Jan 13

Today’s News 13th January 2017

  • Why Has The White House Suddenly Released A Strategy For Dealing With A Catastrophic Meteor Impact?

    As SHTFPlan.com's Mac Slavo notes, we should take notice at the government preparations for disaster, and the possibility of a cataclysmic collision with damaging objects in space.

    At the same time, we should take notice at what they are preparing for with all the billions of dollars thrown at defense and survival, it comes in secretive infrastructure for a reclusive sect of power, and in top-down plans to contain the unrest.

     

    Preparations for the individual to survive, and be resilient are not being put in place in this government, though many other governments have made such an investment into the lives of individuals. Time and again, these people are told to brace for the worst, with little to show for it. A few have made their preps, and it may yet prove useful in this or some other disaster.

    Why Has The White House Suddenly Released A Strategy For Dealing With The Threat Of A Catastrophic Meteor Impact?

    Authored by The End Of The American Dream's Michael Snyder,

    Does the White House know something that the rest of us do not? As the Obama administration draws to a close, the White House has suddenly released a major document that details a multi-pronged strategy for dealing with the threat of a catastrophic meteor impact. Most of us remember movies such as “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon” that attempted to depict what such a crisis would look like, but up until fairly recently the U.S. government has never seemed to take this kind of threat very seriously.

    So what has changed?

    Of all the things that the White House could be focusing on, why this?

    And this new report is just the latest in a series of measures that the government has taken over the past couple of years to help prepare us for incoming meteors and asteroids. The following is an excerpt from a recent Gizmodo article…

    Concern over an apocalyptic asteroid strike has risen all the way to the top: The White House released a document this week detailing a strategy for National Near Earth Object (NEO) preparedness. Morgan Freeman would no doubt be proud, although honestly, the nation might have more pressing apocalypse concerns closer to home.

     

    Last year brought renewed interest in handling humanity-ending impact events. After a 2014 audit showed that NASA had a cruddy NEO preparedness system, the agency founded a new Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) last year to detect all of our potentially nasty NEO neighbors. The office quickly escalated talk to action, running preparedness drills with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), launching spacecraft to gather asteroid information, and even drawing up plans to nuke the bad boys out of the sky if things get dicey.

    NASA continues to assure us that no threat is imminent, so why spend so much time, energy and resources on a non-existent crisis?

    If you want to read the 25 page document that the White House just released, it is entitled “National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy” and you can read it for yourself right here.

    The document was put together by the Interagency Working Group for Detecting and Mitigating the Impact of Earth-bound Near-Earth Objects, and it outlined seven key objectives that the authors believe are important…

    1. Enhance NEO detection, tracking, and characterization capabilities
    2. Develop methods for NEO deflection and disruption
    3. Improve modelling, predictions, and information integration
    4. Develop emergency procedures for NEO impact scenarios
    5. Establish NEO impact response and recovery procedures
    6. Leverage and support international cooperation
    7. Establish coordination and communications protocols and thresholds for taking action

    And without a doubt, we definitely do need to enhance our detection abilities. Just the other day, a very large asteroid barely missed us, and we had only discovered it two days earlier…

    Early Monday morning, while the US East Coast was pouring coffee, dropping kids off at school, and cursing in traffic, a space rock as big as a 10-story building slipped past Earth.

     

    The asteroid, dubbed 2017 AG13, was discovered only Saturday by the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey, according to an email from Slooh, a company that broadcasts live views of space.

    We were very fortunate this time, but the truth is that our planet crosses paths with other giant space rocks on a very regular basis.

    In fact, a near-Earth object that is being called “a cross between an asteroid and a comet” will come fairly close to our planet in February…

    The latter “object”, dubbed the 2016 WF9, was detected by NASA in late November and has left scientist’s scratching their heads.

     

    They have described the celestial rock as a cross between an asteroid and a comet.

     

    It’s in the middle of its of.9 year orbit between Jupiter and Earth and will approach us on February 25, flying by at a distance of 32million miles from the planet.

    Currently, approximately 10,000 major near-Earth objects have been identified by scientists, and about 10 percent of them are one kilometer or larger in size.

    If one of those monsters directly hit our planet, we truly would be facing an extinction-level event.

    For example, just imagine the kind of devastation that would happen if a large asteroid or meteor hit the Atlantic Ocean. Tsunami waves hundreds of feet tall would be sent racing toward the coasts of North America, South America, Africa and western Europe, and millions upon millions of people would die.

    This is something that scientists have actually studied. According to a study conducted at the University of California at Santa Cruz, if a giant meteor did strike the Atlantic Ocean we could potentially see tsunami waves as high as 400 feet slam into the east coast of the United States…

    If an asteroid crashes into the Earth, it is likely to splash down somewhere in the oceans that cover 70 percent of the planet’s surface. Huge tsunami waves, spreading out from the impact site like the ripples from a rock tossed into a pond, would inundate heavily populated coastal areas. A computer simulation of an asteroid impact tsunami developed by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows waves as high as 400 feet sweeping onto the Atlantic Coast of the United States.

    Depending on where the meteor strikes, we could potentially see New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Charleston, Miami and countless other major coastal cities all wiped out on a single day.

    Right now, 39 percent of all Americans live in a county that directly borders a shoreline.

    To say that we are vulnerable to a massive tsunami caused by a meteor impact would be a massive understatement.

    And scientists assure us that it will happen someday. In fact, I don’t know if you have noticed, but our area of space seems to have a lot more “traffic” in it these days. NASA tells us that there is nothing to be worried about, but others are concerned that something may be coming toward us or that we are moving toward something.

    Ultimately, we need to remember that we are essentially a speck of dust hurtling through a massive galaxy at incredibly high speeds, and our galaxy is only an extremely small part of an absolutely enormous and ever changing universe.

  • Mexican Drug Cartels Looting State-Owned Gas Pipelines For Black Market Sales

    A couple of weeks ago we highlighted the protests that had engulfed Mexico after the finance ministry announced plans to raise gasoline prices by 20.1% starting January 1st.  Amid the chaos, the country’s powerful Jalisco New Generation cartel threatened to to burn down gas stations as retribution for taking advantage of “the majority of the people who don’t make even a minimum wage.”

