Tag: finance

Authored by Michael Lesher via Off-Guardian.org,

I never thought I’d see the day when publicly wearing a muzzle would constitute a proof of virtue in the same country whose government, less than twenty years ago, rationalized the bloody invasion of Afghanistan as a way of saving women from veiling their faces.

But then, I never thought I’d hear American liberals proudly denounce supporters of the US Constitution as a “death cult,” nor that I’d actually start to find Donald Trump sounding almost reasonable.

But at least there’s one thing we can all be sure about: “mainstream” news media, busily cheerleading for the death of freedom, will continue to gush with absurdities, self-contradictions and victim-shaming memes in their propaganda war to Keep America Gagged. The Bill of Rights (in case you haven’t noticed) is history; today, we demonstrate our patriotism by creeping around hiding our faces. Dissenters need not apply.

If you think I’m exaggerating, I suspect you haven’t been paying attention. Recently I had the poor judgment to turn on National Public Radio for about an hour, under the impression that I was going to learn something about the day’s news.

I could have saved myself the trouble. During the hour in question, I learned nothing at all about the presidential election campaign (now in its final months), nothing about the tens of millions of my fellow citizens whose jobs have been snatched away by government fiat, nothing about climate change, nuclear arms buildups, international refugees or growing worldwide poverty – nothing even about the intensification of air and water pollution authorized by recent federal regulation, although pollution kills an estimated 100,000 Americans every year.

No – for a solid hour, I heard the following: that COVID19 – in reality, at most, a moderately serious flu virus – is the worst medical threat the United States has ever faced; that this “deadly” virus (the word “deadly” was repeated obsessively, even though the disease is fatal in a tiny percentage of cases) has been empowered by a conspiracy of Republican politicians serving the arch-demon Donald Trump; that recent data showing the rapid decline in deaths attributable to the virus may have been faked, because the numbers aren’t what the “experts” want them to be; and that a massive increase in COVID19 tests – primarily among people between 20 and 40 years of age who are subjected to swabbing because their employers demand it, not because they’re in any danger – cannot possibly have anything to do with a rise in the number of reported infections, and that anyone who dares to suggest otherwise is “putting lives at risk.”

But the real theme of the hour was masks, masks, masks: how to make them, how to wear them, their different types, who doesn’t seem to have enough of them, and why muffling our faces (even though no such thing was ever demanded of us during dozens of past viral outbreaks) is absolutely, positively good for us all.

I waited in vain for some mention of the fact that every single order requiring the wearing of muzzles in the US is probably unconstitutional, a matter that National Public Radio – which once prided itself on its legal affairs reporting – might have been expected to care about.

Nor did anyone mention that just a few months ago, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention was explicitly advising against a general mask-wearing regime, as was Anthony Fauci, the High Priest of COVID19.

No, facts would only have complicated matters. After all, we already knew what good little boys and girls were expected to do with those muzzles. At the close of each weather forecast, just in case anyone had missed the point, the reporter said cheerily, “And when you go out – put on a mask.” “And drink milk with every meal,” I half expected him to add, but I guess self-conscious condescension would have spoiled the effect.

Put on a mask.

In well over half a century, I cannot remember a weather report that ended with a brisk piece of non-meteorological advice, let alone a patently silly one – after all, if these magical masks were to make any difference, their greatest usefulness would have been at the beginning of the outbreak, not on its heels.

Yet throughout March, while police-state fever prompted the suspension of democracy in some 40 states and most of the US population was being hustled into virtual house arrest, the pro-incarceration crowd’s loudest voices unanimously insisted that masks were of no practical value.

For anyone who has forgotten, Fauci told 60 Minutes that:

[t]here’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think it is. And often there are unintended consequences – people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

That was how things stood when the epidemic was new and all stops were out. And now? Contemplating the lockdown-lovers’ belated fetish for surgical gear, one can only imagine the US Navy ceremoniously issuing an air-raid warning at Pearl Harbor a hundred days or so after the Japanese attack had wiped out much of the fleet.

But you’ve got to hand it to the mask-maniacs. No matter how many of their excuses for muzzling the population go the way of the Great Auk, they keep the new ones tumbling out so fast you can hardly keep track.

Here’s one peddled on July 14 in the Los Angeles Times: even though the masks won’t really prevent infection, they may reduce the amount of the virus you breathe in – that is, just in case you happen to come across an infected person who somehow manages to breathe into your (masked) face from a very short distance and for an extended period. (No one cited in the article bothers to discuss how often such a scenario is likely to occur.) According to a Dr. Monica Gandhi:

[t]here is this theory that facial masking reduces…disease severity.”

In other words, you’ll get COVID19 with or without a mask, but the effects will probably be milder if you muffle your face.

But wait a minute – even if “this theory” is correct (note that it contradicts everything the propagandists have been telling us about masks for the last three months), wasn’t it always the case that the overwhelming majority of those who catch COVID19 have very mild symptoms, or no symptoms at all?

So what’s the big advantage of the mask? The article is silent on that point – and Dr. Gandhi herself ultimately admits that her “theory” remains unproven. But that doesn’t stop the Times from lambasting a few local California officials who have raised inconvenient questions about mandatory muzzling.

“This anti-mask rhetoric is mind-blowing, dangerous, deadly and polarizing,” the article quotes Dr. Peter Chin-Hong as responding. Why? Because masks prevent infection? No. Because they save lives? No. Criticizing the muzzle mandate is “deadly” because – wait for it – because:

[t]here is no evidence that [wearing a mask] is dangerous.”

Well, actually, there is such evidence; Anthony Fauci admitted as much to 60 Minutes in March.

But the main problem with this retort is that it misses the point: people are being forced to mask their faces in public without any evidence that it’s dangerous not to.

Dr. Chin-Hong’s implicit confession that this is so knocks the stuffing out of the mandate – and the Times’ rationale. But to say so openly is “dangerous, deadly [there’s that favorite adjective again] and polarizing.” It’s no accident that the symbol of submission currently in vogue is one that covers the mouth. The real message of the mask-maniacs is that we have no right to say what we think.

And speaking of “polarizing,” what about the personal viciousness to which mask-mania so frequently descends? I have lost track of the number of videos circulated by so-called news outlets that depict frustrated shoppers losing their cool over being forced to dress like mummies.

Apparently this is supposed to be cute – as in, “Get a load of that stupid, Trump-supporting bitch having a public meltdown.” Myself, I feel sorry for these people; I share their exasperation, and I empathize with them over the invasion of their privacy.

As for the propagandists who peddle Schadenfreude in support of governors-turned-dictators – I indict them as heartless hypocrites, who claim to value our collective welfare and prove it by publicly humiliating their victims. Would they take similar pleasure, I wonder, in mocking the reaction of a black shopper who’d just been called “nigger”?

And it gets worse. In the upside-down world of COVID19 media values, even death is no protection from victim-shaming. Recently, American news organizations “reported” the death of an Ohio man who had the misfortune to die on July 4 of what they gleefully called “complications of COVID-19.”

More than two months earlier, the victim had posted a comment on social media saying he wasn’t going to “buy a mask.” The articles – which even named the deceased (a combat veteran) – practically salivated over the fact that he had had the audacity to go to a swimming pool in mid-June, where he may have contracted the virus. You see? screamed the reporters’ moralizing subtext. The maskless, self-indulgent right-wing bastard got what he deserved!

Just for the record, let me note that there are a number of things we don’t know. We don’t know whether the poor man actually wore a mask or not. (He wrote in late April that he didn’t intend to buy one, but that’s really not the same thing.) We don’t know how he actually caught the virus. We don’t know whether he could have been saved with better treatment; it’s even possible he waited too long to seek medical help.

Given his youth and the apparently lightning pace of his descent into serious illness, his death from COVID19 is so highly unusual that its medical significance amounts to another thing we don’t know.

Most important, we don’t know whether wearing or not wearing a mask had anything at all to do with his death. (If he was infected while at a swimming pool, I doubt even the mask-maniacs would insist that he should have worn it in the water.)

What we do know is that he was targeted for savage personal attacks after he died, first on social media and now in the press.

“[P]eople have come out of the woodworks, posting nasty, hateful comments about a man they knew nothing about,” one of his friends has said. “Most of it crossed the line into harassment. When reported to Facebook, nothing was taken down nor was there ANY action taken,” he added, while “[t]hose that defended [him] faced consequences from Facebook in way of bans.”

Well, at least the pattern of the propaganda makes sense, in a way: slander the nonconformist and you can get away with murder; defend him, you’re silenced.

Even the New York Times’ resident faux progressive, Michelle Goldberg, has taken up the cry. Another “Trump fan,” she sniffed on July 14, has become a “macabre cliché” by dying of a disease she blames him for contracting.

I wonder whether Ms. Goldberg would be smirking about a woman who was raped some two months after posting a comment to the effect that “I’ll go wherever I want and dress however I like.” My guess is that the analogy hasn’t occurred to her; she knows her job, and it’s about propaganda, not consistency.

