peakprosperity | Given its situation, is it really any surprise that King Salman and
his son have decided to pivot to China? In need of a new partner that
would align better with their current and future interests, China is the
obvious first choice.
So in March 2017, only a very short while after Obama's failed visit,
a large and well-prepared KSA entourage accompanied King Salman to
Beijing and inked tens of billions in new business deals:
China, Saudi Arabia eye $65 billion in deals as king visits
Mar 16, 2017
BEIJING (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia’s King Salman oversaw the
signing of deals worth as much as $65 billion on the first day of a
visit to Beijing on Thursday, as the world’s largest oil exporter looks
to cement ties with the world’s second-largest economy.
The deals included a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between giant
state oil firm Saudi Aramco and China North Industries Group Corp
(Norinco), to look into building refining and chemical plants in China.
Saudi Basic Industries Corp (SABIC) and Sinopec, which already
jointly run a chemical complex in Tinajin, also agreed to develop
petrochemical projects in both China and Saudi Arabia. Salman told Xi he hoped China could play an even greater role in Middle East affairs, the ministry added.
Deputy Chinese Foreign Minister Zhang Ming said the memorandums of
understanding and letters of intent were potentially worth about $65
billion, involving everything from energy to space.
(Source)
This was a very big deal in terms of Middle East geopolitics. It
shook up many decades of established power, resulting in a shift away
from dependence on America.
The Saudis arrived in China with such a huge crowd in tow that a
reported 150 cooks had been brought along to just to feed everyone in
the Saudi visitation party.
The resulting deals struck involved everything from energy to
infrastructure to information technology to space. And this was just on
the first visit. Quite often a brand new trade delegation event
involves posturing and bluffing and feeling each other out; not deals
being struck. So it’s clear that before the visit, well before,
lots and lots of deals were being negotiated and terms agreed to so
that the thick MOU files were ready to sign during the actual visit.
The scope and size of these business deals are eye catching, but the
real clincher is King Salman's public statement expressing hope China
will play "an even greater role in Middle East affairs."
That, right there, is the sound of the geopolitical axis-tilting.
That public statement tells us everything we need to know about the sort
of change the Salman dynasty intends to pursue.
So it should have surprised no one to hear that, in August this year, another$70 billion of new deals were announced between China and KSA. The fanfare extolled that Saudi-Sino relations had entered a new era, with “the agreements covering investment, trade, energy, postal service, communications, and media.”
This is a very rapid pace for such large deals. If KSA and China
were dating, they’d be talking about moving in together already. They're
clearly at the selecting furniture and carpet samples stage.
As for the US? It seems KSA isn't even returning its calls or texts at this point.
medium | A new scientific study
led by the China University of Petroleum in Beijing, funded by the
Chinese government, concludes that China is about to experience a peak
in its total oil production as early as next year.
Without
finding an alternative source of “new abundant energy resources”, the
study warns, the 2018 peak in China’s combined conventional and
unconventional oil will undermine continuing economic growth and
“challenge the sustainable development of Chinese society.”
This
also has major implications for the prospect of a 2018 oil squeeze — as
China scales its domestic oil peak, rising demand will impact world oil
markets in a way most forecasters aren’t anticipating, contributing to a
potential supply squeeze. That could happen in 2018 proper, or in the
early years that follow.
There
are various scenarios that follow from here — China could: shift to
reducing its massive demand for energy, a tall order in itself given
population growth projections and rising consumption; accelerate a
renewable energy transition; or militarise the South China Sea for more
deepwater oil and gas.
Right
now, China appears to be incoherently pursuing all three strategies,
with varying rates of success. But one thing is clear — China’s
decisions on how it addresses its coming post-peak future will impact
regional and global political and energy security for the foreseeable
future.
Fossil fuelled-growth
The study was published on 19 September by Springer’s peer-reviewed Petroleum Science
journal, which is supported by China’s three major oil corporations,
the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), China Petroleum
Corporation (Sinopec), and China National Offshore Oil Corporation
(CNOOC).
Since
1978, China has experienced an average annual economic growth rate of
9.8%, and is now the world’s second largest economy after the United
States.
The new study points out, however, that this economic growth has been enabled by “high energy consumption.”
In
the same period of meteoric economic growth, China’s total energy
consumption has grown on average by 5.8% annually, mostly from fossil
fuels. In 2014, oil, gas and coal accounted for fully 90% of China’s
total energy consumption, with the remainder supplied from renewable
energy sources.
After
2018, however, China’s oil production is predicted to begin declining,
and the widening supply-demand gap could endanger both China’s energy
security and continued economic growth.
Bostonglobe |In a recent Pew study,
72 percent of Americans report feeling either worried or very worried
about “a future where robots and computers can do many human jobs.”
Seventy-six percent believe that economic inequality will grow worse in
such a future.
As president of an institute with “technology” in
its name and national service in its mission, I take these concerns
seriously. Every past technology wave ultimately produced more jobs than
it destroyed and delivered important gains, from higher living
standards and life expectancy to productivity and economic growth. Yet
many fear that this time the change may be so fast and so vast, and its
impact so uneven and disruptive, that it may threaten not only
individual livelihoods, but the stability of society itself.
Fortunately,
this outcome is not inevitable — and the future is in our hands.
Indeed, deliberate, coordinated action is what smoothed such transitions
in the past. If we want the advance of technology to benefit everyone,
however, we need to take action right away: We must proactively and
thoughtfully reinvent the future of work.
Simply understanding the problem is a challenge; interestingly, experts
still disagree on exactly which groups and regions are losing jobs
primarily to automation, how quickly such impact will spread, and what
interventions can help. To build sound, long-term policy on something
this important, we cannot rely on anecdotes. Government, foundation, and
corporate leaders need to invest in better data now.
theautomaticearth | Trying to figure out what on earth is happening in the Middle East
appears to have gotten a lot harder. Perhaps (because) it’s become more
dangerous too. There are so many players, and connections between
players, involved now that even making one of those schematic
representations would never get it right. Too many unknown unknowns.
