An independent Chinese refiner has suspended crude oil purchases from the United States and has now turned to Iran as one of its sources of crude, media reports cited an official from the refiner, Dongming Petrochemical Group, as saying.
The source said Beijing is planning to slap tariffs on US crude oil imports and replace them with West African and Middle Eastern crude, including crude from Iran, Oil Price reported. China has already said that it will not comply with US sanctions against Iran and it seems to be the only country for now in a position to do this.
US crude oil exports to China reached 400,000 barrels per day at the beginning of this month, but now Beijing is planning to impose a 25% tariff on these as part of its retaliation for Trump’s latest round of tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods. The retaliation began with tariffs on 545 US goods worth another $34 billion, but Reuters reports that oil tariffs will be announced at a later date.
Energy analysts seem to believe that these oil tariffs are more or less a certainty, and now expect a reshuffle of crude oil imports to Asia. With China turning to Iran for its crude, US oil could start flowing in greater amounts to another leading importer in the region, South Korea.
“If China retaliates with tariffs on US crude, that could improve South Korea’s terms of buying US crude … because the US would need a market to sell to,” an analyst from the Korea Energy Economic Institute said.
Meanwhile, South Korea’s Embassy in Iran this weekend rejected media reports that the country had suspended oil purchases from Iran under pressure from the United States.
The US has pressed South Korea and some other nations to cut down its purchase of Iranian oil to zero or face so-called secondary sanctions. The deadline is Nov. 4 when the 180-day grace period ends.
In May, the US announced its exit from the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, formally dubbed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and plans to reinstate harsh sanctions on the OPEC member.
The country is the third-biggest buyer of Iranian crude in Asia, buying Iranian crude at an average daily rate of almost 300,000 barrels since March this year.
As Presidents Trump and Putin are set to meet Monday in Helsinki, efforts toward winding down the proxy war in Syria will no doubt be high on the agenda.
We explained previously that the diplomatic cards for ending the war seem to have fallen into place as just days before the historic summit Netanyahu said in a stunning turnaround for Israeli policy fresh off his own visit with Putin in Moscow that “Israel does not object to President Bashar al-Assad’s regaining control over all of Syria”so long as Iranian forces are pushed back from the Israeli border, according to the New York Times.
And now according to a new bombshell report, US military commanders have conveyed to Syrian President Assad via Russian mediation that “we will pull out of al-Tanf and the North if Iran withdraws from Syria.”
Below is his dispatch on the back-channel “military to military” exchange that recently took place between US, Russian, and Syrian forces, including Assad’s response to the American offer of a potential deal.
* * *
A top decision maker in Syria has said “the US has sent a message to the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad that expresses the US establishment’s wishes. Under these wishes there is an Israeli goal compatible with Donald Trump’s objective to pull out its own forces from Syria with as little damage as possible. Trump would like to avoid the same fate that hit the US forces during Georges Bush’s era where thousands of US soldiers were killed in action”.
According to the source involved in overseeing the entire military operation for the last years of war in Syria, “President Assad was very clear in his answer to the US establishment. Syria – said Assad – is determined to liberate the entire Syrian territory regardless of the consequences. There is of course a price to be paid to obtain the liberation of north Syria which is occupied by both the US and Turkey, neither of whom were invited by the Syrian government: this price is worth it”.
The American message is clear: ”The US will leave al-Tanf crossing and abandon north-east Syria in al-Hasaka and Deirezzour as soon as possible. The only condition is for Russia and Syria to guarantee a total withdrawal of all Iranian forces from the Levant. The US is ready to leave the Kurds and let these continue their negotiation with Damascus. The US establishment will recognize Assad’s authority over Syria but Iran must leave”.
Assad responded: “Iranian forces and their allies came to Syria under an official request by the central government and will leave when this government asks the allied forces to leave, and only when all terrorists have been eradicated from the Levant”.
“You – said Assad – came to Syria without any permission and occupied our territory. It is therefore our duty to push you out by all means. You shall not obtain by negotiation and peace what you failed to obtain after seven years of war”.
#Syria#Tanf#Military
Former US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford wrote at the Middle East Institute this week that in Washington, policymakers in the administration plan to retain the Tanf base until Iran withdraws its fighters from Syria.https://t.co/WPJx8LOX6V
Russia played the role of postman for the exchange of the US-Assad messages. President Assad, however, informed the Americans that Iran is not interested in remaining in Syria once all terrorist Takfiris are killed and when its function is no longer required.
The bottom line is that Assad and his allies believe that the US-French-UK withdrawal from Syria would actually be an achievement.
Moreover, both Iran and Hezbollah consider their withdrawal both a fact and a necessity, once Assad is no longer in need of their contribution. However, there is still al-Qaeda in the Levant, and other jihadists in the north under Turkish control. Also, there is still ISIS in the north-east within the US-controlled area. All these can only be eliminated once the Syrian Army and its allies wage war against them.
From this point of view, the US proposed “deal” is feasible and is considered reasonable by Assad and his allies — but only once the very last US soldier has left Syria.
Russia will act as guarantor for its own allies, and these will commit to leave Syria once all jihadists no longer pose a threat to the central government.
Damascus and Tehran look at this “deal” positively but this does not mean they trust a US establishment led by a President who can unilaterally revoke his own signed deals, just as he did for the Iran Nuclear deal he signed with his allies. Moscow, Tehran and Damascus are aware that Trump cannot realistically keep his forces in Syria for very long, particularly since the south of Syria is about to be liberated.
