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May. 3rd, 2020
The GOP and its core constituents — conservative corporations — now face two dangers, one in the short term and one in the longer term. They’re currently using their standard playbook to smother both. Whether they succeed will determine our lives for decades.
The short-term danger is that Americans will resist the push from business to get us back on the job and making money for them. Their plan is simple: Starve us out. They know we can’t survive indefinitely without a continuing government bailout focused on regular people’s needs. So they’re going to stop that bailout from happening.
The longer-term danger they face is that we’ll make the government work for us in the short term — and then we will realize we could make it work for us all the time by removing the threat of starvation from their arsenal. This would totally change the balance of power in society. This is their deepest fear, one that’s consumed them since World War II, the first time in history that everyday people gained consciousness that it was possible for them to use the government to create a world that puts them first, not their bosses.
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/29/coronavirus-government-right-bailout/
The short-term danger is that Americans will resist the push from business to get us back on the job and making money for them. Their plan is simple: Starve us out. They know we can’t survive indefinitely without a continuing government bailout focused on regular people’s needs. So they’re going to stop that bailout from happening.
The longer-term danger they face is that we’ll make the government work for us in the short term — and then we will realize we could make it work for us all the time by removing the threat of starvation from their arsenal. This would totally change the balance of power in society. This is their deepest fear, one that’s consumed them since World War II, the first time in history that everyday people gained consciousness that it was possible for them to use the government to create a world that puts them first, not their bosses.
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/29/coronavirus-government-right-bailout/
The mayor of an Oklahoma city amended an emergency declaration requiring customers to wear face masks while inside businesses after store employees were threatened with violence.
Stillwater Mayor Will Joyce announced the change Friday afternoon, less than 24 hours after the declaration took effect.
“In the short time beginning on May 1, 2020, that face coverings have been required for entry into stores/restaurants, store employees have been threatened with physical violence and showered with verbal abuse," City Manager Norman McNickle said in a statement. "In addition, there has been one threat of violence using a firearm."
Joyce said in a series of tweets that he expected some pushback on requiring face masks but did not think there would be physical confrontations with employees and threatening phone calls to City Hall.
"I hate that our businesses and their employees had to deal with abuse today, and I apologize for putting them in that position," the mayor wrote.
"I am not the kind of person who backs down from bullies, but I also will not send someone else to fight the battle for me," he added in a second tweet.
Joyce said face masks are still required for store employees and are now "strongly recommended" for customers.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/city-ends-face-mask-rule-205822754.html
Stillwater Mayor Will Joyce announced the change Friday afternoon, less than 24 hours after the declaration took effect.
“In the short time beginning on May 1, 2020, that face coverings have been required for entry into stores/restaurants, store employees have been threatened with physical violence and showered with verbal abuse," City Manager Norman McNickle said in a statement. "In addition, there has been one threat of violence using a firearm."
Joyce said in a series of tweets that he expected some pushback on requiring face masks but did not think there would be physical confrontations with employees and threatening phone calls to City Hall.
"I hate that our businesses and their employees had to deal with abuse today, and I apologize for putting them in that position," the mayor wrote.
"I am not the kind of person who backs down from bullies, but I also will not send someone else to fight the battle for me," he added in a second tweet.
Joyce said face masks are still required for store employees and are now "strongly recommended" for customers.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/city-ends-face-mask-rule-205822754.html
The protest Friday in Sacramento urging California’s governor to reopen the state resembled the rallies that have appeared elsewhere in the country, with crowds flocking to the state Capitol, pressing leaders to undo restrictions on businesses and daily life.
But the organizers were not militia members, restaurant owners or prominent conservative operatives. They were some of the loudest anti-vaccination activists in the country.
