Tag: finance

As Deutsche Bank CEO Christian Sewing looks to cut operating costs and headcount to try and meet lofty targets for return on shareholder’s tangible equity, he has apparently stumbled upon a novel approach that has been shunned by American rivals like JPM: Making ‘working from home’ a permanent part of Deutsche Bank’s ‘culture’.

Source: Statista

According to Bloomberg, Deutsche Bank AG is weighing a new policy that would allow most employees to permanently work from home two days a week as the lender draws lessons from the coronavirus pandemic.

But anonymous representatives from the bank told Bloomberg that the bank is waiting for lawmakers in several countries to pass new work-from-home-friendly legislation.

Deutsche Bank AG is weighing a new policy that would allow most employees to permanently work from home two days a week as the lender draws lessons from the coronavirus pandemic. Germany’s largest bank has been discussing the changes for several months and the two-days rule has emerged as the preferred scenario, people familiar with the matter said. Some regulatory questions still need to be answered and any policy won’t be applied uniformly to all staff, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information. Deutsche Bank is still waiting for lawmakers in several countries to finalize new remote-work legislation, one person said. It’s also not clear yet how to deal with issues including enforcing confidentiality in a private setting, and such regulatory concerns will likely result in diverging policies for some staff and some countries, the people said.

DB’s move stands in stark contrast to other megabanks, like JP Morgan, whose CEO Jamie Dimon said a couple of months ago that working from home diminishes employees’ “creative intelligence.”

Bloomberg added later on in the story that the WFH plan is part of Sewing’s efforts to reach his “ambitious savings target” which he unveiled last summer.

Goldman and JPM have continue to demand investment bank employees return to the office, long-term work from home policies aren’t unique among the biggest European banks. Some Dutch banks are reportedly targeting long-term WFH rates of 50% or more.

Source: Bloomberg

Deutsche is targeting the nearly $2 billion it spent during fiscal year 2019 on furniture and rent for reduction, and believes a permanent WFH scheme could help make a serious impact.

“As publicly known, we are exploring what positive lessons Deutsche Bank can learn from the Covid-19 crisis about how we work as a bank in the future,” Christine Peters, a spokeswoman for the bank, said by email. “We are working on a hybrid model that will combine working from home as well as in the office. No decision has been made yet.”

Sewing isn’t wasting any time: the bank is already working to sublet or walk away from leases as it begins to cut office space along with its headcount (the bank announced plans last year for one of the biggest waves of layoffs since Lehman collapsed).

Authored by Vanand Meliksetian via OilPrice.com,

Oftentimes the most interesting and challenging moments in life come when you least need them. Nowhere is it truer than with Russia’s eternal uphill battle to tap into its vast resources in the Arctic. Every time crude prices fall below 60-70 USD per barrel, Russia’s Arctic ambitions suffer. U.S. and EU sanctions against Russia’s national oil companies (i.e. the only companies that are granted access to the Arctic) have only made things worse for Russia as they have barred Western majors from participating in joint Arctic ventures. Nevertheless, attesting to the Arctic’s immense resource bounty, Russia keeps on discovering new fields, each of them as good as the last.  

It needs to be pointed out that the Putin administration has seemingly done its utmost to complicate its Arctic objectives. For quite a long time the possibility of allowing non-state companies into the Arctic offshore was entertained, but since 2015 the topic was dropped despite U.S. sanctions pitching out erstwhile JV partners. Thus, not only does Arctic production still require a breakeven level of some 100-110 USD per barrel, only two companies can lay their hands on license blocks, Rosneft and Gazprom Neft. In terms of oil production there has been no new project commissioned since Western majors left and Russia is only carrying on with its “legacy” project, the Prirazlomnoye field.

Confronted with a series of delays, oftentimes quite problematic, such as launching the 4th liquefaction train of Yamal LNG, and being fully dependent on NOVATEK’s progress with projects, the Russian Energy Ministry has started to gradually soften up long-term objectives. The initial version of Russia’s 2035 Arctic Strategy stipulated that it reach 46mtpa output by 2025, a target that has now been revised to 43mtpa. With the 19.8mtpa Arctic LNG 2 being delayed beyond the original 2025 deadline and the 5mtpa Obsky LNG still not receiving any final investment decision, the Energy Ministry assumed that it would be expedient to also lower the longer-term aims, bringing the 2030 production target at 64mtpa, exactly in the middle of the output interval NOVATEK has assumed for the same timeframe (57-70mtpa, depending on how swiftly can it commission Arctic LNG 1). 

Gazprom has had quite a remarkable 2019-2020 exploration season in the Kara Sea, located between the Barents and Laptev Seas, separated from them by the archipelagoes of Novaya Zemlya and Staraya Zemlya. This year it confirmed 3P reserves of 391 BCm on the Dinkov field, 121 BCm on the Nyarmeiskoye and 202 BCm on the 75 Let Pobedy (the name celebrates the Soviet Union’s victory in WWII 75 years ago), propelling them into the top discoveries’ list of 2020. Yet more importantly, Gazprom has discovered a new shallower gas deposit at the Leningradskoye field that has yielded flow rates above 1 MCm per day, the highest-ever attained within Russia’s Arctic region. As things stand, the Leningradskoye field boasts reserves of 1.9 TCm, a considerable resource bounty that might increase in the future with further exploration campaigns. 