A short and incomplete list of the actors: Sunni, Shiite, Saudi
Arabia, US, Russia, Turkey, ISIS, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Kurds,
Lebanon, Hezbollah, Hamas, Qatar, Israel, United Arab Emirates (UAE),
Houthis, perhaps even Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan. I know I know,
add your favorites. So what have we got, or what do we know we’ve got?
We seem to have the US lining up with Israel, the UAE and Saudi Arabia
against Russia, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah. Broadly. But that’s just a -pun
intended- crude start.
Putin has been getting closer to the Saudis because of the OPEC
production cuts, trying to jack up the price of oil. Which ironically
has now been achieved on the heels of the arrests of 11 princes and
scores of other wealthy and powerful in the kingdom. But Putin also
recently signed a $30 billion oil -infrastructure- deal with Iran. And
he’s been cuddling up to Israel as well.
In fact, Putin may well be the most powerful force in the Middle East
today. Well played?! He prevented the demise of Assad in Syria, which
however you look at it at least saved the country from becoming another
Iraq and Libya style failed state. If there’s one thing you can say
about the Middle East/North Africa it’s that the US succeeded in
creating chaos there to such an extent that it has zero control left
over any of it. Well played?!
One thing seems obvious: the House of Saud needs money. The cash
flowing out to the princes is simply not available anymore. The oil
price is a major factor in that. Miraculously, the weekend crackdown on
dozens of princes et al, managed to do what all the OPEC meetings could
not for the price of oil: push it up. But the shrinkage of foreign
reserves shows a long term problem, not some momentary blip
Another sign that money has become a real problem in Riyadh is the
ever-postponed IPO of Saudi Aramco, the flagship oil company supposedly
worth $2 trillion. Trump this week called on the Saudi’s to list it in
New York, but despite the upsurge in oil prices you still have to wonder
which part of that $2 trillion is real, and which is just fantasy.
But yeah, I know, there’s a million different stocks you can ask the
same question about. Then again, seeing the wealth of some of the
kingdom’s richest parties confiscated overnight can’t be a buy buy buy
signal, can it? Looks like the IPO delay tells us something.
And then you have the 15,000 princes and princesses who all live off
of the Kingdom’s supposed riches (‘only 2,000’ profit directly). All of
them live in -relative- wealth. Some more than others, but there’s no
hunger in the royal family. Thing is, overall population growth outdoes
even that in the royal family. Which means, since the country produces
nothing except for oil, that there are 1000s upon 1000s of young people
with nothing to do but spend money that’s no longer there. Cue mayhem.
news.com.au | IT IS said to be unlike anything the world has seen before — and that may well be right.
Saudi
Arabia’s visionary Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 32, has offered a
glimpse the $640 billion futuristic megacity that will be Saudi Arabia’s
next economic powerhouse and it looks very much at odds with the image
of the ultraconservative kingdom we’ve seen before.
The project,
dubbed NEOM, is part of the young prince’s vision of social and economic
changes geared towards a more progressive future for Saudi Arabia.
And
in a promotional video for the NEOM project, women can be seen jogging
in crop tops and working side-by-side with male colleagues: a far cry
from the Saudi Arabia where, up until last month, women weren’t even
allowed to drive a car.
NEOM is a business and industrial zone extending to neighbouring
Jordan and Egypt and spanning a whopping 26,500sq km — making it 33
times bigger than New York City, and more than twice the size of greater
Sydney.
The proposed megacity will be financed by the Saudi
government and private investors and powered entirely by wind and solar
energy. It will focus on the food, entertainment, energy and water,
biotechnology and advanced manufacturing industries.
The NEOM zone
would serve as another revenue stream for Saudi Arabia, the world’s top
oil exporter, which has struggled with slumping oil prices since 2014.
Announcing the project at a major investment conference in the
capital Riyadh, Prince Mohammed said NEOM would be an example of the
hi-tech future he envisioned for his notoriously conservative country.
He
held up two mobile phones — one, a modern smartphone and the other, a
decade-old device — to illustrate the difference between futuristic NEOM
and anything else, Reuters reported.
“This project is not a place for any conventional investor,” the
Prince said. “This is a place for dreamers who want to do something in
the world.
energyskeptic | In the past several years, the gap between demand and supply, once
considerable, has steadily narrowed, and today is almost negligible. The
consequences of an actual shortfall of supply would be immense. If
consumption begins to exceed production by even a small amount, the
price of a barrel of oil could soar to triple-digit levels. This, in
turn, could bring on a global recession, a result of exorbitant prices
for transport fuels and for products that rely on petrochemicals — which
is to say, almost every product on the market.
The impact on the American way of life would be profound: cars
cannot be propelled by roof-borne windmills. The suburban and exurban
lifestyles, hinged to two-car families and constant trips to work,
school and Wal-Mart, might become unaffordable or, if gas rationing is
imposed, impossible. Carpools would be the least imposing of many inconveniences; the cost of home heating would soar — assuming, of course, that climate-controlled habitats do not become just a fond memory.
But will such a situation really come to pass? That depends on Saudi
Arabia. To know the answer, you need to know whether the Saudis, who
possess 22 percent of the world’s oil reserves, can increase their
country’s output beyond its current limit of 10.5 million barrels a day,
and even beyond the 12.5-million-barrel target it has set for 2009.
(World consumption is about 84 million barrels a day.) Saudi
Arabia is the sole oil superpower. No other producer possesses reserves
close to its 263 billion barrels, which is almost twice as much as the
runner-up, Iran, with 133 billion barrels.
