- From PsyOp To MindWar
From PsyOp To MindWar
“MindWar must be strategic in emphasis, with tactical applications playing a reinforcing, supplementary role. In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies, and neutrals alike across the globe…through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth…State of the art developments in satellite communication, video recording techniques, and laser and optical transmission of broadcasts make possible a penetration of the minds of the world such as would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. Like the sword of Excalibur, we have but to reach out and seize this tool; and it can transform the world for us if we have the courage and integrity to enhance civilization with it. If we do not accept Excalibur, then we relinquish our ability to inspire foreign cultures with our morality. If they can then desire moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level.”
– “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory” by Col. Paul Vallely and Maj. Michael Aquino, a document written to increase the influence of the “spoon-benders” in the U.S. military.
About one year ago, the U.S. military conducted a simulation of a “limited” nuclear exchange with… Russia.
This was strange news on several accounts. For one, this sort of thing is not typically announced in the candid detail U.S. defense secretary Mark Esper described to journalists, giddy that he got to “play himself” in this war game scenario as if he were preparing for a Hollywood movie doing his best John Wayne impression: “If you got them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow.”
However, the most concerning revelation of this simulated exercise was the announcement to the American people that “it might be possible to fight, and win, a battle with nuclear weapons, without the exchange leading to an all-out-world-ending conflict.”
In other words, throw your cares to the wind, that is, the “spirit wind” known as kamikaze, because we are going for it.
In the transcript of a background briefing on the war game exercise, senior Pentagon officials described their tactic further, explaining that their confident calculation on being “victorious” in this exercise completely relied on the supposition that such a confrontation would remain “limited” in its nuclear exchange.
“It’s a very reasonable response to what we saw was a Russian nuclear doctrine and nuclear capability that suggested to us that they might use nuclear weapons in a limited way,” a senior official stated.
It seems what senior Pentagon officials are really saying here about the predictability of the Russians, is that there seems to be a line the Russians won’t cross in the case of a nuclear conflict…but the Americans sure will.
Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists tried to play down the “rodeo circus” and reduce the high profile announcement of the U.S. military exercise as simply a marketing gimmick to “justify” the new nuclear weapons since we are entering the new budget phase. “So all of this has been played up to serve that process.” stated Kristensen.
I don’t know about you but I am getting some serious déjà vu. Didn’t we already go through all of this with the disastrous JIC-502?
The JIC-502 Spookery
In August 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, several years before the 1953 date forecast by the CIA. As a response, the Joint Intelligence Committee submitted an estimate of the nature of the nuclear threat from the Soviets. JIC-502 claimed that once the Soviets had 200 atomic bombs, they could launch a surprise attack and defeat the U.S.
These assertions were made without analysis of Soviet capabilities to actually deliver the weapons, let alone produce them at that rate. The estimates did not even attempt to analyze Soviet strategic intentions.
JIC-502 intelligence report titled “Implications of Soviet Possession of Atomic Weapons” drafted in Jan 20th 1950, turned out not to be an intelligence report at all but rather a sales pitch, claiming that a nuclear-armed Soviet Union had introduced the notion that “a tremendous military advantage would be gained by the power that struck first and succeeded in carrying through an effective surprise attack.” For more on this refer to my paper.
It was JIC-502 which would be the first to put forward a justification for the preventive first strike concept, supported by a massive military buildup under the pretence of pre-emptive war.
NSC-68 would be drafted the same year and called for a massive military buildup to be completed by 1954 dubbed the “year of maximum danger,” the year JIC-502 claimed the Soviets would achieve military superiority and be able to launch war against the U.S. This proposed military buildup would increase the defense budget from $10 billion to $40 billion from 1950-53.
During this same period another security doctrine was drafted, titled “NSC-75: A Report to the NSC by the Executive Secretary on British Military Commitments”. The report concluded that if the British Empire collapsed, and Britain could no longer carry out these deployments, in defending the “free world” against the Soviets, the U.S. would not be able to carry out its current foreign policy, including NSC-68.
It was thus concluded in the report that it would be more cost-effective to aid Britain in saving its Empire!
If you were ever wondering why the CIA was constantly found paired with British Intelligence, starting from its very inception, in a series of coups in countries they had no reason to be in, now you know why.
The U.S. had gone from an explicit mission to end imperialism worldwide under Roosevelt, to actively supporting and upholding British colonies and vassal states under Truman!
This was all done under the pretence of protecting the “free world” from the evil boogeymen Soviets, whom Churchill decided to be labelled such in his Iron Curtain Speech. And thus, the interests of the British Empire were safeguarded by an abiding American stooge, as long as the narrative that all Russians were villains was believed.
Interestingly, the CIA was not on board with the pre-emptive war strategy, as defined by JIC-502. In February 1950 the CIA responded in ORE 91-49, stating:
“It is always possible…that the USSR would initiate a war if it should estimate that a Western attack was impending. [However], It is not yet possible to estimate with any precision the effects of Soviet possession of the Atomic Bomb upon the probability of war. The implications of atomic warfare, either militarily or psychologically, have not yet been fully appraised.” (emphasis added)
In other words, the CIA was stating that JIC-502’s frantic lunacy in demanding a military buildup and first strike capability against the Soviets was groundless. That there was no data to support such a claim, and thus such a response would be a reckless and dangerous one.
It became evident to those who wished to push through these permanent war policies that the CIA was going to need “stronger” leadership.
At least, this was the argument made by the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report which called for a strong CIA Director in the wake of the Cold War. Though Walter Bedell Smith, who would become CIA Director from 1950-53, did much to reorganise the CIA away from the pre-emptive war mongering, it was ultimately Allen Dulles who would take the CIA throne.
It should not come as a surprise that Dulles had himself in mind the whole time when he was talking about the stuff that was needed for a “strong” CIA Director… however, he was not referring to a strong mind, but rather a strong stomach.
Dulles would act as Director of the CIA from 1953-61, until he was fired by President Kennedy (along with the Deputy Director and Deputy Director for Plans), all three were caught essentially committing treason during the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
During Dulles’ term as CIA Director, he did nothing less than entrench America’s role in exacting permanent warfare across the world against “communist insurgents”, with the never-ending Indochina wars lasting for over 35 years. (Refer to my paper on how the CIA through illegal clandestine activity drew the American military into the Vietnam War).
But the Soviets never did launch such a war, and all claims of their capabilities let alone their intentions turned out to be entirely fraudulent… so what was it all for?
Did the U.S. have to put everything into expanding their military, turning away from the concept of a nation at peace made up of citizen soldiers and instead towards a nation in perpetual war made up of the Nietzschean fantasy of Übermensch (Beyond-Man) super soldiers, the very thing that Eisenhower warned against?
Did this all have to happen in defense of “peace and security” of the free world?
Why were the predictions of the JIC-502 completely unfounded? Were the predictions based off of corrupted data? Did the Soviets simply change their mind? Or was it never about a pre-emptive war but rather was always about global dominance.
What would the American people think if they knew the truth, that their entire military industrial complex was never built for the protection of the “free world” in opposition to dictators and despots but rather the very opposite? That it simply thought its ideology the superior one, the only lawful dictatorship that had the right to rule, even if it meant by force.
In the words of Vallely/Aquino:
“If we do not accept Excalibur, then we relinquish our ability to inspire foreign cultures with our morality. If they can then desire moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level.”
This may look like just a “rodeo circus” but it is far far worst. As Edgar Poe elaborated in his “The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether”, the asylum is quite literally being run by the lunatics.
What do Jedi Warriors, Spoon-benders, the First Earth Battalion and Men Who Stare at Goats Have in Common?
For those who need a refresher of the film Dr. Strangelove’s synopsis, it is about what could happen if a lunatic had the authority to bypass the U.S. president and cause a nuclear escalation between the U.S. and USSR. In the movie, it is U.S. Air Force General Jack Ripper who initiates a nuclear attack to destroy the USSR under the premise that once the U.S. government is briefed on the situation, they would have no choice but to commit 100% towards a hostile attack against the USSR, in order to prevent nuclear retaliation.
The reason why General Jack Ripper is fully convinced that it is absolutely necessary to destroy the USSR is because he believes that the communists are conspiring to pollute the “precious bodily fluids” of the American people. Gen. Jack Ripper goes on to describe how he first discovered this Soviet ploy, after sexual relations with a woman and how he felt empty inside but that luckily he was astute enough to be able to accurately deduce the cause of this feeling of emptiness as due to being drained of his “life essence”, all part of the communist conspiracy for sure. In other words, Gen. Jack Ripper is unequivocally insane.
Unfortunately, this type of thinking in the U.S. military is not reserved to pure fiction.
Sometime in the late 1980s then Col. Paul Vallely, Commander of the 7th Psychological Operations Group and then Maj. Michael Aquino, PSYOP Research & Analysis Team Leader authored a paper titled “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory”, which discusses the necessity to wage perpetual psychological warfare against friend and enemy populations alike, and even against the American people. As stated in the paper:
“MindWar must target all participants to be effective. It must not only weaken the enemy; it must strengthen the United States. It strengthens the United States by denying enemy propaganda access to our people, and by explaining and emphasizing to our people the rationale for our national interest in a specific war…There are some purely natural conditions under which minds may become more or less receptive to ideas, and MindWar should take full advantage of such phenomena as atmospheric electromagnetic activity, air ionization, and extremely low frequency waves.”
Of course the terms “enemy” and “national interest” are not elaborated on, nor is the matter of free will even considered but rather that mind control is not only “natural”, it is essential. Besides the overtly fascist and occultist content in the paper, the proposal had a disturbing similarity to the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program launched by the Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon. TIA was a global propaganda and mega-data-mining plan that was supposedly scraped after a series of negative news stories.
On Aug 17th, 2005 The New York Times published an article that discussed how “a military intelligence team repeatedly tried to contact the FBI in 2000 to warn about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell that included the ring leader of the Sept. 11 attacks” as reported by veteran Army intelligence officer Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer.
The information came from the highly classified intelligence program “Able Danger”, which had successfully identified the terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta and three other hijackers of the 9/11 terrorist attack in mid-2000, well over a year before the actual 9/11 attack.
According to New York Times article, Shaffer learned later that lawyers associated with the Special Operations Command of the Defense Department had canceled the FBI meetings “because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States.” (Able Danger was linked in its function to the TIA program)
However, this is only part of the truth, the by far uglier truth is that they were already fully aware of the 9/11 terrorist ring and didn’t want a wrench thrown into the gears so to speak.
Gen. Vallely, Lt. Col. Aquino and Col. Alexander (author of “The New Mental Battlefield: Beam Me Up, Spock”) are leading figures within the Special Operations community. In addition, Gen. Stubblebine III, Gen. Schoomaker, Gen. Downing and Gen. Boykin are the four names most often cited as promoters of programs like the “Goat Lab,” “Jedi Warriors,” “Grill Flame,” “Task Force Delta,” (aka the spoon-benders) and the “First Earth Battalion,” and have held top posts within the military intelligence and Special Operations commands.
These were the programs that promoted the idea that one could learn to bend a metal spoon, walk through walls, and burst the hearts of goats with the use of “mind over matter” techniques.
In 1979, Lt. Col. Channon presented a 125 page document called “The First Earth Battalion” which outlined “non-lethal” techniques that would soon be adopted by the military including the use of atonal noises as a form of combat psychological warfare and widespread experimentation with psychoelectronics and other means of debilitation.
On March 10th, 1991, then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz while serving as chief policy advisor to then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, wrote the memo “Do We Need a Non-Lethal Defense Initiative?” in which he wrote, “A U.S. lead in non-lethal technologies will increase our options and reinforce our position in the post-Cold War world.”