The Leningradskoye field remains, however, a reminder of how intensive geological appraisals were in Soviet times, plentiful untapped fields date their discovery back to the late 1980s and early 1990s. The biggest find by modern Russia is the Universitetskaya prospect (renamed Pobeda, Russian for Victory), drilled in 2014 with the active participation of ExxonMobil. As victorious as Rosneft felt at that time, boasting of 3P reserves of 1MMbbls crude and 499 BCm gas, the field’s past 5 years have been characterized by total idleness. Rosneft carried out seismic surveying of the bountiful Prinovozemelskiy license in 2018 and upon the perusal of data, the Russian NOC decided to start drilling again, simultaneously prompted by the Energy Ministry to start working on Arctic projects.

There were 2 wildcats drilled roughly at the same time – the Vikulovskaya-1 well was drilled some 50 southwest of Pobeda (using the Chinse Nanhai IX semi-submersible rig owned by COSL) and the Rogozinskaya-1 well around 150km to the east of Rosneft’s prime Arctic asset (again, using a Chinese semi-submersible rig, Oriental Discovery). The results are still unknown as Rosneft only finished drilling operations in late September 2020, however it is possible that Russian media will soon start talking about a renaissance of Arctic oil for the country. The Rogozinskaya-1 wildcat is particularly interesting, being drilled in water depths of a mere 30 meters – the Kara Sea is generally a rather shallow sea with almost half of its territory having a depth of 50 meters or less. 

There are several non-trivial factors to consider when assessing Russia’s Arctic potential. First, 20 or 30 years ago production in Arctic areas would have necessitated even more complex solutions than it already does, solely due to the fact that temperatures are warming. The Kara Sea, home to most of known Arctic discoveries, has experienced the most tangible increase in air temperatures – with the annual averages having risen 5°C since 1998. This is not only noteworthy for the very few inhabitants of cities scattered on the Kara Sea shoreline (Dikson or Novy Port) but also has immediate consequences for Northern Sea Route navigation. For instance, coastal territories along the Kara Sea would witness negative temperatures for an average of 8 months a year with temperatures in July fluctuating between 1-6°C. Were the external surroundings to warm up further, drilling campaigns and navigation seasons might be extended, all the while costing less. 

Airlines are on track to lose up to $157 billion between this year and next year, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA) – a sharp increase over their June projection of $100 billion in losses they made in June for the same period.

The new projection includes a $118.5 billion deficit for 2020, and at least $38.7 billion for 2021, according to Reuters, which suggests that the bleak outlook “underscores challenges still facing the sector despite upbeat news on development of COVID-19 vaccines, whose global deployment will continue throughout next year.”

“The positive impact it will have on the economy and air traffic will not happen massively before mid-2021,” said IATA Director General Alexandre de Juniac in a statement to Reuters.

Passenger numbers are expected to drop to 1.8 billion this year from 4.5 billion in 2019, IATA estimates, and will recover only partially to 2.8 billion next year. Passenger revenue for 2020 is expected to have plunged 69% to $191 billion.

 

“That’s by far the biggest shock the industry has experienced in the post-World War Two years,” IATA Chief Economist Brian Pearce said.

The forecasts assume significant re-opening of borders by the middle of next year, helped by some combination of COVID-19 testing and vaccine deployment. –Reuters

The association recommends that governments stop travel-killing quarantines and instead implement widespread testing for COVID-19.

“We are seeing states progressively coming to listen to us,” said de Juniac, pointing to testing programs underway in the United States, Britain, Singapore, France, Germany and Italy.

Recently, Quantas Airways CEO Alan Joyce said that the COVID-19 vaccine will be mandatory for anyone boarding its flights, and that it will become the norm for international travel.

“We are looking at changing our terms and conditions to say, for international travelers, that we will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft,” said Joyce, adding “I think that’s going to be a common thing talking to my colleagues in other airlines around the globe.”

De Juniac, however, is not a fan.

“It would prevent people who are refusing (the vaccine) from traveling,” he said, adding “Systematic testing is even more critical to reopen borders than the vaccine.”

Meanwhile, air cargo is doing extremely well during the pandemic – and will likely see global revenues rise 15% to $117.7 billion in 2020 despite a decline in volume of 11.6% to 54.2 million tons according to the IATA.

Some $173 billion in government aid has left recipients with debts that threaten to hobble future investment, it warned, and more bankruptcies are likely. Norwegian Air became the latest casualty on Nov. 18, when it filed for bankruptcy protection in Ireland. –Reuters

According to the report, the average airline can survive another 8.5 months with liquidity on hand, while some have just weeks. “I think we will get consolidation through some airline failures,” says Pearce.

Authored by Amir Taheri via The Gatestone Institute,

As the dust settles after the latest fighting in Transcaucasia we may be witnessing the shaping of a bigger disaster involving more parts of the Western Asian arch of instability spanning from the Caspian Basin to the Mediterranean.

Pictured: Erdogan (right) with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev on April 25, 2018 in Ankara, Turkey.

Let’s briefly recall what happened.

Sometime in 2018, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered to help his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliev to reconquer the High Qarabagh enclave captured by neighboring Armenia in the early 1990s, soon after the disintegration of the Soviet Empire. A crash program of training and arming the newly created Azeri army was launched by Ankara, financed by Azerbaijan’s spiraling oil revenues. The fact that the so-called Minsk Trio, the United States, France and Russia, who guaranteed the status quo had lost interest in the whole thing enabled Erdogan to put the new and as yet fragile Azeri republic on a war footing with the help of over 100 Turkish advisers and some 300 Syrian jihadis forming part of a Turkish Foreign Legion.

