Category: zerohedge

Authored by Thomas Greene via Medium.com,

The Bronx of my childhood was a paradise. My street ran parallel to a section of the old Croton Aqueduct, by then long disused, which we kids called the Ackey. Along its banks grew trees and bushes and wild flowers forming a ribbon of thicket in which we played, and through which we “hiked.”

We were always in the street. We learned our games and rhymes by word of mouth, from older to younger. We chose our adventures and settled disputes among ourselves. We played stick ball and ringolevio and skully, red rover and stoop ball, and a deliciously sadistic variety of Johnny on a pony. We raced about on noisy cheap skates with metal wheels.

In this urban sanctuary I grew up safe, loved, happy, and unmistakably working class, yet somehow I slipped away. I was reared to become an ironworker or electrician, but I managed to pass through a posh New England liberal arts college and end up a tech journalist and author. I’ve worked unsupervised, chiefly from home, since the 1990s.

Most of my relatives and old neighborhood friends hate people like me. And I don’t blame them. Most are lifelong Democrats, yet they voted for Donald Trump, and will again, and I can’t blame them for that, either. Let me explain.

My career is the product of an economic revival engineered by the center-right New Democrats of the Clinton era and subsequent administrations. I’ve observed the tech industry for two decades; it’s a job, but it’s hardly work: I’m a nerd; I like science, technology, and medicine. Right now, I couldn’t be more comfortable in lockdown. Amazon supplies my dry goods while a friendly driver brings my groceries. My family and I are safe. No one comes near us without a mask. I control my environment; I choose the people in whose presence I’ll work, if any. I can smoke and drink on the job if I please. So long as I honor my deadlines and file clean copy, no one has anything to say about it. Tech’s been good to me.

But the guy I was expected to become walks beside me like an imaginary friend I never outgrew. I think about him often — daily, if I’m honest. He commutes by bus, encountering irresponsible louts who refuse to mask up. He worries about it, too. His wife, who had earned a second income, is at home supervising their kids. He lives by the lunch buzzer and the punch clock. If there’s music where he works, it’s amplified by cheap, overdriven speakers and the genre will suit him only by chance. The temperature and ambient noise and lighting were calibrated by industrial psychologists. He can’t evade disagreeable co-workers. He’s paid far less than a family wage, but he’s got no health coverage or pension. He endures daily uncertainty about his family’s needs. Why should he not hate me? I would hate me if I were him.

New and Improved

He and millions of others failed to thrive in the tech economy, but that was a feature, not a bug. Blue-collar Americans were never going to adapt, despite the assurances of New Economy cheerleaders, many of whom were in government. Factories closed and data centers opened. Dotcom outfits traded on nothing more than an online presence, which somehow made sense to us. The New Democrats exalted capital both tangible and intellectual, and devalued labor, as if they’d been old-school Establishment Republicans. They fawned over Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Andy Grove the way one imagines Calvin Coolidge gushing about Rockefellers and Morgans, Vanderbilts and Astors.

A high-tech meritocracy would lead America in a better direction, and the need was urgent. The Old Economy was failing, undeniably. It was time to re-formulate it with a progressive veneer: no more dirty factories or pollution; NAFTA would ship that mess abroad. America would subsist on green energy, outsourcing, financial services, the sacrament of e-commerce, and high-tech gadgets: a middle-class Valhalla governed by upper-middle-class trustees from the best schools. There would be no need for troublesome relics like labor unions; the virtuous nature of technological progress would itself ensure quality jobs and dignity for workers. Plentiful consumer credit would replace the family wage and health-care benefits. Blue-collar America would suffer collateral damage, but too much was at stake; it would be a necessary sacrifice. And of course we’d be gentle; we were Democrats and nerds, after all.

Big Tech was hardly the sole disruptor, but the New Democrats fell for, and amplified, Silicon Valley’s specific flavor of empty promises wrapped in technobabble. “Delivering the ____ of the future,” they said. We got e-this and i-that and smart everything else. It had a wholesome ring and implied that Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan were finally in charge. The progressive, sciency veneer gave cover to other mega-rackets with less compelling legends, enabling them to fleece their workers and consumers too. Soon everyone was delivering the ____ of the future.

The Democratic Party divorced its industrial, unionized base and married its Silicon Valley mistress. It had once believed in collective bargaining. It had once believed that workers were an essential part of a healthy economy and worthy of respect. There was a time when a US president, like Harry Truman, might entertain a labor activist, like Walter Reuther, amiably in the Oval Office. But the Party had fallen hard for its tech darlings and began to dream of a meritocracy based on steadily-increasing knowledge, intelligence, and creativity that would lift us all toward self-realization as we bathed in the restorative glow of our screens. In other words, Democrats put their faith in social vaporware. Old-Economy workers would be “rehabilitated,” language implying that they might be more intellectually challenged than unlucky. “Euthanized” would be a more honest word. The former lower-middle and working classes would listen to two decades of meritocratic cant while their standards of living would fall steadily with no ground floor in sight. They were never a priority.

