Attention Deficit Nation

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

[Published before Mueller"s charges were released]

I’m obliged to file this blog before Robert Mueller’s office releases the name of the first winner in the Russian Election Meddling tribunal indictment lottery. Most of the betting is on Paul Manafort, the Swamp-creature-fixer-lobbyist-grifter who spent his summer vacation of 2016 managing Donald Trump’s election campaign.

Before that unfortunate summer internship, Manafort was just a shadier-than-average influence-peddler. It happened that many of his clients were bigshots in foreign lands - Mobuto Sese Seko (Congo), Jonas Savimbi (Angola), and Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines), as well as interests in Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, the Dominican Republic, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ukraine, and other world beauty spots. Also, most notably, Russia where the wicked Mr. Putin dwells and incessantly plots evil against our shining city of a republic.

Over the years, Manafort took large sums of money to the DC laundry room and then distributed bales of it around town to other lobbyist subcontractors, but he left quite a trail. And he overlooked the requirement to register as an agent for foreign interests. So, indicting him looks like a no-brainer. An entry-level US Attorney could, figuratively speaking, hitch him up to the rear bumper of a Chevy Yukon and drag him over five miles of broken Coke bottles.

If I am right, his indictment will provoke a five-column headline in The New York Times, Don Lemon will have a multiple orgasm on CNN tonight, and by Halloween the whole Manafort matter will be as forgotten as Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the Las Vegas Country Music Massacre.

That’s how we roll in Attention Deficit Nation. I suppose Mueller’s team next will want to charge fired National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn for failing to register as a foreign agent prior to a having conversation with the Russian ambassador - but mightn’t it be a little absurd to outlaw dialogue between incoming White House officials and foreign ambassadors who, after all, are here to have conversations with our people? That’ll be an interesting precedent. Why would other countries even bother to send an ambassador here if that’s our policy?

It’s hard to see where it goes from there. The standard plot-line is to net these smaller fish and use them as bait to harpoon the Big White Whale. Give them immunity and let them sing their hearts out to avoid getting sent to ping-pong camp in the Poconos for a five-year stretch. Or else these two schnooks go bankrupt paying hotshot DC lawyers to get them off the hook. Does Mueller go after Donny Junior for having a conversation with a Russian lawyer? Or son-in-law Jared Kushner for flying to Russia and having meetings with Russians? Hey, does anyone remember that A) We’re not at war with Russia, and B) the soviet regime there folded up twenty-five years ago?

The casual observer can’t avoid dragging Hillary into this.

It appears that, among other things, the Clinton Foundation received over a $100 million in “charitable donations” from various Russian companies and individuals over the years. Gosh, they’re a big-hearted people! Maybe it’s all the vodka they guzzle. No doubt, the newly-converted Russian capitalists were yearning to support “impact entrepreneurs” who are creating “new enterprises to generate both social impact and financial returns” by addressing market gaps in developing countries, or to “strengthen the capacity of people in the United States and throughout the world to meet the challenges of global interdependence” - as the Clinton Foundation described their activities.

More likely they wanted to grease their access to the sure-thing It’s-My-Turn Madam President. Except then she went and lost the election... all because of Russian meddling.

Rig Count Rises To April 2015 Highs As Analysts Warn "Oil Market Rebalancing Hasn't Even Started Yet"

After falling for the first time this year two weeks ago, Baker Hughes reports US oil rig count rose once again (up 2 to 765) for the 24th week in the last 25, to the highest since April 2015.

"The so-called re-balancing is likely to happen later than earlier," Michael Poulsen, an analyst at Global Risk Management Ltd, said on Friday.

It does appear we have reached an inflection point in the rig count numbers (if the historical relationship with crude holds)...

While EIA cut its 2018 production outlook, this week saw the effect of field maintenance in Alaska and Tropical Storm Cindy in the Gulf of Mexico fall away and production surged once again this week - to new cycle highs...