The people behind the rally are founders of a group, the Freedom Angels Foundation, which is best known in California for its opposition to state efforts to mandate vaccinations. And the protest was the latest example of the overlapping interests that have connected a range of groups — including Tea Party activists and armed militia groups — to oppose the measures that governors have taken to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
Activists known for their opposition to vaccines have also been involved in protests in New York, Colorado and Texas, where they have found an audience for their arguments for personal freedom and their suspicion of government. But their growing presence at the protests worries public health experts who fear that their messaging could harm the United States’ ability to turn a corner following the pandemic if Americans do not accept a future vaccine.
“One of the things that we’re finding is that the rhetoric is pretty similar between the anti-vaxxers and those demanding to reopen,” said Dr. Rupali Limaye, who studies behavior around vaccines at Johns Hopkins University. “What we hear a lot of is ‘individual self-management’ — this idea that they should be in control of making decisions, that they can decide what science is correct and incorrect, and that they know what’s best for their child.”
https://news.yahoo.com/anti-vaccination-activists-growing-force-154321279.html?.tsrc=bell-brknews
But the organizers were not militia members, restaurant owners or prominent conservative operatives. They were some of the loudest anti-vaccination activists in the country.
The people behind the rally are founders of a group, the Freedom Angels Foundation, which is best known in California for its opposition to state efforts to mandate vaccinations. And the protest was the latest example of the overlapping interests that have connected a range of groups — including Tea Party activists and armed militia groups — to oppose the measures that governors have taken to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
Activists known for their opposition to vaccines have also been involved in protests in New York, Colorado and Texas, where they have found an audience for their arguments for personal freedom and their suspicion of government. But their growing presence at the protests worries public health experts who fear that their messaging could harm the United States’ ability to turn a corner following the pandemic if Americans do not accept a future vaccine.
“One of the things that we’re finding is that the rhetoric is pretty similar between the anti-vaxxers and those demanding to reopen,” said Dr. Rupali Limaye, who studies behavior around vaccines at Johns Hopkins University. “What we hear a lot of is ‘individual self-management’ — this idea that they should be in control of making decisions, that they can decide what science is correct and incorrect, and that they know what’s best for their child.”
https://news.yahoo.com/anti-vaccination-activists-growing-force-154321279.html?.tsrc=bell-brknews
"Richard Nixon is a no-good lying son of a bitch. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time. Hell, if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in." -Harry Truman
Even by President Donald Trump’s historically low standards, the town hall on reopening the nation’s economy featured some astounding falsehoods on Sunday night: that he was never warned about the novel coronavirus until late January; that all 43,000 people who returned to the United States from China after the implementation of his travel ban were tested; that the American people will have a vaccine by Christmas.
But perhaps the biggest demonstrable lie told under the unblinking eyes of Abraham Lincoln was Trump’s repeated insistence that, despite the mounting death toll from the coronavirus pandemic and the collapsing national economy, “it’s all working out.”
“I think it’s all working out. You know, the numbers are heading in the right direction,” Trump said, in response to a question about workers at meat processing plants being forced back on the job despite fears of spreading the virus. “It’s all working out. It’s all working out. It’s horrible that we have to go through it, but it’s all working out.”
The town hall—billed by Fox News as “America Together: Returning to Work” and broadcast live from the memorial built to honor a president who, earlier this weekend, Trump said did less for black people than he has—was in many ways a highlight reel of the president’s inadequate response to a pandemic that has claimed more than 68,000 lives, including a record 2,909 just on Thursday.
The president casually announced that the final death toll could reach 100,000 people, more than 50 percent higher than he told Americans only a few weeks ago. He made scientifically dubious claims about the speed and availability of a potential vaccine—throwing in a vow to “be AIDS-free within eight years.” And he saved his most emotional answer for a question from a New Jersey guidance counselor who asked him to “please let go of those behaviors” and “characteristics that do not serve you” when dealing with the press.
Trump’s response to that request, as best as it can be distilled, included a rambling list of supposed accomplishments unrelated to the pandemic, including increased military spending and the formation of the “Space Force,” as well as the assertion that not even Lincoln ever faced such mistreatment while in office.