Meanwhile, successive Armenian governments, thinking that Russia will always be there to protect Armenia, as it had done since the 18th century, had neglected the new nation’s defense needs. Just over a month of fighting drove the Armenians onto the defensive and then defeat on various fronts. But when the Azeris and Turkish allies were swooning for the kill, Russia intervened by calling the leaders of Baku and Yerevan to Moscow to agree to a confused ceasefire that, while stopping the fighting, left the deep causes of the conflict untouched. In typical fashion of opportunist powers, Russia used the occasion to extend its military presence, already significant in Armenia, to Azerbaijan as well. Under the Moscow accord, a Russian “peacekeeping” force will seize control of the ceasefire line plus the borders of Azerbaijan and Armenia with Iran.

On balance, the Azeris didn’t gain much. Most of the disputed enclave, notably its capital Stepanakert (Khan Kandi in Azeri) remains beyond their control, while a good chunk of their own territory, notably the land route between Azerbaijan proper and its “autonomous” enclave of Nakhichevan, fall under Russian control.

Armenia loses six settlements while at least half of High Qarabagh’s ethnic Armenian population has chosen to flee, often burning their villages. Worse still, Yerevan will now have to consult, read obey, Moscow before attempting any revenge in the future. The message is clear: Transcaucasia was a Russian protectorate for two centuries and is again becoming a Russian glacis.

All this may recall what Putin has done in some other so-called “near neighbors” of Russia. He has annexed the Crimean Peninsula and carved out a fiefdom in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. He has annexed the Georgian enclave of South Ossetia and created another fiefdom in Abkhazia. He has a similar fiefdom in eastern Moldova, under Russian protection and is breathing down Latvia’s neck with a military build-up.

And yet, Putin may turn out to be one of the losers in this deadly game.

To start with, the mini-victory he has won against Armenia may have whetted Erdogan’s appetite for further conquests. Pro-Erdogan papers in Turkey are beating the drums about “victory in the Caucasus” as the first time, since the end of the Ottoman Empire, that Turks have managed to “liberate” a chunk of Islamdom from “infidel” rule. Forty-eight hours after the ceasefire, Erdogan asked the Turkish Parliament to let him send an expeditionary force to Azerbaijan. A Turkish military presence in Transcaucasia could entail the risk of direct confrontation between Moscow and Ankara which are already in conflict in a number of other places notably Syria, Libya and Kosovo.

Worse still for Putin, Erdogan has already indicated he wants to involve his Foreign Legion of Jihadis in protecting “Muslim lands”. The Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta quotes Russian military experts who warn that Erdogan may have his eyes on stirring trouble among Crimean Tatar already unhappy with Russian annexation. A recent visit by a gentleman who claims to be heir to the throne of Crimea on behalf of the Develt Giray Tatar dynasty who ruled in Baghche-Sarai in medieval times was given top billing in Ankara. (Crimean Tatars were transported to Siberia en masse by Stalin but allowed to return under Khrushchev in the 1950s.)

The region is full of Muslim lands to be “liberated “from Russian “Infidel” control, notably Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia and Charkes-Qarachai, not to mention the more populated autonomous republics of Tatarstan a Bashkortostan.

More immediately, Erdogan’s ambitions may threaten Armenia’s very existence. Turks blame Armenians for having stabbed the Ottoman Empire in the back in the First World War by siding with Russia. It is no accident that Ankara has revived the memory of the so-called Iravan (Yerevan in Armenian) Khanate, a mini-state under a self-styled Turkic khan that enjoyed a brief existence during the period of Iranian decline under the Qajars.

Several Moscow papers claim that Erdogan’s swelling ambition is dangerous for both Russia and Armenia.

By mixing his Muslim Brotherhood jihadism with pan-Turkic themes that recall Enver Pasha, Erdogan hopes to replace the Ataturk narrative with a new narrative of religious nationalism. It is no accident that he is also sharpening his anti-West rhetoric and tightening ties with the Grey Wolves, a pan-Turkish outfit banned by the European Union as a “terrorist organization.” The “Grey Wolves” dream of a Turkic empire stretching from the Balkans to Central Asia. In their most cherished book, The White Lilies, they even claim that Finns and Hungarians are also Turks and would become part of the empire.

The mess created by Putin and Erdogan in Transcaucasia may also revive Armenian militancy. There are some 12 million Armenians across the globe, more than 3 million in Russia alone. In recent days we have heard noises about “volunteers” from various parts of Europe and North America who might go to the region to fight against the “Turkish enemy.”

Two decades ago, we witnessed a similar trend as Serb and Croats in diaspora returned to the Balkans to fight for their respective patch of land. For almost three decades, until the fall of the Soviet Empire, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) was a thorn in the side of both Turkey and Russia.

Ah, and what about Iran? It has lost its border with Armenia, and once again has Russia as a land neighbor. The latest episode revealed the Islamic Republic as a country without a proper government in the normal sense of the term, and thus as an irrelevant spectator as the “big beasts” fight it out.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

Four geoeconomic summits compressed in one week tell the story of where we stand in these supremely dystopian times…

The (virtual) signing of RCEP in Vietnam was followed by the equally virtual BRICS meeting hosted by Moscow, the APEC meeting hosted by Malaysia, and the G20 this past weekend hosted by Saudi Arabia.

Cynics have not failed to note the spectacular theater of the absurd of having the Top 20 – at least in theory – economies discussing what is arguably the turning point in the world-system linked to a beheading-friendly desert oil hacienda with a 7th century mentality.

The Riyadh declaration did its best to lift the somber planetary mood, vowing to deploy “all available policy tools” (no precise details) to contain Covid-19 and heroically “save” the global economy by “advancing” global pandemic preparedness, vaccine development and distribution – in tandem with debt relief – for the Global South.