But the truth about Saudi oil is hard to figure out. Oil reservoirs
cannot be inventoried like wood in a wilderness: the oil is underground,
unseen by geologists and engineers, who can, at best, make highly
educated guesses about how much is underfoot and how much can be
extracted in the future. And there is a further obstacle: the Saudis
will not let outsiders audit their confidential data on reserves and
production. Oil is an industry in which not only is the product hidden
from sight but so is reliable information about it. And because we do
not know when a supply-demand shortfall might arrive, we do not know
when to begin preparing for it, so as to soften its impact; the economic
blow may come as a sledgehammer from the darkness.
For 31 years, Matthew Simmons has prospered as the head of his own
firm, Simmons & Company International, which advises energy
companies on mergers and acquisitions. A member of the Council on
Foreign Relations, a graduate of the Harvard Business School and an
unpaid adviser on energy policy to the 2000 presidential campaign of
George W. Bush, he would be a card-carrying member of the global oil
nomenclatura, if cards were issued for such things. Yet he is one of the
principal reasons the oil world is beginning to ask hard questions of
itself.
Two years ago, Simmons went to Saudi Arabia on a government tour for
business executives. The group was presented with the usual dog-and-pony
show, but instead of being impressed, as most visitors tend to be, with
the size and expertise of the Saudi oil industry, Simmons became
perplexed. As he recalls in his somewhat heretical new book, ”Twilight
in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy,” a
senior manager at Aramco told the visitors that ”fuzzy logic” would be
used to estimate the amount of oil that could be recovered. Simmons had
never heard of fuzzy logic. What could be fuzzy about an oil reservoir?
He suspected that Aramco, despite its promises of endless supplies,
might in fact not know how much oil remained to be recovered.
Simmons returned home with an itch to scratch. Saudi Arabia was one
of the charter members of OPEC, founded in 1960 in Baghdad to coordinate
the policies of oil producers. Like every OPEC country, Saudi Arabia
provides only general numbers about its output and reserves; it does not
release details about how much oil is extracted from each reservoir and
what methods are used to extract that oil, and it does not permit
audits by outsiders. The condition of Saudi fields, and those of other
OPEC nations, is a closely guarded secret. That’s largely because OPEC
quotas, which were first imposed in 1983 to limit the output of member
countries, were based on overall reserves; the higher an OPEC member’s
reserves, the higher its quota. It is widely believed that most,
if not all, OPEC members exaggerated the sizes of their reserves in
order to have the largest possible quota — and thus the largest possible
revenue stream.
bloomberg | Prince Mohammed seems to be playing the equally ruthless roles of
autocrat and reformer. The millennial has been outspoken about his bold
plans to modernize Saudi society and wean the kingdom from fossil fuel.
Now, Prince Mohammed has locked up globe-trotting tycoons and other
dynastic rivals, sending shock waves across the desert and around the
world. Since Saudi Arabia’s founding in 1932 by his grandfather,
Abdulaziz Al Saud, successive kings have sought consensus among the
family’s thousands of princes, balancing religious, princely, and tribal
factions to maintain stability in the world’s largest oil supplier.
Decisions were made at a glacial pace, often capped with generous
payouts for anyone left unhappy. Prince Mohammed has smashed that
conservative status quo in an act, he no doubt believes, of creative
destruction.
This is a man of dead-certain belief in himself, who told this magazine in a long, autobiographical interview
in April 2016 that his childhood experiences among princes and
potentates were more valuable and formative than Steve Jobs’s, Mark
Zuckerberg’s, and Bill Gates’s. So, he wondered aloud, “if I work
according to their methods, what will I create?” Now we know his
disruptive potential.
The prince’s unprecedented arrest of a who’s who of Saudi society
is a first stab at fulfilling his vow to hold the corrupt accountable.
“I confirm to you, no one will survive in a corruption case—whoever he
is, even if he’s a prince or a minister,” Prince Mohammed said in a
televised interview in May. The vow has now become a Twitter sensation
among Saudis under the age of 30, who make up 70 percent of the
population, the demographic bulge the prince has made his base. They’re
still plenty skeptical of Prince Mohammed and his father the king, who
recently visited Moscow with 1,500 retainers, his own carpets, and a
golden escalator for his Boeing 747.
No
one imagined the crown prince would go so far. The takedown, set up by
his father, King Salman, through a new anticorruption commission that
Prince Mohammed chairs, rounded up his most visible potential adversary,
Prince Miteb bin Abdullah. A favored son of the late King Abdullah, who
died in 2015, Miteb, 65, commanded the Saudi National Guard, which,
until his arrest, had been the last military branch not under Prince
Mohammed’s control.
capitalistexploits | Saudi Arabia is a tribal society where order has been, up until last
week, maintained by a consensus amongst the various branches of the
Royal family. Up until now it’s been unthinkable to publicly shame,
humiliate, and imprison other members of the ruling family, and so
fracturing this established order is a big deal. A really big deal!
This is not like admitting at a family gathering to having snuck into
auntie’s beach house for a quickie with the cute waitress at the corner
coffee shop.
Rather, it’s like telling them you’ve already burnt down their homes
after becoming a transvestite. It’d be a huge shock, and that’s exactly
what the families are experiencing right now.
You see, the way it’s worked is that the families all have a stake in
the system, and this in turn helps secure their loyalty. What MBS has
just done is to completely shatter the way things have always worked and
in so doing destroyed any loyalty and trust.
So what the hell is happening?
To understand what’s likely taking place let’s follow the money.
Here’s what we do know.
Oil makes up 90% of Saudi government revenue, and the entire place is a
giant welfare state. So the price drop has been very painful and they’re
bleeding through their reserves.
In fact, according to the IMF, Saudi Arabia is set to burn through all of its cash within five years.
This is why the market is putting more pressure on their currency peg
than at any time in its history. I wrote about this back in May when I
said the Saudi sheikhs only have two options.