And the propaganda’s bottom line is as clear as it is grim. Forget about your personal liberties. Forget about the democracy you thought you were living in. The mask – the symbol of fear, of arbitrary rule, of the abolition of normal social life, of voiceless submission – isn’t going away any time soon.

Nor is the police state that sponsors it.

“There’s going to be no summertime lull with a big wave in the fall,” says Eric Toner, one of the boffins of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, a partner of the neoliberal American Enterprise Institute that has been instrumental in promoting lockdowns from the start.

It’s clear that we are having a significant resurgence of cases in the summer, and they’ll get bigger. And it’ll keep going until we lock things down again.”

And how long before the cycle of incarceration really ends? “[S]everal years,” Toner says blandly, adding the sinister afterthought that people who resist being muzzled “will get over it.… It’s just a question of how many people get sick and die before they get over it.”

Makes you feel kind of warm and protected, doesn’t it? Thank heaven people like Toner know our needs so much better than we do.

The media ubiquity of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security is another ominous feature of the current wave of propaganda.

Last October, the Center ran a coronavirus pandemic “simulation” in New York City – cosponsored by the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – for an assembly of powerful people in business and government, after which its members openly speculated about the possible need for “censoring social media content” on the theory that “[m]isinformation and disinformation are likely to be serious threats during a public health emergency.”

These facts obviously bear on the organization’s motives and credibility, at the very least. But you won’t hear them mentioned when the Center’s data are repeated as fact in mainstream media, nor when its members assure us that if we don’t wear masks for the next two years we’ll all drop dead.

Is it unreasonable to hope that reporters might want to explore why “health security” is presumed to entail censorship? Or whether the huge investment of the Gates Foundation in vaccine development has any influence on its partner organization’s bleak predictions for escaping the coronavirus without a new vaccine? Or whether, having insisted first on devastating lockdowns and now on worthless face masks, the Center will use its political leverage to demand mandatory vaccination when the time comes?

Professor Lawrence Gostin is another worrisome presence in the media, including Michelle Goldberg’s recent sanctimonious outburst in the New York Times – where, pretending to describe the consequences of the virus, she catalogs the devastation of the lockdowns instead:

[A] record 5.4 million people lost their health insurance between February and May. A generation of American kids will have their educations derailed, and many parents who don’t lose their jobs due to the economic crisis will see their careers ruined by the demands of child care

[…]

The psychological consequences alone will be incalculable. Even before the coronavirus, researchers spoke of loneliness as its own epidemic in America. A March article in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry attributed 162,000 deaths a year to the fallout of social isolation. Now people are being told that they can socialize only under the most stringent conditions. Much of what makes life sweet is lost to us, not for days or weeks, but months or years.

As I said, this is a chillingly accurate summary of the consequences of the mass incarceration foisted on us by more than 40 state governors, most of them Democrats, beginning in early March – when each one, with a unilateral declaration of a “health emergency,” seized quasi-dictatorial powers, shunted aside the Constitution and bankrupted the citizenry. Those “emergency” powers have not been relinquished to this day.

But neither Goldberg nor her hero, Professor Gostin, offers a single word of criticism for any of those governors, and certainly not for the Democratic Party leadership that has backed this democracy-destroying, economy-wrecking madness at every step. For them, everything is the exclusive fault of one man: Donald Trump.

Coming from Goldberg, that might be just another election-year screed against an incumbent the Times dislikes. But what about Gostin? Well, although Goldberg never mentions it, Professor Gostin just happens to be the author of the model version of the Emergency Health Powers Act, the adoption of which in all fifty states (if in somewhat different versions) made possible the coup the governors pulled off by claiming “emergencies” several months ago.

It’s worth remembering that Gostin’s proposed bill was sharply criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union back in 2001 as “replete with civil liberties problems” and “a throwback to a time before the legal system recognized basic protections for fairness.”

In fact, some of its specific objections to the EHPA deserve quoting at length, in light of where the Act’s reckless application has brought us today:

1. It fails to include basic checks and balances. The Act would grant extraordinary emergency powers, but that kind of authority should never go unchecked. Public health authorities make mistakes, and politicians abuse their powers…The lack of checks and balances could have serious consequences for individuals’ freedom, privacy, and equality. The Act lets a governor declare a state of emergency unilaterally and without judicial oversight, fails to provide modern due process procedures for quarantine and other emergency powers…and contains no checks on the power to order forced treatment and vaccination.

2. It goes well beyond bioterrorism. The act includes an overbroad definition of “public health emergency”…that clearly do[es] not justify quarantine, forced treatment, or any of the other broad emergency authorities that would be granted under the Act.

3. It lacks privacy protections. The Act requires the disclosure of massive amounts of personally identifiable health information to public health authorities, without requiring basic privacy protections and fair information practices…. That not only threatens to violate individuals’ medical privacy but undermines public trust in government activities.

It’s not hard to see why Ms. Goldberg is reluctant to give us the accurate back story for her star witness. The ACLU’s list of warnings about the potential abuses of the law Gostin drafted is a near-perfect précis of what has actually happened: unilateral declarations of an “emergency,” state by state, where none really existed; the seizure by each governor of almost unlimited power to order quarantines and forced vaccinations; the elimination of “due process” restrictions on mass confinement; the dismantling of privacy protections along with basic rights.

I don’t intend to sing the praises of the ACLU, which – like so many other liberal institutions in the US – has been missing in action since the actual coup began last March. But no one can deny the prescience of its critique. And Goldberg knows her readers aren’t stupid: once they are aware of the role Gostin played in orchestrating the overthrow of their freedoms, they’re not likely to grant him the pied piper status Goldberg wants him to have.

Why does she cite Gostin? First, to “prove” – like Eric Toner in another context – that the COVID19 outbreak, the current excuse for the denial of our liberties, will last another two years; amazingly, Goldberg claims this while insisting simultaneously that the same outbreak is practically over in New Zealand, Taiwan and Italy after just a few months.

But she also needs him to explain, albeit in somewhat indirect language, why democracy isn’t good for us.

According to Gostin, the coronavirus has proved that “health system capacity alone is almost useless unless you have a government that can unleash that capacity promptly and consistently.” Obviously, we can’t do that if we have to bother with pesky constraints like representative government or the public will. And from Gostin’s perspective, we’ve been dabbling in the utopianism of democracy for too long as it is: “It’s going to take several years for us to be able to come out of all of the trauma that we’ve had,” he warns.

And I think that suggests the real message Goldberg and the other propagandists are keen on peddling. They didn’t do this to us. It’s not that we’ve been lied to and illegally confined. It’s not that our state executives have defied their oaths of office. It’s not that their media mouthpieces have offered us one swindle after another: lockdowns, business closings, job losses, muzzling, scare-mongering, the destruction (as Goldberg herself admits) of “much of what makes life sweet” – theater, cinema, public discussion, time shared with friends.

The problem is us. We’ve been clinging to dreams of freedom – and that will cost us. The lockdown-lovers are going to punish us for our wrongheaded attachment to notions of individual rights, and they will punish us still more for continuing recalcitrance. But note this: they can only get away with it by selling us one more lie – namely, that what they’re doing to us is really the work of a disease beyond anyone’s control.

“The coronavirus is a natural disaster,” Goldberg writes.

No, it isn’t.

The coronavirus is just another flu. The real disaster has been the work of human beings. Resisting it must be, too.

Over the last 20 years, the U.S. opioid crisis has claimed tens of thousands of lives. In fact, as Visual Capitalist’s Iman Ghosh details below, opioid overdose deaths accounted for nearly 70% of all drug overdose deaths in 2018.

Although the damage of the opioid epidemic is well documented, what people might not know is that it has escalated in three distinct waves.

We pull the latest statistics from the UN World Drug Report 2020 to uncover the scope of the opioid crisis in the U.S., and how national drug-related death rates compare to other countries.

Three Waves of the Opioid Crisis

According to the CDC, the opioid epidemic can be traced back to the 1990s, when opioids started being over-prescribed for pain relief purposes.

• 1990s – Wave 1
  Over-prescription of opioids for pain relief, including natural opioids, semi-synthetic opioids, and methadone. Addiction risks were widely downplayed.
• 2010 – Wave 2
  Heroin-related overdose deaths on the rise.
• 2013 – Wave 3
  Synthetic opioid-related deaths on the rise, particularly fentanyl and tramadol.

Here’s how that breaks down in terms of opioid-related overdose deaths over the years. Note that by the year 2018, 67% of overdose deaths involved synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.

Overdose deaths from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and tramadol shot up by over 4,000% between 1999-2018. This can be attributed to two things: their relative potency, and the minute quantities of each that qualify as a lethal dose.

As per the medical and legal standard, opioids are often compared to morphine. To that end, heroin is 2-5x stronger—while fentanyl is 50-100x more potent. Put another way, roughly a dime-size or 10-12mg of heroin is considered a lethal dose, compared to only 1-2mg of fentanyl.

