Category: zerohedge

The years-long war for post-Gaddafi Libya now threatens to spill over into the Mediterranean as Turkey and Greece line up on either side of the conflict. Each side is now threatening the others’ allied ships in southern waters after a controversial maritime deal expanded Turkish claims off Libya’s coast.

On Thursday Benghazi-based General Kalifa Haftar declared his Libyan National Army has begun its “final decisive battle” to wrest control of the capital of Tripoli from the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA). 

“Zero hour has come for the broad and total assault expected by every free and honest Libyan,” Haftar said in a televised address, reports Al Jazeera. “Today, we announce the decisive battle and the advancement towards the heart of the capital to set it free… advance now our heroes.” Beginning eight months ago Haftar launched a siege of Tripoli, which has been stalled in recent months.

Turkey has been the closest military supporter to Tripoli’s GNA, even recently signing a controversial maritime agreement, after providing heavy weaponry to repel Haftar’s assault. Last summer the LNA even attacked Turkish naval ships, in what’s an ongoing declared war with any Turkish vessel or aircraft. This “proxy war” element is now threatening to involve Greece. 

Days ago Erdogan confirmed his country signed a bilateral memorandum, finalized on Nov. 27, which would allow Turkish forces to enter Libyan territory or waters at the request of the GNA authorities.

“With this new agreement between Turkey and Libya, we can hold joint exploration operations in these exclusive economic zones that we determined,” Erdogan said. The agreement established a continental shelf and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) boundary line of 18.6 nautical miles between the two countries.

It’s being criticized as yet another attempt to unilaterally expand Turkish oil and gas exploration and drilling rights in the eastern Mediterranean at the expense of Cyprus, Greece, Israel, and Turkey. Cyprus and Greece in particular have charged Turkey with violation of their sovereign EEZs and with mounting illegal acts of aggression, a charge the EU has largely stood behind. 

But now the ongoing Turkey-Greece-Cyprus energy exploration conflict has entered the Libyan arena, as the commander of Haftar’s LNA naval forces, Major General Faraj Mahdawi, has revealed an agreement with Greece that aims to block the sea lane linking Crete and the eastern sea borders of Libya to Turkish ships.

Beirut-based Al-Masdar News reports the following statements, citing Arabic media:

Major-General Faraj al-Mahdawi said in a statement to Al-Arabiya that “there is great coordination between Greece and Libya in order to monitor the movement of Turkish ships for oil or access to the western Libyan ports to deliver weapons to the militias, especially the Misurata port.”

Turkish and Greek media are reporting that the pro-Haftar navy chief has also threatened to “sink any Turkish research vessels” that arrive off Libya’s coast, in reference to oil and gas exploration. 

After signing deals with its own puppet state in occupied northern Cyprus and with the pseudo-government in Libya’s Tripoli, Turkey declares that it owns half of the eastern Mediterranean. https://t.co/Yvmpi7PA9t pic.twitter.com/N41ERkTTt3

— Aron Lund (@aronlund) December 3, 2019

“I have an order… as soon as the Turkish research vessels arrive, I will have a solution. I will sink them myself. I have this order from Haftar,” Gen. Mahdawi is reported to have said.

“I will sink your ships myself,” the pro-Haftar commander said.

Given Erdogan has recently made support for Tripoli a priority, and given it appears Greece stands ready to block Turkish vessels from entering sea lanes near Crete — not to mention Haftar’s standing order to sink any Turkish vessels that enter near Libya — it appears the next round of an internationalized Libya war is ready to explode in the southern Mediterranean. 

Authored by Robert Bridge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Once again, Russia is suffering from the tainted judgment of non-transparent Western institutions, this time from the World Anti-Doping Agency, which just banned Russia from all international sporting events. The reason for the arbitrary judgment should surprise no one.

The globalists certainly never banked on Russia rising so fast and furious from the ruins of the Soviet Union to the point where it is now in the position to deter Western intrigues around the world. This was witnessed first and foremost in the miraculously recovering hot-spot of Syria – which, unlike the tragic fate that awaited doomed countries like Ukraine, Iraq and Libya – managed at the 11th hour to escape the jaws of NATO’s regime-change juggernaut. Syria’s salvation was due overwhelmingly to Russian military and diplomatic intervention.

