Month: April 2022

Authored by Laurie Calhoun via The Libertarian Institute,

The power of language is magical to behold. Through the mere pronouncement of words, people can be persuaded to do what they would never have thought to do, left to their own devices. The playbook with the most success in this regard is that of war. When people are “informed” that they and their families are in mortal danger, they can and often will acquiesce to any and all policies which government authorities claim to be necessary in order to protect them.

Young people can be coaxed into killing complete strangers who never did anything personally to them. Citizens can be brainwashed to believe that suitably labeled persons can and indeed must be denied any and all human rights. When the stakes are claimed to be life and death, even apparently intelligent people can be goaded to accept that the mere possession of a divergent opinion is evil, and the expression of dissent a crime. The use of military weapons to execute obviously innocent, entirely innocuous civilians, including children, suddenly becomes permissible, so long as the victims have been labeled collateral damage. All any of this takes is to identify “the enemy” as evil.

In centuries past, “the laws of war” were said to require the humane treatment of enemy soldiers. They were diagnosed as suffering from “invincible ignorance,” misled and mistaken about the dispute said to necessitate recourse to war, but still acknowledged as persons capable of being courageous combatants who found themselves through historical fortuity on the wrong side. An enemy soldier was to be provided with the opportunity to lay down his weapon and surrender in order to save his own life. Disarmed or incapacitated soldiers were not to be executed by their captors, for they had already been neutralized and posed no more danger than unarmed civilians. Prisoners of war were to be treated as human beings, and when they were tortured or summarily executed, this constituted a war crime. Such “laws of war,” which form the basis of international agreements, including the Geneva Conventions, have needless to say often been flouted, but, in theory, they were to be upheld by civilized people.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, political leaders and government officials proclaimed that “everything changed.” The Bush administration legal team deployed linguistic innovation to issue in an entirely new era of warfare, wherein the “laws of war” would still be said to obtain, but they would be inapplicable to entire classes of human beings. Jihadist soldiers for radical Islamist causes were labeled unlawful enemy combatants, whose “unlawful” status was said to imply that they were protected by neither international norms such as the Geneva Conventions nor the laws of civil society.

Under this pretext, terrorist suspects were tortured while held captive at prisons in Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and Baghram, in addition to many black sites around the world. Ever keen to cover their tracks, the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) also flatly denied that they ever tortured anyone, by redefining as enhanced interrogation techniques the abusive practices inflicted on hundreds, if not thousands, of men in an effort to extract from them actionable intelligence. And just in case any of this “logic” was called into question by pesky human rights advocates, Bush administration officials also derided the Geneva Conventions as “quaint.”

Imminent vs. Immediate in the Global War on Terror

The “peace candidate” Barack Obama was elected in 2008 on the promise to rein in the excesses of the Bush administration, including what Obama characterized as the “dumb” war on Iraq. The new president publicly denounced “enhanced interrogation techniques” as torture but then proceeded to take linguistic neologism to an entirely new level by not only redefining assassination as targeted killing but also labeling any suspect eliminated through the use of lethal drones as an Enemy Killed in Action (EKIA).

The slaughtered “soldiers” were assumed to be guilty of possible complicity in future possible crimes, a preposterous position never fully grasped by Obama’s devotees, who somehow failed to recognize that the specific implement used to kill does not distinguish various types of homicide from one another, morally speaking. The extrajudicial execution of individual human beings in civil society is illegal, but the Obama administration effectively maintained that the targeting of suspicious persons and their associates in lands far away was perfectly permissible, so long as the victims were killed by missiles launched from drones, thereby rendering them “acts of war.”

The entire drone program, whether within or far from areas of active hostilities (i.e., war zones), was portrayed by Obama and his administration as just another facet of “just war.” Blinded to the moral atrocity of this new lethal-centric approach to dealing with suspected enemies, whereby they would be executed rather than taken prisoner, Obama’s loyal supporters blithely embraced the propaganda according to which he was a smart warrior. After demonstrating his death creds to the satisfaction of hawks, by killing not only Osama bin Laden, but also U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, suspected of complicity in factional terrorism, Obama was reelected for a second term in 2012, despite having summarily executed thousands of men—mostly brown-skinned, unnamed, and unarmed—located in their own civil societies, far from any U.S. citizen, and in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The deft deployment of two simple words, immediate and imminent, played a key role in allowing Obama to get away with murder, even of U.S. citizens such as Anwar al-Awlaki and his sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Guided by drone-killing czar John Brennan, Obama’s lawyers calmly explained in public addresses and official documents that suspects who posed imminent threats to the United States could be targeted by lethal drones because an imminent threat did not imply immediacy. In other words, they could be killed even when they were currently unarmed and living in their own civil society, surrounded by family members and friends, and even when the future crime of which they were vaguely suspected was merely hypothetical and therefore had no specific date.

