Category: zerohedge

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

Oxfam. I’m wondering if I should warn this is not for the faint of heart, or say don’t read on an empty stomach. If so, hereby. I know I found it hard.

The first and foremost thing the BBC last week felt its audience should know about the sleaziest scandal to come out of Britain in quite some time -and that’s saying something- is that an actress had turned her back on the aid organization. Your news in bite-size pre-chewed headlines.

While a guy who ‘served’ Oxfam in Bosnia claims it’s nobody’s business if he visited the local hookers in his spare time. The head office even specifically refuses to ban staff from doing that. Not violating a staff member’s civil liberties trumps a question like what drives desperate women -girls- into prostitution that same staff member pays for with money donated to aid desperate people.

Someone at the Dutch Oxfam/Novib office complained that his British colleagues should have provided more information, sooner, because now his branch suffers from the scandal (fewer donations). A branch that knew about it at least as far back as 2012, and passed on the info to the Dutch Foreign Ministry and Accounting Office. Who looked at potential -financial- damage in their country, found none, and located a carpet to sweep it under.

The only right choice for us, and our governments, would seem to be to cancel all donations to Oxfam, because apparently nobody connected to the organization is able to figure out who the actual victims are here. They instead portray themselves as the victims.

Of all people, its own chief executive feels a need, when responding to accusations of child sex abuse concerning his organization, to paint himself -and Oxfam- as victims. ‘Anything we say is being manipulated. We’ve been savaged’ . How does that guy hold on to that job?

Charities like Oxfam receive donations to help those people who have fallen victim to the conditions that exist where they live, be they manmade or due to natural disaster. Obviously, if Oxfam cannot (will not) even correctly identify these victims, it has no reason to exist.

Of course Oxfam announces more internal investigations when these accusations come out, but it’s too late. They’ve hush-hushed all previous such investigations, and there’s no reason to believe that won’t happen again. Oxfam has covered up the issues for a long time, likely decades, and if they can no longer cover things up -like now-, they try and make things look like incidents, stand-alone occurrences. This is a pattern.

Of course there are many people involved in international aid who are pure -enough- souls with the best intentions, but that’s simply not enough: sexual predation has infiltrated its ranks to such a degree, and management has refused to take the only appropriate steps against its perpetrators for so long, that sex abuse has become Oxfam’s middle name. And that very much includes child sex abuse.

I’ve been reading a lot about the story over the past 10 days, and one of the things that stand out is that the typical first reaction is to cover up whatever nastiness it is that surfaces, out of fear that donations would suffer. Instead of thinking about the people Oxfam is supposed to help, for which it receives those donations, and put their interests first. That is a death sentence for any aid organization. And rightly so.

It’s quite simple when you think about it: if we allow Oxfam to continue to exist, we accept that the aid we pay for through donations is sold to victims for sex. If you say, as many people do, that shutting down Oxfam will ‘only’ be bad for those in need who rely on it for aid, then that’s what you promote: aid for sex.

Through the many articles I’ve read I’ve seen people finger Oxfam for sex abuse in Haiti, Chad, South Sudan, Ivory Coast, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Nepal. Ten to one that is but a partial list. Other aid organizations cover even more territory. There are specific accusations, just through these articles, from 1999, 2004, 2012, 2015 and 2017. That too is but a partial list.

Let’s see if I can make a coherent story of all this without turning it into an entire book (would not be a problem). Here’s from The Independent, with a headline that takes us right where we need to be:

Oxfam Told Of Aid Workers Raping Children In Haiti A Decade Ago

Aid agencies including Oxfam were warned that aid workers were sexually abusing children in Haiti a decade ago, The Independent can reveal. Children as young as six were being coerced into sex in exchange for food and necessities, according to a damning report by Save the Children, which called for urgent action including the creation of a global watchdog. Its research exposed abuse linked to 23 humanitarian, peacekeeping and security organisations operating in Haiti, Ivory Coast and what was then Southern Sudan. “Our own fieldwork suggests that the scale of abuse is significant,” the report concluded.

“Every agency is at risk from this problem … existing efforts to keep children safe from sexual exploitation and abuse are inadequate.” It identified “every kind of child sexual abuse and exploitation imaginable”, including rape, prostitution, pornography, sexual slavery, assaults and trafficking. One 15-year-old girl in Haiti told how “humanitarian men” exposed themselves and offered her the equivalent of £2 to perform a sex act. “The men call to me in the streets and they ask me to go with them,” said another Haitian girl. “They do this will all of us young girls.”

A six-year-old girl described being sexually assaulted and a homeless girl was given a single US dollar by a “man who works for an NGO” before being raped and severely injured, while boys were also reportedly raped. When asked why the abuse was not reported, children said they feared losing aid, did not trust local authorities, did not know who to go to, felt powerless or feared stigma and retaliation. “The people who are raping us and the people in the office are the same people,” said one girl in Haiti.

Ironically, that report is from Save the Children. Ironic because just today the Telegraph had this:

The former chief executive of Save the Children resigned after he admitted making “unsuitable and thoughtless” comments to three young female members of staff, it emerged on Tuesday. Justin Forsyth, who is now deputy executive director at Unicef, “apologised unreservedly” to the women after sending them text messages commenting on how they looked and what they were wearing. Mr Forsyth’s resignation from Save the Children came just four months after Brendan Cox, a friend of Mr Forsyth and former chief strategist at the charity, quit following separate allegations of sexual misconduct.

Mr Forsyth and Mr Cox worked together at Oxfam and later again as advisors to Gordon Brown in Downing Street. Mr Cox, the widower of the late Jo Cox who was murdered in 2016, admitted at the weekend that he had caused the women “hurt and offence”. Neither Mr Forsyth nor Mr Cox were subject to a formal disciplinary hearing. Save the Children said on Tuesday night that trustees had carried out two internal investigations into the complaints against Mr Forsyth in 2011 and 2015.

Save the Children admitted on Tuesday that it dealt with 193 child protection and 35 sexual harassment cases last year, which led to 30 dismissals.

It’s by no means just Oxfam. But they’re a major player. In more ways than one, unfortunately. Oxfam has some 2,500 staff and 31,000 volunteers through the world. Its annual budget is about half a billion dollars.

Another ‘interesting’ pattern to emerge is that the perpetrators, even if they are penalized, seemingly seamlessly float between aid organizations: get kicked out in one place, start afresh a few months later at the next. This article from IRIN is about the Belgian guy with whom the latest scandal surfaced.

