TiLTNews Network: Earth Watch - Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference, not by safety. It is easy to clamor for government security when terrible things happen; but liberty is given true meaning when we support it without exception, and we will be safer for it ~ Dr. Ron Paul
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Thursday, October 22, 2015
THE STEALTH EXPANSION OF A SECRET U.S. DRONE BASE IN AFRICA
Nick Turse Oct. 21 2015, 7:29 a.m. Read the complete Drone Papers.
VIEWED FROM HIGH ABOVE, Chabelley Airfield is little more than a gray smudge in a tan wasteland. Drop lower and its incongruous features start coming into focus. In the sun-bleached badlands of the tiny impoverished nation of Djibouti — where unemployment hovers at a staggering 60 percent and the per capita gross domestic product is about $3,100 — sits a hive of high-priced, high-tech American hardware.
Satellite imagery tells part of the story. A few years ago, this isolated spot resembled little more than an orphaned strip of tarmac sitting in the middle of this desolate desert. Look closely today, however, and you’ll notice what seems to be a collection of tan clamshell hangars, satellite dishes, and distinctive, thin, gunmetal gray forms — robot planes with wide wingspans.
Unbeknownst to most Americans and without any apparent public announcement, the U.S. has recently taken steps to transform this tiny, out-of-the-way outpost into an “enduring” base, a key hub for its secret war, run by the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), in Africa and the Middle East. The military is tight-lipped about Chabelley, failing to mention its existence in its public list of overseas bases and refusing even to acknowledge questions about it — let alone offer answers. Official documents, satellite imagery, and expert opinion indicate, however, that Chabelley is now essential to secret drone operations throughout the region.
Tim Brown, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org and expert on analyzing satellite imagery, notes that Chabelley Airfield allows U.S. drones to cover Yemen, southwest Saudi Arabia, a large swath of Somalia, and parts of Ethiopia and southern Egypt.
“This base is now very important because it’s a major hub for most drone operations in northwest Africa,” he said. “It’s vital. … We can’t afford to lose it.”
Aerial image of Chabelley Airfield, Djibouti, April 2013.
Photo: Google Earth
Aerial image of Chabelley Airfield, Djibouti, October 2013.
Photo: Google Earth
Aerial image of Chabelley Airfield, Djibouti, March 2015.
Photo: Google Earth
The startling transformation of this little-known garrison in this little-known country is in line with U.S. military activity in Africa where, largely under the radar, the number of missions, special operations deployments, andoutposts has grown rapidly and with little outside scrutiny.
The expansion of Chabelley and its consequent rise in importance to the U.S. military began in 2013, when the Pentagon moved its fleet of remotely piloted aircraft from its lone acknowledged “major military facility” in Africa — Camp Lemonnier, in Djibouti’s capital, which shares the country’s name — to this lower-profile airstrip about 10 kilometers away.
A hasty perimeter of concertina wire and metal fence posts was constructedaround a bare-bones compound once used by the French Foreign Legion, and the Pentagon asked Congress to fund only “minimal facilities” enabling “temporary operations” there for no more than two years.
But Chabelley would follow a pattern established at Lemonnier. Located on the edge of Djibouti-Ambouli International Airport, Lemonnier also began as an austere location that has, year after year since 9/11, grown in almost every conceivable fashion. The number of personnel stationed there, for example, has jumped from 900 to 5,000 since 2002. More than $600 million has already been allocated or awarded for projects such as aircraft parking aprons, taxiways, and a sizeable special operations compound. It hasexpanded from 88 acres to nearly 600 acres. Lemonnier is so crucial to U.S. military operations that, in 2014, the Pentagon signed a $70 million per year agreement to secure its lease through 2044.
But as the base grew, the skies over Lemonnier and the adjoining airport became increasingly crowded and dangerous. By 2012, an average of 16 U.S. drones and four fighter jets were taking off or landing there each day, in addition to French and Japanese military aircraft and civilian planes, while local air traffic controllers were committing “errors at astronomical rates,”according to a Washington Post investigation. The Djiboutians were specifically hostile to Americans, ignoring pilots’ communications and forcing U.S. aircraft to circle above the airport until low on fuel — with special ire reserved for drone operations — adding to the havoc in the skies. While the U.S. did not find Djiboutian air traffic controllers responsible, six remotely piloted aircraft based at Lemonnier were destroyed in crashes, including an accident in a residential area of the capital, prompting Djiboutian government officials to voice safety concerns.