When targets were “nominated” for execution, the administration operated under the assumption that they were guilty unless specific information was brought forth to demonstrate their innocence. The victims themselves obviously could not do this, initially, because they were not informed that they were being targeted and, later, because they were dead. Meanwhile, local residents and journalists on the ground who knew these people’s names and dared to assert that the victims were not terrorists were either denounced as propagandists or cast as misguided persons hoodwinked by the rhetoric of jihadists.

As the death toll mounted, outspoken critics in the vicinity of the missile strikes became progressively more terrified of being themselves eliminated for seeming to support terrorist groups. Their concerns were not unfounded, for they risked being affixed with the lethal label associate and added to hit lists for execution if they dared to question the drone warriors’ narrative. This oppressive climate needless to say served actively to suppress dissent from the U.S. government’s official story of what they had done, even among locals who witnessed the grisly scenes where entirely innocent community members were incinerated by missiles launched from drones.

Imminent vs. Immediate in the Opioid Crisis

Improbably enough, the very same two words, imminent and immediate, used by the Obama legal team to invert the presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt in the case of terrorist suspects located abroad, proved to be deadly in an entirely different context during the twenty-first century as well.

The causes of the sudden and shocking increase in the number of narcotics addicts and overdose deaths all over the United States are manifold, but a tidal wave of diversion was made possible by drug-dealer doctors and the notorious “pain clinics” where they plied their trade. Manufacturers produced and pharmacies dispensed billions of pills as demand multiplied in tandem with the creation of more and more new addicts, who could no longer function without narcotics.

Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family are widely regarded as the prime movers of the opioid crisis, having undertaken a highly successful campaign to coax doctors into believing that their patented time-release prescription narcotic Oxycontin was nonaddictive and could be safely provided to patients even for moderate pain. This marketing feat was achieved by influencing key players at the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), who not only approved the medication but permitted it to be sold along with a package insert falsely suggesting that it was less prone to abuse than other narcotics.

In its quest to sell as many pills as possible, the pharmaceutical industry repeatedly pivoted to neologize in lethal ways over the two decades following the launch of Oxycontin in 1996. When it emerged that the pills sometimes wore off before the twelve-hour time release period, marketers and sales representatives claimed that those patients were suffering from breakthrough pain, the remedy for which was (surprise!) to double their dose. The narcotics marketers indulged in flat-out sophistry when they insisted that patients who appeared to be addicted to their painkillers were in fact suffering from pseudoaddiction, the remedy for which was (surprise!) even higher doses of their drugs. As farcical as these arguments may seem in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight and in the light of the overdose epidemic now running rampant, many doctors appear to have been persuaded to believe that their patients’ miserable condition was not indicative of addiction but a manifestation of their ongoing and unbearable pain, the solution to which was to ply them with yet more powerful narcotics.

Pharma-coopted lawmakers were notified of the proliferating addiction problem early on but refused to stop the runaway train by demanding that the FDA cease playing along with Purdue’s insane pro-narcotics marketing campaign. Other companies needless to say contributed as well, through promulgating the “pain epidemic” propaganda so as to expand the market niche of such products, which had previously been reserved for terminally ill patients. Johnson & Johnson played a causal role in what became the opioid crisis by growing tons of poppies (in Tasmania) to meet the enormous increased industry need for raw opium, without which the billions of pills prescribed could not and would never have been produced.

As the opioid crisis began to become recognized for what it was, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) sought to issue “Immediate Suspension Orders” (ISOs) against the three major drug wholesale distributors to pharmacies, Cardinal Health, McKesson, and Amerisource Bergen. Through issuing such orders, Joe Rannazzisi, the deputy director of the Office of Diversion Control, hoped to halt the ongoing mass shipments of opioids to retailers such as CVS in cases where the sheer volume of prescriptions could not be explained by ordinary medical practice and so was a clear indication that widespread diversion of narcotics was underway.

Rannazzisi ended up being hobbled by a team of corporate lawyers and lobbyists who managed to cobble together a new law in 2014 which, despite its beneficent-sounding name, “The Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act” (HR4709), served to protect, above all, drug manufacturers and distributors. The Act rewrote the law already on the books through redefining the imminent danger required to issue an ISO to mean “a substantial likelihood of an immediate threat.” One of the new Act’s enthusiastic promoters, Linden Barber (a former DEA officer and lawyer who had left his government position to represent the drug distributors), persuasively explained on the floor of Congress that “having a clear legal standard is always better.” The measure passed unanimously, without a roll call vote, for the simple reason that it sounded like a policy to which no decent person could object. But rather than stemming the tide of the opioid crisis, the Act severely hampered the DEA’s ability to issue ISOs, for it was prohibitively difficult for officials to meet the newly stipulated legal standard of imminence as requiring immediacy.

President Obama signed the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2014 into law, and the marketing campaign used to promote the use of highly addictive time-release narcotics barreled ahead. The DEA’s sudden inability to call a halt to the shipment of tons of narcotics to retailers effectively guaranteed that the number of dependent persons would multiply, as potent prescription pills continued to be diverted for recreational uses and thereby create more addicts. But more addicts meant more overdoses, not only from the potent pills themselves, but also because the street supplies of heroin to which many users eventually turned were often cut with extremely dangerous fentanyl.

