Category Archives: Industry Jobs Oil Economics

The U.S. has Agreed to Financial Aid to Afghanistan

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An interagency delegation of U.S. officials met this weekend with senior representatives with the Taliban and called the two-day meeting in Doha “candid and professional,” a statement from the State Department obtained by Fox News read.

The meetings covered a lot of ground and ranged from terrorism concerns to human rights in the country. The statement said the delegation also called for the safe passage for U.S. citizens and others in the country.

The U.S. delegation—once again—told the Taliban that they will be judged on their actions, not only their words, Ned Price, the spokesman, said.

Taliban political spokesman Suhail Shaheen told the Associated Press there would be no cooperation with Washington on containing the increasingly active Islamic State group in Afghanistan.

IS has taken responsibility for a number of recent attacks, including a suicide bombing Friday that killed 46 minority Shiite Muslims and wounded dozens as they prayed in a mosque in the northern city of Kunduz.

Last month, the White House said there is “no rush” to recognize the Taliban as the official government of Afghanistan, saying that recognition from the U.S. will be “dependent” on their actions, as the group announced the formation of its new government.

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Afghanistan’s state power company has appealed to a United Nations-led mission to give $90 million to settle unpaid bills to Central Asian suppliers before electricity gets cut off for the country given that the three-month deadline for payments has passed. source

Afghanistan's Crippled Power Grid Exposes Vulnerability of Besieged Capital - The New York Times source

(AP) — A month after the fall of Kabul, the world is still wrestling with how to help Afghanistan’s impoverished people without propping up their Taliban leaders — a question that grows more urgent by the day.

With the Afghan government severed from the international banking system, aid groups both inside Afghanistan and abroad say they are struggling to get emergency relief, basic services and funds to a population at risk of starvation, unemployment and the coronavirus after 20 years of war.

Among the groups struggling to function is a public health nonprofit that paid salaries and purchased food and fuel for hospitals with contributions from the World Bank, the European Union and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The $600 million in funds, which were funneled through the Afghan Health Ministry, dried up overnight after the Taliban took over the capital.

Now, clinics in Afghanistan’s eastern Khost Province no longer can afford to clean even as they are beset with COVID-19 patients, and the region’s hospitals have asked patients to purchase their own syringes, according to Organization for Health Promotion and Management’s local chapter head Abdul Wali.

“All we do is wait and pray for cash to come,” Wali said. “We face disaster, if this continues.”

Donor countries pledged during a United Nations appeal this week to open their purse strings to the tune of $1.2 billion in humanitarian aid. But attempts by Western governments and international financial institutions to deprive the Taliban-controlled government of other funding sources until its intentions are clearer also has Afghan’s most vulnerable citizens hurting.

The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union suspended financing for projects in Afghanistan, and the United States froze $7 billion in Afghan foreign reserves held in New York. Foreign aid to Afghanistan previously ran some $8.5 billion a year — nearly half of the country’s gross domestic product.

 

Is the U.S. Post Office Slow Service Because it is Becoming a Real Bank?

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Slow mail service is on purpose.

WASHINGTON — Americans across the country could start seeing slowdowns in mail delivery as early as Friday, when the US Postal Service implements its new service standards.

The changes, which include longer first-class mail delivery times and cuts to post office hours, are part of embattled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s 10-year plan for the agency that he unveiled earlier this year.

'Tis the Season to Renew and Expand the US Postal Service ...
According to USPS spokesperson Kim Frum, the service changes won’t affect about 60% of first-class mail and nearly all periodicals. Within a local area, standard delivery time for single-piece, first-class mail will remain at two days.

However, mail traveling longer distances will take longer to arrive in some cases, due to the USPS increasing transit time.

“These changes would position us to leverage more cost-effective means to transport First-Class packages via ground rather than using costly air transportation, which is also less reliable due to weather, flight traffic, availability constraints, competition for space, and the added hand-offs involved,” Frum said.

Many Democrats have called for the ouster of DeJoy, a major donor to the GOP and former President Donald Trump.