Though no mention was made of Col. Alexander, who spear-headed the non-lethal weaponry campaign, Alexander at the time of the memo had retired from active duty and was heading the Non-Lethal Weapons Program at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In 1990, Col. Alexander published “The Warrior’s Edge” and states its goal as to:
“unlock the door to the extraordinary human potentials inherent in each of us. To do this, we, like governments around the world, must take a fresh look at non-traditional methods of affecting reality. We must raise human consciousness of the potential power of the individual body/mind system – the power to manipulate reality. We must be willing to retake control of our past, present, and ultimately, our future.” (emphasis added)
Investigative journalist Jon Ronson, in his book “The Men Who Stare at Goats”, goes through how ‘psychic warriors’ such as Uri Geller and Jim Channon were called back into government service after 9/11, and that a series of meetings in 2004 were held between Gen. Schoomaker and Jim Channon to start a think tank which would utilise “First Earth Battalion” techniques in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Non-Lethal Techniques of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and al-Qa’im
According to Ronson and The New Yorker writer Jane Mayer, many of the torture techniques employed at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the less-well-known al-Qa’im near the Syrian border in Iraq, are based on Channon and Alexander’s non-lethal conceptions. Jim Channon actually confirmed this in an email correspondence with Ronson.
At one point in his investigation, Ronson asks Stuart Heller, friend of Jim Channon, if he could name one soldier who was “the living embodiment” of the First Earth Battalion, to which Heller responds unhesitatingly “Bert Rodriguez.” Ronson continues in his book, “In April 2001, Bert Rodriguez took on a new student. His name was Ziad Jarrah.” Rodriguez taught Jarrah “the choke hold and the kamikaze spirit. You need a code you’d die for, a do-or-die desire.” Rodriguez added, “Ziad was like Luke Skywalker. You know when Luke walks the invisible path? You have to believe it’s there…Yeah, Ziad believed it. He was like Luke Skywalker.” Rodriguez trained Ziad Jarrah for six months.
On Sept 11, 2001, Ziad Jarrah took control of the United Airlines flight 93 as part of the orchestrated 9/11 terrorist attack.
Meet Dr. Strangelove
At the end of the film Dr. Strangelove we are finally confronted with the “top lunatic” so to speak who was really in charge this whole time. For all the “top brass” in the war room, nobody was really in control of the situation this entire time since the entire “war scenario” was set-up as a positive feedback loop within the doomsday plan of a lunatic.
You see, the belief that one can bend spoons, walk through walls, and burst the hearts of goats is not the problem, it is the belief held by top officials within the U.S. military industrial complex that their ideology of appropriate morality is to prevail and that one must use these mind-over-matter techniques to achieve the ultimate goal, “the power to manipulate reality”, that global dominance can be achieved without wiping out the world.
That somehow “it might be possible to fight, and win, a battle with nuclear weapons, without the exchange leading to an all-out-world-ending conflict,” and if not…we may all die for a lunatic’s dream in the process.
* * *
The author can be reached at https://cynthiachung.substack.com/
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 23:30 - Mercator Misconceptions: Clever Map Shows The True Size Of Countries
Mercator Misconceptions: Clever Map Shows The True Size Of Countries
Maps are hugely important tools in our everyday life, whether it’s guiding our journeys from point A to B, or shaping our big picture perceptions about geopolitics and the environment.
For many people though, as Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley shows below, the Earth as they know it is heavily informed by the Mercator projection – a tool used for nautical navigation that eventually became the world’s most widely recognized map.
Mercator’s Rise to the Top
With any map projection style, the big challenge lies in depicting a spherical object as a 2D graphic. There are various trade-offs with any map style, and those trade-offs can vary depending on how the map is meant to be used.
In 1569, the great cartographer, Gerardus Mercator, created a revolutionary new map based on a cylindrical projection. The new map was well-suited to nautical navigation since every line on the sphere is a constant course, or loxodrome.
Geographic Inflation
The vast majority of us aren’t using paper maps to chart our course across the ocean anymore, so critics of the Mercator projection argue that the continued use of this style of map gives users a warped sense of the true size of countries—particularly in the case of the African continent.
Mercator’s map inadvertently also pumps up the sizes of Europe and North America. Visually speaking, Canada and Russia appear to take up approximately 25% of the Earth’s surface, when in reality they occupy a mere 5%.
As the animated GIF below—created by Reddit user, neilrkaye – demonstrates, northern nations such as Canada and Russia have been artificially “pumped up” in the minds of many people around the world.
Greenland, which appears as a massive icy landmass in Mercator projection, shrinks way down. The continent of Africa takes a much more prominent position in this new, correctly-scaled map.
This visualization also highlights how distorted neighboring countries can look in Mercator projection. In the GIF above, Scandinavian countries no longer loom imposingly over their European neighbors, and Canada deflates to a size similar to the United States.
Despite inaccurate visual features—or perhaps because of them—the Mercator projection has achieved widespread adoption around the world. This includes in the classroom, where young minds are first learning about geography and forming opinions on the relationships between countries.
Getting Reacquainted with Globes
Google, whose map app is used by approximately 150 million people per month, took the bold step of using different projections for different purposes in 2018.
The Earth is depicted as a globe at further zoom levels, sidestepping map projection issues completely and displaying the world as it actually is: round. The result is a more accurate depiction of countries and landmasses.
With 3D Globe Mode on Google Maps desktop, Greenland’s projection is no longer the size of Africa.
Just zoom all the way out at https://t.co/mIZTya01K3 😎🌍 pic.twitter.com/CIkkS7It8d
— Google Maps (@googlemaps) August 2, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
At closer zoom levels, users are typically using maps for things like navigation, which the Mercator projection was designed for. The exact angles of roads and borders are preserved in this projection.
In the Right Direction
In a more globally connected world, geographic literacy is more important than ever. As people become more accustomed to equal area maps and seeing the Earth in its spherical form, misconceptions about the size of continents may become a thing of the past.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 23:00 - Study Links Excess COVID-19 Cases And Deaths To Wildfire Smoke
Study Links Excess COVID-19 Cases And Deaths To Wildfire Smoke
Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,
New research indicates that exposure to pollutants in wildfire smoke may have led to thousands more COVID-19 cases and deaths.
The new study, published in the journal Science Advances, links fine particle pollution known as PM2.5, which measures 2.5 micrometers across and is produced by wildfires, among other sources, to a significant increase in COVID-19 cases and deaths in California, Oregon, and Washington state.
“The wildfires exacerbated the pandemic substantially,” said Francesca Dominici, a Harvard biostatistician and author of the study, in remarks to National Geographic.
The study sought to gauge the impact of last year’s wildfires in the three states on excess COVID-19 cases and deaths by evaluating their correlation with data on short-term PM2.5 exposure, while seeking to account for a number of confounding factors, including weather, seasonality, long-term trends, mobility, and population size.
Evaluating data from 92 counties affected by fires, the study’s authors “found strong evidence that wildfires amplified the effect of short-term exposure to PM2.5 on COVID-19 cases and deaths, although with substantial heterogeneity across counties.”
Heterogeneity refers to clinical, statistical, or methodological variability among studies in a systematic review.
Members of the Cal Fire San Mateo-Santa Cruz Unit (CZU) march along Old Lawley Toll Road during the Glass Fire in Calistoga, Calif., on Oct. 2, 2020. (Stephen Lam/Reuters)
For COVID-19 cases, the study found that 52 of 92 counties had “strong evidence” of a positive association between PM2.5 and heightened risk of contracting the respiratory illness, which is caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as the SARS-CoV-2 or the novel coronavirus.
While there were sharp differences across counties, when pooled across multiple counties, the results indicated that a daily increase of 10 micrograms per cubic meter in PM2.5 for 28 subsequent days was associated with an 11.7 percent increase in COVID-19 cases. In two counties with the highest impact—Sonoma, California, and Whitman, Washington—the researchers concluded that the same level of PM2.5 over the same time horizon was associated with a 65.3 percent and 71.6 percent increase in infections, respectively.
There was also significant variability among counties in terms of COVID-19 deaths, with 17 of 92 counties reflecting “strong evidence of a positive association” between PM2.5 and fatalities. Under the same PM2.5 exposure parameters as above, the researchers found an 8.4 percent overall increase in deaths, with two California counties—Calaveras and San Bernardino—coming in at 52.8 percent and 65.9 percent, respectively.
Overall, the study concluded that the PM2.5 in wildfire smoke likely accounted for 19,742 more COVID-19 cases and 748 more deaths than would have been the case absent the fine pollutant.
“We found strong evidence of a positive associations [sic] between daily increases in PM2.5 and increased risks of COVID-19 cases and deaths, cumulatively up to 4 weeks,” the researchers wrote.
While scientists continue to learn more about how wildfires impact human health, an expert told National Geographic that PM2.5 could make it easier for the CCP virus to enter the body by compromising certain cells that help expel various pathogens.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 22:30 - Unlike The Fed, Brazil Central Bank Vows To Do Whatever It Takes To Tame Soaring Inflation
Unlike The Fed, Brazil Central Bank Vows To Do Whatever It Takes To Tame Soaring Inflation
Just days after Brazil’s central bank hiked rates last Wednesday by a whopping 100bps, to 5.25% and up 325bps since March, with market consensus for much more tightening to come, Brazilian policy markets vowed to do what the Fed won’t – or can’t – do, and will do whatever it takes to bring inflation expectations back to target despite a perceived deterioration in the country’s fiscal outlook .
Speaking at a Thursday online event organized by the national association of bars and restaurants, Campos Neto said “keeping inflation anchored is key at this moment, when we are facing consecutive inflationary shocks and it’s becoming difficult to model inflation.”
Foreign investors are perceiving a deterioration in Brazil’s fiscal accounts, Campos Neto said, as spending pressures mount ahead of next year’s presidential election. His remarks echoed similar comments made by Monetary Policy Director Bruno Serra on Wednesday, and followed the central bank’s decision to step up the pace of monetary tightening last week.
Neto’s speech comes at a time when the most severe drought in decades, along with higher commodity prices and an economic reopening are keeping inflation well above target in Brazil. Consumer prices soared 8.99% in July from the year prior, higher than economists forecast and the highest in over 5 years. Analysts polled by the central bank estimate consumer prices to rise 6.88% in 2021 and 3.84% in 2022, above the targets of 3.75% and 3.5% for each year.
The main drivers of Brazil’s runaway inflation are housing costs, which jumped 3.1% on the month due mainly to electricity bills that increased 7.88%, while transportation prices rose 1.52%, the statistics agency said.
“We will use all the tools we have, as much as needed, to anchor inflation in the medium and long term,” Campos Neto said, adding that current inflationary shocks are contaminating expectations for next year. His comments follow the central bank’s guidance from last week which signaled another 100bps Selic increase at the September meeting, and a hiking cycle that will ultimately drive the Selic to an above-neutral level; i.e., into restrictive territory as the central bank scramble to contained soaring prices.
After promising last week to raise interest rates above the so-called neutral level, the central banker said later on Thursday he still considers that point to be around 3% in real terms according to Bloomberg. Yet there’s an upward bias to that rate, which neither stimulates nor restricts the economy, when the most recent macroeconomic data is taken into account, he added.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 22:00 - The Propaganda Multiplier
The Propaganda Multiplier
It is one of the most important aspects of our media system, and yet hardly known to the public: most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.
The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.
A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles were based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews were in favor of a US and NATO intervention, while propaganda was attributed exclusively to the opposite side.
The Propaganda Multiplier: How Global News Agencies and Western Media Report on Geopolitics
A Study by Swiss Propaganda Research
Translated by Terje Maloy
“Therefore, you always have to ask yourself: Why do I get this specific information, in this specific form, at this specific moment? Ultimately, these are always questions about power.”
– Dr. Konrad Hummler, Swiss banking and media executive
Contents
Introduction: “Something strange”
“How does the newspaper know what it knows?” The answer to this question is likely to surprise some newspaper readers: “The main source of information is stories from news agencies. The almost anonymously operating news agencies are in a way the key to world events. So what are the names of these agencies, how do they work and who finances them? To judge how well one is informed about events in East and West, one should know the answers to these questions.” (Höhne 1977, p. 11)
A Swiss media researcher points out: “The news agencies are the most important suppliers of material to mass media. No daily media outlet can manage without them. () So the news agencies influence our image of the world; above all, we get to know what they have selected.” (Blum 1995, p. 9)
In view of their essential importance, it is all the more astonishing that these agencies are hardly known to the public: “A large part of society is unaware that news agencies exist at all … In fact, they play an enormously important role in the media market. But despite this great importance, little attention has been paid to them in the past.” (Schulten-Jaspers 2013, p. 13)
Even the head of a news agency noted: “There is something strange about news agencies. They are little known to the public. Unlike a newspaper, their activity is not so much in the spotlight, yet they can always be found at the source of the story.” (Segbers 2007, p. 9)
“The Invisible Nerve Center of the Media System”
So what are the names of these agencies that are “always at the source of the story”? There are now only three global news agencies left:
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The American Associated Press (AP) with over 4000 employees worldwide. The AP belongs to US media companies and has its main editorial office in New York. AP news is used by around 12,000 international media outlets, reaching more than half of the world’s population every day.
