- Censorship Purge Signals Imminent False Flag Violence Before Mid-Term Elections… Bigger Than 9/11?
Authored by Mike Adams via NaturalNews.com,
For the last two months, I’ve been warning about the rising risk of a major false flag attack taking place before the mid-term elections.
The aggressive, unprecedented PURGE of Alex Jones / InfoWars underscores the desperation of the totalitarian deep state that’s about to make a move to eliminate President Trump and / or steal the elections.
Anyone who believes that the sudden de-platforming of Alex Jones across over a dozen online services and platforms isn’t coordinated collusion is delusional. The coordinated de-platforming effort is clearly directed by the deep state to eliminate a prominent, dissenting voice in preparation for unleashing a history-shaping false flag attack that’s likely going to be bigger than 9/11.
The radical Left is escalating its violence across America, and the tech giants are dramatically escalating their censorship actions to silence all independent voices that might question any “official” narrative.
It all points to something big about to come down – something so big that only the official narrative can be allowed to be heard or spoken.
We are living under an Orwellian totalitarian regime beyond any horrific imagination. Google, Apple, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other tech giants are engaged in the most criminal, malicious racketeering and tyranny imaginable. This is not sheer coincidence. They’ve all been ordered to censor the independent media in preparation for what’s coming next.
As I explain in this video, the most likely false flag assault to be staged by the Left might be a “mass shooting” at CNN or another media giant, all staged with impressive theatrics to augment the real violence with a false narrative. Watch my entire warning, below:
Read more articles about false flag events at FalseFlag.news.
Also check out the shhnookered channel at REAL.video which now has multiple video channels covering mass shooting events in U.S. history.
- Mapping The 22 Cities With The Most Million-Dollar Homes In America
Throughout most of America, owning a $1 million home gives you definite bragging rights – it means you may have six bedrooms, 5,000 square feet, an infinity pool, and at least a few acres of property.
But, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, along the coasts – and particularly in California – the two comma club has lost most of its novelty. That’s because in some places, like San Jose, CA, the majority (53.8%) of homes are already soaring past the $1 million mark, despite most of them looking nothing more than ordinary.
$1 MILLION HOMES BY CITY
Today’s chart uses data from a study by LendingTree, which ranks the largest 50 U.S. cities by the percentage of million dollar homes in each metro area. The data from the study was pulled out of a database of 155 million property prices throughout the country.
Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist
Here are the 22 U.S. cities that have at least 1% of their housing stock exceeding the $1 million value mark:
The data looks pretty telling, with four of the top five cities being located in California. In each of those cities, more than 10% of all homes have surpassed the $1 million mark.
In the Bay Area specifically, prices are amplified even further: San Francisco (40.0%) and San Jose (53.8%) have by far more $1 million homes than other major cities in the country. It’s also worth noting that in San Jose, the median price of all homes is a whopping $1,069,000.
You can just imagine what houses might cost in some of the Silicon Valley towns like Mountain View or Palo Alto, or just over the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County.
THE BOTTOM OF THE LIST
While the above chart shows the 22 U.S. cities with the most $1 million homes, LendingTree also listed the major cities in the country with the fewest.
Buffalo, located in upstate New York, takes this title, with only 0.10% of homes passing the mark and an overall median home price of just $141,000. So, to buy the average home in San Jose, you’d need to sell off about eight average houses in Buffalo.
The other cities with the smallest concentrations of million dollar homes are also located in the Great Lakes and Midwest regions: Pittsburgh (0.17%), Hartford (0.18%), Cleveland (0.19%), and Indianapolis (0.27%).
- Lenin Updated: "Turn The Globalist War Into A Race War"
Authored by James Georges Jatras via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
It’s déjà vu all over again.
First US President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and appears to make some progress towards his stated goal of putting ties between Washington and Moscow on a positive course. Immediately, all hell breaks loose. Trump is a called a traitor. The “sanctions bill from hell” is introduced in the Senate. Trump is forced on the defensive.
Next Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky visits Moscow, where he meets with Putin and gives him a letter from Trump proposing moderate steps towards rapprochement. Paul also talks with Russian Senators and invites them to come to Washington to continue the dialogue. Immediately, all hell breaks loose. Paul is called a traitor. The State Department “finds” the Russians guilty of the using illegal chemical weapons (CW) in the United Kingdom and imposes sanctions. Trump is forced even more on the defensive.
In each instance the actions of the Washington establishment, both in Congress and in even in departments and agencies allegedly part of the Executive Branch of government headed by Trump, moved quickly to nip in the bud even the most tentative efforts by Trump to keep his campaign pledge. With regard to the new CW sanctions it is unclear whether Trump had anything to do with them at all; most likely they either were imposed without his participation or he acceded to them because he felt he had no other option.
It is debatable how much of the US government Trump actually controls. The baseless CW finding by the State Department (with heavy pressure from Congress) is the work of Trump’s globalist enemies in the bureaucracy and in Congress (all of the Democrats, and almost all of the Republicans), with the complicity of his own appointees, to undermine his overtures to Moscow and further erode his Executive authority. Besides blocking every possible path to détente with Russia, this is another step to setting Trump up for removal from office.