    But before readers blow this off as just another protest by an angry population which fails to grasp the “global deflationary collapse” while focusing on “fringe, outlier events”  – at least in the words of central bankers –  things suddenly got serious when none other than the country’s powerful Jalisco New Generation cartel has entered the fray, threatening to burn gas stations in response to the price hikes, according to Jalisco authorities cited by TeleSur.

     

    “They are speculating in order to obtain million dollar profits from the majority of the people who don’t make even a minimum wage, we have already realized that the (shortage) of fuel is because dealers don’t want to sell fuel unless they can do so at a profit, all of our people are now ready to start the mission,” the Mexican drug cartel stated in a WhatsApp message circulating in Jalisco.

     

    “The CJNG, in support of the working class, commits itself to making burn all the gasoline stations that to December 30 of the current year, at 10:00 p.m.” — before the price increases go into effect — “have not normalized the sale of fuel at the fair price,” the message said, according to the Mexican news outlet Aristegui Noticias.

    Gas Looting

     

    Alas, after the knee jerk reaction to riot subsided, which would have only resulted in gas prices soaring even higher anyway, Mexico’s drug cartels did what any clever black market entrepreneurial organization would do:  they decided to steal the gasoline and sell it themselves.  With a modest upfront capital investment of $5,000 – $8,000, the cartels have realized they can tap directly into state-owned gas pipelines and withdraw seemingly unlimited supplies of gasoline which they then sell along the highway at a discount to official government prices.  It’s a win-win situation whereby the drug cartels make 100% profit margins and citizens get “cheap” fuel.

    The black market is booming. Several states experienced gasoline shortages at the end of last year as more thieves tapped into state-owned Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) pipelines. The pilfered fuel was sold to drivers hoping to save money. Pipeline theft in 2015 increased sevenfold, to more than 5,500 taps, from just 710 in 2010. Pemex attributes the company’s 12-year slide in crude production in part to the growth in illegal taps.

     

    The drug cartels have turned to fuel theft as a side business worth hundreds of millions of dollars each year, and crime groups focused solely on gasoline robbery have sprung up, says Alejandro Schtulmann, president of Empra, a political-risk consulting firm in Mexico City. “You only need to invest $5,000 or $8,000 to buy some specific equipment, and the outcome of that is huge earnings.”

     

    Fuel theft creates a vicious cycle: The theft increases costs for Pemex and makes the official gasoline supply more scarce, contributing to higher prices for legal consumers. Theft amounts to about $1 billion a year, says Luis Miguel Labardini, an energy consultant at Marcos y Asociados and senior adviser to Pemex’s chief financial officer in the 1990s. “If Pemex were a public company, they would be in financial trouble just because of the theft of fuel,” he says. “It’s that bad.”

    Of course, there are some losers in all of this as Enrique Peña Nieto has basically become the least popular President in Mexico since one-party ruled ended in 2000.

    All this is creating headaches for Enrique Peña Nieto, whose popularity was already the lowest of any president since one-party rule ended in 2000. Peña Nieto is limited to a single term, and polls show potential candidates from his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) trail populist opposition leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the race for the mid-2018 presidential election. López Obrador has made the jump in gasoline prices his latest rallying cry against the administration.

     

    “This is definitely going to have consequences for the PRI,” says Jorge Chabat, a political scientist at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching, a university based in Mexico City. “Frankly, I don’t see any way that they can win in 2018.”

    State-owned Pemex is also one of the losers with the company expected to lose about $1 billion to theft this year…but no one really pays taxes anyway so it shouldn’t be that big a deal.

  • Neil Cavuto Kicks CNN in the Ass for Ignoring Obama’s Attacks on Fox News Over the Past 8 Years

    Over the past 8 years, on a continuous basis, the liberal media has impugned the integrity of the only conservative news outlet in the country (Fox) — laughing and smirking while President Obama kicked them in the shins. Now that Trump refused a question from a reporter at CNN, which was punishment for publishing some very damaging information about him that wasn’t true or fact checked, CNN is crying ‘unfair’, causing their supporters to accuse Trump of (wait for it) FASCISM. There’s a double standard being pressed by here by CNN, wanting to be treated fairly while at the same time being shameful in their own conduct.

    The proverbial shoe is on the other foot, claimed Fox’s Neil Cavuto, and it probably isn’t a very comfy one. The Obama administration has gotten away with murder (extra Seth Rich) over the past 8 years and not once did CNN take him to task for it, instead opting to serve him and his ilk in a manner which is the antithesis of a free and independent press.

    They’ve ruined the fifth estate, which is why start up media organizations are booming across the internet.

     

    Content originally generated at iBankCoin.com

  • The Utter Stupidity Of The New Cold War

    Submitted by Gary Leupp via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    It seems so strange, twenty-seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to be living through a new Cold War with (as it happens, capitalist) Russia.

    The Russian president is attacked by the U.S. political class and media as they never attacked Soviet leaders; he is personally vilified as a corrupt, venal dictator, who arrests or assassinates political opponents and dissident journalists, and is hell-bent on the restoration of the USSR.

    (The latter claim rests largely on Vladimir Putin’s comment that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a “catastrophe” and “tragedy” — which in many respects it was. The press chooses to ignore his comment that “Anyone who does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart, while anyone who wants to restore it has no brain.” It conflicts with the simple talking-point that Putin misses the imperial Russia of the tsars if not the commissars and, burning with resentment over the west’s triumph in the Cold War, plans to exact revenge through wars of aggression and territorial expansion.)

    The U.S. media following its State Department script depicts Russia as an expansionist power. That it can do so, so successfully, such that even rather progressive people—such as those appalled by Trump’s victory who feel inclined to blame it on an external force—believe it, is testimony to the lingering power and utility of the Cold War mindset.