As Lemonnier expanded, the Chabelley site underwent its own transformation. Members of the Marines and Army conducted training thereduring 2008 and, in 2011, troops began work at the base with an eye toward the future. That October, a Marine Air Traffic Control Mobile Team (MMT) undertook efforts to enable a variety of aircraft to use the site. “We provide our commanders the ability to keep the battle line moving forward at a rapid pace,” said Sgt. Christopher Bickel, the assistant team leader of the MMT that worked on the project.
It was in February 2013 that the Pentagon asked Congress to quickly supply funds for “minimal facilities necessary to enable temporary operations” at Chabelley. “The construction is not being carried out at a military installation where the United States is reasonably expected to have a long-term presence,” said official documents obtained by the Washington Post. The next month, before the House Armed Services Committee, then-chief of Africa Command (Africom), Gen. Carter Ham, explained that agreements were being worked out with the Djiboutian government to use the airfield and thanked Congress for helping to hasten things along. “We appreciate the reauthorization of the temporary, limited authority to use operations and maintenance funding for military construction in support of contingency operations in our area of responsibility, which will permit us to complete necessary construction at Chabelley,” he said.
In June 2013, the House Armed Services Committee noted it was “aware that the Government of Djibouti mandated that operations of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) cease from Camp Lemonnier, while allowing such operations to relocate to Chabelley Airfield, Djibouti.”
But there was another benefit of moving drone operations from the capital to a far less visible locale. In an Air Force engineering publication from the same year, U.S. Air Forces in Europe/Air Forces Africa engineers listed as “significant accomplishments” the development and implementation of plans to shift drones “from Camp Lemonnier to Chabelley Airfield … providing operations anonymity from the International Airport and improving host-nation relations.”
Tim Brown of GlobalSecurity.org notes that Chabelley allows the U.S. to keep its drone missions under much tighter wraps. “They’re able to operate with much less oversight — not completely in secret — but there’s much less chance of ongoing observation of how often drones are leaving and what they’re doing,” he told me recently.
Dan Gettinger, the co-founder and co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College and the author of a guide to identifying drone bases from satellite imagery, agrees. “It seems they started with two CAPs — combat air patrols — about seven aircraft, a mix of Predators and Reapers,” he said. “And since then, we’ve really seen expansion, particularly within the last couple months; a few more hangars and certainly a lot more facilities for personnel at Chabelley.”
By the fall of 2013, the U.S. drone fleet reportedly had been transferred to the more remote airstrip. Africom failed to respond to questions about the number and types of drones based at Chabelley Airfield, but reporting by The Intercept, drawing on formerly secret documents, demonstrates that 10 MQ-1 Predators and four of their larger cousins, MQ-9 Reapers, were based at Lemonnier prior to the move to the more remote site. Neither the Pentagon nor Africom responded to repeated requests by The Intercept for comment on other aspects of drone operations at Chabelley Airfield or the transformation of the outpost into a more permanent facility. The reasons why aren’t hard to fathom.
“These are JSOC and CIA-led missions for the most part,” Gettinger told me recently, conjecturing that the hush-hush operations are likely focused on intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance activities and counterterrorism strikes in Somalia and Yemen, as well as aiding the Saudi-led air campaign in the latter country. Indeed, an Air Force accident report obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act details a February 2015 incident in which an MQ-9 “crashed during an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission in the United States Africa Command Area of Responsibility.” The Reaper, assigned to the 33rd Expeditionary Special Operations Squadron operating from Chabelley had flown “about 300 miles away from base” when it began experiencing mechanical problems, according to the pilot. It was eventually ditched in international waters.
Special Operations Command, JSOC’s parent organization, would not comment on Gettinger’s assertions. “We do not have anything for you,” responded spokesperson Ken McGraw.
Despite the supposed temporary nature of the Chabelley site, Africom “directed an expansion of operations” at the airfield and the U.S.inked a “long-term implementing arrangement” with the Djiboutian government to establish Chabelley as a “enduring” base, according to documents provided earlier this year to the House Appropriations Committee by the undersecretary of defense (comptroller). The Air Force also reportedly installed a “tactical automated security system” — a complex suite of integrated sensors, thermal imaging devices, radar, cameras and communications devices — to provide extra layers of protection to the site.