“I am greeted with a hostile press the likes of which no president has ever seen. The closest would be that gentleman right up there,” Trump said, nodding at Daniel Chester French’s statue of the 16th president in the temple where, as Royal Cortissoz’s epitaph states, “the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”
“They always said Lincoln, nobody got treated worse than Lincoln,” Trump said. “I believe I am treated worse.”
In the days since Trump meanderingly suggested that Americans might be able to cure themselves of COVID-19 by injecting either sunlight or disinfectant into their bodies, the White House has attempted to shift the focus of its coronavirus response from public health to an economic message.
But as question after question came in from across the country about the specifics of Trump’s response to a pandemic that has effectively shuttered the national economy, Trump primarily responded with boasts about past accomplishments, mini-tirades about past grievances, or generalities about how the nation will “win bigger than we’ve ever won before” once the crisis abates.
“You’re gonna get a job where you’re gonna get more money, frankly,” Trump told a single mom in Alabama who said she was facing eviction and struggled to pay even the smallest bills. “I’ve got a great feel for this stuff.”
“I want ’em to go back, yeah, I want to get our country back,” Trump said, in response to a pair of questions from a teacher and student about his plan to reopen the nation’s schools. “We have to go back. We have to go back. And, whatever it is.”
“It depends on where you’re coming from,” Trump told a D.C. restaurateur who asked about specific protocols to keep restaurants safe. “It goes up and it goes up rapidly,” he added of the death toll, but sunnily explained that the nation’s dead are “at the very lower end of the plane.”
Every desired answer, from a timeline for opening restaurants at full capacity to filling sports stadiums and college graduations, was predicated on Trump’s enthusiastic prediction that “we are going to have a vaccine by the end of this year.”
“The doctors would say, ‘Well, you shouldn’t say that.’ I’ll say what I think,” Trump said, doubling down on a vaccine development schedule that would surpass even the most hysterically optimistic timelines put forward by epidemiologists for the rollout of a potential vaccine. “I think we’re going to have a vaccine much sooner than later… Look, a vaccine has never gone like it’s gone now.”
At one point, Trump marveled at the changes in everyday life as a result of the pandemic, noting the yawning distance between himself and Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum. But that distance, while effective at halting the spread of the deadly coronavirus, did little to stop the spread of another pandemic: what World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called “an infodemic.”
“We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic,” Ghebreyesus told the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 15, the same day as Trump’s third-to-last all-day visit to one of his golf clubs. “Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as dangerous.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-offers-lie-lie-under-022637099.html
Even by President Donald Trump’s historically low standards, the town hall on reopening the nation’s economy featured some astounding falsehoods on Sunday night: that he was never warned about the novel coronavirus until late January; that all 43,000 people who returned to the United States from China after the implementation of his travel ban were tested; that the American people will have a vaccine by Christmas.
But perhaps the biggest demonstrable lie told under the unblinking eyes of Abraham Lincoln was Trump’s repeated insistence that, despite the mounting death toll from the coronavirus pandemic and the collapsing national economy, “it’s all working out.”
“I think it’s all working out. You know, the numbers are heading in the right direction,” Trump said, in response to a question about workers at meat processing plants being forced back on the job despite fears of spreading the virus. “It’s all working out. It’s all working out. It’s horrible that we have to go through it, but it’s all working out.”
The town hall—billed by Fox News as “America Together: Returning to Work” and broadcast live from the memorial built to honor a president who, earlier this weekend, Trump said did less for black people than he has—was in many ways a highlight reel of the president’s inadequate response to a pandemic that has claimed more than 68,000 lives, including a record 2,909 just on Thursday.
The president casually announced that the final death toll could reach 100,000 people, more than 50 percent higher than he told Americans only a few weeks ago. He made scientifically dubious claims about the speed and availability of a potential vaccine—throwing in a vow to “be AIDS-free within eight years.” And he saved his most emotional answer for a question from a New Jersey guidance counselor who asked him to “please let go of those behaviors” and “characteristics that do not serve you” when dealing with the press.