Moscow’s efforts, which could best be described as humanitarian in nature, did not come without a price tag for Russia on the propaganda front. From being wrongly accused of meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections, to being unjustly blamed by a Dutch-led probe for the downing of Flight MH17, it is more than apparent that Russia is under full-scale fake news attack.

❌ No flag
❌ No anthem

Here’s what the WADA ban means for Russia ⬇️https://t.co/HYqkT7nauG

— RT Sport (@RTSportNews) December 9, 2019

This week proved no exception as the West’s anti-Russia machine shifted into overdrive as the World Anti-Doping Agency slapped Russia with a ban from all international sporting events – including the 2020 Tokyo Games and the 2022 World Cup – for four years. The reason is exactly the same as it was ahead of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games: the alleged tampering in Moscow of athletes’ laboratory drug-test results. Russia has vehemently denied that any manipulations occurred inside of its labs, and vowed to appeal the decision.

Clearly, the motivation here is to humiliate, provoke and punish Moscow by any means available – even on the field of dreams. Any Russian athlete who wishes to challenge the verdict and participate in the upcoming Games will be required to “prove their innocence” first. If they pass that stage and are allowed to compete, they will not be permitted to don the Russian tricolors, nor will the Russian national anthem be played. Russian athletes, who will be branded as ‘Olympic Athlete from Russia,’ will have to settle for pledging allegiance to the generic Olympic flag as opposed to the Russian national flag. If ever there were a litmus test for a One World globalist government, where athletes play for some singular monolithic entity, this might just be it.

Euro 2020 LOC chief Alexey Sorokin tells RT ‘WADA ban will not affect Russian part of Euro 2020’

Says UCL final in St. Peterbsurg unlikely to be moved

Full story on RT Sport https://t.co/FRhwWBHaN9 |

— Danny Armstrong (@DannyWArmstrong) December 10, 2019

Aside from punishing Moscow for scuttling Western designs in Syria and beyond (incidentally, news of WADA’s ban came just as Vladimir Putin was sitting down in Paris for the Normandy Four summit with Angela Merkel, Volodymyr Zelensky and Emmanuel Macron in an effort to stabilize the situation in Eastern Ukraine, as well as relations between Moscow and Kiev), the Western capitals have never quite recovered from Russia’s flawless handling of the 2018 World Cup, hosted by 11 Russian cities and visited by an estimated 3 million fans from around the world.

Here was a golden opportunity for Russia to prove firsthand that the Western media has been portraying Russia in a completely misleading light for many years. And much to everyone’s apparent surprise it worked. In what amounted to a massive PR disaster for the Western world, those millions of visitors took home with them glowingly positive reviews about Russia and the Russian people, thereby flushing many years of Western anti-Russia propaganda down the proverbial toilet.

According to FIFA President Gianni Infantino:

“Everyone discovered a beautiful country, a welcoming country that is keen to show the world that everything that has been said before might not be true. A lot of preconceived ideas have been changed because people have seen the true nature of Russia.”

Infantino also went on record as calling Russia 2018 “the best World Cup ever.”

Needless to say, the Western policymakers would like nothing more than to deny Russia from receiving any further global accolades in the future.

Danny Armstrong, a Moscow-based sports commentator for RT, described the folly of attempting to ban Russia from Euro 2020 next year, where four games are already scheduled to be held in St. Petersburg.

“Would fans, organizers and commentators be banned from stating they are in Russia? We’re do you draw the line?

“I think given that this level of scrutiny isn’t generally applied to other nations and the cynical calls for heightened stringency from USADA in reaction – who has had more than its fair share of doping scandals – there’s more than a whiff of motivation to potentially eliminate a rival,” Armstrong said via email.

Just had a very good meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and representatives of Russia. Discussed many items including Trade, Iran, North Korea, INF Treaty, Nuclear Arms Control, and Election Meddling. Look forward to continuing our dialogue in the near future! pic.twitter.com/tHecH9a9ck

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2019

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who was meeting with Donald Trump in side of the Oval Office when the WADA decision was made public, couldn’t resist taking some cracks at members of Congress who predictably criticized the high-ranking Russian delegation being invited to the White House.