In June, the Pentagon contacted the House Appropriations Committee about reallocating $7.6 million to construct a new 7,720-meter perimeter fence around the burgeoning base, complete with two defensive fighting positions and four pedestrian and five vehicle entry points that also “provides a platform for installing advanced perimeter sensor system equipment.” Last month, defense contractor ECC-MEZZ LLC of Burlingame, California, wasawarded a $6.96 million contract for a fence, gates, a perimeter roadway, and a modular guard tower.
Africom remains close-lipped about the expansion and increasing importance of Chabelley. Phone calls and emails seeking comment were ignored. Multiple requests by The Intercept were even “deleted without being read” according to automatic return receipts. After days of also sending requests to Major James Brindle at the Pentagon’s press office, it became apparent that The Intercept isn’t alone in getting the cold shoulder when it comes to America’s preeminent African drone base. A note from Brindle suggested Africom didn’t want to talk to him about Chabelley either. He had apparently passed along my requests only to be similarly ignored. “Still waiting on a reply from Africom. Sorry,” was all he wrote.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Nick Turse
LAWSUIT CHALLENGES A MISSISSIPPI DEBTORS PRISON
Photo: Jackson Free Press Juan Thompson Oct. 22 2015, 7:38 a.m.
LOW-INCOME RESIDENTS of Jackson, Mississippi, are being coerced into working on a penal farm in a “modern-day debtors prison” for being unable to pay municipal fees and fines for misdemeanors, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in a federal court last week.
The suit alleges that the City of Jackson, in Hinds County, employs a “pay or stay” system in which impoverished plaintiffs who are unable to pay court-ordered fines must work off their debts at the county’s penal farm in nearby Raymond at a rate of $58 per day. Those unable or unwilling to work can sit out their debts in jail at a rate of $25 per day.
Seven Hinds County residents are listed as plaintiffs in the complaint, all impoverished black men. Many of them also have physical disabilities.
Jerome Bell, 58 years old and disabled following a series of strokes, owed more than $4,000 in fines and other fees related to traffic violations when he was arrested in July. In court, Judge Gerald Mumford ordered Bell to pay the fines or sit in jail until the debt was paid off. Bell, who lives off a monthly Social Security disability check and food stamps, could not afford to pay and was consequently jailed. The lawsuit claims Bell’s public defender made no effort to assess the accuracy of the court’s charges, nor did he ask the court to consider Bell’s financial difficulties.
According to court documents, Bell was housed at the Raymond Jail for more than 35 days. For 20 days he “slept on the concrete floor of a holding cell in the booking unit of the jail with no mattress or cushion of any sort.” According to his attorney, Jacob Howard, who works with the University of Mississippi’s MacArthur Justice Center, Bell suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, and weakness on the left side of his body as a result of multiple strokes.
Despite his physical impediments, Howard told me, Bell would have preferred to be jailed on the penal farm because the living conditions there are said to be better than those at the overcrowded Raymond Jail. Unfortunately for Bell, the county kept him in the jail because his daily insulin shot was unavailable at the penal farm, which sits less than 1 mile from the jail. “I have no idea why they’re incapable of providing daily insulin,” Howard said.
Those incarcerated at the farm pay off their debts by cleaning up horse and chicken dung and collecting eggs, among other tasks.
After spending more than a month in jail, Bell was discharged after Howard argued before the court that his client was legally entitled to perform community service. Judge Mumford ordered Bell to perform more than 500 hours of community service to pay off his debt.
Asked to comment on the lawsuit, a spokesperson for the City of Jackson released a prepared statement denying the lawsuit’s allegations and vowing to fight it:
The City of Jackson does not operate a “debtors prison,” and aims to treat all of its citizens fairly under the law. The City of Jackson does not imprison any citizen without statutory authority and the weighing of all factors, unlike surrounding municipalities who make it a practice to imprison individuals who cannot pay immediately. … The City of Jackson will vigorously defend against these unfounded claims.
Jails in Hinds County have faced criticism before.