And the lagged rig count trend suggests crude production has further to rise yet...

Crude prices have been active today with macro headlines hurting and machines helping ramp any dip... the rig count create iunstant selling which was instantly bid back upo,,,

And while US crude production just jumped to cycle highs (and shale production we believe reached a record high), OilPrice.com"s Nick Cunningham notes the oil market rebalancing hasn"t even started yet...

Global oil production surged in June “as producers opened the taps,” according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA). OPEC was a major culprit, with Libya and Nigeria doing their best to scuttle the production cuts made by other members.

But it wasn’t just those two countries, who are exempted from the agreed upon reductions. OPEC’s de facto leader, Saudi Arabia, also boosted output by an estimated 120,000 bpd in June, from a month earlier. That put Saudi production above 10 million barrels per day (mb/d) for the first time in 2017. Those gains, combined with the 80,000 bpd increase from Libya and a 60,000 bpd jump from Nigeria, plus some smaller contributions from Equatorial Guinea, put OPEC’s June production 340,000 bpd higher than in May. It also took the cartel’s compliance rate down to just 78 percent from 95 percent in May, the worst monthly figure for the group since its deal came into force at the start of the year.

Even worse, the production figures from Libya and Nigeria are much higher at this point than their June average. Over the past few months, the two countries have added 700,000 bpd in new supply, offsetting nearly half of the 1.8 mb/d in the combined OPEC/non-OPEC cuts. And more barrels could be on the way. Libya’s output is now above 1 mb/d, a four-year high, and Nigeria could see production “soar towards full capacity of roughly 1.8 mb/d during August,” the IEA says, up from 1.59 mb/d in June.

The IEA noted that the production cut deal is averaged over the entire compliance period through March 2018, so one month’s worth of data might not mean much. But it does not bode well. If the higher level of production continues, or if the compliance rate slips further, it would throw most projections about rebalancing out the window. “It will be a very difficult six months for the oil industry,” Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said at a conference in Istanbul. “It will be riding on the storm.”

Still, OPEC woes also mean that U.S. shale is suffering too. Prices collapsed in June, and there are many more causes for concern about the health of the shale industry than previously. The IEA said that “[f]inancial data suggests that while output might be gushing, profits are not,” with even executives from the industry saying that oil needs to be north of $50 per barrel for shale growth to be sustainable. U.S. shale might still grow in the near-term, but “the recent exuberance is being reined in,” the Paris-based energy agency concluded.

For now, though, non-OPEC supply is depressing the oil market. Global oil production is up 1.2 mb/d from a year ago, and “non-OPEC [is] firmly back in growth mode,” the IEA said in its report. Next year, things don’t get much better. Non-OPEC countries – led by the U.S., Canada and Brazil – will add 1.4 mb/d of new supply, enough to meet the entire growth in global demand. As such, any gains in output from OPEC would merely return the market to a surplus. That raises a very big question about what OPEC plans on doing after March 2018 when its deal expires. For now, it has no “exit strategy.”

The silver-lining for oil prices is that demand was much more robust in the second quarter compared to the first, leaping from 1 mb/d to 1.5 mb/d. The IEA revised up its overall 2017 demand growth figure to 1.4 mb/d, an increase of 0.1 mb/d compared to last month.

Putting supply and demand together, the IEA predicts that global inventories should have drained at a rate of 0.7 mb/d in the second quarter, although incoming data suggests the drawdowns might not have actually occurred at such a pace.

Ultimately, the message from the IEA was much more pessimistic than in previous months. In May, the agency said that the “rebalancing is essentially here and, in the short term at least, is accelerating.” But that bullish sentiment has all but vanished. “[W]e need to wait a little longer to confirm if the process of re-balancing has actually started in 2Q17 and if the waning confidence shown by investors is justified or not,” the IEA wrote this week.

What Is The World's Most Powerful Passport?