He lived in a splendid $2000 a month Oxfam-sponsored villa in Haiti right after the 2010 earthquake, when most locals didn’t even have a roof over their heads, and threw sex-parties there. None of that hurt him much; he lost his Oxfam job, though only after many years of complaints, but just kept going (and denies just about all):

The man at the centre of a sexual exploitation scandal at aid agency Oxfam was dismissed by another British NGO seven years earlier for similar misconduct, IRIN has found. A former colleague reveals that Roland van Hauwermeiren was sent home from his job in Liberia in 2004 after her complaints prompted an investigation into sex parties there with young local women. Despite this, van Hauwermeiren was recruited by Oxfam in Chad less than two years later and went on to work for them in Haiti, and then in Bangladesh for Action contre la Faim.

The Swedish government’s aid department, alerted in 2008, also missed an opportunity to bring his behaviour to light and even went ahead that year to fund Oxfam’s Chad project, under his management, to the tune of almost $750,000. [..] Seeing the Times article about van Hauwermeiren, Swedish civil servant and former aid worker Amira Malik Miller was shaken to read about the Haiti case, which pertained to alleged parties and orgies in 2011, seven years after her own experiences of him in Liberia. She couldn’t believe he was still active in the aid world, especially after she had blown the whistle on him and his colleagues, not once but twice.

“Oh my God, he’s been doing this for 14 years,” she remembers thinking. “He just goes around the system… from Liberia to Chad, to Haiti, to Bangladesh. Someone should have checked properly,” she told IRIN. On two previous occasions, she thought she had done enough to stop his predatory behaviour. Malik Miller told IRIN how her initial complaints way back in 2004 led to van Hauwermeiren being pushed out of his job as Liberia country director of UK charity Merlin, a medical group now merged with Save the Children. An internal investigation into sexual exploitation and misconduct led to his departure, several Merlin staff members confirmed.

And that was just for warming up. An interesting voice in the whole narrative is that of Australian professor Andrew MacLeod, who worked with the Red Cross in Bosnia and the UN Emergency Co-ordination Centre in Pakistan. From the Times:

UN Staff Responsible For 60,000 Rapes In A Decade

Andrew MacLeod, who was chief of operations at the UN’s Emergency Co-ordination Centre, said that “predatory” abusers used development jobs to get to vulnerable women and children. He estimated that 60,000 rapes had been carried out by UN staff in the past decade, with 3,300 paedophiles working in the organisation and its agencies. “There are tens of thousands of aid workers around the world with paedophile tendencies, but if you wear a Unicef T-shirt nobody will ask what you’re up to,” he told The Sun. “You have the impunity to do whatever you want. It is endemic across the aid industry across the world.”

More Andrew McLeod, via the Daily Mail:

I was first alerted to it in 1996 while working in former Yugoslavia with the International Committee of the Red Cross. People would talk about a nightclub called Florida 2000, in the Bosnian city of Zenica, where girls of 14 and 15 were working as prostitutes. These children were being trafficked into Bosnia from neighbouring Moldova by individuals working for the UN and Bosnian police. They were used exclusively for the sexual gratification of UN staff. Such lurid rumours seemed difficult to credit at first, but when a UN peacekeeper called Kathryn Bolkovac tried to investigate, she was swiftly demoted and then fired. Her story was turned into a film, Whistleblower, in 2010, starring Rachel Weisz.

There is so much opportunity for abuse and so little to stop it that jobs in international aid actively attract sexual predators who benefit from the artificial power the aid industry confers upon them. [..] Senior figures in the UN and some of our best known charities have known for decades that this problem was rampant. They should have put in place systems for training, prevention, protection and prosecution. By failing to do so they were committing an offence. They were party to child sex crime. They did nothing, and they should face charges. If they’re not worried – they should be.

From the same article:

A middle-aged man who persistently hangs around the gates of a British primary school as children are leaving will attract the wary attention of teachers, parents and, pretty soon, the police. But the same man lurking outside a school in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, will be quite safe. Especially if he is wearing a T-shirt bearing the logo of Unicef, Save the Children, Oxfam or any other internationally-renowed aid organisations. Almost 20 years ago, the UK’s National Criminal Intelligence Service, warned that due to better policing and safe-guarding strategies and an international crackdown on child sex tourism, predatory paedophiles were turning their attention to the developing world.

And the best way of gaining access to children? Work for a children’s charity in some place where paedophilia is ignored or difficult to police. Everyone working in the international aid industry needs to be aware of the scale of sexual abuse – happening on their watch and often involving their personnel – of vulnerable people, especially children. Those who deny it are either lying through their teeth, or have their heads buried so far in the sand that their ignorance is deliberate.

And if you think government investigations would solve anything, here’s how Britain’s Charity Commission deals with things:

The Charity Commission has been forced to defend its own investigations after Oxfam’s former head of safeguarding claimed she told the watchdog women were being coerced into sex for aid. Helen Evans said she was “extremely concerned” by the response to concerns she raised while heading the charity’s global efforts to protect staff and beneficiaries from 2012 to 2015.

While appealing for more resources from management to deal with a rising number of allegations, Ms Evans told how in a single day she was told of a woman being coerced into sex in exchange for aid, another aid worker having sex with a beneficiary and a member of staff being struck off for abuse. “There has been a lot of coverage about Oxfam and how shocking and surprising this is – it isn’t,” she told Channel 4 News.

“I went in 2015 to the Charity Commission, I went back again in 2017. Everything I’m saying today, the Charity Commission knew, so why is the Government saying this is a surprise?” Ms Evans had emailed Oxfam’s chief executive, Mark Goldring, warning that data being gathered from staff “increasingly points to a culture of sexual abuse within some Oxfam officers” but a face-to-face meeting was cancelled in 2014.

So far we’ve encountered Oxfam, Save the Children, Doctors without Borders (MSF) and the UN (including its children’s fund Unicef). But that’s by no means the whole story. Try this on for size from Agence France Presse:

Oxfam is not the first non-governmental organisation to be accused of abuse. Previous revelations spurred the United Nations in 2002 to issue special measures for all its staff and others, including aid workers under UN contract, based on a policy of zero tolerance. The issue came to public attention in 2002 after allegations of widespread abuse of refugee and internally displaced women and children by humanitarian workers and peacekeepers in West Africa.