In May, the Department of Justice completed an investigation finding that the county jail in Raymond and the Jackson City Detention Center were “facilities in crisis.” In a 29-page report, the DOJ charged that Hinds County “violates prisoners’ constitutional rights at both jail facilities” and that officials “fail to protect prisoners from violence by other prisoners and from improper use of force by staff.”
Jail staff members were accused of being poorly trained and quick to use improper and excessive force against the incarcerated population. Conditions in the jails were filthy and “grossly inappropriate.” In one instance, while touring an isolation unit, inspectors and jail officials were surprised to discover a prisoner occupying a cell that was supposed to be out of service. “It turned out that the prisoner had spent the past three weeks in this cell, without properly functioning plumbing and in horrible living conditions. The cell stank, and the floor toilet was clogged with urine-soaked blankets and cloth,” the report said. In another instance, the report highlighted the case of an unnamed inmate “who could neither speak nor hear,” who “had been living in a cramped, dark booking cell with a reeking toilet for nearly three years.”
In response, county authorities told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger that measures were being taken to address the problems, including the addition of cameras and dogs and a new ceiling. “This highlights what we’ve been saying since we were in office since 2012,” Sheriff Tyrone Lewis told the paper. “We appreciate what the DOJ has come in and done.”
CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Monday, October 19, 2015
Death of a Patriot
THIS IS A MUST READ IF YOU LOVE THIS COUNTRY…AT ALL
My father Irwin A. Schiff was born Feb. 23rd 1928, the 8th child and only son of Jewish immigrants, who had crossed the Atlantic twenty years earlier in search of freedom. As a result of their hope and courage my father was fortunate to have been born into the freest nation in the history of the world. But when he passed away on Oct. 16th, 2015 at the age of 87, a political prisoner of that same nation, legally blind and shackled to a hospital bed in a guarded room in intensive care, the free nation he was born into had itself died years earlier.
My father had a life-long love affair with our nation’s founding principals and proudly served his country during the Korean War, for a while even having the less then honorable distinction of being the lowest ranking American soldier in Europe. While in college he became exposed to the principles of Austrian economics through the writings of Henry Hazlitt and Frederick Hayek. He first became active in politics during Barry Goldwater’s failed 1964 presidential bid. His activism intensified during the Vietnam Era when he led local grass root efforts to resist Yale University’s plans to conduct aid shipments to North Vietnam at a time when that nation was actively fighting U.S. forces in the south. Later in life he staged an unsuccessful write in campaign for governor of Connecticut, then eventually lost the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination to Harry Brown in 1996.
In 1976 his beliefs in free market economics, limited government, and strict interpretation of the Constitution led him to write his first book The Biggest Con: How the Government is Fleecing You, a blistering indictment of the post New Deal expansion of government in the United States. The book achieved accolades in the mainstream conservative world, receiving a stellar review in the Wall Street Journal, among other mainstream publications.
But my father was most known for his staunch opposition to the Federal Income Tax, for which the Federal Government labeled him a “tax protester.” But he had no objection to lawful, reasonable taxation. He was not an anarchist and believed that the state had an important, but limited role to play in market based economy. He opposed the Federal Government’s illegal and unconstitutional enforcement and collection of the income tax. His first book on this topic (he authored six books in total) How Anyone Can Stop Paying Income Taxes, published in 1982 became a New York Times best seller. His last, The Federal Mafia; How the Government Illegally Imposes and Unlawfully collects Income Taxes, the first of three editions published in 1992, became the only non-fiction, and second and last book to be banned in America. The only other book being Fanny Hill; Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, banned for obscenity in 1821 and 1963.
His crusade to force the government to obey the law earned him three prison sentences, the final one being a fourteen-year sentence that he began serving ten years ago, at the age of 77. That sentence turned into a life sentence, as my father failed to survive until his planned 2017 release date. However in actuality the life sentence amounted to a death sentence. My father died from skin cancer that went undiagnosed and untreated while he was in federal custody. The skin cancer then led to a virulent outbreak of lung cancer that took his life just more than two months after his initial diagnosis.