Trump’s response to that request, as best as it can be distilled, included a rambling list of supposed accomplishments unrelated to the pandemic, including increased military spending and the formation of the “Space Force,” as well as the assertion that not even Lincoln ever faced such mistreatment while in office.
“I am greeted with a hostile press the likes of which no president has ever seen. The closest would be that gentleman right up there,” Trump said, nodding at Daniel Chester French’s statue of the 16th president in the temple where, as Royal Cortissoz’s epitaph states, “the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”
“They always said Lincoln, nobody got treated worse than Lincoln,” Trump said. “I believe I am treated worse.”
In the days since Trump meanderingly suggested that Americans might be able to cure themselves of COVID-19 by injecting either sunlight or disinfectant into their bodies, the White House has attempted to shift the focus of its coronavirus response from public health to an economic message.
But as question after question came in from across the country about the specifics of Trump’s response to a pandemic that has effectively shuttered the national economy, Trump primarily responded with boasts about past accomplishments, mini-tirades about past grievances, or generalities about how the nation will “win bigger than we’ve ever won before” once the crisis abates.
“You’re gonna get a job where you’re gonna get more money, frankly,” Trump told a single mom in Alabama who said she was facing eviction and struggled to pay even the smallest bills. “I’ve got a great feel for this stuff.”
“I want ’em to go back, yeah, I want to get our country back,” Trump said, in response to a pair of questions from a teacher and student about his plan to reopen the nation’s schools. “We have to go back. We have to go back. And, whatever it is.”
“It depends on where you’re coming from,” Trump told a D.C. restaurateur who asked about specific protocols to keep restaurants safe. “It goes up and it goes up rapidly,” he added of the death toll, but sunnily explained that the nation’s dead are “at the very lower end of the plane.”
Every desired answer, from a timeline for opening restaurants at full capacity to filling sports stadiums and college graduations, was predicated on Trump’s enthusiastic prediction that “we are going to have a vaccine by the end of this year.”
“The doctors would say, ‘Well, you shouldn’t say that.’ I’ll say what I think,” Trump said, doubling down on a vaccine development schedule that would surpass even the most hysterically optimistic timelines put forward by epidemiologists for the rollout of a potential vaccine. “I think we’re going to have a vaccine much sooner than later… Look, a vaccine has never gone like it’s gone now.”
At one point, Trump marveled at the changes in everyday life as a result of the pandemic, noting the yawning distance between himself and Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum. But that distance, while effective at halting the spread of the deadly coronavirus, did little to stop the spread of another pandemic: what World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called “an infodemic.”
“We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic,” Ghebreyesus told the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 15, the same day as Trump’s third-to-last all-day visit to one of his golf clubs. “Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as dangerous.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-offers-lie-lie-under-022637099.html
The Humbling of Exxon
May. 3rd, 2020 11:12 pmDarren Woods, chief executive officer of ExxonMobil Corp., was chipper as he bandied with industry analysts on Jan. 31 about his company’s poor 2019 performance. The coronavirus had yet to spread far beyond China, but Woods had prepared to say a few words about it if anyone asked. No one did.
As for the lower earnings and sliding share price, Woods assured his conference-call audience that things were under control. Oil prices languishing in the $60-a-barrel range weren’t a problem but an opportunity. “We know demand will continue to grow, driven by rising population, economic growth, and higher standards of living,” Woods said. “We believe strongly that investing in the trough of this cycle has some real advantages.” He went on to describe how Exxon would spend in excess of $30 billion on exploration and other projects in 2020, more than any other Western oil company. “While we would prefer higher prices and margins,” he said, “we don’t want to waste the opportunity this low-price environment provides.”
Over the next several weeks, Covid-19 ravaged the oil industry by vaporizing global demand just as Russia and Saudi Arabia launched a price war. Investors were stunned to see oil fall to an 18-year-low of $22.74 a barrel at the end of March. An agreement aimed at cutting output and boosting prices failed to halt the slide, and on April 20 some oil contracts were trading for less than zero—sellers were paying buyers to take the crude. The fallout for producers large and small has been devastating. “You’re seeing fragilities exposed,” says Kenneth Medlock III, senior director of the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “Covid-19 is doing things that nobody could have imagined.”