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The quasi-governmental French Agence France-Presse (AFP) based in Paris and with around 4000 employees. The AFP sends over 3000 stories and photos every day to media all over the world.
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The British agency Reuters in London, which is privately owned and employs just over 3000 people. Reuters was acquired in 2008 by Canadian media entrepreneur Thomson – one of the 25 richest people in the world – and merged into Thomson Reuters, headquartered in New York.
In addition, many countries run their own news agencies. These include, for instance, the German DPA, the Austrian APA, and the Swiss SDA. When it comes to international news, however, national agencies usually rely on the three global agencies and simply copy and translate their reports.
The three global news agencies Reuters, AFP and AP, and the three national agencies of the German-speaking countries of Austria (APA), Germany (DPA) and Switzerland (SDA).
Wolfgang Vyslozil, former managing director of the Austrian APA, described the key role of news agencies with these words: “News agencies are rarely in the public eye. Yet they are one of the most influential and at the same time one of the least known media types. They are key institutions of substantial importance to any media system. They are the invisible nerve center that connects all parts of this system.” (Segbers 2007, p.10)
Small abbreviation, great effect
However, there is a simple reason why the global agencies, despite their importance, are virtually unknown to the general public. To quote a Swiss media professor: “Radio and television usually do not name their sources, and only specialists can decipher references in magazines.” (Blum 1995, P. 9)
The motive for this discretion, however, should be clear: news outlets are not particularly keen to let readers know that they haven’t researched most of their contributions themselves.
The following figure shows some examples of source tagging in popular European newspapers. Next to the agency abbreviations we find the initials of editors who have edited the respective agency report.
News agencies as sources in newspaper articles
Occasionally, newspapers use agency material but do not label it at all. A study in 2011 from the Swiss Research Institute for the Public Sphere and Society at the University of Zurich came to the following conclusions (FOEG 2011):
“Agency contributions are exploited integrally without labeling them, or they are partially rewritten to make them appear as an editorial contribution. In addition, there is a practice of ‘spicing up’ agency reports with little effort: for example, unpublished agency reports are enriched with images and graphics and presented as comprehensive articles.”
The agencies play a prominent role not only in the press, but also in private and public broadcasting. This is confirmed by Volker Braeutigam, who worked for the German state broadcaster ARD for ten years and views the dominance of these agencies critically:
“One fundamental problem is that the newsroom at ARD sources its information mainly from three sources: the news agencies DPA/AP, Reuters and AFP: one German/American, one British and one French. () The editor working on a news topic only needs to select a few text passages on the screen that he considers essential, rearrange them and glue them together with a few flourishes.”
Swiss Radio and Television (SRF), too, largely bases itself on reports from these agencies. Asked by viewers why a peace march in Ukraine was not reported, the editors said: “To date, we have not received a single report of this march from the independent agencies Reuters, AP and AFP.”
In fact, not only the text, but also the images, sound and video recordings that we encounter in our media every day, are mostly from the very same agencies. What the uninitiated audience might think of as contributions from their local newspaper or TV station, are actually copied reports from New York, London and Paris.
Some media have even gone a step further and have, for lack of resources, outsourced their entire foreign editorial office to an agency. Moreover, it is well known that many news portals on the internet mostly publish agency reports (see e.g., Paterson 2007, Johnston 2011, MacGregor 2013).
In the end, this dependency on the global agencies creates a striking similarity in international reporting: from Vienna to Washington, our media often report the same topics, using many of the same phrases – a phenomenon that would otherwise rather be associated with »controlled media« in authoritarian states.
The following graphic shows some examples from German and international publications. As you can see, despite the claimed objectivity, a slight (geo-)political bias sometimes creeps in.
“Putin threatens”, “Iran provokes”, “NATO concerned”, “Assad stronghold”: Similarities in content and wording due to reports by global news agencies.
The role of correspondents
Much of our media does not have own foreign correspondents, so they have no choice but to rely completely on global agencies for foreign news. But what about the big daily newspapers and TV stations that have their own international correspondents? In German-speaking countries, for example, these include newspapers such NZZ, FAZ, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Welt, and public broadcasters.
First of all, the size ratios should be kept in mind: while the global agencies have several thousand employees worldwide, even the Swiss newspaper NZZ, known for its international reporting, maintains only 35 foreign correspondents (including their business correspondents). In huge countries such as China or India, only one correspondent is stationed; all of South America is covered by only two journalists, while in even larger Africa no-one is on the ground permanently.
Moreover, in war zones, correspondents rarely venture out. On the Syria war, for example, many journalists “reported” from cities such as Istanbul, Beirut, Cairo or even from Cyprus. In addition, many journalists lack the language skills to understand local people and media.
How do correspondents under such circumstances know what the “news” is in their region of the world? The main answer is once again: from global agencies. The Dutch Middle East correspondent Joris Luyendijk has impressively described how correspondents work and how they depend on the world agencies in his book “People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East”:
“I had imagined correspondents to be historians-of-the-moment. When something important happened, they would go after it, find out what was going on, and report on it. But I didn’t go off to find out what was going on; that had been done long before. I went along to present an on-the-spot report.
The editors in the Netherlands called when something happened, they faxed or emailed the press releases, and I’d retell them in my own words on the radio, or rework them into an article for the newspaper. This was the reason my editors found it more important that I could be reached in the place itself than that I knew what was going on. The news agencies provided enough information for you to be able to write or talk your way through any crisis or summit meeting.
That’s why you often come across the same images and stories if you leaf through a few different newspapers or click the news channels.
Our men and women in London, Paris, Berlin and Washington bureaus – all thought that wrong topics were dominating the news and that we were following the standards of the news agencies too slavishly.
The common idea about correspondents is that they ‘have the story’, () but the reality is that the news is a conveyor belt in a bread factory. The correspondents stand at the end of the conveyor belt, pretending we’ve baked that white loaf ourselves, while in fact all we’ve done is put it in its wrapping.
Afterwards, a friend asked me how I’d managed to answer all the questions during those cross-talks, every hour and without hesitation. When I told him that, like on the TV-news, you knew all the questions in advance, his e-mailed response came packed with expletives. My friend had relalized that, for decades, what he’d been watching and listening to on the news was pure theatre.” (Luyendjik 2009, p. 20-22, 76, 189)
In other words, the typical correspondent is in general not able to do independent research, but rather deals with and reinforces those topics that are already prescribed by the news agencies – the notorious “mainstream effect”.
In addition, for cost-saving reasons many media outlets nowadays have to share their few foreign correspondents, and within individual media groups, foreign reports are often used by several publications – none of which contributes to diversity in reporting.
“What the agency does not report, does not take place”
The central role of news agencies also explains why, in geopolitical conflicts, most media use the same original sources. In the Syrian war, for example, the “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” – a dubious one-man organization based in London – featured prominently. The media rarely inquired directly at this “Observatory”, as its operator was in fact difficult to reach, even for journalists.
Rather, the “Observatory” delivered its stories to global agencies, which then forwarded them to thousands of media outlets, which in turn “informed” hundreds of millions of readers and viewers worldwide. The reason why the agencies, of all places, referred to this strange “Observatory” in their reporting – and who really financed it – is a question that was rarely asked.
The former chief editor of the German news agency DPA, Manfred Steffens, therefore states in his book “The Business of News”:
“A news story does not become more correct simply because one is able to provide a source for it. It is indeed rather questionable to trust a news story more just because a source is cited. () Behind the protective shield such a ‘source’ means for a story, some people are inclined to spread rather adventurous things, even if they themselves have legitimate doubts about their correctness; the responsibility, at least morally, can always be attributed to the cited source.” (Steffens 1969, p. 106)
Dependence on global agencies is also a major reason why media coverage of geopolitical conflicts is often superficial and erratic, while historic relationships and background are fragmented or altogether absent. As put by Steffens: “News agencies receive their impulses almost exclusively from current events and are therefore by their very nature ahistoric. They are reluctant to add any more context than is strictly required.” (Steffens 1969, p. 32)
Finally, the dominance of global agencies explains why certain geopolitical issues and events – which often do not fit very well into the US/NATO narrative or are too “unimportant” – are not mentioned in our media at all: if the agencies do not report on something, then most Western media will not be aware of it. As pointed out on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the German DPA: “What the agency does not report, does not take place.” (Wilke 2000, p. 1)
“Adding questionable stories”
While some topics do not appear at all in our media, other topics are very prominent – even though they shouldn’t actually be: “Often the mass media do not report on reality, but on a constructed or staged reality. () Several studies have shown that the mass media are predominantly determined by PR activities and that passive, receptive attitudes outweigh active-researching ones.” (Blum 1995, p. 16)
In fact, due to the rather low journalistic performance of our media and their high dependence on a few news agencies, it is easy for interested parties to spread propaganda and disinformation in a supposedly respectable format to a worldwide audience. DPA editor Steffens warned of this danger:
“The critical sense gets more lulled the more respected the news agency or newspaper is. Someone who wants to introduce a questionable story into the world press only needs to try to put his story in a reasonably reputable agency, to be sure that it then appears a little later in the others. Sometimes it happens that a hoax passes from agency to agency and becomes ever more credible.” (Steffens 1969, p. 234)
Among the most active actors in “injecting” questionable geopolitical news are the military and defense ministries. For example, in 2009 the head of the American news agency AP, Tom Curley, made public that the Pentagon employs more than 27,000 PR specialists who, with a budget of nearly $ 5 billion a year, are working the media and circulating targeted manipulations. In addition, high-ranking US generals had threatened that they would “ruin” him and the AP if the journalists reported too critically on the US military.
Despite – or because of? – such threats our media regularly publish dubious stories sourced to some unnamed “informants” from “US defense circles”.
Ulrich Tilgner, a veteran Middle East correspondent for German and Swiss television, warned in 2003, shortly after the Iraq war, of acts of deception by the military and the role played by the media:
“With the help of the media, the military determine the public perception and use it for their plans. They manage to stir expectations and spread deceptive scenarios. In this new kind of war, the PR strategists of the US administration fulfill a similar function as the bomber pilots. The special departments for public relations in the Pentagon and in the secret services have become combatants in the information war.
For their deception maneuvers, the US military specifically uses the lack of transparency in media coverage. The way they spread information, which is then picked up and distributed by newspapers and broadcasters, makes it impossible for readers, listeners or viewers to trace the original source. Thus, the audience will fail to recognize the actual intention of the military.” (Tilgner 2003, p. 132)
What is known to the US military, would not be foreign to US intelligence services. In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts:
Former CIA officer and whistleblower John Stockwell said of his work in the Angolan war: “The basic theme was to make it look like an [enemy] aggression. So any kind of story that you could write and get into the media anywhere in the world, that pushed that line, we did. One third of my staff in this task force were propagandists, whose professional career job was to make up stories and finding ways of getting them into the press. () The editors in most Western newspapers are not too skeptical of messages that conform to general views and prejudices. () So we came up with another story, and it was kept going for weeks. () But it was all fiction.”
Fred Bridgland looked back on his work as a war correspondent for the Reuters agency: “We based our reports on official communications. It was not until years later that I learned that a little CIA disinformation expert had sat in the US embassy and had composed these communiqués that bore absolutely no relationship at all to truth. () Basically, and to put it very crudely, you can publish any old crap and it will get into the newspaper.”
And former CIA analyst David MacMichael described his work in the Contra War in Nicaragua with these words: “They said our intelligence of Nicaragua was so good that we could even register when someone flushed a toilet. But I had the feeling that the stories we were giving to the press came straight out of the toilet.” (Hird 1985)
Of course, the intelligence services also have a large number of direct contacts in our media, which can be “leaked” information to if necessary. But without the central role of the global news agencies, the worldwide synchronization of propaganda and disinformation would never be so efficient.
