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When multiple op-ed pieces appear in the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and the CFR-owned Foreign Affairs authored by neocons simultaneously pleading with Trump Don’t Get Out of Syria(!) all within the same week, this is typically an indicator that the president is about to do something good. 

Trump is set to meet with Putin one-on-one this coming Monday in Helsinki after a contentious NATO summit and a sufficiently awkward visit with Theresa May, and mainstream pundits’ heads are exploding. 

The Post’s Josh Rogin warns, Trump and Putin may be about to make a terrible deal on Syria, and Susan Rice suddenly emerges from obscurity and irrelevance to say in the Times that Trump Must Not Capitulate to Putin while urging the administration not to “prematurely withdraw United States forces [from Syria], thus thus ceding total victory to Russia, Mr. Assad and Iran.” From North Korea to Afghanistan to Syria to Ukraine, Rice advises the typical regime change script of “harsh additional sanctions” anywhere the dictates of Washington are not strictly adhered to. 

Similarly, Eli Lake links together the main regime change wars begun under Obama while lamenting their potential winding down as a result of Putin and Trump meeting as indicative of living in “some alternate universe”. “The price of Russian cooperation in Syria cannot be U.S. capitulation on Crimea,” Lake writes, and further calls such a possibility “the most dangerous possible outcome.”

The Kagan-led neocon think tank ISW, meanwhile, is outraged(!) the administration appears to lack “the will to use” America’s military might to counter Assad, Iran, and Russia, saying “the United States should invest now in building leverage for future decisive action.” 

And then there’s Senator Lindsey Graham’s meltdown on Twitter this week in reaction to both the Syrian Army victoriously raising the national flag over Daraa and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telling President Vladimir Putin during a summit that Israel has no problem with Assad staying, so long as Israel can preserve “freedom of action” if attacked. 

In a significant change of posture toward Damascus, Netanyahu told reporters in Moscow, “We haven’t had a problem with the Assad regime, for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights.” 

This was enough to send Graham’s head spinning: “Radical Sunni groups will say – correctly – that Assad is a proxy of Iran and the Ayatollah. It means the Syrian war never ends and ISIS comes back,” he said in a strange twist of logic that gives credence to the arguments of terror groups. 

Israel’s Haaretz newspaper featured Sen. Graham’s reaction:

‘Without Assad’s blessing, the flags of Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard would not be on Israel’s front door,’ Graham tweets in response to Netanyahu claiming Israel has no problem with Assad.

As Trump readies for Putin summit, saying “He’s not my enemy,” interventionistas are raging: 

Senator @LindseyGrahamSC continues his Twitter storm against the Netanyahu-Putin meeting https://t.co/MAjs8VA30Y

— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) July 12, 2018

#Putin is not our friend nor merely a competitor. Putin is our enemy—not b/c we wish it so, but b/c he has chosen to be. He chose to invade Ukraine & annex Crimea. He chose to help Assad slaughter Syrians. He chose to attack our election & undermine democracies around the world.

— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) July 12, 2018

In the past months there’s been widespread reporting on a “secret” deal brokered between Russia, Israel, and Syria, which reportedly involves the Syrian Army agreeing to keep Iranian forces away from the ongoing successful campaign along the Israeli and Jordanian borders, especially the contested Golan Heights.

Netanyahu now says, fresh off his Moscow visit, that Putin agreed to restrain Iran in Syria, but that ultimately Assad will take back all of Syria. The New York Times reports this hugely significant acknowledgement and surprising change of tune from the Israeli PM:

Israel, he said, did not object to President Bashar al-Assad’s regaining control over all of Syria, a vital Russian objective, and Russia had pushed Iranian and allied Shiite forces “tens of kilometers” away from the Israeli border.

The NYT continues: 

But a commitment to keep Iranian forces tens of kilometers from Israel was a far cry from ejecting them completely from Syria, which Mr. Netanyahu has been lobbying Mr. Putin to do. And even that commitment was not confirmed by Russian officials.

…So a willingness to accept Mr. Assad’s resumption of control over all of Syria is no small concession, said Amos Yadlin, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence who now heads the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

“Nobody can these days destabilize the Assad regime,” he said. “The only one who can do it is Israel. And the Russians know that very well. So to get a commitment from Israel not to destabilize Syria is something that Russia will value very much.”

The neocon pundits’ last hope for military intervention in Syria has remained Netanyahu, and to see him fold must feel like a swift unexpected punch in the stomach, but more crucially the Syrian diplomatic cards have fallen in place just days before Monday’s Trump-Putin meeting. 

President Assad has long vowed to liberate “every inch” of sovereign Syrian territory, something which but two years ago appeared impossible, yet which now looks increasingly inevitable. Should the Trump-Putin summit result in a green light that ensures Moscow and Damascus remain in the driver’s seat and set the terms for Syria’s stabilization, we could be witnessing the final diplomatic chapter in this dark seven-year long proxy war. 

However, Trump continues to be urged from various corners of the beltway foreign policy establishment to salvage and preserve what he can of the open-ended US troop presence in eastern Syria: the US must “preserve its interests in the conflict, namely… constraining Iranian influence in the country” as one Foreign Policy essay argues. 

For months now, Trump has talked of US military withdrawal from the country — which the Pentagon in public statements has put at over some 2000 troops — a proposal which hawks within his administration have pushed back against every time. 

And then there’s the clearly observable pattern that seems to repeat whenever the administration announces it is poised to pull out of Syria. Indeed it seems to occur every time the Syrian Army is on a trajectory of overwhelming victory: an ill-timed and strategically nonsensical mass chemical attack on civilians supposedly ordered by Assad — inevitably giving the West an open door for military intervention, new rounds of crippling sanctions, and yet more international media condemnation heaped on Damascus. 