Unfazed by the death tolls, which had already soared to many thousands by 2014, the pharmaceutical giants insisted that the sorry situation of addicts was no argument against helping patients genuinely in pain, who would in fact be wronged if their access to narcotics were curbed. The addicts dropping like flies were painted as solely responsible for their plight, despite ample evidence that many of the overdose victims began as legitimate pain patients, who became aware of their dependency only upon reaching the bottom of their amber vials.

The Role of Obamacare in Propelling and Augmenting the Opioid Crisis

“Everything changed” in the twenty-first century, not only with the war on terror, the rebranding of torture, and the normalization of assassination, but also in the pharma-friendly approach to healthcare ushered in by President Barack Obama. By pushing through his signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, which leftists were led to believe would create a system of socialized medicine (referred to by many as Obamacare), the president notoriously bowed to drug makers and the insurance industry, extending to those sectors the very form of crony corporate welfare already enjoyed by companies in the military industry.

Obama’s collaboration with pharmaceutical and insurance company executives in crafting the ACA allowed them to secure advantageous pricing arrangements to ensure the maximization of their profits, while at the same time massively increasing the sheer volume of sales. The pharmaceutical industry was greatly enriched through the provision of virtually limitless free psychiatric medications to low-income patients through government programs such as Medicaid and Medicare, and to veterans through the VA (Veterans Administration). Mental health-based disability claims soared, and the sales of SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), anti-anxiety, atypical anti-psychotic medications and other psychotropes, including narcotics, increased accordingly. The millions of new prescription medications dispensed to formerly uninsured Americans ended up being paid for by the middle class, who were mandated by law to sign up for Obamacare or else face a hefty tax penalty, should they decline to comply.

Despite what may have been Obama’s initial good intention, to make healthcare available to uninsured persons, Obamacare ultimately made medical treatment in the United States prohibitively expensive for many middle class families, whose copays, premiums and deductibles increased dramatically. The new mandatory healthcare program skyrocketed the salaries of health industry executives while pricing drugs and procedures out of reach for many persons who had previously been able to afford them. Millions of people in the United States have filed medical bankruptcy in recent years. In cases where prescription narcotics addicts became uninsured because they lost their jobs, they turned to the streets for their needed drugs, given the impossibility of paying out of pocket for extraordinarily expensive prescription pills.

Given the story of Obamacare, perhaps no one should be surprised that when the Obama administration finally took action to address the opioid epidemic, most of the allocated $1.1 billion was for the alternative medication of already existing addicts. The pharma-friendly approach prevailed once again, encouraging the sale of more and more drugs (such as Suboxone) to help addicts to wean themselves off their narcotics. Obama’s dilatory and pro-pill approach to the opioid crisis ultimately generated even more people who, in order to kick their narcotics habit, would need to avail themselves of further pharmaceutical means, effectively trading one drug for another. In other words, both the problem of opioid overprescription, facilitated through Obamacare by providing easy access to narcotics to formerly uninsured persons, and the measures implemented by the Obama administration in response to the overdose epidemic, served to increase pharmaceutical industry profits.

The Death Connection

Whether or not one wishes to connect any further dots in the cases of drone assassination and the opioid epidemic, it does seem worth pointing out that Obama’s own attorney general, Eric Holder (2009-2015), was a former legal counselor to Purdue Pharma, who in fact defended the company in a 2004 lawsuit alleging deceptive marketing of Oxycontin. This is noteworthy because it was none other than Eric Holder who, in an infamous White Paper and various public addresses, so adamantly defended the creative interpretation of imminence as not implying immediacy, the crucial linguistic maneuver used to defend and promote Obama’s drone killing spree.

The normalization of assassination achieved by the Obama administration expanded the domain of what was said to be legitimate state killing by inverting the burden of proof on suspects while simultaneously claiming (illogically enough) that “areas outside active hostilities” were in fact war zones. Together, all of these linguistic tricks generated a veritable killing machine, opening up vast new market niches and dramatically increasing the profit potential for companies in the shockingly lucrative business of state-inflicted homicide. Not only weapons manufacturers but also logistics and analytics companies were able to reap hefty profits through eliminating as many people pegged as “terrorist suspects” as possible.

The imminent vs. immediate dichotomy was inverted and redeployed, but in the opposite direction, by pharmaceutical company legal teams and collaborating lawmakers in 2014 to permit the promiscuous sale of narcotics to continue on despite the opioid overdose epidemic on display throughout the United States. The Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2014 ironically “ensured” only profits for drug companies, as millions of new addicts would be created during the second decade of the twenty-first century, accelerating and multiplying the domino effect of diversion and overdoses already ravaging communities all across the United States. It matters not that pharmaceutical company executives sought not to kill people but to sell pills. They aggressively pushed narcotics without regard for the likely future consequences of their drive for profit. Indeed, they persisted in pushing narcotics even as drug overdose deaths reached record levels.