Not a peep about The Great Reset – the Brave New World scheme concocted by Herr Schwab of Davos and fully supported by the IMF, Big Tech, transnational Big Capital interests and the oh so benign Prince Charles. Meanwhile, off the record, G20 sherpas moaned about the lack of real global governance and multiple attacks on multilateralism.

And not a peep as well about the real life vaccine war between the expensive Western candidates – Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca – and the much cheaper Russia-China versions – Sputnik V and Sinovac.

What seems to be the case is that any agenda – sinister or otherwise – fits the one-size-fits-all vow by the G20 to provide “opportunities of the 21st century for all by empowering people, safeguarding the planet, and shaping new frontiers.”

The House of Xi

At the G20, President Xi Jinping did not waste the chance – after RCEP, BRICS and APEC – to once again emphasize China’s priorities: multilateralism, support for WTO reform, ample international cooperation on vaccine research and production.

But then, in tandem with reducing tariffs and facilitating the trade of crucial medical supplies, Xi proposed a global health QR code – a sound way to restore global travel and trade: “While containing the virus, we need to restore the secure and smooth operation of global industrial and supply chains.”

Predictably, there were howls about neo-Orwellian intrusion, comparing the QR code with the exceptionally misunderstood Chinese credit system. Herr Schwab’s Great Reset in fact proposes something similar, with even more neo-Orwellian overtones, disguised under an innocent “Covid Pass” app, or highly secure “health passport”.

What Xi has proposed amounts to just a mutual recognition of health certificates, issued by different nations, based on nucleic acid tests. No gene altering vaccines coupled with nanochips. These QR codes, incorporated to health apps, are already used for domestic travel in China.

Chinese officials have made it very clear that Beijing has been working as the representative of the Global South inside the G20. That’s multilateralism in action. And the multilateralist drive extends from RCEP – signed between 15 nations – to the brilliant Sun Tzu maneuver of China now accepting even the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the successor of the Obama-promoted and Trump-detonated TPP.

This revival – a case of Make TPP Chinese Again – can be envisaged because Beijing not only has mastered how to contain Covid-19 but is also recovering in lightning speed. China will be the only major economy growing in 2020 – de facto leading the world to a tentative post-Covid paradigm.

What the APEC meeting made crystal clear is that with East Asia graphically hitting the economic limelight, as seen with RCEP, much vaunted US “leadership” inevitably diminishes.

APEC promoted a so-called Putrajaya Vision 2040, condensing an “open, dynamic, resilient and peaceful” Asia-Pacific all the way to 2040. That neatly ties in with the three accumulated five-year Chinese plans all the way to 2035, approved last month at the CCP plenum in Beijing.

The emphasis, once again, is on multilateralism and an open global economy.

Few are more capable to capture the moment than Professor Wang Yiwei at the Institute of International Affairs at Renmin University, who wrote the best Chinese book on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Wang stresses how China is in a period of “strategic opportunity” and is now “the most powerful leader of globalization”. China’s emphasis on multilateralism will “activate the connectivity and vitality of a trade platform like RCEP”.

Stranger than fiction

Now compare all of the above with Trump at the G20 tweeting about the election dystopia and privileging golfing instead of discussing Covid-19 containment.

And then there’s The Elements of the China Challenge, the new 74-page delusional epic concocted by the office of secretary Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo.

Diplomatic howls comparing it with the notorious George Kennan “long telegram” that codified the containment of the USSR in the Cold War are nonsense. Chinese Foreign Ministry reaction was more to the point: this was concocted by some “living fossils of the Cold War” and is doomed to end up “being consigned to the dustbin of history”.

President Xi Jinping, at RCEP, BRICS, APEC and the G20, concisely laid out the Chinese case: multilateralism, international cooperation on multiple fields, an open global economy, due representation of Global South’s interests.

As we wait for a set of imponderables all the way to January 20, 2021, perhaps an angular approach to what may lie ahead for the world economy is best offered by fiction.

Enter Billions, season 5, episode 2, dialogue written by Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Axe: “You know they call us traders ‘gamblers’. The world’s economy is one big casino, fueled by a giant debt bubble and computer driven derivatives. And there’s only one thing better than being a gambler at a casino.”

Wags: “That’s being the house.”

Axe: “That’s right. There’s a systemized machine out there, sucking capital from localities and injecting it into the global markets, where it can be used to speculate and manipulate. And if something goes wrong there are bailouts and bail-ins, federal aid and easing. Where the government doesn’t hunt you down, but instead gives you a nice soft net to land in.”

Wags: “That’s your answer to the fireside chat: You want to become a bank.”

Axe: “I want to become a bank.”

Wags: “In order to rob it?”

Axe: “In order that I don’t have to.”

Today in “those who surrender their liberty for security” news…

The Jackson, Mississippi police department is piloting a 45 day program that allows them to live stream private security cameras, including Amazon Ring cameras, at the residences of its citizens. 

It’s no surprise that Amazon’s Ring cameras were the only brand named for the pilot program, as EFF pointed out, since they have over 1,000 partnerships with local police departments. 

The program allows Ring owners to patch their camera streams to a “Real Time Crime Center” – i.e. a dispatcher on desk duty whose new favorite way of passing the time is to watch you bring out your garbage twice a week in a bathrobe. 

While the pilot program is supposedly “opt-in” only, meaning residents have to volunteer to be a part of it, it is an obvious step in the wrong direction of mass privacy invasion without a warrant. 

The worst part is that even if you don’t participate and a neighbor’s cameras are pointed off center, perhaps towards a portion of your property, that footage can now be reviewed and combed through by law enforcement officials. 

Police have used Ring cameras to “build comprehensive CCTV camera networks blanketing whole neighborhoods”, EFF notes, reducing the hardware burden on the department and slipping their presence into a neighborhood where it may otherwise not be welcomed. 