“If [Adam] Schiff can describe the ministerial-level contacts normal to any country and my meeting with the president in such a way, then I believe that they will soon accuse our diplomats, just as they have our athletes, of doping and call for criminal punishment,” Lavrov told reporters.

Although it is certainly a positive sign to see one of the highest ranking Kremlin officials respond to these ongoing attacks against Russia in a tongue-in-cheek manner, fully aware of the derangement syndrome that is motivating them, there can be no doubt that such actions against Russia are being viewed in Moscow as passive forms of very real aggression that cannot go unchallenged forever.

In other words, the world should be very wary of the other shoe dropping when that shoe belongs to a nuclear-armed military power whose patience must be wearing very thin.

North Korean state media reported Saturday morning that it had conducted “another crucial test” at a missile launch site at the country’s Sohae Satellite Launching Ground on Friday to beef up its nuclear deterrence against the West. 

Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said the test would support North Korea’s “reliable strategic nuclear deterrent,” though it wasn’t exactly clear what was actually tested. 

“The research successes being registered by us in defense science one after another recently will be applied to further bolstering up the reliable strategic nuclear deterrent of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” a spokesman for North Korea’s Academy of Defense Science said in a statement. 

Testing at the Sohae site is almost becoming a weekly occurrence. Last Saturday, we reported that a “very important” test occurred at the site, likely an engine test, in preparation for an upcoming launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). 

North Korea warned earlier this month that it would send Washington a “Christmas gift,” likely in the form of a new ICBM launch.

Several weeks after North Korea resumed its “dotard” insults at President Trump and their ambassador to the UN said further denuclearization talks are no longer needed, North Korea’s ambassador to the UN said last weekend, denuclearization was off the table in negotiations with the US.

North Korea has warned that it could take a radical “new path” amid stalled talks with the US.

Meetings are expected Sunday between top US envoy for North Korea and South Korean officials. 

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have jumped since November, as recent tests and a war of words have broken out between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, inciting fears that geopolitical uncertainty in the region could surge in 2020.

Authored by Martin Sieff via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The Democratic leaders in Congress really should have checked with Central Casting before picking the stars of their passion play: “The Impeachment and Destruction of Donald Trump.”

Former National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill was supposed to appear as a principled and dignified heroine. Instead, her virulent hate, ignorance and contempt for Russia were apparent to all. And she looked uncannily identical to the late Alan Rickman playing Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies.

Congressman Adam Schiff chaired the House Intelligence Committee hearing and was supposed to be the wise, fearless and incorruptible chairman. Instead, the camera’s cruel, unblinking eye revealed him as a buffoon – and a sinister one at that.

Schiff’s round bald dome was identical to Mussolini’s and his ridiculous bulging eyes are those of Christopher Lloyd’s evil cartoon villain Judge Doom in the Hollywood movie “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”

The supposedly heroic Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman of the National Security Council was even worse – Presented as an all-American Patriot, instead he resembled the thick, hulking brutal thug that Hollywood Central Casting always chooses to play endless Russian intelligence service or criminal villains in thousands of bad primetime TV shows.

Kurt Volker was almost as bad. He was the quiet cool, calm, bespectacled villain – always a CIA bureaucrat and usually played by Ronnie Cox – who wants to feed Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Steven Seagal or Bruce Willis to the villains.

And of course – the Real Hero could not appear at all. The Whistleblower’s identity is being jealously guarded – though as Senator Rand Paul has pointed out, everyone knows who he is and – far from being a Disinterested Pure Hero, he was a CIA veteran and former senior National Security Council official outspoken in his contempt for the President of the United States: In other words, yet another anonymous Deep State manipulator and apparatchik.

No doubt he will be revealed as the winner on the Fox Television Channel’s popular show, “The Masked Singer.”

Or perhaps he will reveal himself in an exclusive interview with a fawning Rachel Maddow, still masked and identified as “The Lone Ranger.”

(Is this The Whistleblower?)

Now Rand Paul does have the looks, the bearing, the moral fervor and the dramatic character to play the hero in this botched fiasco of a drama. But there is only one small problem. He is on the other side. He has forcefully publicly defended President Donald Trump.

Gravity – Albert Einstein assures us – “bends” light (A dubious assertion at best but at least Einstein, unlike Schiff and Company Looked the Part he always played – Lovable, Child-Like Jewish Genius Who Never Gets a Hair Cut) And Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) has bent the brains of movie directors Nancy Pelosi and Schiff.