Through this “propaganda multiplier”, dubious stories from PR experts working for governments, military and intelligence services reach the general public more or less unchecked and unfiltered. The journalists refer to the news agencies and the news agencies refer to their sources. Although they often attempt to point out uncertainties (and hedge themselves) with terms such as “apparent”, “alleged” and the like – by then the rumor has long been spread to the world and its effect has taken place.
The Propaganda Multiplier: Governments, military and intelligence services using global news agencies to disseminate their messages to a worldwide audience.
As the New York Times reported …
In addition to global news agencies, there is another source that is often used by media outlets around the world to report on geopolitical conflicts, namely the major publications in Great Britain and the US.
News outlets like the New York Times or the BBC may have up to 100 foreign correspondents and additional external employees. However, as Middle East correspondent Luyendijk points out:
“Our news teams, me included, fed on the selection of news made by quality media like CNN, the BBC, and the New York Times. We did that on the assumption that their correspondents understood the Arab world and commanded a view of it – but many of them turned out not to speak Arabic, or at least not enough to be able to have a conversation in it or to follow the local media. Many of the top dogs at CNN, the BBC, the Independent, the Guardian, the New Yorker, and the NYT were more often than not dependent on assistants and translators.” (Luyendijk p. 47)
In addition, the sources of these media outlets are often not easy to verify (“military circles”, “anonymous government officials”, “intelligence officials” and the like) and can therefore also be used for the dissemination of propaganda. In any case, the widespread orientation towards the major Anglo-Saxon publications leads to a further convergence in the geopolitical coverage in our media.
The following figure shows some examples of such citation based on the Syria coverage of the largest daily newspaper in Switzerland, Tages-Anzeiger. The articles are all from the first days of October 2015, when Russia for the first time intervened directly in the Syrian war (US/UK sources are highlighted):
Frequent citation of major British and US media, exemplified by the Syria war coverage of Swiss daily newspaper Tages-Anzeiger in October 2015.
The desired narrative
But why do journalists in our media not simply try to research and report independently of the global agencies and the Anglo-Saxon media? Middle East correspondent Luyendijk describes his experiences:
“You might suggest that I should have looked for sources I could trust. I did try, but whenever I wanted to write a story without using news agencies, the main Anglo-Saxon media, or talking heads, it fell apart. () Obviously I, as a correspondent, could tell very different stories about one and the same situation. But the media could only present one of them, and often enough, that was exactly the story that confirmed the prevailing image.” (Luyendijk p.54ff)
Media researcher Noam Chomsky has described this effect in his essay “What makes the mainstream media mainstream” as follows: “If you get off line, if you’re producing stories that the big press doesn’t like, you’ll hear about it pretty soon. () So there are a lot of ways in which power plays can drive you right back into line if you move out. If you try to break the mold, you’re not going to last long. That framework works pretty well, and it is understandable that it is just a reflection of obvious power structures.” (Chomsky 1997)
Nevertheless, some of the leading journalists continue to believe that nobody can tell them what to write. How does this add up? Media researcher Chomsky clarifies the apparent contradiction:
“[T]he point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going say the right thing. If they had started off at the Metro desk, or something, and had pursued the wrong kind of stories, they never would have made it to the positions where they can now say anything they like. The same is mostly true of university faculty in the more ideological disciplines. They have been through the socialization system.” (Chomsky 1997)
Ultimately, this “socialization system” leads to a journalism that no longer independently researches and critically reports on geopolitical conflicts (and some other topics), but seeks to consolidate the desired narrative through appropriate editorials, commentary, and interviews.
Conclusion: The “First Law of Journalism”
Former AP journalist Herbert Altschull called it the First Law of Journalism: “In all press systems, the news media are instruments of those who exercise political and economic power. Newspapers, periodicals, radio and television stations do not act independently, although they have the possibility of independent exercise of power.” (Altschull 1984/1995, p. 298)
In that sense, it is logical that our traditional media – which are predominantly financed by advertising or the state – represent the geopolitical interests of the transatlantic alliance, given that both the advertising corporations as well as the states themselves are dependent on the transatlantic economic and security architecture led by the United States.
In addition, the key people of our leading media are – in the spirit of Chomsky’s “socialization system” – often themselves part of transatlantic elite networks. Some of the most important institutions in this regard include the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission, all of which feature many prominent journalists (see in-depth study of these groups).
Most well-known publications, therefore, may indeed be seen as a kind of “establishment media”. This is because, in the past, the freedom of the press was rather theoretical, given significant entry barriers such as broadcasting licenses, frequency slots, requirements for financing and technical infrastructure, limited sales channels, dependence on advertising, and other restrictions.
It was only due to the Internet that Altschull’s First Law has been broken to some extent. Thus, in recent years a high-quality, reader-funded journalism has emerged, often outperforming traditional media in terms of critical reporting. Some of these “alternative” publications already reach a very large audience, showing that the “mass” does not have to be a problem for the quality of a media outlet.
Nevertheless, up to now the traditional media has been able to attract a solid majority of online visitors, too. This, in turn, is closely linked to the hidden role of news agencies, whose up-to-the-minute reports form the backbone of most online news sites.
Will “political and economic power”, according to Altschull’s Law, retain control over the news, or will “uncontrolled news” change the political and economic power structure? The coming years will show.
* * *
Case study: Syria war coverage
As part of a case study, the Syria war coverage of nine leading daily newspapers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland were examined for plurality of viewpoints and reliance on news agencies. The following newspapers were selected:
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For Germany: Die Welt, Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)
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For Switzerland: Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), Tagesanzeiger (TA), and Basler Zeitung (BaZ)
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For Austria: Standard, Kurier, and Die Presse
The investigation period was defined as October 1 to 15, 2015, i.e. the first two weeks after Russia’s direct intervention in the Syrian conflict. The entire print and online coverage of these newspapers was taken into account. Any Sunday editions were not taken into account, as not all of the newspapers examined have such. In total, 381 newspaper articles met the stated criteria.
In a first step, the articles were classified according to their properties into the following groups:
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Agencies: Reports from news agencies (with agency code)
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Mixed: Simple reports (with author names) that are based in whole or in part on agency reports
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Reports: Editorial background reports and analyses
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Opinions/Comments: Opinions and guest comments
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Interviews: Interviews with experts, politicians etc.
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Investigative: Investigative research that reveals new information or context
The following Figure 1 shows the composition of the articles for the nine newspapers analyzed in total. As can be seen, 55% of articles were news agency reports; 23% editorial reports based on agency material; 9% background reports; 10% opinions and guest comments; 2% interviews; and 0% based on investigative research.
Figure 1: Types of articles (total; n=381)
The pure agency texts – from short notices to the detailed reports – were mostly on the Internet pages of the daily newspapers: on the one hand, the pressure for breaking news is higher than in the printed edition, on the other hand, there are no space restrictions. Most other types of articles were found in both the online and printed editions; some exclusive interviews and background reports were found only in the printed editions. All items were collected only once for the investigation.
The following Figure 2 shows the same classification on a per newspaper basis. During the observation period (two weeks), most newspapers published between 40 and 50 articles on the Syrian conflict (print and online). In the German newspaper Die Welt there were more (58), in the Basler Zeitung and the Austrian Kurier, however, significantly less (29 or 33).
Depending on which newspaper, the share of agency reports is almost 50% (Welt, Süddeutsche, NZZ, Basler Zeitung), just under 60% (FAZ, Tagesanzeiger), and 60 to 70% (Presse, Standard, Kurier). Together with the agency-based reports, the proportion in most newspapers is between approx. 70% and 80%. These proportions are consistent with previous media studies (e.g., Blum 1995, Johnston 2011, MacGregor 2013, Paterson 2007).
In the background reports, the Swiss newspapers were leading (five to six pieces), followed by Welt, Süddeutsche and Standard (four each) and the other newspapers (one to three). The background reports and analyzes were in particular devoted to the situation and development in the Middle East, as well as to the motives and interests of individual actors (for example Russia, Turkey, the Islamic State).
However, most of the commentaries were to be found in the German newspapers (seven comments each), followed by Standard (five), NZZ and Tagesanzeiger (four each). Basler Zeitung did not publish any commentaries during the observation period, but two interviews. Other interviews were conducted by Standard (three) and Kurier and Presse (one each). Investigative research, however, could not be found in any of the newspapers.
In particular, in the case of the three German newspapers, a journalistically problematic blending of opinion pieces and reports was noted. Reports contained strong expressions of opinion even though they were not marked as commentary. The present study was in any case based on the article labeling by the newspaper.
Figure 2: Types of articles per newspaper
The following Figure 3 shows the breakdown of agency stories (by agency abbreviation) for each news agency, in total and per country. The 211 agency reports carried a total of 277 agency codes (a story may consist of material from more than one agency). In total, 24% of agency reports came from the AFP; about 20% each by the DPA, APA and Reuters; 9% of the SDA; 6% of the AP; and 11% were unknown (no labeling or blanket term “agencies”).
In Germany, the DPA, AFP and Reuters each have a share of about one third of the news stories. In Switzerland, the SDA and the AFP are in the lead, and in Austria, the APA and Reuters.
In fact, the shares of the global agencies AFP, AP and Reuters are likely to be even higher, as the Swiss SDA and the Austrian APA obtain their international reports mainly from the global agencies and the German DPA cooperates closely with the American AP.
It should also be noted that, for historical reasons, the global agencies are represented differently in different regions of the world. For events in Asia, Ukraine or Africa, the share of each agency will therefore be different than from events in the Middle East.
Figure 3: Share of news agencies, total (n=277) and per country
In the next step, central statements were used to rate the orientation of editorial opinions (28), guest comments (10) and interview partners (7) (a total of 45 articles). As Figure 4 shows, 82% of the contributions were generally US/NATO friendly, 16% neutral or balanced, and 2% predominantly US/NATO critical.
The only predominantly US/NATO-critical contribution was an op-ed in the Austrian Standard on October 2, 2015, titled: “The strategy of regime change has failed. A distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ terrorist groups in Syria makes the Western policy untrustworthy.”
Figure 4: Orientation of editorial opinions, guest comments, and interviewees (total; n=45).
The following Figure 5 shows the orientation of the contributions, guest comments and interviewees, in turn broken down by individual newspapers. As can be seen, Welt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, NZZ, Zürcher Tagesanzeiger and the Austrian newspaper Kurier presented exclusively US/NATO-friendly opinion and guest contributions; this goes for FAZ too, with the exception of one neutral/balanced contribution. The Standard brought four US/NATO friendly, three balanced/neutral, as well as the already mentioned US/NATO critical opinion contributions.
Presse was the only one of the examined newspapers to predominantly publish neutral/balanced opinions and guest contributions. The Basler Zeitung published one US/NATO-friendly and one balanced contribution. Shortly after the observation period (October 16, 2015), Basler Zeitung also published an interview with the President of the Russian Parliament. This would of course have been counted as a contribution critical of the US/NATO.
Figure 5: Basic orientation of opinion pieces and interviewees per newspaper
In a further analysis, a full-text keyword search for “propaganda” (and word combinations thereof) was used to investigate in which cases the newspapers themselves identified propaganda in one of the two geopolitical conflict sides, USA/NATO or Russia (the participant “IS/ISIS” was not considered). In total, twenty such cases were identified. Figure 6 shows the result: in 85% of the cases, propaganda was identified on the Russian side of the conflict, in 15% the identification was neutral or unstated, and in 0% of the cases propaganda was identified on the USA/NATO side of the conflict.
It should be noted that about half of the cases (nine) were in the Swiss NZZ, which spoke of Russian propaganda quite frequently (“Kremlin propaganda”, “Moscow propaganda machine”, “propaganda stories”, “Russian propaganda apparatus” etc.), followed by German FAZ (three), Welt and Süddeutsche Zeitung (two each) and the Austrian newspaper Kurier (one). The other newspapers did not mention propaganda, or only in a neutral context (or in the context of IS).
Figure 6: Attribution of propaganda to conflict parties (total; n=20).
Conclusion
In this case study, the geopolitical coverage in nine leading European newspapers was examined for diversity and journalistic performance using the example of the Syrian war.
The results confirm the high dependence on the global news agencies (63 to 90%, excluding commentaries and interviews) and the lack of own investigative research, as well as the rather biased commenting on events in favor of the US/NATO side (82% positive; 2% negative), whose stories were not checked by the newspapers for any propaganda.