Precisely this scenario occurred just days after President Trump declared in the last week of March of this year that he wanted a complete US military pullout from Syria. What then immediately followed was the April 7 “chemical attack” provocation in Douma — just the thing that brought Trump’s planned pullout to a grinding halt, instead resulting tomahawk missiles unleashed on Damascus. 

Should Trump and Putin ultimately come to a lasting settlement on the Syria issue which results in US troop withdrawal from Syria, will the international proxy war come to a close?

Or will we witness yet another last minute “mass casualty event” or other other provocation that pulls the US, Israel, and Russia into yet deeper direct military confrontation?

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Authored by Michael Scott via SafeHaven.com,

Some 84 percent of Americans claim that a higher education is a very or extremely important factor for getting ahead in life, according to the National Center for public policy and Higher Education.

So, it’s worth the exorbitant cost, but not everyone can pay, and outsized costs in the U.S. are giving much of the rest of the developed world the higher education advantage.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), people with a Bachelor’s Degree earn around 64 percent more per week than those with a high school diploma, and around 40 percent more than those with an Associate’s Degree. In turn, those with an Associate’s degree earn around 17 percent more than those with a high school diploma.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York says that college graduates overall earn 80 percent more than those without a degree.

There’s also job security to consider.

Individuals with college degrees have a lower average unemployment rates than those with only high school educations. Among people aged 25 and over, the lowest unemployment rates occur in those with the highest degrees.

From this perspective, it’s no surprise that students are willing to bite the bullet and take on a ton of debt to finance education.

About three-fourths of students who attend four-year colleges graduate with loan debt. And this number is up from about half of students three decades ago.

The average student loan debt for Class of 2017 graduates was $39,400, up 6 percent from the previous year. Over 44 million Americans now hold over $1.5 trillion in student loan debt, according to Student Loan Hero.

According to College Board, the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2017–2018 school year was $34,740 at private colleges, $9,970 for state residents at public colleges, and $25,620 for out-of-state residents attending public universities.

The U.S. is one of the most expensive places to go obtain a higher education, but there are pricier venues, too.

If you want a free higher education, try Europe—specifically Germany and Sweden. Denmark, too, doles out an allowance of about $900 a month to students to cover their living expenses. But don’t try to study in the UK on the cheap. The UK is the most expensive country in Europe, with college tuition coming in at an average of $12,414.

In Australia, graduates don’t pay anything on their loans until they earn about $40,000 a year, and then they only pay between 4 percent and 8 percent of their income, which is automatically deducted from their bank accounts, reducing the chances of default.

For Japan—a country that sees more than half of its population go to college—the highly respected University of Tokyo only costs about $4,700 a year for undergraduates, thanks to government subsidies. The Japanese government spends almost $8,750 a year per student because it sees the massive value in having a highly educated citizenry.

For Americans, while student loans may still be a good investment overall, the idea of taking a lifetime to pay off the debt may become increasingly unattractive. And it’s only going to get worse, according to JPMorgan, which predicts that by 2035 the cost of attending a four-year private college will top $487,000.

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When Attorney General Jeff Sessions said at a gathering of police officials back in May that “if you want crime to go up, let the ACLU run the police department,” he may have had a point. While opponents of “aggressive” police tactics like stop and frisk and other “broken windows”-type policing have complain about the injustice faced by minorities who they say are disproportionately and unfairly targeted by police, the city of Baltimore is demonstrating what happens when police dial back stops for minor violations like street-level drug dealing and other “everyday violations.”

According to USA Today, since the death of Freddie Gray and the arrest of several officers who were charged with murder for allegedly playing a role in his death (he died handcuffed in the back of a police van after reportedly breaking his neck) police in Baltimore have “stopped noticing” small crimes and minor violations. The officers who were charged were acquitted, but the incident ended their careers, and the Baltimore Police Department faced a 2016 Department of Justice investigation that found the city’s police routinely violated the constitutional rights of the city’s residents. More than 150 people have been killed in the city already this year, compared with 342 last year, which was the city’s deadliest on record.

Unsurprisingly, shootings soared…

…Leading to a spike in murders that has transformed Baltimore into America’s deadliest city.

Just before a wave of violence turned Baltimore into the nation’s deadliest big city, a curious thing happened to its police force: officers suddenly seemed to stop noticing crime.

Police officers reported seeing fewer drug dealers on street corners. They encountered fewer people who had open arrest warrants.

Police questioned fewer people on the street. They stopped fewer cars.

In the space of just a few days in spring 2015 – as Baltimore faced a wave of rioting after Freddie Gray, a black man, died from injuries he suffered in the back of a police van – officers in nearly every part of the city appeared to turn a blind eye to everyday violations. They still answered calls for help. But the number of potential violations they reported seeing themselves dropped by nearly half. It has largely stayed that way ever since.

“What officers are doing is they’re just driving looking forward. They’ve got horse blinders on,” says Kevin Forrester, a retired Baltimore detective.

The surge of shootings and killings that followed has left Baltimore easily the deadliest large city in the United States. Its murder rate reached an all-time high last year; 342 people were killed. The number of shootings in some neighborhoods has more than tripled. One man was shot to death steps from a police station. Another was killed driving in a funeral procession.

Police records show officers respond to calls as fast as ever, if not more quickly. The only drop has been in what police call “on-views” – when an officer witnesses a potential violation and stops the perpetrator (like when somebody is stopped for speeding). Between 2014 and 2017, the number of suspected narcotics offense stops dropped by 30%, and the number of people reported with outstanding warrants dropped by 50%. But Baltimore Police Commissioner Gary Tuggle, who took command in May, also blamed a shortage of patrol officers

Police officials acknowledge the change. “In all candor, officers are not as aggressive as they once were, pre-2015. It’s just that fact,” says acting Police Commissioner Gary Tuggle, who took command of Baltimore’s police force in May.