In refugee camps in Guinea, Liberia, and to a lesser extent Sierra Leone, dozens of male aid workers, often locals, were suspected of having exchanged money or gifts for sex with young refugee girls aged between 13 and 18. “It’s difficult to escape the trap of those (NGO) people, they use the food as bait to get you to have sex with them,” an adolescent in Liberia was quoted as saying in a report from the UN refugee agency. More than 40 agencies and organisations and nearly 70 individuals were mentioned in the testimonies taken from 1,500 children and adults for the UN report [..]

It’s everywhere, the pedophile rot. And the cover-ups, the industry approach, the aid as big business. And that can only lead to ever more misery. Because aid should never become an industry.

I touched on that about a year ago in one of many articles on our efforts for refugees and homeless in Greece. When it comes to scrutiny of aid organizations, you shouldn’t expect much if anything from governments. They’re part of the same industry.

Politicians find it much easier to fork over their constituents’ cash to ‘recognized’ aid organizations than to investigate them. They have a vested interest in letting the system roll on without disturbing it.

The Automatic Earth Still Helps Greeks and Refugees

[..] NGOs, as I’ve written before, have become an industry in their own right, institutionalized even. As someone phrased it: we now have a humanitarian-industrial complex. Which in Greece has received hundreds of millions of euros and somehow can’t manage to take proper care of 60,000 desolate souls with that.

I’ve even been warned that if I speak out too clearly about this, they may come after Konstantinos and his people and make their work hard and/or impossible. This is after all an industry that is worth a lot of money. Aid is big business. And big business protects itself.

Still, if we’re genuinely interested in finding out how and why it is possible that hundreds of millions of taxpayer euros change hands, and people still die in the cold and live in subhuman conditions, we’re going to have to break through some of the barriers that the EU, Greece and the iNGOs have built around themselves.

If only because European -and also American- taxpayers have a right to know what has made this ongoing epic failure possible. And of course the first concern should be that the refugees have the right, encapsulated in international law, to decent and humane treatment, and are not getting anything even remotely resembling it. Refugees Deeply quotes ‘a senior aid official’ (they don’t say from what) anonymously saying that €70 out of every €100 in aid is wasted.

But the Oxfam scandal, spreading as it is across the entire aid’ industry’, is many times worse than letting refugees freeze on islands. Or is it? Isn’t it perhaps the exact same thing, that changes appearance between places but remains always the same in essence?

Oxfam must go. It’s been found painfully wanting for too long and on too many occasions. It’ll be a useful deterrent for all other groups. The managers of which, who often make hundreds of thousands of dollars if not more, must also go. They’ve all either known or should have known for many years. The buck stops with them.

The aid itself may stop too in some places, at some times, but when you can only hand out aid when you’re ready to accept that it will be traded for sex with often underaged children, you’re losing big time, and you’re never going to turn that around. Institutionalization can only be halted when walls are broken down, up to and including their foundations.

The aid organizations that cause all these problems have one thing in common: they’re large, large enough to become like, look like, industries. The ones that have expensive offices in A locations because that’s where their major donors are, and executives who make salaries like the executives at those donors.

That’s simply the wrong scale. In all the countries where these organizations operate, and where they bring their depraved sex-crazed staff, there are other, smaller, local organizations too. Who most often don’t have anything like those issues, who often exhibit the exact opposite behavior: people helping people without looking for anything in return. I know this from my experiences in Greece since 2015.

It’s when you scale up the humanity that exists in many, if not most, people, that things go awry and the vermin creeps in. When things become so large that managers are hired, you can be sure that most of the money donated for aid will be burned in a bonfire of politicians, businessmen and, as we now know, pedophiles.

Oxfam gets $500 million a year or so. The EU has pumped over €1 billion into Greece, and probably as much into Italy as well, to ‘solve’ the refugee situation. That Brussels doesn’t want to solve, and neither do Athens or Rome, for fear that it will encourage more refugees to come.

So they make the people they purport to help, miserable, and they put a huge price sticker on that misery posing as help, for the taxpayer to pay. Like this, for instance -from my same article above:

[..] every refugee who, before the EU-Turkey deal, passed through Greece on his/her way to Europe, cost the EU €800. For a family of 5 that adds up to €4,000, which would have been more than enough to pay for transport, stay at decent hotels and eat in normal restaurants for the duration of their trip (7-10 days). Suffice it to say, that was not what they got.

After the EU-Turkey deal made it impossible for refugees to leave Greece, €15,000 has been spent per capita. That is €75,000 per family of 5, more than enough to rent a villa on the beach, hire a butler and eat gourmet food for 8 months. Instead, the refugees are stuck in old abandoned factories with no facilities, in old tents in the freezing cold and in the rain, and forced to eat a dirt poor version of rice with chickpeas and lentil soup.

It won’t be easy to stop this insanity, but it can be done. Refuse to dole out money to organizations that have been accused of abuse. Refuse to give any organization more than $1 million. Support many small organizations instead. Humanitarian aid does not scale up well. To say the least.

It’ll be cost-effective as well. It’ll take more effort to locate the right people, but given that $70 out of every $100 in donations is wasted by large aid organizations today, there’s a huge win lurking right there. You just need to find people who are better at all this than the ones who made that disaster possible.

Then, fire any manager who has not acted in the past on complaints. Establish a system that promises to put anyone in jail against whom credible complaints have been filed.

There are thousands of those walking around right now working for organizations funded by you and me directly, and by our taxes too, free to abuse another girl or little boy, and then another one tomorrow, or a mother who needs to feed her child(ren) because her home has been swept away by floods or bombs.

And make this the number one issue for the UN (yeah, I know, that same UN), to discuss and control as per tomorrow morning. Get multiple countries’ military to deliver what Oxfam did before, and make sure all soldiers understand what’ll happen to them at the first sign of abuse, of money, of people, anything at all.

There are many things out there that we can’t control, but this one we can. Because, as I said, in all locations where aid is needed, there are local people available to deliver it without trying to abuse, centralize, institutionalize it, profit from it, or turn it into a business. Just keep aid donations so small it’s not interesting to do any of those things.

At the UN level, I’m thinking Jimmy Carter. He’s the only man I can conjure up who has the integrity to clean up this mess. I know, one is a very small number. But Carter will know others. Big job, but doable. After all, we can’t very well have the worst of our own societies run rampant in places where people are defenseless against them.

Oh wait, that right there is another reason why our governments like the way things are going, just fine, isn’t it? Oxfam allows them (us) to export their perverts.

Well, screw that. We’re better than our governments.