* * *
About the authors: Swiss Propaganda Research (SPR) is an independent research group investigating geopolitical propaganda in Swiss and international media. You can contact us here.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 21:30 -
- Biden Administration Wants Airlines Off Fossil Fuels By 2050
Biden Administration Wants Airlines Off Fossil Fuels By 2050
As if we weren’t throwing enough trillions of dollars away (or, should we say, printing enough trillions away) incentivizing ill conceived “green energy” subsidies, the Biden administration is now set to be targeting weaning all airlines off of fossil fuels by 2050.
The idea, which is likely going to be laughably impossible to implement at any point in the near future, is part of the White House’s plan to “fight climate change”. It follows the Biden administration’s push for auto manufacturers to go all electric and/or hybrid by 2030.
And how are they going to get airlines to go along with such an asinine idea and time schedule? You guessed it: offering cash in the form of incentives that we don’t have. The administration is “contemplating incentives to support private-sector production of sustainable aviation fuel,” according to Reuters. By 2050, the administration wants airlines to fly on 100% jet fuel from renewable sources, the report says.
Discussions are in “early stages”, according to two sources. Meanwhile, sustainable aviation fuel is two to five times more expensive than conventional jet fuel.
Ali Zaidi, the Deputy National Climate Advisor for the White House, said: “As part of the Build Back Better agenda, President Biden proposed catalytic investments to propel innovation and deployment of sustainable aviation fuels.”
Zaidi continued: “The administration is committed to advancing climate solutions in every sector and segment of the economy – with the urgency that the climate crisis demands.”
Electrification of airlines isn’t an option, due to the weight of the batteries that would need to be used, the report notes. In Europe, regulators are trying to “force suppliers to blend rising amounts of SAF into their kerosene,” which has been opposed by U.S. airlines, Reuters notes.
Fuel remains the second largest cost for airlines, other than labor. This means any additional costs due to implementing new fuel rules would likely be passed on to customers.
Plane manufacturers are targeting planes and engines that can run without fossil fuels by 2025 to 2030. Meanwhile, congress is debating a tax credit of up to $2 per gallon for SAF – with money we don’t have to spend.
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION WEIGHS 2050 TARGET FOR AIRLINES TO FLY ON 100% JET FUEL FROM RENEWABLE SOURCES pic.twitter.com/9igC8Boyi7
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 10, 2021
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 21:00 - Rabobank: The World's Biggest Oil Consumer Showed Its Political Vulnerability To Higher Oil Prices And Skyrocketing Inflation
Rabobank: The World’s Biggest Oil Consumer Showed Its Political Vulnerability To Higher Oil Prices And Skyrocketing Inflation
By Ryan Fitzmaurice of Rabobank
Summary
- The White House released a statement on Wednesday pleading with OPEC+ to increase oil production to stem off inflationary pressures from higher domestic gasoline prices
- The world’s biggest oil consumer showed its political vulnerability to higher oil prices this week and more specifically skyrocketing consumer inflation
- The push for “green” energy is also putting upward pressure on commodity price inflation
Oil markets started off the week under pressure as continued speculative “long” liquidation amid delta variant demand concerns weighed on prices. However, in an ironic twist, the oil market got a boost from an unlikely source on Wednesday as the Biden administration announced it was pleading with OPEC+ members to increase oil production to stem inflationary pressures from rising domestic gasoline prices.
The White House announcement was naturally intended to pressure oil prices lower as has worked under past administrations but instead the opposite occurred as the oil market saw right through the veiled attempt (while spurring criticism from all sides including industry lobbyists, “climate scientists”, progressives and conservatives). For starters, OPEC+ and more importantly Saudi Arabia, are unlikely to answer Biden’s calls for more crude oil as they already have a fully agreed to plan in place. Further to that end, the US/Saudi relationship is quite strained as the Biden administration has pivoted towards Iran as it anxiously looks to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, but so far with little success. As such, the oil market rightly interpreted the desperate plea as coming from a place of weakness and not strength which led to strong gains in the notoriously unforgiving financial oil markets on Wednesday.
Adding to the irony, oil prices had actually been trending lower prior to the announcement but consequently found a new source of strength as the world’s biggest oil consumer showed its political vulnerability to higher oil prices and more specifically skyrocketing consumer inflation. In addition to shifting the short-term oil momentum back to the upside, the plea to OPEC+ also enraged oil producers in the US and Canada given there is plenty of capacity available in North America that can be called upon rather than increasing dependency on Middle East oil. Furthermore, not only was this North American oil not called upon, but it has also been intentionally stifled by the Biden administration by cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline and vowing to ban drilling on federal lands, to name a few.
The “green” energy conundrum
In addition to angering North American oil producers, the plea for more OPEC+ oil is also not sitting well with the “green” energy enthusiasts that make up a meaningful percentage of Biden’s base. This outrage should come as no surprise as increased oil production undermines the push to decarbonize economies and reduces the incentive to shift away from fossil fuels and towards electric vehicles, a key part of the current administration’s agenda.
Perhaps more importantly though, the plea to OPEC+ to lower US gasoline prices shines a bright light on the cost of going “green” which can be quite expensive it turns out (as discussed here back in June in “Why One Bank Thinks ESG Could Trigger Hyperinflation“). After all, the cost of crude oil makes up a shrinking portion of retail prices at the pump in states such as California, the US leader when it comes to decarbonisation and “green” policies.
As you can see in Figure 2 below, the average cost of regular gasoline is significantly more expensive than the national average. In fact, looking at the most recent price of $4.35 per gallon in California, that equates to a cost of $183 per barrel, or more than 2.5x the cost of Brent crude oil. So why the huge mark-up in retail gasoline prices?
For starters, California requires a very strict and specific grade of gasoline known as CARBOB, that has tighter specifications than the rest of the US meant to address air quality issues in the state. This reduces the gasoline supply pool for California as not all refiners can produce the specifications while also increasing the cost of production for refiners. In addition to tighter specs, federal and state renewable credits have been soaring this year, adding even more upwards pressure to prices at the pump as a large portion of these costs are passed on to the consumer.
Perhaps more importantly, the huge run-up in renewable credits has US oil refiners shutting crude oil capacity in favor of renewable fuels production. As a result, the US has less operable refining capacity than it did prior to the pandemic, but the renewable facilities are still under construction. As such, the refined products are experiencing supply tightness and upward pressure on prices.
Looking Forward
Looking forward, the oil market is heading into next week with a mixed technical picture. On the bullish side of things, the spot Brent contract recaptured the psychologically important $70/bbl level on the upside this week, but on the other hand, the market remains below its 20-day moving average. Looking at the big picture though, inflation remains a key concern for consumers, politicians, and investors alike.
This dynamic was on full display this week as the Biden administration’s pleaded for OPEC+ to pump more oil and reduce gasoline prices. As we explained though, we do not expect OPEC+ to change course on its already agreed to production increases and, as such, we expect oil prices will likely stay high and US balances will remain tight. Furthermore, this dynamic could work to reignite inflation-driven commodity index flows from large asset managers that have been so important to the oil market this year.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 20:30 - Hell Came: Millennials Lost "Millions" On Bill Ackman's SPAC Implosion
Hell Came: Millennials Lost “Millions” On Bill Ackman’s SPAC Implosion
High profile fund manager Bill Ackman wound up torching retail investors when his special-purpose acquisition company, Pershing Square Tontine Holdings, failed to find a merger partner after months of bluster from Ackman and blind faith from investors.
The failure of PSTH to get off the ground resulted in large losses for retail investors, like one 35-year-old unmarried Chicago psychiatrist who lost nearly $1 million “investing” in call options on the pre-merger entity, a new profile by Institutional Investor points out.
PSTH had been touted by Ackman to be an “investor friendly” SPAC. Ackman even “tweeted a rap video about SPACs minting money” in February 2021. Ackman even joked about “marrying a unicorn” when talking about his SPAC’s launch last July.
The rise and fall of PSTH, from Sept. 2020 to Aug. 2021 “That video literally single-handedly caused the stock to rise 10 percent,” the investor told II. “It was like, okay, this is coming very soon. If you don’t get in now, you’re going to miss it.”
“Just because I have specialized training doesn’t mean I can’t be just as much of a fool as the guy next door,” the investor said. “Whatever money I had, I pretty much was putting it all into buying more of it,” he said of his purchases of June 18, 2021 $25 strike call options. The stock traded at $23 at the time, leaving the options to be a total loss.
But reality hit on June 4 when PSTH announced a deal to take a 10% stake in Universal Music Group. It was a small slice of an investment that left money over for other deals. Then, “hell came” when the SEC told Ackman that the deal didn’t meet NYSE’s requirements for a SPAC, all but killing the deal.
In fact, II talked to 16 other people who invested in PSTH and though it was a “safe, calculated bet”. “Nine of the 17 men II contacted were either immigrants or first-generation Americans,” the report noted.
One 31 year old German college student put about $294,000 in savings into the SPAC. He had lost about $100,000 on the investment. “I looked up to Ackman,” he said, noting that he was impressed by Ackman’s SPAC doing away with free sponsor shares and encouraging holding shares post-merger through special warrants. “It was clear to me that this was a new kind of vehicle. To me, the warrants were the unique selling point of PSTH,” he said.
Another investor who lost $600,000 on PSTH options told II: “The gambler’s fallacy is always the high end. You think you’re invincible until you’re not, and that’s generally what happened to me.”
The biggest loss came from a 39 year old software engineer, who saved $1.6 million over 20 years. He set up an account at Fidelity last year and, behind the back of his parents whom he was helping support, put the entire $1.6 million into PSTH.
“Ackman just sounded very confident. I trusted the guy. I thought he knew what he was doing,” the engineer said.
It was then that he transferred his shares into in the money call options with a strike price of $22. The stock was trading at $30 at the time.
His account hit $2 million at one point before his options expired worthless on July 16.
He said of the resulting depression he is suffering from: “I’m not mentally there. I’ve got to pick myself up or this is going to ruin my life even further.”
You can read II’s full piece here.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 20:11 - 'Named & Shamed' – IRS Lists The Record Number Of Wealthy Americans Becoming Ex-Americans In 2020
‘Named & Shamed’ – IRS Lists The Record Number Of Wealthy Americans Becoming Ex-Americans In 2020
The number of wealthy Americans with assets over $2 million who renounced their citizenship has surged amid socioeconomic despair, political firestorms, and an unrelenting virus pandemic sparking increasingly freedom-destroying mandates from the ‘petty tyrants’ – as Rand Paul described them – in Washington.
Earlier this year, we noted 6,705 Americans gave up their citizenship in 2020, a 260% increase from 2019 when 2,577 renounced their citizenship. People fleeing the country tend to have the economic mobility to do so and seek tax haven countries. They also seek areas that are safer (free of social unrest) and have more freedoms.
It’s no secret that the Democrat’s key campaign promise is higher taxes and that may have spooked wealthy people also.
For 2021, the number of Americans who renounced their citizenship this year is down, but that might be due to COVID restrictions at U.S. embassies and consulates that have delayed the process.
David Lesperance, an international tax lawyer based in Poland who helps people renounce U.S. citizenship, told Axios that there’s a backlog of wealthy people trying to renounce their citizenship but “can’t get the appointment” with the government because “the system’s capacity has peaked.”
He estimates “20,000 or 30,000 people” are attempting to renounce their citizenship.
Lesperance told Axios that the first process to renouncing citizenship requires obtaining citizenship in another country. He said, “it’s a year-and-a-half to get an appointment at a Canadian embassy.”
He added the virus pandemic has complicated the process and made it more time-consuming than ever before.
Ashkan Yekrangi, an immigration lawyer, based in Orange County, told Axios that “the bulk of the cases are individuals trying to avoid tax liability.”
Even tech billionaires have begun to apply for citizenship elsewhere: the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, is becoming a citizen of the island of Cyprus.
The Biden tax plan to raise the corporate tax rate, top individual income tax rate, and capital gains tax rate will likely push more wealthy people out of the U.S. on top of the already socioeconomic collapse that is being held up by a thread of fiscal and monetary stimuli.
Wealthy folks are beginning to understand: they don’t want to be the last ones sticking around when the party ends.