Regarding the timing of a second set of sanctions set to kick in November, it’s hard to see how that will be avoided. Russia will not submit to inspections, which the US is arrogantly demanding of Russia, as if she were some pipsqueak country like Libya. Given that the OPCW certified in 2017 that the Russians had completed destruction of 100% of their CW stockpile (cf., the US still has almost 10% of our stocks, which are not expected to be completely gone until 2023), the demand is the equivalent of proving that you have stopped beating your wife (to the satisfaction of someone who admittedly continues to beat his own wife).
In the absence of capitulating to the US demand, which Russia will not do, legally Trump can waive the sanctions. But that option is no doubt part of the political trap being laid for him, presenting him a Hobson’s choice.
On the one hand, he can waive the sanctions, further hyping the charges of treason against him (and, if the waiver is before the elections, giving the Democrats another red flag to wave), as well as inviting new legislation passed by a margin “Putin’s puppet” cannot veto;
or he can let them go into effect.
If, as seems likely, the harsher measures are applied it is hard to overstate the danger created. These are the kind of things that countries do just one step from totally breaking relations in advance of war: cutting off access to American banks, barring Aeroflot from the US (in context, the least of our concerns, though symbolic), effectively blocking all exports and imports, and downgrading or suspending diplomatic ties. With respect to the last – a direct assault on Trump’s presidential authority to send and receive ambassadors under Article II of the Constitution (oddly, no one in Congress seems to care that presidents routinely usurp their authority to make war) – this likely would mean withdrawing the US ambassador from Moscow and expelling the Russian ambassador in Washington, while maintaining relations if at all at the chargé d’affaires level.
In word, this is insanity. What’s perhaps worse is that this political warfare is being conducted with total disregard for the truth, much less an honest attempt to find it. It’s worse than a presumption of guilt; it’s a positive, unambiguous verdict of culpability under circumstances where the accusers in Washington and London (I would guess but cannot prove) know perfectly well that the CW finger pointing is false.
It has been clear from the beginning of Trump’s meteoric rise on the American political scene that he and his American First agenda were perceived by the beneficiaries of the globalist, neoliberal order as a mortal danger to the system which has enriched them. Maintaining and intensifying hostility toward Russia, even at the risk of a catastrophic, uncontainable conflict, lies at the center of their efforts. This political war to save globalism at all hazards is intensifying.
It would be a mistake, however, to understand hostility to Russia as just a cold calculation of pecuniary and social advantage by a corrupt mandarin class. It is all that of course, but it is also deeply ideological, reflecting the agenda of the entrenched pseudo-elites to dismantle the traditional national identities and Christian moral values of the West – and impose their godless agenda on the East as well.
But there is something else too, something that touches the emotional heart of both Russophobia in a global context and anti-Trumpism domestically. That is the accusation of racism.
Unsurprisingly one of the first to give voice to this concept was Hillary Clinton, who in her August 2016 “tinfoil hat speech” sought to portray Trump as a creature of the “Alt-Right” because, among other things, he once complimented Infowars’ Alex Jones: “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.” But in Hillary’s estimation, who is “the grand godfather” of the worldwide Alt-Right? You guessed it: “Russian President Vladimir Putin.” A month later she doubled down in her infamous “basket of deplorables” speech, branding Trump’s tens of millions of supporters “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.” (In an evident oversight, she omitted mention of Putin.)
Give the warmongering old girl credit for her doggedness. Hillary has stuck to this theme even as she sinks into irrelevance (while still reportedly harboring ambitions of a 2020 presidential run!), in June 2018 calling Putin the leader of the worldwide “authoritarian, white-supremacist, and xenophobic movement” who is “emboldening right-wing nationalists, separatists, racists, and even neo-Nazis.”
Hillary is not alone. As summed up by Jodi Jacobson of Rewire.News (“Putin, Trump, and Kavanaugh: A Triad of White Supremacy and Oligarchy”):
‘Putin is a dictator. His interests are in amassing wealth and power at any cost, both in Russia and globally. … He is an ethnic nationalist, a white supremacist, and an Islamophobe. He aligns himself with radical right-wing religious and political groups to marginalize and attack the rights of women, LGBTQ communities, and religious and ethnic groups outside his power base.’
But perhaps the most revealing description comes from putative comedian Bill Maher on a recent episode of his HBO program, explaining that “Race Explains Shift From Party Of Reagan To Party Of Putin” and excoriating not just Putin but Russians as such for their genetic characteristics:
‘UPDATE, with video The “dirty little secret” that explains how the Party of Reagan morphed into the Party of Putin is a four-letter word, Bill Maher said tonight: Race.
‘“Russia,” Maher said during his New Rules segment on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher, “is one of the last places on earth to say, ‘F**k diversity. We’re here. We’re white. Get used to it.’”
‘Attempting to explain how 87% of Republicans (according to a recent poll) are fine with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin visiting the White House, Maher chalked it up to racism, and even quoted a tweet from his old pal Ann Coulter.
‘“Last year Ann Coulter tweeted that ‘In 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is recognizably European.’ As far back as 2013 Matt Drudge called Putin the leader of the free world. David Duke called Russia the key to white survival.
‘“Today’s Republicans, what’s left of them, do not like the melting pot,” he said. “And Russia? That pot don’t melt.”