What’s worse, fentanyl is typically mixed with other types of drugs such as heroin or cocaine to increase their effects, which is how it ends up unintentionally ingested. Between 2008-2017, drug-use disorders as a whole claimed the most healthy lives due to poor health or early deaths—measured in disability-adjusted life years (DALYs)—followed in close second by opioid use disorders.

The Death Toll of U.S. Drug Overdoses

It’s undeniable that the opioid epidemic in America has caused significant harm to communities. But how does the U.S. drug crisis compare to the same issue in other countries?

The UN Drug Report further puts these numbers into perspective by comparing drug-related deaths per million population. Note that the source also compiled the total deaths across years for selected countries.

With 314.5 deaths per million, the U.S. by far had the highest proportion of drug-related deaths per million people in 2018. It also had the highest overall number at 67.4K deaths.

Elephant in the Room?

Another drug rearing its head on the streets is carfentanil. Formerly developed as ‘elephant tranquilizer’, this synthetic opioid is similar in appearance to other illicit drugs such as heroin, making it indistinguishable when mixed in. However, there’s one big problem—carfentanil is 100x more potent than fentanyl itself.

In response to the continued crisis, an additional $35.7 billion was requested for counter-drug funding efforts in the FY2021 Budget. This amount is expected to go towards prevention and treatment efforts ($18.6 billion) and law enforcement efforts ($17.1 billion) both domestically and internationally.

But will these efforts properly combat the crisis, or are we already in the midst of a fourth wave of the opioid epidemic?

Authored by Lord Pettigrew, op-ed via Townhall.com,

Many conservatives are concerned about polling results regarding conservative issues, especially about President Trump. For example, the latest CNN poll found that 51% of voters believe the president should be impeached. How much credence should conservatives give these polls?

Mark Twain is credited with introducing into the American vernacular the phrase, “Lies, damned lies and statistics.” One of the pervasive damned lies people take for granted is the results of political polls, especially in the Trump era. Most polls show him behind several of the myriad candidates vying to represent Democrats in the 2020 election. But the American Association for Public Opinion Research confirms that “national polls in 2016 tended to under-estimate Trump’s support significantly more than Clinton’s.”

We are inundated with the latest polling on President Trump’s approval rating and how people are likely to vote in the 2020 election. Both bode poorly for the president, but he doesn’t believe them and neither should we. As an academic, I ran a research center that conducted local, state-wide and national public opinion polls and took a year’s leave of absence from my university to work for Lou Harris, founder of the Harris Poll.

Social Desirability

The reason why we shouldn’t believe most of the current or future polling results about President Trump can be summarized in two words: Social Desirability.

Social desirability is a concept first advanced by psychologist Allen L. Edwards in 1953. It advances the idea that when asked about an issue in a social setting, people will always answer in a socially desirable manner whether or not they really believe it. Political polling, whether by telephone or online, is a social setting. Respondents know that there is an audience who are posing the questions and monitoring their response. As a result, despite a respondent’s true belief, many will answer polling questions in what may appear to be a more socially desirable way, or not answer at all. 

When it comes to President Trump, the mainstream media and academics have led us to believe that it is not socially desirable (or politically correct) to support him. When up against such sizable odds, most conservatives will do one of three things:

1) Say we support someone else when we really support the president (lie);

2) tell the truth despite the social undesirability of that response;

3) Not participate in the poll (nonresponse bias).

This situation has several real consequences for Trump polling. First, for those in the initial voter sample unwilling to participate, the pollster must replace them with people willing to take the poll. Assuming this segment is made up largely of pro-Trump supporters, finding representative replacements can be expensive, time-consuming and doing so increases the sampling error rate (SER) while decreasing the validity of the poll. Sampling error rate is the gold standard statistic in polling. It means that the results of a particular poll will vary by no more than +x% than if the entire voter population was surveyed. All else being equal, a poll with a sampling error rate of +2% is more believable than one of +4% because it has a larger sample. Immediate polling on issues like President Trump’s impeachment may provide support to journalists with a point of view to broadcast, but with a small sample and high sampling error rates, the results aren’t worthy of one’s time and consideration.

Some political pollsters often get around the necessity of repeated sampling over the course of an election by forming a panel of people who match the demographics (party affiliation, age, gender, race, location, etc.) of registered voting public. Polling companies often compensate panel members and use them across the entire election cycle. Such panels are still subject to the effects of social desirability and initial substitution error.

Interpretive Bias

Another factor to consider is the institution that is conducting the poll and those reporting the data. Their progressive sensibilities are thumbing the scale of truth. In my experience, polls conducted by media companies are less credible since they are often guilty of the same biases seen in their news reports. The perfect example of this is The New York Times’s “Poll Watch,” which provides a weekly review of their political poll. My experience is that it reflects strongly the Times’s negative opinions about President Trump and conservative ideas and the paper’s heavy political bias.

Even the Harris Poll, when Lou was alive, suffered somewhat from this bias. Lou Harris was the first person to conduct serious political polling on a national level and is credited with giving John Kennedy the competitive advantage over Richard Nixon in the 1960 election. He made political polling de require for future elections. While many people point to Nixon’s twelve o’clock shadow during the televised debate, Harris gave Kennedy the real competitive advantage—a more complete grasp of what issues voters thought were most important and how to tailor his policy pitches toward that end.

I worked for Lou between 1999-2000. During the election season we would get the daily tab read-outs. While the results were pristine, Lou would interpret those numbers on NPR and in other media in a way that showed his clear Democrat bias. His wishful thinking that Al Gore would beat George W. Bush would color his interpretation of what the numbers meant. In the end, by a razon thin margin, Bush took the White House and Gore was relegated to inconvenient environmental truths. Similarly, the 2016 election saw Trump beat favorite Hillary Clinton by a significant electoral margin, despite the vast majority of polls giving Mrs. Clinton the edge by between 3-5%.

Where We Go from Here

Public opinion polling is generally not junk science although with some companies it can be. Companies like Gallup and Pew consistently do a good job of chronicling political opinion in America. At issue is the fact that these polling stalwarts don’t work for media companies and use large national samples from current voter rolls; they also tend to not put their thumbs on the interpretation of data. President Trump is a president unlike any other and most of his supporters don’t participate in political polls. Even Trump’s own pollsters were surprised by his 2016 win. We would do well during these fractured times to ignore political opinion polls for they will continue to be much to do about nothing.

Just be sure to vote your conscience and that is nobody’s opinion but your own. 

While Morgan Stanley continues to stubbornly repeat that the US economy is undergoing a jolly V-shaped recovery, one would be very hard pressed to observe that in either the number of airline passengers, or the commercial aerospace sector in general, where Boeing has become a poster child for how quickly the fate can turn… and it’s not just the company’s ill-fated Boeing 737 MAX which may or may not fly again. According to Bloomberg, Boeing is now also running out of space to stash newly-built 787 Dreamliners, as unsold jetliners are now crammed onto “every available patch of pavement on airfields near its factories in Washington and South Carolina.”

Citing people familiar with the situation, Bloomberg writes that “dozens of the planes are sitting on the company’s premises” with Uresh Sheth, a closely followed blogger who meticulously tracks the Dreamliners rolling through Boeing’s factories, putting the total somewhere above 50. That’s more than double the number of jets typically awaiting customers along Boeing’s flight lines.

According to Sheth, brand-new widebodies are lined up on a closed off runway at the airport that abuts Boeing’s hulking plant north of Seattle. In North Charleston, 787s are tucked around the delivery center and a paint hangar. The U.S. planemaker has even started sending aircraft to be stored in a desert lot in Victorville, California.

Boeing’s troubles with parked jets are nothing new: last year Boeing had so many 737 Maxes after their global ground when it emerged that Boeing had drastically cut corners to save on costs even if it meant risking people’s lives, that it commandeered an employee parking lot to store surplus aircraft. Now, as it finally starts to emerge from that crisis, another critical source of cash – the company’s marquee jet, the 787 Dreamliner – is under pressure but not do to airworthiness concerns but simply due to the global depression that commercial air traffic has found itself in.

As Bloomberg notes, Boeing has relied on the wide-body jet, produced in record numbers, to help bankroll the $20 billion in costs it has rung up since the Max was banned from commercial flight in March 2019 following two fatal crashes. But as Covid-19 sapped consumer interest in long-range travel this year, “the tally of undelivered Dreamliners has stacked up and created a new financial drag as regulators move closer to clearing the 737’s return.”

As a result of the current state of the airline industry, “the next couple of years are just going to be very hard for this airplane,” George Ferguson, a Bloomberg analyst said of the 787 Dreamliner. Some more details:

Demand for the twin-aisle 787, Boeing’s 777 and Airbus’s A350 and A330neo has been especially hard hit as cash-strapped airlines slow or cancel aircraft purchases. Some would-be buyers don’t want to send pilots to claim aircraft in the U.S., where the pandemic is raging. When they are able to start growing fleets, airlines are expected to initially focus on smaller planes for domestic flights before adding larger aircraft for continent-hopping trips.

Boeing also faces a “capacity hangover” after pushing Dreamliner production to a 14-jet monthly pace last year — a record for wide-body aircraft — in a market that was already glutted with aircraft, said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with Teal Group.

