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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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How a McConnell-backed effort to lift Russian sanctions boosted a Kentucky project

https://wapo.st/2yX4D5V

Here's an important story regarding #MoscowMitch and the lifting of Russian sanctions. As Russia is developing nuclear weapons that can hit the United States and our allies, as well as attacking our elections, #MoscowMitch is cozing up to Deripaska. Mitchell McConnell is a traitor and must be defeated. Please support his Democratic challenger Amy McGrath.

How a McConnell-backed effort to lift Russian sanctions boosted a Kentucky project

By Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman | Published August 13 at 10:38 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted August 14, 2019 11:16 AM ET|

McConnell “was not aware of any potential Russian investor before the vote,” spokesman David Popp said.

Bouchard said no one from his company, Braidy Industries, told anyone in the U.S. government that lifting sanctions could help advance the project. Rusal’s parent company, EN+, said in a statement that the Kentucky project played no role in the company’s vigorous lobbying campaign to persuade U.S. officials to do away with sanctions.

But critics said the timing is disturbing.

“It is shocking how blatantly transactional this arrangement looks,” said Michael McFaul, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration and now teaches at Stanford University.

Democratic senators have called for a government review of the deal, prompting a Rusal executive in Moscow last week to threaten to pull out of the investment.

The Rusal-backed project is one of several issues fueling broader scrutiny of McConnell’s posture toward Russia and its efforts to manipulate American voters.

In 2016, McConnell privately expressed skepticism about the intelligence reports on Russia’s activities in the election and resisted a push by the Obama administration to issue a bipartisan statement condemning the Kremlin. Last month, he blocked consideration of election security bills that have bipartisan support, despite warnings from the FBI and the intelligence community about the risks of foreign interference in the 2020 election.

Democrats have accused McConnell of being unwilling to stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin, taunting him with the moniker “Moscow Mitch.” The critique has drawn an angry response from the usually understated majority leader.

“I was called unpatriotic, ‘un-American’ and essentially treasonous by a couple of left-wing pundits on the basis of boldfaced lies,” McConnell said late last month. “I was accused of ‘aiding and abetting’ the very man I’ve singled out as our adversary and opposed for nearly 20 years: Vladimir Putin.”

A McConnell aide declined Tuesday to discuss discussions that occurred in a classified setting in 2016, but noted that the senator signed a bipartisan letter that fall requested by the Obama administration that warned state election officials about the risks of cyberattacks and urged them to be especially vigilant as Election Day approached.

McConnell has said since then that he supports efforts to improve election security and has budgeted more money for the effort, but does not agree with proposals that would give federal control over election issues that traditionally have been handled by states.

The controversy shows how Russia’s surreptitious 2016 activities, rather than unite U.S. officials, have left Democrats and Republicans bitterly divided — and have triggered heated debate about Russian investments in American businesses.

“You just can’t be so picky,” said Bouchard, who sold a Midwestern steel company he previously owned to another Russian firm. He now says politics shouldn’t get in the way of a good deal for Kentucky: “Whoever is going to help us go in and rebuild this place that’s been decimated, we just welcome it, with open arms.”

But in Kentucky, some leaders are questioning the wisdom of partnering with a Russian company recently punished by the U.S. government.

“Rusal is not okay,” said Kelly Flood, a Democratic state legislator from Lexington who said she regrets a 2017 vote to invest $15 million of state taxpayer money in the project. “It’s not okay that we’re turning to Deripaska, given the damage he’s done to our democracy. . . . Rusal’s reputation is now ours.”

A lawyer for Deripaska did not respond to a request for comment. He has denied being beholden to the Kremlin.

“While I realize I’ve involuntarily become a lightning rod for the anger some Americans have about the elections result, they need to look elsewhere for a scapegoat,” Deripaska told The Washington Post in February. “I am nobody’s man, in Russia, the U.S. or anywhere else, for that matter.”

A PROMISE FOR APPALACHIA

In Ashland, a city of 22,000 wedged along Kentucky’s border with West Virginia and Ohio, there has been enthusiasm for the Braidy Industries project, a venture the company says will bring as many as 650 new high-paying jobs to a region hit hard by the impending closure of a major steel mill and the decline of coal mining.

Bouchard said the idea for the mill was his brainstorm: a new environmentally friendly, low-cost, nonunion facility that will roll sheets of lightweight aluminum that are increasingly in demand to build cars and airplanes.

He said he was leaning toward building the mill in Indiana until an hours-long meeting with Bevin in March 2017 persuaded him to give Kentucky a closer look.

Bevin got the state legislature to agree in the waning hours of their 2017 annual session to make a $15 million equity investment in the Braidy project.

“That’s skin in the game, and that means the state is behind you,” Bouchard said.

Flood said lawmakers were informed of the governor’s proposal at 9 one night as they raced to meet a midnight deadline. She said lawmakers were told only that the appropriation was needed to create jobs in hard-hit Appalachia, but not how the money would be invested. The bill passed unanimously.

Bevin, who in his bid for reelection is blasting Democrats as socialists, has fielded criticism that he steered the government to buy stock in a private company.

“This is a handout. This is a giveaway,” said Jim Waters of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Positions, a free-market think tank. He said he understood the desire to create jobs in a hard-hit region; some impact studies show the mill could indirectly result in thousands of new jobs. But, Waters added, “I think the excitement of that overrode some of the due diligence.”

A spokeswoman for Bevin did not respond to a request for comment. State officials have said the investment will make Kentucky more competitive to attract high-wage, high-tech jobs in the future.

In a 2017 radio interview, Bevin said he thought the Braidy project would be “transformative.”

“That’s going to be one of the best investments the state has ever made,” he said.

Early on, the Kentucky project apparently caught the attention of Rusal, which is the world’s second-largest aluminum producer.

A top Rusal executive told Bloomberg News in an interview in June that the project was “discussed long before Rusal was sanctioned.”

“We just had to put the talks on hold after sanctions,” he added.

An EN+ spokeswoman said the early conversations about the Kentucky project were all internal. She declined to comment further.

Bouchard said he was talking to other possible investors for the project from the time the company first announced it would build in Kentucky in 2017. But he insisted they did not include Rusal — and said that a partnership with the Russian company was not even on his radar when the Treasury Department announced sanctions about a year later, in April 2018.

“Not even a thought,” he said.

The sanctions allowed the government to freeze any Rusal assets in the United States and made it illegal for Americans to do business with the company.

At a groundbreaking for the mill a couple of months after the sanctions were announced, Bouchard and other speakers emphasized that the project would produce American-made aluminum sheets.

“This is what hope feels like,” Bevin said at the event, according to a video posted online, adding, “We are Kentucky.”

But Bouchard said he encountered an unexpected problem: with aluminum ore in short supply, he was having trouble finding smelters with the capacity to produce enough raw material for his plant. He said he traveled the world, meeting with Rusal’s competitors, but was only able to find 60,000 tons of raw aluminum to purchase. He needed more.

In late December, he said an aluminum industry consultant alerted him to a new low-carbon smelter that Rusal was building in Siberia. Bouchard said he quickly concluded that the Rusal plant, set to open in 2021, could produce the aluminum Braidy needed.

At that point, he said he became convinced that a partnership with Rusal would be a dream deal, providing his company with much-needed capital and access to raw aluminum. But sanctions, he said, stood in the way.

Bouchard said he contacted his lawyers for advice. They were clear: He could talk to Rusal, but he could not legally conduct negotiations with the company while sanctions were in place.

That same month, Treasury announced plans to lift sanctions on Rusal. But Congress still had a chance to block the move.

Bouchard said that by the time of his January meeting with the Rusal executive in Zurich, he knew the sanctions could be ending. Still, he said, he thought the final decision could be months or years away.

On the night of his dinner in Zurich, which was first reported by Time magazine, the outcome of the sanctions debate remained uncertain, with some Republicans expressing concerns about the plan.

Over the meal, Bouchard said he told his Rusal counterpart, “Look, I don’t know what’s going to happen with sanctions. . . . I don’t know if it’s a month or 10 years, but if the day comes and sanctions go away, I’d love to meet again.”

EN+ declined to comment on the dinner.

ROLLING BACK SANCTIONS

In April 2018, after the poisoning of a former Russian spy in England, the United States imposed sanctions on some Russian entities, including Deripaska and his companies. “Russian oligarchs and elites who profit from this corrupt system will no longer be insulated from the consequences of their government’s destabilizing activities,” Mnuchin said in a statement.

A U.S. diplomatic cable from 2006, published by WikiLeaks, referred to Deripaska — who founded Rusal and had financial ties to Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s now-jailed former campaign chairman— as “among the 2-3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis.”

In announcing the new sanctions, Treasury noted that Deripaska had been investigated for money laundering and accused of “threatening the lives of business rivals” and having ties to organized crime. The U.S. government has not accused Deripaska of personal involvement in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Deripaska sued the U.S. government earlier this year, alleging that the sanctions relied on “false rumors and innuendo and originate from decades-old defamatory attacks by Deripaska’s business competitors” and have led to the “utter devastation” of his reputation and economic well-being. He told CNBC in March that he thought the sanctions represented the “weaponizing of the financial system” and that they crushed “all concept of presumption of innocence and fair process.”

The sanctions caused Rusal’s stock price to plummet and disrupted the international aluminum market, drawing complaints from some U.S. trading partners.

In December, Mnuchin said the Trump administration was prepared to lift sanctions imposed on Deripaska’s companies, while keeping sanctions on Deripaska personally, to restore order to the international aluminum market.

He said that Deripaska had agreed as part of the deal to reduce his ownership stake in the firms he once controlled.

“These entities are undergoing significant restructuring and governance changes that sever Deripaska’s control and significantly diminish his ownership,” Mnuchin said in the statement. “If these companies fail to comply with the terms, they will face very real and swift consequences.”

Members of Congress were skeptical.

“There are too many open questions about whether Deripaska will still control the companies,” Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, said in January. “With the threat that Russia poses to the United States, to our friends and allies, to democracy around the world, Congress cannot just look the other way when the administration rushes a decision like this.”

With strong Republican support, the House on Jan. 14 overwhelmingly rejected the administration plan to lift sanctions, 362 to 53.

But the effort failed in the Senate, thanks in part to McConnell and strong lobbying efforts.

The effort to lift sanctions was led by Lord Gregory Barker, the new British chief executive of EN+, and included former senator David Vitter of Louisiana, now a lobbyist at Mercury Public Affairs, according to public lobbying records.

Vitter and Mercury warned that failure to lift Rusal sanctions would “open the Trump administration up to criticism for harming U.S. manufacturers and consumers,” according to lobbying records. Vitter was spotted in McConnell’s office days before the vote.

Michael Crittenden, a spokesman for Mercury, said the Braidy project “categorically” did not figure into the firm’s sanctions lobbying. He declined to comment on whether anyone at Mercury knew there was a possibility that Rusal might invest in the project if sanctions were lifted, citing a company policy about not commenting on client matters.

Just before the vote, Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned the Senate that providing sanctions relief “gives Vladimir Putin exactly what he wants” at a time that “Russia continues to run rampant over international norms, to meddle in democratic elections, and to destabilize the world.”

McConnell called Schumer’s resolution “a political stunt.” And he rejected claims that he or others in the GOP were soft on Putin.

“We Republicans are hardly strangers to the need for strong policies concerning Russia,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. “We have long seen Vladimir Putin for the KGB thug that he is.”

At McConnell’s urging, the measure was defeated on Jan. 16, falling three votes short of the required three-fifths majority needed to overcome a threatened filibuster.

Joining in opposition was Kentucky’s junior GOP senator, Rand Paul.

A spokesman for Paul said the senator was unaware of the prospect of a major Rusal investment in Kentucky at the time and said he voted against the measure because he opposes sanctions against Russia, Iran and North Korea as a matter of principle.

“We were not involved, consulted or aware of any investment discussions with any foreign entity” before the sanctions vote, said Kelsey Cooper, Paul’s communications director.

Similarly, McConnell said he was not motivated by any Kentucky interests.

“It was completely unrelated to anything that might happen in my home state,” McConnell told reporters at the Capitol in May. “A number of us supported the administration. . . . And that’s — that was how I voted — the reason I vote the way I did.”

A NEW PARTNERSHIP

Less than two weeks after that January vote, Treasury announced that it had accepted Rusal’s plans to limit Deripaska’s control over the company and removed sanctions.

Four weeks later, Rusal executives were in Ashland, touring Braidy’s mill site. By April, the new partnership was announced. As part of the deal, Barker, the British head of Rusal’s holding company, will become co-chairman of Braidy Atlas, the company that will operate the mill.

Bouchard, who said he had watched the Senate sanctions vote live on television, was thrilled.

“For me, to this day, this is one of the greatest things that’s ever happened to northeast Kentucky — Rusal saying yes to our deal,” Bouchard said. “Particularly if you think about Appalachia and what’s happened there — you know, those people today are jumping up and down and welcoming them, Rusal, because they’re helping rebuild the community.”

With sanctions lifted, EN+ is “exploring and acting on strategically expanding our global partnership and opportunities, including in the United States,” the company said in a statement.

EN+ is “the only global producer capable” of supplying Braidy with the low-carbon aluminum it had been seeking, and a result, “the whole project would not have been possible without Rusal’s investment,” the company said.

Despite the 2018 groundbreaking, Bouchard agreed that getting the mill open would have been difficult without Rusal. “It would have imposed upon us a real challenge that would have been tough,” he said.

Braidy is gathering additional investors and hopes to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq. The firm plans to begin producing aluminum sheets by September 2021.

In Ashland, Braidy has opened a headquarters in a downtown office building, but it has not yet begun building on its site, city officials said.

And some lawmakers are voicing concern about Rusal’s role, including Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), a McConnell ally who has clashed with Bevin and criticized state investment in a project whose prospects he said appear uncertain.

“I hope we can get some jobs there. But it’s not looking real good for this business,” Comer said in a television interview in April. “I would have not taken the Russian money if I was a start-up.”

On Friday, the chief financial officer of Rusal said during an earnings call reported by Bloomberg News that the company could pull out of the project if U.S. officials continue applying pressure on the company.

The comment was an apparent reference to recent efforts by Democratic senators, led by Ron Wyden of Oregon, to secure a review of the Kentucky deal from the U.S. government agency charged with examining national security implications of foreign investments.

Barker issued a statement from London, saying Rusal’s parent company “remains committed” to the project. Bouchard, in a separate statement, blamed the media for “taking an active role in trying to undermine” a project that could create many jobs.

Wyden rejected such complaints, saying he and several Senate colleagues were pushing ahead on a request for a review of the Russian investment.

“The national security of the United States is more important than the preferences of a Russian company,” Wyden said Sunday in a statement. “I’m not going to let up because Rusal finds oversight inconvenient.”

This story has been updated to correct the spelling of the name of the president and chief executive of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Positions, a free-market think tank. It is Jim Waters, not Watson.

Jeanne Whalen contributed to this report.