‘Making jokes about White Russians (“Let’s see, I want to get drunk but I also want a glass of milk”) and Russian basketball players (“the team that played against the Globetrotters”), Maher compared racial diversity (or lack thereof) in Russia to that of Western Europe.
‘Ending the bit with a bite, Maher concluded, “A Barack Obama does not become the president of Russia. Wingnuts used to accuse Obama of being a foreign agent who took over America, but when a foreign power actually did take over America and it was the proudly white one, their response was ‘come right on in.’
‘“To the members of the Grand Old Party, Russia meddling in our elections isn’t a breach of national security, it’s just white people helping white people. Or what Republicans call governing.”’
Maher gives away more than he suspects. Very little in the foregoing says anything about racism, either Russian or American, but it does say a great deal about Maher’s own disdain for Russia because it is “recognizably European,” also known as (if you’ll pardon the expression) white.
One suspects he doesn’t castigate, say, Koreans or Japanese for the fact that their countries are “recognizably Asian” and are going to stay that way.
Shifting to the US, it is increasingly obvious that what poses as antiracism and opposition to “hate” is little more than hostility to the identity and values of the core American ethnos: English-speaking Christians of European descent, including completely or partially assimilated descendants of immigrants. (In other countries this would be understood in specifically national terms – Russian, French, German, English, etc. – but for historical reasons too complex to summarize here, the core American demographic is generally seen in terms of race, not ethnicity. This stems in part from the absurd but widespread claim that the US not an ethnic state, only a civic one.) More and more this hostility is expressed as hatred of “whiteness” itself, in a manner that would be totally unacceptable applied to any other ethnic, racial, or religious group.
The current Exhibit A of such hatred is the controversy over a newly appointed member of the New York Times editorial board, Korean-born Sarah Jeong, whose expressions of anti-white bias were parodied by African-American conservative Candace Owens, only substituting “Jewish” and “black” for Jeong’s “white.” Unsurprisingly, Owens was suspended from Twitter while Jeong – who also trashes men and the police – is the beneficiary of full-throated support from the assembled forces of diversity, tolerance, and overall wonderfulness.
Jeong is just one example of a phenomenon that has become fashionable among the haters. “White thoughts” are a disease, as is whiteness itself. Among the items various college professors have denounced as tainted by white racism are math, farmers’ markets, interracial friendship, solar eclipses, the Bible (of course), environmental pollution, college football, the song “Jingle Bells,” the nuclear family, punctuality, and (it goes without saying) supporting Trump. The existence of entire US states like New Hampshire and Vermont that are just “too white” is an affront to diversity, a problem demanding a solution. For the über-PCHuffPost.com, whiteness constitutes an entire issue category for the grievances of other racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual “communities,” including helpful advice to liberal white feminists to just “shut the f**k up!” The inevitability of the United States’ becoming a majority-minority country is stated as a fact as inevitable as sunrise and sunset, but it’s “unabashed white nationalism” for even mainstream conservatives who are light-years away from the Alt-Right to point out that Americans never voted for or were asked their opinion about such a future. Conversely, “white-bashing” by self-loathers is a demonstration of the “nobility that flows from racial self-flagellation.”
Connecting Putin and Russia with racism feeds into cockamamie phantasmagoria of Crimethink concepts that increasingly are considered outside the protection of what was once quaintly known as free speech: hate speech, fake news, conspiracy theories, white nationalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, “cisgenderism,” and many more. (Astonishingly, this recent video from ADL’s Orwellian-named “Center for Technology and Society,” which claims to identify “online hate” with 78 to 85 percent accuracy through the use of artificial intelligence, is real, not a parody.) Just to be accused of subjectively and politically defined hate is now sufficient to trigger a coordinated muzzling of the offender’s online presence by the lords of the Internet, getting them fired from their jobs, and even subjecting them to physical attack from violent enforcers like Antifa. Ostensibly these actions are undertaken by private entities, conveniently hiding the government hand encouraging tech companies to police content to counter “Russian meddling” and other thought crimes.
The current coupling of a globalist agenda with demonization of our country’s majority demographic has a disquieting precedent.
In August 1915 the committed internationalist Vladimir Lenin issued his infamous call to “turn the imperialist war into a civil war.” In that, if in nothing else, his program was a smashing success, resulting in the deaths of up to ten million people through savage warfare, “Red Terror” repression, disease, and famine. As he summed it up, “I spit on Russia! That’s only one stage we have to pass through on our way to world revolution!” No sacrifice of other peoples’ lives was too high a price to be paid to implement Lenin’s version of globalism.
As Anatoly Karlin notes (“The Real Lenin: Traitor, Parasite, Failure”) the horrendous destruction inflicted by the Bolsheviks was motivated in part by Lenin’s conscious hatred – perhaps not very different from Maher’s today – of Russians as the majority ethno-religious group, who had to be crushed to liberate the certified oppressed minorities.
That hatred gives “an inkling of the real reason why Western intellectuals like Lenin a lot more than Stalin,” writes Karlin. Indeed, in light of the Russian experience there is a chillingly familiar ring to today’s legitimatization of racial detestation of the American majority.