Tuggle blames a shortage of patrol officers and the fallout from a blistering 2016 Justice Department investigation that found the city’s police regularly violated residents’ constitutional rights and prompted new limits on how officers there carry out what had once been routine parts of their job. At the same time, he says, police have focused more of their energy on gun crime and less on smaller infractions.

“We don’t want officers going out, grabbing people out of corners, beating them up and putting them in jail,” Tuggle says. “We want officers engaging folks at every level. And if somebody needs to be arrested, arrest them. But we also want officers to be smart about how they do that.”

The change has left a perception among some police officers that people in the city are free to do as they please. And among criminals, says Mahogany Gaines, whose brother, Dontais, was found shot to death inside his apartment in October.

 “These people don’t realize that you’re leaving people fatherless and motherless,” Gaines says. “I feel like they think they’re untouchable.”

A pastor in West Baltimore spoke with USA Today about the rise in violence. He described a city where residents are becoming afraid to leave their homes. Criminals have taken over, and crews are setting up drug-dealing operations on corners across the city.

At least 41 people have been shot near his church. He described how a new drug corner recently set up shop on the corner across the street, and nearly got into a gun battle with another crew working nearby.

On a sticky morning in May, the Rev. Rodney Hudson slips on a black “Sermonator” T-shirt and walks down the street from his west Baltimore church, a gray stone edifice two blocks from where police arrested Gray. A few days earlier, a drug crew from another neighborhood set up camp on the corner across the street. Hudson says  the dealers nearly got into a gunfight with the crew that usually works across from the elementary school down the block.

Since Gray’s death, at least 41 people have been shot within a short walk of Hudson’s church.

“Drug dealers are taking control of the corners and the police’s hands are tied,” Hudson says. “We have a community that is afraid.”

Two blocks away, Mayor Catherine Pugh and a knot of city officials are under a tent on an empty lot to break ground for a group of new townhouses. Police officers linger on the streets, and a helicopter swirls overhead. But three blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue, drug crews still appear to be at work. Shouts of “hard body” – one of the drug cocktails on offer – ring clearly. Another man shouts a warning as Hudson and a reporter approach.

Drug dealers have worked Baltimore’s street corners for decades. But Hudson says it has been years since he has seen so many young men selling so brazenly in so many places. Dealers, he says, “are taking advantage” of a newly timid police force.

At least 150 people have been killed in Baltimore this year.

To be sure, the investigation did expose some legitimate corruption, including incidences of officers planting drugs and other evidence. Police Commission Darryl De Sousa resigned in May after federal prosecutors charged him with failing to pay his income taxes.

This year, eight officers in an elite anti-gun unit were convicted in a corruption scandal that included robbing drug dealers and carrying out illegal stops and searches. One officer testified that a supervisor told them to carry replica guns they could plant on suspects. Another officer was indicted in January after footage from his body camera showed him acting out finding drugs in an alley. The city’s new police commissioner, Darryl De Sousa, resigned in May after federal prosecutors charged him with failing to pay his income taxes.

But with the wave of protest and anti-police threats, officers absorbed the message that they shouldn’t take unnecessary risks when making stops. And that affect isn’t limited to Baltimore. Nearly three-quarters of the officers who responded to a Pew Research Center survey incidents like the Gray killing had left them less willing to stop and question people who seem suspicious. Others said the incidents had made stopping people harder. Meanwhile, civil rights advocates have accusing police of laying back on enforcement as a means of retaliating.

“What it says is that if you complain about the way the police do our job, maybe we’ll just lay back and not do it as hard,” says Jeffery Robinson, a deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, which had advocated for an overhaul of police agencies in Baltimore and elsewhere. “If it’s true, if that’s what officers are doing, they should be fired.”

Another criminologist pointed out that police are largely doing as the public asked: They’re lessening the racial disparity in the number of people they stop and the number of police-involved shootings and complaints.

“The cops are being less proactive at the same time violence is going up,” says Peter Moskos, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor and former Baltimore officer who reviewed USA TODAY’s data and analysis. “Cops are doing as requested: lessening racial disparity, lessening complaints, lessening police-involved shootings. All those numbers are just great right now, and if those are your metrics of success, we’re winning. The message has clearly gotten out to not commit unnecessary policing.”

[…]

Anthony Barksdale, a retired Baltimore police commander, says the message to officers was unmistakable.

“These guys have family members who tell them ‘Don’t go to work and chase people for a city that doesn’t care about you,'” he says. “If I’m riding down the street and I see an incident, I see it, but you know what? It’s not worth it. That’s what these cops are thinking.”

Of course, this information probably won’t stop the millions of leftists who insist that all police departments are purveyors of “systemic racism” and that “broken windows”-style policing policies – where police in America’s cities are empowered to make more stops, not fewer – inevitably lead to racially motivated stops. Maybe the murder rate will need to move a little higher for them to understand how these policies have been a major contributor to the massive drop in America’s rate of violent crime over the past 25 years. Or maybe, because many of them live in rich, all-white enclaves, the problem of urban crime will never truly register. 

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Authored by Gareth Porter via The American Conservative,

Press irresponsibly relies on single-source report to accuse Kim of breaking an agreement he never made…

In late June and early July, NBC News, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal published stories that appeared at first glance to shed a lurid light on Donald Trump’s flirtation with Kim Jong-un. They contained satellite imagery showing that North Korea was making rapid upgrades to its nuclear weapons complex at Yongbyon and expanding its missile production program just as Trump and Kim were getting chummy at their Singapore summit.

In fact, those media outlets were selling journalistic snake oil. By misrepresenting the diplomatic context of the images they were hyping, the press launched a false narrative around the Trump-Kim summit and the negotiations therein.