To summarize: right now, your donation to Oxfam literally pays for pedophiles to go rape children across the world. Not every penny or dollar (they need their shiny offices too), but that’s not the point: your dollars keep the aid industry, the system, and therefore the opportunity for the abuse going. Is that what you want?

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/2sQoV0A Tyler Durden

Finding a suitable balance between work and daily living is a challenge that all workers face.

Families are particularly affected. The ability to successfully combine work, family commitments and personal life is important for the well-being of all members in a household.

1 in every 8 employees in the OECD works 50 hours or more per week, but, as Statista’s Dyfed Loesche notes, people in Turkey don’t have a work-life balance, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Mexicans aren’t really in the balance either…

You will find more infographics at Statista

The United States and the United Kingdom also perform pretty poorly, out of all 35 OECD member countries (plus Russia, Brazil and South Africa) covered in the Better Life Index for 2017.

The most important aspect for a healthy work-life balance is the amount of time people spend (not) at work. The authors of the Better Life Index note that “evidence suggests that long work hours may impair personal health, jeopardise safety and increase stress.”

And the Dutch are apparently the people who enjoy the best work-life balance.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/2CEqtuj Tyler Durden

Authored by Peter Korzun via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Can you hear the drumbeat of war? It is getting louder.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on the final day of the Munich Security Conference that Israel might go a step beyond striking the proxy powers and instead take direct action against Iran. He was especially concerned about the possibility of a land bridge stretching from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea. According to the PM, Iran represents an existential threat and its permanent military presence in Syria is unacceptable to Israel.

The Feb. 10 incursion of what Israel called an Iranian drone from Syria into Israeli airspace has spiraled into a major fight, resulting in the downing of an Israeli jet and a broad wave of strikes against military targets in Syria alleged to be linked to Iran. This was the first time Israel has used force directly against Iran.

If Iran itself is attacked, its sites related to its nuclear program will top the list of the prime targets for Israel’s F-35, F-15, F-16, and Kfir fighters, drones, and intermediate-range Jericho missiles. There are different routes they could take, but all of them would require flying through the airspaces of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, or Turkey. None of these Muslim countries will openly allow Israel to use their airspace, but anti-Iran sentiments are strong in the Sunni-dominated Arab states. Some of them might be willing to look the other way. A clandestine agreement to tacitly allow Israeli aircraft to cross their air space is entirely possible. Anger could be vented publicly once the mission has been completed.

Iraq is not focused on monitoring its airspace – it has many other problems to deal with and Israel could take advantage of that. The route through Iraq looks like it might be the best option.

The distance that would need to be covered would be between 1,500 km (930 miles) and 1,800 km (1,120 miles). The aircraft will also have to make a return trip, so in-flight refueling will be a necessity. Israel is only believed to own between eight and ten large tanker aircraft (such as Boeing 707s). That will hardly be enough. The Israeli military is not particularly adept at aerial refuelling. If the aircraft have to fly undetected, the F-35s will have to forgo their externally mounted weapons in order to preserve their stealth capabilities. Then their payload will be reduced to only two JDAM-guided bombs in the internal bay. Pretty underwhelming.

Then Iran’s radars will have to be spoofed, and its air defenses, especially the Russian-made S-300, will have to be knocked out. It won’t be easy.

Israel has a few dozen laser-guided bunker buster bombs (the GBU-28). The Jericho III is an Israeli three-stage solid propellant missile with a payload of more than a ton and capable of carrying multiple low-yield independently targeted reentry warheads. All the targets in Iran fall within its range of up to 6,500 km (4,038 miles). These missile strikes are capable of destroying every command and control site, as well as all major nuclear facilities.

The Heron-2 and Eitan drones can hover in the air for more than 20 consecutive hours to provide guidance and intelligence and to jam Iranian communications and confuse its radar.

Israel would wage electronic warfare against Iran’s military and civilian infrastructure, such as its electric grids and Internet, creating interference with Iran’s emergency frequencies.

After the war has begun, Israel will come under rocket and missile attack from Iran’s proxies: Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah has up to 150,000 rockets that can reach anywhere in Israel. It is true however, that Israel possesses a sophisticated, multilayer, air-defense shield. A first-class intelligence and early-warning system will mitigate the fallout, but substantial damage will be unavoidable.

Israeli troops will have to deploy in the Strip and move across the Lebanese border. But the Shia group will have to fight on two fronts: in Syria to prop up the Assad government, and in Lebanon against Israel. Syria is likely to find itself involved in combat operations. Israel will go to any length to keep Iran and Hezbollah away from its border.

Iran may try to block the Strait of Hormuz. But even if it does not, global oil prices would go up. Iran or its proxies might attack US forces in the Middle East, primarily in Syria and Iraq. Should that happen, Iraq would likely become a battleground between US forces and Iranian proxies, with American reinforcements rushing in. Iran could punish the Americans for their support of Israel in Afghanistan.

A conflict between Israel and pro-Iranian forces would douse the light at the end of the tunnel so recently kindled as a result of the diplomatic initiatives in Syria by Russia, Turkey, and Iran. Once the shooting starts, all that work will go down the drain. This scenario could be prevented. As we have seen in some other situations, Russia is the only actor capable of effectively mediating. The US has become openly hostile toward Tehran and may have a hidden agenda in which peace is not the goal. There may be forces interested in sparking any conflict that would exacerbate the situation in Syria and bring a large-scale war against Iran even closer.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/2GFtBbT Tyler Durden

The United States takes pride in being a technological leader in the world. Companies such as Apple, Alphabet, IBM, Amazon and Microsoft have shaped our (digital) lives for many years and there is little indication of that changing anytime soon.

But, as Statista’s Felix Richter notes, when it comes to IT infrastructure however, the U.S. is lagging behind the world’s best (and many of its not-so-best), be it in terms of home broadband or wireless broadband speeds. According to OpenSignal’s latest State of LTE report, the average 4G download speed in the United States was 16.31 Mbps in Q4 2017.

You will find more infographics at Statista

That’s little more than a third of the speed that mobile device users in Singapore enjoy and ranks the U.S. at a disappointing 62nd place in the global ranking.

While U.S. mobile networks appear to lack in speed, they are on par with the best in terms of 4G availability. According to OpenSignal’s findings, LTE was available to U.S. smartphone users 90 percent of the time, putting the United States in fifth place.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/2HG2xuc Tyler Durden

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

As has been made perfectly clear, Mueller’s “indictment” of 13 Russians and 3 companies is just another hoax.