Amazon published a statement distancing themselves from the program: “[Amazon and Ring] are not involved in any way with any of the companies or the city in connection with the pilot program. The companies, the police and the city that were discussed in the article do not have access to Ring’s systems or the Neighbors App. Ring customers have control and ownership of their devices and videos ,and can choose to allow access as they wish.”

Submitted by South Front,

The Yemeni Houthis have fired their new cruise missile, the Quds-2, at a Saudi Aramco oil company distribution station in the kingdom’s city of Jeddah, the group’s media news wing announced early on November 23. A spokesperson for the Armed Forces of the Houthi-led government, Yahya Sarea, said foreign companies and residents in Saudi Arabia should stay away from the military and oil infrastructure of Saudi Arabia as “operations will continue”. He emphasized that the missile precisely hit its target causing notable damage.

The Houthis claim that the Quds-2 is a new generation “winged missile” produced by their Missile Forces. As always, the missile was likely assembled thanks to technical assistance from Iran or Iranian-supplied components.  That facility is located southeast of Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz International Airport. Over the past years, the Houthis have repeatedly pounded the military section of the airport with missiles and drones. Therefore, it was just the question of time, when the nearby oil infrastructure would be hit.

At the same time, the Saudi side remains silent regarding the impact of the Houthi missile strike. This is an ordinary posture of Saudi Arabia towards Houthi missile and drone strikes. The Kingdom censors social media, denies any damage and claims that all targets were intercepted, if it appears possible and that no visual evidence of destruction are leaked immediately. Also, the main oil production and export facilities of Aramco are mostly in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, more than 1000km across the country from Jeddah. Therefore, Riyadh likely believes that it can silence another setback in the ongoing war with the Yemeni movement.

In September 2019, when the Houthis, with probable help from Iran, put out of service almost a half of Saudi oil infrastructure by hitting targets in Abqaiq and Khurais, the Kingdom was vowing a powerful response and the full destruction of Houthi missile and drone capabilities. However, a year later, the situation on the ground in Yemen for Saudi-backed forces became even worse and the widely-promoted ‘great Saudi victory’ over the Houthis turned into ashes.

In recent month, Saudi-led forces lost the battle for the Yemeni province of Bayda, and now they seem to be losing the battle for Marib. Recently they retreated from the key Maas Base and the route for the potential Houthi advance on the provincial capital is almost open. The denial of the facts on the ground and the air dominance of the Kingdom did not help it to achieve a victory in the war. In turn, it’s the Houthis who have put themselves in the position that allowed them to turn the tide of the conflict. With the current trend in the Yemeni conflict, Saudi Arabia will apparently have to pay an even bigger price for its intervention in the Arab country.

Wealthy Americans are rushing to secure second passports, as a growing club of individuals have begun participating in government programs abroad which allow foreigners to acquire them, according to Bloomberg.

Eric Schmidt acquired all the typical trappings of a mega-rich U.S. citizen: a superyacht, a Gulfstream jet, a Manhattan penthouse.

One of his newest assets is far less conventional: a second passport.

Alphabet Inc.’s former chief executive officer applied to become a citizen of Cyprus, according to an announcement last month in a Cypriot newspaper that was first reported by the website Recode. –Bloomberg

According to the report, Americans rarely sought to buy so-called ‘golden passports’ in prior years, with such programs historically appealing to people from countries with far fewer travel freedoms than the United States – such as China, Pakistan and Nigeria.

“We haven’t seen the likes of this before,” said Paddy Blewer, a London-based citizenship and residency advisory director at Henley & Partners. “The dam actually burst — and we didn’t realize it — at the end of last year, and it’s just continued getting stronger.“

A second passport can be had for as ‘little’ as $100,000 – and include potential benefits such as lower taxes, greater investment freedom, and hassle-free travel.

The so-called citizenship-by-investment programs haven’t historically been as popular with Americans since one of their main draws — the favorable tax regimes of adopted countries — has been of little benefit to citizens of the U.S., one of the few nations to tax its people regardless of where they live.

The current heightened interest among U.S. citizens predates the coronavirus pandemic, but the crisis has helped turbo-charge demand as they plan for how to maintain some freedom of movement with lockdown measures increasing amid a swelling second wave of Covid-19 cases. –Bloomberg

“Americans are thinking: ‘I want to have that ability to move as quickly as possible and not be stuck,” said Nestor Alfred, CEO of St. Lucia’s citizenship-by-investment unit.

Another factor stoking interest is the prospect of a President Biden and a flipped Senate in January resulting in massive tax hikes on the wealthy. Others are securing the passports out of fear of social unrest according to Apex Capital Partners, which says its clients have increased 650% since the November 3 election.

“We’re seeing this interest from Americans who are all saying the same things that Chinese, or Middle Eastern or Russian clients are saying,” said Apex founder Nuri Katz. “They’re saying, ‘We’re not leaving the U.S. right now, but we’re concerned and we want to have something else, just in case.’”

Over half-a-dozen countries are now offering a citizenship-by-investment program, after St. Kitts and Nevis was the first country to do so in the early 1980s. Malta, for example, has raised $1 billion through June 2019 following the launch of their program last decade. The Carribean territory of Dominica has raised over $350 million in five years.

That said, the programs have also invited their share of scandal.

Fugitive Malaysian financier Jho Low was among 26 individuals to lose their Cyprus citizenship last year. The speaker of the Cypriot House of Parliament, Demetris Syllouris, resigned last month after offering to help a Chinese businessman with a criminal record get citizenship.