#russia #russia investigation #mitch mcconnell #trumpism #trump scandals #trump administration #president donald trump #mueller investigation #mueller report #muellerinvestigation #putin #vladimir putin

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mattkennard · 6 years ago

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African Governments Are Paying for the World Bank’s Mauritius Miracle

Published: Foreign Policy (18 October 2018) w/ Claire Provost

PORT LOUIS, Mauritius—The security guard at Malawi Mangoes’ registered address at an office at the St Louis Business Centre in downtown Port Louis is not sure if we’re in the right place. The staff at the front desk are bewildered by our request to speak to someone from the company. The otherwise modest office block has flat-screen televisions on the walls and glossy magazines with titles like Savile Row and Family Business on a table in a small waiting area.

After about 20 minutes, a woman in a suit appears, bearing apologies—she had been out to lunch. At first, she seems to mistake us for investors in Malawi Mangoes. We jump in to clarify: We’re journalists looking to talk to someone from the company, which in 2014 received a $5 million loan from the private investment arm of the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Our interlocutor appears confused, as if she knows little about the business, or why we might be attempting to learn more about it in Port Louis, Mauritius.

She confirms that Malawi Mangoes, a company whose plantations and juice-making operations are located over 1,500 miles away in Malawi, is indeed registered at this address, but she declines tell us anything else. There is no one from the company here to speak to, no one to interview, no pamphlets or brochures we can read.

Mauritius sits 1,200 miles off the eastern coast of southern Africa, in the Indian Ocean. It’s an isolated island, without an endowment of exploitable natural resources like oil or minerals. Simon Springett, the United Nations resident coordinator for the island, told us that when the country became independent from the United Kingdom in 1968, “economists basically said there’s no way Mauritius can survive as an independent nation-state.”

Sugar cane had been the country’s core crop for centuries. Sugar is still produced in Mauritius, but the island owes much of its modern prosperity to the development of another more controversial industry.

In 2018, Mauritius has an international reputation built around extremely low taxes—a flat corporate tax rate of 15 percent and an effective rate as low as zero to 3 percent for offshore companies—as well as high levels of financial secrecy. Global businesses registered in Mauritius have assets valued at more than $630 billion, almost 25 times the country’s own GDP of $26 billion. Its offshore financial industry includes more than 21,000 registered businesses —almost 70 times the number of primary schools in the country. However, these firms don’t take up a lot of space; many of them exist only on paper, set up to benefit from the island’s cut-rate taxes and its “ask no questions” attitude.

Since the early 1990s, Mauritius has remade itself into an African tax haven, where multinational corporations and ultra-rich individuals can stash their cash and profits and minimize their tax bills, away from the prying eyes of other governments and the public.

As the private investment arm of the World Bank, the IFC is tasked with investing in businesses in developing countries to help “end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity,” while also making money to support the bank’s other programs. Despite its mandate to help the world’s poorest people, it seems to have largely turned a blind eye to the controversial role Mauritius plays in the global tax system—and, in some cases, it has likely profited from the country’s remoteness and opaque financial services itself.

The IFC has approved loans and investments in more than 1,600 companies since 2012. According to our analysis of their project disclosures, at least 50 of these were for companies registered in Mauritius but operating elsewhere. Many of these companies, including Malawi Mangoes, are based in sub-Saharan Africa, and their registration in Mauritius may be depriving African governments of much needed-tax revenue.

Last year, the African Business Review reported that nearly 60 percent of investments made by international companies registered in Mauritius were destined for mainland Africa. Mauritius has been accused by civil society groups such as Oxfam of draining public resources from poorer countries by allowing multinational investors to shift their profits here, enabling them to pay much less than their fair share of taxes in the countries where they actually operate. And in 2013, the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa criticized the island as “a relatively financially secretive conduit” that facilitates illicit financial flows across the continent.

Malawi Mangoes is one of the companies in which the IFC has invested. It was founded in 2009 by a pair of British entrepreneurs, Jonathan Jacobs and Craig Hardie. From the Salima district in central Malawi, it produces mango and banana puree and fresh fruit for export around Africa, to the Middle East, and to Europe.

When the IFC approved its $5 million investment in Malawi Mangoes in 2014, it was described as an agribusiness project in the soft drink sector, with the loan going to support the company as it tried to establish itself in the country. This would create much-needed rural jobs, the IFC argued, “thus injecting money to the local economy through wages and benefits paid.” Economic growth in poorer countries like Malawi is being held back, the IFC contends, by “the lack of risk capital” needed to “build the dynamic, job-creating companies that drive prosperity.”

To even be eligible for its support, projects must be located in a developing country and “have good prospects of being profitable”—but also “benefit the local economy; and Be environmentally and socially sound.” And though the IFC’s investment location is listed as Malawi, the funds actually go to “Malawi Mangoes (Mauritius) Limited.”

Company records in Mauritius and the United Kingdom, where the owners have filed paperwork, reveal that Malawi Mangoes moved its business to Mauritius after it had already started working in Malawi. This is significant because it appears to contradict claims that Mauritius is encouraging investment in Africa that wouldn’t otherwise happen.

Malawi Mangoes was incorporated in the United Kingdom in 2009, according to financial records filed in London. This U.K. entity was dissolved in 2015. By then, Malawi Mangoes had incorporated two companies in Mauritius (in 2012 and 2013), under the island’s global business system. In other words: Mauritius didn’t facilitate the company’s entrance into Malawi. It had already happened.

This suggests that Malawi Mangoes was attracted to Mauritius by something else: not the chance to move into Africa for the first time, but more likely its low taxes, high secrecy levels, and what the World Bank touts as its “ease of doing business.”

Despite the IFC’s poverty-reducing mandate and its requirement that projects benefit the local economy, the institution, and the World Bank as a whole, has been criticized for years for investing in commercial projects with dubious impacts on poor communities, including five-star hotels, upmarket shopping malls, and even agribusiness projects that have displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

On its website, the IFC explains how potential investments are reviewed, with proposals that are supposed to contain information such as the company’s finances and expected profits. IFC teams assess whether projects will comply with environmental and social performance standards, which cover issues such as labor conditions, land acquisition, and biodiversity—but not taxation, let alone tax justice.

The IFC’s disclosure explains that Malawi Mangoes is majority-owned by BXR Group, a private investment group in Amsterdam, and that the second-largest shareholder is “well-known fund manager and philanthropist” Stewart Newton. The project’s environmental and social review says Malawi Mangoes (Mauritius) Limited is “a holding company that runs an operation in Malawi.” No explanation is provided in the disclosure, however, as to why a company structured like this was deemed a suitable investment for the IFC, or why the entity receiving IFC money would be based on the Indian Ocean island.

Because this company is registered in Mauritius, where such information is not disclosed, we could not determine its annual revenues, profits, or how much tax it pays. However, it was reported locally in Malawi earlier this year that the company had secured 1,700 hectares of farmland near its existing plantations to expand its operations, and that its mango exports so far have already been worth more than $1.4 million.

The IFC’s disclosures also hint at possible problems on the ground in Malawi. In 2014, it said Malawi Mangoes had more than 600 employees, with the lowest-paid workers making just $35 a month. Though this is described as 20 percent higher than Malawi’s minimum wage, the company has also subsidized maize purchases for its workers during periods of the year when they could not afford it. And while the company does buy fruit from small-scale farmers through so-called outgrower schemes, it does not appear that local farmers or the Malawian economy are the main beneficiaries of the company’s activities.

Last year, a report in Malawi’s Maravi Post claimed that a senior chief in the Salima district “made shabby land deals” with Malawi Mangoes for which she allegedly pocketed proceeds and left “affected families” largely uncompensated.

Vigils were reportedly organized for 18 days at Salima District Commission offices to demand her removal as chief. “This land was sold dubiously to foreigners, without consultations but only telling us that it was government which allocated it,” one of the demonstrators, Muhamad Chingomanje, was quoted as saying. “We are not against developmental projects on our land, but … we want to benefit from its proceeds.”

The U.N. Economic Commission for Africa says illicit financial flows from Africa could be worth as much as $50 billion per year—double the amount of official international aid budgeted for the continent—with impacts including drained foreign exchange reserves and worsening poverty. Tax havens enable this, it explains, by allowing for the creation of “disguised corporations, shell companies, anonymous trust accounts, and fake charitable foundations.”

The secrecy afforded in places like Mauritius may facilitate illegal practices—though the real story is how tax havens enable aggressive tax practices and legal tax avoidance on a massive scale, with companies taking advantage of gaps and mismatches in tax rules to shift their profits and declare them not where their real business is, but where they’ll pay less. This is part of a larger story about how countries have been sucked into competing with one another to offer the best deal to corporations, regardless of the impacts on their economy and their citizens. Then there is the impact on countries like Malawi, which is even worse for the public purse.

According to the IMF, developing countries’ revenue losses from what’s called “base erosion and profit-shifting” may exceed $200 billion.

This issue has been acknowledged at the very top of the World Bank as well. In 2015, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said: “Some companies use elaborate strategies to not pay taxes in countries in which they work, a form of corruption that hurts the poor. More equitable taxation could easily eclipse official development assistance received by countries.”

Mauritius is an epicenter of this sort of profit-shifting. In addition to its flat tax rate of 15 percent, there is no capital gains tax and no tax on dividends or interest paid to nonresidents. Companies don’t even need to have a direct physical presence with staff on the island: This can also be outsourced to agents of financial services firms, whose employees may act as representatives for many companies at a time—just like those we met in Port Louis, at Malawi Mangoes’ registered address, who appeared surprised to be asked questions about the firm.

Once in Mauritius, it also helps for a business to have more than one subsidiary to take advantage of different incentives offered to different types of companies. Malawi Mangoes’ company records list two businesses in the country: Malawi Mangoes (Mauritius) Limited, incorporated in April 2012, and Malawi Mangoes Management (Mauritius) Limited, set up in January 2013. Both are incorporated as offshore companies within the island’s global business system and registered to the same address: “St Louis Business Centre, CNR Desroches & St Louis Streets, Port Louis.”

This is where we went in Mauritius, to ask about the company’s business and why it was running an operation in Malawi from an island so far away. But it’s just a care-of address, at the offices of a financial services firm called Rogers Capital, which helps its customers set up and manage offshore entities, lends its address for their registration forms, and keeps their details under wraps.

That pattern holds for other IFC investments in sub-Saharan Africa, made via Mauritius instead of directly in the countries of operation. In the capital of Port Louis, we had more Kafkaesque experiences. In one small office, on a narrow road in the city’s Chinatown, we found the registered office of CSquared, a broadband internet infrastructure business operating in several countries including Ghana and Uganda that counts Google among its investors. There, the man we spoke to would not even confirm the address of the building we were sitting in.

The IFC says clearly on its website that “tax evasion is unacceptable in any part of a transaction in which the World Bank Group is involved.” It insists that it “exercises due diligence to confirm that the structures in which it invests are chosen for legitimate reasons” and that it’s “committed to advancing the international tax transparency agenda.”

This sounds serious, but the language used also carefully limits the problem to illegal activity. Tax evasion is the illegal nonpayment or underpayment of tax. But for multinational companies, there are many strategies to limit tax bills that may be currently legal but still highly questionable—particularly for an institution, backed by the world’s governments, with an explicit mandate to help end poverty and boost “shared prosperity.”

Anti-poverty and tax justice nongovernmental organizations have argued for years that the IFC shouldn’t be investing in companies using tax havens at all, as such structures enable information on money made and taxes paid to be hidden from governments as well as the public. Legitimate reasons for companies to incorporate in tax havens may be a matter of interpretation, but it cannot be publicly scrutinized or debated if businesses’ information is never disclosed.

In 2016, Oxfam accused the World Bank of “turning a blind eye” to the use of tax havens by the companies that the IFC invests in. It also scrutinized IFC disclosure information and found that 25 percent of all of the organization’s investment projects in sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 were directly allocated to companies incorporated in tax havens, with almost 9 percent of the projects in Mauritius. What’s more, it found that a large majority of firms receiving IFC financing use tax havens, apparently unconnected to their core business, at some point in their corporate structure.

Oxfam demanded that the World Bank “ensure that its clients can prove they are paying their fair share of tax” and confirm that these businesses aren’t taking “advantage of the weakness of the system to reduce their tax bill to the minimum, especially through the artificial shift of profits” to countries like Mauritius. The organization suggested specifically that “responsible corporate tax considerations—beyond legal compliance” should be incorporated into the IFC’s environmental and social performance standards immediately and used to review and monitor their array of investments.

At the time, an IFC spokesperson responded by inaccurately characterizing the NGO’s criticisms as focused on illegal tax evasion, again stressing that “there are legitimate uses for offshore structures.”

This week, an IFC spokesman told Foreign Policy that the organization would only invest in a company if it was “satisfied with the integrity of the client and that the structure of the transaction is legitimate and not designed to be used for tax evasion.” The spokesman reiterated the argument that “Offshore Financial Centers can play a key role in cross-border investment,” especially when a host country lacks certain laws, contract enforcement mechanisms, or shareholder protections. “Appropriate use of intermediate jurisdictions,” he argued, “enables increased mobilization of private capital for investment that helps the poor.”

According to the spokesman, the IFC’s investment in Malawi Mangoes was “to support rural incomes through development of commercial production and processing of mangoes and bananas in a region where poverty is high” and that it was subject to the “policy on use of intermediate jurisdictions” and found to be acceptable. The IFC also pointed out that its performance standards “were developed before some of the public focus on tax and illicit financial flows” and that it was now updating its policies based on new and evolving international standards. It is unclear if Malawi Mangoes would qualify under the new standards.

According to the IFC, Malawi Mangoes has failed to ramp up its production and never generated any profits. This, of course, does not alter the nature of the tax arrangements the company set up for that eventuality.

Malawi Mangoes did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Last October, the prime minister of Mauritius, Pravind Jugnauth, revived the old narrative of the island’s dim economic prospects in an interview with the Financial Times. “We are a small island that is limited in many ways. We don’t have any natural resources,” he told the newspaper.

“We need to have an edge over others to be attractive,” Jugnauth added. “I think the advantage in taxation is important.”

At the World Bank office in Port Louis, the argument is much the same. Alex Sienaert, the country representative for Mauritius, said the offshore industry has benefited the island, providing a source of foreign exchange and encouraging kids to stay in school and work hard to get offshore office jobs. He said there is a sense among young people in the country that if “I can qualify as an accountant or a lawyer, there’s a good job for me, an office job, on the island. … That’s been going on for well over a generation now.”

But he acknowledged that “you do hear some concerns.” The offshore industry in Mauritius employs a surprisingly small fraction of the population—just 5,000 workers directly in a country of over 1 million people. And not all boats have been lifted equally by the island’s transformation into a corporate utopia. In March, the World Bank warned in a new 147-page report that inequality among Mauritians has “widened substantially” over the last 15 years, “threatening the standards of living of the poor.”