This is also why they need to list Aramco — in order to shore up their finances.
Not only have weak oil prices hurt them. They’ve been engaging in
futile silly wars… and these things cost billions. Yemen, Syria — both
of which they figured would be easily won and over in months. Oops!
So their expense column looks horrible due to their losing billions
in wars and welfare, while their revenue column has been under severe
pressure due to the price of oil.
theconversation | The so-called Paradise Papers
may sound familiar – leaked documents from a law firm that specialises
in offshore services reveal how the global elite avoids paying taxes.
Even the name has the same ring to it as last year’s Panama Papers expose. But the Paradise Papers are different, reflecting the complexity of the global offshore tax system.
Panama is generally considered among tax haven experts as one of the
least reformed corners of the offshore world. International rules
regarding tax evasion and avoidance are intended to help national
governments to pursue their own offenders, but the Panama Papers
revealed that the country was being used primarily by the business and
political elites of countries like Russia, China and many more in Latin
America and Asia; countries where the governments are closely linked to
business and which are less likely to use tools provided by new
international rules to pursue offenders. Hence, relatively few Americans
or Europeans were caught in the Panama story. And Mossack Fonseca, the
law firm at the centre of the leak has since been discredited.
The Paradise Papers reveal the goings on of the elites of the
offshore world – this time in the supposedly highly-regulated havens of
the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Singapore and the like. All places that
received a fairly clean bill of health during the OECD peer review
process only a few years ago. The law firm at the centre of this new leak, Appleby, insists there is “no evidence of wrongdoing” in any of the revelations.
Nonetheless, the Paradise Papers will tell us a lot about the activities of business and political elites of well-regulated countries like the US and UK – implicating big multinationals such as Nike and Apple, and individuals including the British Queen.
You don’t know me, but I know you. Not
personally, but from TV, livestreams of your appearances in Cupertino as
you unveiled the next iPhone, and of course, from my organization’s
newspaper and its website. I am the editor-in-chief of the Süddeutsche Zeitung,
Germany’s leading daily and the outlet that obtained the Panama Papers
and later the Paradise Papers, which we continue to analyze and report
on with colleagues from the New York Times, the Guardian, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and nearly 100 other media organizations.
Yours
is one of the most famous and prestigious companies on the planet. Its
products are outstanding. The iPhone not only changed the world, it did
so faster than virtually any other technological innovation in history.
Apple is adored by millions and has achieved cult status. Personally, I
have had an iPhone for 10 years. My fingers brush across my iPad every
day. At home, a MacBook awaits. If everyone in our newsroom had their
choice of work computer and smartphone, I’m confident most people would
opt for an Apple device.
My colleagues and I have long followed
the debates in the United States and Europe over the taxation of Apple.
You, yourself, have often taken a stance on the issue, like you did
before the U.S. Senate in 2013. You said at the time that Apple did not
“depend on tax gimmicks.” In the Paradise Papers, however, we uncovered information that tarnishes the image of Apple that you try to convey. Questions posed by the Süddeutsche Zeitung and our aforementioned colleagues have gone either unanswered or been met with, at best, tight-lipped platitudes. Why?
theintercept |CIA Director Mike
Pompeo met late last month with a former U.S. intelligence official who
has become an advocate for a disputed theory that the theft of the
Democratic National Committee’s emails during the 2016 presidential
campaign was an inside job, rather than a hack by Russian intelligence.
Pompeo met on October 24 with William Binney, a former National Security Agency official-turned-whistleblower who co-authored an analysis
published by a group of former intelligence officials that challenges
the U.S. intelligence community’s official assessment that Russian
intelligence was behind last year’s theft of data from DNC computers.
Binney and the other former officials argue that the DNC data was
“leaked,” not hacked, “by a person with physical access” to the DNC’s
computer system.
In an interview with The Intercept, Binney said Pompeo told him that
President Donald Trump had urged the CIA director to meet with Binney to
discuss his assessment that the DNC data theft was an inside job.
During their hour-long meeting at CIA headquarters, Pompeo said Trump
told him that if Pompeo “want[ed] to know the facts, he should talk to
me,” Binney said.
A senior intelligence source confirmed that Pompeo met with Binney to
discuss his analysis, and that the CIA director held the meeting at
Trump’s urging. The Intercept’s account of the meeting is based on
interviews with Binney, the senior intelligence source, a colleague who
accompanied Binney to CIA headquarters, and others who Binney told about
the meeting. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment. “As a general
matter, we do not comment on the Director’s schedule,” said Dean Boyd,
director of the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs.
Binney said that Pompeo asked whether he would be willing to meet
with NSA and FBI officials to further discuss his analysis of the DNC
data theft. Binney agreed and said Pompeo said he would contact him when
he had arranged the meetings.
It is highly unorthodox for the CIA director to reach out to someone
like Binney, a 74-year-old ex-government employee who rose to prominence
as an NSA whistleblower wrongfully persecuted by the government, for
help with fact-finding related to the theft of the DNC emails. It is
particularly stunning that Pompeo would meet with Binney at Trump’s
apparent urging, in what could be seen as an effort to discredit the
U.S. intelligence community’s own assessment that an alleged Russian
hack of the DNC servers was part of an effort to help Trump win the
presidency.
consortiumnews | The two sources that originated the allegations claiming that Russia
meddled in the 2016 election — without providing convincing evidence —
were both paid for by
the Democratic National Committee, and in one instance also by the
Clinton campaign: the Steele dossier and the CrowdStrike analysis of the
DNC servers. Think about that for a minute.
We
have long known that the DNC did not allow the FBI to examine its
computer server for clues about who may have hacked it – or even if it
was hacked – and instead turned to CrowdStrike, a private company
co-founded by a virulently anti-Putin Russian. Within a day, CrowdStrike
blamed Russia on dubious evidence.