…

Following the scandal, Cyprus said it would end its current passport-for-investment program on Nov. 1. The European Union, meanwhile, issued legal ultimatums to Malta and Cyprus about their citizenship-by-investment programs, claiming they may have violated the EU law. Representatives for Malta’s government, which announced plans to revise its program before the EU’s action, didn’t respond to requests for comment. –Bloomberg

What’s next, golden immunity passports?

Authored by Whitney Webb via UnlimitedHangout.com,

British and American state intelligence agencies are “weaponizing truth” to quash vaccine hesitancy as both nations prepare for mass inoculations, in a recently announced “cyber war” to be commanded by AI-powered arbiters of truth against information sources that challenge official narratives.

In just the past week, the national-security states of the United States and United Kingdom have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 “war on terror” are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting “vaccine hesitancy” and information related to Covid-19 that runs counter to their state narratives. 

A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the UK’s signal intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which seeks to target websites that publish content deemed to be “propaganda” that raises concerns regarding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccine development and the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations involved. 

Similar efforts are underway in the United States, with the US military recently funding a CIA-backed firm—stuffed with former counterterrorism officials who were behind the occupation of Iraq and the rise of the so-called Islamic State—to develop an AI algorithm aimed specifically at new websites promoting “suspected” disinformation related to the Covid-19 crisis and the US military–led Covid-19 vaccination effort known as Operation Warp Speed.

Both countries are preparing to silence independent journalists who raise legitimate concerns over pharmaceutical industry corruption or the extreme secrecy surrounding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccination efforts, now that Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is slated to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by month’s end. 

Pfizer’s history of being fined billions for illegal marketing and for bribing government officials to help them cover up an illegal drug trial that killed eleven children (among other crimes) has gone unmentioned by most mass media outlets, which instead have celebrated the apparently imminent approval of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine without questioning the company’s history or that the mRNA technology used in the vaccine has sped through normal safety trial protocols and has never been approved for human use. Also unmentioned is that the head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Patrizia Cavazzoni, is the former Pfizer vice president for product safety who covered up the connection of one of its products to birth defects.

Pedestrians walk past Pfizer world headquarters in New York on Monday Nov. 9, 2020. Pfizer says an early peek at its vaccine data suggests the shots may be 90% effective at preventing COVID-19, but it doesn’t mean a vaccine is imminent. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

Essentially, the power of the state is being wielded like never before to police online speech and to deplatform news websites to protect the interests of powerful corporations like Pfizer and other scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giants as well as the interests of the US and UK national-security states, which themselves are intimately involved in the Covid-19 vaccination endeavor. 

UK Intelligence’s New Cyberwar Targeting “Anti-Vaccine Propaganda”

On Monday, the UK newspaper The Times reported that the UK’s GCHQ “has begun an offensive cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by hostile states” and “is using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State” to do so. In addition, the UK government has ordered the British military’s 77th Brigade, which specializes in “information warfare,” to launch an online campaign to counter “deceptive narratives” about Covid-19 vaccine candidates.

The newly announced GCHQ “cyber war” will not only take down “anti-vaccine propaganda” but will also seek to “disrupt the operations of the cyberactors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.”  The effort will also involve GCHQ reaching out to other countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance (US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) to alert their partner agencies in those countries to target such “propaganda” sites hosted within their borders.

The Times stated that “the government regards tackling false information about inoculation as a rising priority as the prospect of a reliable vaccine against the coronavirus draws closer,” suggesting that efforts will continue to ramp up as a vaccine candidate gets closer to approval.

It seems that, from the perspective of the UK national-security state, those who question corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and its possible impact on the leading experimental Covid-19 vaccine candidates (all of which use experimental vaccine technologies that have never before been approved for human use) should be targeted with tools originally designed to combat terrorist propaganda. 

While The Times asserted that the effort would target content “that originated only from state adversaries” and would not target the sites of “ordinary citizens,” the newspaper suggested that the effort would rely on the US government for determining whether or not a site is part of a “foreign disinformation” operation. 

This is highly troubling given that the US recently seized the domains of many sites, including the American Herald Tribune, which it erroneously labeled as “Iranian propaganda,” despite its editor in chief, Anthony Hall, being based in Canada. The US government made this claim about the American Herald Tribune after the cybersecurity firm FireEye, a US government contractor, stated that it had “moderate confidence” that the site had been “founded in Iran.” 

In addition, the fact that GCHQ has alleged that most of the sites it plans to target are “linked to Moscow” gives further cause for concern given that the UK government was caught funding the Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative, which falsely labeled critics of the UK government’s actions as well as its narratives with respect to the Syria conflict as being related to “Russian disinformation” campaigns.

Given this precedent, it is certainly plausible that GCHQ could take the word of either an allied government, a government contractor, or perhaps even an allied media organization such as Bellingcat or the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab that a given site is “foreign propaganda” in order to launch a cyber offensive against it. Such concerns are only amplified when one of the main government sources for The Times article bluntly stated that “GCHQ has been told to take out antivaxers [sic] online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda,” which suggests that the targets of GCHQ’s new cyber war will, in fact, be determined by the content itself rather than their suspected “foreign” origin. The “foreign” aspect instead appears to be a means of evading the prohibition in GCHQ’s operational mandate on targeting the speech or websites of ordinary citizens.

This larger pivot toward treating alleged “anti-vaxxers” as “national security threats” has been ongoing for much of this year, spearheaded in part by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the UK government’s Steering Committee on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force, which is part of the UK government’s Commission for Countering Extremism. 