Under Obama, more than two thousand suspects outside areas of active hostilities were premeditatedly and intentionally incinerated by missiles launched from drones. The tally of overdose deaths in the United States exceeded 100K for the single year ending in April 2021. The long-range effects of the normalization of assassination, however, are likely to be more deadly than the opioid crisis, given that many other governments have followed suit in acquiring lethal drones for their own use, having been persuaded by the precedent set by the U.S. government that this form of state-inflicted homicide is perfectly permissible. In contrast, the promiscuous opioid prescription practices of doctors in the United States has been curtailed and was not emulated in the UK or in Europe, although the pharmaceutical giants do appear to have continued their morally dubious marketing practices in other countries abroad, especially in less-developed lands.

As both the drone program and the opioid prescription debacle illustrate, when government agencies such as the Pentagon and the FDA have been captured by industry forces focused above all on maximizing profits, they will simply look the other way as the corpses pile up, denying responsibility for any and all “collateral damage.” This tendency of bureaucrats and corporate leaders to shirk responsibility for the negative consequences of their policies helps to explain the ease with which lawmakers are coopted by lobbyists from not only the military but also the pharmaceutical industry. The recent deployment of imminent and immediate by lethal legal “experts” serves to underscore why the censorship of language by government officials themselves is inherently dangerous, given that their policies in recent years have multiplied, not prevented, the deaths of human beings.

In a representative democracy, the lawmakers promote the interests of the voters who elected them. What kind of government sacrifices the lives of human beings in order to maximize the profits of corporate leaders?

Reports about the superyachts of sanctioned Russian billionaires being frozen or detained came a dime a dozen in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine by the country at the end of February. But are these floating displays of obscene wealth now closely watched over in European harbors and marinas big or little fish when considering the most valuable superyachts owned by Russian billionaires?

The answer to this question is: they kind of are.

As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, among the megalomaniac yachts detained in Europe are some of the biggest known to be owned by now sanctioned Russians. This is according to information by the Russian Asset Tracker and several media reports by Forbes and others.

The Crescent, currently being held in Tarragona on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, is linked to sanctioned Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin. At an approximate value of $600 million and a length of 443 feet, it is one of the largest yachts in the world and is said to feature a large glass-bottom pool, a helicopter hangar and a two-story glass atrium.

Another enormous vessel – nabbed by authorities while undergoing repairs in Hamburg, Germany – is the Dilbar, owned by Metalloinvest’s Alisher Usmanov. It is the world’s largest yacht measured by interior volume and has a staggering length of 511 feet. The yacht is believed to have been even more expensive upon delivery in 2016 than the Crescent, which was finished in 2019. Finally, the world’s largest sailing yacht, three-master SY A, was detained in Trieste, Italy. It is owned by Andrey Melnichenko of EuroChem and coal company SUEK.

But several more of the biggest boats owned by sanctioned Russian oligarchs are currently out of reach of Western authorities.

You will find more infographics at Statista

These vessels have been sighted in the Maldives, Dubai or Turkey – all countries that haven’t imposed sanctions on Russian individuals and have no extradition agreements with the West. The latter nation is currently hosting two boats of yacht afficionado and soon-to-be former Chelsea F.C. owner Roman Abramovich.

Compared to the value of these massive boats, some other superyachts that European countries detained seem rather modest despite their luxurious furnishings. The only ones valued at more than 100 million dollars were Sergei Chemezov’s Valerie, which was frozen by Spanish authorities, and another one of Igor Sechin’s yachts, Amore Vero, which was detained in France. Only the price at the time of delivery was available for the two boats, meaning the current value of the boats built in 2013 and 2011, respectively, would be lower now.

Other highly publicized detainments of superyachts included Alexey Mordaschov’s Lady M and Gennady Timchenko’s Lena, both held up in Italy. The vessels are valued at comparably low $27 million and $8 million, considering loss of value after delivery. The only other yacht of a value of more than $50 million belonging to a sanctioned Russian billionaire was detained in the islands of Mallorca – Victor Vekselberg’s Tango. The latest catch was a $38 million superyacht belonging to an unnamed Russian businessman, which was frozen by British authorities in London’s Canary Wharf in connection with sanctions, The Guardian reported Tuesday.

Authored by Wesley Shank via The Epoch Times,

Misleading label claims are everywhere…

They bombard you while walking down the grocery store aisles.

They creep up on you while scanning a slick marketer’s website.

They shock you when even your best friend recommends an industrial organic brand… “Hey, it’s a lot cheaper and they say it’s just as good!”

“Well… how do I know?”

I admit this is the hard part because the big guys don’t want you to know! They spend tens of thousands of dollars to design the label and marketing claims to subtly deceive you without you knowing.

And they’ve done a good job… many people are fooled.