Trump Derangement Syndrome: a fearful, incurable affliction more terrible and humiliating than Alzheimer’s: Better to forget who you are than remember you are a hate-crazed, foaming at the mouth, credulous idiot who will believe anything.

Like all policy wonks of their aging generation of corrupt and complacent Baby Boomers, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Schiff have salivated at the thought of inflicting a “Watergate 2” impeachment drama comeuppance on Donald Trump.

But the Villain of Watergate, Richard Nixon, was indeed an inept and more than slightly sinister creep (and lifelong liberal). He looked the part and he exuded pious bogus ineptitude on camera his entire career. (Nixon’s inspiration for how he projected himself on television was clearly Jack Webb playing Sergeant Joe Friday in the wonderfully badly acted “Dragnet” police series on US television in the 1950s.)

By contrast, Donald Trump channels John Wayne, the most popular and enduring movie star in American history:

Trump is a physically big and fearless New York construction businessman turned immensely successful popular entertainer. He, like Wayne is a natural athlete. It is a matter of public record ignored by all fearful liberal wimps that Trump really was offered a contract after college to be Major League Baseball player for the Phillies, but he turned it down to focus on his business career.

Working class American Heartland men and women over 40 instinctively loved Wayne and therefore they love Trump too. Aging American feminists like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren – and the further they are over 50, the more rabid and rage crazed and insane they become – hated Wayne and are traumatized by his resurrection as a defining national culture hero nearly four decades after his physical death echoing in the figure of Trump.

It was Trump’s genius at silent reaction shots that ridiculed 17 Republican Congress members, Senators and Governors in the 2015-16 campaign before he even began to turn his wit and video skills on Hillary Clinton – a creepy Richard Nixon clone if there was one.

Trump was crafted by Fate and his brilliant media career from The Apprentice to Worldwide Wrestling Central Casting to be the Hero of Impeachment. Making him the villain reverses the entire emotional dynamic of the drama. It is like casting James Stewart as Nixon. (At worst, Trump is classic King Kong eternally plagued by those pesky biplanes: And everybody roots for Kong)

Liberals who loved Watergate went into emotional frenzies over Nixon’s imagined humiliation at the hands of such ludicrous pompous and overpaid fools as Dan Rather of CBS.

Pelosi and her laughably misnamed “advisers” have learned nothing from all this. This week, we are seeing yet more interminable biased show-trial hearings and the even more ludicrous Jerrold Nadler has taken center stage. He looks like Frankenstein’s dwarf –servant Igor in Mel Brooks’ classic 1973 comic horror movie “Young Frankenstein.”

The bottom line on why Impeachment has failed so miserably to whip up a storm or convince anyone beyond the already committed “Trump Must Go”, babies-throwing-tantrums across Liberal America lies in the childishness and elemental incompetence of its cast and directors. Being repulsive and ridiculous human beings themselves, they have no clue how obvious it would be that they would appear that way to everyone else.

There is no doubt that a wave of automation is about to be unleashed on economies worldwide. 

In fact, the impact of automation on the labor market has become more of a political issue now than it ever has, with its impact on the labor force being cited as one of the main causes for the election of leaders like U.S. President Donald Trump and Italy’s Matteo Salvini, according to a new Bloomberg op-ed by Ferdinando Giugliano.

In the U.S., the main factor as to whether or not a worker can beat out a robot for a job seems to be his or her education. Overseas, in the EU, a lot of it is determined by how strong a workers’ employment contract is. 

Giugliano argues that it would be foolish for any government to argue against automation because it is such a large driver of economic growth. Equally, Giugliano argues that the impact of automation needs to be spread evenly. 

He calls the American model of favoring the educated “brutal”, but at least having some semblance of being meritocratic. The European model of protecting workers with contracts, he says, is unfair on younger workers that don’t have contracts. This, in turn, won’t help with the problem of inter-generational injustice that drives voters toward populist politicians, the op-ed argues. 

He also points out a study by Konstantinos Pouliakas for the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training that shows the extent of how automation is a challenge in Europe. The study found that 14% of adult workers may face a “very high risk of automation” and that the occupations most in danger are routine jobs with little demand for transferable skills or social interaction. 