Robert Mueller discredited himself and his orchestrated Russiagate investigation today (Friday, February 16, 2018) with his charges that 13 Russians and 3 Russian companies plotted to use social media to influence the 2016 election. Their intent, Mueller says, was to “sow discord in the US political system.”

What pathetic results to come from a 9 month investigation!

And as Moon of Alabama explained:

The published indictment gives support to our long held believe that there was no “Russian influence” campaign during the U.S. election. What is described and denounced as such was instead a commercial marketing scheme which ran click-bait websites to generate advertisement revenue and created online crowds around virtual persona to promote whatever its commercial customers wanted to promote. The size of the operation was tiny when compared to the hundreds of millions in campaign expenditures. It had no influence on the election outcome.

The indictment is fodder for the public to prove that the Mueller investigation is “doing something”. It distracts from further questioning  the origin of the Steele dossier. It is full of unproven assertions and assumptions. It is a sham in that none of the Russian persons or companies indicted will ever come in front of a U.S. court.

All Mueller has found is a click-bait commercial marketing scheme that had nothing to do with election interference.

Why is Mueller comfortable bringing a transparently false indictment?

The answer is, as Glenn Greenwald makes clear, that Mueller knows there are large numbers of warmongering politicians and media whores who will seize on the fake indictment as proof that Russia has “committed an act of war equivalent to Pearl Harbor and 9/11.”

The fact that what Mueller has indicted is only a click-bait marketing scheme will never be mentioned by politicians and presstitutes shouting the military/security complex’s slogan that “Russia must be punished.”

Greenwald supplies the names of some of these reckless and irresponsible people who are willing to bring on war with their rants: politicians Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Jeanne Shaheen, Jerry Nadler, Marco Rubio—indeed almost all of Congress—Clinton aides such as Philippe Reines and John Podesta, and the legions of presstitutes such as Karen Tumulty, David Frum, Chuck Todd, Tom Friedman—indeed, the entirety of the print and TV media with the exceptions of Tucker Carlson and Pat Buchanan.

*  *  *

When a country armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and overwhelmed by its own exceptionalism and indispensability has political and media lunatics equating a click-bait commercial marketing scheme with Pearl Harbor, that country is a recipe for the end of the world.

*  *  *

Note: Two presstitutes at Bloomberg, Lauren Etter and Ilya Arkhipov think that filming disadvantaged Americans in order to cast the US in a bad light is the same as interfering in the presidential election, and they think that a Russian food caterer is heading a Russian disinformation campaign.

This shows how utterly stupid the US media is. The entire article is based on nothing, just what some people say they think. Prigozhin’s business is a bait-click marketing scheme. What the utterly dishonest Mueller and the presstitutes are doing is turning a click-bait marketing scheme into an election interfering scheme. The only way this “indictment” could succeed in a court would be if no evidence could be presented, only Mueller’s absurd “indictment.”

Mueller’s “indictment” is not meant to go to court. It is just a propaganda device, and that is how the presstitutes are using it.

As Glenn Greenwald reports, three CNN “journalists” had to resign for their fake news “Russia threat” stories.

In actual fact, the entirely of the US print and TV media should have to resign.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/2EP4VNG Tyler Durden

The era of hypersonic tech has arrived. Unbeknownst too many, a race for hypersonic aircraft and weapons has flourished among global superpowers (China, Russia, and the United States), who realize that the first to possess these technologies will revolutionize their civilian and military programs.

In Beijing’s bid for the first place, Chinese researchers have revealed a novel design for an ultra-fast plane they say will be able to take dozens of people and tonnes of cargo – “anything from flowers to bombs, and likewise, passengers could be tourists or military special forces” – from Beijing to New York in about two hours.

The plane would travel around 6,000km/h (3,700mph) or about five times faster than the speed of sound, according to the team, which is also “involved in China’s top-secret hypersonic weapons programme,” according to the South China Morning Post. Today’s current journey from Beijing to New York depending on the jet stream is roughly 13 to 14 hours. An 80% reduction in travel time is a game changer for civilian aviation, but also a red flag if the aircraft is converted into a hypersonic heavy bomber.

“It will take only a couple of hours to travel from Beijing to New York at hypersonic speed,” head of hypersonic research Cui Kai wrote in a paper this month in Physics, Mechanics and Astronomy, published by Science China Press.

The team said they had tested a scaled-down prototype of the hypersonic plane in a wind tunnel at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Researchers carried out aerodynamics evaluations on the aircraft pushing it to 8,600km/h (5343 mph) and discovered it performed exceptionally well, with low drag and high lift.

Cui and his crew, who hail from the academy’s Key Laboratory of High-Temperature Gas Dynamics, under the Institute of Mechanics, have dubbed their hypersonic plane the “I-plane” (so far Apple has not launched a trademark infringement suit against the team’s “I-Plane”). The South China Morning Post explains the “name comes from the shadow cast by the aircraft on the ground – in the shape of a capital “I” – when it is bearing down like a dive-bomber.”

The South China Morning Post discussed why the radical design of the I-Plane is a game changer for aeronautical engineering but stresses the aircraft is still in the experimental stage and many years out from actual development.

With two layers of wings, the I-plane design resembles that of biplanes used during the first world war. The earliest type of aircraft, most biplanes disappeared after the 1930s as plane designers pursued higher speeds and fuel efficiency.

Fast-forward to 2018, and China’s latest hypersonic vehicle features lower wings that reach out from the middle of the fuselage like a pair of embracing arms. A third flat, bat-shaped wing meanwhile extends over the back of the aircraft.

The researchers said this biplane design means the aircraft will be able to handle significantly heavier payload than existing hypersonic vehicles that have a streamlined shape and delta wings.

At extremely high speeds, they said the double layer of wings works together to reduce turbulence and drag while increasing the aircraft’s overall lift capacity.

The amount of lift generated by the new hypersonic vehicle was about 25 per cent that of a commercial jet of the same size, according to the study. That means an I-plane as big as a Boeing 737 could carry up to five tonnes of cargo, or 50 passengers. A typical Boeing 737 can carry up to 20 tonnes of cargo or around 200 passengers.

While Cui’s design has provided an answer to the aerodynamic configuration problem encountered by previous hypersonic plane models, many issues still need to be tackled for this to move beyond the conceptual stage.

All known hypersonic vehicles being developed worldwide are still in the experimental stage because of the many technological challenges that exist, and none of them can take passengers yet.