The headline of the June 27 NBC News story revealed the network’s political agenda on the Trump-Kim negotiations. “If North Korea is denuclearizing,” it asked, “why is it expanding a nuclear research center?” The piece warned that North Korea “continues to make improvements to a major nuclear facility, raising questions about President Donald Trump’s claim that Kim Jong Un has agreed to disarm, independent experts tell NBC News.”

CNN’s coverage of the same story was even more sensationalist, declaring that there were “troubling signs” that North Korea was making “improvements” to its nuclear facilities, some of which it said had been carried out after the Trump-Kim summit. It pointed to a facility that had produced plutonium in the past and recently undergone an upgrade, despite Kim’s alleged promise to Trump to draw down his nuclear arsenal. CNN commentator Max Boot cleverly spelled out the supposed implication: “If you were about to demolish your house, would you be remodeling the kitchen?”

But in their determination to push hardline opposition to the negotiations, these stories either ignored or sought to discredit the careful caveat accompanying the original source on which they were based – the analysis of satellite images published on the website 38 North on June 21.

The three analysts who had written that the satellite images “indicated that improvements to the infrastructure at North Korea’s Yongbyon Nuclear Research Center are continuing at a rapid pace” also cautioned that this work “should not be seen as having any relationship to North Korea’s pledge to denuclearize.”

If the authors’ point was not clear enough, Joel Wit, the founder of 38 North, who helped negotiate the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea and then worked on its implementation for several years, explained to NBC News: 

“What you have is a commitment to denuclearize—we don’t have the deal yet, we just have a general commitment.”

Wit added that he didn’t “find it surprising at all” that work at Yongbyon was continuing.

In a briefing for journalists by telephone on Monday, Wit was even more vigorous in denouncing the stories that had hyped the article on 38 North.

“I really disagree with the media narrative,” Wit said.

“The Singapore summit declaration didn’t mean North Korea would stop its activities in the nuclear and missile area right away.”

He recalled the fact that, during negotiations between the U.S. and the Soviets over arms control, “both sides continued to build weapons until the agreement was completed.”

Determined to salvage its political line on the Trump-Kim talks, NBC News turned to Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, who has insisted all along that North Korea won’t give up its nuclear weapons.

“We have never had a deal,” Lewis said. “The North Koreans never offered to give up their nuclear weapons. Never. Not once.”

Lewis had apparently forgotten that the October 2005 Six Party joint statement included language that the DPRK had “committed to abandoning all nuclear weapons….”

Another witness NBC found to support its view was James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who declared, “If [the North Koreans] were serious about unilaterally disarming, of course they would have stopped work at Yongbyon.” That was true but misleading, because North Korea has always been unambiguously clear that its offer of denuclearization is conditional on reciprocal steps by the United States.

On July 1, a few days after those stories appeared, the Wall Street Journal headlined, “New satellite imagery indicates Pyongyang is pushing ahead with weapons programs even as it pursues dialogue with Washington.” The lead paragraph called it a “major expansion of a key missile-manufacturing plant.”

But the shock effect of the story itself was hardly seismic. It turns out that the images of a North Korean solid-fuel missile manufacturing facility at Hamhung showed that new buildings had been added beginning in the early spring, after Kim Jong-un had called for more production of solid-fuel rocket engines and warhead tips last August. The construction of the exterior of some buildings was completed “around the time” of the Trump-Kim summit meeting, according to the analysts at the James Martin Center of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

So the most Pyongyang could be accused of was going ahead with a previously planned expansion while it was just beginning to hold talks with the United States.

The satellite images were analyzed by Jeffrey Lewis, the director whom had just been quoted by NBC in support of its viewpoint that North Korea had no intention of giving up its nuclear weapons. So it is no surprise that the Martin Center’s David Schmerler, who also participated in the analysis of the images, told the Journal, “The expansion of production infrastructure for North Korea’s solid missile infrastructure probably suggests that Kim Jong Un does not intend to abandon his nuclear and missile programs.”

But when this writer spoke with Schmerler last week, he admitted that the evidence of Kim’s intentions regarding nuclear and missile programs is much less clear. I asked him if he was sure that North Korea would refuse to give up its ICBM program as part of a broader agreement with the Trump administration. “I’m not sure,” Schmerler responded, adding, “They haven’t really said they’re willing to give up ICBM program.” That is true, but they haven’t rejected that possibility either—presumably because the answer will depend on what commitments Trump is willing to make to the DPRK.

These stories of supposed North Korean betrayal by NBC, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal are egregious cases of distorting news by pushing a predetermined policy line. But those news outlets, far from being outliers, are merely reflecting the norms of the entire corporate news system.

The stories of how North Korea is now violating an imaginary pledge by Kim to Trump in Singapore are even more outrageous, because big media had previously peddled the opposite line: that Kim at the Singapore Summit made no firm commitment to give up his nuclear weapons and that the “agreement” in Singapore was the weakest of any thus far.

That claim, which blithely ignored the fundamental distinction between a brief summit meeting statement and past formal agreements with North Korea that took months to reach, was a media maneuver of unparalleled brazenness. And big media have since topped that feat of journalistic legerdemain by claiming that North Korea has demonstrated bad faith by failing to halt all nuclear and missile-related activities.

A media complex so determined to discredit negotiations with North Korea and so unfettered by political-diplomatic reality seriously threatens the ability of the United States to deliver on any agreement with Pyongyang. That means alternative media must make more aggressive efforts to challenge the corporate press’s coverage.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2Ld5P9L Tyler Durden

Meat-loving employees of co-working giant WeWork are going to have to stick to veggies and sushi after the company notified its global staff of 6,000 that they will no longer reimburse meals that include meat – and it won’t pay for any red meat, poultry or pork at WeWork events.