But as there is Federal government scrutiny on the private banking system(s), crypto-currency and all alternate forms of monetary exchange such as PayPal, Facebook, Venmo, Zelle or ApplePay…now it is the US. Postal System that is entering the industry.

The Postal Service Should Not Offer Banking Services | Op ...

The U.S. Postal Service has launched a pilot program to offer customers financial services, an unexpected first step toward realizing a longstanding progressive goal of postal banking.

USPS is testing the program at just four post offices on the East Coast. It will enable individuals to deposit payroll or business checks of up to $500 onto a single-use debit card for a flat fee of $5.95. The offering is far short of the much more comprehensive suite of financial services many advocates and left-leaning lawmakers have sought for years, but still takes USPS in a surprising direction under the leadership of embattled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.

Postal management worked with the American Postal Workers Union to set up the pilot. APWU has also long advocated for postal banking, including by negotiating it into a previous collective bargaining agreement.

The four sites, located in Washington, D.C.; Falls Church, Virginia; Baltimore; and the Bronx, New York, will not accept any checks larger than $500. The debit cards, to which USPS is referring as “gift cards,” will allow users to withdraw cash from an ATM for a fee or purchase goods online or at retail stores. The American Prospect first reported the pilot.

The initial sites and services are meant to be a “proof-of-concept” test for the Postal Service, APWU officials said. The union is hopeful that USPS will expand the pilot in early 2022, both in terms of services offered and locations where they are available. The easiest areas for expansion would be to allow for gift cards for checks of more than $500. Thousands of post offices already offer Visa gift cards, and management concluded there would be few legal hurdles to simply accepting another form of payment for them. The cards USPS currently has in stock are capped at $500, hence the current maximum. Management is looking to both raise the cap on those and allow for the bundling of multiple cards.

Other services in discussion are a bill pay product, making the cards branded to the Postal Service and reloadable, and wire transfers from one post office to another. USPS has expressed an openness to setting up its own ATMs, though that may require additional statutory authority and is therefore only expected much further down the road. USPS offered banking services for more than 50 years, but stopped in 1967.

Tatiana Roy, a USPS spokeswoman, said that offering “affordable, convenient and secure” services was aligned with DeJoy’s 10-year plan to fix the mailing agency’s finances. The Postal Service this month implemented another key element of DeJoy’s plan, slowing down delivery times for about 40% of First-Class mail while also raising prices above the normal inflation-based rate.

The banking pilot “is an example of how the Postal Service is leveraging its vast retail footprint and resources to innovate,” Roy said.

APWU renewed its push for banking services earlier this year and management took a serious interest. While the union sought a wider array of services in more locations, management told the labor group that “the best way to get started was to get started.”

“It’s a baby step but we’re thrilled to be moving in the right direction,” one union official said.

USPS and APWU have not set specific figures for the number of sites to which the pilot could expand, but those discussions are ongoing. Before Monday when the program gained attention in national media outlets, USPS only announced the availability of the check cashing service through signs in the four affected post offices. The Postal Service is in the midst of soliciting proposals from the private sector for check verification services.

Research from the University of Michigan has found that one-in-four U.S. Census tracts, which are home to 21 million people, do not have any banks within their borders. Advocates for postal banking have highlighted that the private sector often charges high fees for check cashing services and that historically disadvantaged communities are disproportionately impacted by them. APWU has suggested expanding the pilot to all of the Bronx, all of Puerto Rico or to an entire rural county.

Postal management has put together a training session for impacted employees to get them up to speed on the pilot. An APWU official said its members were excited by the new task and recognized it could play a vital role in the future of the Postal Service.

The push for postal banking has gained steam in recent years, even becoming a part of the official platform of the Democratic Party. A House-backed funding bill for fiscal 2022 would require USPS to implement a banking pilot in five rural and five urban ZIP codes. Democratic lawmakers have also put forward legislation to create a public banking system backed by the Federal Reserve, which users would access at post offices. Porter McConnell, co-founder of the Save the Post Office Coalition, praised USPS for launching the pilot but said it was “not enough.”

“Given that experts and elected officials have been calling on the USPS to pilot postal banking for years, these pilots are long overdue,” said McConnell, the daughter of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. “They are late to this party, but they have at least rung the doorbell.”