And, it has now been disclosed that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for opposition
research memos written by former British MI6 intelligence agent
Christopher Steele using hearsay accusations from anonymous Russian
sources to claim that the Russian government was blackmailing and
bribing Donald Trump in a scheme that presupposed that Russian President
Vladimir Putin foresaw Trump’s presidency years ago when no one else
did.
Since
then, the U.S. intelligence community has struggled to corroborate
Steele’s allegations, but those suspicions still colored the thinking of
President Obama’s intelligence chiefs who, according to Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper, “hand-picked” the analysts who
produced the Jan. 6 “assessment” claiming that Russia interfered in the
U.S. election.
In
other words, possibly all of the Russia-gate allegations, which have
been taken on faith by Democratic partisans and members of the
anti-Trump Resistance, trace back to claims paid for or generated by
Democrats.
If
for a moment one could remove the sometimes justified hatred that many
people feel toward Trump, it would be impossible to avoid the impression
that the scandal may have been cooked up by the DNC and the Clinton
camp in league with Obama’s intelligence chiefs to serve political and
geopolitical aims.
Absent
new evidence based on forensic or documentary proof, we could be
looking at a partisan concoction devised in the midst of a bitter
general election campaign, a manufactured “scandal” that also has fueled
a dangerous New Cold War against Russia; a case of a dirty political
“oppo” serving American ruling interests in reestablishing the dominance
over Russia that they enjoyed in the 1990s, as well as feeding the
voracious budgetary appetite of the Military-Industrial Complex.
NationalReview | Ice-T never received an Academy Award, which makes sense inasmuch
as his movies have been for the most part crap. But as an actor, you
have to give the man credit: Along with other gangster rappers such as
Ice Cube, he turned in such a convincing performance — amplifying
negative stereotypes about black men and selling white people their own
Reagan-era racial panic back to them in a highly stylized form — that
people still, to this day, believe he was the guy he played on stage.
One social-media critic accused him of hypocrisy for having recorded the
infamous song “Cop Killer” before going on to a very lucrative career
playing a police officer on television. Ice-T gave the man an honest
answer: “It’s both acting, homie.”
Acting, indeed.
Pretty good acting, too, across the board in the rap world.
Consider the
strange evolution of Tupac Shakur, who went from the quiet, effeminate
young man seen in this interview — a former acting and ballet student at
the Baltimore School for the Arts apparently pointed like a rocket at a
career in musical theater — to the “Thug Life” antihero persona that
made him famous in a remarkably short period of time. He played
tough-guy Roland Bishop in Juice and basically stayed in character for
the rest of his public life. As with Ice-T, many of his fans assumed the
stage persona was the real man. There’s a whole weird little racial
dynamic in there waiting for some doctoral student to sort it out.
Nobody expects Anthony Hopkins to eat a census worker.
A theater critic can’t really begrudge a performer for making a living,
and Ice-T put on a great show. I do wonder how much damage those
performers did by reinforcing and glamorizing criminal stereotypes of
black men. And I do mean that I wonder — I do not know. Maybe the act is
more obvious if you are the sort of person who is being dramatized or
caricatured. (I experience something like that when I hear modern
country songs on the radio, all that cheerful alcoholism and casual
adultery and ridiculous good-ol’-boy posturing.) It would be weird to
describe black men as “acting black,” but whatever they were up to was
the opposite of “acting white.”
There’s a certain kind of conservative who loves to talk about
“acting white,” i.e., about the legendary social sanction purportedly
applied to African Americans who try too hard in school or who speak in
an English that is too standard or who have interests and aspirations
other than the ones that black people are stereotypically supposed to
have. (“Acting white” isn’t a complaint exclusive to African Americans.
My friend Jay Nordlinger relates a wonderful story about the American
Indian educator Ben Chavis, who once was accused by a sister of “acting
white.” His reply: “‘Acting white’ is not enough. I’m acting Jewish. Or
maybe Chinese.”) Oh, how we love to knowingly tut-tut about “acting
white,” with the obvious implication that black Americans corporately
would be a good deal better off if they would do a little more acting
white. That sort of thing is not entirely unique to conservatives, of
course: Nine-tenths of all social criticism involving the problems of
the American underclass consists of nice college graduates and policy
professionals of many races and religions wondering aloud why they can’t
be more like us, which is why so much social policy is oriented toward
trying to get more poor people to go to college, irrespective of whether
they want to do so or believe they would benefit from it.
Conservatives have a weakness for that “acting white” business because
we are intellectually invested in emphasizing the self-inflicted
problems of black America, for rhetorical and political reasons that are
too obvious to require much elaboration. It’s a phenomenon that may or
may not be exaggerated. John McWhorter argues that it is a real problem,
and makes a pretty good case. So did President Barack Obama, who called
on the nation to “eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a
book is acting white.” I am not sure that a white man from Lubbock,
Texas, has a great deal to add to President Obama’s argument there.
But I do have something to say about the subject of white people acting
white.
WaPo | In April 2016, at the height of the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S.
history, Congress effectively stripped the Drug Enforcement
Administration of its most potent weapon against large drug companies
suspected of spilling prescription narcotics onto the nation’s streets.
By then, the opioid war had claimed 200,000 lives, more than three times the number of U.S. military deaths in the Vietnam War. Overdose deaths continue to rise. There is no end in sight.
A handful of members of Congress, allied with the nation’s major drug
distributors, prevailed upon the DEA and the Justice Department to
agree to a more industry-friendly law, undermining efforts to stanch the
flow of pain pills, according to an investigation by The Washington
Post and “60 Minutes.” The DEA had opposed the effort for years.