    The military brass keep reminding us: We are up against an existential threat! One wants to say that this — obviously — makes no sense! Russia is twice the size of the U.S. with half its population. Its foreign bases can be counted on two hands. The U.S. has 800 or so bases abroad.

    Russia’s military budget is 14% of the U.S. figure. It does not claim to be the exceptional nation appointed by God to preserve “security” on its terms anywhere on the globe. Since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the U.S. has waged war (sometimes creating new client-states) in Bosnia (1994-5),  Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001- ), Iraq (2003- ), Libya (2011), and Syria (2014- ), while raining down drone strikes from Pakistan to Yemen to North Africa. These wars-based-on-lies have produced hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, millions of refugees, and general ongoing catastrophe throughout the “Greater Middle East.” There is no understating their evil.

    The U.S. heads an expanding military alliance formed in 1949 to confront the Soviet Union and global communism in general. Its raison d’être has been dead for many years. Yet it has expanded from 16 to 28 members since 1999, and new members Estonia and Latvia share borders with Russia.

    (Imagine the Warsaw Pact expanding to include Mexico. But no, the Warsaw Pact of the USSR and six European allies was dissolved 26 years ago in the idealistic expectation that NATO would follow in a new era of cooperation and peace.)

    And this NATO alliance, in theory designed to defend the North Atlantic, was only first deployed after the long (and peaceful) first Cold War, in what had been neutral Yugoslavia (never a member of either the Warsaw Pact nor NATO), Afghanistan (over 3000 miles from the North Atlantic), and the North African country of Libya. Last summer NATO held its most massive military drills since the collapse of the Soviet Union, involving 31,000 troops in Poland, rehearsing war with Russia. (The German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier actually criticized this exercise as “warmongering.”)

    Alliance officials expressed outrage when Russia responded to the warmongering by placing a new S-400 surface-to-air missiles and nuclear-capable Iskander systems on its territory of Kaliningrad between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic coast. But Russia has in fact been comparatively passive in a military sense during this period.

    In 1999, as NATO was about to occupy the Serbian province of Kosovo (soon to be proclaimed an independent country, in violation of international law), nearby Russian peacekeepers raced to the airport in Pristina, Kosovo, to secure it an ensure a Russian role in the Serbiam province’s  future. It was a bold move that could have provoked a NATO-Russian clash. But the British officer on the ground wisely refused an order from Gen. Wesley Clark to block the Russian move, declaring he would not start World War III for Gen. Clark.

    This, recall, was after Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright (remember, the Hillary shill who said there’s a special place in hell reserved for women who don’t vote for women) presented to the Russian and Serbian negotiators at Rambouillet a plan for NATO occupation of not just Kosovo but all Serbia. It was a ridiculous demand, rejected by the Serbs and Russians, but depicted by unofficial State Department spokesperson and warmonger Christiane Amanpour as the “will of the international community.” As though Russia was not a member of the international community!

    This Pristina airport operation was largely a symbolic challenge to U.S. hegemony over the former Yugoslavia, a statement of protest that should have been taken seriously at the time.

    In any case, the new Russian leader Putin was gracious after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, even offering NATO a military  transport corridor through Russia to Afghanistan (closed in 2015). He was thanked by George W. Bush with the expansion of NATO by seven more members in 2004. (The U.S. press made light of this extraordinary geopolitical development; it saw and continues to see the expansion of NATO as no more problematic than the expansion of the UN or the European Union.) Then in April 2008 NATO announced that Georgia would be among the next members accepted into the alliance.

    Soon the crazy Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, emboldened by the promise of near-term membership, provoked a war with the breakaway republic of South Ossetia, which had never accepted inclusion of the new Georgian state established upon the dissolution of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1991. The Ossetians, fearing resurgent Georgian nationalism, had sought union with the Russian Federation. So had the people of Abkhazia.

    The two “frozen conflicts,” between the Georgian state and these peoples, had been frozen due to the deployment of Russian and Georgian peacekeepers. Russia had not recognized these regions as independent states nor agreed to their inclusion in the Russian Federation. But when Russian soldiers died in the Georgian attack ion August, Russia responded with a brief punishing invasion. It then recognized of the two new states (six months after the U.S. recognized Kosovo).

    (Saakashvili, in case you’re interested, was voted out of power, disgraced, accused of economic crimes, and deprived of his Georgian citizenship. After a brief stint at the Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University—of which I as a Tufts faculty member feel deeply ashamed—he was appointed as governor of Odessa in Ukraine by the pro-NATO regime empowered by the U.S.-backed coup of February 22, 2014.)

    Sen. John McCain proclaimed in 2008: “We are all Georgians now,” and advocated U.S. military aid to the Georgian regime. An advocate of war as a rule, McCain then became a big proponent of regime change in Ukraine to allow for that country’s entry into NATO. Neocons in the State Department including most importantly McCain buddy Victoria Nuland, boasted of spending $ 5 billion in support of “the Ukrainian people’s European aspirations” (meaning: the desire of many Ukrainians in the western part of the country to join the European Union — risking, although they perhaps do not realize it, a reduction in their standard of living under a Greek-style austerity program — to be followed by NATO membership, tightening the military noose around Russia).

    The Ukrainian president opted out in favor of a generous Russian aid package. That decision — to deny these “European aspirations” — was used to justify the coup.

    But look at it from a Russian point of view. Just look at this map, of the expanding NATO alliance, and imagine it spreading to include that vast country (the largest in Europe, actually) between Russia to the east and Poland to the west, bordering the Black Sea to the south. The NATO countries at present are shown in dark blue, Ukraine and Georgia in green. Imagine those countries’ inclusion.

    And imagine NATO demanding that Russia vacate its Sevastopol naval facilities, which have been Russian since 1783, turning them over to the (to repeat: anti-Russian) alliance. How can anyone understand the situation in Ukraine without grasping this basic history?