It’s time to pull back the shroud to expose the industrial reality that lies behind.

Deceptive Label Claims to Be Aware of:

1. Cage-Free, Free-Range, and even Pastured

The big guys describe their chickens flawlessly. Their websites show lovely pictures of birds walking in lush grass with sunshine streaming around them.

Yes, they do look… almost pastured… until you notice the sprawling industrial “CAFO barn” at the edge of one picture (in the video link).

That barn could be holding 10,000+ birds. Maybe 5% of them will venture outside during their short lives—but probably not.

Truly no comparison…

There is so much more to share and explain… I’ll devote an entire email to this as soon as possible.

And I didn’t even start on the same problem with CAFO Industrial Organic Dairy farms. More on that next week…

2. “Grass-fed,” Beef

Some “grass-fed” beef is actually fed a corn and soy based diet for the last 3-5 months of its life in a feedlot.

Sure doesn’t sound like grass-fed to me!

But like so many of these label claims, they have a kernel of truth mixed in to make a very tricky logic.

Most cattle are raised on grass for the first half of their lives before being grain-finished in a CAFO feedlot. So the industrial guys say…

“Of course I can label my beef as ‘grass-fed’!”

These cattle eat grass for part of their lives and the regulations don’t say how much grass they need to eat before I sell this as ‘grass-fed beef.’

Too bad for the customers if they don’t know what my ‘grass-fed’ means!”

I’m not making this up.

This is the logic that gets cheap “grass-fed” beef into supermarkets.

If you want truly grass-fed beef, you must ask for 100% grass-fed & grass-finished. And make sure it’s chemical-free too! Even grasses are commonly sprayed in the industrial world.

3. Product of the USA Meat

Beef and Pork can be raised and slaughtered in Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay, Brazil, China, etc…

It’s then shipped over here to be cut into your supermarket steaks, roasts and burgers…

And legally labeled as “Product of the USA!”

Sad, but true.

Those cattle and pigs didn’t breath a single breath of United States air to merit this status. But shoppers will never know the difference.

A Stone Barns Center report says 75-80% of all “USA” grass-fed beef sold online or in grocery stores is imported from overseas.

It is shocking that United States label regulations allow this.

But in some ways, the next one is even crazier!

4. “Fresh,” and “Never-been-frozen,” Poultry

According to the USDA, poultry can be sold as “fresh” if it has never been below 26° F.

Excuse me, but isn’t 32° usually considered the freezing point?

And there’s another misleading claim. This one is especially important with turkey season here.

Poultry can be sold as “never been frozen” as long as it hasn’t been stored below 0° F. Read it in the USDA’s own words.

This. is. crazy.

“Never been frozen” says quite clearly that it, well… has never been frozen. I know from experience that chickens and turkeys at 10° are quite solidly frozen!

But not to the industrial guys. As long as last year’s turkey didn’t go below 0° they can thaw it out and sell it to unsuspecting families as a beautiful “never-been-frozen” Thanksgiving Turkey.

That’s the level of integrity you get with the Industrial Organic food system.

Industrial Organics are not all bad. They help cut down on our nation’s chemical and antibiotic use.

BUT.

The deceptive marketing claims are wrong. We need to pull back the Industrial Curtain layer by layer so everyone in this country can see what lies behind.

Please help spread the word.

It’s time more people wake up and start supporting small farms across the country again. Those farms are where the real, truly pastured organics all began.

Buried deep within the DoD FY23 budget request by weapon system, the US Army has officially chosen the contractor(s) for the Next Generation Squad Weapons (NGSW) program. 

NGSW is a prototyping effort by the Army that consists of a new rifle (NGSW-R) and automatic rifle (NGSW-AR), chambered in a new high tech 6.8mm cartridge, set to replace the aging M16, M4A1 Carbines and the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, chambered in a 5.56 NATO round. 

The NGSW has been in competitive prototyping testing with three defense firms, including SIG Sauer, General Dynamics – OTS, and Textron Systems. 

On page 53/106 of the budget request, the Army expects to procure 29,046 NGSWs in 2023.

“Starts funding for the procurement and fielding of 1,704 NGSW-AR, which is the planned replacement for the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) within the Close Combat Force; Procurement and fielding of 15,348 NGSW-R which is the planned replacement for the M4A1 Carbine within the Close Combat Force; and procurement and fielding of 11,994 Next Generation Squad Weapons Fire Controls,” the document read. 

The document didn’t mention the prime contractor(s), though that should be announced later this year. 

The Army will be fielding these new main battle rifles and machine guns next year — just as tensions with Russia heat up.

By Dees Stribling of Bisnow

Already grappling with long-term pandemic-fueled troubles, the travel and hospitality industry finds itself confronting yet another adversary: surging fuel prices.

The sector had managed to claw its way back to a tolerable recovery in 2021 — and 2022 was shaping to look a little more like the days before the coronavirus. Summer vacations to the beach and further afield were anticipated. Business travel was ticking back up with conferences and in-person meetings on the rise.