Promises, Promises

The candidate Barack Obama spoke to blue-collar America. He campaigned on change that would rejuvenate careers and restore dignity. Working Americans in the swing states doubted that Hillary Clinton even knew they existed. They saw Obama as a last hope and supported him enthusiastically in the 2008 primaries and later in the general election, but he soon proved to be a disappointment. He, too, fell in love with Silicon Valley and Wall Street and neglected the people who needed him most. And they punished him: he won fewer states in 2012 than he had in 2008. People like the alternate me felt cheated by a guy who rocked a Brooks Brothers suit and talked a great game, then gave the Tech and Finance sectors everything they wanted and more. Educated people from the best schools trusted Big Tech outfits because educated people from the best schools ran them. Elites imagine each other to be virtuous because they imagine themselves that way.

Wise and benevolent, surely; courtesy of Guillaume Paumier

Technology giants were understood not as hardy sprouts but would be treated instead with princess-and-the-pea levels of delicacy, thanks to a superstitious fear that it might all be brought to grief by, say, forcing companies with hundreds of billions in share value to tolerate an employees’ union, offer a minimum wage adequate for a decent life, or pay tax proportional to their reliance on public goods.

No one bears greater responsibility for the lack of empathy toward Old-Economy workers that led to Donald Trump’s victory than big-name Tech darlings and the New Democrats who coddled them, then openly ridiculed their own voter base: the people Hillary foolishly nicknamed “Deplorables;” that is, the millions of disappointed Obama voters who would happily have voted blue if they’d had confidence that the party would respect them, welcome them, and acknowledge their needs. But the New Economy is a gated community, shut firmly to them, whose most strenuous boosters have been the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations. Old-school, working-class Democrats are unwelcome in the party they built. No one wants them tracking mud through the salon.

Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the swing states the same way Barack Obama had: by characterizing her as disdainful toward blue-collar Americans. It was a potent message among those who once had seen decent wages in return for honest work, lately reduced to Walmart greeters and Uber drivers. Humiliated by a labor market in which they had nothing to trade, the former working class understood that they also had nothing to lose. Liberal democracy and its supporting institutions shed their veneer of sanctity when dead-end employees can aspire only to dead-end management gigs. Call them “associates” and “technicians” all you want; they know who they’ve become and what others think of them. They are why Trump won in the swing states; he was propelled to victory by disillusioned Obama voters. They gleefully chanted “lock her up” not because they thought Hillary was an actual criminal, but because they knew what her election would bring them: four or eight more years of economic and social stagnation to top off the twenty they’d already been through.

Our Fiasco

They elected Donald once and they will try to again. He is scornful and vicious. He despises openly. He snarls and barks. He will make a pig’s breakfast of everything he touches, but here’s the thing everyone misses: educated elites will feel the hardship he causes more acutely than the millions of workers who have already adapted to pittance wages, dead-end careers, and chronic disrespect. They’ve endured two decades of it; they can cope. They’re betting that liberal snowflakes like me can’t.

Trump will not be defeated by educating voters, by exposing his many foibles and inadequacies. Highlighting what’s wrong with him is futile; his supporters didn’t elect him because they mistook him for a competent administrator or a decent man. They’re angry, not stupid. Trump is an agent of disruption — indeed, of revenge. Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic has positioned him as a tragic force-multiplier on a scale that few could have predicted, and the result is verging on catastrophic.

Still, that might not be enough to prevent his re-election. Workers now sense that economic justice – a condition in which labor and capital recognize and value each other – is permanently out of reach; the class war is over and it was an absolute rout: insatiable parasites control everything now, and even drain us gratuitously, as if exacting reparations for the money and effort they spent taming us. The economy itself, and the institutions protecting it, must be attacked, and actually crippled, to get the attention of the smug patricians in charge. Two decades of appealing to justice, proportion, and common decency have yielded nothing. I’d rather not see four more years of Donald, but I understand the impulse to use him as a cat’s paw.

Joe Biden is only moderately attractive to swing voters. He’s got longstanding ties to the financial and consumer-credit rackets, and many of his senior campaign people are former lobbyists, industry flacks, and banking alums. He’s a New Democrat at heart: too much like Hillary and too little like the Barack Obama we thought we were voting for in 2008. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders appeal to the Obama 2008 → Trump 2016 electorate, not Biden, and not the domesticated Obama of 2020 who will be campaigning for him.

I doubt that Obama can draw enough of his old swing voters back to the Democratic Party. They were his constituency once, but he let them go and now his transformation into a New Economy aristocrat is complete. He could even be a liability to Biden, who seems more down to earth than today’s Obama.