Economists Maarten Goos, Alan Manning and Anna Salomons also conducted a study, looking at 16 European countries between 1993 and 2006, and finding an increase in the employment share for high-paid professional managers, as well as low-paid services workers, and a decrease in the share of manufacturing and routine office workers. 

This is a result of computers easily replacing routine tasks, the study concludes, echoing the sentiment that workers doing these jobs are the most vulnerable. 

There is little evidence that automation is polarizing wages in Europe the way that it is in the US. Economists Paolo Naticchioni, Giuseppe Ragusa and Riccardo Massari researched salaries on the continent between 1995 and 2007 and found that technology only had a “weak effect” on their distribution. They also found that education plays no role in determining wage inequality in the EU, which is not the case in the US.

The clear losers from automation in Europe can be highlighted by study of Germany by Wolfgang Dauth, an economist at the University of Wuerzburg. He found that the burden falls primarily on young workers just entering the manufacturing sectors. Newer workers are penalized because Europe’s labor market means companies have to give more stable and better paid jobs to older incumbent workers. 

Giugliano concludes that governments shouldn’t dissuade innovation: 

The example of Italy shows that not having enough automation has a pernicious effect on the labor market. Gaetano Basso, a researcher at the Bank of Italy, found that since the mid-2000s, Italians haven’t suffered wage polarization, but rather an outright degradation of the jobs market. Only the share of low-wage manual occupations has increased markedly, while high-wage jobs have dropped along with middle-income employment. The lack of automation is one cause. Italy’s economy has been marred by stagnant productivity for three decades, so it’s unsurprising that wages and job quality haven’t improved.

Instead, he concludes that governments must get better at handling the unwanted consequences of automation by promoting the right skills and education for prospective workers. 

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

Have you ever been given a gift that totally offended you? In today’s highly charged political environment, it can be so easy to “trigger” someone, and the gifts in this article could definitely “trigger” your liberal friends. So while they may be absolutely hilarious, I would definitely not give anything on this list to anyone other than a Trump supporter. Hopefully political civility will make a major comeback in America someday, but for now our nation is very deeply divided. The other day I was doing some research, and I came across a recent survey that found that politics is the number one source of stress for Americans today. And unfortunately the amount of stress that we are experiencing about politics is only going to intensify as we approach the 2020 election.

Last year I actually ran for Congress, and so I understand how stressful politics can be. I really wanted to get to Washington and make some positive changes, but a massive flood of PAC money came pouring in from outside the state for another candidate and that totally turned the tide of the campaign. In fact, the PACs spent more money on the campaign that any of the individual candidates did by a very wide margin. It was a very painful lesson, and it taught me a lot about why our political system is so deeply corrupt.

Laughter can be great medicine, and sometimes I find it helpful to laugh about what is going on in Washington right now. With that in mind, the following are 14 hilarious political gifts that you should definitely not give to your liberal friends, and each link will take you directly to Amazon via an affiliate link…

#1 Nancy Pelosi toilet paper: Pelosi has become the face of the impeachment sham that is currently unfolding in D.C., and considering how unfairly the Democrats have been treating President Trump, what conservative would not be at least a little tempted to put this toilet paper in their bathrooms?

#2 Full Set of Democrat Monopoly-Style Board Game Money: The Democratic candidates for president seem to be competing with one another to see who can promise to give the voters the most free stuff, and so this gag gift seems very appropriate for the 2020 election season. The money features the faces of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris.

#3 Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide: This book has more than 3,000 ratings on Amazon, and it has an average rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars. It is almost entirely blank, and because of that President Trump has called it “a great book for your reading enjoyment!”

#4 The Impeachment Case Against Trump: Funny Trump Political Humor Gag Gift: This is another book that is almost entirely blank because the truth is that the Democrats have no case at all.

#5 All The Reasons To Vote For Biden: Needless to say, this is another blank book, and I expect it to become a lot more popular if Biden can actually win the Democratic nomination.

#6 Clown Show Trump Haters T-Shirt: Can you imagine Pelosi, Schumer, Brennan, Clapper, Schiff, Nadler, Pressley, AOC, Waters, Biden, Sanders, Mueller, Warren, Omar, Beto, Comey and Tlaib on a single shirt? And what makes it even better is that they are all in clown masks.