The Pandora Papers are Exposing Corruption of World Leaders

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A HUGE hat tip to the investigative journalists over the intensive and dedicated work on exposing tax evaders and money laundering across the globe.The Big Picture: Real estate in some of the world’s most coveted neighborhoods is owned by anonymous companies registered in notoriously secretive jurisdictions, like the British Virgin Islands (BVI).

Behind many of these offshore firms are political elites — including heads of state — who are often trying to avoid taxes or, in some cases, launder money.

?? Dictator’s Family in London: Family and close associates of Azerbaijan’s president — including his teenage children — secretly purchased $700 million worth of London real estate. Read more.

?? Czech PM in France: Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš set up a British Virgin Islands company in 2009 that secretly loaned €15 million to other shell companies he owned in the U.S. and Monaco. The money was eventually used to buy luxury French real estate. Read More.

?? Zelensky’s Offshore Network: Comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, who won Ukraine’s presidency on an anti-corruption platform, was co-owner of an offshore network. Even now, his family appears to still be able to profit from one of the companies. Read More.

?? Russian Money in Croatia: The family of a wealthy Croatian tycoon with ties to Vladimir Putin secretly took over a real estate developer. The family then funnelled suspicious funds from a Russian pipeline company to this real estate firm, using an opaque trust. Read More.

?? Kazakh Oligarchs and a ‘Tokal’: Two oligarchs are linked to $30 million worth of transfers to the alleged unofficial third wife (or tokal) of Kazakhstan’s former president, who remains arguably the most powerful man in the country. Read More.

?? Serbian PEP’s Properties: When our Serbian colleagues reported that Siniša Mali, then the mayor of Belgrade, had bought 24 properties on Bulgaria’s coast, he denied the allegations and offered a challenge: “If you determine I’m the owner of these apartments, they’re all yours…”

Well, the Pandora Papers prove he is the properties’ owner, without a shadow of doubt. We’re still waiting for the keys. Read More.

Other finds in the data: ?? A Slovenian cosmetics fraudster.

PANDORA PAPERS FROM PARTNERS

OCCRP was one of 150 media outlets to investigate leaked documents from 14 service providers. Here are some highlights from our colleagues outside of the OCCRP network. 

?? Tony Blair’s Taxes: Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife saved hundreds of thousands of pounds in property taxes when acquiring a London office building from an offshore company. Read more in the Guardian.

?? Kenyan Dynasty: The family of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta secretly owned a web of offshore companies in Panama and the BVI. Read more in Finance Uncovered. 

?? Pakistan PM’s Inner Circle: Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan has surrounded himself with people who have secret holdings hidden offshore. Read more in ICIJ. 

?? King of Jordan in the U.S. and U.K.: Jordan’s long-ruling monarch King Abdullah II has secretly owned 14 luxury homes in the U.K and the U.S., which he purchased through front companies registered in notorious tax havens. Read more in ICIJ.

? Latin American PEPs: One of Central America’s most prestigious law firms, Alcogal, set up offshore companies for 160 politicians and public officials — including some accused of looting their own countries. Read more at ICIJ.

IMPACT & RESPONSES

?? Pakistan: Prime Minister Khan welcomed the Pandora Papers in a tweet, vowing to investigate citizens named in the investigation.

?? Czech Republic: The Czech national police announced they will “act upon” the Pandora Papers’ revelations into the prime minister, who is up for reelection this week.

?? Sri Lanka: Sri Lanka’s anti-corruption commission will reportedly investigate the assets of any politician named in the Pandora Papers, which includes ex-minister Nirupama Rajapaksa.

Find more impact at ICIJ

The U.S. government has long condemned prominent offshore financial centers, where liberal rules and guarantees of discretion have drawn oligarchs, business tycoons and politicians.

But a burgeoning American trust industry is increasingly sheltering the assets of international millionaires and billionaires by promising levels of protection and secrecy that rival or surpass those offered in overseas tax havens. That shield, which is near-absolute, has insulated the industry from meaningful oversight and allowed it to forge new footholds in U.S. states.

