31 March 20
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Juan Cole | Trump Admits That Easy Voting Would Defeat Republicans
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Cole writes: "Colin Kalmbacher at Law&Crime surveys reactions to Trump's admission in an interview on Fox News that a mail-in ballot program that made it possible for the public to vote with ease and increased turnout would keep Republicans from ever being elected again."
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Stephen Colbert. (photo: CBS)
Stephen Colbert Unloads on Trump for Accusing Medical Workers of Stealing Masks
Matt Wilstein, The Daily Beast
Wilstein writes: "Stephen Colbert became the first late-night host to social distance himself from both an audience and guests when he delivered The Late Show from his bathtub two weeks ago."
A Mount Sinai Health System hospital holds personal protective equipment training in New York on March 5. (photo: Sharon Pulwer/WP)
ALSO SEE: Frightened Doctors Face Off With Hospitals
Over Rules on Protective Gear
Hospitals Tell Doctors They'll Be Fired if They Speak Out About Lack of Gear
Olivia Carville, Emma Court and Kristen V Brown, Bloomberg
Excerpt: "Hospitals are threatening to fire health-care workers who publicize their working conditions during the coronavirus pandemic - and have in some cases followed through."
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Strikers at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island demanded Amazon temporarily shut down for cleaning after reports of multiple employees testing positive for Covid-19. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Amazon Fires New York Worker Who Led Strike Over Coronavirus Concerns
Kenya Evelyn, Guardian UK
Evelyn writes: "An Amazon worker who led a walkout at a New York City facility on Monday has been fired."
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'Any deportations resulting from such raids force unnecessary separation of families and movement of people.' (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
ICE Agents Are Still Performing Raids - and Using Precious N95 Masks to Do So
Miriam Magaña Lopez and Seth M Holmes, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "On the first day of California's 'shelter-in-place' lockdown, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents raided immigrant communities in Los Angeles."
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Members of the National Socialist Movement, one of the largest neo-Nazi groups in the U.S., hold a swastika burning after a rally in 2018 in Georgia. (photo: Platt/Getty Images/AFP)
As World Struggles to Stop Deaths, Far Right Celebrates COVID-19
Michael Colborne, Al Jazeera
Colborne writes: "The new coronavirus has already infected hundreds of thousands of people, taken more than 20,000 lives and caused a level of economic, social and political disruption not seen in decades."
Some hardliners want to use the virus as a weapon to kill minorities, as others spread further hate and conspiracy.
But for many far-right hardliners, it's a crisis to be welcomed.
The hardest-core "accelerationists" - violent neo-Nazis who want civilisation to crumble, hope that COVID-19 will turn out to be their secret weapon.
"The situation is ripe for exploitation by the far right," Cynthia Miller-Idriss, American University sociologist and expert on the far-right, told Al Jazeera.
Aside from feeding into "accelerationist and apocalytic ideas", Miller-Idriss said "the uncertainty the pandemic creates creates fertile ground for claims about the need for change or the solutions the far right purports to offer."
A leader of the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM), a neo-Nazi movement based in northern Europe, said that he welcomed the pandemic as a necessary step to help create the world that his group wants to see.
"[COVID-19] might be precisely what we need in order to bring about a real national uprising and a strengthening of revolutionary political forces," Simon Lindberg, the leader of NRM's Swedish branch, wrote on the movement's website.
"We cannot build a society lasting thousands of years into the future on the rotten foundations of today," Lindberg added, "[but] instead we must build it upon the ruins of their creation."
NRM, described as a neo-Nazi "cult" by one former member, has temporarily been banned by Finnish courts pending a final ruling on the movement's legality.
According to Norwegian police, the 22-year-old perpetrator of an August 2019 attack on a mosque had been in contact with NRM.
Other far-right groups see the pandemic as an opportunity to further push xenophobic, racist messages.
In Germany, members of the neo-Nazi group Die Rechte (The Right) claimed that German borders should have been sealed off weeks ago to all "non-Europeans".
Another German neo-Nazi group, Der Dritte Weg (The Third Way), said that the virus was being exploited by German leaders as a "diversionary tactic" to distract from an apparent oncoming "flood" of refugees and migrants from the Middle East.
In Ukraine, a figure in the country's far-right Azov movement took to messaging app Telegram to claim that the spread of COVID-19 "generally isn't the fault of white people" and stated that ethnic minorities in Italy should alone be blamed for the spread of the virus there - where now more than 8,000 have died.
And it was on Telegram, the online messaging application that has been the target of much criticism for allowing openly violent content on its platform, where the most ardent far-right fans of COVID-19 can be found.
"Neo-Nazi accelerationist Telegram channels have increased their calls for destabilisation and violence related to COVID-19," Joshua Fisher-Birch, a researcher from the United States-based Counter Extremism Project, which monitors international "extremist" movements, told Al Jazeera.
"These channels are treating the current situation … as an opportunity to try to increase tension and advocate for violence."
Much of this content is available to anyone online, even those without a Telegram user account.
One popular neo-Nazi channel urged its members to cough on doorknobs at synagogues. Another urged followers infected with COVID-19 to spray their saliva on police officers.
And a further channel praised a man arrested in New Jersey in the US for coughing on a grocery store employee and claiming he had COVID-19.
"Exalted to sainthood," the channel wrote in a now-deleted comment on a news story about the incident.
The term saint or sainthood is common praise for perpetrators of violence on neo-Nazi Telegram channels.