The law was the crowning achievement of a multifaceted campaign by
the drug industry to weaken aggressive DEA enforcement efforts against
drug distribution companies that were supplying corrupt doctors and
pharmacists who peddled narcotics to the black market. The industry
worked behind the scenes with lobbyists and key members of Congress,
pouring more than a million dollars into their election campaigns.
The chief advocate of the law that hobbled the DEA was Rep. Tom Marino,a Pennsylvania Republican who is now President Trump’s nominee to become the nation’s next drug czar. Marino spent years trying to move the law through Congress. It passed after Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) negotiated a final version with the DEA.
For years, some drug distributors were fined for repeatedly ignoring
warnings from the DEA to shut down suspicious sales of hundreds of
millions of pills, while they racked up billions of dollars in sales.
The new law makes it virtually impossible for the DEA to freeze
suspicious narcotic shipments from the companies, according to internal
agency and Justice Department documents and an independent assessment by
the DEA’s chief administrative law judge in a soon-to-be-published law
review article. That powerful tool had allowed the agency to immediately
prevent drugs from reaching the street.
newyorker | The north wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
is a vast, airy enclosure featuring a banked wall of glass and the
Temple of Dendur, a sandstone monument that was constructed beside the
Nile two millennia ago and transported to the Met, brick by brick, as a
gift from the Egyptian government. The space, which opened in 1978 and
is known as the Sackler Wing, is also itself a monument, to one of
America’s great philanthropic dynasties. The Brooklyn-born brothers
Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler, all physicians, donated lavishly
during their lifetimes to an astounding range of institutions, many of
which today bear the family name: the Sackler Gallery, in Washington;
the Sackler Museum, at Harvard; the Sackler Center for Arts Education,
at the Guggenheim; the Sackler Wing at the Louvre; and Sackler
institutes and facilities at Columbia, Oxford, and a dozen other
universities. The Sacklers have endowed professorships and underwritten
medical research. The art scholar Thomas Lawton once likened the eldest
brother, Arthur, to “a modern Medici.” Before Arthur’s death, in 1987,
he advised his children, “Leave the world a better place than when you
entered it.”
Mortimer died in 2010, and Raymond
died earlier this year. The brothers bequeathed to their heirs a
laudable tradition of benevolence, and an immense fortune with which to
indulge it. Arthur’s daughter Elizabeth is on the board of the Brooklyn
Museum, where she endowed the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist
Art. Raymond’s sons, Richard and Jonathan, established a professorship
at Yale Cancer Center. “My father raised Jon and me to believe that
philanthropy is an important part of how we should fill our lives,”
Richard has said. Marissa Sackler, the thirty-six-year-old daughter of
Mortimer and his third wife, Theresa Rowling, founded Beespace, a
nonprofit “incubator” that supports organizations like the Malala Fund.
Sackler recently told W that she finds the word “philanthropy” old-fashioned. She considers herself a “social entrepreneur.”
When
the Met was originally built, in 1880, one of its trustees, the lawyer
Joseph Choate, gave a speech to Gilded Age industrialists who had
gathered to celebrate its dedication, and, in a bid for their support,
offered the sly observation that what philanthropy really buys is
immortality: “Think of it, ye millionaires of many markets, what glory
may yet be yours, if you only listen to our advice, to convert pork into
porcelain, grain and produce into priceless pottery, the rude ores of
commerce into sculptured marble.” Through such transubstantiation, many
fortunes have passed into enduring civic institutions. Over time, the
origins of a clan’s largesse are largely forgotten, and we recall only
the philanthropic legacy, prompted by the name on the building.
According to Forbes, the Sacklers are now one of America’s richest families,
with a collective net worth of thirteen billion dollars—more than the
Rockefellers or the Mellons. The bulk of the Sacklers’ fortune has been
accumulated only in recent decades, yet the source of their wealth is to
most people as obscure as that of the robber barons. While the Sacklers
are interviewed regularly on the subject of their generosity, they
almost never speak publicly about the family business, Purdue Pharma—a
privately held company, based in Stamford, Connecticut, that developed
the prescription painkiller OxyContin. Upon its release, in 1995,
OxyContin was hailed as a medical breakthrough, a long-lasting narcotic
that could help patients suffering from moderate to severe pain. The
drug became a blockbuster, and has reportedly generated some thirty-five
billion dollars in revenue for Purdue.
newyorker | When we talk about drug abuse in America, our
leaders use the language not just of war but of invasion. It is true, of
course, that many illegal drugs are produced in other countries and
imported into the United States. But our tendency to focus,
relentlessly, on the supply side of the drug problem obscures the more
intractable problem of the demand side—and of our complicity, as
voracious consumers. “An astonishing ninety per cent of the heroin in
America comes from south of the border,” President Trump said on
Thursday, in his remarks on the opioid epidemic. And this is true. But,
in focussing on this particular statistic, and promising that “building a
wall” along the Mexican border “will greatly help this problem,”
President Trump indulged the old nativist myth of drug prohibition.
This week, in the magazine, I wrote a piece about the origins of the current epidemic—a
story that unfolded not in Mexico but in Stamford, Connecticut, where
Purdue Pharma, a privately held company that is owned by the Sackler
family, developed a powerful opioid painkiller, OxyContin, and set out
to persuade the American medical establishment that it was not
addictive. As my piece relates, Purdue succeeded beyond its wildest
imaginings. OxyContin became a blockbuster drug, generating billions of
dollars for the Sacklers. Meanwhile, a generation of Americans grew
addicted to opioid painkillers. Four out of five people who try heroin
today first abused prescription painkillers. In light of such a
statistic, it would be folly to focus on Mexico and not look very hard
at the F.D.A.-approved drug pushers closer to home.