The unnecessarily cruel twist in his final years occurred seven years ago when he reached his 80th birthday. At that point the government moved him from an extremely low security federal prison camp in New York State where he was within easy driving distance from family and friends, to a federal correctional institute, first in Indiana and then in Texas. This was done specially to give him access to better medical care. The trade off was that my father was forced to live isolated from those who loved him. Given that visiting him required long flights, car rentals, and hotel stays, his visits were few and far between. Yet while at these supposed superior medical facilities, my father received virtually no medical care at all, not even for the cataracts that left him legally blind, until the skin cancer on his head had spread to just about every organ in his body.
At the time of his diagnosis in early August of this year, he was given four to six mouths to live. We tried to get him out of prison on compassionate release so that he could live out the final months of his life with his family, spending some precious moments with the grandchildren he had barely known. But he did not live long enough for the bureaucratic process to be completed. Two months after the process began, despite the combined help of a sitting Democratic U.S. congresswoman and a Republican U.S. senator, his petition was still sitting on someone’s desk waiting for yet another signature, even though everyone at the prison actually wanted him released. Even as my father lay dying in intensive care, a phone call came in from a lawyer and the Bureau of Prisons in Washington asking the prison medical representatives for more proof of the serious nature of my father’s condition.
As the cancer consumed him his voice changed, and the prison phone system no longer recognized it, so he could not even talk with family members on the phone during his finale month of life. When his condition deteriorated to the point where he needed to be hospitalized, government employees blindly following orders kept him shackled to his bed. This despite the fact that escape was impossible for an 87 year old terminally ill, legally blind patient who could barley breathe, let alone walk.
Whether or not you agree with my father’s views on the Federal Income Tax, or the manner by which it is collected, it’s hard to condone the way he was treated by our government. He held his convictions so sincerely and so passionately that he continued to espouse them until his dying breath. Like William Wallace in the final scene of Braveheart, an oppressive government may have succeeded in killing him, but they did not break his spirit. And that spirit will live on in his books, his videos, and in his children and grandchildren. Hopefully his legacy will one day help restore the lost freedoms he died trying to protect, finally allowing him to rest in peace.
By Schiff Staff|October 17th, 2015
Friday, October 16, 2015
Black Sites Revealed: UK Journos Uncover Chilling Details of CIA Prisons
09:06 16.10.2015(updated 10:11 16.10.2015) Get short URL
A group of journalists and a human rights watchdog in the UK have put forth an unprecedented array of data on the CIA's notorious secret detention centers, where terrorist suspects were kept and tortured in the early-2000s.
Torture Is Still Taking Place Within US Prisons - CIA Whistleblower
The investigation reveals the realnames of detainees for the first time, as well as the locations they were kept in at the behest of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) around the world and the exact dates of events connected to their detention and torture.
In late 2014, a 480-page-long summary on the CIA detention centers was published by the US Senate Intelligence Committee after having been heavily redacted by the secret service. It is only a prelude to the original 6,000-page report, which remains secret.
It took nine months for the independent UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in cooperation with The Rendition Project to reveal what was cut off from the government report using open sources and investigative techniques. All the data they discovered is available online.
"Although many published accounts of individual journeys through the black site network exist, this is the first comprehensive portrayal of the system’s inner dynamics from beginning to end," the Bureau of Investigative Journalism stated.
The testimonies of former prisoners, flight records, commercial contracts, court cases, declassified government documents, information leaks and NGO reports, along with media coverage, were put together and compiled into accessible interactive databases and maps revealing the locations of the CIA black sites.
Map credit: Victoria Parsons
The countries that participated in the CIA's terrorist detainee interrogation and transfer program had full knowledge of what was being done within their borders, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell told Sputnik earlier this year.
In May, the European Court of Human Rights forced the government of Poland to pay approximately $250,000 in reparations to two terrorist suspects who had reported being tortured at a CIA black site in Poland.
According to reports, the United States gave Poland and other countries millions of dollars to allow the CIA to operate a detention center within their borders in 2002 and 2003.
Morell noted that the countries hosting CIA sites supported the program “"because they thought that we would be able to keep all of this secret."
"This was facilitated, supported and was very closely monitored at the highest level of the United States government, up to and including the White House," former senior executive at the National Security Agency (NSA) and whistleblower Thomas Drake commented to Sputnik earlier.