- "A Devastating Scenario": Brazil Breaks Own Record For Number Of Murders, Ahead Of Election
The total number of people killed in a single year in Brazil has hit a record, the economically collapsed, South American country saw 63,880 homicides in 2017, according to a Brazilian think-tank, which indicated much of the violent crime is concentrated in the impoverished northeastern states.
New data from the Brazilian Forum of Public Security (BFPS), an independent organization that tracks national crime statistics, said the shocking number of homicides are up 3 percent on the previous year.
BFPS showed that the State of Rio Grande do Norte in northeastern Brazil recorded the highest homicides, with about 68 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. The Acne state in the north came in second with 63 deaths per 100,000 people, followed by the state of Ceara in the northeast with 59.1 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.
On the other hand, the wealthier state of Sao Paulo had the lowest murder rate — 10.7 homicides per 100,000 people.
“It is a devastating scenario,” said Renato Sérgio de Lima, director of the independent forum, who told The Guardian that homicide figures had been increased by antiquated laws, police procedures and the rapid growth in organized crime. Most victims were young, impoverished black men from city areas, he said.
“The numbers show we have a serious problem with lethal violence,” he added.
The terrifying statistics are expected to play a significant role into October’s presidential election, in which violent crime will be a crucial topic for many voters.
A controversial far-right politician, Jair Bolsonaro, formally declared that he was running for president last month. Bolsonaro leads some polls on a platform that includes “loosening gun controls and giving police more license to kill,” said The Guardian.
His surge in popularity has forced opponents, including centrist former governor Geraldo Alckmin, to partner with law enforcement conservatives to strengthen their crime-fighting credentials.
Earlier this year, Brazil’s President Michel Temer enacted an emergency decree authorizing the country’s military to take over policing duties in Rio de Janeiro. The emergency measure, the first of its kind since the mid-1980s, came in response to out of control organized crime in the region.
* * *
To make matters worse, the emerging market rout on Friday, with the Turkish Lira crashing more than 18 percent on the session to a record low, could result in more economic, political, and or social destabilization in Brazil heading into the Fall.
“These factors had been viewed as isolated and local, but they started triggering a wider contagion this morning,” a Rio de Janeiro-based fund manager said. Currencies in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Argentina had all declined at least 1 percent at one point on Friday, which could lead to financial stress, thus social instability.
One veteran EM trader in Brazil exclaimed to us on Friday “this is a fucking bloodbath,” adding that “liquidity has disappeared” and as spooked retail investors pile out of ETFs (that their advisers said were no-brainers), the pressure in real markets is explosive. Emerging Market FX is indeed a bloodbath…
Equities markets in Latin America including Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina were also off over 1 percent. Brazil’s Bovespa index hit a liquidity gap of -2.1 percent after several companies reported disappointing earnings on Thursday, along with a -3 percent slide on Friday thanks to EM contagion via Turkey.
Why should you care? The answer is below.
- Free-Speech Monopoly – The Game Is Rigged
Via Ben Garrison’s GrrrGraphics.com,
In early America many cities had ‘town squares’ in which citizens could stand on soapboxes and shout out various messages. Our First Amendment protects such speech.
The Internet is today’s town square. The soapboxes are social media.
The Deep State and the left are intertwined with Silicon Valley. The CIA helped Google and Facebook get started. Why? To make it easier to spy on people. Over time, millions gravitated toward Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Conservative and Libertarian voices became very strong and that alarmed the Deep State. So they began demonetizing conservatives. Then they shadow-banned them. Now they are deleting them outright.
For many years, Alex Jones reached millions with his journalism and rants. His tirades helped wake people up. He yelled at us about the Deep State, including the corrupt security agencies, the Bohemian Grove, the CFR, the Bilderbergs, fluoride in our water, the lies about 9-11, and yes, even Sandy Hook. The latter had many anomalies that should be questioned. Alex brought all of this up and more before anyone else had a inkling about what was really going on with such matters. He was routinely dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ by the establishment. However, much of what he has been saying over the years is now acknowledged as self-evident. The legacy media, the Deep State, and Silicon Valley could not stomach the fact that he was informing and influencing minds and elections. They all got together and confiscated his soapbox. Their lame excuse? They claimed he was a purveyor of ‘hate speech.’
Having previously endured years of hate speech aimed toward me, I know what it is and what it isn’t. To me, it’s libel, defamation and death threats. Alex Jones has never engaged in hate speech. Questioning climate change is not hate speech. Jones is not a racist, a bigot or any of the other ‘phobic’ names the left enjoy pinning on ideological opponents. ‘Hate speech’ sounds alarming and terrible, but it’s also vague. Who gets to decide what it is?
The Supreme Court ruled it was legal speech, but apparently the Silicon Valley and Deep State commissars want to overrule that decision. They own their social media game and they’ve rigged it in their favor. They have all the money in the world, so they can afford to lose revenue from the millions of conservatives and libertarians they’re forcing out of the game. They can’t win the argument, so they’re resorting to censorship.
Censorship is what China does, and companies like Facebook and Apple are eager to please the communist oligarchs. The Deep State wants what President Xi enjoys – a rigged Internet that does not allow dissent or criticism of the political elite. Right now, even Winnie the Pooh is being banned in China. Why? Because Xi opponents in China were using the cartoon bear as a ‘meme’ to criticize their leader. Remember, conservatives greatly out-memed the left during the last presidential election. Hillary is no doubt very angry that we have the ability to meme and ridicule her pomposity. She once said herself that the Internet needs an ‘editor.’ She would welcome a Chinese-style, well-censored Internet that she and her ilk would control.