Trump
may not be particularly focussed on pharmaceutical companies, but there
are promising signs that others are. On Thursday morning, federal
agents arrested
the founder of Insys, a drug company that produces a powerful opioid,
and charged him with racketeering and fraud. And on Wednesday it was revealed
that federal prosecutors in Connecticut have opened a new criminal
investigation of Purdue Pharma—focussed on the marketing of OxyContin.
unz |The
phrase “angry white males” has been around awhile, but Donald Trump’s
election has pushed it to the forefront. Indeed, at least for some, it
is central to Trump’s election. As Steven M. Gillon put it in The Washington Post,
“Donald Trump has tapped into this anger and manipulated it to his
political advantage. The bond between President Trump and his white
followers is not based on policy but on grievance. They both reject the
cultural changes over the past half-century, and Trump’s Make America
Great Again slogan signals his intent to unravel them.”
Whether
this anger is somehow justified is, of course, a question of immense
complexity but let me offer three observations that explain its scope
regardless of its justification. My point is that affirmative action and
other egalitarian social engineering nostrums inescapably
spreads antagonisms beyond those immediately affected by the policies.
And the anger will only grow as government keeps pushing the egalitarian
fantasy.
First,
violating the merit principle, whether in college admissions or hiring
police officers guarantees disgruntled white males far in excess of its
true victims. Consider hiring five firefighters strictly according to
civil service exam scores. Let’s assume that a hundred men apply for the
position and can be ranked by test scores. The top four are white and
are hired. Now, thanks to a Department of Justice consent decree, the
fire department must hire at least one African American from the list
and if the highest ranking black scores at 20 in the array he will be
hired despite his middling score.
How
many white males have actually lost their job to a black? The correct
answer is exactly one, the fifth ranking applicant. But how many whites
will mistakenly believe that they lost out to an affirmative
action candidate? The answer is 14 since this is the number of rejected
white candidates between 6 and 19 and, to be honest, all can make a
legitimate claim of being passed over to satisfy the diversity bean
counters. Further fueling this anger is that each of those fourteen
“unfairly” rejected applicants may complain to family and friends and
thus tales of the alleged injustice multiply though, in fact, only a
single white applicant lost out to a less qualified black.
Affirmative
action is thus a white grievance multiplier if this information is
public (as is often the case in university admissions and in reverse
discrimination litigation). No doubt, every Spring when colleges and
professional schools such as law and medicine mail out their
acceptance/rejection letters, millions of white males can honestly
complain that they would have been admitted to their first choice if
they had only been black or Hispanic and judged exclusively by test
scores. Of course, if the university admitted all those whites who
exceeded the scores of the least qualified black, the university would
have to dramatically increase the freshman class, a policy that possibly
tantamount to admitting nearly every white applicant.
Second,
the greater the pressure to increase “diversity” via adding additional
under-qualified blacks and Hispanics and not expanding enrollment, the
greater the visible gap between affirmative action admittees and all
others. Again, everything is purely statistical. For example, in the
pre-affirmative action era only a few blacks attended college, nearly
all of whom got there on merit. Whites (and Asians) would likely view
them as equals, no small benefit in a society obsessed with expunging
“racist stereotypes” regarding black intellectual ability.
WaPo | Brazile alleges that Clinton’s top aides routinely disrespected her and put the DNC on a “starvation diet,” depriving it of funding for voter turnout operations.
As one of her party’s most prominent black strategists, Brazile also recounts fiery disagreements with Clinton’s staffers — including a conference call in which she told three senior campaign officials, Charlie Baker, Marlon Marshall and Dennis Cheng, that she was being treated like a slave.
“I’m not Patsey the slave,” Brazile recalls telling them, a reference to the character played by Lupita Nyong’o in the film, “12 Years a Slave.” “Y’all keep whipping me and whipping me and you never give me any money or any way to do my damn job. I am not going to be your whipping girl!”
Cheng, the campaign’s national finance director, did not participate in this call, according to a senior Clinton campaign official.
Brazile’s book, titled “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House,” will be released Tuesday by Hachette Books. A copy of the 288-page book was obtained in advance by The Washington Post.
Former Clinton campaign officials strongly disputed some details in Brazile's account as well as her overall characterization of the campaign, and they disparaged her memoir as an effort to sell books and manufacture drama.
More than 100 former senior aides issued an open letter Saturday night reading, “We do not recognize the campaign she portrays in the book.
The B.C.C.I. scandal involves the laundering of drug
money, the illicit financing of terrorism and of arms to Iraq, the easy
purchase of respectability and the corruption of the world banking
system.
For more than a decade, the biggest banking swindle in history worked
beautifully. Between $5 billion and $15 billion was bilked from
governments and individual depositors to be put to the most evil of
purposes — while lawmen and regulators slept.
Now the fight among investigators is coming out into the open.
Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who gave impetus to
long-contained probes, told a Senate subcommittee headed by Senator John
Kerry that he is getting no cooperation from the Thornburgh Justice
Department.
Justice’s Criminal Division chief, Robert Mueller, tells me he will
have a hatchet-burying session with the independent-minded D.A. next
week, and vehemently denies having told British intelligence to stop
cooperating with the Manhattan grand jury.
Mueller’s handling of the BCCI scandal as the point man for the Justice Department was widely criticized. As noted by a Senate report written by Senators Kerry and Brown:
Over the past two years, the Justice Department’s
handling of BCCI has been criticized in numerous editorials in major
newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and
the New York Times, reflecting similar criticism on the part of several
Congressmen, including the chairman of the Subcommittee, Senator Kerry;
the chief Customs undercover officer who handled the BCCI drug-money
laundering sting, Robert Mazur; his superior at Customs, Commissioner
William von Raab; New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau; former
Senate investigator Jack Blum, and, within the Justice Department
itself, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida,
Dexter Lehtinen.
Typical editorials criticized Justice’s prosecution of BCCI as
“sluggish,” “conspicuously slow,” “inattentive,” and “lethargic.”