Israel, of course, is trembling — so this source believes — at the idea that Iran could create a copy of the Lebanese Hezbollah in Syria because the menace will be much greater along a united but very long border from Naqoura (Lebanon) right through to the occupied Golan Heights.
But in the midst of all this, Assad considers the real war to be over: he now has to deal with only two countries rather than with hundreds of non-united, disparate groups. The Syrian President believes that Syria, as a multi-ethnic, secular and multi-cultural country, has triumphed: it has definitively won the battle against “regime change” and the partition of the Levant.
The framers of our constitution would be turning over in their graves if they could see what happened to their words “with the advice and consent of the senate.”
Now senators neither advise nor consent to Supreme Court nominations. They politicize, delay, demonize, obscure, fabricate and discredit what should be a non-partisan process of assuring that the most qualified lawyers serve on our highest court. Instead we have come to expect votes that are cast largely along party lines.
It was not always what it has now become. Even in the recent past, highly qualified but controversial nominees — such as Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsberg — were confirmed with hardly any dissents. No more.
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Some Democrats showed their disdain for the process by opposing President Trump’s pick even before it was made. (Photo by Alex Edelman/Getty Images)
There is enough blame to go around.
Republicans point to the Bork rejection (which resulted in the Kennedy nomination) and the Clarence Thomas “high-tech lynching.”
Democrats point to the Republican refusal even to consider former President Barack Obama’s nomination of the highly qualified and centrist Merrick Garland. They also point to the fact that President Trump has “outsourced the selection process to the Federalist Society.”
Whoever is to blame, the real victims are the American people who have been denied the constitutional protection of a legitimate confirmation process.
Focusing on the current confirmation battle over Brett Kavanaugh, some Democrats showed their disdain for the process by carrying signs opposing President Trump’s nominee even before the nomination was made. They left the name blank and filled it in only after the President nominated Judge Kavanaugh.Others have taken the view that they would never confirm any nominee whose name was on the list provided by the Federalist Society.
A story from the past is worth recalling. When the great Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes retired, President Herbert Hoover asked his Attorney General to supply him a list of ten names to fill the seat of this great justice. The list contained nine Republican names, but at the bottom was the name of one Democrat — a great New York judge named Benjamin Cardozo. When Hoover saw the list, he reportedly said to his Attorney General, “It’s a great list but you have it upside down. Cardozo’s name should be on the top because he is the most distinguished sitting judge in the US.” The Attorney General reportedly responded that Cardozo was a Democrat, a Jew (there was already one Jew on the Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis) and a New Yorker and his appointment would not serve the political interest of the president or his party. But Hoover nominated Cardozo who served with distinction on the High Court.
Today such a nomination would be unthinkable. Generally, presidents still look for high quality nominees, but among the many who are so qualified, they demand a nominee who will toe their ideological line, be acceptable to their base and generally promote the interests of their party. That is not what the Framers contemplated.
The Supreme Court is supposed to be above politics. It is supposed to serve as a check and balance against the two political branches of government. It is supposed to be non-partisan. The votes of justices are not supposed to be based on ideological or partisan considerations. The Framers would be livid at the 5-4 party line vote in Bush v. Gore. They would have been equally livid if there were a 5-4 partisan vote in favor of a Democratic president. Partisan votes are supposed to take place in Congress, not in the chambers of our Highest Court.
It may be too late to restore the integrity of the confirmation process. We are in the age of tit-for-tat political reprisals. The Democrats say that the Republicans stole the Merrick Garland nomination, so the Democrats want to try to steal the Kavanaugh nomination. They will almost certainly fail, but not before they have further tarnished the confirmation process.
It will take a statesman rather than a politician in the Oval Office to change this dynamic. A great president will someday nominate the most distinguished lawyer in the country, without regard to party ideology or other political considerations. All presidents claim that they are doing this. Former President George H. W. Bush told the American public that Clarence Thomas was the most qualified person in American to serve on the High Court. No one, probably not even Clarence Thomas, believed that. But he, too, was confirmed, largely along party line votes.
Justice Kavanaugh is extraordinarily well qualified by his educational and academic background and judicial history. He should be given a hearing and asked probing questions about his judicial philosophy and his approach to constitutional construction and precedent. Senators should approach this process with an open mind. Before I finally make up my own mind, I will be listening carefully to his answers.
Today we got a little bit of a deeper look into the true “hell” that took (and is taking) place at Tesla in the weeks leading up to the company making its Model 3 push.
A new report from Bloomberg has Elon Musk exclaiming that he is going through “the most excruciatingly hellish several months that [he has] ever had” – along with reporting details on an unreported incident about a worker’s leg (that later had to be amputated) gushing blood from a forklift accident and recounting a story of employees having to trudge through raw sewage on the floor at the Fremont plan.
We’ve heard various news outlets and even the company itself talk about trying to hit its Model 3 production number and having to go through “production hell” for weeks now. We knew that Elon Musk was supposedly sleeping at the Fremont, California factory during this time (“I was wearing the same clothes for five days,” he told Bloomberg) and that countless numbers of revisions have been made to Tesla’s engineering and production processes in order to try and help the company reach its 5,000 car per week goal – which it was able to finally tap for the first time last week.
The question of whether or not the company is going to be able keep producing at this scale and at this rate remains to be seen.
Make no mistake, the hell that Tesla has gone through over the last month or two, as the patience of investors and Wall Street has worn thin, has been well documented.