The 2014 report produced by the US Senate provided official documentation of numerous incidents of torture, and so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" used against enemy combatants in US-controlled detention facilities. Little has been revealed about the foreign sites or the practices there.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, then the chair of the Intelligence Committee, released the report's 480-page executive summary, over objections from CIA and White House officials.
After the release in December, the US government publicized 27 pages of interview notes compiled by lawyers for Guantanamo detainee Majid Khan in which he described his torture.
Khan said interrogators poured ice water on his genitals, videotaped him naked and repeatedly touched his "private parts" – details which were not described in the Senate report.
A month after the summary's release, in January 2015, the government said it had issued new classification rules that permitted only the release of "general allegations of torture," and "information regarding the conditions of confinement."
But, they said, the names of CIA employees and locations of secret CIA "black sites" could not be released.
Later, the US government blocked the release of 116 pages of notes detailing the torture another Guantanamo Bay detainee, Abu Zubaydah, says he endured while in CIA custody, defense lawyers said in September.
Zubaydah, a 44-year-old Saudi national, has been held in Guantanamo for nine years despite not ever being charged with a crime.
130
Tags:
prisons, torture, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Community standardsDISCUSSION
Read more: http://sputniknews.com/world/20151016/1028603545/CIA-Prisons.html#ixzz3on15oxhg
"In Fed We Trust" Is Back: Risk Soars On Hopes Economy Collapses
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/16/2015 17:18 -0400
After yesterday's epic squeeze ramp into OpEx, and today's hanging-by-a-thread range on no volume, we couldn't help but think of this...
And with this week's rally, valuations for the S&P 500 push back towards highs (P/E >18x once again)...
And we warned what happens next...
As Gold, Bonds, & Stocks all rise as The Fed rate-hike disappears over the horizon... From "rate-hikes are good for stocks" to "please njo rate hikes, we are not ready"!!!
A very mixed bag for stocks this week... Trannies ugly (down 2.4% - worst week in 2 months, after last week's best week in 13 months) but Nasdqq up for the 3rd week in a row (the first 3 week gain since Feb 2015's big squeeze)...
On the day, futures drifted off the late spike highs overnight, spiked into the open (thanks to opex pinning), chopped around in a narrow range on dismal data before liftoff into the close sparked by crude into NYMEX Close then USDJPY lifted futures into p[anic-buying mode..
On the day the late-day ramp dragged all but small caps (and Trannies) into the green... on terrible volume.. Today's exuberance blamed on hope for a shitty print from China on Sunday night!!
Here's how the ramp was achieved - Crude's ubiquituous trend reversal into NYMEX Close tehn USDJPY hyper-beta into the close...
VIX had quite a week (most notably in VXX - the VIX ETF)...
This dragged S&P 500 just into the green post-QE3...
"Most Shorted" stocks have seen another rampalicious squeeze in the last 24 hours into opex but end the week lower (after last week's record-breaking surge)...
Valeant is a great example of today's illiquid insanity in stocks...
And TWTR...
Treasuries end the week lower in yield (with a notable flattening in 2s10s and 2s30s)...
2s30s dropped 3bps on the week - the biggest flattening in 10 weeks...BUT 2s10s is now the flattest since May 2013...
The USDollar continued to drift higher against the majors (extending yesterday's gains), faded during US pm session and ended the week lower...
The USDollar also fell for the 3rd week in a row against Asian FX, almost fully retracing the China devaluation surge...
Commodities were mixed on the week with crude tumbling (though bid today) to its worst week in 2 months and gold and silver rising (with copper limping lower)...
Gold had its best week in the last 5 (and is up 4 of the last 5 weeks)... closing baove its 200-day moving average...
The biggest mover across the commodity complex was in Coffee...biggest drop in almost 8 months...
Charts: Bloomberg
Bonus Chart: Bad news is officially Good news...
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-16/fed-we-trust-back-risk-soars-hopes-economy-collapses
McDonald’s on Last Leg as ‘All Day Breakfast’ Gimmick Implodes
Last ditch effort actually causing stores to lose more money, customers
Adan Salazar
Prison Planet.com
October 16, 2015
An ill-thought scheme intended to retain the last of McDonald’s’ customers has blown up in franchise owners’ faces, showing how little can be done to save the fast food giant from imminent collapse.
After seven straight quarters of declining sales, McDonald’s decided to implement an all day breakfast menu earlier this month in hopes to revive their bottom line.