The leftist media have dominated American minds for decades. The lies they told were readily accepted as facts. That kind of mind control is no longer working for them, thanks to the Internet. We know their ‘Russia collusion’ narrative is bunk. We’re not going along, so now they want to force us to go along and if we don’t, we get banned as ‘haters.’
It will get worse. PayPal is already banning users who are being smeared as ‘haters.’ The left will make that tactic seem fashionable, so it’s a matter of time before banks get in on the act. Maybe even the Bezos-owned Amazon?
What can we do? Many think conservatives should develop their own social media. That is no easy task and we will receive no generous funding from the Deep State to do it. What we should NOT do is ask government to ‘regulate’ social media. That would only add bureaucracy and regulations on free speech and if the left regains political control, they will use it to their advantage. Just like they used the IRS to harass conservatives.
The only thing we can do now is keep our cool and let the leftist oligarchs play their game and reveal themselves for who they are – tyrants who want control over our minds via their game of monopoly.
- Iran Sanctions Fallout: China Takes Over French Share In Giant Iran Gas Project
When it comes to the Middle East, China has not been shy about its recent ambitions to expand its geopolitical influence in the Gulf region: Just last week we reported that the Chinese Ambassador to Syria, Qi Qianjin, shocked Middle East pundits and observers by indicating the Chinese military may fill the void left in the wake of the collapse of ISIS – and most regional armies – and directly assist the Syrian Army in an upcoming major offensive on jihadist-held Idlib province.
The “[Chinese] military is willing to participate in some way alongside the Syrian army that is fighting the terrorists in Idlib and in any other part of Syria,” the ambassador said in an interview with the pro-government daily newspaper Al-Watan, subsequently translated by The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
And having staked a military claim in Syria, China was next set to expand its national interest in that other key regional nation which has been the source of so much consternation to its neighbors and world powers in recent months and which has emerged as a key source of crude oil exports to Beijing: Iran.
It did so today when China’s state-owned energy giant, CNPC – the world’s third largest oil and gas company by revenue behind Saudi Aramco and the National Iranian Oil Company – finally took over the share in Iran’s multi-billion dollar South Pars gas project held by France’s Total, Iran’s official news agency Shana reported on Saturday.
To many the move had been expected, with only the details set to be ironed out. Recall that back in May we wrote that CNPC – the world’s third largest oil and gas company by revenue behind Saudi Aramco and the National Iranian Oil Company – was set to take over a leading role held by Total in a huge gas project in Iran should the French energy giant decide to quit amid US sanctions against the Islamic Republic.
That finally happened when the Chinese energy giant took advantage of Trump’s sanctions to step in the void left by the French major. As a reminder, Total signed a contract in 2017 to develop Phase II of South Pars field with an initial investment of $1 billion, marking the first major Western energy investment in the country after sanctions were lifted in 2016. South Pars has the world’s biggest natural gas reserves ever found in one place.
And after hen the French company said it would pull out unless it secured a U.S. sanctions waiver – which it was unable to do – in June, the deputy head of the National Iranian Oil Company, Gholamreza Manouchehri, said that CNPC would take over if Total were to walk away.
“China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) has replaced Total of France with an 80.1 percent stake in the phase 11 of the South Pars (gas field),” IRNA quoted Mohammad Mostafavi, director of investment of Iran’s state oil firm NIOC, as saying, although there was no immediate confirmation of the IRNA report by CNPC.
Following the transaction, CNPC – which earlier held a 30% stake in the project – will now hold an 80.1% stake in the prokject, having taken over Total’s 50.1% share. The remainder is held by Iran’s Petropars.
Total has not yet said what it would do with its stake following the pull out, and it has until Nov. 4 to wind down its Iran operations. Total had spent €40 million on the project by May when it said it would have to withdraw from Iran if it couldn’t secure sanctions waivers from the U.S. Treasury.
So is China willing to risk Trump’s wrath and suffer economic sanctions for taking over where Total left off? It certainly looks like it: back in May we wrote that CNPC will use its banking unit, Bank of Kunlun, as a funding and clearing vehicle if it takes over operation of South Pars. The bank was used to settle tens of billions of dollars worth of oil imports during the UN sanctions against Tehran between 2012 and 2015, and is thus well-equipped to skirt US sanctions.
Sure enough, the US Treasury sanctioned Kunlun in 2012 for conducting business with Iran, however since most of the bank’s settlements during that time were in euros and Chinese renminbi, there was little it could do in terms of credible punishment.
If CNPC goes ahead, it would also likely have to develop crucial equipment, such as large-powered compressors needed for developing gas deposits on this scale, on its own. And since leading manufacturers like U.S. firm GE and Germany’s Siemens could be barred from supplying to Iran under US sanctions, it means even more Chinese companies will find willing demand for their services in Iran.