Whether you seek to explore distant lands, or you just want to sit on a remote island beach with a margarita, your passport can be your biggest travel asset. The right document grants you visa-free access to over 150+ countries, and makes applying for entry to the other places a short and easy afterthought.

But, as Visual Cpitalist"s Jeff Desjardins notes, a passport can also be your biggest liability. Having a passport from the wrong place means travel is extremely restricted to just a few countries – and these are generally not the places travelers want to go, anyways.

Even worse, passports on the lower end of the spectrum are also heavily scrutinized at entry-points around the world. If you have a document from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, or several other countries, there may be many hoops for you to jump through to get to your final destination.

(Click image for giant legible version)

Source: Visual Capitalist

THE MOST POWERFUL PASSPORT

According to the Passport Index, the distinction for the world’s most powerful passport actually ends up as a tie between Germany and Singapore. Both have unparalleled access to visa-free entries, each with a list of 159 countries that citizens can go to without any hassles.

Like Germany, most other Western European nations do similarly well in the visa-free department:

In Asia, however, things are quite different. After Singapore and a few other countries (Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia), things drop off faster.

Further down the list in Asia, citizens of certain countries find themselves in even a tougher place, especially if they reside in the Middle East. Countries like Afghanistan (22), Pakistan (25), Iraq (26), Syria (30), and Bangladesh (35) have some of the shortest lists of visa-free countries that citizens have access to.

NORTH AMERICA

In North America, the United States and Canada both have powerful passports with 157 and 155 visa-free options respectively.

However, they differ in a few key areas. Americans have visa-free access to Armenia, Equatorial Guinea, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Central African Republic, while Canadians have visa-free access to Bolivia, Venezuela, and Gambia.

DON’T OWN THESE PASSPORTS…

We alluded earlier to the fact that a passport can also be a traveler’s biggest liability.

Here are some of the countries that you would likely not want to have a passport from:

"Billion-Year" Gambian President Was Installed By The CIA

Submitted by Wayne Madsen via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Gambian President and dictator Yahya Jammeh, facing a combined military force composed of Senegalese army troops, the Nigerian air force, and troops from Mali, Ghana, and Togo, has agreed to relinquish the presidency of Gambia. On December 1, 2016, Jammeh was defeated for re-election in a surprise upset by his little-known rival Adama Barrow. Jammeh received only 45 percent of the vote.

During the election campaign Jammeh vowed in an interview with the BBC to «rule for one billion years». After initially conceding defeat to Barrow, Jammeh reneged on his promise to step down and announced he would remain as president.

The Economic Community of West African Countries (ECOWAS) decided that Jammeh had to go, a stance ironically supported by the United States, which had assisted Jammeh in overthrowing Gambia’s democratically-elected president, Sir Dauda K. Jawara, in 1994.

After Jammeh refused ECOWAS’s, the African Union’s, and the United Nations Security Council’s demands to leave office and permit Barrow to assume the presidency, ECOWAS mobilized its military forces. On January 19, 2017, Barrow was sworn in as president in the Gambian embassy in Dakar, the Senegalese capital. Hours later, Senegalese troops began to enter Gambia and Nigerian air force jets buzzed the Gambian capital of Banjul. The presidents of Mauritania and Guinea flew to Banjul to urge Jammeh to leave office peacefully. Jammeh’s fate was sealed when Major General Ousman Badjie, the commander of the Gambian armed forces, recognized Barrow as Gambia’s commander-in-chief.

The demand from the United States for Jammeh to relinquish power was a display of absolute hypocrisy since Washington had not only installed Jammeh into power but two successive U.S. presidents warmly welcomed the military ruler to the White House. Jammeh, who owns a $3.5 million mansion in Potomac, Maryland, was warmly greeted by President Barack Obama at the 2014 and 2015 U.S.-Africa Leaders’ Summits in Washington. President George W. Bush greeted Jammeh at the U.S.-Africa Business Summit in Washington in 2003. With the protection of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, Jammeh’s Moroccan-born wife, Zineb Jammeh, ran up huge totals at the Washington area’s fashionable shopping malls. She also settled on Sam’s Club, a wholesale discount store, to buy massive amounts of household goods. Jammeh is a textbook case of CIA-sponsored kleptocracy on a grand scale.