Let Them Eat Quinoa

The New Democratic Party and the flashy economic colossus controlling it are a seductive pair. We saw this as Obama spoke on 30 July 2020, eulogizing the late US Representative John Lewis. The former president and Colombia University and Harvard Law School graduate promised us that one day, “when we do finish that long journey toward freedom; when we do form a more perfect union — whether it’s years from now, or decades, or even if it takes another two centuries — John Lewis will be a founding father of that fuller, fairer, better America.” Thus did our first black president signal that he might condone two more centuries of racial and social injustice so long as the meritocracy continues to treat him and his family right.

He and other high-minded elites are thinking fine thoughts and beaming positive energy to ordinary Americans from the metaphorical gated community swaddling the rich, progressive class. No uniformed weasel will dare kneel on any of their necks, we can be certain. There will be no eviction notices, no local food pantries, no paltry unemployment checks for them. These people have no clue what’s going on in the workaday neighborhoods of American cities and in our towns and rural communities, and they’ll be pleased to keep it that way.

Courtesy of the Executive Office of the President

Why should the victims of the New Economy not despise the system, and the people tending it, so intensely that they would vote Republican again? Why would they not hope that Donald will cause so much damage that America will be forced to make a fresh start? For them, stability equals stagnation while chaos might bring opportunities.

Elections are decided in the swing states. We know how Massachusetts and Mississippi will vote. The battle will take place in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virgina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Colorado, and it will be decided by Obama-Trump voters. They haven’t forgotten that, during two decades’ time, Democrats exported their jobs and rewarded them with gigs. The question is, will their resentment overcome their reluctance? They might fear Donald’s destructive potential, but they’ll be inclined to vote for someone who has been wrecking the political and economic system that cut them down from working class to working poor with no hope of escape. Donald has a solid chance of winning.

For Democrats, the only path forward is behind: the Party must welcome, and actually represent, employees whose lives and labor and services are valued as essential contributions to society. The former working class won’t be satisfied until they see Bill and Hillary, Barack and Joe enact an auto-da-fé through the streets of Washington accompanied by a dreary huddle of bankers, VCs, bond traders, and Tech CEOs in quest of a genuine catharsis in which the pain of their guilt and self loathing swells and burns and finally grows so unbearable that they literally curse themselves and beg to be forgiven.

If candidates Biden and Harris, and the wider Democratic Party, fail to recognize and renounce the worst elements of the high-tech, financialized New Economy they’re in bondage to, and neglect to reach out to Obama-Trump swing voters with genuine understanding, compassion, and respect — not to mention actual, regulatory solutions — Donald might well be elected again, exactly as he was in 2016: by swing-state Democrats who have had enough.

Las Vegas is expected to become one of the focal points of the eviction crisis as nearly a quarter-million people could be removed from their homes in the coming weeks, reported AP News. 

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports a perfect storm of factors in Clark County including high unemployment, a high percentage of renters, collapsed travel and tourism industry, expiration of the state’s eviction mortarium, and the end of federal unemployment benefits could result in an eviction wave beginning as early as next month. 

Las Vegas research group Guinn Center and the COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project in Denver estimates about 250,000 people in Clark County, or approximately 10% of the population, are at risk of eviction in September. 

Nancy Brune, Guinn Center executive director, called the situation “a bad confluence of events.” 

Brune said the virus-induced downturn had severely damaged Las Vegas as fewer people are coming to gamble at casinos. Brune said 47% of households in the county are renters, of the renters, about 38% are currently unemployed. 

The bust cycle of Las Vegas could linger for a couple of years as the city must shrink to survive. 

Las Vegas economic analyst Jeremy Aguero recently warned, an economic recovery in the town could take upward of three years. 

“Our economy is in recession,” Aguero said, warning that the velocity of job loss today was much higher than the economic crash a decade ago.

We noted, in late April, certain casinos were transformed into food banks, with thousands of residents lined up outside. 

As for the rest of the country, at least 40 million people are at risk of eviction, according to Aspen Institute think tank. President Trump signed an executive order a week ago to stop evictions, though that doesn’t appear to solve the looming crisis among renters at risk of losing their homes.

Senior editor, Ash Bennington, hosts Tony Greer, editor of The Morning Navigator Newsletter, to discuss the S&P 500 breaking record highs and the wild inflation trade. Tony considers where inflation is cropping up and how dollar weakness is connected to a dovish Fed. He also talks about the biggest market movers—bitcoin, FANG stocks, precious metals, and miners—and where the market may be headed should low interest rates persist. Ash and Tony explore what is happening in the housing market and what is influencing its activity. They top off their conversation by looking at the risks of momentum strategies to novice investors, ESG strategies catching fire, and Tony’s approach to position sizing. In the intro, Peter Cooper discusses the kick-off of the Democratic National Convention and the latest on CalPERS.

Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics.com,

The 2020 election could be the biggest gamble in the history of the United States, starting with the huge consequences at stake but made even more uncertain because of two huge question marks at the front and back ends of the voting itself.

Think of this election as a giant roulette wheel, except instead of red or black, you are betting on red or blue – Republican or Democrat.

Here’s how a Republican sees that gamble:

• If the spinning ball falls into a red slot, you get four more years of Donald Trump appointing conservative judges, empowering minorities through a strong economy, negotiating peace in the Middle East and fighting back against unconstitutional abuse of power represented by James Comey, John Brennan and James Clapper. 

• If the election result comes up blue, you get four years of President Kamala Harris – oops, I mean Slow Joe Biden – grabbing power back for the entrenched elites while at the same time weakening our economy, opening the door to illegal immigrants, raising taxes to bail out failed cities and states, and encouraging lawlessness by attacking the police.

Democrats, of course, would turn that equation on its head – worrying about four years of unregulated tweeting from Putin-puppet Trump and imagining a new era of hope and prosperity under the Biden-Harris ticket.

Either way, only a fool would call the winning color just when the wheel is set in motion, yet the polls and pundits have settled on Democrat blue as the prohibitive favorite, even before the two parties’ virtual conventions have been held. How can that be? We haven’t had a single debate yet, and thanks to COVID-19, we haven’t even seen any real campaigning for votes. When President Trump held a test rally in Oklahoma, he was roundly criticized for campaigning during the pandemic, and then mocked for not filling the arena thanks to — yep — the selfsame pandemic.

So if the major media and the Democrats are so certain that Trump is going to lose, what do they know that you don’t? It can’t just be the polls because, as everyone knows, the polls showed candidate Trump losing badly to Hillary Clinton consistently during the 2016 campaign. Whether it’s because of bias in the polls themselves or simply because of “shy” Trump voters rejecting participation in them or actively lying to confound the results, something causes Trump to underperform in these surveys.

I’m betting that Democrats are banking on two election provisions – one long-term and one specific to 2020 – that will skew the results toward Biden.

The long-term change in voting habits that could benefit Democrats is early voting. Let’s face it: Donald Trump is counting on winning the side-by-side comparison with Joe Biden. There will not be any better opportunity to highlight differences between the candidates than the three presidential debates, yet at least 16 states will allow early voting before the first debate, on Sept. 29, takes place. That means millions of votes could be locked in five weeks before Election Day, and before Joe “Big Gaffe” Biden gets to lose his train of thought, repeatedly, on a national stage.

Whether you agree with President Trump that the resulting election will be “rigged” or not, you still have to question whether there is something fundamentally wrong with encouraging people to vote before they have a chance to hear from the candidates — or from the Fourth Estate, if the press would ever do its job and fairly vet the candidates on both sides of the aisle.

Maybe Joe Biden won’t implode in the debates, maybe it will be President Trump who gets confused and starts to call God “the thing” the way Biden did back in March. But whoever starts to act like he has lost his crackers, the voters ought to be able to know it before they send in their ballots.

Of course, Democrats and their media allies have been encouraging early voting for decades, presumably on the assumption that uninformed voters will likely be safe votes for Democrats. But this year it’s more important than ever because if voters wait till Nov. 3 to cast their ballot, they will have had way too many chances to figure out that Biden is running on empty.

However, just in case even those early voters are informed enough to know that Biden wants to fundamentally transform America into a great big version of anarchist Portland or violent Chicago, the Democrats have an insurance policy.

This is where things get interesting. All-mail voting goes hand-in-hand with early voting since the ballots go out early and can be sent back early, thus contributing to the problem of voting prior to campaigning. But there is a more nefarious component to universal mail-in ballots, which President Trump has vigorously condemned.

Unlike absentee ballots or early voting, which require active participation by the voter, universal mail-in voting means that every registered voter will be sent a ballot whether they want one or not – heck, even whether they are alive or not.

Democrats argue that nothing can go wrong, but these are the same people who want to give illegal immigrants free health care and consider people throwing Molotov cocktails into federal courthouses “peaceful protesters.”

Fact of the matter is that cheating on mail ballots is child’s play. Here, off the top of my head, are four ways to monkey with the vote:


1) A hard-core Democrat union-rep mailman is collecting mail from households in a neighborhood that skews Republican. He dutifully collects the ballots left for him, but then dumps them in the trash or (smarter) burns them in his fire pit later that night. 
What is the protection against this happening? Or any of the remaining scenarios below?

2) A hard-core Democrat nurse’s aide making 10 bucks an hour decides to monkey-wrench the system that she thinks is exploiting her. When she collects the ballots from 120 residents in the nursing home where she works, she volunteers to drop them at the post office “to make sure they are secure,” but then heads home and buries them in the backyard.