Ahmed told the UK newspaper The Independent in July that “I would go beyond calling anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists to say they are an extremist group that pose a national security risk.” He then stated that “once someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy it’s easy to lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world views that can lead to violent extremism,” thereby implying that “anti-vaxxers” might engage in acts of violent extremism. Among the websites cited by Ahmed’s organization as promoting such “extremism” that poses a “national security risk” were Children’s Health Defense, the National Vaccine Information Center, Informed Consent Action Network, and Mercola.com, among others.

Similarly, a think tank tied to US intelligence—whose GCHQ equivalent, the National Security Agency, will take part in the newly announced “cyber war”—argued in a research paper published just months before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis that “the US ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement would pose a threat to national security in the event of a ‘pandemic with a novel organism.’”

InfraGard, “a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and members of the private sector,” warned in the paper published last June that “the US anti-vaccine movement would also be connected with ‘social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns’ orchestrated by the Russian government,” as cited by The Guardian. The InfraGard paper further claimed that prominent “anti-vaxxers” are aligned “with other conspiracy movements including the far right . . . and social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns by many foreign and domestic actors. Included among these actors is the Internet Research Agency, the Russian government–aligned organization.”

An article published just last month by the Washington Post argued that “vaccine hesitancy is mixing with coronavirus denial and merging with far-right American conspiracy theories, including Qanon,” which the FBI named a potential domestic terror threat last year. The article quoted Peter Hotez, dean of the School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, as saying “The US anti-vaccination movement is globalizing and it’s going toward more-extremist tendencies.”

Simone Warstat of Louisville, Colo., waves a placard during a rally against a legislative bill to make it more difficult for parents to opt out for non-medical reasons to immunize their children Sunday, June 7, 2020, in Denver. 

It is worth pointing out that many so-called “anti-vaxxers” are actually critics of the pharmaceutical industry and are not necessarily opposed to vaccines in and of themselves, making the labels “anti-vaxxer” and “anti-vaccine” misleading. Given that many pharmaceutical giants involved in making Covid-19 vaccines donate heavily to politiciansin both countries and have been involved in numerous safety scandals, using state intelligence agencies to wage cyber war against sites that investigate such concerns is not only troubling for the future of journalism but it suggests that the UK is taking a dangerous leap toward becoming a country that uses its state powers to treat the enemies of corporations as enemies of the state.

The CIA-Backed Firm “Weaponizing Truth” with AI

In early October, the US Air Force and US Special Operations Command announced that they had awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to the US-based “machine intelligence” company Primer. Per the press release, “Primer will develop the first-ever machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation [emphasis added]. Primer will also enhance its natural language processing platform to automatically analyze tactical events to provide commanders with unprecedented insight as events unfold in near real-time.”

According to Primer, the company “builds software machines that read and write in English, Russian, and Chinese to automatically unearth trends and patterns across large volumes of data,” and their work “supports the mission of the intelligence community and broader DOD by automating reading and research tasks to enhance the speed and quality of decision-making.” In other words, Primer is developing an algorithm that would allow the national-security state to outsource many military and intelligence analyst positions to AI. In fact, the company openly admits this, stating that their current effort “will automate the work typically done by dozens of analysts in a security operations center to ingest all of the data relevant to an event as it happens and funnel it into a unified user interface.”

Primer’s ultimate goal is to use their AI to entirely automate the shaping of public perceptions and become the arbiter of “truth,” as defined by the state. Primer’s founder, Sean Gourley, who previously created AI programs for the military to track “insurgency” in post-invasion Iraq, asserted in an April blog post that “computational warfare and disinformation campaigns will, in 2020, become a more serious threat than physical war, and we will have to rethink the weapons we deploy to fight them.” 

In that same post, Gourley argued for the creation of a “Manhattan Project for truth” that would create a publicly available Wikipedia-style database built off of “knowledge bases [that] already exist inside many countries’ intelligence agencies for national security purposes.” Gourley then wrote that “this effort would be ultimately about building and enhancing our collective intelligence and establishing a baseline for what’s true or not” as established by intelligence agencies. He concludes his blog post by stating that “in 2020, we will begin to weaponize truth.”

Notably, on November 9, the same day that GCHQ announced its plans to target “anti-vaccine propaganda,” the US website NextGov reported that Primer’s Pentagon-funded effort had turned its attention specifically to “Covid-19 related disinformation.” According to Primer’s director of science, John Bohannon, “Primer will be integrating bot detection, synthetic text detection and unstructured textual claims analysis capabilities into our existing artificial intelligence platform currently in use with DOD. . . . This will create the first unified mission-ready platform to effectively counter Covid-19-related disinformation in near-real time.”

Bohannon, who previously worked as a mainstream journalist embedded with NATO forces in Afghanistan, also told NextGov that Primer’s new Covid-19–focused effort “automatically classifies documents into one of 10 categories to enable the detection of the impact of COVID” on areas such as “business, science and technology, employment, the global economy, and elections.” The final product is expected to be delivered to the Pentagon in the second quarter of next year.

Though a so-called private company, Primer is deeply linked to the national-security state it is designed to protect by “weaponizing truth.” Primer proudly promotes itself as having more than 15 percent of its staff hailing from the US intelligence community or military. The director of the company’s National Security Group is Brian Raymond, a former CIA intelligence officer who served as the Director for Iraq on the US National Security Council after leaving the agency. 

The company also recently added several prominent national-security officials to its board including:

• Gen. Raymond Thomas (ret.), who led the command of all US and NATO Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan and is the former commander of both US Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

• Lt. Gen. VeraLinn Jamieson (ret.), the former deputy chief of staff for Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance who led the Air Force’s intelligence and cyber forces. She also personally developed “strategic partnerships” between the Air Force and Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and IBM in order “to accelerate the Air Force’s digital transformation.”

