama’s 2010 Interagency Ocean Policy Taskforce and Executive Order 13547 of July 2010, “Stewardship of the Ocean, Our Coasts, and the Great Lakes.” (Aaron Klein, World Net Daily)

Sierra Club is blocking the natural gas liquefaction facility of Virginia-based Dominion Resources Inc. at Cove Point, Maryland because it would “change the footprint” of this “natural heritage area.” Dominion wants to export by 2017 750 million cubic feet of gas per day from the Marcellus Shale to Asia. (Ben Wolfgang, The Washington Times)

Sierra Club argues that Dominion’s hydraulic fracturing (fracking) would pollute the Chesapeake Bay and cause irreversible environmental damage to many adjacent areas. The air and drinking water would be poisoned by the process of injecting water, sand, and harmful chemicals to crack deep underground rocks that would release the natural gas.

“Supporting Safe and Responsible Development of Unconventional Domestic Natural Gas Resources,” President Obama’s Executive Order passed on April 13, 2012, aims to control the natural gas market that delivered 25 percent of our energy in 2011. Environmentalists cannot let cheap natural gas interfere with their stated plans to de-develop the United States as punishment for 235 years of ecological imperialism and social injustice.

Many solar energy storage companies, alternative energy companies, and solar panel manufacturing companies that were backed by the Obama administration and heavily subsidized by the Department of Energy have sought bankruptcy protection. Several government subsidized German manufacturers of solar panels have also gone bankrupt.

According to Christopher Bedford, China stopped expansion of its wind and solar energy production, concentrating on nuclear, hydroelectric, and fracking. China has 14 nuclear power plants and 25 under construction. U.S. has 104 nuclear power plants, built prior to 1974, with two new ones scheduled to operate in Georgia in 2016-2017. Unlike China, who is the largest producer of hydroelectric power in the world, we do not build hydroelectric power sources, we blow up dams in order to comply with the EPA Endangered Species Act.

Daniel Kish explained that China is making cheaper solar panels and windmills in order to sell them to western countries that impose renewable energy and clean energy standards on their citizens.

“It is getting tougher and tougher for the Obama administration to argue that somehow we’re in this big race for green power worldwide when the rest of the world seems to have decided that the race isn’t worth winning.” (Daniel Kish, Institute for Energy Research, Daily Caller)

In the meantime, we are experiencing unnecessary high prices at the pump when we could be energy independent, if our administration cared more for the U.S. economy and its citizens and less for the United Nations dictates, treaties, and laws.

It is true, there are other variables that affect the price of oil, such as exchange rates (oil is priced in dollars, a very weak currency right now), OPEC policies, a changing commodities market, inelastic demand for oil products (consumers must buy gasoline whether they like the price or not), and federal taxes on gasoline (18.4 cents per gallon).

The main impediment to our energy independence is the federal government’s policies of green energy, wind, solar, renewables, and out-of-control regulatory agencies such as the EPA and federal bureaucracies like the Department of Energy.

The EPA will use any tactics, including “crucifixion of Big Oil,” to enforce draconian rules and to bring coal, oil and gas companies into submission, in order to fulfill Obama’s “dream of a green planet” devoid of polluting humans. Americans will pay dearly for his dreams.

Are Speculators to Blame?

The Obama administration masterfully manipulates the politics of fear and obvious misinformation through speeches and a compliant media to rally its voting base and to justify its destructive policies that have brought this economy and our country to its knees.

Are Republicans the reason why students cannot get affordable student loans? Is the federal government not in charge of the student loan program? Why is college tuition so high, textbooks and tiny dorm rooms so expensive? Why do college graduates have 25 percent unemployment under President Obama’s administration? What good is the ability to get a low interest college loan if you cannot find a job when you complete your degree?

Are oil speculators the reason why we pay high gas prices at the pump? Has President Obama not promised that under his watch energy prices will necessarily skyrocket, coal plants go bankrupt, and gasoline will rise to $10 a gallon, following the European model? Has Secretary of Energy Chu not stated, they must find ways to push gas prices even higher than the current price?

Supply and demand are crucial determinants of the price of oil. Other variables such as a crisis and turmoil in the Middle East can cause real oil shortages or increase the fear of shortages. That is why oil futures contracts were invented, bought and sold by speculators.