- Governments Have Destroyed Housing Affordability In Many Places…But Some Refuges Remain
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
From crime rates to life expectancy to income levels, statistics at the national level are next to useless when it comes to measuring the daily lives of ordinary people in the United States. This is because the United States – which is a huge and geographically diverse country – is simply too large to be summed up in a single number. This sort of generalizing is inappropriate for pretty much any place that’s larger than a single metro area, but it’s especially bad when applied to a place like the United States. Even the larger European countries are much smaller, more compact, and less diverse than than US.
The importance of looking at things on a more local level is perhaps most important when looking at issues of homes and home prices. After all, even people who have never studied housing know that housing tends to be highly dependent on local issues, such as climate, local amenities, and access to employment. Many people already know that a four bedroom house in a nice Cleveland suburb is dirt cheap compared to a house of the same size in, say, San Diego, California.
So, it shouldn’t be terribly surprising to find that in many parts of the United States, buying a home continues to be quite affordable by historical standards. This fact has started to attract some attention in recent years. In her column titled “Opting Out of Coastal Madness to Live a Low-Overhead Life,” Anne Trubek discusses how its possible to live comfortably on $40,000. But here’s the rub. To do this, one has to live in an un-sexy midwestern city – albeit in a neighborhood with tree-lined streets and solid, four-bedroom houses.
Statistical data seems to bear this out as well. In June, the Brookings Institution released a new study showing that housing affordability varies greatly from coastal cities to the American interior. And by coastal, they mean “ocean coast.” Living near the coastline of the Great Lakes, apparently brings with it even more affordability:
The basic premise of the research is to analyze affordability based on the fact that “U.S. median house prices have been roughly 2.5 to 4 times median income.”Comparing current home prices to incomes in each area, the report concludes:
Metropolitan areas with low price-income ratios are located in very different parts of the country from high-priced metropolitan areas (Figure 5). The lowest ratio metros are mostly located in the Midwest, especially clustered around the Great Lakes, and scattered across Texas. The metros with the highest ratios are primarily along the Pacific and Northeast Atlantic coasts. South Florida, Colorado, and several smaller metros along the Southeast coast also rank among the most expensive areas. Across the U.S., most states have more metro areas with price-income ratios in the normal range (2.4-4.3) than metros with outlying values.
Comparing against incomes, of course, is important. It’s surely easy to find places where home prices are at rock-bottom levels — in places with depressed economies.
In this case, however, we’ll be looking at incomes in relation to housing prices, and it is not at all a given that places with good job markets must also have unaffordable housing.
Texas, for example, has for years had a substantial amount of employment growth. Yet according to the Brookings report, the state has numerous metro areas with “low” and “very low” price-income ratios on housing.
The focus here is on middle-income families, and on for-purchase housing. Low-income households and renters face a different set of challenges, but even middle-income households may daily be told through the media that housing in the United States is quickly becoming unaffordable. Except those articles and news clips tend to focus on housing in places like Seattle, or along the California coast. And there’s no arguing with the assertion that places like that are “unaffordable” for many middle-income people.
And as the Brooking article notes, and as I’ve noted, the lack of affordability in places like California can often be blamed on state and local government measures designed to limit the construction and diversification of housing. Zoning laws and other regulatory barriers to new housing production have decimated housing affordability of housing in many coastal cities. Cities like San Francisco and Seattle have essentially become playgrounds for the wealthy in which existing homeowners fight tooth and nail any attempt to allow sizable amounts of new housing construction. They do this, they tell us, to preserve “the character of the neighborhood.” But what they’re really doing is using government regulations to drive up the prices on their own real estate, while driving lower-income people further and further out into the periphery. Oh sure, these Progressive guardians of the local “quality of life” might allow a handful of subsidized housing units to be built. After all, somebody has to make your cappuccino or do your dry cleaning. But the overall effect is to ensure few people can afford to move in.
This issue, however, is far less prominent in the un-stylish cities of the interior where city officials still welcome new construction and new housing — and where there’s a greater abundance of less-expensive land.
Still Affordable by International Standards
I started out by noting it’s a bad idea to ignore the enormous regional differences in the United States when considering aggregate data. And that’s true.
It is interesting to note, however, that even when we include the price of California and New England coastal housing in our analysis, housing in the United States is still less expensive than in most other wealthy countries.
According to the OECD, housing expenditure in the United States is 18 percent of gross adjusted disposable income. That’s the third-lowest in the OECD. Moreover, housing costs in the US by this metric are only 75 percent the size of what they are in Denmark and the United Kingdom. US costs are 78 percent the size of housing costs in Italy.
Americans also tend to get more living space for what they pay.
For example, the OECD notes that in the United States, there are on average 2.4 rooms per person. Only Canadians have more rooms per person. In Switzerland, Spain, Denmark, and Japan, however, there are only 1.9 rooms per person. That’s one-fifth less than the average in the US.
And the number of rooms aren’t the only metric by which US homes are bigger. According to the BBC, floor space in newly built homes in the United Kingdom is less than half of what it is in the United States:
Federal Policy Favors Those Who can Get Into Expensive Markets
As the Brookings report notes, however, federal policy puts homeowners in more affordable markets at a disadvantage by favoring rapidly appreciating real-estate in pricier markets:
In low-priced areas, even families that have paid down their mortgages find it difficult to build wealth. That makes it harder for them to supplement retirement savings or borrow against home equity for their kids’ education. Federal tax policies that strongly favor owner-occupied homes over other asset types are not well suited to support middle-class wealth building in lower-price locations.