• Brett McGurk, one of the “chief architects” of the Iraq War “surge,” alongside the notorious Kagan family, as NSC Director for Iraq, and then as special assistant to the president and senior Director for Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration. Under Obama and during part of the Trump administration, McGurk was the special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS at the State Department, helping to manage the “dirty war” waged by the US, the UK, and other allies against Syria.

In addition to those recent board hires, Primer brought on Sue Gordon, the former principal deputy director of National Intelligence, as a strategic adviser. Gordon previously “drove partnerships within the US Intelligence Community and provided advice to the National Security Council in her role as deputy director of national intelligence” and had a twenty-seven-year career at the CIA. The deep links are unsurprising, given that Primer is financially backed by the CIA’s venture-capital arm In-Q-Tel and the venture-capital arm of billionaire Mike Bloomberg, Bloomberg Beta.

Operation Warp Speed’s Disinformation Blitzkrieg   

The rapid increase in interest by the US and UK national-security states toward Covid-19 “disinformation,” particularly as it relates to upcoming Covid-19 vaccination campaigns, is intimately related to the media-engagement strategy of the US government’s Operation Warp Speed. 

Officially a “public-private partnership,” Operation Warp Speed, which has the goal of vaccinating 300 million Americans by next January, is dominated by the US military and also involves several US intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as intelligence-linked tech giants Google, Oracle, and Palantir. Several reports published in The Last American Vagabondby this author and journalist Derrick Broze have revealed the extreme secrecy of the operation, its numerous conflicts of interest, and its deep ties to Silicon Valley and Orwellian technocratic initiatives. 

Warp Speed’s official guidance discusses at length its phased plan for engaging the public and addressing issues of “vaccine hesitancy.” According to the Warp Speed document entitled “From the Factory to the Frontlines,” “strategic communications and public messaging are critical to ensure maximum acceptance of vaccines, requiring a saturation of messaging across the national media.” It also states that “working with established partners—especially those that are trusted sources for target audiences—is critical to advancing public understanding of, access to, and acceptance of eventual vaccines” and that “identifying the right messages to promote vaccine confidence, countering misinformation, and targeting outreach to vulnerable and at-risk populations will be necessary to achieve high coverage.”

The document also notes that Warp Speed will employ the CDC’s three-pronged strategic framework for its communications effort. The third pillar of that strategy is entitled “Stop Myths” and has as a main focus “establish[ing] partnerships to contain the spread of misinformation” as well as “work[ing] with local partners and trusted messengers to improve confidence in vaccines.”

Though that particular Warp Speed document is short on specifics, the CDC’s Covid-19 Vaccination Program Interim Playbook contains additional information. It states that Operation Warp Speed will “engage and use a wide range of partners, collaborations, and communication and news media channels to achieve communication goals, understanding that channel preferences and credible sources vary among audiences and people at higher risk for severe illness and critical populations, and channels vary in their capacity to achieve different communication objectives.” It states that it will focus its efforts in this regard on “traditional media channels” (print, radio, and TV) as well as “digital media” (internet, social media, and text messaging). 

The CDC document further reveals that the “public messaging” campaign to “promote vaccine uptake” and address “vaccine hesitancy” is divided into four phases and adds that the overall communication strategy of Warp Speed “should be timely and applicable for the current phase of the Covid-19 Vaccination program.” 

Those phases are:

• Before a vaccine is available

• The vaccine is available in limited supply for certain populations of early focus

• The vaccine is increasingly available for other critical populations and the general public

• The vaccine is widely available

Given that the Covid-19 vaccine candidate produced by Pfizer is expected to be approved by the end of November, it appears that the US national-security state, which is essentially running Operation Warp Speed, along with “trusted messengers” in mass media, is preparing to enter the second phase of its communications strategy, one in which news organizations and journalists who raise legitimate concerns about Warp Speed will be de-platformed to make way for the “required” saturation of pro-vaccine messaging across the English-speaking media landscape.

Consumers are panic-hoarding toilet paper, food, and ammo as coronavirus surges across the country. Kroger, Giant, Target, and other supermarket chains have recently placed limits on toilet paper and other high demand goods to prevent shortages. 

Last week, we reminded readers that the next round of “panic hoarding” was about to begin – and as of this week – that is certainly the case with reports across Twitter of empty store shelves. 

Toilet paper shortage 2.0 #HereWeGoAgain #2020strikesagain pic.twitter.com/icG3Z1b0O7

— Julie Dolan (@WLKYJulie) November 18, 2020

Many people are saying that everything is going very strongly and only great energy exists in the American supply chain for paper products pic.twitter.com/kab6Y2myzJ

— Attorney@Law (@TheGlare_TM) November 16, 2020

yeah. The second toilet paper shortage of 2020 pic.twitter.com/xjrEiOHDaf

— Peter Jausovec 💻 (@pjausovec) November 19, 2020

While everyone scrambles to find toilet paper in stores and or online, there’s a more hygienic way to wipe than using a roll of Charmin ultra-soft, that is, a bidet. 

Americans are quickly catching on about bidets, commonly found in European and Asian countries. The neat thing about a bidet, it requires no toilet paper and seamlessly cleans the undercarriage after nature calls. 

Internet search trends for “best bidet” are surging again, the second time this year. The first eruption occurred in March after lockdowns resulted in a shortage of essential items. Now, as states and cities reimpose strict social distancing measures, with threats of lockdowns if a Biden presidency is seen early next year, bidet searches are back to April levels. 

Is the panic-hoarding of bidets next?