3) A pizza delivery guy enters an apartment building with a large pepperoni and leaves with a carton of blank ballots that were left in the lobby for pickup by the residents. The pizza guy happens to be a member of antifa and he has no problem filling out all the ballots against President Trump and the Republicans. Even if the fraud is discovered, it is highly unlikely that all the ballots will be disqualified.


4) A Democratic campaign aide who is working to “get out the vote” in a neighborhood with a high proportion of older people knocks on doors and offers to help voters mark their ballots. Not a citizen? No problem. That’s been waived. Not sure who to vote for? How about that nice Democrat! And if you do happen to vote Republican, no problem — I will deliver it for you … right to the Dumpster!


You can think of more on your own. It’s not that hard.

But perhaps even more worrisome is the possibility that votes will not be counted on election night. Some states are allowing ballots to come in by mail for days after the official election. In some cases, the ballots need to be postmarked by Election Day, but in other cases the ballots will be sent out with prepaid postage, meaning there will be no postmark and no way to know if the ballots were mailed before or after the deadline.

Suppose the results on election night are inconclusive. Biden and Trump are both short of the majority of electoral votes needed to win, and close races are reported in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Minnesota, North Carolina and Michigan. Many ballots are uncounted, and it looks like the vote could drag on for weeks. Colorado and Nevada have universal mail ballots, so if either candidate needs those electoral votes for the win, they will target the states with lawyers, lawsuits, and protesters.

Imagine the chaos when peaceful protests turn into riots, and then boxes of uncounted ballots are mysteriously discovered in a county courthouse in Las Vegas. Imagine what happens when those ballots favor Joe Biden by a margin of three to one, giving him just enough votes to win Nevada’s six electoral votes and assure him of victory. Maybe for once Republicans would take to the streets and demand justice, or maybe not. Maybe they would just let Las Vegas decide what has been called the most important election in U.S. history with a coin toss.

Now, that would be a storybook ending to our tale, wouldn’t it? The biggest gamble in election history gets settled in the gambling capital of the United States. You pays your money and you takes your chance.

The battle for the future of ride-sharing businesses in the US will hinge this week on a critical decision from a California Judge regarding whether Uber and Lyft will be forced to comply with a restrictive new law in the state of California called AB5, a bill that is disrupting the livelihoods of some of America’s most vulnerable workers in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic.

AB 5, better known as California’s anti-freelancer law, as it’s written to establish numerous requirements that restrict companies’ ability to hire and compensate independent contractors. Uber and Lyft’s entire business model is built on the principle that its drivers are merely “freelancers”, who have no accountability to the company (other than complying with the ToS), and vice-versa: They can choose to work whenever they want.

However, critics on the left led by AOC and her fellow “Squad”-mates have singled out Uber and Lyft for depriving their workers of adequate and livable wages, and for demolishing industries like NYC’s yellow cabs, driving many drivers to suicide as the value of NYC’s taxi cab medallions plummeted.

With Uber & Lyft having appealed a California judge’s ruling that the two companies must comply with the new law, which would mean switching all of their drivers in California into full-time employees, a difficult process in the best of times, but an improbable ask during the middle of a recession. The economics, Lyft & Uber have argued, just wouldn’t make sense, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has told the press that should the appeal be denied, Uber will likely need to shut down its service in the state, at least for a short time.

As the countdown to the decision continues, reporters and analysts are trying to game out what Uber and Lyft might do if the decision goes against them, as well as how the two companies might react other scenarios, since AB 5 likely isn’t going away any time soon.

The NYT reported Tuesday morning that one plan under discussion at Uber and Lyft would be to shift their operations to a franchise model, where they provide the software, and independent entrepreneurs provide the cars and the dispatch. It would effectively mark a return to black-cab fleets of old, as the NYT pointed out.

We could call it ‘the McRideshare’.

One option that both companies are seriously discussing is licensing their brands to operators of vehicle fleets in California, according to three people with knowledge of the plans. The change would resemble an independently operated franchise, allowing Uber and Lyft to keep an arms-length association with drivers so that the companies would not need to employ them and pay their benefits.

The idea would effectively be a return to the days of how groups of black cars were run. Lyft has presented the plan to its board of directors, one person said. Uber, which already works with fleet operators in Germany and Spain, is also familiar with the business model.

The paper added that some of the scenarios planned out during Uber’s corporate strategy sessions were given code-names from the “Super Mario Bros” video game franchise.

At Uber, many of the proposed ideas were code-named with the names of characters from the Mario Bros. video game, like Luigi, the people said. The Washington Post reported earlier on Project Luigi, which included the changes to Uber’s app that give drivers more control over fares.

Another option that policy teams at both of the companies floated was the franchise-like model, the people with knowledge of the plans said.