Speculators can estimate the demand for oil and plan accordingly. They can lose or gain money based on too much demand and little supply or too much supply and little demand. They buy futures contracts to smooth out unexpected price changes. They never take delivery of gasoline; they hold contracts worth 42,000 gallons each.

Keynesian economists agree that speculators sell protection from risk to other people and smooth out price fluctuations by purchasing oil when it is abundant and cheap, holding the contracts and reselling them when oil is scarce and expensive. Speculators, in this economic view, “play an important role in alleviating and even preventing shortages of oil.”

Independent oil producers and OPEC, the best-organized cartel in the world, can increase or decrease output. A cartel’s decision is always collusive and often counterproductive to the goals of our economy. U.S. makes cartels illegal within our borders, in the interest of the free market, but they are legal elsewhere.

Speculators make money by betting on price moves, some willing to take the risk and some willing to avoid it. The price of future contracts is influenced by political events, economic news released by the government, and natural disasters.

The government releases economic data, sells Treasury bills, or creates new policies that influence the price of futures contracts for both natural (oil) and financial commodities (derivatives).

Speculators themselves can have a temporary influence on commodity prices by a sudden demand for a contract either sparked by rumors, inside information, or other factors that drive the price up or down. (Kenneth M. Morris and Virginia B. Morris)

Speculators operate in a “zero sum market.” For every person who makes a dollar, another person loses a dollar. Speculators trade in order to make money, they are not interested in acquiring oil or holding it, they purchase contracts. Speculators gamble on price changes, they buy contracts when they think prices are low and sell when they think prices are high.

According to Kevin Freeman, oil-price manipulation by speculators on the futures market in 2007 when oil was $50 per barrel to $150 per barrel in 2008 occurred without a disruption in supply. Supply actually increased slightly. “Daily paper trades at the New York Mercantile Exchange were seven times higher than the actual oil used.” If you accounted for all other exchanges, Chicago, London, Dubai, other markets, trades of oil speculators may have been 50 to 100 times that of oil used. Producers and consumers had no change in production levels or consumption patterns.

Dr. Mark J. Perry, Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Michigan, said, “Market forces, not speculators, are the main determinants of oil prices and all other commodity prices. “A large number of scientific studies have failed to produce any credible evidence that high oil and gas prices were caused by the presence of financial investors in oil futures markets.”  

“The Obama administration is mistaken in attributing high oil and gas prices to the presence of financial investors in oil futures markets.” (CNN editorial, Professor Lutz Kilian)

Joseph Kennedy (D-MA) argued that, because of speculators, “today’s oil prices of about $100 a barrel have become disconnected from the costs of extraction, which average $11 a barrel worldwide.” The fact that it is physically and economically impossible to extract oil for $11 a barrel is lost on Representative Kennedy. (John Hinderaker, Energy Policy)

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) criticized the EPA’s “philosophy of enforcement” to “crucify” and “make examples” of oil and gas companies like the “Romans crucified random citizens in areas they conquered to ensure obedience.” EPA engaged in smear campaigns against natural gas producers in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wyoming, claiming that the use of hydraulic fracturing caused water contamination, without providing scientific proof. After threats of steep fines and overt intimidation, the EPA backtracked, but the public’s perception of danger and fear was already entrenched. (Craig Bannister)

Economic fear, intimidation, threats, empty promises, and glaring misinformation are some of the tools used to rally support for this administration’s failing policies and to pander to its voting base. Are progressive Americans so dim, chanting gleefully in a propaganda style reminiscent of communism, eager to vote for the demise of their own freedom and economic independence? Are the taxpaying residents of Realityville America hoping against all odds that they will out-vote the mesmerized and satisfied welfare recipients who want more communism?

Butler on Business WAFS 1190 Atlanta

http://www.cyberears.com/cybrss/15768.mp3
Butler on Business WAFS 1190 Atlanta 4/25/12
Topic: Environmentalists cookstoves scam
I come on in the second hour at the 19 minute mark.

A Piece of Land and a Moment of Time

In December 1989, communism fell in Eastern Europe and Romanians started the process of reclaiming their land and personal property confiscated by the Communist Party during 1949-1962. My maternal family recently received judicial notification of recovery, 23 years after the suit commenced.

Mom and I were given a plot of land that we have never seen. I am told that it is covered with rocks, the type that an enterprising fellow nearby is already exploiting and selling to construction companies for road building. I am not holding any high hopes or interest right now to plant a crop but it feels strange and empowering at the same time to own an ancestral piece of property that had belonged to my family for generations but was taken by force after World War II. Grandpa would be proud!