“It was one of the few levers they could pull to bring in more cash during what seemed like a crisis, and now looks like a nothingburger,” Aboulafia said of Boeing’s response to the Max grounding. That scandal has been eclipsed by the unprecedented aviation collapse brought on by Covid-19. “No twin-aisle had ever been built at 14-a-month for a very good reason.”

For now, Boeing is acting as if demand will soon rebound: “We continue to closely monitor the commercial marketplace by staying very engaged with our customers around the globe to fully understand short term and long term requirements,” Greg Smith, the company’s chief financial officer and executive vice president of enterprise operations, said in a statement.

Unfortunately, such optimism remains wildly misplaced as customers took just three of Boeing’s 787 during May and June, and 36 of the aircraft in the first six months of the year, down more than 50% from 78 deliveries a year earlier.

While Boeing has already lowered 787 production to 10 jets a month, it will need to pursue far deeper cuts over the next two years, which will further sap the company’s cash flow. Even so, the manufacturer could be left holding one-third of the more than 100 Dreamliners that J.P. Morgan analyst Seth Seifman projects the company will build this year.

In short, as a result of the global economic recession, Boeing is facing a good, old inventory glut, and absent taking a machete to prices, it will have big problems clearing out the excess inventory.

“It may be difficult to clear this inventory next year,” given that Boeing would have to ramp up deliveries at a time when “when long-range travel may still be under pressure,” Seifman said in a July 15 report.

While Boeing’s stock has so far neglected the lack of demand for the company’s cash cow, that will soon change. Boeing’s ballooning 787 inventory and deferred production costs should come into sharper focus over the next two weeks as key customers like American Airlines and United Airlines report earnings, followed Boeing itself on July 29.

For years after the 787 Dreamliner made its commercial debut in 2011, taped up aircraft awaiting retrofitted parts dotted Paine Field, adjacent to Boeing’s factory in Everett, Washington. For Sheth, there’s a sense of déjà vu to the growing glut.

“I have no doubt they are going to recover from that downturn,” Sheth said. “But at this point they’re probably going to have to cut production even lower because they can’t continue on this trajectory.”

All of which means even lower future income, more layoffs and – eventually – a return to the bargaining table to ask Uncle Sam for some bailout cash, which Boeing has so far managed to avoid.

Authored by Dr. Jack Rasmus via JackRasmus.com,

On July 6, 2020 I posted my extended view and analysis why the 3rd quarter US GDP would falter–and lead to a W-shape recovery, as it typical of all Great Recessions. The current recession’s scenario was compared with 1929-30 and 2008-09, and 8 reasons were given why the US current economic rebound (not recovery) would falter. In this follow-on post a somewhat longer term scenario is added to the prior shorter, 3rd quarter view. It’s an addendum and sequel to the prior post, focusing on the more permanent impacts on the economy that will continue well into 2021 and beyond. Here’s the addendum piece, “What Lies Ahead”

WHAT LIES AHEAD?

The US economy at mid-year 2020 is at a critical juncture. What happens in the next three months will likely determine whether the current Great Recession 2.0 continues to follow a W-shape trajectory – or drifts over an economic precipice into an economic depression. With prompt and sufficient fiscal stimulus targeting US households, minimal political instability before the November 2020 elections, and no financial instability event, it may be contained. No worse than a prolonged W-shape recovery will occur. But should the fiscal stimulus be minimal (and poorly composed), should political instability grow significantly worse, and a major financial instability event erupt in the US (or globally), then it is highly likely a descent to a bona fide economic depression will occur.

The prognosis for a swift economic recovery is not all that positive. Multiple forces are at work that strongly suggest the early summer economic ‘rebound’ will prove temporary and that a further decline in jobs, consumption, investment, and the economy is on the horizon.

A Second Wave of Permanent Job Losses

Through mid-June to mid-July, the COVID-19 infection rate, hospitalization rate, and soon the death rate, have all begun to escalate once again. Daily infections consistently now exceed 60,000 cases—i.e. more than twice that of the earlier worst month of April 2020. Consequently, states are beginning to order a return to more sheltering in place and shutdowns of business, especially retail, travel, and entertainment services. The direction of events cannot but hamper any initial rebound of the economy, let alone generate a sustained economic recovery. Exacerbating conditions, a second wave of job layoffs is clearly now emerging—and not just due to economic shutdowns related to the resurging virus.

Reopening of the US economy in June resulted in 4.8 million jobs restored for that month, according to the US Labor Department. That number included, however, no fewer than 3 million service jobs in restaurants, hospitality, and retail establishments. These are the occupations that are now being impacted again with layoffs, as States retrench once more due to the virus resurgence underway. But there’s a new development as well: A second jobless wave is now emerging in addition to the renewed layoffs due to shutdowns not only of the resumed service and retail occupations, but reflecting longer term and even permanent job layoffs across various industries.

Household consumption patterns have changed fundamentally and permanently in a number of ways due to both the virus effect and the depth of the current recession. Many consumers will not be returning soon to travel, to shopping at malls, to restaurant services, to mass entertainment or to sport events at the levels they had, pre-virus.

In response, large corporations in these sectors have begun to announce job layoffs by the thousands. Two large US airlines—United and American—have announced their intention to lay off 36,000 and 20,000, respectively, including flight attendants, ground crews, and even pilots. Boeing has announced a cut of 16,000, and Uber,n just its latest announcement, a cut of 3,000. Big box retail companies like JCPenneys, Nieman Marcus, Lord & Taylor, and others are closing hundreds of stores with a similar impact on what were formerly thousands of permanent jobs. Oil & gas fracking companies like Cheasepeake and 200 other frackers now defaulting on their debt are laying off tens of thousands more. Trucking companies like YRC Worldwide, the Hertz car rental company, clothing & apparel sellers like Brooks Brothers, small-medium independent restaurant and hotel chains like Krystal, Craftworks—all are implementing, or announcing permanent layoffs by the thousands as well.

Reflecting this, since mid-June new unemployment benefit claims have continued to rise weekly at a rate of more than 2 million—with about 1.3 million receiving regular state unemployment benefits plus another 1 million independent contractors, gig workers, self-employed receiving the special federal government unemployment benefits. The latter group’s numbers are rising rapidly since mid-June.

As of mid-July no fewer than 33 million are receiving unemployment benefits, with another 6 million having dropped out of the labor force altogether and no longer even being counted as unemployed. Unemployment therefore remains at what will likely be a chronically high number, at around 40 million—with about 25% of the US labor force unemployed—as renewed service-retail sector layoffs, plus new permanent layoffs, both loom on the horizon.

Added to the growing problem of renewed service layoffs and the 2nd wave of permanent layoffs in the private sector is the growing likelihood of significant layoffs in the public sector, as states and cities facing massive budget deficits are forced to lay off several millions of the roughly 22 million public sector workers in the US. This potential public employee layoff wave will accelerate and occur sooner, should Congress in summer 2020 fail to bail out the states and cities whose budgets have been severely impacted by the collapse of tax revenues while facing escalating costs of dealing with the health crisis. Estimates as of last May are that the states and cities will need $969 billion in bailout funding this summer—roughly two-thirds for the states and the rest for cities and local governments.

The resurgence of layoffs from all these sources is a sure indicator that the economy’s rebound—let alone recovery—is in trouble. Rising joblessness means less wage income for households and therefore less consumption and, given that consumption is 70% of the economy, a slowing of the rebound and recovery. Problems in consumption in turn mean business investment suffers as well, further slowing the economy and recovery. Exacerbating the decline in personal income devoted to consumption due to unemployment is the evidence that even those fortunate enough to return to work after spring 2020’s economic shutdown are doing so increasingly as part time employed—which means less wage income for consumption compared to the pre-COVID period before March 2020.

Overlaid on these negative prospects for employment, consumption, business investment is the intensification of economic crisis-related problems.

Rent Evictions, Child Care & Education Chaos

There is an imminent crisis in rents affecting tens of millions. At the peak in April, it is estimated that roughly one-third of the 110 million renters in the US economy had stopped making rent payments due to the COVID-related shutdowns of the economy. The CARES ACT, passed in March, provided forbearance on rental payments, although perhaps as many as 20 states failed to enforce it. That forbearance directive expires at the end of July, with as many as 23 million rent evictions projected in coming months. A major housing crisis is thus brewing, as well as the second wave of job layoffs.

A combined education-child care crisis is about to occur almost simultaneously. The K-12 public education system is approaching chaos, as school districts plan to introduce remote learning on a major scale in order to deal with the renewed COVID-19 infection and hospitalization wave. The heart of the crisis is that tens of millions of US working class families dependent on two paychecks to survive economically cannot afford to accommodate school district practices for remote learning—especially for young children in the K-6 grade levels. Even if such families could afford to pay for expensive child care, the current US child care system is far from being able to accommodate them. Many minority and working class households, moreover, lack the computers and networking equipment, or even the requisite skills to set it up, to enable their children participate in remote learning.