Bloomberg published a report Thursday morning, looking at Tesla’s walk through production hell in a deeper fashion. Aside from what we already know, the report provides a couple of new details on exactly how hellish the ride has been for employees.
Everybody knows that to reach its goal, Tesla has shifted vastly away from its original plans of how it was going to produce these vehicles. What was supposed to be a brand new, automated and best in industry production line turned into a makeshift tent hastily erected outside of the company’s Fremont plant. Famously, analysts thought the plan was a ridiculous idea:
“Insanity,” said Max Warburton, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., in an email to Bloomberg News. “I don’t think anyone’s seen anything like this outside of the military trying to service vehicles in a war zone.”
As we’ve reported a couple times over the last few days, this hastily erected makeshift solution has not impressed analysts or Wall Street and could be part of the reason the company stock actually fell after it hit its production target.
The Bloomberg article also sheds new light on concerns that have been bubbling up recently about Tesla – safety at its plants, for one. The article details an event where a quality control manager ultimately had to have his leg amputated as a result of a workplace accident. The incident was later blamed on somebody doing donuts on a forklift. As a result, employees had to be sent to counseling because the injury was so gruesome to witness.
Bloomberg reported:
On Nov. 18, 2016, eight months before Model 3 production began, a factory employee heard a scream coming from just outside the main building at the Fremont plant. He saw a colleague, quality-control lead Robert Limon, writhing on the blacktop and grabbing at his leg, which was “bleeding like crazy,” the worker says. The specifics of this incident haven’t been previously reported.
Limon’s co-workers gathered around him. Someone used a belt to tie a tourniquet around his leg. The witness, who declined to be named out of concern for adverse consequences from Tesla, says management offered counseling for people who had seen what happened—and the witness took the company up on it, because it was traumatic.
Limon later told this co-worker he’d been hit by a forklift driver who’d been doing doughnuts on the property for fun. Limon didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story, but according to people who saw and spoke to him in the following days, and as depicted in photos seen by Bloomberg Businessweek, the injured leg was amputated.
Tesla says that both Limon and the forklift driver were fooling around in an inappropriate way that isn’t representative of the automaker’s safety culture.
Another previously unreported incident that popped up in Bloomberg’s in-depth article was the fact that workers at Tesla’s Fremont factory had to trudge through raw sewage at one point because of time constraints required to get the Model 3 completed:
Four current employees say the pressure they felt to avoid delays forced them to walk through raw sewage when it spilled onto the floor. Dennis Duran, who works in the paint shop, says that one time when workers balked, he and his peers were told, “Just walk through it. We have to keep the line going.” Tesla says it’s not aware of managers telling employees to walk through sewage and that plumbing issues have been handled promptly.
It also details the “Tesla stare” that some employees wind up painting on their faces after consuming one too many company provided Red Bulls “to battle exhaustion” while working:
To battle exhaustion, employees drink copious amounts of Red Bull, sometimes provided free by Tesla. New employees develop what’s known as the “Tesla stare.” “They come in vibrant, energized,” says Mikey Catura, a Tesla production associate. “And then a couple weeks go by, and you’ll see them walking out of the building just staring out into space like zombies.”
The article, in fairness, also does detail a couple of innovations Tesla has made along the way. The company is credited with engineering a new HVAC system for the Model 3 that allows for ample air circulation without the aesthetics of traditional vehicle e-vents:
Musk declared he didn’t want visible air vents. “I don’t want to see any holes,” von Holzhausen recalls him saying. Von Holzhausen paired engineer Joseph Mardall with designer Peter Blades to figure that one out. Blades’s sketch called for a recessed gap across the entire width of the car from which the air would flow, with a long strip of wood instead of the dash. Mandel pointed out that to make the approach work, the entire ventilation system would need to be redesigned. “Are we serious about this?” he recalls asking.
Musk was serious, but a second problem soon appeared: The wooden strip, just below the air gap, worked like an airplane wing, sucking cold air down and shooting it into the driver’s lap. Mardall, an aerodynamics specialist, proposed adding a second, hidden gap from which air would shoot straight up, lifting the main blast of cold air above the piece of wood and away from the driver’s crotch. “It was one of those eureka moments,” Blades recalls, still in awe of the elegance of the solution. “The spine still tingles.”
The system Blades and Mardall designed combines all the components of a standard HVAC system into a single basketball-size glob of molded plastic tucked under the hood, which Tesla calls the Superbottle. The glob is stamped with a logo of a bottle wearing a superhero cape.
The article also details another in house invention called the Golden Wheel, which is used to break in suspension and align vehicles in an automated fashion at the plant.
Finally, as has been reported on in the past, Tesla also manufactures all of its seats in-house at a separate factory.
Despite the fact that Tesla has hit these immense challenges, Elon Musk’s attention seems to be diverted elsewhere.
He is also now starting to chime in on the Flint, Michigan water crisis. Don’t get us wrong, all of these problems need solutions and help is a good thing, but is it possible that Elon is forgetting he has a public company to worry about?
After Elon Musk’s efforts to demonstrate his engineering genius in Thailand failed to be appreciated by the world resulting in an odd public spat with the leader of the local rescue team, the Tesla CEO, who suddenly appears eager to find any distractions from focusing on the one thing that matters to Tesla investors, producing cars, has found a new calling: he will take on the contaminated water system in Flint, Michigan.
Responding to a twitter dare that “there’s NO WAY you could help get clean water to Flint, Michigan. Said you wouldn’t be capable idk”, Musk immediately responded:
Please consider this a commitment that I will fund fixing the water in any house in Flint that has water contamination above FDA levels. No kidding.