The IRS published a quarterly list of the latest millionaires who have renounced their citizenship or given up their green cards. Read the complete list here.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 20:00 - Judge Orders Biden Administration To Resume "Remain In Mexico" Policy
Judge Orders Biden Administration To Resume “Remain In Mexico” Policy
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,
The stoppage of the policy has contributed to the border crisis, ruling says…
A federal judge on Friday said the Biden administration must resume a policy that sees asylum seekers wait in Mexico for their claims to be heard.
The Department of Homeland Security “failed to consider several critical factors” before axing the Trump era “Remain in Mexico” policy, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, found.
That included ignoring how the program was beginning to lead to some immigrants with asylum claims that lacked merit voluntarily returning home, he wrote in a 53-page ruling.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on June 1 of this year formally ended “Remain in Mexico,” though in practice it was stopped when President Joe Biden entered office on Jan. 20. In a memorandum (pdf) to top immigration officials, Mayorkas said a review determined the policy “does not adequately or sustainably enhance border management in such a way as to justify the program’s extensive operational burdens and other shortfalls.”
“Over the course of the program, border encounters increased during certain periods and decreased during others. Moreover, in making my assessment, I share the belief that we can only manage migration in an effective, responsible, and durable manner if we approach the issue comprehensively, looking well beyond our own borders,” he wrote.
The memo fails to mention some of the primary benefits of the program, which is known as MPP, Kacsmaryk said.
“At the very least, the Secretary was required to show a reasoned decision for discounting the benefits of MPP. Instead, the June 1 Memorandum does not address the problems created by false claims of asylum or how MPP addressed those problems. Likewise, it does not address the fact that DHS previously found that ‘approximately 9 out of 10 asylum claims from Northern Triangle countries are ultimately found non-meritorious by federal immigration judges,’ and that MPP discouraged such aliens from traveling and attempting to cross the border in the first place,” he said.
That made the policy change both arbitrary and capricious, the judge added. The Administrative Procedure Act states that agency actions that are “arbitrary, capricious, or an abuse of discretion” are ripe for being overturned by courts.
Kacsmaryk ordered the Biden administration to resume MPP, though he stayed his order for seven days to let the federal government seek emergency relief at an appeals court.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who brought the lawsuit with the state of Missouri, said the ruling showed the Biden administration “unlawfully tried to shut down the legal and effective Remain-in-Mexico program.”
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, another Republican, described the ruling as a “huge win for border security and the rule of law.”
The Biden administration did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is seen at a Customs and Border Protection processing facility in Donna, Texas, on May 7, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
The Trump administration established MPP in 2019 to deal with a surge in illegal immigration. Former President Donald Trump successfully partnered with Mexico to start the program, which saw the U.S. send some asylum seekers back to Mexico until their claims were heard.
Kirstjen Nielsen, who served as Homeland Security secretary during the Trump administration, said when the program was first implemented that it was in response to “a security and humanitarian crisis on the Southern border.”
“MPP will help restore a safe and orderly immigration process, decrease the number of those taking advantage of the immigration system, and the ability of smugglers and traffickers to prey on vulnerable populations, and reduce threats to life, national security, and public safety, while ensuring that vulnerable populations receive the protections they need,” she said in a statement at the time.
Biden and top officials this year have reversed or altered a number of key Trump-era immigration policies. The United States has seen a leap in illegal border crossings, culminating in a new 21-year-high in July.
Mayorkas, Biden, and others have repeatedly blamed Trump, claiming his administration’s policies were “inhumane” and needed changing. That process takes time, they’ve said.
Speaking about the border crossings during a visit in Texas this week, Mayorkas said one reason for them was “the end of the cruel policies of the past administration, and the restoration of the rule of laws of this country that Congress has passed, including our asylum laws that provide humanitarian relief.”
Trump “slashed our international assistance to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, slashed the resources that we were contributing to address the root causes of a right of irregular migration,” he added later.
Stephen Miller, a top immigration adviser to Trump during the previous administration, called Mayorkas “a pathological liar” in response.
“He inherited the most secure border—& the most effective enforcement regime—in history,” Miller wrote on Twitter. “The *sole* cause of the present border disaster was Biden’s decision to reverse the Trump program & replace it with sovereignty-erasing catch-and-release.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 19:30 - Visualizing The Taliban's Advance In Afghanistan
Visualizing The Taliban’s Advance In Afghanistan
More Afghan provincial capitals have fallen to the Taliban as the insurgent group is advancing quickly in the country after the United States started to withdraw its troops.
The exodus of the U.S. military is not expected to finish before the end of the month, but, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, the insurgents have already regained control of large swaths of the country, suggesting that their defeat was never more than temporary. According to media reports, the Afghan capital Kabul could be surrounded in as little as 30 days, which has led to foreign governments including the U.S. scrambling to remove their personnel from the city.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Southern provincial capital Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, fell to attacks Friday, while Lashkar Gah in the neighboring province of Helmand also came under Taliban control. This is according to the Foundation For Defense of Democracies’ Long War Journal.
According to the journal, the Taliban announced retaking twelve complete provinces and two more provincial capitals – Aybak and Puli Khumri in northern provinces Samangan and Baghlan – in the past week. The two provinces are still qualified as under high Taliban threat in the chart with Long War Journal data, as are six additional provinces. Kabul province meanwhile is listed as being under moderate threat of Taliban capture. Only two provinces are currently under low Taliban threat, remaining firmly in the hands of Afghan government.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 19:00 - Rhode Island Teachers' Union Sues Mother For Daring To Ask To See Her Kindergartener's Curriculum
Rhode Island Teachers’ Union Sues Mother For Daring To Ask To See Her Kindergartener’s Curriculum
Authored by Andrew Widburg via AmericanThinker.com,
Nicole Solas, a Rhode Island mom with a kindergartener in public school, was curious about whether CRT had entered her daughter’s school.
Therefore, she filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with her school district.
“I became concerned that Critical Race Theory (CRT) and gender theory were integrated into lessons when an elementary school principal told me that teachers don’t refer to students as ‘boys’ and ‘girls,’” Solas wrote in an op-ed published on Legal Insurrection.
“Additionally, I was told a kindergarten teacher asks five-year-olds, ‘what could have been done differently on the first Thanksgiving’ in order to build upon a ‘line of thinking about history.’”
The school has been fighting her to keep these taxpayer-funded records private…
South Kingstown School Committee chairwoman Emily Cummiskey said in a June 2 statement:
“This issue is a much larger one—one that involves a disturbing attempt by a nationally organized, racist group to create chaos and intimidate our district in recent weeks as we discuss bringing equity and anti-racism curriculum to our schools,” adding that,
“this is their MO nation-wide, and I anticipate other districts in our state will soon experience the same unfortunate influx we have.”
…and, just this week, the local branch of the National Education Association (America’s largest teacher’s union) sued to block her request. Frankly, from a lawyer’s point of view, the union’s objections are ridiculous.
The complaint is here. I’ve reviewed it, and, while I’ll be the first to admit that I last worked on school district law in the mid-1980s, I think I have enough experience under my belt to point and laugh at the complaint.
The remedy the union seeks is simple:
In short, this action seeks to: (a) prohibit the disclosure of non-public records; and/or (b) for those requests that call for personally identifiable and other personnel related information about public school teachers, that no records be disclosed under the Court employs a balancing test that properly assesses the public interest in the records at issue measured against the teachers’ individual privacy rights.
It’s certainly understandable that the teachers should have an expectation of privacy when it comes to records about their health or personal finances. Otherwise, these are public employees. If one of the teachers is sending around emails saying, “We’d better make sure the White students understand their unfairly acquired privilege,” it doesn’t matter if she didn’t fill out a form to make that statement.
Anything in the school’s possession that touches upon curriculum matters is appropriate for public consumption. Much as the unions and school district would like to ignore the fact, it is the taxpayers who, by paying school salaries, are the employers.
The NEA explains that when the school principal refused to turn over papers and, instead, told Solas to utilize the state’s FOIA process, AKA the Access to Public Records Act (APRA), she did so with enthusiasm, as did others, once word got out about her efforts to pry loose information from her school. Instead of producing the requested information, the school whined that Solas was asking for too much.
The NEA was also upset by multiple requests, a few of which I’ve highlighted here:
Documents about the union’s role in the school.
Considering the fact that unions have significant say in school curricula, this is an appropriate thing for a taxpaying parent to want to know.
“Public documents” about a union employee.
The fact that they are public makes them automatically discoverable.
Complaints about a specific retired teacher and union member.
If those complaints are relevant to CRT in the classroom, they should be discoverable.
Details of disciplinary [actions] against teachers.
This request made clear that it sought publicly available information because it further acknowledged that, even if the details were private, a parent is still entitled to know the names of the teachers who were subject to such actions. Once again, this is appropriate information for taxpayers dealing with their children’s public schools.
Teachers’ emails.
No employee can ever write an email with an expectation of privacy. All emails belong to the employer. In the case of a public entity, the ultimate employer is the taxpayer.
A reasonable negotiation would exclude or redact emails in which teachers relate personal concerns, such as matters regarding their or their families’ health, personal financial issues, or other obviously private matters. To the extent that the emails discuss school policy, there is no basis to object to them. If the teachers are genuinely concerned about their well-being, their names can be redacted, provided that the content is produced.
It’s certainly true that there are a lot of bad judicial rulings out there protecting public employees from being called out for their bad actions. However, without doing a review of that law, I’m betting that the rules are different when parents are seeking information about what schools are teaching their children — and if they’re not, they ought to be.
Meanwhile, at Legal Insurrection, law professor William A. Jacobson has a vast body of articles about Solas’s efforts to get these records. Jacobson’s take is a little broader than mine about motives, but the same about the specifics of production:
My initial take is that this smells collusive. South Kingstown doesn’t want to produce records and the union is helping them out. The lawsuit purports to prevent disclosure of “private” information, but the public records laws and Solas’ requests pursuant to those laws only require the district to produce public records. The district has been very aggressive in asserting exemptions and redacting documents, so the union’s concern and rush to court seems peculiar, at best.
Ultimately, the school’s resistance, now with the backing of the union, is so over the top that it’s reasonable to infer that the school has been grossly abusing its access to innocent children in order to indoctrinate them with Critical Race Theory, an ideology so racist that, if one substituted Black or Jewish for White, it would be appropriate in a KKK or Nazi school.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 18:30 - Double Trouble: Tropical Storm Sets Crosshairs On Haiti Amid Earthquake Chaos
Double Trouble: Tropical Storm Sets Crosshairs On Haiti Amid Earthquake Chaos
Tropical Depression Fred struggled Saturday morning to gain momentum and moved toward the eastern Gulf of Mexico with a cone of uncertainty forecasted to make landfall on Monday near the Florida-Alabama border. Although Fred has been downgraded from a tropical storm, peak hurricane season has arrived, and another system is developing.
The National Hurrican Center (NHC) is eyeing Tropical Storm Grace about 400 miles east of the Leeward Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. The storm quickly strengthened into tropical storm status in the last 24 hours.
The five-day cone of uncertainty shows Grace is a threat to several landmasses across the Caribbean. The most notable is Haiti, where on Saturday morning, the U.S. Geological Survey reported a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck off the Caribbean country’s coast and has produced devastating effects on land.
Haiti appears to be in Grace’s cone of uncertainty.
Tropical winds could arrive in Haiti as early as Monday morning.
A double whammy of natural disasters could strike Haiti in a short period. Grace is forecasted to pass near or over Haiti early next week.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 18:00 - The Value Of Gold And What It Is Worth In Today's Market
The Value Of Gold And What It Is Worth In Today’s Market
Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,
While reflecting on the distorted world in which we live and thinking about the woes of owning real estate which weather and time have a way of ravishing I started to think about value. Owning any tangible object seems to have its drawbacks, especially if it has no utility value. Still, they do have at least one thing going for them, they are real. Liquidity is also an issue and unless you can sell an item safely and without a lot of bother, it is difficult to argue it is liquid.
The recent pullback in the price of gold brings front and center the reality no investment is free of risk. When leveraging a position by using borrowed money this risk grows substantially. There is also the issue of where to store it, and even whether what you have purchased is real. Nobody wants to be made a fool of, and that is what a person becomes when they spend their money on what they think is gold only to find out later the item purchased is a fake.