The president of the company’s US division called the launch a “success,” but that statement is at odds with franchise owners’ sentiments, one of whom says the new policy is driving customers away “in droves.”
In a survey conducted by Nomura, franchise owners revealed how the launch of all-day breakfast is costing their businesses money and time, and is overall a disaster.
“In small stores, the problems are vast with people falling over each other and equipment jammed in everywhere,” one franchise owner said, according to Business Insider.
Another franchisee called the gimmick “a non-starter” and said it’s causing his or her store to lose money, as cheaper foods on the breakfast menu produce lower average ticket costs.
“We are trading customers down from regular menu to lower-priced breakfast items. Not generating new traffic,” they said.
Yet another owner described the sudden change as an “erratic, distorted, disorganized direction from McDonald’s,” while another revealed that “Customers are abandoning us in droves because we are either too slow, or sub-par quality.”
“Unfortunately, with the current labor pool in our area, we are struggling to have enough people to run the shift, much less add an extra person,” another franchise owner wrote.
One franchise operator also expressed McDonald’s is in the “throes of a deep depression,” and another added the restaurant could be “facing its final days.”
“The CEO is sowing the seeds of our demise,” the franchise owner wrote. “We are a quick-serve fast-food restaurant, not a fast casual like Five Guys or Chipotle. The system may be facing its final days.”
The company did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
The massive fail of 24-hour breakfast is just the latest indication of McDonald’s demise after numerous attempts by the company to bring it back into the public’s favor.
In May, the company announced they would no longer report monthly same-store sales, instead switching to quarterly data following “11 straight months of declining global comparable-store sales,” according toBloomberg Business.
That followed the closure of 350 stores by April of this year, and an announcement that they would close an additional 350 by 2016.
Some analysts attribute the company’s decline to consumers who are growing more conscious of unhealthy food choices and rejecting the industry altogether in favor of gmo-free, healthier fresh foods.
“McDonald’s is a huge company, a huge supply chain spread everywhere, and it’s kind of getting nibbled at the margins by all these upscale burger chains, organic places [and] locally sourced food,” Yahoo finance columnist Rick Newman wrote in April.
This article was posted: Friday, October 16, 2015 at 3:46 pm
McDonald’s on Last Leg as ‘All Day Breakfast’ Gimmick Implodes
adans
Fri, 16 Oct 2015 20:46:53 GMT
MIDDLE SCHOOL ASSIGNMENT: WOULD YOU SAVE WHITES OR BLACKS FROM SINKING SHIP?
Students also asked to choose between President Obama, Trump, a Hispanic woman, rabbi and minister
by MIKAEL THALEN | INFOWARS.COM | OCTOBER 16, 2015
Middle school students in Florida were asked to choose between saving the lives of whites or blacks from a sinking ship in a controversial school assignment stirring outrage among parents.
Valerie Kennel, whose 11-year-old daughter Leah attends Giunta Middle School near Tampa, says sixth grade students were presented a “Lifeboat Test” in which they were forced to save only nine people out of 15.
“It’s racist in every form,” Kennel told WFLA-TV. “This had nothing to do with history, nothing to do with it. What is it teaching them?”
Several high-profile figures including President Obama and Donald Trump were included on the test alongside whites, blacks, a Hispanic woman, a male and female doctor and a rabbi and minister.
“Leah is 11. How is she supposed to pick people based off of what they’re saying? To her, everybody matters. Everybody should have a chance,” Kennel said. “They didn’t do anything wrong. Everybody deserves to be saved.”
According to Leah, she and her fellow classmates immediately protested the assignment.
“Everybody in the classroom got upset about it and said, ‘This is racist. This is racist,’” Leah notes.
One student, Leah adds, became so upset that they ripped up the assignment before being forced into “time-out” for opposing the test.
In response to protest from both parents and students, the Hillsborough County School District stated that the assignment was merely a “team-building exercise” and denied any racial connotations.
“This school has a culturally diverse population,” a school district representative said. “The test brought up good debates on how to work together, building relationship.”
Kennel, who now plans to meet with the school’s principal, argues the school’s leadership needs to better monitor what is being taught to students.