Explore the latest stories in our groundbreaking Pandora Papers investigation:

Supply Chain Broken Cargo Ships Parked at Sea

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There are several sources reporting this crisis including retailers. Big box stores are working to even send their own charter ships and aircraft to release the inventory.Large, empty spaces have returned to store shelves as consumers return to stockpiling essential items and supply chain issues slow deliveries.Shortage of container ships in service is unsustainable - ESC

Costco has reimposed limits on the purchase of toilet paper, paper towels, and bottled water — limits first imposed during the early days of the pandemic when panicked consumers overstocked their pantries.

With the spread of the Delta variant, some consumers are returning to that buying pattern. However, retail analysts say some consumers never changed their behavior and continue to buy in larger quantities than before the pandemic.

Supply chain bottlenecks

Overbuying isn’t the only reason for the growing gaps on supermarket shelves. The empty spaces in the soft drink aisle are caused by nagging supply chain bottlenecks that continue to slow both production and delivery.

According to the Economic Times (ET), Vietnam is a source of persistent supply chain problems. The U.S. depends on that country for a large amount of food and consumer product manufacturing. It’s one of the Asian nations currently struggling to contain the Delta variant.

“Shipping containers are in the wrong place. Sea freight costs are up tenfold. If goods do arrive at the destined ports, there are too few truck drivers to transport them to retailers,” ET reported. “Shortages of workers to harvest and prepare foods are also adding to the pressures.”

Slowed production has also led to fewer choices in the soft drink aisle. Soft drink manufacturers are dealing with a shortage of packaging, including aluminum cans. There is also a shortage of C02, which produces carbonation. That problem has been felt the most so far in the U.K.

Other products in short supply

Other categories experiencing increased demand are coffee, school supplies, consumer electronics, and pet food. Retailers report that the shortages have been caused by both increased demand from consumers and delivery problems.

With school starting up again, demand for Kraft Heinz’s Lunchables” packaged snack/meal product has created shortages at grocery stores. The food manufacturer told KIRO-TV in Seattle that the product is seeing double-digit sales growth for the first time in five years.

Economists say shortages inevitably lead to higher prices, which are already being seen in some food and beverage categories. The Federal Reserve has acknowledged the presence of inflation but predicted it will be “transitory” in nature.

Economist Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economics, says manufacturers are paying more to produce their products. Unfortunately, they will likely pass those costs along to consumers at some point. He says labor shortages and supply chain issues could keep prices higher for longer than expected.

BI: The Southern California ports that are responsible for almost half of all US imports hit a new record every day last week.

Over the past week, the queue of ships waiting to unload at the ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach have lengthened by 10 ships. On Friday, the ports had 65 cargo ships stuck at anchor or in drift areas waiting for spots to open up to dock and unload. The ports, which are a primary thoroughfare for key imports between Asia and the US, had 147 ships in the locations, including 95 hulking cargo ships on Friday — both new records.

The average wait time for the vessels is about 8.7 days — about 2.5 days longer than the same time the month before, Los Angeles port data indicated. So far, the ports have handled about 862,000 imports in 2021.

The locations hit new records for the number of ships in the port, as well as the number of container ships waiting to undock every day last week, the Marine Exchange of Southern California said.

The ports have hit seven new records in less than four weeks as shipping delays continue to surge past early pandemic levels. When the ports hit an all-time high in late August, it was the first time since February, when the onset of pandemic shutdowns and the panic-buying frenzy wreaked havoc on global supply chains.

“The normal number of container ships at anchor is between zero and one,” Kip Louttit, the executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, told Insider in July.

Freightos told Bloomberg that the average time it takes for an ocean freight to go door-to-door has increased 43% over the past year, from 50 days to 71.5 days.

At the same time, shipping costs have skyrocketed. Last week, Judah Levine, the head of research at Freightos, told Insider that the price for transporting a 40-foot container between the US and Asia jumped 500% from this time last year to $20,586.

Ultimately, the ports are facing backlogs as a result of COVID-19 disruptions and a labor shortage paired with spikes in demand.