Existing hypersonic vehicles – such as the US Air Force’s X-51 Waverider and China’s WU-14 hypersonic glide vehicle – have capacity for just a small, lightweight payload such as a compact nuclear warhead. This has severely limited the application of the technology.

Travelling at hypersonic speed will also generate a huge amount of heat, possibly exceeding 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,800 Fahrenheit), and if that heat cannot be insulated or dispersed effectively, it could prove fatal. Although researchers have found potential solutions to this problem – such as using heat-resistant materials and a liquid-cooling system to push the heat out – this aspect again is still experimental.

The I-plane, however, could be a game changer, according to a Chinese aircraft designer working on military research who said Cui’s team also worked on the development of China’s most advanced hypersonic weapons, so the tests would likely move from wind tunnel to open field.

He added that the hypersonic vehicle could potentially be used to transport anything from flowers to bombs, and likewise, passengers could be tourists or military special forces.

“We’re talking about something like a hypersonic heavy bomber,” he said. The paper has sent ripples through the hypersonic research community, he added. “It’s a crazy design, but somehow they’ve managed to make it work,” the researcher said.

The project reflected China’s ambition to overtake the US on developing new strategic weapons, according to the researcher.

“This will require original rather than knock-off designs,” he said, adding that the I-plane was part of a new family of aircraft in development that had not been reported until now. “It could lead to a huge step forward in hypersonic technology,” he said.

China has tested various types of hypersonic vehicles over the Gobi Desert in recent years, some capable of reaching 10 times the speed of sound.

It is also building the world’s fastest wind tunnel to simulate hypersonic flight at speeds of up to 12 kilometres per second (or 43,200km/h). At such velocity, a Chinese hypersonic vehicle could reach the west coast of the United States in less than 14 minutes.

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Last Wednesday, Admiral Harry Harris, who heads the military’s Pacific Command, warned lawmakers  that, “China’s hypersonic weapons development outpaces ours … we’re falling behind.”

“We need to continue to pursue that and in a most aggressive way to ensure that we have the capabilities to both defend against China’s hypersonic weapons and to develop our own offensive hypersonic weapons.”” Harris added.

And so, perhaps for the first time since World War II, as a radical, game-changing new military technology arrives, it is not the US that is at the forefront.

For those unfamiliar, below is a documentary by the Rand Corporation on the dangers and opportunities of hypersonic weapons.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/2ENNpcD Tyler Durden

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

What Sorkin is suggesting is more of the same, although perhaps with worse consequences. If banks take action where policymakers do not or cannot, they are essentially putting themselves above the law. And if banks start playing that role, where does it end?

What if, for example, banks and credit card companies decided to stop processing payments for any retail purchase of cigarettes? After all, cigarettes are demonstrably bad for all consumers, and secondhand smoke can harm innocent people. Should banks step in to help protect society at large?

Or what if banks decided to stop processing payments for abortion clinics because they believed the practice was immoral? Is it fair for financial institutions to make abortion effectively illegal? What if President Trump called on financial firms to cut off access to environmental groups he believed were delaying projects that could bring jobs to local economies? Maybe banks should freeze Colin Kaepernick’s checking account until he stops kneeling during the national anthem?

Many of these examples are extreme, but you get my point. Just because banks can be used to have a dramatic impact on our society doesn’t mean they should be.

– From the American Banker piece: Call for Bank Crackdown on Gun Sales Is Deeply Misguided

Even in today’s world replete with plutocrat public relations masquerading as journalism, it’s rare to encounter an article simultaneously pandering, authoritarian, childish and dumb. Nevertheless, I found one, and it was unsurprisingly published in The New York Times.

The title of the piece more or less says it all, How Banks Could Control Gun Sales if Washington Won’t, but let’s go ahead and examine some of the author’s suggestions in greater detail.

For instance:

Here’s an idea.

What if the finance industry — credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America?

Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker. And it wouldn’t be hard for them to take a stand.

PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.

If Visa and Mastercard are unwilling to act on this issue, the credit card processors and banks that issue credit cards could try. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, which issues credit cards and owns a payment processor, has talked about how he and his bank have “a moral obligation but also a deeply vested interest” in helping “solve pressing societal challenges.” This is your chance, Mr. Dimon.

Let me interrupt your regularly scheduled programming for a quick moment to remind you of JP Morgan’s post-financial crisis criminal track record. Via Wall Street on Parade:

Now back to The New York Times article…

And here’s a variation on the same theme: What if the payment processing industry’s biggest customers — companies like McDonald’s, Starbucks, Apple, Amazon, AT&T, CVS and others that regularly talk about “social responsibility” — collectively pressured the industry to do it? There’s a chance that some of the payment processors would stop handling gun sales. Perhaps their voices would help push one of the banks to step out and lead?

Is all of this a pipe dream? Maybe, but I spent the last 72 hours calling and emailing a handful of chief executives to discuss these ideas. None wanted to speak on the record, because it’s a hot-button topic. But all applauded the idea and some said they had already been thinking about it. A few, I discovered later, called their peers to begin a conversation. 

Critics of using the finance industry to influence gun sales might argue that such a move would be discriminatory against gun retailers. But gun sellers are not a protected class, like age, race, gender, religion or even political affiliation. This would be a strictly commercial decision.

That last line is a good example of why Andrew Ross Sorkin writes nonsense for The New York Times as opposed to say running a financial services company. If he thinks this would be a smart commercial decision, versus a potentially catastrophic one, he might want to get out of his bubble world for a couple of moments.

Although there’s a concerted effort to have the public believe otherwise, there’s simply no national consensus on this issue at all — even after the recent Florida shooting. As The Hill recently reported:

Fewer Republicans now support a ban on assault weapons than they did nearly two decades ago, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Tuesday.

The number of independents who support such a ban has also dropped starkly since 1999, according to the survey.

Only 29 percent of Republicans said they would back a ban on assault weapons in the U.S., while 45 percent of independents said the same. That’s down significantly from 1999, when more than 7 in 10 Republicans and independents supported the prohibition.

A solid majority of Democrats – 71 percent – still supports such a proposal.

The Washington Post/ABC News poll was conducted following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., roughly 25 miles northwest of Fort Lauderdale. That attack left 17 people dead and 14 injured…

Overall, about half of Americans support a ban on assault weapons, according to the new Washington Post/ABC News poll, compared with 46 percent who oppose such a ban. That shows little change from 2016, when 51 percent support a prohibition on assault weapons.