People may claim there is huge demand, that a commodity is rare, and that the cost of producing it is soaring but that does not mean its value is destined to rise. Supply and demand remain king when it comes to valuing a commodity, and gold’s role in our future has yet to be determined.
A recent post on AdvancingTime looked into how once magnificent Grandfather clocks have now become obsolete symbols of wealth and conspicuous consumption. The fact these large clocks are hard to move and maintain has led to their value dropping like a stone. In fact, many of them can now be found in storage rooms and the back corner of the garage in homes across America. Value is not a constant and whether something is in vogue matters.
It is easy to adopt the view that with the rapid and huge surge in both debt and the money supply gold and inflation have nowhere to go except up. Gold has for a long time been touted as the ultimate place a person can store wealth. Still, we should ask, do the trends taking place in modern society also undermine its value? While many gold bugs are astounded by such a suggestion, it is a question that should be asked. The rise of a slew of cryptocurrencies has called into question gold’s staying power as a defense against inflation.
We must never forget how gold quickly rose in value several times over the years only to slump in price for long periods of time. As charts showing the value of gold indicate, the precious metal has seen many ups and downs. Without a great deal of utility value, the value of gold tends to often move based on shifts in interest rates and the cost of money. Efforts to magically tie the value of gold to historic relationships with other commodities and currencies generally prove futile.
The eroding ability of anything to stand up against governments growing ability to confiscate and steal our wealth brings into question the future of gold and its mantle of the best place to store wealth. This means that a person best have the gold they own in their possession and hidden away from prying eyes or it may not remain theirs for long.
My Precious! Is The General Consensus
One of the sad realities we face is that gold has become so valuable that today many people that wore gold jewelry for years no longer wear it because it increases the risk they will be robbed. Crooks are everywhere, if someone will kill for a few hundred dollars, it does not take a rocket scientist to recognize that anyone wearing a $2,000 chain around their neck has a bullseye painted on them.
Central banks know that gold is a threat to fiat money and by occasionally causing it to retreat in value they can damage those that hold it dear. Many gold bugs and even silver investors claim this exploitation has gone on for decades and won’t stop until economies collapse. They see gold and silver as two of the most manipulated commodities on the planet.
It was recently pointed out to me that many younger people are not as enthralled by gold, many of them are more focused on cryptocurrencies than this precious metal. Also, it must be noted that some cultures and areas of the world hold gold in higher esteem than others. This often has to do with their history and how their ancestors were to the idea gold and wealth flowed together as one.
The reason many young people may not be as captivated and dazzled by gold’s charm could be their interests have turned to other things, they simply can’t afford gold, or they are not familiar with how inflation can destroy the value of currencies. With all the above in mind, the biggest threat facing those that own gold is that it may at some point be confiscated by governments or that it may be made illegal to sell or owned.
In no way should any of the things written above be considered a stand that holding gold is not the ticket to a prosperous future or a bad investment. The above is simply a reminder of how fragile and dangerous the investment world is, it is a place where nothing is carved in stone, and if it were, that stone would be sitting next to a giant stone crusher.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 17:30 - China 'Ready' To Recognize Taliban If Afghan Government Ousted
China ‘Ready’ To Recognize Taliban If Afghan Government Ousted
Late last month the world beheld the unusual footage of Taliban commanders being warmly received by China’s foreign minister Wang Yi in the Chinese city of Tianjin. That trip included the Islamic terror group’s co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in a rare visit widely seen as an attempt of the jihadists to gain “legitimacy” abroad.
It appears to have paid off, given that now at a moment the Taliban is scoring victory and victory on the ground they are eyeing the sought after price of Kabul. And now US News and World Report writes that “China is prepared to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate ruler of Afghanistan if it succeeds in toppling the Western-backed government in Kabul, U.S. News has learned, a prospect that undercuts the Biden administration’s remaining source of leverage over the insurgent network as it continues its startling campaign to regain control.”
Beijing is still said to be urging the Taliban to strike a ceasefire and peace deal with the government under Afghan president Ashraf Ghani. In the past days Kabul has signaled it’s open to a “power sharing” agreement.
But the Taliban has little incentive given it’s already taken over about two-thirds of the country with relative ease and while beholding retreating national forces.
“However, new Chinese military and intelligence assessments of the realities on the ground in Afghanistan have prompted leaders in the Chinese Communist Party to prepare to formalize their relationship with the insurgent network, according to multiple U.S. and foreign intelligence sources familiar with the Chinese assessments,” the report says further.
Wang Yi’s new friends. pic.twitter.com/jmlrWc195J
— Aadil Brar (@aadilbrar) July 28, 2021
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At the same time to US and UK are meekly warning of “isolation” on the global stage should the Taliban take back the country, in what’s simply looking like a repeat of the scenario pre-2001.
China, meanwhile, wants to become the first country to officially recognise Taliban rule in Afghanistan after Pakistan. 🙈
— Aditya Raj Kaul (@AdityaRajKaul) August 12, 2021
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Previously the Biden administration spelled out that any future Taliban government in Afghanistan would be viewed as a “pariah state”. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said weeks ago: “The Taliban says that it seeks international recognition, that it wants international support for Afghanistan. Presumably, it wants its leaders to be able to travel freely in the world, sanctions lifted, etc,” however, he underscored it would be immediately isolated, with “pariah” status akin to other ‘rogue regimes’.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 17:00 - Biden Mobilizes 5,000 Troops For Urgent Afghan Evacuation
Biden Mobilizes 5,000 Troops For Urgent Afghan Evacuation
There’s been reported growing frustration and anger even within the Democratic administration itself over President Biden’s being utterly silent Friday into Saturday while for much of the past week the Taliban has steamrolled Afghan forces as it prepares to lay siege to Kabul. He’s even vacationing this weekend at Camp David; Axios described the president as “relaxing”.
Amid growing pressure to address the crisis which is seeing a rapid emergency evacuation from the US Embassy in Kabul with Pentagon assistance, President Biden belatedly addressed the situation late in the day Saturday. His first move was to announce an increase in the US security deployment to Kabul to assist the evacuation of US diplomatic staff.
“I have authorized the deployment of approximately 5,000 US troops to make sure we can have an orderly and safe drawdown of US personnel and other allied personnel,” he said while acknowledging the Taliban advance. Ironically the past months have witnessed a steady draw down of just as many troops – and now they will go right back.
Image via Reuters Biden confirmed prior reports that Washington has signaled to the Taliban that it’s not to attack retreating US forces: “we have conveyed to the Taliban representatives in Doha, via our Combatant Commander, that any action on their part on the ground in Afghanistan, that puts US personnel or our mission at risk there, will be met with a swift and strong US military response,” Biden said.
Earlier in the day The Washington Post wrote:
US officials now appealing to the Taliban to wait for the completion of the U.S. evacuation saying that doing so would increase “the likelihood that both the international community and Afghans will accept the Taliban’s entry into the capital.”
More details began to be released within the hour after the White House statement. Elite soldiers from Fort Bragg are reportedly being mobilized.
According to Pentagon Correspondent Tara Copp, the breakdown of 5,000 troops breaks down as follows:
- 650 already on the ground protecting Kabul Airport & embassy
- USMC embassy security detachment
- 3,000 from 3 USMC USArmy infantry battalions that are enroute/ will be on the ground by this weekend,
- 1,000 @82ndABNDiv getting re-routed direct to #Kabul
The 5,000 = 650 already on the ground protecting Kabul Airport & embassy + @USMC embassy security detachment + 3,000 from 3 @USMC @USArmy infantry battalions that are enroute/ will be on the ground by this weekend, + 1,000 @82ndABNDiv getting re-routed direct to #Kabul
— Tara Copp (@TaraCopp) August 14, 2021
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Remaining American civilians in the country have been told by the State Department to proceed to Kabul’s international airport “at your own risk”.
BREAKING: President Biden orders 1,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne’s alert brigade out of Fort Bragg to reinforce U.S. troops in Kabul. 5,000 U.S. forces will now be on the ground to evacuate Americans from Afghanistan.
— Lucas Tomlinson (@LucasFoxNews) August 14, 2021
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Much of the rest of Biden’s statement deals with defending his rationale for the full US troop exit by the symbolic date of 9/11…
“America went to Afghanistan 20 years ago to defeat the forces that attacked this country on September 11th. That mission resulted in the death of Osama Bin Laden over a decade ago and the degradation of al Qaeda,” the White House statement reads. “And yet, 10 years later, when I became President, a small number of US troops still remained on the ground, in harm’s way, with a looming deadline to withdraw them or go back to open combat.
More scenes like the following will continue in the coming days and weeks:
Taliban in the house of Dostum, the warlord the US gave the vice presidency and $100k a month to. pic.twitter.com/wAwr9h9kQ6
— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) August 14, 2021
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“Over our country’s 20 years at war in Afghanistan, America has sent its finest young men and women, invested nearly $1 trillion dollars, trained over 300,000 Afghan soldiers and police, equipped them with state-of-the-art military equipment, and maintained their air force as part of the longest war in US history,” Biden continued. “One more year, or five more years, of US military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country. And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 16:45 - The Great Parent Revolt
The Great Parent Revolt
Authored by Katharina Gorka via RealClearPolitics.com,
As overreach in classrooms by progressive school administrators, nonprofits and the federal government has reached new heights, parents are stepping up to fight back.
Moms for Liberty, Informed Parents of California, EdFirstNC, NJ Parental Rights, No Left Turn in Education and Parents Against Critical Theory are just a few of the hundreds of new parent groups that have emerged across the country in recent months. Many parents have become education activists because of schools’ failure to bring children back into the classroom or their continued imposition of mask mandates.
Others are engaging because of the content being taught. Whether it’s age-inappropriate sex education, critical race theory, or anti-American history, parents are seeing more of what their children are learning—thanks to COVID’s virtual learning—and they don’t like it. As a result, parents are organizing, speaking out, and pushing back, and they are having a noticeable impact.
Some of the most effective efforts have begun with individual parents who reached a boiling point and decided to speak out. Mom and investigative journalist A.P. Dillon helped expose critical race theory training in Wake County, N.C., public schools. Elana Fishbein was a lone parent in Lower Marion, Pa., who objected to content in her children’s curriculum, which, in her words, “described ‘whiteness’ as an entitlement to steal land, garner riches, and get special treatment on equity and race.” That letter reached a national audience when Tucker Carlson invited her onto his Fox News Channel show.
Andrew Gutmann also made national news when he sent a letter to 650 families criticizing New York City’s Brearley School, which his daughter attended, for its obsession with race and for “desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
Meanwhile, the 11-minute takedown of a Putnam County, N.Y., school board by Tatiana Ibrahim has well over 1 million views on YouTube.
Individual parents speaking out have helped to kick off what is proving to be a rapidly growing parent revolt. They have helped to galvanize others who were either unaware of the bad content or too afraid to speak out. After Elana Fishbein appeared on Carlson’s show, hundreds of parents across the country reached out to her on social media. And today No Left Turn in Education has 35 chapters across the country and is growing.
When Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice finished their terms as school board members in Florida, they decided to form Moms for Liberty to teach parents how to serve as watchdogs of their local schools boards. When they established the organization in January of this year, they had intended it to serve as a statewide entity in Florida. But today, just over six months later, they have 65 chapters nationwide and have more applications for new chapters.
Wherever these parent groups have emerged, they are finding creative ways to challenge the attempted progressive takeover of K-12 education. Sloan Rachmuth, founder of EdFirstNC, has held webinars and in-person events to educate parents on how the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction rewrote the social studies standards for K-12 based on critical race theory. Patti Hidalgo Menders, a mother of five boys in Loudoun County, Va., read aloud to school board members obscene passages from Tiffany D. Jackson’s “Monday’s Not Coming” and Gretchen McNeil’s “#Murder Trending.”
Educating parents is a critical part of the work. As Hannah Smith, a newly elected board member in Texas explained, “There were a lot of people who had, by their own admission, just kind of fallen asleep. They just thought we’ve got these award-winning schools, we’ve got this awesome community, everything’s going well. I don’t need to show up at board meetings. I don’t need to be worried about what’s happening in the schools.”
In addition to raising the alarm about what’s happening in the schools, parent groups are challenging school boards through recalls — for example in Loudoun County and San Francisco — and by actively running candidates for school board, with some notable successes.