Under the proposal, Uber and Lyft would invite other businesses to establish ride-hailing fleets using their platforms. That could bolster the companies’ claims that they were simply tech companies that built sophisticated dispatch services and that providing transportation was outside their core business, protecting them from A.B. 5’s requirements.

At Uber, the effort drew inspiration from the company’s operations in Germany and Spain, where transportation rules have already forced it to work with fleets, Mr. Kallman said.

Lyft reportedly hashed out a different franchising plan that was based on the “FedEx” model.

Lyft based its plan on FedEx, which franchises some of its delivery routes to local operators, current and former employees said.

Uber and Lyft employees said the companies did not collaborate or share information about their plans with each other.

A franchise-like business can be challenging. Working with a fleet operator could increase costs because it introduces a third party who needs to be paid, potentially forcing Uber and Lyft to raise fares or reduce their service fees, current and former employees said. The companies would also likely have to surrender some control over driver behavior, leaving them more vulnerable to reputational damage if a driver harassed a passenger or a car was dirty.

But whatever model they choose, there will be obstacles. For instance, since Uber and Lyft have already decimated the black car industry, there aren’t really any dispatchers left to absorb all this new business.

Another hurdle is that few fleet operators in California are large enough to absorb Uber’s and Lyft’s business, partly because Uber and Lyft previously disrupted taxis, black cars and similar operations.

If it goes through, we might see another California gold rush – except for taxi cab drivers and dispatchers (because somebody needs to sit in the office and drink coffee all day).

Of course, even if Uber and Lyft do lose on Friday, they will get another shot in November when California voters will be asked to classify ride-share drivers as independent contractors permanently. The measure, called Prop 22, was also helped by DoorDash and is of major consequence to the growing “sharing economy”.

Authored by Jake Johnson via CommonDreams.org,

New research published Monday by the Institute for Policy Studies shows that the dozen richest American billionaires now collectively own more than $1 trillion in wealth, a finding one analyst described as “a disturbing milestone in the U.S. history of concentrated wealth and power.”

According to IPS, a progressive think tank, the 12 top U.S. billionaires have seen their combined wealth soar by 40%—or $283 billion—since the coronavirus began spreading rapidly across the U.S. in mid-March, sparking widespread economic shutdowns and mass job loss.

“During the first stage of the pandemic, between January 1 and March 18, the collective wealth of the Oligarchic Dozen declined by $96 billion,” wrote IPS researchers Chuck Collins and Omar Ocampo. “But their wealth quickly rebounded and surpassed their September 2019 Forbes 400 wealth level. The only exception is Warren Buffett, who is still $2 billion below his September 2019 wealth, but is currently worth $80 billion.”

Last Thursday, the billionaires’ combined wealth reached $1.015 trillion—the first time in U.S. history that the collective net worth of the top 12 American billionaires has topped the trillion-dollar mark. According to IPS, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has seen his wealth jump by $48.5 billion since mid-March, making him the “biggest pandemic profiteer” of the group.

“This is simply too much economic and political power in the hands of twelve people,” Collins, director of IPS’ Program on Inequality and the Common Good, said in a statement.

The dozen wealthiest U.S. billionaires and their respective net worth as of August 13 are listed below:

• Jeff Bezos—$189.5 billion
• Bill Gates—$114.1 billion
• Mark Zuckerberg—$95.5 billion
• Warren Buffett—$80.6 billion
• Elon Musk—$73.1 billion
• Steve Ballmer—$71.5 billion
• Larry Ellison—$70.9 billion
• Larry Page—$67.4 billion
• Sergey Brin—$65.6 billion
• Alice Walton—$62.6 billion
• Jim Walton—$62.3 billion
• Rob Walton—$62.03 billion

“The total wealth of the Oligarchic Dozen is greater than the GDP of Belgium and Austria combined,” said Ocampo. “Meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans are unemployed or living paycheck to paycheck, and 170,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the United States.”

Chrystia Freeland isn’t quite a household name in the US, although her profile expanded substantially after leading trade talks with both the EU and the US and Mexico. But that could soon change as the avowed Russophobe has just been sworn in as Canada’s Finance Minister in PM Justin Trudeau’s latest cabinet reshuffle.

Freeland, a former Rhodes Scholar who previously handled Canada’s Foreign Policy portfolio as Trudeau’s Foreign Minister (and trade minister, among other positions, as well as being an MP), has become the first woman to hold the title of Finance Minister in Canada; she is also a deputy prime minister.

Interestingly enough, Canada’s Globe & Mail, a Liberal-leaning national broadsheet and one of Canada’s most popular newspapers, made no mention of the scandal-plagued departure of Bill Morneau, the Liberal Party politician who resigned today amid a scandal over his failure to repay a charity for associated travel costs (you can read more about that at the BBC).