There simply isn’t overwhelming national support for more gun control. As such, if the mega banks that wrecked the economy a decade ago and consumed massive bailouts to survive, decided to use their power to shadow legislate it will not go over well. I can promise you that much.

While media coverage might make you think everyone is yelling for gun control, here’s some more of what we learned from The Washington Post poll:

If we’re looking for some kind of national consensus, it appears to be centered around the view that mental health issues lie at the core of mass shooting events. Any bank CEO foolish enough to start a fight and ban customers from buying what they want to legally purchase could very quickly regret it. Moreover, irrespective of your stance on the issue, it’s dangerous and irresponsible to call for shadow public policy by crooked mega banks.

Interestingly enough, as a huge Bitcoin proponent, I wouldn’t mind it at all if the banks listen to Sorkin. I couldn’t come up with a more effective marketing campaign to demonstrate clearly to the entire planet why Bitcoin is so incredibly important to a free society. It’s not as if mega banks are especially popular as things stand, so anything that makes a censorship resistance payment system look even better compared to the legacy financial system is perfectly fine by me. Bitcoin’s ability to fund Wikileaks in the face of a financial system blockade is what sparked my interest in the protocol in the first place. If banks want to signal to an entirely new demographic the important of permissionless money, be my guest.

*  *  *

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via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/2EMQg5A Tyler Durden

Across the United States, there’s a seemingly unstoppable movement gaining ground.

The legalization of cannabis for adult use – first passed in the states of Washington and Colorado in 2012 – is now approved in a total of nine states and the District of Columbia; and as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, by the end of the year, that total could be in the mid-teens as states vote on cannabis-related ballots in the upcoming mid-term elections.

CALIFORNIA’S GREEN RUSH

States are legalizing the adult use of cannabis for various reasons, but there’s no doubt that one of the primary ones is the potential impact on both the economy and government coffers.

Today’s infographic comes from cannabis royalty company FinCanna Capital, and it helps to contextualize the possible effects of cannabis legalization on the country’s largest state economy: California.

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

Experts say the current cannabis market (including unregulated sales) in California is already worth about $8.5 billion, making cannabis quite the cash crop to start with. In fact, it’s an amount that’s bigger than the current three largest agricultural markets in the state: milk and cream ($6.1B), grapes ($5.6B), and almonds ($5.2B).

With the passing of Proposition 64 in November 2016 and legalization officially taking effect January 1, 2018, the state of California is now the world’s largest regulated cannabis market.

To take advantage of this growing opportunity, entrepreneurs are rushing to the Golden State from far and wide.

SIZING UP THE GREEN RUSH

In 2016, the regulated market for cannabis, which only included medical marijuana at the time, was worth $2.81 billion in California.

However, Arcview Market Research predicts that California will see regulated sales grow at a 23.1% annual pace between 2016-2020 as adult use sales come into play. By 2020, the total regulated industry will be worth $6.5 billion.

Meanwhile, it’s expected that the state government will be pocketing from the rush as well, picking up $1 billion or moreper year from taxes. That includes a 15% levy on all cannabis sales, as well as cultivation taxes applied to buds and trimmings.

THE MEDICAL COMPONENT

As the largest legal market on the planet, California could see less expected green shoots, as well.

Because of its federal classification as a Schedule I substance, cannabis is extremely under-researched globally. With wider state acceptance of cannabis in California, it may be possible to foster an environment where more could be learned about the vast medical potential of the plant through the state’s powerful universities and institutions. This could lead to increased innovation, investment, and medical discoveries that could have an additional economic impact.

Such a track would follow in the footsteps of Israel, which is the world’s leader in marijuana research. In the country, there are 120 ongoing studies, $100 million in foreign and U.S. funds invested into patents, startups, and delivery devices, and ten-fold growth in investment expected between 2017-2019.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/2CE9DvB Tyler Durden

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

They say those who don’t pay attention to history are destined to repeat it…

It seems like even though humans have paid attention, they somehow think the same things that failed in the past, like prohibition and communism, will magically work now.

Alcohol kills almost three times as many Americans as guns. Last year, about 33,000 people died of gunshot-related injuries, including those who shot themselves; suicide. When removing those who killed themselves only (again, suicide), that number drops to 15,549, by even anti-gun activists estimates.  To put that in perspective, this year’s flu and the vaccine to “prevent” said flu is more deadly. So far, it’s been killing an estimated 4,000 Americans per week. That’s roughly 16,000 per month, a number already higher than last year’s total “gun deaths” which include justified homicides (or self-defense.) You don’t have to be a genius at math to understand that “gun violence” isn’t really the epidemic the media wants you to believe.

By comparison, alcohol abuse killed nearly 88,000 people in 2015 in the United States. So why not ban booze? Because the United States tried that.  It was called prohibition, and it didn’t work.

It resulted in the government poisoning their own people: yes, the US government.  The same government that the anti-gun activists say wouldn’t do that to us. Rational humans would rather not see the government get a monopoly on guns. But the US has strayed rather far from logic, relying on emotional outbursts and teenage angst temper tantrums. 

Joe Joseph from the Daily Sheeple also brings an interesting point to consider. “Did you know, that alcohol is the number one underlying cause and factor behind crime in the US?” Alcohol is alone causes more harm to society than heroin, cocaine, and marijuana combined.

So where’s society’s outrage over alcohol abuse?  Why aren’t kids marching for alcohol control? Because prohibition doesn’t work.

People who want to break the law and drink will do so.  People snort cocaine regardless of the fact that it’s illegal.  Where is society’s outrage at the right thing?

“Where are all the millions of dollars and campaign contributions and television ads trying to save people’s lives from the dangers of alcohol?” Joseph asks.

“This is huge because we have to look at the facts. And the facts are: while it’s awful that these events take place, they’re anomalies in the grand scheme of things. Alcoholism is not an anomaly. It’s very present, ever present in our society and substance abuse is getting worse and worse and worse because the root cause isn’t being tackled.”

The root cause is pain and voids within a person. The problem is that social engineering has created a god for people and that god is the government. And it’s a very poor substitute for actual spirituality, says Joseph.

Americans don’t “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps” and rely on their ingenuity and faith and individual strengths.  Americans now rely on the god created by social engineering: government. Simply suggest that humans could run their own lives just fine without a government, and most people will act as if you actually insulted their god.