“They need to be careful with what their teachers are putting out there,” Kennel said.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mt.examiner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MikaelThalen
Email: Mikael@infowars.com (PGP Key)
OTR: Mikaelthalen@dukgo.com
Thursday, October 15, 2015
Reality Check: What We Know About TPP Makes It The Worst Trade Deal Ever
Is the TPP literally the worst trade deal in the world? Ben Swann investigates in this edition of Reality Check.
By Ben Swann -
Oct 14, 2015
Right here in Atlanta, a dozen Pacific nations along with the United States have finalized a massive trade agreement called the Trans Pacific Partnership. But is the TPP literally the worst trade deal in the world?
This is a Reality Check you won’t see anywhere else.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, like President Barack Obama, is a big supporter of the TPP. The mayor told Sharon Reed that what is really important about the TPP is beating China to other Asian-Pacific countries.
“It really is essential that we beat China into a relationship with these Asian-Pacific countries and that the United States the rules of the road and the terms of the engagement and we have an important ally in Japan and that we send a message about who they want to place their global future,” Reed said.
Is that the case?
The truth is that defining what the TPP actually is, is very, very difficult. Why? Because the text of the agreement is super secret.
Seriously—it is so secret that not even all members of Congress have been allowed to read it. Even weirder, those who have been allowed to read it must do so in a secret room in the basement of the Capitol building. Seriously.
That doesn’t mean, however, that we don’t know anything about the TPP. And the bits that we do know about it reveal that this really isn’t a trade deal.
Take, for instance, the latest meeting over the TPP with world leaders who met here in Atlanta. What were they discussing?
The United States argued for longer protections for exclusivity for prescription drugs. The U.S. delegation was arguing that the trade agreement should expand globally at a 12-year exclusivity period for drugs that treat diseases like cancer.
Australia, which only allows five years of exclusivity, and five other delegations argued against it, saying that would keep life-saving medicines from patients who cannot afford them.
Doctors Without Borders came out against this stating:
“TPP countries have agreed to United States government and multinational drug company demands that will raise the price of medicines for millions. . . . The big losers in TPP are patients and treatment providers in developing countries. . . . The TPP will still go down in history as the worst trade agreement for access to medicines in developing countries.”
That’s not very encouraging. What else do we know about the TPP? Well, it is not just an agreement extending monopolies for drug companies. It is also an agreement that creates massive copyright protections.
The Electronic Freedom Foundation says that, “Despite its earlier promises that the TPP would bring ‘greater balance’ to copyright, more than any other recent trade agreement, the most recent leak of the intellectual property chapter belies their claims. The U.S. Trade Representative [Michael Froman] (USTR) has still failed to live up to its word that it would enshrine meaningful public rights to use copyrighted content in this agreement.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said otherwise: “…It will create jobs. The net result for the United States is that it will grow our economy and strengthen America’s position in the world.”
But that’s not actually true, according to the Washington Post who gave Kerry four “Pinochios” for that statement.
The claim that the TPP would create jobs does not take into account income gains and changing wages. According to the government’s own sources, imports and exports would increase by the same amount, resulting in a net number of zero new jobs.
A trade agreement that creates no jobs sounds like NAFTA (North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement). A trade agreement that creates greater global monopolies on medicine, and one that creates more enforcement of copyright and intellectual property, would make it much worse than NAFTA.
President Obama must wait at least 90 days after notifying congress of the deal before he can sign it and sent it to Capitol Hill, and the full text of the agreement must be made public for at least 60 of those days. We’ll learn more then.
But what you need to know is that the worst thing about the TPP is something called the ISDS—the Investor-State Dispute Settlement.
Under the ISDS, foreign corporations would be allowed to appeal legal decisions to international tribunals rather than face domestic courts.
Ben Swann
Ben Swann is an investigative journalist working tirelessly to dissolve the left/right paradigm prevalent in most mainstream media narratives. As a news reporter and anchor in the earlier days of his career, he has gained a wealth of experience while earning two Emmy Awards and two Edward R. Murrow awards. In addition to heading the Truth In Media Project, Ben is the prime anchor at WGCL-TV in Atlanta, GA. He can be seen anchoring live at 4 p.m., 5:30 p.m., 6 p.m., and 11 p.m. EST, Monday through Friday. A stream is available at cbs46.com.