Co-founder Miguel McKelvy detailed the new policy in an email to employees this week, noting that the firm’s upcoming “Summer Camp” employee retreat would offer no meat options for attendees. 

In his email, McKelvey advised employees that the meat-free move would affect the company’s travel and expense policy, as well as WeWork’s “Honesty Market,” a self-serve food and drink kiosk system present in some of its 400 co-working buildings. –Bloomberg

We’re sure there will be ample soy-based options to fuel WeWork employees’ need for protein, while it is unclear if fish will be an option since it’s not specifically mentioned in the memo.

The company says they’re introducing the new policy for environmental reasons. “New research indicates that avoiding meat is one of the biggest things an individual can do to reduce their personal environmental impact,” said McKelvey in the memo, “even more than switching to a hybrid car.”

According to a 2013 study published by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences– livestock production (including meat, milk and eggs) contribute 40% of agricultural GDP, while a 2006 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization found that livestock is responsible for 18% of human-related greenhouse gases. 

what’s clear is that American levels of meat consumption can’t be sustainably adopted by the rest of the world, even if livestock management becomes more efficient globally. –Time

That said, WeWork employees who require “medical or religious” allowances are discussing options with the company’s policy team. If they’re granted exemptions, however, we assume they will be met with disapproving looks from jealous co-workers as they sink their teeth into their meat of choice.

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Authored by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,

Big Middle East wars are often catastrophic for global oil supplies.

This makes sense. The Middle East accounts for more than 40% of global oil exports. So, a big conflict in the Middle East often triggers a big spike in the price of oil.

Take the 1973 “oil shock,” for example. Oil prices suddenly spiked… roughly quadrupling in a matter of weeks.

Today, we could be on the verge of an oil crisis even worse than that. That’s because regional tensions are growing in the Middle East. Specifically, the conflict between Iran and Israel—and their allies—is quickly getting worse.

As I’ll explain in a moment, this conflict could soon explode, causing a sudden spike in the price of oil.

But first, let’s take a quick look at the first two oil shocks to see how this could all play out.

The First Two Oil Shocks

In 1973, Israel was battling Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War. In response to U.S. support for Israel, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) placed an embargo on oil exports to the U.S. and several other countries. It also cut oil production.

This triggered the first oil shock. The price of oil nearly quadrupled. It jumped from around $3 per barrel to around $12.

The second oil shock started in 1979. It grew out of the Iranian Revolution and continued with the Iran-Iraq War, which was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the past 50 years.

Iraq and Iran were (and still are) two of the biggest oil exporters in the world. So, it’s no surprise that the war rocked global energy markets.

The price of oil more than doubled, as you can see in the next chart.

There was also another, less dramatic price spike in the early 1990s. It happened after Iraq invaded Kuwait, triggering the first Gulf War. Oil shot up over 70%, as you’ll see in the next chart.

The Major Players in the Next War

The Middle East is divided into two basic geopolitical camps. On one side, you have the U.S. and its allies, like Israel and Saudi Arabia. On the other side, Russia and its allies, like Iran and Syria.

You likely know that a bloody conflict has been raging in Syria for nearly seven years. It’s the most significant military conflict on the geopolitical chessboard today.

The U.S.-side, working through its proxies, has been trying to overthrow Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad. Meanwhile, Russia and Iran have massively fortified his regime. Assad is still firmly in charge.

This has shifted the regional balance of power toward Iran. The U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia find that unacceptable. But at this point, a war is the only thing that could reverse the trend.

Team Trump Wants to Bomb Iran

Iran will almost certainly be the focal point of the Middle East’s next regional war. Many people think that war has already started.

Recently, Israel launched its biggest military strike on Syria since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. This attack, and other recent ones, killed dozens of Syrian and Iranian soldiers.

I only expect the conflict to escalate from here.

Aside from what appears to be the start of an actual war, there have been numerous, unambiguous signs that the U.S. has Iran in its sights.

To start, President Trump recently staffed up on known war hawks. In April, he made John Bolton his National Security Advisor and Mike Pompeo his Secretary of State. Both have been eager to bomb Iran for years.

In early May, Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s lawyers and a longtime political ally, announced that Trump is “committed to regime change” in Iran.

A few days later, President Trump pulled out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. He also re-imposed economic sanctions on Iran.

The World’s Most Critical Oil Choke Point

Iran has the world’s third-largest proven oil reserves, or 10% of the world’s total. It exports about 2.4 million barrels of oil per day. China, India, and Europe buy most of it.

A war between Iran and Israel (and its U.S.-led allies) would wreak havoc on the oil market. That’s because Iran holds a very powerful card…

Iran could effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel connecting the Persian Gulf to global markets. It is the only sea route from the Persian Gulf to the open ocean.

Tankers moving oil from Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates all have to pass through the strait. That translates into roughly 35% of the world’s oil traded by sea.

Nearly $2 billion worth of oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz every day. It’s the most critical oil choke point in the world.

In the event of an all-out war, Iran would quickly shut down the Strait of Hormuz. It’s been blatantly clear about this.

Credible studies have shown that – in a best-case scenario for the U.S. Navy – Iran could seal off the Strait with sea mines and asymmetrical warfare techniques for at least a month before the U.S. could reopen it. The Pentagon itself has admitted as much.

If and when a war with Iran happens—even if there’s only a whiff of it happening—investors should expect the third and most dramatic oil shock.

Of course, we’re not cheering for a war, or the collateral damage that would inevitably come with it.

Nevertheless, the odds of a big war in the Middle East starting soon are high. That means a sudden spike in the price of oil is equally likely.

There’s a good chance of outsized returns and soaring dividends in select oil stocks in the weeks ahead. I recommend positioning yourself for big profits now… before the bullets really start flying.

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Mountains of trash have been collecting at US recycling facilities shores after China stopped accepting “contaminated” materials from facilities across the country.