According to the report, the gap between the incomes of the poorest and the richest 10 percent of households increased by 37 percent from 2001 to 2015. One of the report’s authors attributed this to structural changes, including a “progressive shift from traditional and low-skills sectors to services, notably professional, real estate, and financial services,” which not all workers benefited from. Women, in particular, did not share in the gains, with only 57 percent of them in the labor force by 2015, and women in the private sector have been paid on average about 30 percent less than men.

Sienaert at the World Bank told us, “there’s no question that the tax appeal of Mauritius is an important part of the story,” acknowledging that this is “an increasingly less sustainable way to go.” It would be better for Mauritius to become “a conduit for international companies to come into Africa perhaps for the first time, facilitating new activity that wouldn’t otherwise exist,” he said. “Then you’re in win-win territory.”

“That’s not to say it’s going to be an easy transition,” Sienaert added. Like the March report from the World Bank, he had nothing to say about the IFC’s investments via Mauritius and gave the impression that he didn’t know they existed. And much like the staff at the office where the headquarters of Malawi Mangoes is registered on the island, he appeared surprised by our questions on the topic.

Last weekend, the World Bank brought together country delegations and development experts at its annual meetings in Indonesia. The IFC was there, too. At such conferences, grand statements are made while attendees tend to mill around banners bearing pledges to better the world.

Rather than repeating tired mantras about job-creating companies bringing prosperity to the poorest corners of Africa, these powerful international institutions—whose mandates are built around expanding shared prosperity and alleviating poverty—should be asking about the mango farmers in Malawi’s Salima district, and who profited (or didn’t) from the IFC’s support.’

#mauritius #tax #tax avoidance #tax havens #World Bank #IFC

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idolizenews · 6 years ago

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SCHEDULE 09/08.

Each schedule post provides a snapshot into the way the company is marketing your group as a whole, the expectations they have for your involvement in the industry, and so forth. They’ll range from fun things like CF deals to run of the mill events like fan parties, concerts, or rest time. We’ll be varying things across the board and using this as a way to tease upcoming plot lines for groups. Schedules illuminate the often difficult realities of being an idol, and because of that we award +5 exp / + 5 sp to those who complete a 350+ 4/4 thread or a 500 word solo. Solos must be completed during the three week run of the schedule, but threads may be finished after the end of the prompt provided they were started well in excess of the end point (e.g. finishing up a reply or two after is fine, but posting the starter right before the next prompt goes up is not). These needn’t be taken extremely literally when threading and are open to tangential preparation threads and other flexibility.

OLYMPUS – Olympus is putting on their special concert in Seoul this week, with performances on Friday (one), Saturday (two), and Sunday (one). It’s sure to be an exhausting weekend, but with the massive crowds being drawn in, it’s safe to say that this is a testament to their popularity. They’re said to be showcasing some solo stages throughout the concert. Rumor has it: Performance at this concert will be folded into considerations for unit and solo promotional activities upcoming and will be followed by a few months without a comeback for the group.

FANTASY – Both units are currently in preparation for comebacks after the rousing success of their summer songs. The girls are certainly on the upswing and have been invited onto Radio Star to speak about their progress since their slightly unfortunate but endearing fancam. This round of interviews has been more tightly packed even then usual. Rumor has it: This next comeback could make or break the unit concepts as a whole, and that there is discussion around the potential of losing a member in the upcoming days, which Midas is trying to stifle.

TITANIUM – With their first CF already under their belts and a successful debut now behind them, the boys are being worked harder than ever to prepare for upcoming efforts. The boys are being sent to LA for a week to train with notable dance instructors there in an intensive course. Rumor has it: Now is the time to start trying to find ways to use your personal talents to promote the group as a whole. Midas will bend over backwards for you if you can prove yourself capable of bringing in cash.

IMPERIAL –With their 5 year anniversary this month, the boys are holding a fan party in Jamsil Stadium, taking up a fair portion of the venue with their fans. Tickets have already sold out for both dates, a Friday and Saturday night show. The run time is roughly 2 hours, with three comment sections and a host of b-sides, ballads, and songs to entertain their fans. Rumor has it: They’ll be gearing up for a comeback in the second half of the year, and will use reception at this fan meeting to drum up some media play regarding fanbase and popularity.

WINK – A fun spread in CECI is the order of the day for WINK, rounding out their promotional activities with a cover, a photoshoot, and an interview spread on their quick rise to fame over the past two years. Media play is expected hinting at their desires for the next comeback to feature a more mature and sultry image. Rumor has it: With the newly bursting popularity the girls are facing, they risk overexposure with the public, but Koala.T doesn’t seem to mind, intent on putting the girls into as many articles, CFs, and photoshoots as he can get his hands on. HEAVEN – Heaven is on Radio Star this week discussing their recently shifted image, the sultry appeal of their new song, the standout success of their unit Heaven1004, and what the future holds for the members in terms of solo activities! Rumor has it: This guesting will be used to begin shaping the narrative of the girls both as a whole moving towards a more matured sound and image, retaining their summer crown via the unit activities, and establishing their brands as solo promoters, in various avenues, beginning a new chapter for the group.

POIZN – POIZN are stepping in as special hosts for a late night radio show, taking over the air as a group and determined to show off their skills. They’ll be hosting, performing acoustics of a few songs, and designing the playlists for the night - although these playlists will of course be carefully vetted and approved first. Rumor has it: This is a step towards cleaning up the image of the group, a baby step taken to hopefully put out some business posts and media play about their solid skills, improved personalities, and true love of music.

GLIMMER – The ever popular rite of passage for all rookies is the school festival. The girls of Glimmer have been invited to Gyeongsan National University to perform at their yearly festival, and 99 is hoping to drum up some interest in the girls through similar activities throughout the coming months. Rumor has it: The girls will be facing a brief hiatus if this debut doesn’t hit it’s stride, to give those participating in the Produce Project group a chance to drum up appeal for the group as a whole, which means the others might need to start thinking of a way to stand out.

HONEY – The girls have landed another CF deal, this time with Lotte Duty Free’s Yum campaign! It’s a fun, cute, retro take on things, with the inspiration commercial (here). This is certain to further establish their brand power, and the retro styling certainly suits the members quite well! Rumor has it: The upcoming comeback was slightly postponed due to member health concerns and the desire to push Galaxy harder while the public interest in them is heightened.

CHERRY BOMB! – With the girls building up a fanbase on the back of their new summer song, promotions have brought them to After School Club, leaning hard on variety to propel the girls up the ladder a little further if possible, intent on increasing their exposure and using this brighter comeback to provide an offset to their creepy cute image of late. Rumor has it: This new comeback is either heralding the end of their creepy occult vibe concepts, or is designed to demonstrate the girl’s conceptual diversity. With it outperforming former tracks but receiving a mixed critical response, it’s unclear if they’ll continue building an image of experimental musicality or will forsake that for marketability.

ATLAS – It’s comeback week! Time to burst onto stage and take the world by storm once more - hopefully. The immediate reception to the song has been mixed, but live stages are sure to turn that around, provided you don’t make any major mistakes. Rumor has it: The boys are being overworked behind the scenes to the point of exhaustion, with filming for Vlives, preparation for activities, and so on keeping the boys awake for a solid 24 hours prior to their comeback stage performance.

JAWBREAKER – With Let’s Go! Jawbreaker! still filming weekly and a comeback on the horizon, the girls are as busy as ever, with an endorsement for Adidas Originals, who have just made the group their brand faces. It’s a big opportunity for the group and one that KJH is certainly pleased to have been offered. They’ll be shooting a commercial and some promotional material for upcoming release. Rumor has it: KJH is intending to enter the legal fray to reclaim the girls’ former discography from Singularity in order to begin planning a KJH family concert.

GALAXY – There’s a comeback on the horizon for the boys! MSG is really trying to push them harder in hopes that they’ll catch on with the public and amass a bigger fandom to solidify their position in the industry before other companies start debuting new boy groups into the mix. This means their schedules are jam packed with comeback preparations: last minute photo-shoots, rehearsals, and hours upon hours of training to make sure that they nail this comeback. Rumor has it: That MSG is potentially going to be looking into promotional opportunities in China as a new way to strengthen Galaxy’s fandom.

XLNC – Arirang Simply Kpop will be hosting the boys this week. The English speaking broadcast will be featuring the whole group, a few stripped down performances to give the boys a chance to show off their live skills, and audience interaction via live stream feeds and twitter submitted questions. Rumor has it: Having the boys on an English based broadcast is a chance for them to reach out to the foreign market, and Koala.T will be carefully studying the demographics of those responding and interacting with the show to see how best to move forward.

Produce: With the show wrapping up and debut on the horizon, the boys and girls alike have been thrown into the fervor of preparations for their upcoming comeback. If they thought the show was tough, this is ten times worse. Without the cameras, trainers and management can be as micromanaging and strict as they like, which means the pressure is on to get everyone to an equal, debut ready level - not easy with trainees of different companies and experience levels all lumped together. Rumor has it: Despite their overall lower performance and attention given during the show, the boys are being approached for more brand deals and appearances, illustrating the good ol’ sexism of the idol world.

#id.schedule

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divulgacion-alternativa · 4 years ago

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Ben Ful Links | August 2/2021:

Source: benjaminfulford.net

This newsletter does not contain links.

Getting To Know The North Koreans

Notice to readers. So that I may take my annual sabbatical in the Canadian wilderness, the next several reports will be pre-written. They will focus on the history of how I got involved in fighting the Khazarian Mafia. Hopefully, this will help readers get a better understanding of what is happening now. Of course, if something really big happens, we will issue an emergency report.

The assassination attempts against me and the murder of many of my colleagues were part of a Nazi coup d’etat that took place in the U.S. after 9.11.2001. This Nazi faction, led by Fuhrer George Bush Sr., was a sub-group of the Khazarian Mafia. They were killing journalists as a part of an attempt to control the narrative, the story by which Western society was led. However, I did not figure that out until a North Korean princess showed me the evidence.

Here is how it happened. I was running into serious censorship at Forbes. This started after I had run the story about the murder of the banker, that I detailed in last week’s report, brought me to the attention of the people who gave orders to the Forbes family.

For example, a story about Citibank (a Rockefeller company) being kicked out of Japan because it was money laundering for gangsters was killed even though my source was the Japanese Finance Ministry speaking on the record. The last straw for me came when I found out that an anti-virus software company was making viruses. Forbes killed the story, telling me I was “unreliable,” when in fact the story was killed because Steve Forbes had been given $500,000 by the anti-virus company, according to a Forbes whistleblower.

In any case, I was sick of writing business pornography and decided my next career move was to shift to writing books. The hope was to have them made into Hollywood movies. So, I sent two chapters and an outline of a planned book to my agent in the U.S. The book would have described a systematic pattern of the murder of politicians, journalists, industrialists, etc. by politicians and gangsters who were part of the corrupt secret government that really ran Japan.

The day after I sent the book proposal, I got a call from Kaoru Nakamaru, who said she was a princess and a first cousin of Emperor Hirohito. She told me it would be a bad idea to publish the book. Obviously she was connected to people who were reading my mail, so I decided to meet her. When I asked her how she knew what was in my book proposal she said, “A Goddess told me.” (That Goddess would be Amaterasu the reigning deity of the Japanese security police).

When I met Nakamaru she said, “You understand all about the corruption in Japan but you know nothing about the real source, which is in the West.” She then gave me a 9.11 truth video. At the time, I thought “Oh my God, this is one of those anti-Semitic movies about 9.11 that I read about in the New York Times.” I had no intention of watching it but she kept pestering me until I did. That was the real red pill for me. It did not take a lot of fact-checking to realize 9.11 was an inside job. From a missile hitting the Pentagon without breaking the second-floor windows and leaving no plane debris, to a BBC reporter with Building #7 visible in the background saying it had already collapsed, 20 minutes before it actually did at freefall speed, the evidence was undeniable.

The real problem was wrapping my mind around how incredibly large a group would be needed to carry out a campaign like this. The implications were truly mind-boggling. It was only by looking at historical events that I realized such false flags were being commonly used as excuses to start wars.

For example, the sinking of the “innocent passenger vessel” Lusitania in 1914 was used as an excuse to demonize the Germans and get the Americans to join the British in World War I. It was not until a hundred years later in 2014 that the British admitted publicly the Lusitania was transporting arms and was, therefore, a legitimate military target. Historians note that ads in newspapers warned passengers prior to the ship being sent into the vicinity of German U-boats as a sacrifice.

In 2001, the people who controlled the U.S. were using 9.11 as an excuse to invade the Middle East (yet again).

In my still naïve worldview I figured that if people found out the truth, there would be a revolution. After I published front-page articles for major Japanese magazines listing evidence that 9.11 was an inside job, I held a press conference at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Japan to present the evidence to the international media.

It was only when none of them (with a few minor exceptions like rural Australian newspapers) reported the evidence did I realize that freedom of the press had been extinguished from the Western media.

Nobody at the FCCJ or in the Western press debated me or presented evidence showing I was wrong. Instead, all sorts of people I never knew suddenly started a systematic campaign of character assassination against me. The general story was that I was taking drugs, believed in UFOs, and had lost my mind. I was put on a black list and nobody in the English language press would work with me. Many editors told me they had been ordered by their bosses not to publish my stories.

Fortunately, I had published books in Japanese that sold well and provided me with an income. I was also introduced to a Japanese author by the name of Ohta Ryu. He explained to me that he had been approached by a group of Japanese who had studied Western power structures before and during World War II. He used the material they had provided to publish his books.

What Ohta said was mind-boggling at the time. It was talking about how the West had a secret government run by families like the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers. This may be common knowledge now but, at the time (around 2005-6) when I did an internet search about the Rothschilds, I found exactly one sentence about them on the entire web. It was from an Israeli chat room where one participant mentioned a rumor that the Rothschilds were involved in the formation of Israel.

As far as our reputed overlord David Rockefeller was concerned, he was number 300 or so on the Forbes richest list and considered to be a person of the past. I had to go back to the 1918 edition of Forbes to find out the real story. It turns out John Rockefeller the first had suddenly become poor overnight by donating all of his fortune (around $300 billion in today’s money) to a foundation. Once the money was in a foundation, the owners did not pay inheritance tax and did not have to disclose much information.

A paper trail led to over 200 foundations controlled by the Rockefellers that in turn controlled most of the Fortune 500 companies.

What I started to realize was that all the murders of Japanese politicians etc. were part of a Rockefeller & Co. hostile take-over of Japan Inc. One key man they used to carry out this operation was Heizo Takenaka, who was the Finance and Economy Minister from 2002-2005. While he was in this job, he dismantled the system of cross-shareholding where banks and companies owned each others’ shares. Takenaka forced all the banks to sell off their shares in Japan’s listed companies to foreign funds such as Vanguard, Blackrock, and State Street & Banking. When I confronted him about handing over all of Japan’s listed companies to the Rockefellers etc., he squirmed visibly in his chair and was evasive.

However, the day after the interview, I got a phone call from an official at the Japan development bank who told me there was someone Heizo Takenaka wanted me to meet. So, I went to a downtown Tokyo hotel room where I met a person by the name of Shiramine who called himself a Ninja.