Musk’s latest hobby, however, could be frowned upon by one of Tesla’s biggest investors, who earlier on Wednesday called for Tesla to “keep its head down and focus on performance”, or as Bloomberg put it, pipe down and execute.
Speaking in a Bloomberg TV interview, James Anderson, a partner and portfolio manager at Baillie Gifford & Co., Tesla’s fourth- largest shareholder, said that “we are very supportive, but we would like peace and execution at this stage”, adding that “it would be good to just concentrate on the core task.”
While Anderson didn’t comment on Musk specifically or elaborate on Tesla’s issues while speaking from Allen & Co.’s Sun Valley conference, Anderson appears to be addressing Musk’s increasingly erratic behavior of late: Musk has made headlines by attacking journalists and Wall Street analysts in recent months as the company has struggled to ramp up production of its Model 3 sedan and stem losses.
According to Bloomberg data, Baillie Gifford owned 12.8 million shares as of the end of March, a stake that’s worth more than $4 billion at current prices. Only Musk, T. Rowe Price and Fidelity owner FMR LLC have a bigger position.
It remains to be seen if the public chiding will lead to any substantial behavioral changes for Musk, who instead of producing cars appears to have spent the bulk of his past two months on Twitter.
Tesla is set to report earnings in the beginning of August, where we will get our latest update as to the current status of “production hell”.
President Trump escalated the trade war this week, making a kamikaze attack on a vast armada of Chinese imports – $200 billion in total – headed for California.
The Chinese say they will retaliate.
Phony Wars
Last month, we opined that the trade war wouldn’t go any better than Vietnam… or Iraq… or any of the feds’ other phony wars – against drugs, poverty, or terrorists.
It will be expensive, futile… and perhaps disastrous.
But that doesn’t mean it won’t be popular. Wars give the spectators something to live for – us versus them… good guys against bad guys… winners versus losers.
Their hat size swells as their champion wallops the Chinese. Their girth shrinks as he challenges and taunts the Canadians. Their manhood grows when the enemy gives in and admits defeat.
But while this puerile entertainment is taking place in the arena, the real action is going on in the expensive skyboxes, where the elite collude against the fans.
Wars shift resources from the boring and productive win-win deals in the private sector to the magnificently absurd win-lose deals of the feds and their cronies. The only real winner is the Deep State.
He was bravely trying to explain the trade deficit and why it was caused by monetary policy, not by trade ramparts that were too low.
But the young, know-it-all newscasters were such numbskulls – so lacking in any experience, theory, or historical perspective – he might as well have been instructing a walrus on how to chew gum. The lesson was in vain.
The three TV experts saw no problem with the trade deficit… and no danger approaching from Trump’s war on it.
If there were any clouds on the horizon, they didn’t see them; if there was any thunder, they didn’t hear it; whether lightning was striking the light posts near them or not, they had no idea. They wouldn’t even look out the window.
Instead, they seemed eager to get Weatherman David out of the studio so they could go back to their bubble chatter.
They were so confident… so vain… and so dismissive of all risk…
…we thought we heard a bell ringing.
Bubbleheads
The bell, of course, was the one they don’t ring just before the market collapses. They don’t ring it because they are all sure that nothing could go wrong. And there hasn’t been any real trouble for so long that they’ve forgotten where they put it.
Trade deficits have been growing ever since the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1971 (while tariffs have been going down!).
The stock market has been going up (with only three significant slips… in 1987, 2000, and 2008) since 1982.
The bond market, too, has been rising since 1980 (though it probably topped out two years ago).
The current GDP expansion has been going on since 2009 – and is now the second-longest expansion in history.
And the USA has been a going concern, growing in power and wealth since 1781, when the French beat the English at Yorktown, Virginia and thereby rescued the American Revolution.
All of these trends – except the current economic expansion – are older than any of the three bubbleheads David confronted on CNBC. David had to give them a “heads up” on trends: “They go on until they stop,” he warned.
Market Gods
We could practically hear the cackling of the market gods as the twits on TV assured David that nothing could go wrong:
“Oh yeah?”
Will the economy suddenly tip into recession? Will the stock market crash? Will the bond market sink?
Yes… most likely… all of those things will happen.
But what will set them off? What trick will the gods play? What trap will they set? What surprise have they got waiting for us?
We don’t know. But the trade war gives them more to work with.
Tariffs on lumber coming from the evil Canadians are adding about $9,000 to the cost of a new house, according to the National Association of Home Builders.
Washing machine prices have jumped some 15% this year, the fastest increase ever recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
As for auto prices, CBS News reports:
Consumers may see an average price increase of $5,800 if a 25 percent import tariff that Mr. Trump has threatened goes into effect, according to estimates cited by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers (AAM), a lobbying group for carmakers.
That’s a “$45 billion tax on consumers,” the group said, citing an analysis of Commerce Department data.
Automotive news website AutoWise says the top 10 best-selling automobiles will see price increases from $1,000 to $3,600.
Farmers are getting hit hard, too.
The American Farm Bureau says it expects farm incomes to drop to a 12-year low this year, largely because of the trade war.
An agricultural economist at Purdue University, Christopher Hurt, added that 1,000 acres of corn and soybeans would have made a farmer a $42,000 profit on June 1. Now, it could net him a $126,000 loss.
Still, small potatoes? Maybe.