Another new study, recently profiled at Bloomberg, shows how post-2008 banking regulations favor building wealth through high-priced real estate over other options, such as building a family business.
So, for middle income people in a city where home prices are not appreciating very much, owners will be at a disadvantage — thanks to federal tax and regulatory policies — more than someone who sacrifices other important household expenses in order to live in a pricey market.
When it comes to simply putting a roof over one’s head, however, there are still many markets in the US where it’s possible to buy a house at a price that’s manageable for middle-income households. It’s true that these places are not the glittering stylish cities often featured in movies and sitcoms.
Those places tend to be controlled by wealthy Progressive elites who don’t want anyone new moving in.
- 20 Shot Overnight In Chicago: "I’m Scared To Walk To The Corner Store"
Chicago gun violence erupted to start this weekend, leaving two people dead and at least 18 others severely wounded, including a woman killed in a brutal domestic dispute. It follows last weekend’s record for violent crime, when 12 people were killed and 74 shot.
Some have linked the increased aggression among residents to relentless scorching hot temperatures this summer, and Chicago has been ground zero for inner city aggression in 2018. According to NBC Chicago, the most recent incident occurred Saturday morning in the Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side. A 25-year-old man was wounded in a shooting at about 1:55 a.m. in the 4000 block of West Grenshaw.
Law enforcement officials said he was standing outside when two people began firing shots that struck the man. First responders rushed him to St. Anthony’s Hospital with gunshot wounds to the buttocks and the groin, with the hospital now listing him in fair condition.
Community reacts to senseless shooting in #chicago 😢🙏🏾 #prayforchicago pic.twitter.com/r4UrUoz4AM
— KollegeKidd.com (@KollegeKidd) August 10, 2018
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About 4:45 p.m. Friday, a 29-year-old woman involved in a domestic dispute with someone in the 2500 block of East 79th Street was killed, Chicago police said. The woman, who had a pending court order against the shooter, suffered a fatal gunshot to her back, police said.
Genice Hines, the mother of the 15-year-old, told the Chicago Tribune it felt like any other Friday night, until late evening when she left work and received a terrifying call. Her son and nephew, two close friends, had been shot. The boys were both standing at the 1300 block of South Independence Boulevard in the West Side’s Lawndale neighborhood when they heard gunfire. Reports indicated the children were about a block from the gas station at Roosevelt Road and Independence.
The 15-year-old was shot in the head, and the 17-year-old was shot in the abdomen. First responders took them both to Mount Sinai Hospital where they were both listed in good condition.
“Chicago is a scary place to be,” Hines warned. “Even I’m scared to walk to the corner store.”
The boys were among 20 people shot in the past 48 hours. NBC Chicago provides the list of shootings:
- about midnight, a man was wounded after he was shot somewhere on his body in the Austin neighborhood on the West Side;
- a 17-year-old girl was struck in the left shoulder and lower back while she was standing in the kitchen of a home about 2:10 a.m. in the South Side Chatham neighborhood;
- about 9:15 a.m., two men and a 12-year-old girl were wounded in a drive-by shooting Friday morning in the Gresham neighborhood on the South Side. The three victims conditions were stabilized at area hospitals;
- about 11:45 a.m., A 25-year-old man was shot in the left calf in a shooting Friday morning in the Gresham neighborhood on the South Side. The mans condition was stabilized at Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn;
- about 3:20 p.m., a 28-year-old man was sitting on a porch in the 5100 block of South Prairie Avenue when a dark-colored car pulled up and someone inside opened fire, police said. The man was struck in his leg and foot, and was taken to University of Chicago Medical Center, where his condition stabilized;
- about 5 p.m., a 17-year-old boy was wounded in the abdomen in the 2300 block of North Major. He was taken to Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where he was stabilized;
- shortly after 5 p.m., a 41-year-old was inside an abandoned building in the 11900 block of South Michigan when he got into a fight with someone he knew, police said. The person he was fighting with pulled out a gun and shot him in the right leg. He was taken to Roseland Community Hospital, where his condition was stabilized;
- about 6:15 p.m., a 37-year-old man was shot in his leg in the 6400 block of South Martin Luther King Drive. He taken by paramedics to Saint Bernard Hospital, where his condition stabilized;
- about 7:10 p.m., a 20-year-old bicyclist was seriously wounded after another bicyclist shot him in the West Side Austin neighborhood. He was biking in the 5200 block of West Washington Boulevard when a male following him on a bike opened fire, police said;
- about 8:50 p.m., Two teenage boys were wounded in a shooting Friday night in the Lawndale neighborhood on the Southwest Side. The boys, ages 15 and 17, were standing on a sidewalk in the 1300 block of South Independence Boulevard when he heard gunshots, police said. The older boy was struck in the abdomen, and the 15-year-old suffered a graze wound to his head. They both took themselves to Mount Sinai Hospital, where they were listed in good condition; and
- about 10:20 p.m., Two men were wounded in a shooting Friday night in the West Pullman neighborhood on the Far South Side. A 29-year-old was shot in his leg and was taken to Christ Medical Center, where his condition stabilized, police said. A 33-year-old was struck in his foot and was taken to Roseland Community Hospital, where his condition also stabilized.