Several editorials noted that there had been “poor cooperation” by
Justice with other agencies. One stated that “the Justice Department
seems to have been holding up information that should have been passed
on” to regulators and others. Another that “the Justice Department’s
secretive conduct in dealing with BCCI requires a better explanation
than any so far offered.
***
Under Assistant Attorney General Mueller, the Department assigned
nearly three dozen attorneys to the case. During 1992, the Department
brought several indictments, which remained narrower, less detailed and,
at times, seemingly in response to the efforts of District Attorney
Robert Morgenthau of New York, the Federal Reserve, or both
***
Suddenly, on August 22, Dennis Saylor, chief assistant to Assistant
Attorney General Mueller, called Lehtinen and, according to the US
Attorney, “indicated to me that I was directed not to return the
indictment.”
While the Justice Department’s handling of BCCI has
received substantial criticism, the office of Robert Morgenthau,
District Attorney of New York, has generally received credit for
breaking open the BCCI investigation.
*** In going after BCCI, Morgenthau’s office quickly found that
in addition to fighting off the bank, it would receive resistance from
almost every other institution or entity connected to BCCI,
including at various times, BCCI’s multitude of prominent and
politically well-connected lawyers, BCCI’s accountants, BCCI’s
shareholders, the Bank of England, the British Serious Fraud Office, and
the U.S. Department of Justice.
CNN | "Like me, most Americans hope
that our justice system is independent and free of political
interference," Corker said in a statement Friday afternoon. "President
Trump's pressuring of the Justice Department and FBI to pursue cases
against his adversaries and calling for punishment before trials take
place are totally inappropriate and not only undermine our justice
system but erode the American people's confidence in our institutions."
kunstler | What America might want to know right now is: how come Hillary
Clinton doesn’t have any legal problems? Why aren’t DOJ investigators
examining the financial records of the Clinton Foundation? You would
think somebody would want to find out how over $120 million of Russian
“charitable donations” ended up on its ledgers around the time that
Secretary of State HRC approved the Uranium One deal — compared to
which, Bill Clinton’s $500,000 payment from a Russian bank for giving a
speech around the same time just looks like walking-around money.
This is not to mention (well, I will) the flow of donations from
Saudi Arabia pending approval of a major arms deal by HRC. Or of myriad
other donations from foreign nationals tendered simply for face-time
with the Secretary. Has any other cabinet officer in US history run a
money-gathering org while serving? I don’t think so. Maybe the arrant
selling of influence right out-front strains the credulity of government
auditors. And while we’re at this, I would like to know how then-FBI
director Robert Mueller and President Obama might have been informed
about these activities. Or not?
Mr. Mueller also needs to answer about his relationship with former
FBI director James Comey — he was apparently Mr. Comey’s mentor — while
Mr. Comey needs to answer for his peculiar and probably lawless behavior
in dismissing the investigation around HRC’s private email server —
that was not his decision to make — and the notorious meeting at the
Phoenix airport of former president Bill Clinton and Attorney General
Loretta Lynch around the same time the email investigation under Mr.
Comey came to a head.
Now comes the news from Donna Brazille, on-again-off-again Democrat
Party chair, that the primary elections were elaborately rigged by HRC
functionaries to buy control of her nomination. Let’s not even go into
the bidding for the Christopher Steele “dossier” alleging kinky sexual
romps in Moscow by Donald Trump, or the activities in Ukraine of Tony
Podesta’s DC lobbying company — that’s Tony, brother of John Podesta,
Clinton campaign chief, whose emails remain a truffle cache for the
rooting dogs of the DOJ, if they were actually on-the-task.
oftwominds |The nation's elites are desperate to misdirect us from the financial and power dividethat has enriched and empowered them at the expense of the unprotected many.
There are two competing explanatory narratives battling for mind-share in the U.S.:
1. The nation's social discord is the direct result of Russian social media meddling-- what I call the Boris and Natasha Narrative of evil Russian masterminds controlling a vast conspiracy of social media advertising, fake-news outlets and trolls that have created artificial divides in the body politic, or exacerbated minor cracks into chasms.
2. The nation's social discord is the direct result of soaring
wealth/power inequality-- the vast expansion of the wealth and power of
the nation's financial elites and their protected class of technocrat
enablers and enforcers (the few) at the expense of the unprotected many.
Core
to this narrative is the view that the elites and technocrats have
engaged in a massive, coordinated official/media propaganda campaign of fake newsaimed at persuading the bottom 95% that their prosperity and financial security are expanding when the reality is they have lost ground they will never be able to recover.
This propaganda campaign includes official (i.e. gamed/distorted)
statistics such as unemployment and inflation, a reliance on the
manipulated stock market to "signal widespread prosperity" and a steady
drumbeat of corporate media coverage promoting the Boris and Natasha Narrative as the primary source of all our troubles.
The reality the elites must mask is that the few (the elites) have benefited at the expense of the many. The
rising tide of financialization, globalization and
neofeudal-neocolonial neoliberalism has not raised all boats; the yachts
have floated higher while the rowboats have either sunk or are leaking
badly.
bloomberg | Forces are aligning to bring some sunlight to the political dark arts
as they’re practiced on social media. Last week, Congress held a
hearing to discuss a bill that would require new disclosures for online
political ads, and a bigger confrontation looms Tuesday when executives
from Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc., and Alphabet Inc.’s Google come to the
hill to discuss Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Tech
platforms, understandably worried that the salad days of benign neglect
from regulators are numbered, are scrambling to head off new rules by
proposing ways to increase transparency on their own. At the least, it
seems possible that online advertising will soon be subject to some
version of the rules that apply to political ads on TV. But drawing a
line around political activity on social media is tricky no matter who
is wielding the pencil. That’s partially because it’s hard to define
what counts as political activity, and also hard to define what counts
as advertising.
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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