Last year, China accounted for over half of the scrap metal purchases exported by the United States, while for decades they have been buying up US recycling by the ship-full after US sorting facilities bale up paper, cardboard or plastics to be crushed and transformed into raw materials for industrial purposes.

Since 1992, China and Hong Kong have taken in approximately 72% of global plastic waste according to a study in the journal Science Advances. Since January, however, Beijing stopped accepting most paper and plastic waste in accordance with new environmental policies.

What they do still accept – cardboard and metal, now has an extremely low contamination threshold of just 0.5% – a level far too low for current US recycling technology to handle. 

Making matters worse is that US waste handlers believe that China is on track to close its doors to all recycled materials by 2020, just 17 months from now – an impossibly short deadline. 

“There is no single and frankly, probably not even a group of countries, that can take in the volume that China used to take,” warns Adina Renee Adler of the Washington-based Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. –Yahoo

Scrambling to find room

China’s sudden policy shift has sent the US waste industry into a panic. In Elkridge, Maryland for example, a Waste Management facility now has a pile of effectively worthless mixed paper and plastics on their hands – while paying subcontractors to haul it away. 

Other US recycling plants are simply sending mixed recycling straight into landfills. 

“Nobody wants to say it out loud, because nobody likes the fact that they’re having to do it,” said Bill Caesar, CEO of Houston waste company WCA. 

Waste Management and Republic Services, another industry heavyweight, have admitted doing it under limited circumstances, while some small towns, particularly in Florida, have simply stopped collecting recyclable waste.

Other scrap importer countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam or India are incapable of absorbing the tens of millions of tons that China had previously taken.

And few American industries possess the ability to treat the waste. –Yahoo

“The biggest issue here is that China just gave very little time for the industry to transition,” said Adler.

National Waste and Recycling Association president Darrell Smith added: “Eventually we will have such a large backup that more and more will have to start being diverted to landfills if we don’t find new markets and new uses for the recycled materials.”

The trash crunch is compounded by the fact that many cities across the country are already pursuing ambitious recycling goals. Washington D.C., for example, wants to see 80% of household waste recycled, up from 23%. 

D.C. already pays $75 a ton for recycling vs. $46 for waste burned to generate electricity. 

“There was a time a few years ago when it was cheaper to recycle. It’s just not the case anymore,” said Christopher Shorter, director of public works for the city of Washington.

“It will be more and more expensive for us to recycle,” he said.

Perhaps America can begin expanding into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, lashing together hundreds of square miles of floating garbage islands which would undoubtedly be considered prime real estate.

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Authored by Wolf Richter via WolfStreet.com,

8 ‘boots-on-the-ground’ findings from Sydney’s deflating housing bubble…

Australia’s housing market is getting rattled. The mortgage industry is in turmoil. Banks are battered by incessant revelations of misconduct.  Home prices in the Sydney and Melbourne metros, after surging to an astounding degree, are deflating. And the once splendid and vast game of real-estate speculation just isn’t fun anymore.

Lindsay David, of LF Economics in Sydney — who has long played a role in exposing misconduct in Australia’s banking system including, in early 2016, by calling for a Royal Commission investigation into the mortgage sector — put some findings of his boots-on-the-ground analysis into a note to clients. Here are some of them:

1. Drop-off in Speculative Demand:

“We spent countless hours” in recent months “observing buyer turnouts to scheduled property inspections of houses for sale,” he writes. “While there may still be a small sum of properties on market that continue to see very large turnouts, there was a clear visual drop-off of engaged interest from buyers and indeed ‘property snoops’ across the majority of properties for sale that we had observed.”

“On many occasions, we observed either no interested parties, or less than 4 parties inspecting a property across a very decent chunk of offerings on the market,” he writes. “This lower rate of turnouts was something we simply had not observed over the years at such a dramatic scale.”

2. Sharper drop in selling prices than shown in official data:

According to CoreLogic (the official data), home prices in Sydney fell 4.6% in June compared to a year ago, with house prices down 6.2%, and prices of condos down 0.7%. In the most expensive quartile, prices fell 7.3%.

But Lindsay David writes: “It is our view based on all the resources made available that house prices in the Sydney area have broadly fallen somewhere between 11% and 15% over the comparison period.”

3. Sudden eagerness by property agents to negotiate

“We also observed a systemic increase in property agents’ willingness to negotiate and follow up on the majority of very low-ball offers made for properties they are selling. This negotiation approach for buyers was simply not possible twelve months ago,” David writes.

4. Less access to “Jumbo Loans” because rules suddenly matter to banks (a little):

David writes in the note:

As we have always argued, Australian banks had for years been flooding the housing market with “jumbo loans” that were well in breach of the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009 (NCCPA). When benchmarking the ability now to ascertain a loan outside the scope of the NCCPA, it appears the majority have lenders are now simply skirting in and around the laws of the NCCPA versus the outright disregard of this law, which for many years was industry standard.

This shift in lending practices brings lenders closer to the rules of the law and thus resulted in a significant reduction in the overall borrowing capacity of your standard Sydney property buyer. Sydney property buyers were leveraging at the highest ratios in the country (indeed globally) on the back of the easiest of lending environments. This now more broadly appears to be in the past versus the present.

5. The Royal Commission did it:

In 2017, the Australian government finally and reluctantly established The Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, as it’s called, to investigate and report on misconduct in the financial services industry, particularly in the mortgage sector. It found a treasure trove of misconduct and “continues to expose cases of bank malpractice,” David writes:

The publicly released evidence provided consensus that our research into illegal conduct and regulatory capture in the mortgage market was spot on. We anticipate captured regulators will struggle to release the noose of the banks borrowing power without repercussions.