Several forces are driving the shift to remote learning: school district fears of liability actions by parents if children become ill, the significant cost of ensuring disinfected classrooms, the lack of classroom space to allow distance learning on site, and the growing concern of teachers regarding their own exposure to infection. At least 1.5 million public school teachers are over age 50 and have health conditions that put them at greater risk of serious infection, should they attend closed-in classroom environments.

The child care plus K-12 education crisis will likely erupt within months on a major scale. Chaos in education is around the corner.

This fall, higher education—colleges and universities—will also experience chaos of their own kind. While distance learning will not be as serious an implementation problem as it will in K-12 levels, costs from the pandemic will force many smaller, private colleges into bankruptcy, consolidation or closure. Public colleges’ funding problems will require them to sharply reduce available services. Remote education will create a two-tier system of higher education—educational services delivered remotely and those of a more traditional nature on campus; or a hybrid of both.

However, demand for higher education services will likely decline sharply in the short term, during which higher education will experience a devastating decrease in tuition and other sources of college revenues. Some estimates show a third of freshmen plan to take what’s called a ‘gap year’: i.e. accept entrance but not attend for a year. That’s a massive revenue loss. Some estimates foresee a 15%-30% decline in new student attendance, with another 5%-10% decline in transfer students, and a similar decline of 5%-10% in continuing students. In addition, the attendance by international students, the ‘cash cow’ for most colleges, will also decline sharply due to the Trump administration’s new rules.

Still other developments will sharply reduce college revenues. Students forced to attend classes via remote learning will demand lower tuition. One can expect a wave of legal suits as students seek to ‘claw back’ full tuition expenses. Other secondary sources of college revenues—from fees, on-campus room and board, endowment earnings and gifts, and sports revenues—also spell a looming revenue crunch.

A wave of college consolidations and closures is inevitable. And with student loan debt at $1.6 trillion it is unlikely that the federal government will introduce new aid through that channel. Nor will States increase their subsidization of public colleges, given the severe state budget deficits on the horizon.
In short, the economic crisis is about to assume more socio-economic dimensions and character: rent, child-care, education chaos will soon overlay the continuing unemployment problem and worsening recession. Social and political discontent, frustration, and anxiety are almost certainly to rise in turn in coming months as a consequence.

Global Recession & Sovereign Debt Defaults

The weakness of the global economy is yet another factor likely to ensure the US economy’s W-shape trajectory. As noted previously, with 90% of other countries in recession, global demand for US exports will remain weak or declining. In addition, global supply chains have also been severely disrupted by the health crisis, or even broken, and will not be restored soon. The global economy is suffering from deep problems of both demand and supply. This too is a unique historical event. Never before have demand and supply problems occurred congruently. Together, they increase the potential for a global depression.
Commodity producing economies have been hard hit, especially oil and metal producing countries. Many were in a recession well before the COVID health crisis. Global trade in general had stagnated, registering little to no growth in 2019, for the first time since modern records were kept. Many countries had over-extended their borrowing, expanding their sovereign debt loads during the last decade. This was money capital borrowed largely from western banks and capital markets (i.e. shadow banks).

Now, with global trade flat and declining, and prices for their export goods deflating in price as well, these debt-extended countries cannot earn sufficient income from exports in order to pay the principal and interest on their debt. As a result, several countries in the worst shape may soon default on their debt payment to western banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, and so on. Debt defaults potentially mean the same western financial institutions that loaned the funds now experience financial crises in turn. In such a manner, financial instability events abroad are often transmitted to the domestic US economy through its banking system. It would not be the first time, moreover, that foreign bank crashes have spilled over the US and rest of the world economy and in the process significantly exacerbated a recession already underway.

Theoretically, countries experiencing severe sovereign debt crises could borrow from the International Monetary Fund. However, the IMF has nowhere near the funds to accommodate multiple large sovereign defaults that occur simultaneously. Nor is it likely that the US and Europe will increase the IMF’s funding to enable it to do so. Once it becomes clear the IMF cannot handle a crisis of such potential dimensions, the global capitalist economy will slip even further toward global depression.

The further deterioration now already occurring in economic relations between the US and China may also potentially impact the Great Recession in the US, and ensure its continued W-Shape recovery. Trump’s trade pact with China signed December 2019 has proven thus far a colossal failure. The president declared at the deal’s signing it would mean $150 billion in China purchases of US goods in 2020—especially farm products, oil & gas, and manufactured goods. At mid-year,

China has purchased only $5 billion of the agreed $40 billion in farm products and only $14 billion of $85 billion in US manufactured goods. Trump’s promised $150 billion was never agreed to by China, even before the Covid pandemic struck the US economy in 2020. China never agreed to a dollar value of purchases of US exports, but announced it would purchase based on conditions in 2020-21. Trump’s $150 billion was typical Trump misrepresentation of a deal never made. At best China would purchase perhaps $40 billion in agricultural goods—i.e. about the level of it purchases before Trump launched a trade war with it in March 2018. Failure to deliver his exaggerated public promise in 2020 Trump turned on on China and embraced further his anti-China hard line advisors on trade and other matters. The former ‘trade war’ with China will likely transform now, in the wake of Covid, into a broader economic war with China. Furthermore, the deterioration of relations with China, set in motion by the current recession and the collapse of global trade, shows signs of spilling over to other political and even military affairs.

Permanent Industry Transformations

The COVID health crisis is accelerating the transformation of entire industries and sectors of the economy, US and global. As noted above, household consumption patterns are already changing fundamentally and will continue as changed even after the health crisis passes. Entire industries will shrink as a consequence. Company consolidations and downsizing are inevitable in airlines, cruise lines, and even public land transport. So too will companies fail, consolidate and restructure in the hospitality, leisure and hotel industries, in mall-based retail establishments, inside entertainment (movies, casinos, etc.) to name but the obvious. Sports and public entertainment companies are struggling to redefine their business models and how they bring their ‘product’ to the public for consumption. Even education—public and private—is undergoing a radical shift. Not so obvious is similar fundamental change in oil & energy industries, and later as well in manufacturing as supply chains are slowly returned to the US economy.

Not only will these changes significantly (and often negatively) impact employment levels and wage incomes, but business practices as well. Already businesses are instituting new cost cutting practices under the pressure of the health crisis and shutdowns. These practices will become permanent. And since much of the practices and cost cutting will focus on workers’ pay and benefits, more of what economists call ‘long term structural unemployment’ will result—in addition to the current ‘cyclical unemployment’ occurring due to the current recession.

An historic consequence of the current Great Recession precipitated by the COVID-19 health crisis is the accelerating introduction underway of what some call the Artificial Intelligence revolution. AI is about cost-cutting. It’s about new data accumulation, data processing and statistical evaluation, to allow software machines to make decisions previously made by human beings. AI will eliminate millions of low level decision-making by workers in both services and manufacturing. A 2017 report by the business consulting firm, McKinsey, predicted no less than 30% of all workers’ occupations will be severely impacted by AI by the end of the present decade. 30% of jobs will either disappear or have their hours reduced significantly. That means less wage income and less consumption still.

The important linkage to the current Great Recession 2.0 is that the introduction of AI by businesses will now speed up. What McKinsey formerly predicted for the late 2020s decade will now take place by mid-decade. The economic consequences for the next generation of US workers, the late Millennials and the GenZers will be serious, to say the least. After decades of the permeation of low pay, low benefits ‘contingent’ part time and temp jobs since the 1990s, after the impact of the 2008-09 crash and aftermath on employment, after the acceleration of ‘gig’ jobs with the Uberization of the capitalist economy since 2010, and after the even more serious negative economic effects of the current Great Recession 2.0, the tens of millions of US workers entering the labor force today and in coming years will have to face the transformation of another 30% of all occupations. The future does not portend very well for the 70 million millennials and GenZers. US neoliberal economic policies and the Great Recession 2.0 is accelerating the long term structural unemployment crisis of both the US and the global capitalist economy.

Return of Fiscal Austerity

The US federal budget deficit under Trump averaged more than a trillion dollars annually during his first three years in office. The federal national debt at the end of 2019 was $22.8 trillion. As of July 2020 it has risen to $26.5 trillion—and rising. Earlier projections in March were that it would increase by $3.7 trillion in 2020. That has already been exceeded. So, too, will projections for 2021, or another $2.1 trillion. The deficit and debt will likely rise to more than $4 trillion in this fiscal year and another $3 trillion in 2021. That means the current national debt within 18 months will reach $30 trillion. And that’s not counting the debt level rise for state and local governments, already $3 trillion; nor the debt carried on the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, balance sheet which is scheduled to rise another $3 trillion at minimum.