I recorded with his permission a conversation in which he offered me the job of Finance Minister of Japan as long as I went along with a plan to kill 90% of humanity. He said it was necessary in order to “save the environment.” Since war did not kill enough people the plan was to use disease and starvation to kill everyone off, he said. Shiramine added that if I refused the offer I would be killed.

To his credit when Shiramine met me and gave me this proposal, he also handed me a tape and told me to listen to it somewhere private. In this tape, he said the problem was the “elders of Zion.” I was also told by another Takenaka envoy that he handed over control of all the country’s corporations because Japan had been “threatened with an earthquake machine.”

The next day another person called me and said he wanted to meet me. Again, the meeting took place inside a downtown hotel room. This time it was someone from an Asian secret society known as The Red and The Green. He said they had 8 million members including 200,000 assassins who could help. This group also knew about the plan to kill 90% of humanity because they had secretly recorded a meeting at the Bohemian Grove where they discussed all of this.

Members of this group had long worked with Western secret societies, for example by supplying them with heroin from the golden triangle. However, it was the attempt to kill them off with SARS, a bio-weapon designed to kill Asians, that finally put them on a war footing.

You can imagine my shock and disorientation in running into all of this over the space of just a week. As someone who had lived his whole life in the official open world as seen in the public record, this was mind-boggling, to say the least. In any case, since I could not agree with a plan to kill 90% of humanity, I decided to go along with the Asian secret society.

At first, being a peace-loving journalist, I thought of ideas like maybe the Asian secret society could show 9.11 truth movies in Chinatown movie theaters. However, eventually, I had what I call my “Kill Bill” moment. In the movie Kill Bill, there is a scene where a female assassin (played by Uma Thurman) is in a desperate fight for her life with a one-eyed opponent. When Thurman plucks out her opponent’s eye, suddenly the fight is over.

What I realized was that most Westerners (like me) had no idea what their secret leaders were up to and would be appalled if they found out. The flaw of the secret Western government was that it was highly centralized. So, I advised the Asian secret society to “pluck out the eye.” I gave them a list of all the people who were members of the Bilderberg, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. I said if you target them, you can stop the planned genocide.

Later when the earthquake machine threat was made directly to me I responded that “you can’t stop assassinations with an earthquake machine.”

The other thing I suggested to the Asian Secret Society was that buying U.S. government bonds was worse than buying opium. “At least opium gives you pleasure but now you are paying them to kill you,” is what I told a top adviser to the Chinese Politburo.

In any case, the Asian Secret Society became mobilized. They threatened to kill the Western elite and also stopped buying U.S. government bonds. Thus the attempt to kill off 90% of humanity was stalled. This was the real background to the so-called “Lehman shock,” financial crisis of 2008, and the birth of the Obama administration.

However, the secret war had only begun. A lot of new players emerged from the shadows following these events.

Next week I will talk about how I met David Rockefeller. I will also discuss meeting such groups as the Black Sun, the Illuminati (in two flavors), the secret space program Nazis, the Russian FSB, and former MI6 head Dr. Michael Van de Meer.

Please stay tuned…

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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Monday, June 28, 2021

Northwest heat wave builds, all-time records fall (AP) Oregon’s largest city broke its all-time heat record on Saturday. It could beat the new mark on Sunday. Forecasters say many Pacific Northwest communities may sweat through the hottest days in their histories as temperatures soar during a heat wave that has sent residents scrambling for relief. Stores sold out of portable air conditioners and fans, hospitals canceled outdoor vaccination clinics, cities opened cooling centers, baseball teams canceled or moved up weekend games, and utilities braced for possible power outages. Portland, Oregon, reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42.2 degrees Celsius) Saturday afternoon, according to the National Weather Service. The previous heat record for Oregon’s largest city was 107 F (41.7 C), a mark hit in 1965 and 1981. Seattle reached 101 F (38.3 C) Saturday, making it the hottest June day on record and only the fourth time in recorded history the usually temperate city had topped 100 degrees.

Rattlesnakes everywhere: the odd consequences of California’s drought (The Guardian) Len Ramirez stalked through the dried landscape, scanning the ground ahead searching for movement. Called out to an estate in Napa Valley, the owner of Ramirez Rattlesnake Removal company was finishing up his last job of another busy day wrangling, removing and relocating snakes from homes across northern California. He’d found three in just this yard, including one nestled roughly 1,000 yards from the pool. Rattlesnakes are everywhere these days, he says—on front porches, in potted plants, and under children’s play equipment. Ramirez believes the drought may be partly to blame. Snakes are increasingly finding their way into urban environments in search of refuge from the rising temperatures and relief from the drying landscape. And it’s not just snakes. “Bears are showing up in areas where they’ve never seen before,” Rebecca Barboza, a wildlife biologist who studies the trend for the California department of fish and wildlife, told ABC News this month. Smaller animals and insects are also coming closer in search of water. Less perilous pests may also pose more problems during drought conditions. Ants, cockroaches and rodents and other visitors also need water to survive and human homes are typically where they go to find it when it’s absent in outdoor environments.

1st post-pandemic cruise ship from US sails away (AP) The first cruise ship to leave a U.S. port since the coronavirus pandemic brought the industry to a 15-month standstill sailed away on Saturday with nearly all vaccinated passengers on board. Celebrity Edge departed Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at 6 p.m. with the number of passengers limited to about 40% capacity, and with nearly all 1,100 passengers vaccinated against COVID-19. Celebrity Cruises, one of Royal Caribbean Cruise’s brands, says 99% of the passengers are vaccinated. Saturday’s sailing kicks off the cruise lines’ return to business with Carnival vessels already scheduled to depart from other ports next month. Industry officials are hoping all goes smooth to move past a chapter last year of deadly outbreaks on cruise ships that prompted ships to be rejected at ports and passengers to be forced into quarantine. Some passengers died of COVID-19 at sea while others fell so ill they had to be carried out of the vessels on stretchers.

Drug Gang Shootout Leaves 18 Dead In Mexico (AFP) A shootout between suspected drug cartels left 18 people dead Friday in Mexico, a government official said. The gunfight happened in a remote area of Zacatecas state in the country’s north, said Rocio Aguilar, a spokeswoman for the state government. Drug-related violence has claimed more than 300,000 lives in Mexico since 2006, when the government started deploying federal troops to fight the cartels. “There were 18 dead, and the confrontation occurred in the community of San Juan Capistrano, in the municipality of Valparaiso,” Aguilar added. Valparaiso borders Jalisco state, a stronghold of a powerful cartel called Jalisco Nueva Generacion.

Latin America Confronts a Pandemic Education Crisis (NYT) SOACHA, Colombia—Already, two of Gloria Vásquez’s children had dropped out of school during the pandemic, including her 8-year-old, Ximena, who had fallen so far behind that she struggled with the most basic arithmetic. “One plus one?” Ms. Vásquez quizzed her daughter one afternoon. “Four?” the little girl guessed helplessly. Deep into the second year of the pandemic, Latin America is facing an education crisis. It has suffered the longest school shutdowns of any region in the world, according to UNICEF, nearly 16 months in some areas. While many students in wealthy countries have returned to the classroom, 100 million children in Latin America are still in full or partial distance learning. The consequences are alarming, officials and education experts say: With economies in the region pummeled by the pandemic and connections to the classroom so badly frayed, children in primary and secondary school are dropping out in large numbers, sometimes to work wherever they can. Millions of children in Latin America may have already left the school system, the World Bank estimates. In Mexico, 1.8 million children and young people abandoned their educations this school year because of the pandemic or economic hardship, according to the national statistics agency.

Bangkok, 9 provinces restrict movements to curb rising cases (AP) Faced with a sharp rise in coronavirus cases, the Thai capital on Sunday announced a ban on indoor dining and gatherings of more than 20 people, in addition to the closure of construction sites and the sealing off of workers’ quarters in Bangkok and nine other provinces. The measures will remain for 30 days. The situation has become critical as the number of hospital beds in Bangkok for seriously ill COVID-19 patients is running short despite the creation of several field hospitals. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said Friday that a proposal for a seven-day curfew for all of Bangkok has been rejected for the time being.

Singapore’s new plan to ‘live with covid’ revealed (news.com.au) A country that has been one of the world’s most successful at combating Covid-19 has announced it will soon fundamentally change how it manages the pandemic. The city state of Singapore has stated covid will be treated like other endemic diseases such as flu. There will be no goals of zero transmission. Quarantine will be dumped for travellers and close contact of cases will not have to isolate. It also plans to no longer announce daily case numbers. But you may need to take tests to head to the shops or go to work. Senior Singaporean ministers have said it is the “new normal” of “living with covid”. “The bad news is that Covid-19 may never go away. The good news is that it is possible to live normally with it in our midst,” wrote Singapore’s trade Minister Gan Kim Yong, finance minister Lawrence Wong and health minister Ong Ye Kung said in an editorial in the Straits Times this week.

Riots in Lebanon over economy injure 10 soldiers, protesters (AP) Lebanese troops deployed in the northern city of Tripoli early Sunday taking positions around major state institutions after a night of protests and riots against worsening living conditions left several protesters and 10 soldiers injured. Sporadic protests were reported throughout Lebanon on Saturday as the country’s 20-month economic crisis worsened. The World Bank described the crisis as one of the worst the world has witnessed in 150 years. It is coupled with a political deadlock that has left Lebanon without a government since August. Lebanon has been suffering severe shortages of vital products including fuel, medicine and medical products, angering the public.

Blinken, Lapid meet in Rome amid reset US-Israel relations (AP) U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid will meet in Rome on Sunday as their new governments look to turn the page on former President Donald Trump and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose close alliance aggravated partisan divisions within both countries. Now, with Trump sidelined in Florida and Netanyahu leading the opposition, President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett are focused on pragmatic diplomacy rather than dramatic initiatives that risk fomenting opposition at home or distracting from other priorities. That approach—of managing the conflict rather than trying to solve it—may succeed in papering over domestic divisions. But it also maintains a status quo that the Palestinians find increasingly oppressive and hopeless, and which has fueled countless cycles of unrest. Officials expect there will be little settlement expansion beyond so-called “natural growth.” But that’s a vaguely defined term that could allow for considerable construction, as well as moving ahead with major infrastructure projects that pave the way for explosive future growth.

Ethiopia airstrike survivors recall massacre (AP) Maerg was serving customers at his cafe in Ethiopia’s Tigray village of Togoga when the military airstrike occurred, filling the room with dust and bringing down debris that struck him on the head. “Everything was covered in black smoke, it was like a hell,” he told The Associated Press by phone, recounting one of the deadliest attacks in the Tigray conflict. “There was so much blood.” Seven people were killed in his cafe alone, and some 30 were wounded, including his sister-in-law, who suffered burns on her face, hands and legs. Outside, he said, he saw dozens more bodies. As time passed, he watched in horror as survivors realized that Ethiopian soldiers were blocking medical aid from arriving. Such witness accounts are emerging after Ethiopia’s military has said it was responsible for the airstrike that struck Togoga’s busy marketplace on Tuesday, which health officials said killed at least 64 people and injured dozens more. Many died when soldiers blocked medical teams from reaching them, or from taking them to hospitals in the regional capital, Mekele, just 60 kilometers (37 miles) away, health workers said. Most of the victims were women and children, said a doctor who treated people at the scene.

South Africa resumes restrictions to fight surge (AP) South Africa has reintroduced tough restrictions including a ban on alcohol sales and an extended nightly curfew as it fights a fast-increasing surge of COVID-19 cases. President Cyril Ramaphosa says the delta variant that was first discovered in India appears to be driving South Africa’s new increase.

#headlines #news

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ericvick · 4 years ago

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US-China tech war: Beijing’s secret chipmaking champions

Once a month, senior executives of Yangtze Memory Technologies Co fly to Beijing for a flurry of meetings with China’s top economic management bodies. They focus on the company’s efforts to build some of the world’s most advanced computer memory chips — and its progress on weaning itself off American technology.

Based in the central riverside city of Wuhan, Yangtze Memory is considered at the vanguard of the country’s efforts to create a domestic semiconductor industry, already mass-producing state of the art 64-layer and 128-layer Nand flash memory chips, used in most electronics from smartphones to servers to connected cars.

These marvels of nanoengineering stack tiny memory cells in ever-greater densities, rivalling industry leaders such as US-based Micron Technology and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics.

That would be hard enough for a company that only opened its doors in 2016. But added to the challenge is the ambitious, state-directed aim of weeding out the group’s American suppliers, along with those reliant on US technology. The equipment used to manufacture high-end computer chips is virtually an American global monopoly. Eighty per cent of the market in some chipmaking and design processes such as etching, ion implantation, electrochemical deposition, wafer inspection and design software is in the hands of US companies.

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It is a frustrating area of dependence for China, which imported $350bn worth of semiconductors last year, according to the China Semiconductor Industry Association. Removing this source of US leverage over its economy became a national priority two years ago, when Washington put sanctions on China’s biggest telecoms equipment maker, Huawei Technologies, amid spying allegations that the Chinese company has constantly denied.

This was followed by sanctions on several other big Chinese technology companies, from its top contract chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co, to Hikvision, the world’s biggest surveillance camera maker. More than 100 companies in total have been placed on a trade blacklist prohibiting most US technology to be sold to them without a licence. That has spurred an aggressive effort by Beijing to identify and replace risky parts and suppliers.

The result has been an unprecedented flourishing of chip-related companies within China. Dozens of Chinese groups, with specialisations mirroring US incumbents in key areas from ion implantation to etching, have sprung into prominence over the past few years, accelerating as the state realises the enormity of the self-sufficiency project.

“The clock is ticking because they still know that the US could hit the local industry hard,” said Roger Sheng, a chip analyst at consultancy Gartner. “New chip competition is evolving as all the major economies, not just China, now recognise the importance of semiconductors.”

Plan B

So far, Yangtze Memory, also known as YMTC, has remained under the radar of the US government. But the company is taking no chances. With the guidance of Beijing, it has launched a massive review of its supply chain in an effort to find local suppliers — or, at least, non-US ones — to replace the dependence on American technology.

The collective effort has occupied more than 800 people, full time, and including staff from its multiple local suppliers, for two years. And they have not finished yet.

YMTC is seeking to learn as much as it can about the origin of everything that goes into its products, from production equipment and chemicals to the tiny lenses, screws, nuts and bearings in chipmaking machinery and production lines, multiple sources familiar with the matter said. The audit extends not only to YMTC’s own production lines, but also to suppliers, suppliers’ suppliers, and so on.

“The review is as meticulous as knowing where the screws and nuts are coming from, the lead time, and if those parts have alternatives,” one person familiar with the matter told Nikkei Asia.

Yangtze Memory’s plant in Wuhan © Yusho Cho

Each supplier is assigned a score for geopolitical risk, identified in many pages of documents detailing the components they use in their machines. YMTC has sent engineers to audit local equipment suppliers’ production sites to verify that the origins of parts have been truthfully reported, one of the people told Nikkei.