#7 The Hillary Clinton Coloring Book: This is definitely not a coloring book for children. The following is what the seller says about it: Acclaimed artist Tim Foley offers colorists thirty-one black-and-white illustrations of Hillary in all her pant-suited, empowering magnificence. Foley has transposed the former first lady into a wide variety of famous paintings and photographs. From placing her face on the Statue of Liberty to transforming her into Rosie the Riveter or Uncle Sam taking on Trump, Foley masterfully incorporates Clinton into a variety of scenes that are sure to be loads of fun to fill with color. This book also features her as Amelia Earhart, Wonder Woman, Nancy Sinatra, and more! Even good ol’ Bill and Elvis make appearances!

#8 Hillary’s America: Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza got into an enormous amount of trouble for making this film, but it may have helped push Trump over the top in the last election.

#9 “Annoy Liberals – Use Facts And Logic” Coffee Mug: This mug has a great slogan, but it is probably not safe to take to work or anywhere else where you could potentially trigger liberals.

#10 “Impeach Pelosi” T-Shirt: President Trump once suggested that Nancy Pelosi should be impeached, and he is absolutely correct about that.

#11 “Hillary For Prison 2020” T-Shirt: After all this time, Hillary Clinton has still managed to stay out of prison. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if justice was finally served in 2020?

#12 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – AOC – Zero Cents Penny: This fake coin is actually a little bit larger than a real penny. And considering the fact that AOC isn’t displaying any sense at all when it comes to public policy, it would appear to be the perfect monetary denomination for her.

#13 Socialism Survival Kit: Are you ready to survive in socialist America if Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren get elected? According to the seller, this kit contains the following: Kit contains symbols to remind of the failings of socialism. Toilet paper for a failed market, adhesive bandage for failed medical care and for Government oppression, and a candle for failure of basic infrastructure like power. A reminder of the brutality, inhumanity, and oppression that socialism has brought in its first 100 years.

#14 Sweet Warm Cup Of Liberal Tears: Those on the left were crying plenty of tears in the aftermath of the 2016 election, and there will be a tsunami of tears if Trump is able to emerge victorious once again in 2020.

Obviously, any of the gifts on this list would be likely to greatly anger any of your liberal friends, and that is probably not something that you want to do.

So I have a suggestion.

If you have a liberal friend and you can’t figure out what to give, I would give that friend a copy of the U.S. Constitution.

After all, most liberals have never read it, and if they actually became acquainted with it they might just stop trampling on it.

St. John Properties in Baltimore, MD, is seeing to it that its 198 employees are going to have a great holiday season.

At the company’s holiday party this past week, it thanked its employees for the overall production of 20 million square feet of office, retail and warehouse space by offering up a $10 million bonus pool for its employees, according to MarketWatch. 

The bonus checks came to an average of about $50,000 per person and were based on the amount of years people had been with the company. “Everybody is important in this company, and everybody performs in this company,” founder and chairman Edward St. John said at the company’s holiday party last week. 

The bonuses handed out were on top of other year-end bonuses the company offered.

But St. John’s Properties looks more and more like it is the exception from the norm when it comes to holiday bonuses this year. 

According to a survey from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, fewer and fewer companies are offering performance based bonuses in recent years. 

About 10% of companies surveyed said they would give bonuses to all staff based on company performance this year. That number is down from almost 19% in 2015. 

About 24% of companies said that bonuses would be given to select workers. This is down from 37.5% in 2015.

The same survey – which polled 250 companies – shows that the share of companies awarding bonuses of $100 or less, in cash or gift cards, is increasing to 20%, from 12.5%. Other non-monetary gifts, like an extra vacation day or a gift basket (because that’ll help pay the rent) are also up, to 11% from 6.3% in 2015.

On Wall Street, employees probably aren’t hoping for a repeat of last year. The 2018 average bonus in the NY Securities Industry last year was $153,700, which was down nearly 17% from $184,400 in 2017. 

Andrew Challenger, vice president at Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said: “The decline in season’s end gifts was uneven. Based on anecdotes, bonuses in finance, real estate and construction were strong, but slipping in retail and manufacturing.”