Perhaps no company has been humbled as profoundly by recent events as Exxon, the West’s largest oil producer by market value and an industry paragon that sets the bar not just for itself but for its competitors. And the pandemic isn’t primarily to blame; the culprit is just as much the company itself.
The coronavirus has laid bare a decade’s worth of miscalculations. Exxon missed the wild and lucrative early days of shale oil. An adventure in the oil sands of Canada swallowed billions of dollars with little to show for it. Political tensions doomed a megadeal in Russia. Exxon ended up spending so much on projects that it has to borrow to cover dividend payments. Over a 10-year period, Exxon’s stock has declined 10.8% on a total return basis, which includes dividends. The company’s major rivals all posted positive returns in that period, except for BP Plc, which had the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The wider S&P 500 Index has returned nearly 200%.
The oil business is all about how much you produce, how low you get your costs, and how well you capture resources for the future. Exxon produces about 4 million barrels a day—essentially the same as 10 years ago, despite repeated vows to push the number higher. Meanwhile, the company’s debt has risen from effectively zero to $50 billion, and its profit last year was a bit more than half what it was a decade ago. Once the undisputed king of Wall Street, Exxon today is worth less than Home Depot Inc., which has less than half the revenue.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-exxonmobil-coronavirus-oil-demand/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
As for the lower earnings and sliding share price, Woods assured his conference-call audience that things were under control. Oil prices languishing in the $60-a-barrel range weren’t a problem but an opportunity. “We know demand will continue to grow, driven by rising population, economic growth, and higher standards of living,” Woods said. “We believe strongly that investing in the trough of this cycle has some real advantages.” He went on to describe how Exxon would spend in excess of $30 billion on exploration and other projects in 2020, more than any other Western oil company. “While we would prefer higher prices and margins,” he said, “we don’t want to waste the opportunity this low-price environment provides.”
Over the next several weeks, Covid-19 ravaged the oil industry by vaporizing global demand just as Russia and Saudi Arabia launched a price war. Investors were stunned to see oil fall to an 18-year-low of $22.74 a barrel at the end of March. An agreement aimed at cutting output and boosting prices failed to halt the slide, and on April 20 some oil contracts were trading for less than zero—sellers were paying buyers to take the crude. The fallout for producers large and small has been devastating. “You’re seeing fragilities exposed,” says Kenneth Medlock III, senior director of the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “Covid-19 is doing things that nobody could have imagined.”
Perhaps no company has been humbled as profoundly by recent events as Exxon, the West’s largest oil producer by market value and an industry paragon that sets the bar not just for itself but for its competitors. And the pandemic isn’t primarily to blame; the culprit is just as much the company itself.
The coronavirus has laid bare a decade’s worth of miscalculations. Exxon missed the wild and lucrative early days of shale oil. An adventure in the oil sands of Canada swallowed billions of dollars with little to show for it. Political tensions doomed a megadeal in Russia. Exxon ended up spending so much on projects that it has to borrow to cover dividend payments. Over a 10-year period, Exxon’s stock has declined 10.8% on a total return basis, which includes dividends. The company’s major rivals all posted positive returns in that period, except for BP Plc, which had the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The wider S&P 500 Index has returned nearly 200%.
The oil business is all about how much you produce, how low you get your costs, and how well you capture resources for the future. Exxon produces about 4 million barrels a day—essentially the same as 10 years ago, despite repeated vows to push the number higher. Meanwhile, the company’s debt has risen from effectively zero to $50 billion, and its profit last year was a bit more than half what it was a decade ago. Once the undisputed king of Wall Street, Exxon today is worth less than Home Depot Inc., which has less than half the revenue.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-exxonmobil-coronavirus-oil-demand/?utm_source=pocket-newtab