    The Russians denounced the coup against President Viktor Yanukovych (democratically elected—if it matters—in 2010), which was abetted by neo-fascists and marked from the outset by an ugly Russophobic character encouraged by the U.S. State Department. The majority population in the east of the country, inhabited by Russian-speaking ethnic Russians and not even part of Ukraine until 1917, also denounced the coup and refused to accept the unconstitutional regime that assumed power after Feb. 22.

    When such people rejected the new government, and declared their autonomy, the Ukrainian army was sent in to repress them but failed, embarrassingly, when the troops confronted by angry babushkas turned back. The regime since has relied on the neo-fascist Azov Battalion to harass secessionists in what has become a new “frozen conflict.”

    Russia has no doubt assisted the secessionists while refusing to annex Ukrainian territory, urging a federal system for the country to be negotiated by the parties. Russian families straddle the Russian-Ukrainian border. There are many Afghan War veterans in both countries. The Soviet munitions industry integrated Russian and Ukrainian elements. One must assume there are more than enough Russians angry about such atrocities as the May 2014 killing of 42 ethnic Russian government opponents in Odessa to bolster the Donbas volunteers.

    But there is little evidence (apart from a handful of reports about convoys of dozens of “unmarked military vehicles” from Russia in late 2014) for a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. And the annexation of Crimea (meaning, its restoration to its 1954 status as Russian territory) following a credible referendum did not require any “invasion” since there were already 38,000 Russian troops stationed there. All they had to do was to secure government buildings, and give Ukrainian soldiers the option of leaving or joining the Russian military. (A lot of Ukrainian soldiers opted to stay and accept Russian citizenship.)

    Still, these two incidents — the brief 2008 war in Georgia, and Moscow’s (measured) response to the Ukrainian coup since 2014 — have been presented as evidence of a general project to disrupt the world order by military expansion, requiring a firm U.S. response. The entirety of the cable news anchor class embraces this narrative.

    But they are blind fools. Who has in this young century disrupted world order more than the U.S., wrecking whole countries, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocents, provoking more outrage through grotesquely documented torture, generating new terror groups, and flooding Europe with refugees who include some determined to sow chaos and terror in European cities? How can any rational person with any awareness of history since 1991 conclude that Russia is the aggressive party?

    And yet, this is the conventional wisdom. I doubt you can get a TV anchor job if you question it. The teleprompter will refer routinely to Putin’s aggression and Russian expansion and the need for any mature presidential candidate to respect the time-honored tradition of supporting NATO no matter what. And now the anchor is expected to repeat that all 17 U.S. intelligence services have concluded that Vladimir Putin interfered in the U.S. presidential election.

    Since there is zero evidence for this, one must conclude that the Democratic losers dipped into the reliable grab bag of scapegoats and posited that Russia and Putin in particular must have hacked the DNC in order to — through the revelation of primary sources of unquestionable validity, revealing the DNC’s determination to make Clinton president, while sabotaging Sanders and promoting (through their media surrogates)  Donald Trump as the Republican candidate — undermine Clinton’s legitimacy.

    All kinds of liberals, including Sanders’ best surrogates like Nina Turner, are totally on board the Putin vilification campaign. It is sad and disturbing that so many progressive people are so willing to jump on the new Cold War bandwagon. It is as though they have learned nothing from history but are positively eager, in their fear and rage, to relive the McCarthy era.

    But the bottom line is: U.S. Russophobia does not rest on reason, judgment, knowledge of recent history and the ability to make rational comparisons. It rests on religious-like assumptions of “American exceptionalism” and in particular the right of the U.S. to expand militarily at Russia’s expense — as an obvious good in itself, rather than a distinct, obvious evil threatening World War III.

    The hawks in Congress — bipartisan, amoral, ignorant, knee-jerk Israel apologists, opportunist scum — are determined to dissuade the president-elect (bile rises in my throat as I use that term, but it’s true that he’s that, technically) from any significant rapprochement with Russia. (Heavens, they must be horrified at the possibility that Trump follows Kissinger’s reported advice and recognizes the Russian annexation of Crimea!) They want to so embarrass him with the charge of being (as Hillary accused him of being during the campaign) Putin’s “puppet” that he backs of from his vague promise to “get along” with Russia.

    They don’t want to get along with Russia. They want more NATO expansion, more confrontation. They are furious with Russian-Syrian victories over U.S-backed, al-Qaeda-led forces in Syria, especially the liberation of Aleppo that the U.S. media (1) does not cover having no reporters on the ground, and little interest since events in Syria so powerfully challenge the State Department’s talking points that shape U.S. reporting, (2) misreports systematically, as the tragic triumph of the evil, Assad’s victory over an imaginary heroic opposition, and (3) sees the strengthening of the position of the Syrian stats as an indication of Russia’s reemergence as a superpower. (This they they cannot accept, as virtually a matter of religious conviction; the U.S. in official doctrine must maintain “full spectrum dominance” over the world and prohibit the emergence of any possible competitor, forever.)

    * * *

    The first Cold War was based on the western capitalists’ fear of socialist expansion. It was based on the understanding that the USSR had defeated the Nazis, had extraordinary prestige in the world, and was the center for a time of the expanding global communist movement. It was based on the fear that more and more countries would achieve independence from western imperialism, denying investors their rights to dominate world markets. It had an ideological content. This one does not. Russia and the U.S. are equally committed to capitalism and neoliberal ideology. Their conflict is of the same nature as the U.S. conflict with Germany in the early 20th century. The Kaiser’s Germany was at least as “democratic” as the U.S.; the system was not the issue. It was just jockeying for power, and as it happened, the U.S. intervening in World War I belatedly, after everybody else was exhausted, cleaned up. In World War II in Europe, the U.S. having hesitated to invade the continent despite repeated Soviet appeals to do so, responded to the fall of Berlin to Soviet forces by rushing token forces to the city to claim joint credit.