The point of presenting these statistics is that the US elites, sooner or later, will introduce a major austerity program. It will likely come later in 2021. And it will make little difference whether the administration that time is headed by Democrats or Republicans. It will come and it will target social security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, education, housing, transport and other social programs.
A The first Great Recession provides a historical precedent. Obama’s recovery program in January 2009 provided for $787 billion in stimulus. But the joint Republican-Democrat austerity agreement introduced in August 2011 took back nearly twice that stimulus, or $1.5 trillion, in 2011-13. That austerity contributed significantly to the W-shape recovery from the 2008-09 economic crash and contraction—i.e. the first Great Recession. With the current deficit surge of $6 trillion to date, likely to increase to $9 to $10 trillion, the US economic elites will no doubt pursue a new austerity regime at some point within the next few years. That austerity will, like its predecessor, ensure at best a W-shape recovery typical of Great Recessions. At worst, it may prove the final event that pushes the US economy into another Great Depression.

Financial Instability

Those who deny that the US and global economy have already entered a second Great Recession offer the argument that the 2008-09 crash and recession was caused by the banking and financial crash of 2008-09, and therefore, since there has not yet been a financial crash, the economy at present is not in another Great Recession. But they are wrong.

Great Recessions are always associated with a financial crisis, but that crisis need not precede the deep contraction of the real, non-financial economy. The COVID-19 pandemic has played the role of a financial crash in driving the real economy into a contraction that is both quantitatively and qualitatively worse than a ‘normal’ recession. Furthermore, a subsequent banking system-financial crash is not impossible in the coming months, although not yet likely in 2020.
The preconditions for a financial crisis are in development. It won’t be precipitated by a residential mortgage crisis, as in 2007-08. But there are several potential candidates for precipitating a financial crash once again. Here are just a few:

• The commercial property sector in the US is in deep trouble. Commercial property includes malls, office buildings, hotels, resorts, factories, and multiple tenant apartment complexes. Many incurred deep debt obligations as they expanded after 2010 or just kept operating by accruing more high cost debt when they were unprofitable. Today they are unable to continue servicing (i.e. paying principal and interest) on their excessive debt load. Many have begun the process of default and chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. Banks and investors hold much of the commercial property debt that will never be repaid. Excess derivatives (credit default swaps) have been written on the debt. A debt crisis and wave of defaults and bankruptcies in 2020-21 in the commercial property sector could easily precipitate a subprime mortgage-like debt crisis as occurred in 2008-09. And derivatives obligations could transmit the crisis throughout the banking system—as it did in 2009. Regional and small community banks in the US are particularly vulnerable.

• The oil and gas fracking industry, where junk bond and leverage loan debt had already risen to unstable levels by the advent of the COVID crisis. The collapse of world oil and gas prices—which began before the COVID-19 impact and continues—will render drillers and others unable to generate the income with which to service their debt. Already more than 200 companies in this sector are in default and bankruptcy proceedings. Again, regional banks that financed much of the expansion of fracking in Texas, the Dakotas, and Pennsylvania will be impacted severely by the defaults. Their financial instability could easily spread to other sectors of banking and finance in the US.

• State and local governments, should Congress fail to appropriate sufficient bailout funding in its next round of fiscal spending in July 2020. State and local governments are capable of default and bankruptcy—unlike the Federal government, which is not. The US has a long history of state defaults associated with the onset of Great Depressions. This time around, state financial instability will quickly spill over to public pension funds, and from public to private pensions, and from there to the municipal bond markets with which state and local governments raise revenue by borrowing to fund deficits.

• Global sovereign debt markets, as previously noted. Defaults on massive debt accumulated since 2010 by many countries could result in serious contagion effects on the private banking systems of the advanced economies, including the US, Europe, and Japan. Should the IMF fail to contain a chain of sovereign debt crises that could follow in the wake of the current Great Recession, a chain reaction of defaults across emerging market economies in particular has the potential to precipitate a global financial crisis.

History shows that financial crises often originate from unsuspected corners of the economy. The above candidates are the ‘known unknowns’. There may also lurk in the bowels of the capitalist global financial system still more ‘unknown unknowns’—i.e. what are sometimes called ‘black swan’ events.

Political Instability

The US and other countries are on new ground in terms of potential political instability. The piecemeal curtailment of democratic and civil rights has been progressing at least since the mid- 1990s. In the 21st century it has been accelerating, both in the US and across the globe. Recent years have seen a growing public confrontation between contending wings of the capitalist elites and their political operatives. Institutions of even limited capitalist democracy are under attack and atrophying. And now political instability is growing as well at both the institutional and grass roots levels. One should not underestimate the potential for even more intense political confrontation among elites, or between segments of the US population itself, from having a negative impact on the current economic crisis and 2nd Great Recession. A Trump ‘October Surprise’ or a November 2020 constitutional crisis are no longer beyond the realm of the possible, but even likely.

The expectations of both households and business may serve as transmission mechanisms propagating political instability into more economic and financial instability. Political instability has the effect of freezing up business investment and therefore employment recovery. It has the further effect of causing households to hoard what income they have and raise the savings rate—at the expense of consumption. It also leads to government inaction on the policy necessary to provide stimulus for recovery.

On a global front, political instability may even assume a global dimension. History in general, and US history in particular, reveals that US presidents seek to divert public attention from domestic economic and social problems by provoking foreign wars. Targets for US attack, in the short term, are Iran and Venezuela—especially the latter, which is more susceptible to US military action. But tomorrow, in 2021 and after, it could well be Russia (Ukraine or Baltics US provocations), North Korea (a US attack on its nuclear facilities) or China (a US naval confrontation in the South China sea)—irrespective of the unlikely success of such ventures.

Like another financial-banking crash, a major political instability event—domestic or foreign—could easily send an already weak US economy struggling in the midst of a Great Recession into the abyss of the first Great Depression of the 21st century.

San Francisco police are investigating death threats against conservative radio host Michael Savage, which he says are the most “profane and twisted” he’s ever received, according to Breitbart‘s Josh Caplan.

The 78-year-old received a postcard and an email over a seven-day period. The postcard, postmarked in San Francisco, reads (with redactions) “On the road to xxx Mike could get hit by road ragers. Your sister. P.S. enjoy your xxx clerk coughed on.”

SAVAGE THREATENED WITH COVID CONTAMINATION AND CAR WRECK-ANYONE KNOW WHO SENT THIS?

EMAIL TIPS/INFO TO: tiplinethreat@gmail.com pic.twitter.com/nchGzLArhc

— Michael Savage (@ASavageNation) July 10, 2020

The email, sent via Guerrilla Mail – a service where received emails are deleted after one hour, is far more explicit, and contains violent, antisemitic murder fantasies against Savage as well as President Trump and his family. 

In a telephone interview with Breitbart News, Savage said an anonymous individual replied to his appeal for information on July 13, emailing a death threat containing antisemitic, violent, and sexually explicit content. The email also contained threatening language directed at President Donald Trump and his children.

Asked if he was concerned for his safety, Savage said that while threats are par for the course if you’re a high-profile conservative in the media, he’s never received such a profane and twisted note in his over two decades in radio. –Breitbart

Email below, emphasis ours (warning: explicit language):

Subject: die motherfucker die

WOULD YOU JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP you fascist pig jew. We havent forgotten bout you jew. You thought we were gone but no we been watching and you been sloppy I know you been back to Aliotos jew you think I forgot about it noo I was going to send some ricin there or leave a bomb under a table but I need to get you FIRST and dont think I forgot them either. Im going to get you I SWEAR i am going to get you your done

Im goin to make you hurt jew the way your fascist orange tiny dicked criminal imposter in the white house does all the kids he keeps in cages. Im going to come up behind you and shoot in the back so you cant move arms and pig legs and then while you are laid out screaming in the dirt Im gonn grab you by that hair and smash your skull against that concrete over and over while you scream until you stop jew and empty your skull on the pavement. We’ll get your dogs and wife too set them on fire to atone for your hate. Your days are over fucker just weight and our people are going to get Trump and his daughter and kids to just wait and see they will never be safe we will jump when they least expect and catch it all on video for the world. peopple will CELEBRATE they death to just wait. but i just cant wait to watch you die and  shut that big mouth FOR GOOD

According to Savage, San Francisco detectives have notified the US Secret Service of the threats to Trump and his family, while Savage told Breitbart that he’s personally notified members of Trump’s “inner circle” of the threat.

Savage, whose nationally syndicated talk show boasts more than 7.5 million listeners across 400 stations, told Breitbart that he hasn’t been to Alitos since it’s been closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, while he’s been avoiding “the Sicilian-influenced seafood eatery for over nine months” following a heart attack.

“Alioto’s has been closed since Covid struck,” said Savage, adding “It’s been open for over 90 years and been through two world wars, though it may not survive California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s lockdowns.”

“This is nothing new,” Savage said of the threats. “Hitler used some of the sickest people in Germany to kill Jews. There are legions of people attacking people, just look at the protests we see today. They are turning the country into a burning cinder.”

“First, they go for the free speakers, then the First Amendment and on to the Second Amendment,” he added. “It doesn’t happen overnight. The key is to silence the opposition akin to insurgencies like we saw in South Vietnam during the war.”

This isn’t the fist time Savage has been targeted. In 2017, a man allegedly followed him out of Servino’s Italian restaurant in Tiburon, California, shoved his dog, and shouted something at the radio host dubbed the “Godfather of Trumpmania.” Another customer who intervened was punched in the face by Savage’s alleged assailant, according to the Mercury News. Both men claimed the other started it.