For a while, things were looking up.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine. 

Oil prices are now spiking beyond $100 a barrel, driving sharp increases for gas at the pump and for pricy jet fuel — which, if conventional wisdom holds true, will inevitably mean higher costs for U.S. travelers this spring and summer.

So, less travel and another big knock on the hospitality industry? Maybe not.

Travel and hospitality experts told Bisnow this week that they remain optimistic for 2022, citing the fact that bookings are still strong — apparently because last year didn’t satisfy Americans’ demand for travel. Travelers might adjust their plans a bit this year, but mass cancellations don’t seem to be in the cards — yet.

“As concerns around omicron subside, we see very strong demand for leisure travel in the second quarter this year and beyond, and are expecting the travel market to continue to recover,” said Hayley Berg, head of price intelligence at Hopper, a booking service for airlines and hotels.

Bookings are still strong now despite gas prices that are about 70 cents higher than in mid-February, at an average of $4.26 a gallon, according to AAA, and $1.37 higher per gallon than a year ago.

The price of airline tickets is up as well, with Berg expecting airfare to climb to an average of $360 per round-trip through May, a 10% increase from current prices, though rates will taper off some by the end of the summer, as they do every year.

The spike in gas prices has certainly caused pain for many millions of people. That was already the case late last year when gas prices crept up slowly but steadily. Low-income Americans or those on fixed incomes, as well as small businesses that use a lot of transport, are all suffering.

Yet for that large portion of the population with steady incomes, leisure travel is still very much on the table. Spring break travel helped boost U.S. hotel performance for the week of March 19, STR reports, with some industry metrics showing improvements compared with 2019, though occupancy is still down from that period.

For the week, occupancy stood at 66.9%, off 3.7 percentage points off 2019, while the average daily rate was up 13.6% and revenue per available room increased 9.5%, STR reports. The weekly occupancy level, though down compared with before the pandemic, was nevertheless the highest since the week ending Aug. 7, 2021.

More pertinent for the outlook for summer travel, a number of organizations are reporting a sharp increase in bookings for planned travel in the next few months.

“There’s still a lot of demand for travel this year now that vaccines have been widely distributed and restrictions are easing,” Berg said.

Pent-up demand for travel had already been in evidence early this year, Berg said. Hopper’s bookings in Q1 2022 were up about 50% compared with the fourth quarter of 2021 and up a whopping 300% or so over Q1 2021.

Travelers are booking trips to warmer destinations in record numbers, according to booking data from AAA that the organization reported in early March. For March, April and May, bookings to places such as Florida, Mexico and Hawaii were all up more than 200% compared with 2021 and up 10% over 2019.

In mid-February, a AAA survey found that 52% of Americans plan to take a vacation this summer. That was before the war-inspired spike in gas prices, though prices had been creeping upward for some time. In any case, among those planning a trip early this year, 42% said they would not consider changing their travel plans regardless of the price of gas.

Pent-up demand isn’t the only factor that stands to keep travel strong during the summer in the face of high gasoline and jet fuel prices, AAA spokesperson Ellen Edmonds told Bisnow. Despite inflation and supply chain woes, other metrics point to a strong economy with a lot of job creation, higher wages and higher savings.

“As a result, people have more discretionary income to spend from not traveling for two years, though they are dealing with high gas prices,” Edmonds said.

For this summer, AirDNA, which tracks peer-to-peer short-term rents, is seeing higher demand than last year, which was a record-breaking year for U.S. short-term rentals. The main difference this year, according to the company was in the locations chosen: urban areas are losing out to coastal and mountain destinations, as guests looked for nature experiences. 

“As we look towards the summer, we see similar booking trends as 2021, though with 46% more nights booked compared to last year,” AirDNA Vice President of Research Jamie Lane said.

Bookings this summer may be also boosted by the return of international travel, though rising fuel prices could keep Americans traveling a little closer to home as well, Lane said — but still traveling. 

“It remains to be seen what effect fuel prices will have on U.S. vacation rental bookings this summer, but at the moment we aren’t seeing any decrease in demand, while supply is increasing to keep up,” Lane said.

“We continue to be optimistic that there’s still a significant tailwind for leisure demand,” Marriott International CEO Tony Capuano said during the company’s most recent earnings call in February, just ahead of the gas price spike.

“We already have more leisure on the books for months further out than we did in the same months last year,” Capuano said, adding that he believes that working from anywhere has been an accelerant for leisure demand. 

“And as more and more borders open, we think that influx of international leisure travel will also serve to accelerate the pace of leisure demand growth,” Capuano said.

That optimism in the hotel industry extends to the point that new hotel development is still underway, despite the rough time the industry had during 2020.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm in the industry, particularly around new hotel development, because cap rates have been so compressed and it’s so expensive to acquire existing hotels,” Reveille Hospitality CEO Marco Roca Sr. said.