When the Carroll, Texas, Independent School District introduced a Cultural Competence Action Plan, which would require “social justice training” and establish a “diversity and inclusion” week, at the cost of $3 million over 10 years, local father Cameron Bryan decided to run for school board and won. As Bob Lubke, from Civitas, has written, “Historically, conservatives have not been as vocal about down-ballot races. That’s a mistake. Education is often the largest expenditure for state and local government. Local school board members not only make budget and policy decisions that impact the day-to-day operations of how our schools are financed and administered but also how our children are educated. Few local positions are as consequential.”
With the growing anger over the indoctrination of their children, parents have become much more engaged in school board elections, and it is having an impact: In 2021, the number of board member recalls has more than doubled from previous years, according to Ballotpedia.
Parents are also initiating lawsuits as an important tool in their fight against overly progressive schools. According to John Murawski at RealClearInvestigations, about a dozen lawsuits and administrative complaints have been filed since 2018. A new wave of lawsuits is being driven by the recent surge of concern among parents over critical race theory and its implementation in schools.
The first lawsuit against CRT was filed on Dec. 22, 2020, in Nevada. Gabrielle Clark and her son William brought the suit on the grounds that the school violated William’s free speech and due process rights. According to the No Left Turn in Education website: “the Sociology of Change teaching in his civic classes required him to publicly reveal his race, gender, religious, and sexual identities, and then attach derogatory labels such as ‘privileged’ or ‘oppressor’ to those identities. Students were then asked to ‘undo’ and ‘unlearn’ their ‘beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that stem from oppression.’ William and his mother objected, and he was punished with a failing grade and his graduation was at risk.”
The lawsuit was brought by a coalition of organizations, led by The Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth and Poverty, with support from the Upper Midwest Law Center, Schoolhouserights.org, and others. According to CRT expert Chris Rufo, several more lawsuits are in preparation.
On June 20, Patti Hidalgo Menders, Scott Mineo and several others, represented by the Liberty Justice Center, filed a lawsuit against the Loudoun County School Board (Menders v. Loudoun County School Board). On June 23, 2020, LCPS published its Action Plan to Combat Systemic Racism. The plan included the creation of a Student Ambassador Equity Program, which was only open to “students of color” and those with “a passion for social justice.” The lawsuit also states, “The ‘Share, Speak-up, Speak-out’ meetings in which Student Equity Ambassadors are entitled to take part are not an everyday opportunity for student/faculty engagement. Rather they are part of an explicit initiative to stifle speech under the guise of eliminating ‘bias’.”
While 26 states have introduced or passed bills to reject the teaching of critical race theory, it will likely be the courts that ultimately decide whether it fundamentally violates American principles, and even in that process, the role of parents will be pivotal. As John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, recently said, “I think that what’s going to happen is that there have to be more parents, more communities involved, challenging these kinds of efforts to use race explicitly in the schools or in their local governments, and those will generate the cases that get to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court can make clear, as I think it should, that race is just never to be used in the government and in state and local at all, for whatever reason, whether it’s allegedly benign or it’s for malign reasons.”
The bottom line is that education in America will likely never be the same, thanks to the Great Parent Revolt of 2021, and that’s good news. For decades, many parents have outsourced the raising of their children to the schools, trusting that administrators, school board members, and teachers would share their values. We blindly believed that schools would care about our children as much as we do. We believed that if the teaching went astray, if the books were inappropriate, or if the civics and history were a little un-American, what we did at home would serve as a gentle correction and all would be well. The past two years have taught us how wrong we were.
Thankfully parents are reengaging in their children’s education and reasserting their rightful place in decisions about curriculum and content. The question will be whether their efforts are strong enough and sufficiently sustained to win the battle against the radical tide of educators, nonprofits and federal education bureaucrats who are working to rewrite American history.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 16:30 - Taliban Seen Flying Captured Military Helicopters Over Afghanistan
Taliban Seen Flying Captured Military Helicopters Over Afghanistan
Multiple videos out of Afghanistan circulated widely on Saturday show an unusual and true first: the Taliban have “have operationalized at least two helicopters captured in Herat,” according to a regional correspondent on the ground. An analyst at the D.C.-based Middle East Institute (MEI) writes “After capturing several helicopters in Kandahar, a Taliban trained pilot reportedly flew an Mi-17 chopper earlier today, right around the city.” It’s confirmed: the bearded Islamists rapidly overrunning cities while US forces are in retreat now literally have airpower, apparently.
Taliban have operationalized at least two helicopters captured in Herat.
Taliban airforce up and running. Don’t know for how long with American aircrafts flying around. #afghanistan pic.twitter.com/HXIcYk22nk
— Asfandyar Bhittani (@BhittaniKhannnn) August 14, 2021
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Over much of the past two weeks the Taliban have been capturing bases in an around provincial capitals and major cities, taking the abandoned and available military hardware there – some of it even previously supplied and left there by the US. Some choppers appear Russian-made.
Such scenes like the below circulating on social media have become the norm…
Almost unbelievable videos like the below are circulating:
Reports that Taliban is flying a helicopter in Herat that was captured from an Afghan military base
TAAF is in the air
— Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) August 14, 2021
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Likely these pilots were previously part of the Afghan military, perhaps even trained in Pakistan or by the US at some point, before going over to join the advancing Taliban.
There appears actual coordination between Taliban ground forces and their newly captured helicopters in the air, as the below video shows.
A convoy of Taliban fighters is being escorted by a Mi-17 helicopter and its crew.
#Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/iUG67si5C5— Ali Özkök (@Ozkok_A) August 14, 2021
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So now the imminent fight for Kabul could actually witness Taliban helicopters in action, among the other ongoing absurdities amid the US retreat and impending collapse of the country.
Meanwhile, the ultra-fast advance toward Kabul continues. At this point, the fall of the capital is just a matter of time.
New: US officials now appealing to the Taliban to wait for the completion of the U.S. evacuation saying that doing so would increase “the likelihood that both the international community and Afghans will accept the Taliban’s entry into the capital.” https://t.co/Di2An31uf8
— John Hudson (@John_Hudson) August 14, 2021
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 16:01 - American Railroads Warn STB About "Unintended Consequences"
American Railroads Warn STB About “Unintended Consequences”
By Railway Age,
In responding to Surface Transportation Board Chair Marty Oberman’s July 22 letter to the Class I railroads requesting information on the extent of congestion at key U.S. container terminals and on their railroads’ policies and practices for assessing container demurrage fees, the Association of American Railroads (AAR) said its members “have made clear in their own responses how they are collaborating with all stakeholders to keep intermodal terminals and the entire national rail network fluid,” and the STB “should refrain from any regulatory action that would undermine those efforts.”
Following is the full text—filled with references to regulatory and court decisions*—of the Aug. 10 letter to Oberman from AAR Associate General Counsel and Corporate Secretary Timothy J. Strafford:
Recently, you wrote to the Class I freight railroad members of the Association of American Railroads (“AAR”) to express your concern about disruptions within the aspects of the international intermodal supply chain involving the Class I freight rail network. In particular, you noted your concerns “about significant increases in container congestion at key U.S. terminals, and substantial charges being levied by the railroads for container storage at these terminals.” Each of the Class I railroads submitted information responsive to your request regarding their individual situations and practices. AAR writes now to respond to the suggestion you report by some stakeholders that the Board consider revoking aspects of the regulatory exemption for intermodal traffic, and to provide the rail industry’s views as to the legal and policy implications of that request.
The global supply chain faces unprecedented challenges in its recovery from the global pandemic, caused by factors beyond the Board’s regulatory regime. Shutdowns of entire sectors of the global economy throughout the pandemic, an uneven recovery in 2020, backlogs of container supply due to decisions of international shipping lines, port delays, and surging demand as the domestic economy reopened all contributed to create the highest rail intermodal volumes ever for the first half of 2021. As a consequence, railroads’ logistics partners at intermodal terminals have been hampered in their ability to absorb the traffic, due in part to their own labor challenges and equipment shortages, creating a backlog of containers at some locations. As explained in their individual responses, Class I railroads have taken steps within the small pieces of this chain that are within their control to keep the overall system as fluid as possible. One of the few levers available to them to incentivize the removal of containers from terminal facilities is to charge storage fees to those entities with which they have commercial relationships.
We noted and appreciated your observation that any potential Board action related to intermodal exemptions would warrant careful examination. The Interstate Commerce Commission, and later the Board, broadly exempted from regulation trailer-on- flatcar/container-on-flatcar (TOFC/COFC) services at 49 C.F.R. Part 1090 due to the fiercely competitive nature of intermodal traffic. See Improvement of TOFC/COFC Regulation, 364 I.C.C. 731 (1981); Improvement of TOFC/COFC Regulations (R.R.-Affiliated Motor Carriers & Other Motor Carriers), 3 I.C.C.2d 869 (1987); Improvement of TOFC/COFC Regulations (Pickup & Delivery), 6 I.C.C.2d 208 (1989). Any action to limit those exemptions would face a high bar in meeting the revocation standard of 49 U.S.C. § 10502, particularly in light of the statute’s specific reference to the exemption of intermodal traffic. See 49 U.S.C. § 10502(f); WTL Rail Corp.—Petition for Declaratory Order and Interim Relief, NOR 42092 et al. (STB served Feb. 17, 2006) (citing Rail Exemption Misc. Agricultural Commodities, 8 I.C.C.2d 674, 682 (1992)).
While the STB retains authority under 49 U.S.C. § 10502(d) to revoke a previously issued exemption, that authority is constrained by the plain language of Section 10502 and the statutory scheme as a whole, which reflects congressional intent to favor deregulation of the railroad industry. Specifically, Section 10502 provides that the Board “shall” exercise its exemption authority “to the maximum extent” consistent with the statute, but that it “may” revoke exemptions, in whole or in part, only when “necessary” to effectuate the Rail Transportation Policy goals contained in Section 10101. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has recognized that this statutory language mandates the “deregulation of the entire railroad industry to the maximum extent possible in conformity with the national rail transportation policy.” Brae Corp. v. United States, 740 F.2d 1023, 1043 (D.C. Cir. 1984); see also Ass’n of Am. R.Rs. v. Surface Transp. Bd., 237 F.3d 676, (D.C. Cir. 2001).
Congress has stressed that when considering revocation, “the Board should continue to require demonstrated abuse of market power that can be remedied only by reimposition of regulation or that regulation is needed to carry out the national transportation policy.” H.R. Conf. Rep. 104-422, at 169 (1995), 1995 U.S.C.C.A.N. 850, 854. Congress has also emphasized that it “expects the Board to examine all competitive transportation factors that restrain rail carriers’ actions and that affect the market for transportation of the particular commodity or type of service for which revocation has been requested.” H.R. Conf. Rep. 104-422, at 169; see also S. Rep. No. 104-176, at 8–9 (same). The Board itself has previously recognized that an “exemption will be revoked [only] where regulation is shown to be necessary,” and “that showing cannot be made” where a carrier “lacks market dominance over [the shipments] at issue.” FMC Wyo. Corp. v. Union Pac. R.R., EP 346 (Sub-No. 29A), 2000 WL 33527851, at *13 n.17 (STB served May 12, 2000). Storage charges assessed in these circumstances are not a reflection of market power over transportation that would trigger the Board’s regulatory authority.
More important, even partial revocation in this instance would not mitigate the problem and would have unintended consequences. Capacity at rail terminals is finite. To maintain terminal and network fluidity, railroads use storage fees to incentivize the prompt removal of containers. Allowing railyards to overflow with containers has adverse impacts on the entire supply chain, as well as other rail customers. Regulation of demurrage and storage charges, even if permitted by the exemption revocation standard, would only incentivize those unregulated portions of the supply chain to shift the burdens of higher volumes onto railroads. This, in turn, would have the unintended consequence of forcing railroads to meter or halt the inflow of containers to terminals, until the backlog of containers on the ground clears.
That is not to say that the Class I freight railroads have no role to play in working through the challenges currently facing the global supply chain. AAR’s freight members have made clear in their own responses how they are collaborating with all stakeholders to keep intermodal terminals and the entire national rail network fluid. The Board should refrain from any regulatory action that would undermine those efforts.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/14/2021 – 15:30
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