They don’t ring a bell when the end comes. But they do put bubble-brains in front of TV cameras.
The new Mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, is beside herself at the abject squalor resulting from decades of “progressive” policies that encourage homeless residents to use the streets as their personal toilet.
In an interview with local station NBC Bay Area, Breed acknowledged that the poo-coated city she was born and raised in has a “huge problem” she aims to clean up.
“I will say there is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up here,” Breed said. “That is a huge problem and we are not just talking about from dogs — we’re talking about from humans.”
Unfortunately, her solution is to simply ask the city’s estimated 7,500 vagrants to kindly stop with all the street-squatting and clean up after themselves. Considering that 39% of homeless surveyed in San Francisco’s “homeless census” claim to have mental health issues, we’re not entirely sure how this policy will work.
When pressed about whether her plan calls for harsher penalties against those who litter or defecate on city streets, Breed said “I didn’t express anything about a penalty.” Instead, the mayor said she has encouraged nonprofits “to talk to their clients, who, unfortunately, were mostly responsible for the conditions of our streets.” –NBC Bay Area
“I work hard to make sure your programs are funded for the purposes of trying to get these individuals help, and what I am asking you to do is work with your clients and ask them to at least have respect for the community — at least, clean up after themselves and show respect to one another and people in the neighborhood,” Breed told NBC, referencing her conversations with nonprofit groups aimed at serving the homeless.
San Francisco’s “huge problem” isn’t restricted to poo either – the city is full of drug addicts who are more or less allowed to just do their thing. On Friday, two days after Breed was sworn into office, she went on a jaunt around the city in an afternoon stroll, where a guy was literally prepping to shoot up as she walked past.
San Francisco will spend around $280 million this year on homeless housing and services – roughly 40% higher than the city spent five years ago. Meanwhile, the number of homeless has remained more or less steady at 7,500.
The city spent $65 million in 2017 on street cleaning, and will boost that by $13 million over the next two years.
“I don’t think that the city is poorly spending what it already has,” Breed said. “I spend a lot of time on Fillmore Street. I see the people who are part of a program, out there power washing. They’re out there doing what they can to keep the community clean, almost every day, and then right after they leave, maybe an hour or two later, the place is filled with trash again.”
Over 16,000 feces complaints were logged with the City over a seven day period at the beginning of July, according to a local website and app that lets residents report none-emergency services, reports Dan Lyman of NewsWars:
Many of the complaints also connect the fecal matter to vagrants and homeless encampments – a sight all too common now across California.
Users can geotag the location in question, and also provide photos to support their claim.
“Homeless encampment is blocking sidewalk and creates a health hazard w trash and feces,” writes one user.
“Please move them, and send a cleaning crew. Sidewalk is impassable, forcing pedestrians into the street.”
“Homeless individuals sleeping along Funston between Clement and Geary,” writes another user.
“Observed homeless people shooting up at 5pm on Monday, July 2nd. Lots of feces and garbage in the area. Please clean up area and see if homeless individuals need services.”
A recent NBC Bay Area investigation into the alarming volume of trash, drug needles and fecal matter around a 153-block area of San Francisco revealed “trash on every block, 100 needles, and more than 300 piles of feces along the 20-mile stretch of streets and sidewalks.”
As the Investigative Unit photographed nearly a dozen hypodermic needles scattered across one block, a group of preschool students happened to walk by on their way to an afternoon field trip to city hall.
“We see poop, we see pee, we see needles, and we see trash,” said teacher Adelita Orellana. “Sometimes they ask what is it, and that’s a conversation that’s a little difficult to have with a 2-year old, but we just let them know that those things are full of germs, that they are dangerous, and they should never be touched.” –NBC Bay Area
Meanwhile, residents and tourists alike are turning green over the rampant squalor. Now, it’s starting to affect the city’s bottom line. Earlier this month, a major medical convention expected to bring in 15,000 visitors and drop $40 million in less than a week decided to permanently move to another city. From the San Francisco Chronicle:
“It’s the first time that we have had an out-and-out cancellation over the issue, and this is a group that has been coming here every three or four years since the 1980s,” said Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of S.F. Travel, the city’s convention bureau…
“They said that they are committed to this year and to 2023, but nothing in between or nothing thereafter,” D’Alessandro said. “After that, they told us they are planning to go elsewhere — I believe it’s Los Angeles.”
The doctors group told the San Francisco delegation that while they loved the city, postconvention surveys showed their members were afraid to walk amid the open drug use, threatening behavior and mental illness that are common on the streets.
It’s not hard to see why tourists would look for a nicer place to visit. The city is filled with homeless camps, open drug use in public areas, and petty crime. There were 31,000 thefts from vehicles reported in 2017, which works out to 85 per day. Garbage, drug needles, and human feces are ubiquitous sights and smells on the streets. The same week that the medical convention canceled, local news reported on a 20-pound bag of feces that was abandoned on the street.
CBS affiliate KPIX 5 ran a story on the convention complete with man-on-the-street interviews. The people they talked to aren’t shocked by the decision:
Tourists once took home memories of famed cable cars. These days, too often it is of the image of someone begging, or dancing in circles, or just wandering around the streets intoxicated or mentally ill.
“You can smell it,” says one tourist.
“I come from a third world county and it is not as bad as this,” says another.
Here’s the report.
Last month we reported on an Australian couple visiting the city who were shocked by what they saw after deciding to walk back to their hotel:
“Is this normal or am I in a ‘bad part of town?’ Just walked past numerous homeless off their faces, screaming and running all over the sidewalk near Twitter HQ and then a murder scene. Wife is scared to leave hotel now,” reads a Wednesday posting by Reddit user /u/nashtendo.