Roca adds that the wider pattern of inflation is actually a net positive for hotel owners. 

“Hard-asset businesses such as hotels do well in an inflationary environment, especially because they can adjust their rates as needed,” he said. 

Driving destinations reported strong business in 2021, and expect this year to be similar, and for a similar reason — people want to hit the road. 

“People were really sick at being cooped up last year and hit the road,” Wall Drug Inc. Chairman Rick Hustead said. “For us, last year was a record-breaker.”

Wall Drug is a storied tourist attraction in South Dakota, near I-90 and Badlands National Park, with cowboy-themed and other stores, a number of restaurants, an art gallery and an 80-foot brontosaurus sculpture.

As for this year, March has seen about as many visitors as last year, which was a good month, Hustead said, and he’s optimistic about the summer, even though gas is more expensive.

Another reason not to overestimate the impact of higher gas prices on summer travel is that the U.S. has been through this situation before.

Back in the summer of 2008, ahead of the recession, gas prices were at record levels. People traveled anyway, even without the spur of two previous years when travel was more difficult or impossible.

“After a reasonably good start to 2008, the industry fell into an extremely negative pattern during the last four months of the year,” STR President Mark Lomanno said in a statement at the end of that year.

That is, despite high gas prices that year — actually higher than now, adjusted for inflation — travel and hospitality didn’t particularly suffer until the bottom dropped out of the economy with the global financial panic in September. That summer, Americans might have grumbled about the price of gas, but they continued to take summer vacations. 

Data at the time did show that people started to drive less as a result of high gas prices, and use less gas, a pattern that seems to be reasserting itself in 2022. In 2008, the Federal Highway Agency reported, the number of miles Americans drove dropped 3.5% during the first 10 months of the year in response to high gas prices, while the gas consumed has declined by about 4%. 

There is a short-term response to high gas prices: drive less. And there’s also a longer-term one: buy more efficient cars, the government reported, a trend that doesn’t impact leisure travel as much.

“In the long run, there is general agreement in the literature that about two-thirds of this (fuel consumption decline) results from the purchase of more fuel-efficient vehicles and only about a third results from reduced travel,” the FHA reported.

Much of that reduced travel seems to be in day-to-day living, rather than leisure travel, which people tend to plan well in advance and save for, Placer.ai says in a report on the impact of gas prices on retailers.

Rising gas prices tend to cause consumers to consolidate their shopping trips, and as consumers try to limit their gas expenditures, they don’t drive as far as they used to for everyday purchases, according to Placer.ai.

“People still feel cooped up even after last year,” Wall Drug’s Hustead said. “Travel is still worth it to them, even if driving is more expensive this year.”

An ominous sign about today’s high inflation environment, and quite clearly the Federal Reserve is behind the hiking curve, is a contact close with the Fed complaining about out-of-control golf membership prices. 

Yes, you heard that correctly. Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia President Patrick Harker’s speech cited “one of our contacts,” presumably a Wall Street banker or corporate elite, complained about the “whopping membership fee increases at his golf club.”

Harker said the contact even “suggested it may be a good time to play at your local muni instead” of a private course. 

As Matt Taibbi of TK News notes,

“I know I’m a little out of practice, because just as I was about to begin speaking, I made sure my mute button wasn’t on,” he cracked. “In all seriousness…”

Shifting to a graver theme, he mentioned the old saw about being cursed to live in “interesting times.” The novel coronavirus, he said, “has tragically killed at least 6 million people globally and around 1 million here in the United States,” adding, “That’s the equivalent of a city larger than San Francisco or Seattle.” Russia has also invaded Ukraine, he said, “fomenting death and destruction and spurring a humanitarian crisis in the heart of Europe.”

Next in this parade of calamities: the scourge of inflation, a problem so serious that it touched him and his colleagues personally.

“One of our contacts, for instance, mentioned whopping membership fee increases at his golf club,” Harker said, “suggesting this summer may be a good time to play at your local muni instead.”

*  *  *

The Fed member continued to say “generous fiscal policies, supply chain disruptions, and accommodative monetary policy have pushed inflation” to a four-decade high. 

Notice Harker’s listing of inflation’s culprits and how “accommodative monetary policy” is last. In our view, that should be first, though the Fed will never admit creating money out of thin air is the root of all inflation. 

The voting Fed member is onboard for “methodical hikes as the year continues and the data evolve.” He also anticipated that the Fed’s balance sheet of Treasury securities, agency debt, and mortgage-backed securities would be reduced. 

He said he agrees with the current Fed view of seven rate hikes, estimating the Fed to move quickly toward a neutral federal-funds rate target of approximately 2.5% later this year. 

Harker’s speech comes hours after the 2s10s Treasury curve inverted, the most-monitored, the most-studied, and the most accurate predictor of recession the market offers.

Last week, Fed Governor Christopher Waller told an audience that his home searching in Washington, D.C., ran into a brick wall due to low inventory and high prices. 