    And then it wound up, after the war, establishing its hegemony over most of Europe — much, much more of Europe than became the Soviet-dominated zone, which has since with the Warsaw Pact evaporated.  Russia is a truncated, weakened version of its former self. It is not threatening the U.S. in any of the ways the U.S. is threatening itself. It is not expanding a military alliance. It is not holding huge military exercises on the U.S. border. It is not destroying the Middle East through regime-change efforts justified to the American people by sheer misinformation. In September 2015 Putin asked the U.S., at the United Nations: “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

    Unfortunately the people of this country are not educated, by their schools, press or even their favorite websites to realize what has been done, how truly horrible it is, and how based it all is on lies. Fake news is the order of the day.

    Up is down, black is white, Russia is the aggressor, the U.S. is the victim. The new president must be a team-player, and for God’s sake, understand that Putin is today’s Hitler, and if Trump wants to get along with him, he will have to become a team-player embracing this most basic of political truths in this particular imperialist country: Russia (with its nukes, which are equally matched with the U.S. stockpile) is the enemy, whose every action must be skewed to inflame anti-Russian feeling, as the normative default sentiment towards this NATO-encircled, sanction-ridden, non-threatening nation, under what seems by comparison a cautious, rational leadership?

    * * *

    CNN’s horrible “chief national correspondent” John King (former husband of equally horrid Dana Bash, CNN’s “chief political correspondent”) just posed the question, with an air of aggressive irritation: “Who does Donald Trump respect more, the U.S. intelligence agencies, or the guy who started Wikileaks [Assange]?”

    It’s a demand for the Trump camp to buy the Russian blame game, or get smeared as a fellow-traveler with international whistle-blowers keen on exposing the multiple crimes of U.S. imperialism.

    So the real question is: Will Trump play ball, and credit the “intelligence community” that generates “intelligence products” on demand, or brush aside the war hawks’ drive for a showdown with Putin’s Russia? Will the second Cold War peter out coolly, or culminate in the conflagration that “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) was supposed to render impossible?

    The latter would be utterly stupid. But stupid people — or wise people, cynically exploiting others’ stupidity — are shaping opinion every day, and have been since the first Cold War, based like this one on innumerable lies.

  • New York Times Admits "Higher Minimum Wage May Have Losers"

    The New York Times would like for you to know that, after attending the annual meeting of the American Economic Association where they sat in on multiple presentations on the economic impacts of minimum wage, they can now confirm what most of us have known for most of our adult lives, namely that basic economic supply/demand models actually work.

    Apparently, the NYT was pleasantly surprised when the first presentation suggested that higher minimum wage didn’t actually result in job losses, just lower hours, but then quickly realized it’s basically the same thing.

    At first glance, the findings were consistent with the growing body of work on the minimum wage: While the workers saw their wages rise, there was little decline in hiring. But other results suggested that the minimum wage was having large effects. Most important, the hours a given worker spent on a given job fell substantially for jobs that typically pay a low wage — say, answering customer emails.

     

    Mr. Horton concluded that when forced to pay more in wages, many employers were hiring more productive workers, so that the overall amount they spent on each job changed far less than the minimum-wage increase would have suggested. The more productive workers appeared to finish similar work more quickly.

    Unfortunately, the second study left a bit less to the imagination.  After studying “tens of thousands of restaurants in the San Francisco area,” researchers
    Michael Luca of Harvard Business School and Dara Lee Luca of Mathematica Policy Research found that many lower rated restaurants have a unique way of dealing with minimum wage hikes: they simply go out of business.

    A second study presented at the conference suggests another way that employers may respond to a rising minimum wage: simply going out of business.

     

    The husband-and-wife research team of Michael Luca of Harvard Business School and Dara Lee Luca of Mathematica Policy Research identified the ratings of tens of thousands of restaurants in the San Francisco area on the website Yelp and found that many poorly rated restaurants tend to go out of business after a minimum-wage increase takes effect.

    Finally, confirming what we’ve noted multiple times (and basic common sense for that matter), Zane Tankel, an owner of several dozen Applebee’s restaurants in the New York City area, informed the startled New York Times that higher minimum wage simply improves the ROIC profile of capital investments thereby speeding up employee replacement projects….shocking.

    Zane Tankel, chief executive and equity partner in a group that owns and operates several dozen Applebee’s restaurants in the New York City area, said replacing low-skilled workers with higher-skilled ones after the state’s recent minimum-wage increases is “not something that we try to do.”

     

    Mr. Tankel argued that differences in the productivity of low-level workers in his industry are not very big. “It’s just a lot more money for the exact same job description,” he said. He is accelerating automation in his restaurants, including tablet devices for ordering certain items and payment, to offset the costs of the higher minimum.

    With that, here are some charts illustrating where the most minimum wage workers will lose their jobs over the coming years:

    Min Wage

    Min Wage

     

    And while California and Washington DC have already won their “Fight for $15”, here’s where all the other states stand in their efforts to crush low-income workers.

    Min Wage

  • China Daily: Tillerson's "Disastrous" Actions Would Set The Course For A "Devastating Confrontation"

    We were surprised by how contained China was this morning after yesterday’s confirmation hearing of Rex Tillerson, in which the former Exxon CEO said that a failure to respond to China had allowed it to “keep pushing the envelope” in the South China Sea and added that “we’re going to have to send China a clear signal that first the island-building stops and second your access to those islands is also not going to be allowed” and that putting military assets on those islands was “akin to Russia’s taking Crimea” from Ukraine.”

    Traditionally such a direct threat would be i) perceived as very undiplomatic and ii) prompt an immediate, and angry rebuke from Beijing, with China immediately shifting to the offensive.

    “This is the sort of off-the-cuff remark akin to a tweet that pours fuel on the fire and maybe makes things worse,” Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra told Bloomberg. “Short of going to war with China, there is nothing the Americans can do.”

    But not today: during his press conference earlier today, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang could barely muster the will to sound defensive, saying China has been acting within the limits of its sovereignty. “Like the U.S., China has the right within its own territory to carry out normal activities,” he said at a regular briefing in Beijing. When asked repeatedly about Tillerson’s comments on blocking access to islands, China’s foreign ministry spokesman said he couldn’t make any guesses as to what Tillerson was referring to and would not answer hypothetical questions, Reuters reported.