Under Jammeh, Gambia continued to be a strategic ally of the United States. The kleptocratic Gambian leader permitted the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to maintain an emergency landing site for NASA’s space shuttle in the country and Gambia participated with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in the post-9/11 rendition program.

Before being installed as Gambia’s dictator, Jammeh had received training from the Pentagon. Merely a lieutenant in the Gambian National Army. In 1993, Jammeh attended the notorious «School of the Americas» in Fort Benning, Georgia. The school has trained some of Latin America’s most notorious military dictators and death squad commanders. While in Fort Benning, Jammeh was made an honorary citizen of the state of Georgia. The following year, and before he launched his coup, Jammeh attended the Military Police Officers Basic Course (MPOBC) at Fort McClellan, Alabama. He was also made an honorary Lieutenant Colonel in the Alabama State Militia. Jammeh continued to collect American honorifics, including being made an admiral in the non-existent Navy of the State of Nebraska. The corny title is bestowed by the governor of Nebraska to prominent citizens, who have not only included African dictators like Jammeh and his fellow CIA-supported kleptocrat, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, but to the likes of George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Queen Elizabeth II. 

It was during the administration of President Bill Clinton that the green light was given for Jammeh to be installed in a CIA-led coup in Gambia.

On July 24, 1994, President Jawara was at his palace in Banjul entertaining the commanding officer of the visiting U.S. Navy tank landing ship, the USS La Moure County. Also present was U.S. ambassador to Gambia, Andrew Winter, a career foreign service officer who represented a new breed of U.S. ambassador – one that routinely and publicly involved himself in the domestic political affairs of the nation to which they were posted. While Jawara and the ship’s commander exchanged diplomatic niceties, junior army officers, led by Jammeh, staged a coup against the democratically elected government.

Following the announcement of the coup, La Moure County’s skipper could only offer Jawara; Lady Chilele Jawara, one of his two wives; 14 of his 19 children; and his finance minister and police inspector-general a ride to his ship and American protection. Once on board, Jawara was permitted to use the vessel’s communications equipment to contact his military leaders. To Jawara’s dismay, the coup leader, Jammeh, had arrested Colonel Boubakar Dada, the head of Gambia’s 800-strong army, along with ten Nigerian military advisers.

Instead of stepping in to help the Gambian leader, who had known every American president since John F. Kennedy, the Clinton administration merely offered to mediate between Jawara and the rebels. State Department spokeswoman Sondra McCarty suggested the United States was «trying to facilitate dialogue between the two side,» as if the Jammeh and his coup partners possessed legitimacy.

The U.S. Navy ship took Jawara to neighboring Senegal where he was granted political asylum by its government. Jawara’s relationship with Senegal had become testy in recent years. In 1982, Jawara and President Abdou Diouf had agreed to establish the Senegambian Confederation. Many Gambians criticized the agreement as a de facto annexation of Gambia by Senegal as its 11^th region. Sensing the opposition of his people, Jawara scrapped the confederation in 1989. However, this decision did not meet with the favor of the U.S. State Department’s incoming breed of African specialists, who were enthusiastic about African integration. In their view, Jawara seemed to be swimming against the tide and an anachronism that should be dealt with appropriately. After being «dealt with» by the CIA, Jawara eventually took up residence in England.

Ambassador Winter never made a demand that the junta step down and allow Jawara to return to his office in The Quadrangle in Banjul to resume his presidency. The CIA and the Pentagon has already invested heavily in Jammeh as «their man». Jammeh’s pre-coup military training in the United States is similar to that of Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame, who was trained at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas before he left in 1994 to lead an invasion of Rwanda from Uganda, after which, he took over the government.