Executives have warned that rising transportation costs would increase shortages of goods, as well as necessitate more price hikes. Last week, Scott Price, UPS’s president, said the company anticipated that supply-chain snags would continue through 2022.

Meanwhile, many companies have already begun raising their prices to offset the transportation costs.

“When we see these massive increases in transportation costs, it’s clear somebody will have to pay for it,” Douglas Kent, the executive vice president of strategy and alliances at the Association for Supply Chain Management, told Insider.

“One more disruption could send it into complete chaos,” he said of the global supply chain.

This photo is a screen shot taken a few minutes ago that demonstrates the issue.

 

Useful Details/Laws about the Migrant Chaos at the Southern Border

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As a primer:

America’s Founders were concerned about invasion. It was mentioned it four times in the Constitution, though the term was never explicitly defined.

Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 15: The Congress shall have the Power (to) provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 2: The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

Article I, Section 10, Paragraph 3: No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

Article IV, Section 4, Paragraph 1: The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestics Violence.

So, as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Mayorkas admits at least 13,000 Haitians were admitted into the United States to clear Del Rio, no one can deny this is an invasion. Further, that number only refers to those under that bridge in Del Rio, it does not include the 1.2 million that already passed into the United States or the unknown number of ‘gotaways’. Miles and miles of other parts of the Southern border goes unprotected or managed due to the overwhelming volume.

In June of 2021, Congressman Jody Arrington (R-TX) introduced legislation that further explains the lawlessness that Congress must address.

H.J.Res.50 – Recognizing that Article I, Section 10 of the United States Constitution explicitly reserves to the States the sovereign power to repel an invasion and defend their citizenry from the overwhelming and “imminent danger” posed by paramilitary, narco-terrorist cartels who have seized control of our southern border.

Read the proposed legislation here. 

Of course under Speaker Nancy Pelosi there will be no movement to this legislation or others in the pipeline.

Even more crazy is the fact that the Haitians were already given residency status in several countries in Latin America going back to as far as 2010, directly after the earthquake.

After the earthquake of 2010, thousands of Haitians began migration to the country, in hopes of finding a new life. According to Atlanta Blackstar, the United Nations reported “an unprecedented number of people displaced from their homes—one in 113 people in the world—migration and asylum has once again come under the spotlight.”

In 2015, the Brazilian government granted residency to almost 44, 000 Haitians. source

Haitians Flee To Brazil To Escape Getty Images

In part from an NBC affiliate: Most of the Haitians already had refugee status in Chile or Brazil but were not seeking the same from Mexico, according to Mexico’s foreign relations secretary, Marcelo Ebrard. “What they are asking for is to be allowed to pass freely through Mexico to the United States,” Ebrard said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a stark warning during a news conference Monday. “If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned, your journey will not succeed, and you will be endangering your life and your family’s life,” he said. The DHS says some who are being released are given legal documents summoning them to a court date.

“Individuals who are not immediately repatriated are either placed in Alternatives to Detention, detained in an ICE facility, or released with a legal document (either a Notice to Appear in court or a notice to report to an ICE office for further immigration processing),” DHS spokesman Eduardo Maia Silva told Sinclair Broadcast Group in an emailed statement. (this obviously has turned out to be a lie)

 

 

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“The reason Haitian migrants discard their Chilean and Brazilian ID cards over here on the Mex side is to obscure from asylum reviewers that they were already safely and prosperously situated for years and years before coming for the American upgrades,” explained Bensman.

Fox News journalist Bill Melugin also published photographs of documents discarded by the migrants, and among the findings, he discovered that some of them had already been processed by the United States.

 

It should be recalled that according to the Daily Mail, a recent report by the DHS Office of Inspector General found that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) does not have the resources to assess the health of migrants entering its custody and relies on public health systems in surrounding cities to do so.

“Without stronger COVID-19 prevention measures in place, DHS is putting its workforce, support staff, communities, and migrants at greater risk of contracting the virus,” wrote the DHS Office of Inspector General. source

Now back to that pesky Constitution…right? Not for anyone part of the Biden administration.