    As it turns out, China may not have had time to digest what Tillerson said. After all his South China sea remark was toward the end of his nearly all day long hearing, and so many local media outlets may have simply missed it. However, they caught up today, and first China Daily, then its nationalist tabloid, the Global Times took turns to first mock, then attack Tillerson.

    Here is the gist of the China Daily op-ed published earlier today: according to the Chinese daily mouthpiece, not only were Tillerson’s views “divergent from, even contrary to, those of Trump on some critical issues. He openly conceded he is yet to have a serious, in-depth discussion with Trump on foreign policy imperatives. These boil down to one simple point – his remarks at the Wednesday hearing, sensational as they were, turned out to be of little reference value except for judging his personal orientations.“

    Yet while China realizes that Tillerson’s bluster was intended for a specific audience, that does not make it any happier:

    The backlash that has ensued is understandable. It is certainly no small matter for a man intended to be the US diplomat in chief to display such undisguised animosity toward China.  Tillerson labeled China’s reclamation projects in the South China Sea as “an illegal taking of disputed areas without regard for international norms,” in obvious disregard of the essential truth that all those activities took place well within the country’s persistent, historical territorial claims.

     

    Blaming the “extremely worrisome” state of affairs in the South China Sea on an “inadequate US response”, the US secretary of state nominee even claimed China’s access to those islands should “not to be allowed”. Which sounded intimidating; though he stopped short of elaborating how to achieve it. And like Trump, he blamed Beijing for “not being a reliable partner” in dealing with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

    And then, the not so subtle threats followed:

    Such remarks are not worth taking seriously because they are a mish-mash of naivety, shortsightedness, worn-out prejudices, and unrealistic political fantasies. Should he act on them in the real world, it would be disastrous.

     

    As many have observed, it would set a course for devastating confrontation between China and the US. After all, how can the US deny China access to its own territories without inviting the latter’s legitimate, defensive responses?

    Finally, the mocking of Tillerson as a clueless former company exec who does not have the faintest understanding of diplomacy: “Tillerson wanted a reality-based China policy that is “based on what we see and not based on what we hope”. But what he presented was based more on what prejudice and arms-spurred self-righteousness make him believe and hope than on real-world realities. What happened on Wednesday shows that if and when confirmed, Rex Tillerson needs to first acquaint himself with the ABCs of China-US relations and diplomacy at large.“

    The Global Times approach was almost verbatim. First, the justification of Tillerson’s “bluster”:

    It is suspected that he merely wanted to curry favor from senators and increase his chances of being confirmed by intentionally showing a tough stance toward China.

     

    Tillerson did not give details of how he would achieve his self-proclaimed goals. Nonetheless, he also mentioned that Chinese and American economic interests are deeply intertwined and that “China has been a valuable ally in curtailing elements of radical Islam.” He noted that “We should not let disagreements over other issues exclude areas for productive partnership.”

    Motives aside, the GT then explained that China no longer views itself as America’s subordinate:

    China has enough determination and strength to make sure that his rabble rousing will not succeed. Unless Washington plans to wage a large-scale war in the South China Sea, any other approaches to prevent Chinese access to the islands will be foolish. The US has no absolute power to dominate the South China Sea.

    Following this, just like in the case of China Daily, there was the mocking:

    Tillerson had better bone up on nuclear power strategies if he wants to force a big nuclear power to withdraw from its own territories. Probably he just has oil prices and currency rates in his mind as former ExxonMobil CEO.

    Next, the not so thinly veiled threat – again – aimed not so much at Tillerson but at Trump:

    As Trump has yet to be sworn in, China has shown restraint whenever his team members expressed radical views. But the US should not be misled into thinking that Beijing will be fearful of their threats.

    How does it all end according to China? Unless Trump’s diplomatic team changes course, the Times said “the two sides better prepare for a military clash.”

    Tillerson’s statements regarding the islands in the South China Sea are far from professional. If Trump’s diplomatic team shapes future Sino-US ties as it is doing now, the two sides had better prepare for a military clash. South China Sea countries will accelerate their negotiations on a Code of Conduct. They have the ability to solve divergences by themselves without US interference.

    And the conclusion:

    Just as the Philippines and Vietnam are trying to warm their ties with China, Tillerson’s words cannot be more irritating.  It is hoped that Tillerson will desire a productive partnership with China more and his harsh words are just coaxing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But no matter what, China will always respond to various US diplomatic maneuvers.

    As a reminder, all this has already happened and Trump isn’t president yet. We eagerly look forward to the president-elect’s next steps vis-a-vis an increasingly angry CHina and vice versa.

  • S&P Downgrades City Of Dallas On "Continued Deterioration" Of Police Pension

    As the City of Dallas continues to work with the Dallas Police and Fire Pension (DPFP) board on solutions to help close the pension’s massive $4 billion funding hole, Standard & Poor’s has finally decided that the “continued deterioration in the funded status” of the fund merits a downgrade.  As such, S&P has downgraded the city’s general obligation bonds to “AA-” from “AA” and placed them on “negative watch.”  Per the Dallas Business Journal:

    “The downgrade reflects our view that despite the city’s broad and diverse economy, which continues to grow, stable financial performance, and very strong management practices, expected continued deterioration in the funded status of the city’s police and fire pension system coupled with growing carrying costs for debt, pension, and other post-employment benefit obligations is significant and negatively affects Dallas’ creditworthiness,” S&P Global Ratings credit analyst Andy Hobbs said in a statement.

     

    The police and fire pension system could go insolvent in the next 10 years because of a funding gap. The financial troubles, along with a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit between the city and emergency works, could put Dallas on a path to bankruptcy.