Witnessing the extreme measures the United States was taking to restore ousted Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide to power, Jawara said: «We have an even stronger case than Haiti». He added: «I will feel very let down if military rule is allowed to take root [in Gambia]». However, Bill Clinton would not only deal harshly with Gambia but, in the end, Bill and Hillary Clinton eschewed Aristide after they turned Haiti into their personal cash cow. Thanks to the double dealing and corruption of the Clintons, Gambia and Haiti both fell under kleptocratic regimes. Jawara remained exiled in England and Aristide was, for a time, exiled to South Africa after being ousted in a CIA-initiated coup in 2004.

The United States is fond of calling for democracy in countries like Gambia, Haiti, and Rwanda, but those calls come after the CIA destabilized the countries with military coups. Uncle Sam shamelessly wears the hat of a supreme hypocrite.

The Cost Of Being An American Tourist

Good news for globe-trotting Americans: most countries around the world are free or very cheap to get in to. But, as this map from HowMuch.net shows, some countries do charge through the nose for a visa. And it"s not the ones you would expect.

Source: HowMuch.net

First, let"s get a persistent myth out of the way, the one that says Americans don"t travel overseas. That so-called fact is proven by an oft-cited statistic: only 10% of U.S. citizens – or thereabouts – have passports. Wrong! According to the State Department, the actual figure is closer to 46%. And that corresponds to more than 131 million American passport holders.

And that passport is all you need to gain entry in most countries. The official at the border will stamp one of the pages at the back of your booklet and off you go, to explore other climes and cultures. But quite a few nations are not satisfied with passports alone. They require a visa – and to obtain that visa, you must pay. Sometimes you can purchase it on arrival, often you must get it at the embassy or consulate of your destination country. So, who wants how much?

Entry into Europe is completely free for U.S. citizens, from Monaco to Moldova, from Liechtenstein to Lithuania, from the UK to Ukraine. And just about anywhere nearby or in between. With a few exceptions.

• A visa for Belarus costs $65. For that price, you get to visit the landlocked Russian satellite state often branded “the last dictatorship in Europe”. It is highly advised to say only nice things about its president Alexander Lukashenko, in power since 1994.


• Talking about countries with long-lasting leaders, the Russia of Putin (in power since 2000, alternately as president and prime minister) currently charges an entry fee of $160. That sounds like a lot, but Russia is the biggest country in the world.


• Azerbaijan, that Maine-sized ex-Soviet republic on the extreme southeastern edge of Europe, wants exactly as much. In comparison, that seems a bit steep.


• Lest you think that it"s just post-communist near-autocracies that want a visa fee, check out the Czech Republic. Want to see the splendor of Prague? That"ll cost ya $98 to get in. Not cheap, but still not as much as a day pass to Walt Disney"s Magic Kingdom. And all the Czech castles are real. Plus, this is if you want to stay longer than 90 days. Shorter visits are still free. Eat that, Mickey!

Free entry is a lot rarer in Asia, but there is still plenty of choice.

• Americans can get in for free in Mongolia and Kazakhstan, Japan and South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. There is also free entry for countries many not even have heard of – so why not go see Brunei or Kyrgyzstan? The diving is supposed to be good in the Maldives.


• In the Middle East, you don"t pay a cent to get into Lebanon, Israel or the United Arab Emirates, where out of the empty sand dunes the global metropolis of Dubai has arisen almost overnight. Get your Israeli stamp on a separate leaf if you plan to visit any other places in the Middle East: they don"t take kindly to people who visit a state they see as mercilessly oppressing Palestine.


• All the other Asian countries require visas. The cheapest ones, color-coded light green, are Nepal and Tajikistan (both $25); Cambodia, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste (all $30); and Kuwait and Laos (both $35).


• In the slightly more expensive yellow bracket, we find Bangladesh, India, Iraq and Oman ($50). Communist North Korea wants 70 of your capitalist dollars, and Bahrain ($77), Uzbekistan ($80) and Vietnam ($85) think you will afford a bit more for the privilege of visiting them.