For two top Fed members to point out inflationary woes at the highest levels, even affecting themselves or other elites, suggests they’re way behind the hiking curve. 

For a sense of just how far behind, the Taylor Rule suggests given the current inflation rate and unemployment rate, the Fed needs to hike by an absurd-sounding 1155bps to get back to ‘normal’…

Today’s ongoing phenomenon of high inflation is not fading and has been exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which might call for aggressive rate hikes in upcoming FOMC meetings. Happy hiking Powell, the bond market sees danger ahead, and a soft-landing has never been achieved.

Authored by Michael Washburn via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said that Chinese officials were “extremely secretive” about the possible origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, though he stopped short of accusing Beijing of deliberately covering it up.

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease was asked on BBC’s “Sunday Morning” program on March 27 what his response was to claims by World Health Organization (WHO) investigators that China prevented them from “seeing key details and from speaking to key people” when they were probing the pandemic origins in Wuhan in early 2021.

“You know, I don’t want to create any or mention any disparaging remarks about that,” Fauci responded.

“But the Chinese are very closed, in a way of being very reluctant, particularly when you have a disease that evolves in their country, they become extremely secretive, even though there’s no reason to be secretive,” he continued.

Fauci then suggested that embarrassment over global reactions may have driven the Chinese regime to be less than totally forthcoming on the origins and spread of COVID-19.

“I think they were very concerned and maybe embarrassed that the virus evolved from their country but there’s nothing wrong with that,” he said.

“So when they see something evolving in their own country, they tend to have a natural reflex of not necessarily covering things up, but not being very open and transparent.”

U.S. officials and others have repeatedly decried Beijing’s denying access to key data and facilities amid ongoing investigations to find out the source of the pandemic.

In addition, the Chinese regime in the early stages of the initial outbreak in Wuhan suppressed information about the severity and spread of the disease, allowing the virus to transmit around the world that was still unaware of the dangers of the new coronavirus.

Many lawmakers and experts have accused the communist regime of covering up both the origins of the pandemic and the initial spread of the outbreak.

At the heart of the debate on the source of the outbreak is whether it leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan or if the virus was transmitted naturally before jumping to humans. While there are proponents for both theories, the Chinese regime’s refusal to allow independent scrutiny of the lab makes it extremely difficult to fully investigate the matter.

Admitting that he was “never certain” in the early days about when and where COVID-19 might have originated, Fauci said that the similarities he observed between Covid-19 and such earlier diseases as SARS CoV-1 in the early years of the millennium suggested a possible origin for the current pandemic.

“I said, as did many other virologists, that the most likely etiology was a jumping species from the animal to the human,” Fauci commented.

Fauci added that he does not see anything suspicious about the existence of a research laboratory in Wuhan and this fact does not influence his view of the Chinese regime’s conduct in the matter.

“It’s not at all surprising that there is a research lab there. The Chinese were trying to figure out, and did figure out, what the original etiology was of SARS CoV-1,” he said, referring to the SARS virus that spread from China from 2002 to 2003. Scientists ultimately traced that virus to horseshoe bats in China’s Yunnan, which jumped to the intermediary of Asian civets before spreading to humans.

“[The SARS outbreak] made it very very clear there would be a possibility we would have another pandemic outbreak from the animal-human interface, so it makes sense that the Chinese would be studying this to find out how you could prevent another outbreak,” Fauci said.

Emails disclosed earlier this year suggested that Fauci not only initiated efforts to cover up evidence pointing to a lab origin of COVID-19 but actively shaped a highly influential academic paper that excluded the possibility of a laboratory leak.

Police in California arrested a man after discovering two “expended” rocket launchers and a practice grenade in a dumpster near a school. 

“Today, two AT-4 launchers and an MK69 practice grenade were found by construction crews in the county area of Winchester. While all items were expended, these items do not go into dumpsters,” Riverside County Sheriff’s Bomb Squad said in a Facebook post. 

The bomb squad’s statement includes pictures of the Swedish AT4s, a single-shot, disposable, recoilless smoothbore anti-tank weapon, and was deemed “expended” – meaning they were either fired or could no longer be fired. 

“These items are “generally” NOT legal to possess (there are some limited exceptions),” the agency said, adding that people in possession of these weapons should “dispose of them legally” or “return them to the military.” 

 

Through video footage and fingerprint evidence, the sheriff’s office was able to track and trace Christopher Whetstone, 41, back to the weapons. 

“During the service of a search warrant, evidence of the original crime was located, along with narcotics, and a bazooka,” said Riverside County Sgt. Edward Soto.

Soto said, “Although there is a school located directly behind the concerned residence, a school was not directly involved in the incident.” 

Whetstone has been charged with tampering with a motor vehicle, possession of tear gas, and grand theft. He has yet to face federal charges for what the National Firearms Act calls grenades and bazookas “destructive devices.” Perhaps because the AT4s were already spent and are single-shot, though considering California, there could be other legal ramifications he may face on a state level.