It was my wife that was scared and it was partly the mass of concentrated, drug affected homeless mixed with a guy being rolled into an ambulance dead. –/u/nashtendo
“We did La and Nyc on this trip too. Both felt safer,” he said later in the thread, adding “Syringes were visible, people were staggering, others had wide aggressive eyes. ‘Off their faces’ might be an Australian thing (sorry) but I meant just visibly drug affected.”
Another Reddit user replied:
It’s pretty normal.I’m honestly hoping tourists will realize how shitty this city has become and stop coming. Maybe the loss of income will finally push the city to stop allowing the rampant drug dealing and homeless people treating the entire city like their toilet. You would think a city that depends so heavily on tourism and conventions for the bulk of their income would put more effort into maintaining a certain standard, but there is rampant drug dealing out in the open in some of the most heavily tourist areas. The city know about it, they just don’t care. –/u/SgtPeanutbutter
“You see things on the streets that are just not humane,” Kevin Carroll, executive director of the Hotel Council of San Francisco told The Chronicle‘s Heather Knight in April. “People come into hotels saying, ‘What is going on out there?’ They’re just shocked. … People say, ‘I love your city, I love your restaurants, but I’ll never come back.'”
Complicating matters is the fact that the city distributes nearly 5 million needles each year through various programs aimed at reducing HIV and other health risks for drug users who might otherwise share needles.
The city distributes an estimated 400,000 syringes each month through various programs aimed at reducing HIV and other health risks for drug users. About 246,000 syringes are discarded through the city’s 13 syringe access and disposal sites. But thousands of the others end up on streets, in parks and other public areas… –AP
While syringes discarded in public areas have become a nationwide problem amid a growing opium crisis, the problem in population-dense San Francisco (about 50 square miles) is much more noticeable given the city’s growing homeless population. Last year there were 9,500 requests by residents for needle pick-ups by the city. So far this year, there have been 3,700 requests.
And again, Mayor Breed’s new plan is to have nonprofit homeless outreach organizations simply ask vagrants to stop kindly refrain from evacuating their bowels in the street – something we’re guessing the drug-addled segment of San Francisco’s homeless population might not remember halfway through a bender.
Breed is also planning to open a string of new “safe drug injection sites,” which would include booths where drug users can inject drugs, as well as so-called “chill rooms” where they can ride out their highs in a safe environment.
“While there’s an amazing amount of support already in place for these kinds of facilities, there’s still a need to bring in the community as a whole, and that’s why we support a project like this,” said a spokesman for Glide Memorial Methodist Church in the Tenderloin, Robert Avila, to the SF Chronicle.
“It’s about getting people off the street, from shooting up publicly and getting needles off the streets,” said Mayor. “These places provide a location for people to be when they’re going through what they’re going through after they shoot up.”
As we just discussed, some major news stories have recently dropped about what a horrible horrifying menace the Russian Federation is to the world, and as always I have nothing to offer the breathless pundits on CNN and MSNBC but my completely unsatisfied skepticism. My skepticism of the official Russia narrative remains so completely unsatisfied that if mainstream media were my husband I would already be cheating on it with my yoga instructor.
I do not believe the establishment Russia narrative. I do not believe that Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to rig the 2016 election. I do not believe the Russian government did any election rigging for Trump to collude with. This is not because I believe Vladimir Putin is some kind of blueberry-picking girl scout, and it certainly isn’t because I think the Russian government is unwilling or incapable of meddling in the affairs of other nations to some extent when it suits them. It is simply because I am aware that the US intelligence community lies constantly as a matter of policy, and because I understand how the burden of proof works.
At this time, I see no reason to espouse any belief system which embraces as true the assertion that Russia meddled in the 2016 elections in any meaningful way, or that it presents a unique and urgent threat to the world which must be aggressively dealt with. But all the establishment mouthpieces tell me that I must necessarily embrace these assertions as known, irrefutable fact. Here are five things that would have to change in order for that to happen:
1. Proof of a hacking conspiracy to elect Trump.
In most cases, it’s so basic that unproven allegations by a prosecutor in an indictment shouldn’t be accepted as true one need not even point it out. In this case, pointing it out will be seen as blasphemy. Everyone should want to see the evidence on which the claims are based: https://t.co/a10klzbMRS
The first step to getting a heretic like myself aboard the Russia hysteria train would be the existence of publicly available evidence of the claims made about election meddling in 2016, which rises to the level required in a post-Iraq invasion world. So far, that burden of proof for Russian hacking allegations has not come anywhere remotely close to being met.
How much proof would I need to lend my voice to the escalation of tensions between two nuclear superpowers? Mountains. I personally would settle for nothing less than hard proof which can be independently verified by trusted experts like the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Is that a big ask? Yes. Yes it is. That’s what happens when government institutions completely discredit themselves as they did with the false narratives advanced in the manufacturing of support for the Iraq invasion. You don’t get to butcher a million Iraqis in a war based on lies, turn around a few years later and say “We need new cold war escalations with a nuclear superpower but we can’t prove it because the evidence is secret.” That’s not a thing. Copious amounts of hard, verifiable proof or GTFO. So far we have no evidence besides the confident-sounding assertions of government insiders and their mass media mouthpieces, which is the same as no evidence.