Authored by John Vibes via The Mind Unleashed blog,

Oakland City Council President Rebecca Kaplan recently suggested a plan to house up to 1,000 people from the city’s homeless population on a cruise ship, but officials with the Port of Oakland have disputed the proposal, calling it “untenable.”

During a meeting last week, Kaplan told members of the city council that she has already been in contact with cruise ship companies about the possibility of using their vessels for emergency housing for the city’s homeless.

“Maybe we can have a way to create a thousand housing units overnight,” Kaplan said of the program, adding that her plan will come at “no or low” cost because the city would not be purchasing the boat, but simply renting it, and requiring the residents to contribute towards the rental fee based on their level of income.

It may sound counterproductive to charge homeless people for a place to stay, and perhaps it is, but even homeless shelters require a small fee of their residents, and the housing will likely be far more affordable than most apartments or hotels.

“It could be a great way to house a lot of people quickly. Cruise ships have been used for emergency housing after natural disasters and for extra housing for things like Olympics,” Kaplan told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Kaplan suggested that the ship could work similarly to the Queen Mary in Long Beach, a large old ship that is now docked in the harbor, acting as a hotel for tourists and other visitors to the area.

Many members of the council are on board with the proposal, but it would need to be approved by the Port of Oakland and they seem reluctant to allow such a cruise ship to dock in their port for extended periods of time.

Mike Zampa, a spokesman for the port told the Chronicle that Oakland’s port was designed for cargo ships, not cruise ships.

“There isn’t the infrastructure to berth a cruise ship. Safety and security issues at the federally regulated maritime facilities would make residential uses untenable. How do you hook it up to utilities? You can’t have unauthorized personnel walking back and forth through marine terminals—those are federally regulated facilities, you need a badge to get in and out. There is also a lot of big and heavy equipment rumbling over those facilities all day long,” Zampa said.

Without support from the Port of Oakland, it is very likely that this plan will not go forward. Oakland has seen a huge spike in homelessness over the past two years, with the number of people on the street rising from 1,902 to 3,210.

Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), a government agency focused on air travel, said in a monthly briefing on Thursday that it expects a drop in airline capacity and bookings to the US over the Chinese New Year, first reported by Reuters.

CAAC said the decline in outbound travel during the upcoming holiday week would be the first time in four years due to a seismic shift in tourist destinations.  

Chinese middle class, some of the richest in the world, is expected to abandon the US for Japan, Thailand, and South Korea, during the holiday week next month. 

CAAC didn’t explain the cause of the shift in tourism, but after more than a decade of rapid growth, Chinese travels to the US are falling as President Trump’s trade war deepens into the 17th month.

The resulting trend has been hugely damaging for the US tourism sector.

The US Travel Association recently warned that tourism from China might never recover as other countries will take market share.

In the last year, Chinese tourists have been flocking to Russia, Europe, Australia, and Canada, spending record amounts of money.

“If market share loss continues in future years, the United States will be losing out on one of the largest and fastest-growing source markets of global travel,” the US Travel Association warned.

In August, we reported that a slump in tourism was seen in Beverly Hills as Chinese and Saudi tourists went elsewhere.

While the Chinese might be abandoning the US tourism industry, they’re still traveling around the world in increasing numbers. Outbound travel from China rose 5.5% in 2018, as it seems the great decoupling between the US and China is not just affecting trade and technology, but now has spread into tourism. 

 

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

What in the world has happened to us? Once upon a time, America was made up of tightly-knit communities that were united by family, faith and patriotism, but now we are more isolated than ever before. Of course one of the biggest reasons for this is the fact that we are all spending countless hours staring at screens instead of interacting with real people, and this is something that I covered in a previous article. However, our fundamental beliefs are also significantly shaping how we behave. For the past couple of generations, we have de-emphasized family, faith and patriotism as a nation, and instead we have become an extremely “me-centered” society that is primarily focused on doing whatever makes ourselves happy in the moment. But this single-minded pursuit of individual happiness has resulted in much of the country being perpetually mired in loneliness, depression and/or addiction.

When you look at the numbers, they truly are startling. For example, a recent survey that was conducted by Cigna found that almost half of all Americans feel lonely…

Nearly half of Americans are lonely, according to a survey of 20,000 people across America by Cigna, which used the well-regarded UCLA Loneliness Scale to measure responses. Indeed 46% said they sometimes or always feel alone and 47% say they sometimes or always feel left out.