Under scrutiny, banks are now curtailing some of these practices and some of their riskiest lending, such as interest-only mortgages to investors who cannot afford them, and this has caused lending conditions to tighten particularly for speculative buyers.

The changes “appear to have hit the mortgage market over the head with a baseball bat,” David writes. “In our opinion, this is the primary reason the Sydney property bubble got pricked.”

6. Underwater interest-only mortgages:

Property price declines hit interest-only mortgages the hardest because there may be little or no equity cushion. Once a home is worth less than the mortgage, and is thus “underwater,” it cannot be sold because the proceeds won’t suffice to pay off the mortgage. Investors, often with negative cash-flows in the property, are stuck contemplating doom and gloom.

7. “Non-transparency” increases sharply

“The Sydney housing market is synonymous for non-transparency,” David writes. “We have continued to observe an ever-increasing lack of transparency when it comes to house prices (asking price and sale price)”:

• More properties that are for sale are advertised without an asking price.
• The number of transactions where the price is not disclosed has surged. This also appears to be the case in Sydney’s weekly auction results, thus preventing the median sale price at auction from falling faster than what it likely has in reality.
• On many occasions, properties are being put on market only to be taken off market two or three months later. However, many of these properties are still for sale, but no longer advertised or have a ‘for sale’ sign posted on the front lawn.

“It could be argued that the property culture in Australia is to make sure everyone knows how high houses are selling for – unless the market is falling,” he writes.

8. Local Media, hooked on real-estate & bank ads, downplay Bad News

“The local mainstream media (MSM) have made great efforts to play down the systemic nature of the early findings of the Royal Commission along with the fall in house prices in Sydney,” David writes:

‘House Prices will fall, but not crash’ is the chorus despite Sydney house prices falling through the floor on the back of rising funding costs and weakening credit conditions. No doubt, revenues from real-estate and bank advertising remain a critical revenue component for Australian MSM news sites, relative to their international peers.

Humorously, the MSM has also begun to turn their attention on smaller housing markets that are showing signs of strength and increased credit expansion, such as Hobart, Tasmania, which has a population of just 220,000.

And the bottom line?

There are repercussions. Lindsay David, from his perch at LF Economics, concludes the note:

We stand with the view the Sydney housing bubble appears to have been pricked, and we are confident that house prices will continue to fall at a moderate to fast pace over the coming months. This should eventually have knock-on effects to the banking system and its stability and ability to maintain profits.

Furthermore, we can expect the residential construction sector to feel the pressure as more developers come to the realization that there is now no real profit to be made in a falling market. In a feedback-loop economy so reliant on rising land prices, the risk of eventual job losses filtering through the Sydney economy appears to be on the increase which could easily spill into the broader Australian economy.

But even the official reports are no longer brimming with optimism. “Recent home buyers could be facing negative equity,” warns CoreLogic. Read… Update on Deflating Property Bubbles in Sydney & Melbourne 
 

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Vern Unsworth was one of the rescuers that helped pull off the miraculous rescue of 12 children and their soccer coach who were trapped in a cave in Thailand after it flooded. The rescue has been passed around international media for the last couple of days as a fantastic “feel good“ story that everybody could get behind.

The only person that didn’t seem to get behind the rescue after it was completed was Elon Musk, whose proposed kid size submarine that he shipped to Thailand to help with the rescue was ultimately not used. We reported days ago that Musk instead lashed out at the commander of the rescue operation after he didn’t use Musk’s idea.

Today, stunning statements are being made by one of the individuals involved with the rescue who was interviewed by CNN International. CNN International’s Facebook page posted this interview in which Unsworth said that Elon Musk can stick his submarine – that had “absolutely no chance of working” “where it hurts”.

He then went on to state what many of us had already been thinking – that the kid size submarine idea was simply just a public relations stunt.

In the full video interview, he also goes on to state that Elon didn’t have any idea as to what the caves would be like. He says he had “no conception of what the caves would be like”. When the interviewer notes that Elon was there in the Cave area at the time of the rescue, Vern noted that he was then asked to leave very quickly.

Full interview below:

We reported about Musk lashing out at the rescue commander just days ago after he publicly questioned the authority and expertise of one of the key individuals responsible for successfully navigating the rescue of 12 boys and one soccer coach trapped in a cave in Thailand. 

As the rescue effort took place over the course of several days and finally, when on Tuesday it was reported that all 12 children and the coach were in fact safe, Musk’s “escape pod” wasn’t deployed or used in any fashion.

And instead of assuming that “all’s well that ends well” and being happy for the individuals who were rescued, Musk took it upon himself on Tuesday to actually question the authority of one of the joint commanders of the operation.

The Guardian picked up the story on Tuesday and wrote:

Elon Musk has questioned the expertise of Thai rescue officials who turned down his offer of a submarine, despite their having organised the successful rescue of all 12 boys and their football coach from a flooded cave.

The entrepreneur had offered his help and posted footage of tests being carried out on the apparatus he proposed in recent days.

But while Narongsak Osatanakorn, the head of the joint command centre co-ordinating the operation, acknowledged Musk’s offer he said that the mini submarine would not have been practical for the cave rescue.

“Even though their equipment is technologically sophisticated, it doesn’t fit with our mission to go in the cave,” Osatanakorn told reporters.

In response, Musk said Osatanakorn was “not the subject matter expert”, adding that he believed he had been “inaccurately described as rescue chief”, and should be more accurately referred to as the “former Thai provincial governor”.

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Authored Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

On the matter of immigration, even many commentators who support ease of migration also oppose the extension of government benefits to immigrants.

The idea, of course, is that free movement of labor is fine, but taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize it. As a matter of policy, many also find it prudent that immigrants ought to be economically self sufficient before being offered citizenship. Switzerland, for instance, makes it harder to pursue citizenship while receiving social benefits.