American-made parts are scored highest for risk, followed by parts bought from Japan, Europe and those made locally, the person said. Meanwhile, suppliers are asked to provide corrective action reports to explain how they can together diversify procurement and find alternatives.

“Previously, when China talked about self-sufficiency, they were thinking about starting to cultivate some viable chip developers that could compete with foreign chipmakers,” a chip industry executive told Nikkei. “However, they did not expect that they would need to do all that, starting from fundamentals.

“It’s like when you want to drink milk — but you not only need to own a whole farm, and learn how to breed dairy cows, and you have to build barns, fences, as well as grow hay, all by yourselves.”

It’s like when you want to drink milk — but you not only need to own a whole farm . . . breed dairy cows . . . build barns, fences . . . all by yourselves

The purge of YMTC’s supply chain has been handled with the spirit of a national emergency. Based in the city of Wuhan, the effort did not pause even when the virus centre was ravaged by Covid-19 last spring.

While the rest of the city endured a brutal quarantine, high-speed trains remained in service to ferry YMTC employees to its $24bn 3D Nand flash memory plant that began producing chips in 2019. All the while, delivery trucks for critical chipmaking materials drove to and from the production campus.

After Wuhan reopened last April, YMTC mobilised hundreds of engineers, including many from little-known emerging local semiconductor equipment suppliers. They were stationed inside the production campus, labouring for three shifts a day with the aim of overhauling all of its production processes and replacing as many foreign tools as possible, sources said.

“Senior management is raising targets of using locally built chip production machines almost every month, and they hope we could at least know what kind of alternatives we have and have a Plan B of the production line that will be free from US control,” one of the people told Nikkei.

YMTC declined multiple requests by Nikkei to interview the company about its supply chain reviews, progress and capacity expansion plans, as well as its localisation efforts.

‘Secure and controllable’

This effort to localise production has been the opportunity of a lifetime for a new generation of Chinese chip champions such as YMTC and their suppliers, whose fortunes have risen sharply following the start of the US-China trade war.

While the threat of sanctions hangs over them, so too does the largesse of state aid — subsidies and investment from local governments and the private sector have amounted to at least $170bn since 2014, according to the state-backed China Securities Journal. There are also guaranteed orders with other Chinese chipmakers and domestic tech giants such as Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and Lenovo.

“It’s not like it has been written down on a public posting or an official announcement,” another Chinese chip executive told Nikkei, “but everyone in the industry now has a mutual understanding that if anyone is building a new chip plant or expanding a semiconductor manufacturing line, at least 30 per cent of production tools must be from local vendors.”

Every US market leader in the computer chip industry now has a Chinese doppelgänger that is being positioned to take its place as a vendor to the Chinese chip industry. YMTC, for example, is strikingly similar in its approach and strategy to Boise, Idaho-based Micron, while Beijing-based Naura Technology Group represents China’s hope to later challenge Applied Materials, which is based in Santa Clara, California, and makes a wide range of chip production equipment.

Shanghai’s Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment (AMEC) is China’s version of Lam Research of the US, renowned for building essential etching machines. Tianjin-based Hwatsing Technology produces cutting-edge chemical-mechanical planarisation equipment and is set to break Applied Materials’ monopoly on the technology.

See the full graphic at the end of this article for more of China’s upcoming chipmakers.

These and dozens of other state and private companies have become the focus of an industrial policy known by the slogan “secure and controllable”, which has found its way on to posters and into speeches, backed up by immense state investment and guaranteed contracts.

“We have to strengthen self-innovation and to make breakthroughs in some core technologies as soon as possible,” China’s President Xi Jinping told a group of economic and social experts in remarks published in January.

YMTC, for one, is followed closely by China’s leadership, supervised by officials in the State Council — the country’s top administrative authority — as well as the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, the nation’s premium seed fund for the semiconductor industry, which also owns a 24 per cent stake, two people with direct knowledge told Nikkei.

“We are not sure how fast and how well they could build their own independent semiconductor industry, but certainly they will try,” said Chad Bown, a senior fellow with Peterson Institute for International Economics.

‘The whole country is rooting for this.’

In fact, the US trade war and Huawei sanctions have arguably given China’s government the necessary cover for something it has long desired. Since the revelations by Edward Snowden in 2013 that detailed the participation of American tech companies in US government surveillance, Beijing has seen dependence on American technology as a national security threat.

But grand plans to end this dependency have been made in the past, and, despite massive injections of state investment, progress has been slow. For example, when China’s State Council set out its “Made in China 2025” industrial policy in 2015, aimed at promoting China’s high-tech exports, it set a goal of 70 per cent self-sufficiency in semiconductors by 2025.

But the industry has so far fallen short of this goal, according to US-based research firm IC Insights. In 2020, China-based chip production accounted for only 15.9 per cent of the domestic market, the firm estimated in January, predicting it would reach just 19.4 per cent in 2025. Of the 2020 total, China-based companies accounted for only 5.9 per cent of domestic sales, while foreign companies with their headquarters in China accounted for the rest of the China-based sales.

Under threat: cameras near the headquarters of Chinese video surveillance firm Hikvision in Hangzhou © Bloomberg

However, the US sanctions may have removed the main domestic obstacle to the goal of China’s chip self-sufficiency effort, which is the lack of co-operation by China’s own local buyers. They have always preferred buying from tried-and-tested foreign vendors rather than inexperienced local companies. But that, crucially, has now changed.

“Previously, domestic chip manufacturers only used leading production equipment that all the other top global chipmakers like Samsung and Intel also use in their production lines,” another manager with a China-based chipmaker told Nikkei, preferring not to be named. “Who would bother to use and try these local-made machines that could possibly affect production quality?”

As the threat of sanctions hits close to home, however, these same producers are increasingly exploring domestic-made alternatives to the top-end US-made technology, the manager said. “That also means these local players finally have a chance to practice and really upgrade their products in an atmosphere that the whole country is rooting for this,” he said.

Sheng of Gartner told Nikkei that US-China tensions have consolidated industry opinion around the necessity to localise production. “It’s the whole country’s consensus now that building a viable semiconductor industry and boosting self-reliance is the top priority . . . The top policymakers know, company executives know and even local people know,” said Sheng.

Chip related companies make up nearly 25% of all groups listed on Shanghai’s STAR market

For Chinese chipmaking tool and material makers — mostly little known, with limited presence in the industry — the trade disputes serve as the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand business, a chip executive with Kingstone Semiconductor Joint Stock Co, a local ion implanter maker, told Nikkei.

“Not only is our production capacity fully booked for 2021 and needs to expand . . . but also many of our peers’ capacities are fully reserved,” the executive said.

Other domestic champions have done similarly well. Naura Technology Group, China’s largest chip equipment maker, generated a record profit in 2020, up more than 73 per cent from a year earlier. Meanwhile, despite being added to the US trade blacklist in late 2020, the earnings for AMEC, the etching machines maker, hit a record high last year.

Previously a third choice at best, Hwatsing Technology’s chemical-mechanical planarisation equipment has already been widely adopted by Chinese chipmakers such as SMIC, Hua Hong Semiconductor Group and YMTC, according to the prospectus it released late last year as it filed an application to list on Shanghai Star stock market, China’s version of the Nasdaq.

Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment, under majority control by the Shanghai government, has been cemented as a key local participant that China’s government hopes to one day compete against global chip lithography machine builders of ASML, Nikon and Canon, several people with knowledge told Nikkei.

Employees of ASML working on the final assembly of semiconductor lithography tools in Veldhoven, Netherlands © Bloomberg

For now, China’s global market share in the advanced chip fabrication equipment sector is 2 per cent at most. Bernstein Research estimated, while its self-sufficiency rate is about 10 per cent — a very low figure, but one that suggests massive room for future growth.

Crashing the market?

This new push by China has already begun to make waves in the global semiconductor industry, threatening to disrupt the delicate equilibrium between supply and demand. A global chip shortage has swept many industries partly due to “panic buying” by Chinese companies, spooked by the risk of US sanctions, said Eric Xu, the current rotating chair of Huawei, in remarks last month.

One example is that YMTC and other domestic chip companies, such as China’s top contract chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co, have begun to stockpile “at-risk” parts in a jointly owned warehouse that just went into operation this year, sources told Nikkei Asia.

At the same time as they are braced for shortages, however, the global chip industry is simultaneously making preparations for a massive glut of chips as Chinese companies such as YMTC hit their stride.

The Wuhan-based national champion, for example, plans to double its monthly output of memory chips to 100,000 wafers by the second half of 2021, giving it 7 per cent of the global Nand flash memory market measured in wafers, two people with knowledge of the matter told Nikkei.

Measured in gigabit equivalent terms, Taipei-based consultancy Trendforce predicted YMTC would take 3.8 per cent of the global market share in Nand flash memory for 2021 and likely expand its share to 6.7 per cent in 2022 — a precipitous climb, considering it was close to zero two years ago. Samsung, the leader, has a 34 per cent share.

“We expect YMTC will start to affect the overall Nand flash market price by next year and the market may also face some oversupply issues,” said Avril Wu, an analyst with Trendforce.

Yangtze’s chief executive Simon Yang has tried to allay fears of a massive glut of chips. “We want to tell everyone that we are not here to crash the market, and we hope that the industry could be sustainable and healthy,” he told a business forum in 2018, when the company started producing 64-layer Nand flash memory chips.

Despite shortages, the global chip industry is preparing for a massive glut as companies like Yangtze Memory hit their stride

Anticipating just such an oversupply, however, Intel — the world’s biggest microprocessor maker and sixth-largest Nand flash maker — sold its Dalian-based Nand flash memory plant to SK Hynix last year, bowing out in the face of future competition.

The vertiginous rise of YMTC has shown just what China is capable of in the chip industry. It started operations in 2016 and within four years was mass producing some of the most advanced 3D Nand flash memory chips in the world. Memory chips used to be flat wafers with one layer of memory cells, but recently “3D stacking” chips have become the cutting-edge standard for almost all electronics from computers and smartphones to servers and connected cars, with memory cells layered on top of each other in ever-higher stacks.

In 2017, chipmaker Western Digital introduced the “skyscraper,” a 64-layer chip, while Micron last year announced the 176-layer chip, the proportions of which it compared to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

YMTC has been mass-producing 64-layer chips for two years and has just started mass-producing 128-layer chips at its Nand flash memory factory in Wuhan. It is said to be in the process of developing a 192-layer chip that one industry analyst referred to as the “Himalaya”. The company declined to comment.

‘Neck-choking’ technology

In reality, though, the massive growth scenarios for YMTC and the rest of China’s semiconductor industry remain predicated on continued access to western chips and other key equipment. For all the patriotism and rhetoric surrounding self-sufficiency, few believe 100 per cent “de-Americanisation” is a genuinely realistic goal in the near future.

“If Yangtze Memory could continue to buy from US suppliers, they will definitely do that,” Mark Li, a veteran chip analyst with Bernstein Research, told Nikkei. “We all know that it’s an irreversible trend that China is keen to have their own version of everything,” Li said. “However, in reality, it will take a lot of time and great execution and we don’t expect to see them cut significantly from the amount of chipmaking equipment procurement from the US very soon.”

YMTC’s own supply chain audit, for example, found that many vital processes were not immediately replaceable with domestic vendors: high-end lenses, precision bearings, quality vacuum chambers, and motors, radio frequency components and programmable chips all still come from foreign manufacturers in the US, Japan and Europe, people briefed on the matter told Nikkei.

Meanwhile, the entire industry is still reliant on foreign equipment for lithography, ion implantation, etching, and chemical and physical vapour deposition and chemical-mechanical planarisation — all indispensable in manufacturing chips, experts say.

The Chinese government refers to such technologies as “neck-choking,” referring to potential points of US pressure. To build advanced semiconductors, there is presently no way around the leading American participants. Applied Materials, for example, leads the world in chip production technology such as ion implantation, physical and chemical vapour deposition, and chemical-mechanical polishing; Lam Research makes etching, chemical vapour deposition and wafer-cleaning equipment.

California-based KLA and Boston-based Teradyne specialise in providing testing and measuring equipment for defect analysis and failure inspection. Aside from tools, materials suppliers Dow, DuPont and 3M and other US companies also dominate the supplies of special chemical formulas used in advanced chip production.

They collectively control the global market share of more than 80 per cent in equipment and materials for some vital steps in building advanced semiconductors, said Li of Bernstein. In some specialised segments such as electrochemical deposition and gate stack tools, the US share could be almost 100 per cent.

Another key vulnerability in China’s ecosystem was exposed when Huawei’s chip-designing arm HiSilicon — China’s number one chip developer — lost access to technical support and software updates for electronic design automation tools owing to sanctions. That restricted the software used by HiSilicon to lay out blueprints for integrated circuits as well as printed circuit boards and other electronic systems. These tools are 90 per cent-dominated by US companies such as Synopsys, Cadence Design Systems, Ansys and Siemens EDA (which, before its acquisition, was known as Mentor Graphics and is still located in America).

On China’s part, it has been gearing up to cultivate its own participants by luring many talented former employees of Synopsys and Cadence. But Chinese efforts remain far short of the required standard.

“We have gained some business because of China’s de-Americanisation campaign,” a manager of Empyrean Technology, China’s biggest local chip design toolmaker, told Nikkei. “However, asking us to fully replace Synopsys and Cadence is like coming to carmakers and asking to build rockets.”

In some crucial areas, such as the field-programmable gate array — a type of programmable semiconductor component essential for satellites and advanced jet fighters — the market leaders are Xilinx or Intel’s Altera, while for China, this space is largely still blank. In central processing units, the US maintains a tight grip, with leaders including Intel and Advanced Micro Devices that dominate more than 90 per cent of the global market.

This virtual monopoly on chip design and chipmaking equipment sectors has given the US vast powers to control the flow of technology to China, even from non-US companies. Industry leaders such as Samsung Electronics, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, Infineon Technologies, SK Hynix and Sony, all still use massive amounts of American technologies on their production lines and in their development processes, giving Washington a veto over their product sales.

“Once the US names anyone on a trade blacklist, most of the Asian suppliers will see it as a serious warning, and even if legally they could continue to ship to the blacklisted entities, they will self-censor to stop shipping due to political pressure, or consider stopping,” a chip industry legal director told Nikkei. “No one wants to openly and publicly violate Washington’s will . . . That could be dangerous, and your own company could become a target too.”

Europe’s biggest chipmaking tool maker, ASML of the Netherlands, is the exclusive supplier of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines — the world’s most costly but top-notch tool essential to producing the world’s most advanced chips, including Apple’s latest iPhone core processors.

ASML has a production plant in the US, and about one-fifth of the components that ASML needs to build its machines are also made at its US plant in Connecticut, Nikkei has learned. The Netherlands has halted shipments of China’s first orders of the EUV machine amid US pressure since 2019, Nikkei Asia first reported in November of that year.