But by elevating Freeland once again, Trudeau is sending a sign to Russia, and to the broader foreign policy establishment, that as President Trump tries to dismantle the national security and foreign policy “consensus” in the US, his Canadian colleague is doubling down on it.

Ironically, Trudeau is now preparing to try and “prorogue” Canada’s parliament, though the context is slightly different from when Boris Johnson prorogued the British Parliament, effectively shutting it down, as it will effectively act as a “reset” for his agenda following a string of scandals that have roiled Canada’s Liberal Party.

For those who haven’t followed our coverage of Freeland’s rise in Canadian politics, Matthew Ehret once said that “Freeland has become a bit of a living parody of everything wrong with the detached technocratic neo-liberal order which has driven the world through 50 years of post-industrial decay.”

Here’s more from that post.

Freeland Promotes the New Global Elite

Freeland has made it clear that she understands well that there is a fundamental difference in cultural identities of the “new rich” relative to the older oligarchic families which she serves. In the 2011 Rise of the New Global Elite, she describes it as follows: “To grasp the difference between today’s plutocrats and the hereditary elite, who “grow rich in their sleep” one need merely glance at the events that now fill high-end social calendars.”

Freeland then breaks down the categories of “new plutocrats” into two subcategories: the good, technocratic friendly plutocrats who are ideologically compatible with the New World Order of depopulation, such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, George Soros, et al and the “bad” plutocrats who tend not to conform to the British Empire’s program of global governance and depopulation under the green agenda.

In Freeland’s world “good oligarchs” are those who adhere to this agenda, while “bad oligarchs” are those who do not. Trump is a terrible Plutocrat, and – Viktor Yanukovych was a good plutocrat until he decided to not sacrifice Ukraine on the altar of the collapsing European Union and chose to throw Ukraine’s destiny into the Eurasian Economic Union in October 2013.

We imagine Bill Gates and George Soros will be thrilled.

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

It’s undeniable that we’re heading into an economic crisis, but how bad are things really? Pundits are making comparisons to the Great Depression based on unemployment numbers, looming evictions, and unprecedented lines at food banks. But does our situation actually compare to the worst economic downturn in the industrialized world?

This video analysis by Brian Duff compares our current-day crisis and the one that began in 1929 and the similarities are pretty alarming. Also, this is a new YouTube channel I strongly recommend. It’s going to have some incredible information – trust me when I tell you that you’re going to want to subscribe and give him a “like.”

(Don’t forget to subscribe to this channel. You won’t regret it.)

The biggest difference I see between these two eras – and this is the thing that will be our downfall – is that we are now a nation of consumers instead of producers.

Back in the 1920s and 1930s, people had the skills required to do things like producing food, preserving their harvests, and building structures, to name a few. In our current time, skills like this are few and far between outside the preparedness and homesteading world.

This lack of skills will carry over into a much more dependent populace in our current day and age. Our government will not be able to continue providing for people as this crisis snowballs. We’ve already seen widespread shortages that began as the pandemic began to become a reality here, and those really haven’t resolved themselves. Essentials from China have remained limited, as predicted.

I think we can all imagine what will happen once the access to food, resources, shelter, and money becomes even more limited.

Oil prices ended the day largely unch, after a dump’n’pump early on along with all other assets, as investors weighed expectations for shrinking U.S. stockpiles against output hikes from the OPEC+ alliance this month.

“The market is being supported by the expectations for a draw,” said Andrew Lebow, senior partner at Commodity Research Group. Providing “a big help for U.S. markets, the deluge of Saudi crude has pretty much ended, and imports are getting back to somewhat normal.”

Additionally, as Bloomberg notes, crude stockpiles in the U.S. Gulf could start to swell again if more of the area’s refiners shut plants or cut operations to adjust to weak demand, as several have announced they’re considering this fall.

API

• Crude -4.264mm (-2.85mm exp)

• Cushing -590k

• Gasoline +4.991mm

• Distillates -964k

US Crude inventories drew-down more than expected for the 4th week in a row (-4.264mm) but gasoline stocks surged by the most since April…

Source: Bloomberg

WTI slipped on the surprise gasoline build…

But remains largely stuck in a range

“Crude just can’t seem to get out of range with any degree of vigor,” said Bill O’Grady, executive vice president at Confluence Investment Management in St. Louis. Bullish factors on one end “can’t get out of way of fears that demand is just going to be lost for good.”

Authored by Michael Snyder via End of The American Dream blog,

Every summer is hot, and every summer there are heatwaves, but what we are witnessing in 2020 is rewriting all of the rules.  It has been blistering hot across the Southwest, and record after record is being broken.  In a year when we have had a seemingly endless series of things go wrong, we definitely didn’t need a historic heatwave to hit us, and it is causing all sorts of problems.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we will be getting any relief for at least a few more days, because it is being reported that record-setting heat is “expected to last throughout the week”…

As many as 52 million people remain under heat alerts in the West on Monday, where some could see temperatures between 110 and 130 degrees. The heat is expected to last throughout the week, possibly setting more than 100 new daily record highs.