2. Proof that election meddling actually influenced the election in a meaningful way.
Even if Russian hackers did exfiltrate Democratic party emails and give them to WikiLeaks, if it didn’t affect the election, who cares? That’s a single-day, second-page story at best, meriting nothing beyond a “Hmm, interesting, turns out Russia tried and failed to influence the US election,” followed by a shrug and moving on to something that actually matters.
After it has been thoroughly proven that Russia meddled in the elections in a meaningful way, it must then be established that that meddling had an actual impact on the election results.
3. Some reason to believe Russian election meddling was unwarranted and unacceptable.
Highlighting the U.S.’s long history in meddling in other countries’ elections is not #whataboutism, but rather a highly germane point to understanding the context for allegations of Russian meddling in Election 2016, Caitlin Johnstone observes. https://t.co/OZoIzC8vIc@caitoz
The US government, by a very wide margin, interferes in the elections of other countries far, far more than any other government on earth does. The US government’s own data shows that it has deliberately meddled in the elections of 81 foreign governments between 1946 and 2000, including Russia in the nineties. This is public knowledge. A former CIA Director cracked jokes about it on Fox News earlier this year.
If I’m going to abandon my skepticism and accept the Gospel According to Maddow, after meaningful, concrete election interference has been clearly established I’m going to need a very convincing reason to believe that it is somehow wrong or improper for a government to attempt to respond in kind to the undisputed single worst offender of this exact offense. It makes no sense for the United States to actively create an environment in which election interference is something that governments do to one another, and then cry like a spanked child when its election is interfered with by one of the very governments whose elections the US recently meddled in.
This is nonsense. America being far and away the worst election meddler on the planet makes it a fair target for election meddling by not just Russia, but every country in the world. It is very obviously moral and acceptable for any government on earth to interfere in America’s elections as long as it remains the world’s worst offender in that area. In order for Russia to be in the wrong if it interfered in America’s elections, some very convincing argument I’ve not yet heard will have to be made to support that case.
4. Proof that the election meddling went beyond simply giving Americans access to information about their government.
In case anyone forgot: the “hacked emails” contained multitudes of revelatory information about powerful political actors that otherwise would have been concealed from voters https://t.co/PQnOh9V3rW
If all the Russians did was simply show Americans emails of Democratic Party officials talking to one another and circulate some MSM articles as claimed in the ridiculous Russian troll farm allegations, that’s nothing to get upset about. If anything, Americans should be upset that they had to hear about Democratic Party corruption through the grapevine instead of having light shed on it by the American officials whose job it is to do so. Complaints about election meddling is only valid if that election meddling isn’t comprised of truth and facts.
5. A valid reason to believe escalated tensions between two nuclear superpowers are worthwhile.
After it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Russia did indeed meddle in the US elections in a meaningful way, and after it has then been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Russia actually influenced election results in a significant way, and after the case has been clearly made that it was bad and wrong for Russia to do this instead of fair and reasonable, and after it has been clearly proven that the election meddling went beyond simply telling Americans the truth about their government, the question then becomes what, if anything, should be done about it?
If you look at the actions that this administration has taken over the last year and a half, the answer to that question appears to be harsh sanctions, NATO expansionism, selling arms to Ukraine, throwing out diplomats, increasing military presence along Russia’s border, a Nuclear Posture Review which is much more aggressive toward Russia, repeatedly bombing Syria, and just generally creating more and more opportunities for something to go catastrophically wrong with one of the two nations’ aging, outdated nuclear arsenals, setting off a chain of events from which there is no turning back and no surviving.
And the pundits and politicians keep pushing for more and more escalations, at this very moment braying with one voice that Trump must aggressively confront Putin about Mueller’s indictments or withdraw from the peace talks. But is it worth it? Is it worth risking the life of every terrestrial organism to, what? What specifically would be gained that makes increasing the risk of nuclear catastrophe worthwhile? Making sure nobody interferes in America’s fake elections? I’d need to see a very clear and specific case made, with a ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ list and “THE POTENTIAL DEATH OF LITERALLY EVERYTHING” written in big red letters at the top of the ‘cons’ column.
Rallying the world to cut off Russia from the world stage and cripple its economy has been been a goal of the US power establishment since the collapse of the Soviet Union, so there’s no reason to believe that even the people who are making the claims against Russia actually believe them. The goal is crippling Russia to handicap China, and ultimately to shore up global hegemony for the US-centralized empire by preventing the rise of any rival superpowers. The sociopathic alliance of plutocrats and intelligence/defense agencies who control that empire are willing to threaten nuclear confrontation in order to ensure their continued dominance. All of their actions against Russia since 2016 have had everything to do with establishing long-term planetary dominance and nothing whatsoever to do with election meddling.
Those five things would need to happen before I’d be willing to jump aboard the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” train. Until then I’ll just keep pointing to the total lack of evidence and how very, very far the CIA/CNN Russia narrative is from credibility.
* * *
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Legendary Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and the dean of HBS have a new must-read article out; we have a summary and our take below. The topic: how CEOs actually spend their time. It’s not how you think…
When we came across a new study in the Harvard Business Review on how CEOs spend their time, we took notice. Time is especially scarce for CEOs after all, and how they use it sends a message about their priorities and can have a direct impact on their company’s performance.
This 12-year study is particularly important because it is the longest and most comprehensive analysis on CEOs’ time allocations to date and its authors are both rock stars. Starting in 2006, researchers Michael E. Porter (of the famous Porter Model) and Nitin Nohria (the dean of HBS) tracked the activities of 27 CEOs in 15-minute increments, 24 hours of the day for three months each. Most of the companies were public and had an average annual revenue of $13.1 billion.
