Time for a little good cheer this Monday afternoon…

Just to give you an idea of how much debt has been created, the average G-20 budget deficits are 10.2% of GDP, when 3% is normal. Greece, which is on the edge of bankruptcy, will be 12.5% in 2010. Yet, the US is already at 13.5%. Close behind are the UK and Japan at 11.6% and 10.3%. The erosion of confidence and trust will soon manifest itself as lenders stop lending to these nations. This has already happened to the US with the Fed monetizing more than half of Treasury issuance. This is proof the dollar will crash and be devalued, as debt goes into default. Foreign nations are understandably concerned, as the dollar now only makes up 37% of new foreign reserve holdings. That is about a 50% reduction in holdings. As we reported before it is no wonder oil producers have held secret meetings to dump the petro dollar. Wall Street, Washington and central banks worldwide refuse to heed the lessons of the centuries and so have been damned to oblivion.

And:

h/t Larry W.

In 2007, the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) held a seminar for the nonprofits vying for a piece of $78 million in funding. Grant seekers were told that in the next funding cycle, they would be required — for the first time — to provide quantifiable proof their programs were accomplishing something.
The room exploded with outrage. This wasn’t fair. “What if we can bring in a family we’ve helped?” one nonprofit asked. Another offered: “We can tell you stories about the good work we do!” Not every organization is capable of demonstrating results, a nonprofit CEO complained. He suggested the city’s funding process should actually penalize nonprofits able to measure results, so as to put everyone on an even footing. Heads nodded: This was a popular idea.

Read on. 6.6 billion just doesn’t get you what it used to.

When we last checked in on our favourite Railroad Climate Engineer, he was narrowing down the list of Climategate suspects to “fossil fuel lobby” and “corporate interests”.

Today, we find the most excellent Dr.Rajendra Pachauri in a “corporate interest” feature by the Telegraph. For starters;

Dr Pachauri’s TERI empire has also extended worldwide, with branches in the US, the EU and several countries in Asia. TERI Europe, based in London, of which he is a trustee (along with Sir John Houghton, one of the key players in the early days of the IPCC and formerly head of the UK Met Office) is currently running a project on bio-energy, financed by the EU.
Another project, co-financed by our own Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the German insurance firm Munich Re, is studying how India’s insurance industry, including Tata, can benefit from exploiting the supposed risks of exposure to climate change. Quite why Defra and UK taxpayers should fund a project to increase the profits of Indian insurance firms is not explained.
Even odder is the role of TERI’s Washington-based North American offshoot, a non-profit organisation, of which Dr Pachauri is president. Conveniently sited on Pennsylvania Avenue, midway between the White House and the Capitol, this body unashamedly sets out its stall as a lobbying organisation, to “sensitise decision-makers in North America to developing countries’ concerns about energy and the environment”.
TERI-NA is funded by a galaxy of official and corporate sponsors, including four branches of the UN bureaucracy; four US government agencies; oil giants such as Amoco; two of the leading US defence contractors; Monsanto, the world’s largest GM producer; the WWF (the environmentalist campaigning group which derives much of its own funding from the EU) and two world leaders in the international ‘carbon market’, between them managing more than $1 trillion (£620 billion) worth of assets.
All of this is doubtless useful to the interests of Tata back in India, which is heavily involved not just in bio-energy, renewables and insurance but also in ‘carbon trading’, the worldwide market in buying and selling the right to emit CO2. Much of this is administered at a profit by the UN under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the Kyoto Protocol, which the Copenhagen treaty was designed to replace with an even more lucrative successor.

Perhaps he’s just investigating undercover.

I picked up on something said during a television interview at Copenhagen last week, and both my gut and my search engine tell me the language of the UN’s great socialist money-sucking scheme is evolving once again.
Just as “global warming” was pushed into an inconveniently cold and bitter night, “climate change” may be readying its last will and testament.
“Climate change” was always a weak substitute for “global warming”, because it was always so easy to rebut. As even the experts were forced to concede, the climate is always changing and has since long before man discovered spark plugs.
This new terminology is more clever, for it neatly avoids the shortcomings of its clumsy forebears. It requires neither warming, nor change. Just television.
When blizzards descend on scientists and world leaders from Copenhagen to East Anglia to Washington, they warmists can now claim ownership.
When hurricane forecasts fall short of the mark, the propagandists can cite their very failure to support their scheme.
Warm winters, cold winters, more hurricanes, fewer hurricanes, growing ice caps, melting ice caps – directions won’t matter. Every “new” temperature record, every seasonal flood, every California hot spell, every dusting of snow in the south of France – in other words, local weather, reported globally, will return full force as evidence of anthropogenic climate crime, as it did in a simpler time when the ice conditions of a canal in Ottawa led to nationwide panic.
So, get ready to welcome the new talking point on the block: “climate instability“.
I’m not offering a game plan. I’m just warning you to prepare for it.
(Related!)

Winnipeg Free Press;

Each member of the Peguis First Nation band council made more money last year than Winnipeg’s mayor, Manitoba’s premier and nearly every one of the province’s MPs.
According to brown-envelope documents delivered to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation recently, Peguis Chief Glenn Hudson made $174,230 in the fiscal year ending in March.
That includes a base salary of $124,000 plus $48,200 in unspecified “other remuneration.” It doesn’t include $32,000 in travel per diems and expenses.
But Hudson made far less than his four councillors, most of whom earned well over $200,000, tax free.