For Chinese companies, therefore, localisation efforts must be carried out quietly. By far the most preferred course of action is not to fall into Washington’s crosshairs.

“We have to recognise and realise that we are still far lagging behind instead of thinking that we could quickly rock the world . . . The best way, under the geopolitical climate, is to keep our head low and do our work and grow silently,” said a chip executive with ChangXin Memory Technologies, another of China’s key memory chipmakers, based in Hefei, Anhui Province.

Localisation efforts must be carried out quietly. By far the most preferred course of action is not to fall into Washington’s crosshairs

While it pursues its Plan B of self-sufficiency, YMTC still sees it as extremely unrealistic to strip all foreign equipment from its production site. It still hopes to maintain good relationships with American, Japanese and European suppliers, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. In parallel to its localisation efforts, YMTC keeps building production lines that use American equipment and parts to facilitate its expansion.

“It’s really an irreversible trend that China wants to switch to local suppliers,” said Li of Bernstein, “but in reality and in real practices, there are still hurdles and [it] could still take a lot of time. If they want to grow faster and quickly gain more business, it’s more practical that they still use the tools and equipment that all of the foreign market leaders also use.”

In an effort to fend off future sanctions, meanwhile, the Chinese company has also boosted its legal compliance team since 2019, citing the “highly challenging, complex and changing environment in the chip industry” — a step aimed at giving the US no excuses to make it a target.

Martijn Rasser, a senior fellow of the technology and national security programme at the Center for a New American Security, told Nikkei: “China’s goal of total self-sufficiency in semiconductors is unrealistic. It is unaffordable to create a China-only supply chain, and there will almost certainly be some reliance on foreign technology and expertise. What it can do is build a globally competitive industry, and that is something that US policymakers are eyeing closely.”

Decoupling do’s and don’ts

Despite China’s considerable efforts, few experts believe that its chip sector will ever be genuinely free of US parts. However, most also believe that the doomsday scenario — a complete blockade of China’s tech and semiconductor industries — is not realistic, either.

The world’s two largest economies are still interconnected, and they are also the two biggest semiconductor markets: China accounts for at least 25 per cent of the sales of most US chip companies, according to a January report by the Brookings Institution, and few want to see that market disappear.

Bown of the Peterson Institute, said the Biden administration’s approach on China is not yet clear. On the one hand, the US expects China to buy more chips as promised in recent trade talks but has also continued restricting its use of American technologies.

“It’s likely that we are looking at more precisely confined export controls at some areas such as military uses and areas that are really linked to national security,” Bown said. “After all, it’s a trade-off. China is a massive consumer market, and if you restrict a lot of semiconductor shipment, many US companies will be hurt too.”

‘Neck choking’ technology: US president Joe Biden holds a chip before signing an executive order aimed at addressing a global semiconductor shortage in February © AFP via Getty Images

So far, the Biden administration has not yet softened on China’s technological advancement. A total of 162 Chinese entities had been sanctioned by the Trump administration since 2018, while in April, the US Department of Commerce added a further seven Chinese supercomputer makers to the so-called Entity List to restrict their use of American technologies, citing alleged links with the Chinese military.

On April 12, the White House hosted a virtual CEO summit on semiconductor and supply chain resilience, which included the world’s top three chip producers — Intel, Samsung and TSMC — as well as executives from carmakers, including Ford Motor and General Motors, to discuss how to maintain US leadership in the global semiconductor industry.

The Chinese Communist party “aggressively plans to reorient and dominate the semiconductor supply chain,” President Joe Biden said in opening remarks to the summit, quoting a bipartisan letter from 23 senators. “China and the rest of the world is not waiting, and there’s no reason why Americans should wait,” he said.

The administration has also proposed a $50bn funding programme for chip manufacturing, and research and development, mirroring China’s efforts.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or Cfius, last year tightened the rules for examining the national security risks posed by foreign deals, followed by the Taiwanese government’s Investment Commission announcing a new set of rules to intensify screening of Chinese investments in Taiwanese tech companies. Meanwhile, the Italian government rejected a takeover bid for a Milan-based semiconductor equipment provider by a Shenzhen-based Chinese investment company.

South Korea and Taiwan — two leading Asian chipmaking economies — all face growing pressure to help the US boost local chip manufacturing. TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, based in Taiwan, and South Korea’s Samsung, the world’s biggest memory chipmaker, were both forced to cut off supplies to once-big customer Huawei after the US sanctions.

TSMC’s share of revenue from China plunged to 6 per cent in the January-March period from 22 per cent the same time a year earlier. Samsung also saw its revenue from China trending down in the past three quarters.

Most of the global chip developers and manufacturers will still have to side with the US, as American technologies still prevail in their products or services, said Su Tzu-yun, senior analyst at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research. “They have to choose what are their best interests if they get caught between the world’s two biggest economies.”

However, it is still hard to fully decouple the semiconductor supply, involving thousands of suppliers from around the world that have been tightly intertwined for decades. China can try to reduce its reliance on the US, but without American technology sources, it can hardly speed up its technological advancement.

Neither is it practical for the US to exclude China from all of its supply chains, as the country is still a big source of critical raw materials and rare-earth elements used in semiconductors and electronic components, according to a recent report by the Semiconductor Industry Association, an American industry organisation.

“In the short term, due to geopolitical uncertainties, China’s tech development could be slowed a bit,” said Miin Wu, founder and chair of Macronix International, a leading memory chipmaker in Taiwan that serves Apple, Sony and Nintendo. “However, in the longer run, from China’s perspective, it will definitely hope to build a competitive industry. It’s a trend that is hard to resist, and there is no turning back.”

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imeugene · 7 years ago

Photo

That above was my first real bike. It was an early 2000′s Hoffman Condor. I was dead set on getting it instead of anything else. Even as a kid, I was really into researching things for the sake of researching and the conclusion I came up with is that I needed to get a Hoffman Condor. It wasn’t based on real empirical evidence(some things never change) but I liked the idea of running the same type of bike the Condor did when he did the no-handed 900. It was such a mystical trick. It was pre Youtube, in the dial up days where people would post a scanned sequence online cause the idea of creating gif was beyond the skill set of the majority of internet users and even a few second video clip uploaded by someone who isn’t a professional of sorts was mind blowing. I still have the Hoffman Super Fork lying around somewhere in the house. Peg bosses and all. I bring this up cause I have nothing but respect for the Condor and in BMX with it’s heavy us verses them mentality, any point of argument will automatically be shut down. And it’s not even an argument really. It’s just a difference in thought I noticed. I’m gonna try my best to be objective which I think I can maintain cause I honestly don’t know what to think about all this.

https://digbmx.com/dig-this/why-we-need-to-keep-the-uci-out-of-bmx

https://www.reddit.com/r/bmx/comments/82x7kd/why_we_need_to_keep_the_uci_out_of_bmx_matt/dvdjg3i/

Those are the two reading sort of required to understand all this. Both opposing views. One made by the largest legend in our lifestyle/hobby/sport/art/whatever you wanna call it and another is an anonymous commenter who seems to have a pretty well thought view.

Mat Hoffman’s word in BMX is truth. Regardless of whether he’s right or wrong, it doesn’t matter cause he’s built up a legacy and reputation that has upheld the tenants of what he believes is right for BMX. Throughout the years, it’s never been questioned his motivations or his adherence to his own views. Whethers it’s pushing the rider-owned brand and then further into Taiwanese factories to keep BMX cheap for the masses or being there when BMX was ready to blow up with the whole “eXtreme sports” hysteria. There is a whole book called the “Ride of my Life” that documents him that elaborates on all this further (or check out this Albion interview which is just as informative). The Idea is that the Condor is a stalwart of BMX and in world where there aren’t conclusive answers to the questions the BMX industry asks, Hoffman’s word has every right to be spoken and heard. He’s like that old grandpa you ask for life advice cause he saw so much and experienced that much more. Just cause he’s a grandpa don’t make him always right but... he definitely knows more and has a higher chance of being right than most..and Mat Hoffman is against the UCI. Understandably so.

The UCI is an international organization that governs all forms of cycling. All the avenues of what it exactly does evades me but the big thing to understand is the various cycling entities is given a larger corporate identity that can involve itself with actual corporations for money. Even if all of BMX was run by a singular company maybe like.. RideBMX or Danscomp or S&M. It’d be a laughable presence for companies compared to companies like Pepsi to sponsor their events in a serious way. On one hand it’s a high level of bureaucracy that very few in BMX are truly capable of, and BMX isn’t a blip in corporations like thats radar. The UCI is an organization that can possibly make it a blip.

I don’t know how the UCI is directly directly run by but I imagine it’s a bunch of suits who do not have cycling industry experience.. probably some business degree from some fancy company. Maybe they did well with some regional juice company few years before and got a better offer by the UCI so switched jobs. They’re numbers people and that’s what they understand and the language they speak.The reputations these numbers people get proceeds them. At one point a company like Breyer’s probably made really good ice cream, then they went public, then these numbers people came in and looked at the numbers, they realized if they changed sugar to high fructose corn syrup that they’d save a lot of money at the expense of some taste, then they did that to a lot of other avenues which cut costs like amount of milk or changing from handmade to factory made, increasing the budget for marketing verse quality control, which leads them to being sold them in every supermarket in the United States. Now Breyer’s is a household item which makes millions more than it ever did but is half the product it ever was. I think Mat Hoffman is afraid that this kind of snowball effect will happen if BMX was to be controlled by the UCI. For BMX to involve themselves with numbers people who honestly don’t care about the means just the results. It’s completely understandable too.

I think the people who involve themselves with the UCI that are riders are all well intentioned. I think they see that the UCI has something to offer and that in a way real BMX will never truly die. Something like the music industry. Music is a multi-billion industry that has Grammy’s by so called best artists, album sales, song plays, all these number based things but in the end real music continues to exist cause the need for real music continues to exist. I think the riders who involve themselves with the UCI see BMX in a similar fashion. Sure there is going to be A CHANCE in BMX being changed but it’s only on superficial level and only exists to fuel the rest of BMX that will continue to be what it is. To think of BMX expanding, I think a lot of people would think that instead of complete corporate takeover of BMX, that this would be how all this pans out. If all this happens in the first place.

The fact is that BMX doesn’t have money. For growth to happen, it needs money fueling it. The UCI and this whole Olympic situation is the best chance BMX has in growing in a drastic way. Plenty argue against the growth but that’s cause a lot of BMX is anti-social and a bit elitist like that. Which is honestly part of BMX that I love the best cause BMX created a video where some suburban kid ate his own poop and it was celebrated. That’s pretty cool. Seeing some banner in the background of the X-Games ramps that will be watched by millions in hopes that there is gonna be more clicks for that company’s website, hopefully creating more sales all directly tying back with that egregiously expensive spot for that $10 banner. It’s like Breyer’s ice cream. It’s a complete corporate mentality. Like there is probably gonna be a spread sheet of some sort predicting sales based on banner placement and tv screen time to explain all this for the number’s people. It’s not really BMX.

The reason the counter argument on Reddit brings up Fise is cause there is numbers that can be directly generated from that. Which in turn makes it an easier sell for the UCI, to sell to the larger corporations who have that real world money that can make a difference. Art is not supposed to be quantifiable, that’s why people always make big noise when some weird abstract art ends up selling for millions. Well.. there’s countless others that are equally as weird that will never sell for a dime. What I think some people worry is that can be as expressive and abstract as BMX will fall into the later category. It has some type of understood value but ultimately still worthless in real world money. If we’re gonna try to quantify things I can say right now the type of risks that Sean Burns takes does not equate the amount of money he probably makes. I don’t Yhe tricks he’s doing and the potential harm he can do for himself and buildings around him is probably gonna be a heavy risk burden for insurance companies. You hear big name professional riders take a bad fall and go on GoFundMe, it’s cause BMX is not paid nearly as much as the risks involved in that sense. But then we get into artistic argument of whether Sean Burns should be paid more cause he’s risking more compared to someone like Mathias Dandois who does flatland which is definitely less risky but seems to be able to generate good numbers by being ranked number in 1 flatland(not sure if it’s true). BMX is not something you can easily put money value into and any larger corporate entity will probably just avoid it all together cause it’s a headache to understand. They’ll take skateboarding cause the money that they generate is easily understood and in their opinion just as appealing if not more than BMX. There aren’t numbers people in BMX often so people who organize FISE would be conduit for the UCI and it’s BMX program.

What Hoffman and DMC did is not something that can be understood by numbers alone. How can you put a number on respect or what they achieved cause you can’t and that’s why the UCI is so easy to disrespect them. It’s not like they don’t have any real world value, they certainly do and their experiences also but for something as foreign as BMX can be, it’s not easily transcribable for something as large as the UCI, Olympics, large corporations or anything on that level. Numbers are their only language, the accomplishments of Hoffman and the DMC will fall on deaf ears. On one hand it does seem like Hoffman is willing to compromise but once again, to us Hoffman is all, to them he’s more or less just an overdecorated lobbyist.

It goes back to the whole question on how to grow BMX cause a lot of our industry certainly wants it. Whether to grow it slowly in an organic fashion which seems at times truly fruitless or cut a deal with the devil and do what it takes it to really make some changes. Cause it seems like every single time the corporations start having a hold in BMX, there certainly are noticeable changes people always bring up. For better or worse though. I don’t know though. No one does. That’s why were in this situation.

#bmx #uci #mat hoffman #dmc #dennis mccoy #olympics

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mattkennard · 7 years ago

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Business Is Booming for the U.K.'s Spy Tech Industry

Published: The Intercept (11 May 2018)

DRIVING INTO CHELTENHAM from the west, it is hard to miss the offices of Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s surveillance agency. The large, doughnut-shaped building sits behind high-perimeter fencing with barbed wire and many levels of security. The facility – used to eavesdrop on global emails and phone calls – is located on the edge of the sleepy Gloucestershire town, which feels like an incongruous location for one of the world’s most aggressive spy agencies.

Cheltenham has a population of just 117,000 people, and GCHQ’s presence has turned the area into one of Europe’s central hubs for companies working in the fields of cybersecurity and surveillance. GCHQ says it employs almost 6,000 people in Cheltenham and at some smaller bases around the U.K., although the agency has in recent years secretly expanded its workforce, reportedly employing thousands more staff.

People in the area are now talking of a cyber “corridor” that stretches for 50 miles from Malvern, just north of Cheltenham, all the way to Bristol, where the Ministry of Defence has its equipment and support headquarters at Abbey Wood. Many quaint English towns, known for their farming and country pubs, have seen an influx of companies dealing in cybersecurity and electronic spying. Even office space on former farms is being used for this burgeoning industry.

Chris Dunning-Walton, the founder of a nonprofit called Cyber Cheltenham, or Cynam, organizes quarterly events in the town attended by politicians and entrepreneurs. “Historically, there has been a need for the companies that are working here to be very off the radar with their relationships with GCHQ and to some extent, that does exist,” says Dunning-Walton. But since Edward Snowden leaked information in 2013 about GCHQ’s sweeping surveillance activities, the agency has been forced to come out of the shadows and embrace greater transparency. One consequence of this, according to Dunning-Walton, is that GCHQ is now more open to partnering with private companies, which has helped fuel the cyber industry around the Cheltenham area.