In 1921, peasants were given 4 hectares of land. When communists came to power in 1945, under pressure from Moscow, a new agrarian reform was passed meant to disband large farms and to gather votes for the Communist Party. Hundreds of thousands of farmers received small plots of land to grow crops on and feed their families.

Once entrenched, the communist agricultural vision changed. Their leaders were convinced that small properties were not valuable and condemned to non-modernized operations. At the time, people had plenty to eat and their families were thriving. However, community organizers fanned across the country convinced them through extensive propaganda that the state would be more efficient in administering the land.

The Marxist-Leninist dogma said, “A small property generates capitalism day by day, minute by minute, spontaneous, and in mass proportions.” The small-time farmer feeding his family, with a little surplus, was seen as an individual member of the bourgeoisie, requiring squashing.

The commie’s strategy was to turn farmers against the richer farmers through class envy and class warfare and it worked quite well.

The communists began the process of confiscating land from farmers who owned 50 hectares or more in a violent manner in March 1949 via an immediate executive order or decree. Overnight, farmers were taken out of their homes and forcibly moved to other villages, while their homes, animals, agricultural equipment, and land were seized. Farmers who had some mechanized agricultural tools were labeled “rich and bourgeois.” The “socialist transformation of agriculture” followed via division of farmers into five categories: those without any land, poor peasants, middle peasants, well-to-do farmers, and the very rich farmers.

The Communist Party introduced the quota system in order to compensate for lack of food in cities across the nation, to make war reparations to the Soviet Union, and to ruin farm operations that were doing well. A significant part of the crops had to be turned over to the state. Oftentimes the farmers were only left with the seed necessary for next year’s crop or nothing at all. Thousands of previously well-off farmers or people of modest means were ruined this way, including the very poor whom the communists pretended to protect.

The farmers who opposed collectivization, the joining of small private farms into large, state owned and controlled farms, were violently repressed through deportations, incarcerations, and confiscation of everything they owned, including clothes.

Deportations involved taking families who were considered most resistant and uneducable in labor camps and placing them in the middle of nowhere, far from civilization and transportation, forcing them to live in a hut in order to have shelter from wind and cold, surviving like the American pioneers in the west. More than 40,000 farmers were deported this way to 18 geographically difficult regions to survive in, the so-called called „special communes” run by the dreaded security police loyal to the Communist Party.

Northern Moldova and Transylvania offered most resistance. The farmers were arrested, shot in their homes, or summarily executed without due process. Thousands were sent to jail by 1950 and their wealth confiscated. If allowed to return to their village of birth after a lengthy deportation (1949-1956), farmers found their homes occupied by other families who were staunch communist party members and were rewarded for their loyalty with ownership of a confiscated home. Injustice was swift and the spreading of wealth was cruel.

Collectivization was completed in 1962 with medal awarding ceremonies. The chaotic and mismanaged agricultural system under communists experienced such a sustained crisis between 1948-1962, that the effects are still felt today, twenty-three years after the communists lost power.

Can this happen in America? Can we lose our land and property to someone else deemed more deserving by constant leftist propaganda? Can we lose our land to wilderness because environmentalists in control force us to move? Or is it already happening peacefully and silently while the population is being soothed with „hope and change,” lies and fabrications on a daily basis?

Americans are asleep, ignorant, mesmerized, doped up, or so corrupt that they no longer care what happens to their fellow citizens, their children’s future, the future of our country, so long as they have a cushy job, mindless television shows, sports, a pay check, perhaps bribes, comfortable homes, club memberships, vacations, and most of all, intoxicating power and control.

Redistributing wealth is the only thing communists know how to do brutally and stealthily well. Those who do not pay taxes or hold down jobs protest that it is their right to steal someone else’s money. They’ve even come up with a new euphemism, they are not stealing the wealth of producers, they are merely forcing them to „share the burden.”

But it is stealing! Every moment of time that we must work to earn money and pay taxes that are then spent by our out-of-control government on non-producers is a moment too long that we are slaves to someone else, a moment of time that is stolen from our limited time on earth.

Shaping America into Progressivism

Teaching or substituting in America of the early 1980s was not easy. As a Superintendent of Education had told me, they “did not just take anybody off the street. You had to be highly qualified.” That did not necessarily mean well versed in a subject matter. You had to belong to the “rarefied” group of licensed teachers.