A high temperature of 100 degrees is really hot, a high temperature of 110 degrees is dangerously hot, a high temperature of 120 degrees is catastrophically hot, and a high temperature of 130 degrees is not supposed to happen.

But it just did.

On Sunday, the high temperature in Death Valley reached 130 degrees…

A temperature of 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 degrees Celsius) recorded in California’s Death Valley on Sunday by the US National Weather Service could be the hottest ever measured with modern instruments, officials say.

The reading was registered at 3:41 pm at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center in the Death Valley national park by an automated observation system — an electronic thermometer encased inside a box in the shade.

Prior to Sunday, modern instruments had never measured a temperature that high anywhere in the world.

The old all-time global record of 134 degrees has stood since 1913, but the validity of that old record has been heavily disputed…

In 1913, a weather station half an hour’s walk away recorded what officially remains the world record of 134 degrees Fahrenheit (56.7 degrees Celsius).

But its validity has been disputed for a number of reasons: regional weather stations at the time didn’t report an exceptional heatwave, and there were questions around the researcher’s competence.

In any event, everyone can agree that what happened on Sunday was truly a historic event, and it definitely wasn’t an isolated incident.

Just one day before, we witnessed a new daily record high temperature in Sacramento…

Downtown Sacramento set a new record-high temperature of 111 degrees on Saturday, during what is the biggest heatwave of the year so far in the area.

And that came on the heels of Palm Springs absolutely smashing a daily record on Friday…

Palm Springs shattered the previous record of 117° for today’s date by recording 120° this afternoon! Thermal set a record for the ‘highest minimum’ for the days date with a low temperature of just 92° this morning.

Needless to say, all of this heat is putting an enormous amount of strain on California’s power system as people endlessly stay indoors and try to cool off.  In fact, things have gotten so bad that authorities just announced “the first rolling blackouts in the state since 2001”…

As California struggles to rebound from the coronavirus pandemic, wilting heat and wildfires, it’s facing another dangerous crisis: blackouts.

As temperatures broke records across the state, California energy officials announced the first rolling blackouts in the state since 2001 and warned that the state was bracing for what could be the largest power outage it has ever seen, likely on Monday.

Do you remember those crazy days back in 2001?

It seems like it was just yesterday that the Enron scandal erupted, but it really was almost 20 years ago.

Where has the time gone?

Officials are hoping that the rolling blackouts in California will be limited to this week, but they aren’t making any promises.

Meanwhile, record high temperatures are also happening in Nevada.  Las Vegas has been absolutely baking, and new record highs were being anticipated for both Monday and Tuesday…

It’ll be record-hot on Monday and Tuesday in Las Vegas, according to the National Weather Service, as southern Nevada bakes beneath a heat wave that tied a high-temperature mark on Sunday.

The expected high Monday was 114 degrees (45.56 Celsius) at McCarran International Airport, well above the current record temperature of 111 degrees set Aug. 17, 1939, meteorologist Dan Berc said.

And over in Phoenix, there have already been eight days this year with a high temperature of at least 115 degrees, and that breaks the old record that was set in 1974…

According to the National Weather Service in Phoenix, Phoenix reached 115°F during the afternoon hours of August 17, breaking a record set in 2013.

On August 14, Phoenix tied a record for the date with a high of 117 degrees (47 Celsius). Friday was the eighth day in 2020 with a high of at least 115 degrees (46 Celsius), beating the old record of seven days in 1974, the National Weather Service said.

Quite a few years ago I was in Phoenix during a heatwave, and I remember absolutely scorching the bottoms of my feet when I walked along a concrete path without any shoes on.

Dangerous heat is a constant reality this time of the year in Phoenix, but residents have learned how to live with it.

However, the record heat that we are seeing this year combined with extremely dry conditions have created an ideal environment for giant dust storms, and the millions of people living in the area have been warned that some are likely in the days ahead.

Throughout the Southwest, we are starting to see alarming patterns emerge.  If you look at the latest U.S. Drought Monitor map, you will notice that nearly the entire Southwest is already in some stage of drought right now.  In the 1930s, very high temperatures and exceedingly dry conditions for months on end combined to create “the Dust Bowl”, and many are concerned that something similar may now be starting to happen.

Even if you are not yet convinced that a new “Dust Bowl” is coming, everyone should be able to agree that what we are witnessing in the Southwest right now is very, very unusual.

In so many ways, our world seems to be going completely nuts right now, and many believe that this is just the beginning.

The good news is that September is coming, and that means that the weather in the Southwest should begin to cool off a bit.

But throughout this year it has just been one crisis after another, and we shall see what else 2020 has in store for us in the months ahead.