Northrop Grumman, the world’s fifth-largest arms manufacturer, has located its European cyber and intelligence operations in Cheltenham, where it has two offices in the center of the town. In the nearby city of Gloucester, a 20-minute drive west of Cheltenham, Raytheon, the world’s third-largest arms company, in 2015 opened a Cyber Innovation Centre that it says is focused on “big data, analytics and network defense.” BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, the cyber arm of the world’s fourth-largest arms company, also has offices in Gloucester, where it says it “delivers information intelligence solutions to government and commercial customers.”

Many of these companies are secretive about the work they do – especially when it concerns surveillance technology – and refuse to speak to the media. But L3 TRL Technology – which is based in Tewkesbury at the northern tip of this new cyber corridor – does grant an interview via email.

L3 says it provides “electronic warfare” equipment that can jam communication signals and gather intelligence. A spokesperson for the company says it plays “a crucial role in counter terrorism and the protection of military forces with our electronic warfare solutions.” He declines to provide any information about any of the company’s customers. But a video posted on YouTube by a Middle Eastern news agency reveals one potential client: It documents a recent meeting between L3’s parent company and Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy commander of the UAE military.

According to government records, the U.K. has sold weapons and other equipment worth £7.3 billion ($9.9 billion) to the UAE in the past decade, including components for telecommunications eavesdropping technology and “intrusion software,” which is used to hack into targeted phones and computers.

Another Cheltenham-based company is CommsAudit, whose flagship product is a surveillance system called Spectra Black, a portable device that can monitor cellphone calls and other wireless communications. CommsAudit did not respond to a request for comment and does not publicly disclose the identities of its customers. The company was, however, showcasing its products at the 2017 DSEI arms fair in London, which was attended by government delegations from across the world.

Latching onto this wave of innovation, last year, the British government pledged £22 million ($30 million) in funding for a new cyber business park on a patch of land close to GCHQ’s headquarters. “It will act as a ‘honeypot’ for cyber security and high tech supply chain businesses,” the promotional literature said, creating 7,000 jobs, while boosting the number of private companies in the area that can then potentially become GCHQ’s clients. There is a lot of largesse to go around. GCHQ takes the majority of the share of the roughly £2.8 billion ($3.8 billion) budget for Britain’s intelligence services and has twice the number of personnel of MI5 and MI6 combined.

David Woodfine, a former head of the Ministry of Defence’s Security Operations Centre, worked inside GCHQ’s Cheltenham headquarters for two years. He left in September 2013 to found Cyber Security Associates, a Gloucestershire-based company providing cyber consultancy services to the public and private sector.

Woodfine says toward the end of his tenure at GCHQ, there was a realization that the agency needed to partner more with private industry. “From a GCHQ perspective, I think their whole attitude has changed from quite a hard approach – ‘we’ll keep everything in-house’ – to ‘actually, we need to open up.’ They changed their recruiting, their apprenticeship schemes, so they are attracting more young talent into their organization.”

The National Cyber Security Centre – which opened in 2016 under the remit of GCHQ – is currently piloting new “Cyber Schools Hubs” in Gloucestershire. The idea is to send staff into local schools to “encourage a diverse range of students into taking up computer science,” in effect grooming the next generation of cyber-competent spies.

GCHQ offers meager salaries compared to the private sector, but the agency can offer prospective employees the chance to work with technologies that they could not use anywhere else – because if they did, they would be breaking the law. “That’s a good way of retaining people on public sector pay,” says Woodfine. “So you can argue that they don’t join for the money, they join for the ability to learn and to test their techniques and their abilities.”

A GCHQ employee can work with the agency for a few years, learn about its tools and methods, and then take that knowledge with them to a job in the more lucrative private sector, where there are plenty opportunities for surveillance innovation. According to the London-based advocacy group Privacy International, the U.K. has 104 companies producing surveillance equipment for export to foreign governments and corporations. Only the United States – with 122 companies – has more.

SINCE 2013, SALES of surveillance and hacking technology have been controlled under the Wassenaar Arrangement, which was signed by 42 countries, including the U.S. and most of Europe. The arrangement is intended to prevent authoritarian regimes from obtaining arms and sophisticated spy tools that could be used to commit human rights violations. However, it is not legally binding. And the U.K. has continued to sell eavesdropping equipment to a number of countries with questionable human rights records, such as Honduras, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, China, and Qatar.

Inside the bustling Victoria train station in central London, Digital Barriers, the world’s premier video analytics company, has its offices. Video analytics sounds like an arcane branch of the high-tech industry, but in terms of surveillance technology, it is a field that has rapidly advanced in recent years. Zak Doffman, chief executive at Digital Barriers, founded the company in 2010 after recognizing that in the area of video intelligence, there was a gap in the international market. Digital Barriers’s technology is designed to analyze video – and identify people’s faces – in real time, where the cameras are placed, rather than having to rely on retrospective analysis.

In its London offices, the company demonstrates to this reporter how even with a scarf wrapped around a person’s face, its software can successfully identify them within a few seconds using a standard surveillance camera. Facial-recognition technology is notoriously inaccurate and can produce false positives, but Digital Barriers claims its software can pick out obscured and blurred faces in crowds and match them with photographs that are held on databases or published on the internet. It is, the company says, most useful for counterterrorism operations. But in the wrong hands, wired up to a nationwide camera network, the technology could potentially be used to trace the movements of millions of people in real time. “We built the business primarily in the public sector working for government agencies,” says Doffman. “We are now working increasingly in the private sector with the commercial customers.”

Digital Barriers’s website boasts that it has clients in more than 50 countries. Doffman won’t reveal the names of his customers, and when questioned about the export licensing process, he says the company’s products are exempt. “It’s not export control per se,” he says, “so there’s no formal restrictions on the technology.” What would he do if countries with authoritarian governments wanted to buy the system? Doffman says only that Digital Barriers has a “moral code on this stuff.”

People within this industry want the technology to remain uncontrolled; they argue that countries with authoritarian governments don’t want this type of video surveillance anyway. “Countries where you have a lot of corruption, the last thing they want is facial recognition,” says one industry source, because of elite factionalism. But that seems scant reassurance for dissidents living in dictatorships that can now freely access this technology at the right price.

#gchq #surveillance #electronic warfare #cheltenham #mi5 #mi6

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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That Time John McAfee Developed One of the First Social Networks

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Let it be said that we must live in particularly interesting times when John McAfee, one of the most controversial people the world of technology has ever produced, can get arrested in a foreign country for tax evasion … and people barely even notice.

But that’s what happened earlier this month—and as a result, McAfee is sitting in a Spanish jail, waiting to be extradited.

A lot has been written about him over the years, but I’d like to focus on one part of his life that has perhaps been overshadowed by his unusual existence over the past decade: The fact that, in the late 1990s, he was a social media innovator.

That innovation? A chat app called PowWow that, despite a certain McAfee imprint, was well ahead of its time. Here’s why you probably don’t remember it.

1994

The year John McAfee resigned from McAfee Associates, the company he founded in the 1980s that became a major distributor of antivirus software. The company, a multibillion-dollar giant today, nearly sold to Symantec years before it hit its later peaks, but McAfee was talked out of selling his namesake firm by a low-level analyst at a venture capital firm that realized the fundamentals of the company were quite good. While he later left, he did so with a lot more money than he would have had previously.

Image: Steven Weeks/Unsplash

How John McAfee turned a Winnebago sabbatical into his second startup

Everyone has likely heard the story of how Jeff Bezos quit his job in the financial industry and came up with the business plan for Amazon while on a cross-country trip to what would become his new home in Seattle. (Bezos, of course, didn’t drive as he hashed out this plan; his then-wife, MacKenzie, was behind the wheel.)

Less heralded, but perhaps more interesting, is the trip that John McAfee took throughout the Western U.S. after he quit his leadership role with his namesake antivirus company.

Like Bezos, McAfee’s excursion led to the launch of a new company. Unlike Bezos, this was McAfee’s second round in the Winnebago, which is where the antiviral legend got his start when he was first trying to pinpoint computer viruses sometime in the late 1980s.

As recounted in a 1997 article in the legendary tech business magazine Red Herring, McAfee’s second encounter with a Winnebago came after he had a minor heart attack, which led him to sell his company and go on an extended trip to the Rockies, where he encountered various Native American tribes. Those tribes directly inspired his follow-up company—and its inevitable location in the relatively tiny Woodland Park, Colorado, near Pikes Peak.

When McAfee gave away his antivirus software in the 1980s, he did so because of a New Age philosophical approach that suggested that software shouldn’t be sold. Likewise, he found inspiration in the Native American tribes he visited during this mid-’90s journey. Per Red Herring:

There’s an entrepreneur living in the shadow of Pikes Peak, Colorado, who thinks software is a living tree and can’t be sold. So in his last venture he gave it away. He sees the Internet as the physical manifestation of what Indian shamans call “the golden thread,” and his latest project, Tribal Voice, is an attempt to capitalize on this mystical vision.

And where did that mystical vision lead him? It led him to multimedia chat software that was years ahead of the instant messaging trend that would eventually take hold thanks to AOL, ICQ, and later Skype.

An example of the PowWow chat software, which was also an early example of instant messaging.

The software Tribal Voice created, PowWow, may have been one of the first social networks, thanks to its focus on “tribes” as an organizational strategy. It was a great spot to converse—if you could look past the website.

“PowWow lacks the robust business-oriented features of packages such as WebPhone, but if you’re looking to specialize in a chat-room atmosphere and don’t mind enduring the ham-radio quality of the conversations, PowWow might be just the ticket.”

— A passage from a 1996 review of PowWow in PC Magazine, which noted that the application’s big strength was the size and reach of its community. Not so hot? The voice chat, which didn’t work so well on the modems of the era, at least at the time of testing.

Tribal Voice, as it appeared in 1996 and 1997. Image: Internet Archive

Tribal Voice’s initial marketing strategy appropriated Native culture—with a huge side of cringe

The software was good, but Tribal Voice had branding that very much reflected its unusual founder. It had a website (at tribal.com, of course), that was in many ways pure cringe … that seemed to almost make a mockery of the Native American culture that inspired the company.

On one early version of the Tribal Voice site, the about page included a photo of McAfee and company, under the banner “The Outlaw Geeks,” brandishing various types of guns. (Given what we know about McAfee now, it checks out.) And another page featured a “Tribal Voice Yuppie Catalog” which makes one wonder what exactly McAfee learned from his time visiting Native tribes.

A staff shot from the Tribal Voice website, circa 1997. So yeah, that happened. Image: Internet Archive

The company’s active borrowing of Native American imagery and wording drew the ire of an early online Native American activist, Paula Giese, who called the material on the site “sacreligious.”

“Our Sacred Pipe, sweat lodge, cedar, tobacco, all of our most important symbols, ceremonies, objects, places are not just exploited but desecrated, trashed, by this Tribal Voice corporation, which spent hundreds of thousands of dollars preparing its commercial site, but has advertised itself all over the web as ‘Native Culture,’” Giese wrote.

Giese, who died in 1997, had a notably tense online interaction with McAfee, which is saved on the Internet Archive for all to see. (McAfee’s defense? “This is probably not an appropriate site for teenagers. We are focused on adult issues,” he wrote.)

It also did no favors from a PR standpoint. Gary Flood, a reporter for Computer Business Review who was doing a profile on McAfee, recalled being weirded out by the site’s many inside jokes and garish color scheme. His thoughts:

Initial impressions: geek city, lots and lots of feathers and cosmic colors, man, a major section of the site being devoted to the self-admittedly crazy ramblings of an escapee from the Pikes Peak Mental Facility who is obviously some loon one of the programmers thinks is cool, and what seems way too much stuff about ‘adult’ web sites and marijuana.

Nonetheless, despite the somewhat disturbing web branding scheme (which Flood had been told was likely going away at the time of his early 1998 interview), the software’s community-building mentality, something of a combination of IRC and Skype, found a lot of early success. Despite the cringey way the site showed its inspiration, the tribes concept did lead McAfee and company in the direction of social media years before most people cared.

An early Tribal.com page dating to 1997 pinpoints more than 700,000 separate users on its “white pages,” which were pages that people could sign up for to find people to chat with. (Unlike, say, Twitter, you actually had to look people up as if you were using a phone book.) PowWow, says McAfee, attracted numerous walks of life.

“We let people set up whatever tribe they want. We have, for example, a gay Hispanic tribe,” McAfee told Red Herring. “Our biggest tribe, believe it or not, is an Icelandic tribe. We also have an enthusiastic user community in Rio de Janeiro.”

Forgotten today, PowWow was a nice little success at the time—especially after it ditched the weird website. On the way to making things more professional, they even brought in a new CEO, Joseph Esposito (who, true story, once pushed back on a story of ours that discussed his prior employer, Encyclopaedia Britannica). And McAfee, still just a few years off from leaving a hugely successful company that he created, had no trouble attracting investors, unusual site or not.

But the PowWow software attracted a major enemy that would eventually land a body blow: AOL.

$10M

The amount McAfee made from selling half of Tribal Voice in 1997. McAfee would later cash out entirely, selling the company to a dot-com incubator, CMGI, in 1999, for $17 million. (Not a bad payday.) In a 2010 piece on McAfee in Fast Company, Tribal Voice employee Jim Zoromski implied that McAfee was actually scared off by the company’s success—just as he was with McAfee Associates years earlier. “When John was at Tribal Voice, the growth rate was incredible,” Zoromski said. “But when it got to be too popular, it started to feel too much like work, and John wasn’t interested.”

PowWow supported AOL Instant Messenger. AOL didn’t like that.

How AOL took a bite out of Tribal Voice

With Tribal Voice, John McAfee and his rag-tag crew of programmers in small-town Colorado were early to one of the most important early trends in technology during that period—instant messaging.

But the fact that PowWow is basically forgotten while its most high-profile competitor, AOL Instant Messenger, is fondly remembered today, may not exactly be an accident.

By 1998 or so, McAfee’s follow-up company was seeing real success in one of the hottest areas of the early internet—in part because McAfee knew a lot about both building communities and selling technology to the public.

(McAfee, infamously, helped to hype up the craze around the Michelangelo virus in 1992 … which helped to boost the profile of his antivirus app.)

He could also sell technology to companies: Shockingly, given the photo I just shared with you above, Tribal Voice scored a partnership with friggin’ AT&T, with PowWow helping to power the instant messaging capabilities of the telecom giant’s WorldNet service.

Part of what attracted WorldNet to PowWow comes down to its ability to work on multiple networks, including AOL and MSN Messenger. This gave PowWow—and AT&T—a competitive advantage, as it could work across networks with ease.