I was interested in Latin and he had told me that he did not need Latin teachers because he had a person from Latin America who taught Spanish. As I looked at him, I was thinking of the Vice-President who told a crowd in Latin America that, had he paid more attention in his Latin class, he would have been able to speak to his audience in their native language.

The newly formed (1979) Department of Education had instituted stringent rules and regulations that school districts had to follow in order to receive federal funding and state certification. The National Education Association welcomed all dues-paying teachers, eager to indoctrinate them into the master educational plan.

Teaching elementary, middle, and high school required jumping through certification bureaucratic hoops that only the College of Education graduates could easily meet. It was not important if teachers performed well in the classroom, on the National Teacher Exam, or knew their subject area of expertise - they had to be licensed.

Many mediocre students eked out a diploma after four years of easy courses and became distributors of revisionist knowledge and shapers of generations of American students. As they gained tenure, no matter how inadequate their teaching, school districts could not get rid of them. The NEA vehemently defended their rights to a life-long career.

Many former coaches and physical education teachers went back to school for Masters Degrees in School Administration and became principals and superintendents, cheerleaders and supporters of their former colleagues and peers. If they played by the Department of Education rules, the rewards were plenty. Objective teachers who followed their conscience were marginalized as not being “team players.” Non-Education graduates could teach college with a Master’s Degree but not in the public schools. Membership in the club had its rewards and prevented better teachers from entering the system.

Liberals took control of education and imposed political correctness, which silenced conservatives and any possible opposition lest they be labeled racists and anti-children.

The curriculum changed from year to year, becoming more secularized and socialist, pushing religion completely out of the public schools. Prayer at football games, singing the national anthem, and the recitation of the pledge of allegiance to our country were scorned. Atheists objected to traditions that made this country great but interfered with their agenda. Being Green, the worship of Gaia, Mother Earth, and activist environmentalism became the new religion.

Teaching methodologies changed yearly, according to the latest fashion from teacher colleges in New York, Boston, California, like a new dress, more outrageous and less conducive to learning but easy on testing and highly experimental. The curriculum became more “socially just.” Standards were so relaxed that some students graduated who could not read or write on an elementary level. Education was dumbed down to include even the laziest students, test results worsened, dropouts increased, while knowledge retention declined.

Multilingual education and multiculturalism were forced upon schools in order to accommodate the burgeoning illegal immigrant student population.

A wave of anti-Americanism dominated the lectures of liberals. Everything that America did in its history or stood for became evil and open to negative interpretation. Conservative teachers were silenced by the threat of job loss. Performance boards ignored them but awarded constant praise and “I love myself” certificates to mediocre teachers who played by the progressive rule.

When expressing honest opinions, conservative students were intimidated and ridiculed by socialist activist teachers. Some students received lower grades when their opinions clashed with the teacher’s “America is evil” platform. Certain assignments crossed the line of objectivism and had nothing to do with the subject at hand but few parents paid attention or were vigilant enough.

I was shocked when the entire student body was required to attend two-hour indoctrination into the peaceful religion of Islam, presented by a Palestinian imam. A rapt audience of innocent and ignorant high school students was told how respected and cherished Muslim women were. The faculty did not protest but sat stony faced although they all knew the lack of rights and worth of Muslim women. Nobody asked questions about the hangings, stonings, decapitations, and cutting limbs of women under Islam. The religious presentation had been organized by the principal, the same person who said repeatedly that there is a separation of church and state, and refused to allow students to wear crosses to school because it might make students uncomfortable who did not believe in God.

Instead of teaching students that in 235 years of exceptionalism, America rose to become the world’s greatest power and revered society, an AP English teacher in Montgomery County, MD was asking students to explain how “Thoreau’s extolling the virtues of individualism and self-efficiency can jeopardize the community.” They were talking about community in Marxist parlance, as in “communis,” Latin for “shared.”

We were not allowed to be individuals in the totalitarian regime I lived under for 20 years. We shared a lot of misery, poverty, and despair under communism because self-reliance and rugged individualism were discouraged. Instead, we were told to be sheep under a benevolent government with omnipotent, god-like powers. As Marx said, “A people without a heritage are easily persuaded.”

Our children are taught that private property, the lynchpin of liberty, is bad. Thomas Jefferson began the Declaration of Independence with the words, “the pursuit of life, liberty, and property.”