Some more disturbing statistics about America’s inner city warzone:
So far this year, 318 people have been killed in Chicago. The silver lining: that is 110 fewer than 2017.
Homicides tend to peak in the summer months, on the weekend and during later hours.
The majority of Chicago homicides are the result of gun violence.
Though homicides are recorded throughout the city, they are most concentrated in the South and West sides.
The majority of the victims of homicide in Chicago are young, black men.
Previously Trump had proposed “sending in the Feds” to stabilize the death toll in the “gun free” city.
If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible “carnage” going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017
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So far, this remains merely a suggestion.
- Will Myanmar Become A Conduit For Iranian Crude Into China?
Authored by Eric Yep via Platts’ “The Barrel” blog,
On June 1, sometime between the US withdrawal from the JCPOA in early May, and its demand in late June that Asian buyers fully halt Iranian oil purchases, PetroChina snuck in a shipment of Iranian crude through Myanmar to its Yunnan Petrochemical refinery in southern China.
On any other route, this would have been just another Iranian oil shipment. But using the Myanmar-China oil and gas pipeline brings new complications.
That’s because the pipeline has a new avatar – it is now a part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, along with other large infrastructure projects that were not originally a part of BRI, but were included later to boost the profile of the program.
Sending Iranian crude through an oil pipeline with the “Belt and Road” label removes any doubts of whether BRI’s projects have political motives or not.
For critics of BRI, it adds fodder to the narrative that the infrastructure plan is a tool for China to undercut the influence of the US. BRI already has a serious public relations problem and is viewed with suspicion, sometimes for good reason.
Earlier this week, the renewal of US secondary sanctions on Iran faced strong opposition from the remaining JCPOA signatories. China has made it clear it will continue to import Iranian barrels, and using a BRI project to do so will give the US ammunition to criticize BRI openly, potentially leaving the host country open to US reprisals.
BRI has not been particularly polarizing so far, and its participants have included US allies. Oil and gas pipelines are magnets for controversy, however. From the Sumed pipeline in the Middle East to Nordstream 2 in Europe, there hasn’t been an international oil or gas pipeline that was devoid of geopolitics. Myanmar will be no different.
THE BURMESE CONNECTION
The Panama-flagged Dore delivered its cargo of Iranian crudes at Maday Island on June 1, the only vessel to have shipped oil from Iran to Myanmar since the 13 million mt/year (260,000 b/d) Yunnan Petrochemical refinery in southern China started operations in August last year.
Dore’s cargo of 948,000 barrels of crude oil included 474,000 barrels of Iranian South Pars condensate. The refinery said it also processed 56,000 mt of Iranian Heavy crude received via the 1,420 km pipeline, Platts reported previously.
This was the first batch of Iranian Heavy crude processed by a PetroChina refinery, and is unlikely to be the last. Iranian grades contain a relatively higher amount of metallic and chloride contaminants that corrodes refinery units, due to which some of PetroChina’s biggest refineries like Dalian Petrochemical and Guangxi Petrochemical, were unable to crack the crude.
Yunnan Petrochemical has a 1.2 million mt/year delayed coking unit that enables it to process Iranian crude, and it has already tested the first cargo successfully. Other major Chinese refineries under Sinopec have used Iranian crudes and found them attractive because of a high naphtha yield, which is needed for petrochemical products.
All of this paves the way for the China-Myanmar pipeline to become a conduit for Iranian crude, even if it is for just one refinery, which if fully utilized will account for nearly a third of China’s intake of Iranian crude. China’s imports of Iranian crude were around 638,000 b/d in the first half this year.
The Myanmar-China pipeline runs from Maday Island, near the town of Kyaukpyu in Rakhine state, and connects with China’s domestic pipeline to Kunming city in Yunnan province. It is fed by a deepwater VLCC terminal and tank storage farm, and was negotiated with the former military government of Myanmar. State-owned Chinese media now call it a “pioneer project” of BRI.
The final question is around the implications for Myanmar, and the legal complications for players in the Iran crude supply chain, like pipeline operators, shipowners, ports or banks involved.
Legal experts advise caution.
“In respect of persons involved in transporting or storing petroleum from Iran, there is a risk that they could be subject to US sanctions,” Clyde & Co Partner Avryl Lattin said.
Sanctions or other punitive measures of the Trump administration are often considered on a case-by-case basis, such as special waivers given to India to import Russian military equipment because of its position as a budding strategic partner of Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy, Collin Koh, Research Fellow at the Maritime Security Programme of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Singapore, said.
“It depends a lot on how the target country weighs in significance within the US strategic calculus. Myanmar is certainly not one country that the US can afford to alienate now,” Koh said.
There are signs that Myanmar wants to turn towards China due to the Rakhine issue, but at the same time Naypyidaw is more amenable to Western concerns and interests than ever before, He said. Due to this, even India and Australia are careful in their treatment of Myanmar.
So the US may not want to exacerbate the situation by imposing punitive actions on Myanmar just because Iranian oil was piped through its territory to southern China, Koh added.
“The concerns are long-term geopolitics,” he said.
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