• In the orange band, things turn political – or so it would seem. Iran wants $100 before you get a visa. Even more like a shakedown is the $140 you need to get a Chinese single-entry visa... if you"re an American. The same type of visa can be had for as little as $30, if you"re not an American citizen. The Afghans ($160) want even more, but we doubt if it"s that fee which is keeping away all those tourists.


• Bhutan is a small kingdom jammed between India and China, trying hard to take from the modern world only what it deems culturally appropriate. Perhaps that is why the $200 visa seems a bit dissuasive. Same for the other pink-coded Asian country: Burma, a.k.a. Myanmar, tentatively emerging from decades of isolationist military dictatorship. By all means go see its fly-in-amber culture, but be prepared to fork out $250 for a visa.


• The most expensive country in the world, visa-wise, charges more than double. For a visa to get into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, you will have to part with no less than 533 of your hard-earned dollars. Well, at least you won"t be spending that amount of money on the Riyadh club and bar scene.

Africa is a mixed bag, visa-price-wise. Some of the continent"s most fabled and popular holiday destinations can be visited free of charge. Island paradises such as the Seychelles and Mauritius. Fabulous South Africa and its neighbors Lesotho, Swaziland and Namibia. Northern African dream destinations Morocco and Tunisia. Senegal in West Africa.

• Egypt would like $20 before you get a live look at the pyramids. Togo and Zimbabwe want $30, while the island paradises of the Comoros ($32) and Cabo Verde ($43), also in the green category, are not as free as the others.


• Many African countries charge an entry fee between $50 and $100, i.e. the yellow band. These include Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia (it"ll be a while before its fee turns into a moneyspinner), Tanzania, Angola, Djibouti, Sao Tome and Principé, Malawi, Benin, Ghana, Mali and Madagascar – to be precise. Yes, buying the movie Madagascar is a lot cheaper, but the island itself is much more awe-inspiring.


• The most popular color in Africa is orange ($100-$200), with Burundi, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Niger, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Uganda all charging an entry fee equal to one Ben Franklin. Gabon charges you two Bens, as does the neighboring Republic of the Congo – not to be confused with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which wants $175 for a visa. Both Congos are the only two countries in the world with their capitals right across from each other. Land in Kinshasa, take off from Brazzaville, and you"ll have spent $375 on visa fees alone.


• That is more than you would spend touching down in Lagos, although Nigeria is the African country with the highest visa fee: $253.

So what about Oceania?

• There is a whole list of island paradises that you can fly to visa-free, from Fiji and Kiribati to Micronesia and Palau; from Samoa to the Solomon Islands, and from the Marshall Islands to Vanuatu; and of course Tonga and Tuvalu. Let"s throw in another, slightly larger island paradise for free: New Zealand.


• But cross the Tasman Sea, and be prepared to fork out $20 to enter Australia. That"s half as much as Papua New Guinea wants, and a fifth of Nauru"s entry fee.

For Americans, it is a bit cheaper to stay closer to home, even if you discount the air fare. You have to travel pretty far on the American continent to find a country that wants money for your visit. It"s a pretty short list, even across the entire hemisphere:

• Suriname, the former Dutch colony marooned on the northern shore of South America, wants $35 for your visit.


• Paraguay charges at least $100 before you enter the country


• and its neighbor Brazil takes the cake by taking $160 for your entry visa.

Some of the visa fees come across as deliberately dissuasive – Saudi Arabia nor Bhutan seem keen on becoming major tourist destinations. In general, the richer countries are visa-free, while the poorer ones charge higher fees, no doubt not in an attempt to keep out visitors, but to fill the state coffers. That should not keep away the determined visitor: all things considered, none of the fees is prohibitive, especially considering the fact that higher visa fees are likely to be offset by the lower cost of living in most of those destinations.