    The move by S&P comes over a month after Moody’s downgraded Dallas’ credit rating, for the second time in recent months, to A1, which is a notch below S&P’s new rating.  Oddly, as we pointed out yesterday, S&P also seems to be somewhat delayed in their rating downgrade of the City of Chicago (see “Chicago Mayor Emanuel Pushes Moody’s To Rescind Junk Rating Ahead Of $1.2 Billion New Issue“).  That said, we’re sure it has nothing to do with keeping the city’s G.O. rating above investment grade just long enough to get that $1.2 billion bond deal done next week so that Rahm Emanuel can continue his ponzi scheme with taxpayer money. 

    Of course, the downgrades have come as little surprise to Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings who, for months, has been arguing that the “run on the pension” has brought the DPFP to the “verge of collapse.”  Responding to the downgrade, even Dallas CFO Elizabeth Reich implied that S&P was a little late to the ball game saying their “actions today are not a surprise” and that the “pension is a significant risk to the fiscal health of the City.”

    “S&P’s actions today are not a surprise,” Dallas Chief Financial Officer Elizabeth Reich said in a statement. “The more the rating agencies learn about the crisis facing Dallas as a result of the police and fire pension, the more they understand what the City has been saying for some time – the pension is a significant risk to the fiscal health of the City.”

    As we noted last week, this most recent downgrade for Dallas comes after the City Council floated a proposal to inject $1 billion of incremental taxpayer funding into the DPFP, over the course of 30 years, if retirees would agree to a $1 billion “clawback” of what city officials referred to a ill-gotten interest guarantees (see “City Of Dallas Looks To “Clawback” Ill-Gotten Pension Gains From Police“).

    Unfortunately, the downgrade from S&P came a day before the pension board is (1) scheduled to meet with Bank of America about restructuring or extending roughly $130 million in outstanding debt and (2) due to decide whether to lift its ban on large, lump-sum payments to retirees. 

    The pension is in danger of falling into insolvency in the next 10 years because of an estimated $3.3 billion funding gap. The problem, along with a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit over emergency worker back pay, could send the city spiraling into bankruptcy and threaten its blossoming economy. The state is launching a criminal investigation into the previous administration’s handling of the pension’s finances.

     

    “We have been working with Bank of America on the terms of the loan and possibly restructuring and extending the term,” a spokesman for the pension board said in an email to the Dallas Business Journal. “Nothing is finalized at this point.”

    But we’re just everything is fine, Bank Of America, so please go ahead and grant that loan extension for an extra 10 bps of yield.

    * * *

    For those that haven’t followed this story as closely, here is a recap we posted last week.

    Almost exactly one month after taking the unprecedented step of suspending withdrawals from the Dallas Police and Fire Pension (DPFP), the Dallas city council is looking to “clawback” what it views as ill-gotten interest payments made to pensioners to the tune of roughly $1 billion.

    Of course, we have followed the epic meltdown of the DPFP closely over the past several months after a series of shady real estate deals brought the fund to, in the words of Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, “the verge of collapse” and resulted in an FBI raid of one of the funds largest real estate investors (see “Dallas Cops’ Pension Fund Nears Insolvency In Wake Of Shady Real Estate Deals, FBI Raid“).  The discovery of the failed real estate deals led to a “run on the bank” as scared pensioners looked to withdraw as much as possible before the whole ponzi scheme collapsed (see “After A “Run On The Pension Fund” Dallas Mayor Demands Halt Of Withdrawals“).  All of which culminated with the unprecedented decision last month to suspend withdrawals (see “In Unprecedented Move, Dallas Pension System Suspends Withdrawals“) after nearly $500mm was removed from police accounts.

    Now, according to a local ABC affiliate, the Dallas city council is frantically working with the DPFP board to close a $4 billion funding gap.  While the city has agreed to throw an incremental $1 billion of taxpayer money at the problem over the next 30 years, that additional funding comes with some strings attached, which includes a $1 billion “clawback” of what the city views as ill-gotten gains from Police DROP accounts.  The proposed “clawbacks” would come in the form of reduced future distributions for pensioners.

    For those who haven’t followed this story as closely, DROP, which was created in the early 90’s, allowed police and firefighters in Dallas to retire while still on the job. Their monthly pension checks were then diverted into DROP accounts, which were guaranteed an 8-10% return regardless of how the overall fund performed.  Unfortunately for DPFP pensioners, the Dallas City Council now views those guaranteed returns as an effort to defraud Dallas taxpayers of billions…we would tend to agree.

    The city has agreed to put in an additional billion dollars over 30 years, but they’re proposing a series of bitter pills to make up the rest of the nearly $4 billion shortfall.

     

    The bitterest pill: A proposal to take back all of the interest police and firefighters earned on Deferred Option Retirement accounts, or DROP. That would amount to an additional billion dollars saved.

     

    The city is calling it an “equity adjustment.” Retirees call it an illegal “claw back.”

     

    Whatever you want to call it, it’s outlined in a draft legislation being hammered out by the city and pension fund leaders. Pension fund representatives and the city have been meeting almost daily to try to come to an agreement on proposed legislation that they can take to the state capital to fix the failing fund.

    Of course, anyone with half a brain probably should have realized that this ponzi on steroids was doomed to fail from the start.  But, better late than never we suppose. 

    To add insult to injury, for Dallas taxpayers at least, the City Council also notes that the DPFP’s artificially high annual cost of living adjustments have resulted in pension checks that are 20% higher than they would have been had they been tied to actual inflation levels instead. 

    News 8 obtained a copy of the legislation which says accounts would be “adjusted to zero percent of interest.”

     

    “It’s very tough but the city wants to protect the monthly benefit,” Kleinman said. “It’s a restatement of their accounts.”

     

    The city is also seeking to “equity adjustment” on cost of living increases. The city says that pension checks are about 20 percent higher than they would have been if increases had been tied to inflation.

     

    The city’s proposing to freeze cost of living increases until it catches up to the inflation index.

     

    DROP and the cost of living increases account for about half of the fund’s liability, the city says.

     

    For those retirees who have already taken the money out of DROP accounts, they’d garnish their future pension checks to recoup excess interest. Worried retirees have withdrawn in excess of $500 million from DROP accounts in recent months.

    Meanwhile, all of these discussions have Dallas’ police predictably upset.