Here’s how many hours CEOs at these companies worked:
They worked 9.7 hours per weekday on average, or 48.5 hours a week
Each day on the weekend, they worked about 3.9 hours
They also worked 2.4 hours a day on vacation
47% of their work was done at headquarters, with the balance at other “company locations, meeting external constituencies, commuting, traveling, and at home”
Grand total: 62.5 hours a week
What they did while working (75% of which was planned and 25% spontaneous):
They spent 25% of their time developing people and relationships
25% on functional and business unit reviews
21% on strategy
16% on matching organizational structure and culture with the needs of the business
4% on M&A
4% on operating plans
3% on professional development
1% on crisis management
Time spent with those inside the organization:
33% on direct reports
22% with other senior managers
10% with other managers
5% with other employees
The balance they spent with business partners or board members
How they communicated:
61% face-to-face
24% electronic
15% phone and letter
72% of the time they were in meetings vs. 28% alone
As for when they’re not working:
They slept for 6.9 hours a night on average
They exercised for 45 minutes a day
They spent about 3 hours with family and 2.1 hours on downtime for things like watching TV, reading, or hobbies
Overall, CEOs have a lot on their plate and only have a limited amount of time to get everything done. Learning how they delegate their time is an underappreciated window into how a company may perform.
We’ll end with a few takeaways from the article:
“How a CEO spends face-to-face time is viewed as a signal of what or who is important; people watch this more carefully than most CEOs recognize.”
CEOs had 37 meetings a week on average that took up 72% of their total work time. Therefore, the study noted that they need to shorten meetings from their default lengths, such as down from an hour, to increase efficiency. Email also wastes time: “CEOs should recognize that the majority of e-mails cover issues that needn’t involve them and often draw them into the operational weeds.”
CEOs need to spend more time with lower managers and rank and file employees to “keep them in touch with what is really going on in the company.” It will also help “them model and communicate organizational values throughout the workforce”.
Additionally, CEOs in the study were surprised by how little time they spend with customers. The study highlighted how customers are a “key source of independent information about the company’s progress, industry trends, and competitors”, after all. One solution: some CEOs “systematically schedule” time with their customers.
As for CEOs’ off time, the study said “most had learned to become very disciplined” about spending time with their family. They also needed activities to “preserve elements of normal life” to keep them “grounded and better able to engage with colleagues and workers”. Moreover, CEOs “also have to make time for their own professional renewal and development (which our data showed was often the biggest casualty of a packed schedule)”. This is important advice for any professional to remember.
Russia is getting ready to invest US$50 billion in Iran’s oil and gas industry as the two countries continue to seek closer ties, just as the United States is looking to cut as much Iranian crude oil exports from the market as possible.
“Russia is ready to invest $50bn in Iran’s oil and gas sectors,” according to Ali Akbar Velayati, Senior Adviser for International Affairs of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, as carried by the Financial Times.
Velayati was on a visit to Moscow that included a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Military and technical co-operation with Russia is of major importance to Iran,” FT quoted Velayati as saying.
“The discussion focused on Russian-Iranian cooperation issues as well as the situation in the region, including developments in Syria. The parties reaffirmed their commitment to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran’s Nuclear Deal (JCPOA),” the Kremlin said in a brief statement on the meeting on Thursday.
According to the Iranian official, a Russian oil company has signed an agreement with Iran worth US$4 billion, and that deal “will be implemented soon.”
Russian energy giants Rosneft and Gazprom have also started talks with the oil ministry of Iran to potentially sign deals worth up to US$10 billion, the Iranian adviser said, while a Russian government official confirmed to FT Russia’s US$50-billion investment plans.
Earlier this year, a local Iranian company, Dana Energy, in a consortium led by Russia’s Zarubezhneft, signed an agreement with the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) to redevelop the Aban and West Paydar oilfields, with total capex estimated at around US$740 million.
Separately, Russia’s Energy Minister Alexander Novak said on Friday that Russia was studying all legal implications for a possible deal with Iran under which Moscow would provide goods to Tehran in exchange for oil. Such a deal is still possible, Novak said.
While US equity markets (well a few mega-cap tech stocks anyway), the world’s largest shipping company is seeing its stock eviscerated as investor anxiety over trade wars finds an outlet that makes rational sense.
A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S may struggle to make a profit this year after the U.S. and China descended into a trade war that is already showing stress in sentiment surveys…
As Bloomberg reports, Maersk, which is based in Copenhagen, has already lost almost a third of its market value this year as investors gird for more bad news… and it is losing value in line with the collapse in the US Treasury yield curve.
Trade protectionism means less demand, and history suggests the shipping industry will struggle to make the necessary supply cuts. What’s more, Maersk is now more exposed to shipping as the former conglomerate divests its energy business.
Per Hansen, an investment economist at Nordnet in Copenhagen, says Maersk is currently “in the eye of the hurricane” when it comes to the damage that will be inflicted by a trade war.
The company said earlier in the week it will need to temporarily scale back its service between Asia and North Europe as a result.
“It’s highly likely that Maersk’s valuations could sink to its trough valuations in the coming months as investors avoid shipping stocks until more excess capacity is being removed,” said Corrine Png, chief executive officer and founder of Crucial Perspective, a Singapore-based research provider focusing on transport.
So just keep buying Amazon and Netflix.. and keep buying bonds…
