Way back in May 2009 the Guardian reported that:

The Obama administration took on the powerful farming interests in America's heartland today, making clear it does not see corn-based ethanol as part of the long-term solution to climate change.

The new proposals on the biofuel – in the face of intense pressure from agricultural companies and members of Congress from corn-growing states – were seen as the first test of Barack Obama's promise to put science above politics in deciding America's energy future.

A couple of weeks ago the Guardian reported that:

The Obama administration faces a challenge in Congress that could strip it of its powers to cut greenhouse gas emissions, barely a month after committing to action at the Copenhagen climate change summit.

An Alaska Republican, Senator Lisa Murkowski, is expected to put forward a proposal for a vote as early as tomorrow that would seek to prevent the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

Now according to the Los Angeles Times:

The Obama administration gave a boost to the corn and coal industries Wednesday, announcing a series of moves to accelerate biofuel use and deploy so-called clean-coal technology on power plants.

Unveiling the actions in a meeting with energy-state governors at the White House, President Obama said the steps would create jobs in rural areas, reduce foreign energy dependence and curb the emissions that scientists blame for global warming.

Unfortunately it now looks likely that the new political realities in the United States following the loss of the previously safe Democratic Senate seat of  Massachusetts will involve President Obama in further U-turns over the coming months.

Today we've added two new sections to our website.  The first contains our current suggestions about how best to help get relief to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti.  According to Haitian President René Préval the most urgent need is shelter for 800,000 homeless people before the rainy season starts in about a month's time, so we focus on that problem to start with.

In addition Peter Gabriel's record company Real World have generously given us permission to quote the lyrics from one of Peter's songs, which we feel is particularly relevant to the relief effort in Haiti. If you're the sort of person who prefers to read rather than watch videos please take a look at our new "Songs" section.

Our apologies to recent visitors to the econnexus website. At some point over the weekend we were hacked, and you may have seen warnings similar to the following if you tried to access this site recently:

Avast complained about: JS: Small-C [Trj]

AVG complained about: JS/Downloader.Agent

We have fixed the problem, and we have also taken the "opportunity" to transfer the site to a new hosting provider and upgrade to version 2.9.1 of WordPress and a new theme. Please contact us if you discover any parts of the site that still do not appear to be working correctly.

For any geeks amongst you the hackers managed to insert a JavaScript trojan into our theme's header.php file. The problem is now fixed, but it does lead one to question the morality of those who are no doubt able, but also willing, to disrupt the activities of others attempting to assist the victims of the enormous natural disaster that has occurred in Haiti.

Today econnexus.org announces the launch of our latest project, the econnexus Music Making Machines.  This project is intimately interconnected with our "Water Connects Us" downloadable album, which aims to raise money for Haiti earthquake victims.

This project intends to contribute at least one track to "Water Connects Us" recorded in a very low cost "bedroom studio". It will also demonstrate how that track, and indeed the whole album, can then be marketed without the traditional "music industry" soaking up the majority of the profits that the artists have themselves created.  In conjunction with "Water Connects Us" it will also demonstrate how to get aid to the people who need it, without the traditional "aid industry" siphoning off a significant proportion of the contributions of the concerned citizens of this planet.

To get this project started we visited a couple of Exeter music shops on Wednesday.  We received lots of useful advice from Mike and Phil at Project Music, and Jay and Chris at Mansons Guitar Shop. We ended up buying a Line 6 POD Studio UX2. We'll let you know how we get on with it in future posts.

Update 11:35 GMT on January 20th 2010

Haiti just endured another aftershock. This one was apparently 5.9 on the moment magnitude scale.

Synchronicity struck at the opening of the Art, Ecology and the Economy exhibition at CCANW. Several musicians from South West England have now donated a track to our forthcoming "Water Connects Us" album in aid of Haiti:

De Larje giving their first ever concert

Kasia Turajczyk of econnexus.org has produced this video poem in response to the disaster in Haiti:

Peter Gabriel has produced this music video in response to the disaster in Haiti. It is a moving reworking of David Bowie's classic "Heroes":

The Road to Fondwa team are donating proceeds from sales of their documentary movie to the relief effort:

On January 12th 2010 a large number of Haitians lost their homes or their lives following a powerful earthquake.

This is raw footage of the aftermath of that earthquake:

At the beginning of September 2008 a large number of Haitians lost their homes or their lives following Hurricane Hanna.

This is raw footage of the aftermath of that hurricane:

If you would like to help please take a look at our current suggestions about how best to help Haiti.

Hurricane Bill, the first of the 2009 Atlantic season, has already got surfers in the eastern United States excited.  Over here in South West England we're eagerly watching the current predictions:

Whilst we're waiting to see if these predictions turn into an excellent swell on this side of the Atlantic too, we're thankful that so far Bill has not caused death and destruction on the scale of some of last season's storms.