“Freedom is not free,” says Joseph. “Freedom comes at a great cost. It takes a lot to maintain freedom….people are being pushed to the point of rebellion in this country and on purpose.”

Follow Joe Joseph and his News Shots here, on The Daily Sheeple’s YouTube channel. 

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Those who are unfamiliar with Venezuela’s unprecedented economic collapse might be surprised to learn that the country’s oil production has only slowed, even as the price of a barrel of crude has risen in most international markets.

Unsurprisingly (it’s Venezuela), there’s a macabre explanation for this phenomenon: The workers at PDVSA – Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, which once showered Venezuelans with oil wealth – are literally collapsing due to hunger and exhaustion as workers defy their government handlers and flee their jobs in their desperation as the value of their pay has been completely erased.

Bloomberg spoke with several workers in Venezuela’s oil industry about the harsh conditions they face on a daily basis.

Of course, oil workers aren’t the only ones suffering: The situation in Venezuela is getting so dire that ordinary Venezuelans are losing tons of body weight because of the food shortages. Many can no longer afford to buy meat.

One worker told Bloomberg about how his weekly salary barely pays for the corn flour he mixes with water and drinks every morning.

At 6:40 a.m., Pablo Ruiz squats at the gate of a decaying refinery in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, steeling himself for eight Sisyphean hours of brushing anti-rust paint onto pipes under a burning sun. For breakfast, the 55-year-old drank corn-flour water.

Ruiz’s weekly salary of 110,000 bolivares — about 50 cents at the black-market exchange rate — buys him less than a kilo of corn meal or rice. His only protein comes from 170 grams of canned tuna included in a food box the government provides to low-income families. It shows up every 45 days or so.

“I haven’t eaten meat for two months,” he said. “The last time I did, I spent my whole week’s salary on a chicken meal.”

Hunger is hastening the ruin of Venezuelan’s oil industry as workers grow too weak and hungry for heavy labor. With children dying of malnutrition and adults sifting garbage for table scraps, food has become more important than employment, and thousands are walking off the job. Absenteeism and mass resignations mean few are left to produce the oil that keeps the tattered economy functioning.

Researchers at three Venezuelan Universities reported losing on average 11 kilograms (24 lbs) in body weight last year and almost 90% now live in poverty, according to a new university study on the impact of a devastating economic crisis and food shortages. That annual survey has become a key barometer of the country’s economic stress since the government stopped releasing reliable economic data, as Reuters reports.

Per Reuters, over 60% of Venezuelans surveyed said that during the previous three months they had woken up hungry because they did not have enough money to buy food. About a quarter of the population was eating two or less meals a day.

After winning the presidency in 1999, leftist President Hugo Chavez was proud of improving Venezuela’s social indicators as the country’s economy was bolstered by oil-fueled welfare policies.

But his successor President Nicolas Maduro, who has ruled since 2013, has allowed corruption to flourish. And his political allies have mismanaged the economy to such a degree that the collapse in the price of oil during 2014 had ruinous consequences.

Even as the price of crude has begun to creep materially higher, the situation in Venezuela is only getting worse.

In contemporary Venezuela, currency controls restrict food imports, hyperinflation eats into salaries, and people line up for hours to buy basics like flour.

As a result, 90% of Venezuelans live in poverty.

In what appears to be a last-ditch effort to rescue the country’s economy and his regime, President Nicolas Maduro yesterday began sales of the Petro, Venezuela’s oil-backed cryptocurerency. The launch was so successful, Maduro has assured the public, that he is considering launch a “Petro Oro” – a cryptocurrency backed by gold reserves.

But perhaps even more shocking than the dire circumstances under which PDVSA’s remaining employees go to work every day is the contrast with the country’s prosperous past, as Bloomberg describes it…

For decades, PDVSA was a dream job in a socialist petro-state. The company supplied workers not only with a good living and revolutionary-red coveralls, but cafeterias that served lunches with soup, a main course, dessert and freshly squeezed juice. Now, the cafeterias are mostly bare, the children are hungry and employees are leaving to work as taxi drivers, plumbers or farmers. Some emigrate. Some hold out as long as they can.

…Now, instead of enjoying the trappings of a comfortable, middle-class life (not to mention freshly squeezed fruit juice), desperate employees are risking the government’s wrath – and possibly sacrificing their chance at a government pension someday – to escape not only from their jobs, but from Venezuela.

Those who quit without notice risk losing their pensions, as bureaucrats refuse to process paperwork. Many managers live in terror of arrest since the Maduro regime purged the industry, imprisoning officials from low-level apparatchiks to former oil ministers. In one human resources office, a sign advertised a limit of five resignations a day.

“Management is holding them back to stop brain and technical drain,” said Jose Bodas, general secretary of United Federation of Venezuelan Oil Workers. He estimates 500 employees have resigned at the Puerto La Cruz refinery and nearby processing facilities in the past 12 months – even though superiors have labeled them “traitors to the homeland,” a phrase that often precedes arrest. In the streets, families sell their boots and the red coveralls.

“They’re giving up because of hunger,” Bodas said. “They’re leaving because they get paid better abroad. This is unheard of, a catastrophe.”

In a nightmarish reflection of what life must’ve been like in some of the most poverty stricken areas of the Soviet Union, widespread adsenteeism is forcing those who stay behind to work long hours at the state’s insistence – without any additional compensation.

Sitting in the living room of his house, on his day off, Endy Torres says he has lost 33 pounds over the past 18 months. He shows his PDVSA identification photo as proof: a chubby-cheeked man, weighing 176 pounds.

Ten years ago, he joined the company expecting an ample salary and comfortable pension. Today, his 700,000 bolivars per month, plus a food bonus of 1.6 million bolivars (about $9.50 altogether) can’t fill the fridge at his grandmother’s house, where he lives.

About 10 people from his department resigned in January. There are 263 plant operators remaining and 180 vacancies at the Puerto La Cruz refinery, he said.

Absenteeism forces those who show up to work extra hours and burn precious calories. The lack of investment in equipment and maintenance has increased technical failures, almost all in the early hours of the morning, he said. When they occur, workers are too fatigued to act quickly, and accidents occur.

And the worst part of it all is: Even if oil prices make a surprise comeback, years of favoritism, corruption and – now – international sanctions mean it’s unlikely Venezuela’s oil industry will suddenly blossom once again: For those who stay behind, the formerly wealthiest country in Latin America will probably remain mired in poverty, for as long as it’s ruled by a corrupt autocracy.

 

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/2EKAFTX Tyler Durden