Few American students pay attention to what Thomas Jefferson wrote anymore. Distributing condoms to elementary school children and setting up nurseries in high schools across the country for illegitimate babies take precedence over serious education.

American children have been brainwashed to reject the fundamental values of this country and of civilization. The Pew Research Center showed that more Americans age 18 to 29 have a favorable view of socialism over capitalism, 49 percent positive for socialism and 46 percent positive of capitalism. (December 2011)

The United Nation’s 150-page “World Happiness Report” promotes European socialism as the path to well-being. Fabian socialism must be imposed on the entire world through social and environmental justice. It is no coincidence that Maryland was the first state in the U.S. to pass The No Child Left Inside Act, forcing environmental literacy as a condition of graduation from high school. The reading and math test scores for some areas in Maryland are pathetic yet students must be environmentally literate in order to protect Mother Earth from the destructive economic activities of man. The education system is clearly pushing the religion of Gaia to the detriment of traditional education.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution lists the items over which Congress has the power to legislate and education is not one of them, neither can education be logically included under the commerce clause. It would be a stretch to consider the Department of Education constitutional. President Carter signed the DOE into law on October 17, 1979 and it began operating on May 16, 1980. President Reagan tried unsuccessfully to dismantle it.

Title 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 authorizing $1 billion annually to upgrade schools attended by students of low-income families has grown to $19 in 2010. No Child Left Behind is part of Title 1, an attempt to bring all students to proficiency level in math and reading by 2014. “More than half the states have asked the U.S. Department of Education for a waiver from No Child Left Behind.” The Obama’s administration will grant the waivers, ten years after President Bush signed the NCLB law, if those states adopt a new set of requirements established by President Obama, Common Core State Standards, a nationalized k-12 program of instruction. Title 1 funding would be tied to the Common Core. The “Race to the Top” grants in 2009 already emphasized “college and career ready” style of teaching and learning. Common Core national standards and tests require states to “surrender control of their classroom” to the federal government. (Heritage Foundation)

The federal government has spent $7 billion a year on Head Start, a program created by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 to serve almost a million low-income children across the country.  Taxpayers have spent $168 billion since its inception yet the National Head Start Impact Study released by the Department of Health and Human Services in January 2010 showed that three and four year olds who were followed into first grade were not impacted positively at all on cognitive skills when compared to those children who did not participate in Head Start.

Congress mandated in 2006 another study of Head Start participants after third grade. Have their cognitive skills perhaps improved then? Health and Human Services concluded the study in 2008 but has not released the study results, four years later. Senators Tom Coburn, Mike Enzi, Lamar Alexander, Richard Burr, and John McCain have asked HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to release the results of the study. (Lindsey Burke)

It is safe to say that the existence of the U.S. Department of Education has had no positive effect on American education in spite of its $70 billion a year budget and its extensive bureaucracy.

Parents disenchanted with public education have proliferated home schooling and charter schools in spite of the vociferous protests of public school teachers, administrators, and NEA. 

The worthless Bachelor of Arts has become a piece of paper necessary to get an easy job. Students are disappointed when the six-figure salary job promised by their college advisor does not materialize, after having spent $7,000 per year in a public college on tuition alone.

After taking easy courses and the bare minimum of work, often times hiring other students to write papers for them or do their work, the B.A. degree is not worth the paper it is printed on. Employers request a transcript to verify graduation, but grades and courses taken are rarely scrutinized. Perhaps the students show promise in the perseverance department as potential on-the-job learners.

According to Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, eight million Pell Grants were awarded in 2010, totaling more than $32 billion. New loans of $125 billion were issued by the federal government in the same year.

The sad reality is that college graduates are experiencing 25 percent unemployment in the Obama administration that promised them “hope and change.” The hope is gone, there are no jobs in sight, and there is little change left in their pockets when college loans come due.

The Unsolicited Opinion on Executive Order on Natural Gas

http://theunsolicitedopinion.com/audio/USO-04-19-12.mp3
Radio commentary on Executive Order on Natural Gas. I come on in the second hour.

Friday Radio with Silvio Canto Jr. of Dallas, Tx

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/cantotalk/2012/04/20/our-friday-chat-with-dr-ileana-johnson-paugh
Topics: UN Agenda 21, pigs in Michigan, gas prices, France elections, American economy