But the calls for spreading COVID-19 go beyond Telegram.
In recently leaked chat logs on Discord, an online chat application, members of Feuerkrieg Division discussed deliberately infecting Jews and others if one of the members caught the virus.
Feuerkrieg Division is a small neo-Nazi group with a presence in the US and Europe whose members have planned to carry out attacks. Several members of the group, including teenagers, have already been arrested in recent months for their activities.
Law enforcement has taken notice of what the far right has to say about COVID-19.
In a memo this week to US law enforcement agencies, US Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen wrote that anyone in the US who intentionally spreads COVID-19 could be charged under anti-terrorism legislation, given that the virus "appears to meet the statutory definition of a 'biological agent'".
Rosen reportedly would not say whether such actions had yet to take place or whether his warning was merely a precaution.
Far-right fantasies
Some far-right fantasies about COVID-19 have already spilled over into the real world.
Well-known far-right figure Timothy Wilson, 36, died on Tuesday after a shootout with FBI agents in Missouri in the US. Wilson had been planning to attack a hospital caring for patients suffering from COVID-19.
According to reports, Wilson was an administrator of a neo-Nazi Telegram channel known for encouraging violence.
Wilson promoted attacks and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 outbreak on the channel, claiming that the pandemic was an "excuse to destroy our people".
Fisher-Birch from the Counter Extremism Project warns that although it is difficult to gauge the level of danger from the far-right's rhetoric, it still needs to be taken seriously.
"A great deal of this content is shared as an attempt at humour or trolling," Fisher-Birch told Al Jazeera, "but it's possible that a member of the target audience will decide to take action and commit an act of violence."
Looking across the Houston Ship Canal at the ExxonMobil Refinery, Baytown, Texas. (photo: Roy Luck)
Oil Refineries Face Shutdowns as Demand Collapses
Nick Cunningham, DeSmogBlog
Cunningham writes: "A growing number of refineries around the world are either curtailing operations or shutting down entirely as the oil market collapses."
EXCERPTS:
Oil prices have fallen precipitously to their lowest levels in nearly two decades. Typically, falling oil prices are a good thing for refiners because they buy crude oil on the cheap and process it into gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel, selling those products at higher prices. The end consumer also tends to consume more when fuel is less expensive. As a result, the profit margin for refiners tends to widen when crude oil becomes oversupplied.
But the world is in the midst of dual supply and demand shock — too much drilling has produced a substantial surplus, and the global coronavirus pandemic has led to a historic drop in consumption. Oil demand could fall by as much as 20 percent, according to the International Energy Agency, by far the largest decline in consumption ever recorded.
Consumption of jet fuel around the world has plunged by 75 percent. Average retail gasoline prices in the U.S. are dropping below $2 per gallon nationwide and have already fallen below $1 per gallon in some places. They will fall further still.
In fact, margins even fell into negative territory, meaning that the average refiner was losing money on every gallon of gasoline produced. Refiners now find themselves facing a painful financial squeeze.
"We're seeing gasoline cracks at negative margins. We're seeing jet cracks even worse," Brian Mandell, an executive with Phillips 66, said on a March 24 phone call with investors. "Cracks" refer to the difference between the cost of buying crude oil and selling the refined product, and it stands in as a reference point for a refiner's profit margin.
One of the main strategies that refiners use when a particular product is oversupplied is to alter their processing mix. Facing a glut of gasoline, refiners could switch their operations away from gasoline to a focus on diesel, where margins have not declined by nearly as much. "With strong price signals pushing refiners towards diesel production, they would have made immediate adjustments to tweak their refined product yields," RBN Energy, a consultancy, wrote in a report.
However, some refiners already switched over to diesel following tighter international sulfur regulations on maritime fuels that took effect at the start of this year, which placed a premium on low-sulfur diesel. Having already tapped that strategy, the ability to adjust away from gasoline production is "likely limited," RBN concluded.
Collapsing Demand Leads to Refinery Closures
There are around 3 billion people on some form of a lockdown around the world. In those circumstances, refiners have seen buyers vanish overnight.
"We're seeing even our Latin American customers asking us if they can back out of cargoes now, so we see that the demand destruction is starting to move toward Latin America," Brian Mandell, the Phillips 66 executive, told investors.
With no buyers, gasoline is set to pile up in storage. Refiners are looking at no other choice but to curtail or shut down operations.
Valero Energy, for instance, recently announced that it would limit output at six of its 12 U.S. refineries. ExxonMobil announced significant cuts to its refineries in Texas and Louisiana, citing the lack of sufficient storage capacity. Notably, Exxon said it would shut down its gasoline unit at its Baytown, Texas, complex, the company's largest such unit in the United States.
"The refiners are struggling mightily, due to the steep drop in demand," John Kilduff, a partner at Again Capital LLC, told Bloomberg. "The poor refining margins will push companies to reduce operating rates further."
The danger for some refineries is that they cannot simply throttle back and operate at really low levels. "In our experience, crude throughput in the 60 percent to 70 percent range is approaching the minimum rates that a refinery can operate without completely shutting down units," RBN said.
According to Phillips 66, even that threshold might be optimistic. "I don't think a good rule of thumb would be down in the 60 percent range for refiners. Most refineries can't turn down that far," Robert Herman, an executive with Phillips 66, said on an investor call. With refiners already lowering processing, "we're nearing kind of minimum crude rates in many of our refineries today," he added.
In other words, facing a mounting glut and no ability to lower output further, some refineries may simply need to shut down entirely.
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