And other surveys have produced numbers that are even more alarming. A Harris Poll that was conducted a few years ago actually discovered that 72 percent of all Americans “experience loneliness”…

The survey of more than 2,000 Americans conducted by the Harris Poll last month on behalf of the American Osteopathic Association, showed that almost three-quarters (72 percent) of Americans experience loneliness. And for many, it’s not just a once-in-a-while occurrence — one-third said they feel lonely at least once a week.

Of course this is commonly known as “the happiest time of the year”, but for many it just magnifies their loneliness.

People see love, warmth and community modeled in television commercials and in Hallmark movies, and they assume that most people out there must be living lives like that.

Sadly, that is not true at all. What we see on our televisions are echoes of the way that America used to be, and many of us would love to see that type of culture make a roaring comeback.

But for now, America is a very, very lonely place, and this reality is reflected in a song that was just released by one of our most popular pop singers…

Mabel, the singer behind the hit “Don’t Call Me Up,” has a new track for those who struggle with loneliness during the holidays.

Titled “Loneliest Time of Year,” Mabel captured how for some people, the holidays can heighten feelings like loneliness, loss and depression. In the song, released Friday, she sings lines like, “Sorry I’m not so merry/But I feel like this yearly/Christmas time isn’t my vibe/Brings no joy into my life” and “If I’m feeling lonely/I can’t be the only one.”

Yes, millions of American families will gather during the holidays, but way too many of those gatherings are filled with bitterness, resentment, strife and discord.

In fact, another new survey has found that the average American only needs 3 hours and 54 minutes “before they start to feel sick of their families”…

The holidays are supposed to be a time to come together with family and celebrate, but a new survey finds that most Americans can barely get through an evening with their family before needing a break. A total of 2,000 Americans who usually travel to visit family during the holidays took part in the research, and 75% say they will inevitably need to get away from their relatives and indulge in some much needed “me time.”

In fact, it only takes respondents an average of three hours and 54 minutes before they start to feel sick of their families.

This isn’t how it is supposed to be.

We were created to love and to be loved. And when you remove love from the equation, people become very miserable quite rapidly.

In America today, “deaths of despair” are happening at the highest rate in all of U.S. history. The following information comes directly from the United States Congress Joint Economic Committee…

Anne Case and Angus Deaton famously chronicled a dramatic rise among middle-aged non-Hispanic whites since 1999 in “deaths of despair”—deaths by suicide, drug and alcohol poisoning, and alcoholic liver disease and cirrhosis.1 The Social Capital Project has extended Case and Deaton’s research to cover the full American population as far back as available data permit: to 1900 in some cases, and to 1959 or 1968 in others. We present here a snapshot of the long-term trends in deaths of despair. We also attach our full dataset for use in future research, including results broken down by age, sex, and race.

Mortality from deaths of despair far surpasses anything seen in America since the dawn of the 20th century. (The trend for middle-aged whites reveals a more dramatic rise but only goes back continuously to 1959.) The recent increase has primarily been driven by an unprecedented epidemic of drug overdoses, but even excluding those deaths, the combined mortality rate from suicides and alcohol-related deaths is higher than at any point in more than 100 years.

So it would appear that our very unhappy nation is rapidly becoming even unhappier.

And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what this is happening.

As a society, we decided that marriage wasn’t important. So now we have one of the lowest marriage rates and one of the highest divorce rates in the entire world.

As a society, we decided that children weren’t important. So now our birth rate has dropped below replacement level and a third of all U.S. children live in a home without a father.

As a society, we decided that patriotism wasn’t important. So now the American flag is being banned by some schools as a “divisive symbol” and most of our young people have never even read the entire U.S. Constitution.

As a society, we decided that God wasn’t important. So now just about every form of evil that you can possibly imagine is exploding in our society, and we are literally on a path that leads to national suicide.

If you feel lonely, miserable or depressed this holiday season, I would definitely encourage you to get my latest book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters”. It is filled with very practical advice that will enable you to start turning things around immediately. But even more importantly, reach out to those that you love during this holiday season.

Life is way too short to live it alone.

Society would have us believe that those that have the most money are the most “successful”. But that is not true at all. In reality, those that love the most are really the most “successful”, and so let us endeavor to be people of great love.