This discussion often centers around officially recognized “welfare” and social-benefits programs such as TANF and Medicaid. But it is also recognized that taxpayer-funded benefits exist in the form of public schooling, free clinics, and other in-kind benefits.

But there is another taxpayer-supporter program that subsidizes immigration as well: the US military.

Government Employment for Immigrants

Last week, the AP began reporting that “the US Army is quietly discharging Immigrant recruits.”

Translation: the US government has begun laying off immigrants from taxpayer-funded government jobs.

It’s unclear how many of these jobs have been employed, but according to the Department of Homeland security, “[s]ince Oct. 1, 2002, USCIS has naturalized 102,266 members of the military.”

The Military as a Jobs Program

Immigrants, of course, aren’t the only people who benefit from government jobs funded through military programs.

The military has long served as a jobs programs helpful in mopping up excess labor and padding employment numbers. As Robert Reich noted in 2011 , as the US was still coming out of the 2009 recession:

And without our military jobs program personal incomes would be dropping faster. The Commerce Department reported Monday the only major metro areas where both net earnings and personal incomes rose last year were San Antonio, Texas, Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. — because all three have high concentrations of military and federal jobs.

He’s right. While the private sector must cut back and re-arrange labor and capital to deal with the new economic realities post-recession, government jobs rarely go away.

Because of this, Reich concludes “America’s biggest — and only major — jobs program is the U.S. military.”

Reich doesn’t think this is a bad thing. He only highlights the military’s role as a de facto jobs program in order to call for more de jure jobs programs supported by federal funding.

Given the political popularity of the military, however, it’s always easy to protect funding for the military jobs programs than for any other potential jobs programs. All the Pentagon has to do is assure Congress that every single military job is absolutely essential, and Congress will force taxpayers to cough up the funding.

Back during the debate over sequestration, for example, the Pentagon routinely warned Congress that any cutbacks in military funding would lead to major jobs losses, bringing devastation to the economy.

In other words, even the Pentagon treats the military like a jobs program when it’s politically useful.

Benefits for enlisted people go well beyond what can be seen in the raw numbers of total employed. As Kelley Vlahos points out at The American Conservative, military personnel receive extra hazard pay “even though they are far from any fighting or real danger.” And then there is the “Combat Zone Tax Exclusion (CZTE) program which exempts enlisted and officers from paying federal taxes in these 45 designated countries. Again, they get the tax break — which accounted for about $3.6 billion in tax savings for personnel in 2009 (the combat pay cost taxpayers $790 million in 2009)– whether they are really in danger or not.”

There’s also evidence that military personnel receive higher pay in the military than do their private-sector counterparts with similar levels of education and training.

Nor do the benefits of military spending go only to enlisted people. The Pentagon has long pointed to its spending on civilian jobs in many communities, including manufacturing jobs and white-collar technical jobs.

This, of course, has long been politically useful for the Pentagon as well, since as political scientist Rebecca Thorpe has shown in her book The American Warfare State, communities that rely heavily on Pentagon-funded employment are sure to send Congressmen to Washington who will make sure the taxpayer dollars keep flowing to Pentagon programs.

Whether you’re talking to Robert Reich or some Pentagon lobbyist on Capitol Hill, the conclusion is clear: the military is both a jobs program and a stimulus program. Cut military spending at your peril!

Military Spending Destroys Private Sector Jobs

The rub, however, is that military spending doesn’t actually improve the economy. And much the money spent on military employment would be best spent on the private, voluntary economy.

This has long been recognized by political scientist Seymour Melman who has discussed the need for “economic conversion,” or converting military spending into other forms of spending. Melman observes:

Since we know that matter and energy located in Place A cannot be simultaneously located in Place B, we must understand that the resources used up on military account thereby represent a preemption of resources from civilian needs of every conceivable kind.

Here, Melman is simply describing in his own way what Murray Rothbard explained in Man, Economy, and State. Namely, government spending distorts the economy as badly as taxation — driving up prices for the private sector, and withdrawing resources from private sector use.

Ellen Brown further explains:

The military actually destroys jobs in the civilian economy. The higher profits from cost-plus military manufacturing cause manufacturers to abandon more competitive civilian endeavors; and the permanent war economy takes engineers, capital and resources away from civilian production.

But, as a classic case of “the seen” vs. “the unseen,” it’s easy to point to jobs created by military spending. How many jobs were lost as a result of that same spending? That remains unseen, and thus politically irrelevant.

Military fan boys will of course assure us that every single military job and every single dollar spent on the military is absolutely essential. It’s all the service of “fighting for freedom.” For instance, Mitchell Blatt writes, in the context of immigrant recruits, “I’m not worried about the country or origin of those who are fighting to defend us. What matters is that our military is as strong as it can be.” The idea at work here is that the US military is a lean machine, doing only what is necessary to get the job done, and as cost effectively as possible. Thus, hiring the “best” labor, from whatever source is absolutely essential. 

This, however, rather strains the bounds of credibility. The US military is more expensive than the next eight largest militaries combined. The US’s navy is ten times larger than the next largest navy. The US’s air force is the largest in the world, and the second largest air force belongs, not to a foreign country, but to the US Navy. 

Yet, we’re supposed to believe that any cuts will imperil the “readiness” of the US military.

Cut Spending for Citizens and Non-Citizens Alike

My intent here is not to pick on immigrants specifically. The case of military layoffs for immigrants simply helps to illustrate a couple of important points: government jobs with the military constitute of form of taxpayer-funded subsidy for immigrants. And secondly, the US military acts as a job program, not just for immigrants but for many native-born Americans.  

In truth, layoffs in the military sector ought to be far more widespread, and hardly limited to immigrants. The Trump Administration is wrong when it suggests that the positions now held by immigrant recruits ought to be filled by American-born recruits. Those positions should be left unfilled. Permanently.  

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