Another long video, but essential watching nonetheless. This is a lecture given at UCLA's Hammer Museum by William K. Black. He investigated the 1980s Savings and Loan crisis when he was at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. In this talk he discusses how more money was recently lost by one single bank, IndyMac, than during that entire crisis:

Here's a video (over an hour long!) which was recorded at the Edge "Reflections on a crisis" event held in Munich earlier this year. In it Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, ex derivatives trader and now Professor of Risk Engineering and author, discuss how a toxic combination of corporate greed and human failings created the current economic crisis:

In an interview on CNBC this morning Texas oil billionaire and wind energy advocate T. Boone Pickens blamed "lack of leadership" from George W. Bush and "that speech" from Nancy Pelosi for the vote against the Bail-Out plan in the House yesterday:

Watch the T. Boone Pickens interview on CNBC

Commenting on the current financial crisis and the Bail-Out failure Mr. Pickens said that:

Paulson is in there with bullets going past his head all over the place. He's very smart to call Warren Buffet.  Buffet's in Omaha and nobody's shooting at him… I think that's very smart on the part of Paulson and Buffet's very good to come in and help out on it. So here you've got the American people don't understand, and you've got everyone trying to get re-elected. I think they've got to come together on the deal, that's all there is to it. It's got to happen, and I think it will. I think it will happen on Thursday… I think you've got to get the FDIC into it, and I think that'll happen too.

Then he pointed out that in his opinion there is an even bigger problem waiting in the wings – The energy crisis:

You've got another one coming up, and that'll be energy. We can't continue to do what we're doing on energy. What's the number on this problem, $700 billion? Look at what you're paying for foreign oil. Annually, not one time, $700 billion!

The oil [price] we're still right around the $100.  I said OPEC would support it at $100, and I'm not so sure they're not supporting it right now.  All they have to do is just pinch back a little bit.  There's not any reason for them to take $60 oil. People talking about how it's going to come down to $60 they don't understand how the people that make the oil work. They're not going to give it to you at $60.

When we get to the energy issue, and we're going to get to it pretty quick just as soon as this is cleared up. When we get to the energy issue Washington doesn't fully understand it and they can't explain it to the American people.

Now it seems I was a bit hasty when I said just over a month ago that "BP Capital is still going strong".  Boone Pickens revealed in the CNBC interview that his hedge funds have lost over a billion dollars.

We have a 90 day notice and right now we have been notified by about 15% of our people that they want the option to withdraw their funds by the end of the year.

If I may summarise: the American people don't understand finance or energy. That's because Washington doesn't understand finance or energy. T. Boone Pickens understands energy so well his hedge funds have lost more than 1 billion dollars, plus a lot more yesterday. I guess we'd all better hope Warren Buffet understands some of this stuff, or who knows what might happen? As Boone Pickens put it:

We'll hope that Warren and Hank get this thing squared away here.

Another day dawns, and the list of failed banks grows ever longer.  Congress has renamed the Bail-Out as The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act.  The House has just rejected the latest draft by 228 votes to 205. George W. Bush said he was "very disappointed". Whilst Congress were extending the new act to a total of 109 pages over the weekend, banks around the world were dropping like flies as the virus spread.

In the United States Wachovia is the latest venerable institution to fall prey to the contagion.  Citigroup has agreed to buy the banking operations of Wachovia for the knockdown price of around $2.2 billion.  Wachovia Corporation was the fourth largest banking chain in the US. It originally got it's name from the Wachau valley of the river Danube. Settlers from Moravia named part of North Carolina after their homeland way back in 1753.

The deal does not currently include Wachovia's money management and retail brokerage arms, and the government is providing a limit to Citigroup's risk on the transaction.  In a similar guarantee to the one provided to JPMorgan Chase in their emergency takeover of Bear Stearns, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will absorb all losses that Citigroup incurs on Wachovia's riskiest mortgages over and above $42 billion. Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the FDIC, said that:

This morning's decision was made under extraordinary circumstances with significant consultation among the regulators and Treasury. This action was necessary to maintain confidence in the banking industry given current financial market conditions.

As the the International Herald Tribune points out:

The deal further concentrates Americans' bank deposits in the hands of three banks: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup will control more than 30 percent of the industry's deposits. Together, they will have unrivaled power to set prices for their loans and services… Some small and midsize banks, already under pressure, might have little choice but to seek suitors in order to compete.

Whilst the US government was underwriting Citigroup's buyout of Wachovia the UK government was being similarly obliging as Spanish bank Santander bought the 197 branches and £20 billion retail savings operation of the United Kingdom's Bradford and Bingley for £612 million. The bank's £50 billion mortgage and loans business has effectively been nationalised. Santander subsidiary Abbey has been paid £14.6 billion from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, plus an additional £4.5 billion from the UK Treasury. The UK government says it will start to recoup that money when it sells off the mortgages that it now owns. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that:

We will do whatever it takes to ensure the stability of the British financial system… We allowed Lloyds TSB to take over HBOS. We intervened to deal with share speculation in the market, and will continue to do whatever is necessary over these next few days in very difficult times, turbulent times around the world, to make sure that the British stability for which we have done a great deal over these last few years is maintained, and that's why the actions have been taken in the way they have.

As if Wachovia and Bradford and Bingley were not sufficient it seems as though the breakdown of the new paradigm in Anglo Saxon capitalism is not confined to just the United Kingdom and the United States.  In other announcements today the governments of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg have agreed to bail-out Fortis to the tune of 11.2 billion euros, and the goverment of Iceland has agreed to pay 600 million euros for a 75% stake in Glitnir, Iceland's third largest bank.

When do you suppose this government sponsored concentration of wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer giant corporations will stop, if it ever does?