Via InternationalMan.com,

Bloated governments around the world are faced with worsening fiscal conditions. Strapped for cash, they continue to squeeze every drop of wealth that’s within their reach through money printing and higher taxes. Today, we ask Jeff Thomas to weigh in on how to ensure you don’t become collateral damage in the next crisis.

International Man: We see this trend playing out around the world in the US, across Europe and in third world countries. Desperate governments are always in need of more capital. What does that mean for people who earn money and want to keep it?

Jeff Thomas: The most direct answer is that, if they’re going to survive the situation with their skin on, they’re going to have to rethink the way they hold on to wealth. But more broadly, they’re going to need to understand that the crisis that’s headed their way is not going to look the same as the mini-crashes that occurred in 2000 and 2008. This one is going to be far more devastating for some jurisdictions such as the EU, US and Canada. In those jurisdictions, this will be an endgame situation.

Historically, whenever this occurs, the big players – governments included – tend to scrape all the chips off the table, ignoring any previous rules of the game. At such a time, no government, no banking institution, no investment fund is to be trusted.

This will mean that any monetary exposure the individual has with regard to these entities, should be regarded as sacrificial. By this, I mean that any exposed wealth is not necessarily certain to be lost entirely, but it’s quite possible. So any wealth that’s subject to the control of these institutions should be assumed to be wealth that may, suddenly and without warning, be confiscated or otherwise lost.

The greatest difficulty in this is that traditional investments and stores of wealth may no longer be viable, and the individual will have to prepare for this eventuality now, before this occurs.

International Man: To a large extent, everyone is forced to use and earn in US dollars, euros, pesos, etc. These are all paper currencies that are centrally controlled by governments looking to spend more and finance it with the printing press. How do people get what they earn outside of that system?

Jeff Thomas: The answer to this comes in two parts. If the individual only does one, he may still lose everything he’s got. He has to do both if he’s to protect himself. The first part is that, if he lives in one of the endangered jurisdictions, he’ll need to expatriate his wealth to a safer location – a jurisdiction that’s less likely to head south in a crisis. In any crisis, there are always some jurisdictions that remain stable.

These jurisdictions actually thrive in a crisis, as the money flows to them rapidly. There’s an old saying that says, “Money tends to go where it’s treated best,” and that’s especially true in a crisis. So, whilst some jurisdictions will be in crisis, others will actually prosper – and therefore be safer – than they were before.

The second part is that, once you’ve liquidated all of your holdings that you can, at home, and have successfully expatriated the proceeds to a safer location, you want to get them into a form that’s as safe as possible. Unfortunately, in a crash, banks worldwide are likely to close without warning.

In some jurisdictions, they’ll re-open once they’re assured that there will be no run on the banks, but in the interim, your access to your wealth may be frozen. In an overseas bank, this is better than losing it entirely, as you might have, back home, but it does limit your options for an indeterminate period.

Therefore, once your wealth is expatriated, you’ll want to convert much of it out of cash. Real estate is an excellent choice in an overseas jurisdiction, as your home government cannot confiscate it. For one country to take land in another country is an act of war.

The other choice is to buy precious metals and store them in the best facility you can, in the safest jurisdiction you can. In a crisis, the value of precious metals always rises, as does the demand for them. In such a facility it’s also possible to store cash. Unlike a bank, a storage facility doesn’t have the right to confiscate your wealth or to refuse you the right to withdraw it. That means that, as monetary events unfold, you retain the ability to control your wealth.

International Man: In an effort to end America’s Great Depression, President Roosevelt made gold ownership illegal in 1933 – forcing people to turn in their gold in exchange for paper money. How do hard assets like gold, other precious metals and real estate stack up against any future attempts by a government to confiscate or tax it?

Jeff Thomas: In any crisis, there are no guarantees. The best you can do is avoid being the low-hanging fruit. If you live in, say, New York, and all your real estate ownership is in the US and all your cash is in New York banks, you’re as exposed as you can get. The objective is to make it as difficult to take your wealth as possible. If all your wealth is in another country (or countries), your home country has to deal with another country’s laws and go through their courts in order to take what’s yours. Your objective is to make your wealth so difficult to go after that you’re too much trouble to bother with.

I should mention that this approach is working well, as we speak, for those who are employing it. However, it may become essential in a crisis.

Another fact to bear in mind is that, whilst politicians are forever complaining about those countries that respect wealth, those same politicians need a place to keep their own wealth in a crisis. Politicians who know what’s coming want to be sure that safer jurisdictions exist, and although they may rail publicly about those jurisdictions, they’ll privately want to be assured that they themselves will be able to use those same jurisdictions as their own back door.

International Man: What should people consider in their decision to move their wealth and assets outside the control of unfavorable governments?

Jeff Thomas: First, be aware that time is limited. We may have a year or two before it’s necessary, but a market crash could happen at any time. It’s always better to be a year too early than a day too late. Second, I always advise people to select the safest jurisdiction they can find that’s not too far to get to, if an emergency were to occur. For example, Singapore is an excellent choice, but for North Americans, it’s halfway round the world.

Once you’ve selected your best option for an accessible jurisdiction, seek out a storage facility within that jurisdiction that’s not also a banking institution. The OECD, FATCA, etc., are in a great position to blackmail banks, but they can’t do the same to non-banking institutions. That’s one more layer of protection for you.

If the laws of that jurisdiction protect you well, that means that a storage facility within that jurisdiction is protected by those same laws. Again, one more layer.

International Man: What do you look for in a place that might be safe for your money?

Jeff Thomas: I begin with those countries that have no direct taxation of any kind – no income tax, property tax, sales tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax, etc. (Remember – it’s much harder for any government to create a new form of taxation than to simply raise an existing tax). Also, as regards precious metals ownership, look for an absence of taxes or duties that apply to the purchase, ownership, storage or sale of precious metals. This ensures not only an absence of taxes; it also ensures an absence of governmental interference in what you do with your wealth. You can act quickly if you need to without having red tape tie you up.

Second, you’d want a jurisdiction whose government has a consistent history for economic stability that caters to international investors. This is critical. It means that if that country’s economy is dependent upon foreign investment, the political leaders can’t change the rules on you without destroying their own careers. You want them to need you to do well, so that they can remain in their jobs. That’s your insurance policy when times are hard and political temptations are great.

Finally, if you’re able to do so, financially, you’d want to have a bolt hole – a property in a jurisdiction that’s either going to be minimally affected by the coming crisis or will be positively affected. That’s something you’d need to create in advance, as, if conditions turned sour in your home country, you’d want to have your Alamo ready for you. You’d just pack a carry-on and go to the airport, knowing your destination was waiting for you. Making your wealth safe in a crisis won’t help much if you can’t get to it and get your family safe.

I’m not predicting an “end-of-the-world” scenario here, but it would be wise to anticipate significant unrest that may be brief or periodic. Ideally, you’d want to sit that out someplace safer.

*  *  *

Unfortunately, there’s little any individual can practically do to change the trajectory of broke governments in need of more cash. There are still steps you can take to ensure you survive the turmoil with your money intact. New York Times best-selling author Doug Casey and his team just released a free guide that will show you exactly how. Click here to download the PDF now.

The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are still dormant, recording double-digit cargo declines last month, ending the first half significantly lower when compared with the same period in 2019, reported Los Angeles Daily News.

Both ports are some of the busiest seaports in the US. The Port of Los Angeles reported this week that cargo in June fell 9.6% compared to June 2019. The Port of Long Beach reported an 11.1% decline in cargo last month when compared to the same period last year. 

The plunge in containerized volume at both ports is due to coronavirus pandemic crashing the global economy with world trade sinking in the last several months. Even before that, global trade volumes were waning as the US and China were engaged in a fierce trade war. 

Gene Seroka, the executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, warned  Wednesday containerized volumes at the port could plunge 15% this year when compared with all of 2019.

Seroka said the port is operating well below capacity at around 80%-85%, adding that, slumping trade flows will profoundly impact dock jobs. 

“Less cargo means fewer jobs here at America’s port and we’re watching this very closely,” he said. “Our labor shift work for our longshore groups is down 18% compared to the same period in 2019.

“Now, the double-hit is in full focus,” Seroka added, “with levels of cargo volumes not seen since the (2008) Great Recession.”

Imports at the Port of Los Angeles fell 13.7% for the first half compared to last year, and down 7% in June compared with the same month the previous year. Exports plunged 18% in the first half and 21% in June. 

Last week, Mario Cordero, the Long Beach port’s executive director, said, “canceled sailings continued to rise at a rapid rate in the second quarter as ocean carriers adjusted their voyages to a decline in demand for imports during the national Covid-19 outbreak.” 

Officials at both ports warned recessionary forces are damaging consumer spending, resulting in a reduction in products from overseas and further suggested containerized volumes could continue to decline through the second half. 