    “We used the rules they gave us now all of the sudden they’re going to go back on the rules and say hey you don’t get any of that,” said Charles Hale, a retired police officer. “That’s not fair.”

     

    Retirees promised they’d be suing if anybody tried to take back money they feel they’ve earned.

     

    “It’s acting like it was an underhanded Ponzi scheme that we pulled,” said Joe Dunn, a retired police officer. “It’s not fair.”

    Frankly, we too are shocked at the audacity of the Dallas City Council to suggest that public employees be forced to be compensated in a way somewhat more akin to private employees.  It’s just outrageous.

     

  • Afghan "Ghost Soldiers" Are Costing US Taxpayers Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars Annually

    Submitted by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,

    Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko is once again warning about the long-standing problems of corruption in Afghanistan, and the amount of US “reconstruction aid” disappearing down black holes over the course of the years. As always, the discussion came around to “ghost soldiers.”

    Ghost soldiers are a phenomenon in which Afghan military commanders fill their ranks with fictional names and just keep the salaries, which since the salaries are paid pretty much exclusively by NATO and overwhelmingly by the US, has been a known tactic that the Afghan government has done nothing to prevent.

    Sopko warned that the “ghost soldier” problem has expanded to include fictional police, teachers, and other government officials, and that all told the US taxpayers are paying the salaries of “tens of thousands” of Afghans who don’t actually exist, and will likely be doing so for years, potentially decades to come. Though exact figures are impossible to know, SIGAR said some $300 million in salaries are paid to “unverified” employees.

    Individual Afghan government employee salaries are pretty small, particularly for military recruits, which has been a big reason the nation has struggled to fill the ranks with actual people. That commanders can pocket the difference just adds to the incentive to make up names and “pay” them.

    This is a big reason why the Afghan military has struggled so mightily in fights with the Taliban as well, as their statistics on how many troops they have defending any given checkpoint or important city are wildly inaccurate, and they can find that the Taliban forces they thought they handily outnumbered are actually in a position to seize territory.

    SIGAR found that corruption cut across all aspects of the reconstruction effort, jeopardizing progress made in security, rule of law, governance, and economic growth. The report concluded that failure to effectively address the problem meant U.S. reconstruction programs, at best, would continue to be subverted by systemic corruption and, at worst, would fail.

    The report identified five main findings:

    1. Corruption undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by fueling grievances against the Afghan government and channeling material support to the insurgency.
    2. The United States contributed to the growth of corruption by injecting tens of billions of dollars into the Afghan economy, using flawed oversight and contracting practices, and partnering with malign powerbrokers.
    3. The U.S. government was slow to recognize the magnitude of the problem, the role of corrupt patronage networks, the ways in which corruption threatened core U.S. goals, and that certain U.S. policies and practices exacerbated the problem.
    4. Even when the United States acknowledged corruption as a strategic threat, security and political goals consistently trumped strong anticorruption actions.
    5. Where the United States sought to combat corruption, its efforts saw only limited success in the absence of sustained Afghan and U.S. political commitment.

    *  *  *

    Full SIGAR Report below…

  • Israeli Jets Bomb Damascus Military Airport; Syria Vows It Will Respond To "Flagrant Attack"

    Just as the Syrian proxy war showed some hopeful signs of finally dying down, the Syrian army command said on Friday that Israeli jets have bombed the Mezzeh military airport west of Damascus, accusing Tel Aviv of supporting terrorism, and warned Tel Aviv of repercussions of what it called a “flagrant” attack. Syrian state TV quoted the army as saying several rockets were fired from an area near Lake Tiberias in northern Israel just after midnight which landed in the compound of the airport, a major facility for elite Republican Guards and special forces. The airport was rocked by multiple explosions, some of which were captured by social media.

    “Syrian army command and armed forces warn Israel of the repercussions of the flagrant attack and stresses its continued fight against (this) terrorism and amputate the arms of the perpetrators,” the army command said in a statement.

    The statement did not disclose if there were any casualties, but said the rockets caused a fire. Earlier, state television said several major explosions hit Mezzeh military airport compound near Damascus and ambulances were rushed to the area, without giving details.

    The airport southwest of the capital is a major strategic air base used mainly by Syrian elite Republican Guards and had been a base used to fire rockets at former rebel-held areas in the suburbs of Damascus. State television did not give any further details.

    Footage from the scene with heavy fire and the sounds of explosions has surfaced on social media. Multiple reports from journalists and activists on the ground described the bombing, with the opposition also reporting there were rockets fired.

    “Rockets strike at Mezzeh Military airport in Damascus minutes ago,” tweeted Hadi al-Bahra, former president of the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces.

    In the past, Israel has targeted positions of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group inside Syria where the Iranian-backed group is heavily involved in fighting alongside the Syrian army. According to Israeli breaking, the airport was bombed because it was a “suspected holding ammunition depots for Hezbollah. “

    Israeli defence officials have voiced concern that Hizbollah’s experience in the Syrian civil war, where it has played a significant role and recently helped the Syrian army regain the eastern sector of the city of Aleppo, has strengthened it.

    Rebels operating in the area have said Hizbollah’s major arms supply route into Damascus from the Lebanese border has been targeted on several occasions in recent years by air strikes. This has included strikes on convoys of weapons and warehouses.

    This is the second time in two months the Israeli Defense Forces have being accused by Syria of targeting Syrian positions from Israeli territory.  On December 7, SANA reported that “several surface-to-surface missiles” were launched by the IDF from the Golan Heights. At the time, the source in the Syrian armed forces slammed the attack as a “desperate attempt” by Israel to endorse terrorists.   

    Rebels operating in the area have said Hezbollah’s major arms supply route into Damascus from the Lebanese border has been targeted on several occasions in recent years by air strikes. This has included strikes on convoys of weapons and warehouses. Damascus airport was also hit by air strikes in 2013. Tel Aviv neither confirms nor denies involvement in striking targets inside Syria. Damascus has also been tightlipped about previous strikes.

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