Articles by Grist staff

Two real financial thinkers venture into CNBC fantasy world; comedy ensues

Okay, this is priceless -- and anyone who wants to understand not only our economic calamity but also why we're still screwed has to watch it. Oh, and don't worry -- it's also absolutely, laugh-out-loud hilarious (in a bittter sort of way).

Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb are two of our most trenchant and learned commenters on finance. It's time to start listening to them -- if Obama is serious about running a centrist administration, it's a scandal that he tapped Robin Rubin acolytes Summers and Geithner, not Roubini and Taleb, to run economic policy.

For years, the two men have been making the point that the U.S. economy is way too hinged on debt, speculation, obsession with short-term gain, and philistine optimism -- the very things raised to the level of fetish by the Rubin crowd. Roubini and Taleb predicted a cataclysmic tumbling of the house of cards built on that shaky foundation. They gained a small following, but were widely ignored -- particularly by the TV financial media, which became a craven, self-parodying machine for turning Wall Street and corporate hucksters into folk heroes.

Chad fights charcoal in battle against creeping desert

NDJAMENA — Authorities in Chad are cracking down on the use of charcoal to save forests and keep the desert from advancing in the Saharan nation, but discontent is mounting over the tough measures. Sanctions that began coming into effect in December include torching vehicles carrying charcoal and arresting people transporting the product, law-and-order officials […]

Bush's former ag deputy slinks back from whence he came: a cush agribiz post

A few years back, I thought I was on to a Really Big Story: President Bush had plucked a man named Chuck Conner from his perch as president of the Corn Refiners Association -- a front group for Archer Daniels Midland, and the force behind those putrid high-fructose corn syrup ads -- and made him his "special assistant to the president for agriculture, trade and food assistance." Eventually, Conner became the USDA's deputy secretary -- widely seen as the agency's fixer, the guy who got things done.

In the corn bubble in which I then existed -- some say I'm still there -- this seemed like a really big deal. A man who had essentially worked as a lobbyist for Archer Daniels Midland -- the company that singlehandely rigged up both the corn ethanol program and the high-fructose corn syrup market, two massive travesties -- was now advising the president on ag policy.

And people ... yawned. Thinking back on it, of course they did. This was the Bush administration -- crony capitalism had been raised to the level of statecraft. These guys were handing billion-dollar no-bid contracts to the vice president's old company, to perform outsourcing functions in a war he himself had engineered. What was a bit of Oval Office bump-and-tickle with an industrial corn man?

Well, for those of you who care, here's a newsflash: Conner waltzed out of Bush's USDA and into another top job at a big agribiz trade group: the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives. Now, the group's name makes it sound a bit down-home, like a bunch of guys in overalls banding together to run a grain elevator.

Don't be fooled. The NCFC is made up mainly of "cooperatives" that have scaled up to corporate size; many of them work in concert with agribiz giants like ADM to squeeze small farmers and workers. One glaring example is the giant entity Dairy Farmers of America, an NCFC member that controls a third of the milk produced in the U.S. DFA has been accused of colluding with milk-processing giant Dean Foods to squeeze farmers on price.

States agree to mercury treaty talks

NAIROBI — More than 140 countries agreed Friday to launch negotiations establishing a treaty on mercury to limit pollution affecting millions of people across the world, the UN environment body said. They also agreed an interim plan to curb pollution while awaiting the treaty because “the risk to human health was so significant that accelerated […]