“We’re seeing a miss on just about every season we cater to,” Seroka said of shipments. “The spring fashion season has come and gone without real impact, back to school will not be anywhere near what we’ve witnessed in the past. And the trade peak season that’s normally in August will be relatively flat simply because you and I are not out at the stores on a regular basis.”

Combined, both ports had 104 canceled sails in the first half, more than double the figure from 1H19.

Depressed containerized volumes at North America’s largest seaports tells us a lot about the broader economy and indicates there’s no V-shaped recovery in the cards this year. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

The ground is quickly shifting in Asia and India is quickly finding itself in a difficult position.

For years India has dithered and played games over central Asian development. Since the rise of Narendra Modi as India’s leader, he has played the game of courting both the West and the East to wheedle India a better position.

Modi shifted India back towards a pro-West position immediately after taking over. He’s famously dragged his feet on major infrastructure projects in Central Asia, continuing India’s dreams of outmaneuvering China to become the central power of the Heartland.

So, color me not shocked to see just days after the $400+ billion mega-deal between China and Iran is announced to be close to completion, Iran gives India the boot over delays involving an important infrastructure project.

Four years after India and Iran signed an agreement to construct a rail line from Chabahar port to Zahedan, along the border with Afghanistan, the Iranian government has decided to proceed with the construction on its own, citing delays from the Indian side in funding and starting the project.

India has played footsie with Iran for two years now over major projects like this rail line since President Trump unilaterally pulled out of the JCPOA and began his maximum pressure campaign on Iran.

This all comes down to Modi who has pulled India away from Iran as the pressure ramps up versus being one of the few countries willing to flout U.S. sanctions back in 2012/3 when President Obama put them on the first time.

Back then India and Iran traded oil for goods and/or local currency. India is still a major energy importer and they’ve purposefully strained relations with their energy-rich neighbor.

Go back to November 2017 when Gazprom announced preliminary work on a new version of the long-delayed IPI Pipeline — Iran, Pakistan, India. Since that announcement very little work has been done.

The IPI pipeline, like other major Russian pipelines, like South Stream, Nordstream 2 and Turkstream, has long been fought aggressively by the U.S. going back 20 years.

We’ve pushed for the TAPI Pipeline to come down from Turkmenistan and through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. And, indeed, the Turkmen national gas company has laid the first 200 miles of the project to the Afghan border but it cannot secure the funding to go further.

Urged on by the U.S. to begin the project, which was supposed to be finished this year, Turkmenistan is now stuck with an unfinished, uneconomical boondoggle since the U.S. could never deliver on its promises to control the ground needed in Afghanistan nor cut a deal with the Taliban to ensure its passage.

The whole thing is a mess while the IPI pipeline remains stalled, exactly as Washington wants it.

So now, with China moving in to secure Iran’s future, cementing their strategic partnership with both Iran and Russia, it’s clear Iran has run out of patience with Modi’s games.

India, especially under Modi, has resisted China’s One Belt, One Road program, being one of the few nations to not send a head of state to the first OBOR summit in 2018. Even the U.S. sent an undersecretary, 3rd class to monitor things.

But this is par for the course with India. They feel entitled to be the major hub in any future trade routes and that entitlement is fueled by U.S. promises of future rewards.

Before their opposition to OBOR, which makes sense given the strained relations between India and China, India was opposed to being a strong partner in the North South Transport Corridor (NSTC) which connects St. Petersburg as well as points east in Russia, with a termination point at the Iranian port at Bandar Abbas as well at Chabahar.

From there goods could traverse the Arabian Sea to Mumbai. The point of the NTSC is to create an overland route which drastically cuts down the time to bring goods from Russia to and from Southern Asia and the Pacific Rim.

It is an important part of OBOR making Iran, not India the key geographical component to Eurasian connectivity and economic development.

This railway from Chabahar to Zahedan was, in part, a concession to India as a spur off the NTSC to open up Afghanistan and satisfy its need to retain some semblance of control over the big picture.

India and Iran have a relationship over Chabahar itself, upgrading its capacity. This was a major breakthrough for the Asian powers which India has now, effectively, thrown away because Trump told them to.

Because it should be clear by now that despite still buying Russian military hardware, Modi chose Trump over its neighbors to the west and east. His aggression in Kashmir last year along with slow-walking this rail line, he’s been holding up central Asian integration for years, including his disastrous opening salvo in the globalist’s war on cash.

Modi has been a good little foot soldier for the West.

Sure he kicks every once in a while, but ultimately, he does what the U.S. wants him to do.

The problem for him and India is now that Trump has raised the stakes on China as well as Europe in the hopes of keeping the petrodollar system afloat, he’s also trying to pull the U.S. out of region physically, leaving only the financial weapons behind.

Trump wants out of Afghanistan. The U.S. will be forced out of Iraq and Syria. Iran will weather whatever Israel throws at them. Trump has already proven that he’s willing to fund proxies like the Saudis and the Kurds but he’s not willing to involve the U.S. in an actual shooting war.

And because of this India’s foreign policy will eventually have to reconcile with its neighbors rather than its bigger dreams of replacing China as the rising power in Asia.

Simply put, look at the Heartland now. Western influence is collapsing. Not only does Trump want out of Afghanistan but Pakistan isn’t coming back into the Saudi/U.S. orbit any time soon.

China just splashed another $11 billion into Pakistan while its huge deal with Iran all but cuts the Saudis out of future oil exports to China. And if the Saudis do want to do business with China it will be on China’s terms.

And those terms will be settled in yuan, not dollars.

This is why I said last week that Trump has reaped the whirlwind in his dubious foreign policy towards the Middle East and Asia.

In article after article I patiently explained how and why Trump and the U.S. had no real leverage over Iran short of bombing the country back to the stone age. That would never happen on Trump’s watch because Iran’s leadership would never do anything so overt as to invite that response.

Even the attack on the U.S. bases in Iraq in January in response to Trump’s miscalculated assassination of General Qassem Soleimani was measured, precise and, officially, without U.S. casualties. If there was ever a moment for the Iranians to make a strategic mistake that invited Trump’s wrath, it was that.

And once his bluff was called there, that was the end of Energy Dominance and the entire strategy of isolating Iran.

Modi to me looks like another Erdogan, a political cockroach who thinks geography gives him more leverage than it actually does. He keeps overplaying his hand and now Iran has chopped it off for being an unreliable partner.

The railway to Afghanistan gets built with Chinese money through the AIIB — Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. AIIB was developed to be a competitor to the U.S.-led Asian Development Bank (ADB) and it just got a major scalp.

China and Russia will have access to not only the ports at Bandar Abbas and Chabahar but also Gwadar near the Iran/Pakistan border in Balochistan, which China has turned into a focal point for OBOR.

By the time Modi is done playing his games India will have lost a lot of ground. Maybe that’s why despite violent clashes along the disputed border with China, peace quickly ensued.

Because India can’t afford to push China away given the size of their trade relations. I’m sure Trump is telling Modi the U.S. will substitute in goods from the U.S. but that’s going to be a hard sell with China now a major partner with its neighbor to the north and west.

The new silk roads are coming. India to me looks lost.

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The virus pandemic is now surging in 37 U.S. states with caseloads rapidly increasing, and the resulting factor is a terrified consumer unwilling to shop at malls or eat at restaurants. 

Before we dive into restaurant data via OpenTable, Axios published a fantastic visualization of where changes in new COVID-19 cases are occurring in the U.S. The map shows cases are exploding across much of the country, jeopardizing the recovery as governors in many states are either pausing or reversing reopenings. 

Nationwide, new virus infections have increased 21% since last week — and before were up 24% from the prior week. The reemergence of the virus has had a profound impact on the recovery, due mainly to several factors: the first, governors pausing or reversing reopenings; second, the human psyche of a virus pandemic reemerging with no vaccine is forcing people to hunker down at home and consume less. 

OpenTable data of restaurants across the country shows the percentage of eateries taking reservations has plateaued in the last 20 days, coinciding with the latest virus surge.   

OpenTable found Arizona, California, Washington, D.C., Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Louisana, Maryland, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennesee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin, were states with restaurant reservations stalling in late June, or in some cases reversing through the first half of July. 

Arizona

California 

Washington, D.C. 

Georgia

Illinois

Kansas

Louisana

Maryland

New Mexico

Ohio

Oklahoma

Pennsylvania

South Carolina

Tennesee 

Texas

Virginia

Washinton

Wisconsin

Readers may recall our latest reports on the stalling recovery: 

• Real-Time Data Shows That After Peaking In Late June, Consumer Spending Is Now Declining
• U.S. Recovery Stalls As Pandemic ‘Second Wave’ Threatens To Unleash Double-Dip Recession

To make matters worse, as the recovery stalls due to reemerging virus cases, there’s also a fiscal cliff looming, threatening to crash consumption if another round of stimulus isn’t passed. 

Here are some of the reasons why a fiscal cliff is ahead: 

• expiration of extended unemployment insurance,
• the fading support from stimulus checks,
• exhaustion of PPP
• stress from state and local aid gov’ts.

Combine this all together, and there’s no way in hell a V-shaped recovery will be seen this year.