This wasn’t something, however, that AOL liked. In fact, AOL didn’t like anyone encroaching on its instant-messaging turf and took steps to protect it at all costs: It outright purchased ICQ, attempted to block competitors from using similar terminology to AOL Instant Messenger (a fight it fortunately failed at), and took steps to block Microsoft’s MSN Messenger from its users.

Smaller IM services during the period were trying to make a case for interoperability, so that users of one network could reach friends on any of them. For a time, AOL offered guides that described how this was done to allow for the development of Unix-based clients for AIM. The problem was that its competitors read those posts as well, and PowWow found itself pulled into a messy battle as it attempted to raise up its own application by adding AIM support, and admitting it was doing so without any approval from AOL.

Tribal Voice created a mortal enemy with this move, and it likely hastened the demise of the PowWow tool, which found itself at the center of a high-profile battle with AOL that worked to make the case for interoperability between instant messaging clients. It was a game of chicken for a while; PowWow would add functionality to enable AIM support, AOL would shut it down.

At one point—which should be noted, came after McAfee had left the company—Tribal Voice and other clients found itself making this case in front of the FCC.

According to a New York Times article from the era, new CEO Ross Bagully evoked Ronald Reagan: “Mr. Case, on behalf of the IM industry and users everywhere, tear down this wall!”

But ultimately, the cause of encouraging open IM support came at the cost of the original weird Native American-inspired thing that McAfee built. The new owner lost interest in PowWow entirely, and shut the app down at the beginning of 2001 … while claiming continued interest in IM technology as a whole.

“After careful review of CMGion’s business objectives and strategic direction by its new management team CMGion feels that the PowWow technology is not an integral part of CMGion’s mission,” an FAQ from the shutdown stated.

One has to wonder, if McAfee stayed with the company he started instead of leaning on the easy payout, where it might have gone. After all, he waited with McAfee Associates … and look where that company is now.

It’s so bizarre to think about this product in retrospect.

PowWow was a genuinely innovative product, one that predicted the success of about half a dozen apps that followed it. But even folks that did use it only have faded memories of it. I’m sure I used this program in 1996, but I completely forgot about its existence until I started writing this and went, “Ohhhhh.”

It might come down to the fact that it was simply too early.

Image: a PowWow Facebook fan page

Jason Pontin, then the editor of the MIT Technology Review, argued in 2005 that one of the reasons that PowWow didn’t see the level of success that McAfee’s antivirus suite did, despite also being sold for free, was that the market wasn’t ready for his inventions. He was a first-mover in a second-mover market—something that was not true of his first startup, which innovated most effectively thanks to its business model.

“Tribal Voice was the innovator in two emerging markets, now much in the news, whose dynamics are still only partially known. The first is multiprotocol IM. The second is social networking,” Pontin wrote. “Today, thriving companies like Cerulean Studios and LinkedIn can be found in both markets. But John McAfee was there first, even if he didn’t know how to make money from Tribal Voice.”

Today, McAfee is a colorful figure, one of tech’s most interesting and controversial. But despite his success in antivirus software, there’s a strong case to be made that he also should be celebrated as a social media pioneer.

Well, if you can look past the photo.

That Time John McAfee Developed One of the First Social Networks syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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douchebagbrainwaves · 7 years ago

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WHAT DOESN'T SEEM LIKE YOU WEREN'T MEANT TO START A CHANGING WORLD

She's trying to get the present shape. For illustrative purposes I've left the abandoned branch as a footnote. You can see how there would be a better one. But the incentives are more than just financial. I suspect that if you pushed this idea, you'd be running Windows. The ideal medium seemed the short story, which I've since learned had quite a brief life, roughly coincident with the peak of magazine publishing. After the lecture the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is get startups launched straight. The confident will often, like swallows, seem to be that many ready this time. There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of different cafes, but there is one that could put millions more to use. Ada, and Java, were created for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Ada have lost, while hacker languages C, Perl have won. You don't want to have to declare variables before using them, for example—that's not an innovation, in the same way. All of us had ever even had what you would call a real job.

Ten years ago VCs used to insist that founders step down as CEO and hand the job over to a business guy they supplied. If you feel you're really helping people, you'll keep working even when it seems like your startup is doomed. How did things get this way? Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist. But could you also base a successful startup out of curing an unfashionable but deadly disease like malaria? But the first time in history that a committee has designed a good language. You also need Florence in 1450. I've spent mostly in front of users as soon as this thought occurred to me, a whole bunch of other things fell into place. These combine to make us believe that every judgement of us is about us.

After the deal, but because it's so much easier than building something great. My experience of writing for magazines suggests an explanation. I've learned, to some degree a predictor of ability, the 21st best. And notice the beautiful mountains to the west of 280: Woodside, Portola Valley, Los Altos Hills, Saratoga, Los Gatos. They think what they're building. If you do everything the way the average big company does it, you can expect to do as well as the first type. All users care about is whether you make something users love enough to tell their friends, you grow exponentially, and that they'll make it big if and only if they're launched with sufficient initial velocity. But one of the most memorable paintings, especially when two halves react to one another, as in war, surprise is worth as much as force. Startups tend to be an inborn trait in humans. But for some bizarre reason actually, a very specific bizarre reason that I'll explain in a moment, the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the reputation hierarchy they embody to enhance web searches. One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters usually comes from an unforeseen quarter.

And odds are that you're not designing something good, you have a choice. Sun's business model is being undermined on two fronts. It did serve some purposes: reading a foreign language was difficult, and thus taught discipline, or at least the prerogative—of strength is not to work your way slowly around the contour of an object, because errors will accumulate and you'll find at the end that the lines don't meet. You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it will save you if anything can. I pay for this if I found it at a garage sale, dirty and frameless, and with no option pool that comes only from the founders' shares stands to reap huge benefits. And it does seem as if Google was a pioneer in all three components of Web 2. There is usually so much demand for custom work will always be pushing you toward the bottom. Then it was Paypal's.

At each step, flow down. Most only come into effect if the company gets sold at a low price, the founders tell themselves they should at least see what it is, right? When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan's form follows function, what they meant was, form should follow function. It could be because it's beautiful, or because they know it's expensive. But that's not what you're trying to save your company from death here, so make customers pay a lot, quickly. The time I haven't spent in bookshops I've spent mostly in front of users as soon as possible. And yet it seems to me that beliefs about the future are so rarely correct that they usually aren't worth the extra rigidity they impose, and that explains a lot of external evidence that benevolence works.

Ada: Every existing language is missing something. -Fashioned robber baron business world got incorporated into the startup world. It would be up to them to pick, because every bad startup would approach them first. Around 1000 Europe began to catch its breath. It is possible to slow time somewhat. When the company consists only of the founders of Sun. At first glance it doesn't seem there's anything to see.

This idea is at least nominally preserved in our present-day thesis defense—indeed, in the initial phases of a startup that went through really low lows and survived. So some founders impose it on themselves when they start paying you specifically for that attentiveness—when they start paying you specifically for that attentiveness—when they were Robin Hood, their stock price rose like Google's. It's not something you read looking for a specific answer, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to anything interesting. And the books we did these disgusting things to, like those we mishandled in high school classes, we read a lot of good publicity for the VCs. It costs you a little more equity, but being able to play the two firms off each other as well as the first type. It's not the product that should be generally applicable. Many of the students who now major in English would major in writing if they could do searches online. A stage.

They leave 20% as an options pool for later employees but they set things up so that they can accelerate fast. You can't trust authorities. Of all the places to go next, choose whichever seems most interesting. You still need just as much of your money. Put yourself in the right direction, admit you have no idea why. What have other people learned about design? 8 times. But don't let them or the situation intimidate you.

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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Friday, May 21, 2021

Record 55 million people internally displaced worldwide, NGOs report (AFP) Conflicts and natural disasters forced someone to flee within their own country every second of last year, pushing the number of people living in internal displacement to a record high, monitors said Thursday. This came despite strict restrictions on movement imposed around the globe in efforts to halt the spread of Covid-19, which observers had expected to push down displacement numbers last year. But 2020 was also marked by intense storms, persistent conflicts and explosions of violence, forcing 40.5 million people to become newly displaced within their countries, according to a joint report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). That is the highest number of newly displaced reported in 10 years, and brings the total number of people living in internal displacement around the world to a record 55 million, the report showed. “Both numbers this year were unusually high,” IDMC director Alexandra Bilak told AFP, saying the surge in internal displacement was “unprecedented”.

Ring (Guardian) Amazon’s Ring “smart doorbell” is the largest civilian-surveillance network the US has ever seen, writes Lauren Bridges, a PhD candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. One out of every 10 US police departments can access videos from millions of home-security cameras without getting a warrant, Bridges says. “In a 2020 letter to management, Max Eliaser, an Amazon software engineer, said Ring is ��simply not compatible with a free society’ [and] we should take his claim seriously.” Ring is effectively building the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen. An estimated 400,000 Ring devices were sold in December 2019 alone, and that was before the across-the-board boom in online retail sales during the pandemic.

Is Competition With China the New Pork Barrel? (Foreign Policy) A bill that aims to counter the fear that China is overtaking the United States technologically passed the U.S. Senate by 86 to 11 on Monday, heralding the start of a new era of strategic competition—and businesses and special interest groups are getting in on the game. The Endless Frontier Act, which has backing from both parties and the White House, would allocate $120 billion to funding new technologies, focusing on artificial intelligence, superconductors, and robotics. It would also support new hubs to geographically diversify the U.S. technology industry, which is heavily concentrated in Silicon Valley. Competition with China will be the foreign-policy priority for this and future administrations, and special interest groups see attaching their causes to the so-called new cold war as a way into U.S. government support. This in a way mirrors the Chinese political economy, where companies leap on slogans such as “Belt and Road” to win government favor. Expect a lot more rhetoric suggesting that since China is supposedly doing X, the United States must also do X to compete—or it must instead do Y in order not to be like the Chinese Communist Party.

The Gaza Conflict Is Stoking an ‘Identity Crisis’ for Some Young American Jews (NYT) Dan Kleinman does not know quite how to feel. As a child in Brooklyn he was taught to revere Israel as the protector of Jews everywhere, the “Jewish superman who would come out of the sky to save us” when things got bad, he said. But his feelings have grown muddier as he has gotten older, especially now as he watches violence unfold in Israel and Gaza. His moral compass tells him to help the Palestinians, but he cannot shake an ingrained paranoia every time he hears someone make anti-Israel statements. “It is an identity crisis,” Mr. Kleinman, 33, said. “Very small in comparison to what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, but it is still something very strange and weird.” As the violence escalates in the Middle East, turmoil of a different kind is growing across the Atlantic. Many young American Jews are confronting the region’s longstanding strife in a very different context, with very different pressures, from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. The Israel of their lifetime has been powerful, no longer appearing to some to be under constant existential threat. The violence comes after a year when mass protests across the United States have changed how many Americans see issues of racial and social justice. Many Jews in America remain unreservedly supportive of Israel and its government. Still, the events of recent weeks have left some families struggling to navigate both the crisis abroad and the wide-ranging response from American Jews at home.

Cleared For Take-Off? (Washington Post) After more than a year of travel into the bloc being severely restricted, the EU council is recommending member states begin opening their borders to Americans and others who have been “vaccinated with an E.U.-authorized vaccine.” Specifically, that means all the coronavirus vaccines available in the U.S. would be greenlighted, but vaccines manufactured in Russia and China would not be. Officials said the reopening could take effect within days of final approval, which should happen this week or next since E.U. ambassadors signed off on the plan on Wednesday. The guidance is not binding, however, so some countries could choose to be more or less restrictive than the bloc as a whole. Some E.U. countries require quarantines of all new arrivals, regardless of vaccination status. And Britain, which is no longer a member of the bloc, has its own separate set of rules, which as of now includes no special treatment for vaccinated travelers.

Mexico’s coronavirus deaths are plummeting (Washington Post) After suffering one of the world’s deadliest coronavirus outbreaks, Mexico is witnessing a significant decrease in cases. Confirmed deaths from covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, have tumbled more than 85 percent since January, when a brutal second wave swept the country. Mexico City, the epicenter of the country’s outbreak, went off high alert this month for the first time in a year. Officials say the capital’s coronavirus alert could soon turn from yellow to green—that is, from medium risk to low. The abrupt decline in cases has brought relief to exhausted hospital workers and some sense of normalcy to a battered nation. During the weekend, the capital’s massive Azteca Stadium opened to fans for the first time in 14 months. Thousands turned out for a pair of quarterfinal matches in the Liga MX soccer league. Scientists and government officials say the pandemic seems to be abating—at least temporarily—because of increasing levels of immunity on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. As much as half the Mexican population has developed antibodies because the coronavirus circulated so widely over the past year. In addition, U.S. vaccinations appear to be blocking the southward spread of the virus.

As India sets a record for covid-19 deaths, variant worries grow globally (Washington Post) India set another coronavirus milestone this week. On Wednesday, authorities announced the country had recorded more than 4,500 deaths from covid-19 for the prior 24 hours, setting a world record. Despite the record number of deaths, there are some positive signs that India’s surge may be slowing, with less than 300,000 new daily cases this week. Other countries are expressing new concern over the variant that is widespread in India. On Tuesday, British scientists said that the variant, known as B.1.617.2, could quickly become the dominant strain in the United Kingdom if it is allowed to spread. In recent days, U.S. health experts have raised their concerns about the variant spreading here, while there have been documented cases in Germany, Singapore and elsewhere. “It’s outcompeting the other viruses,” Jeremy Luban of the University of Massachusetts Medical School told NPR this week. “It’s replacing whatever variants were there before. And it’s always a concern when something like this changes because we don’t know what will happen.”

Netanyahu’s prospects bolstered amid Israel-Hamas fighting (AP) Israel is at war with Hamas, Jewish-Arab mob violence has erupted inside Israel, and the West Bank is experiencing its deadliest unrest in years. Yet this may all bolster Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Just over a week ago, the longtime Israeli leader’s political career seemed all but over. He had failed to form a coalition government following an indecisive parliamentary election, and his political rivals were on the cusp of pushing him out of office. Now, as Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers wage their fourth war in just over a decade, Netanyahu’s fortunes have changed dramatically. His rivals’ prospects have crumbled, Netanyahu is back in his comfortable role as Mr. Security, and the country could soon be headed for yet another election campaign that would guarantee him at least several more months in office. The stunning turn of events has raised questions about whether Netanyahu’s desperation to survive may have pushed the country into its current predicament. While opponents have stopped short of accusing him of hatching just such a conspiracy, they say the fact that these questions are being asked is disturbing enough.

Perspectives on war (CJR) Ariana Pekary, CJR’s public editor for CNN, writes about the network’s coverage of the violence between Israel and Palestine, and how it seems to give a lot more time and space to the Israeli government’s position than to that of the Palestinians who are being shelled and fired upon by the Israeli military. “CNN aired a two-hour special on the brewing crisis from 3pm to 5pm Eastern Time without explaining why it was happening,” Pekary writes. “Almost every guest was located in Israel; the network didn’t feature a single person in a Palestinian territory or neighborhood.”

Gaza’s health system buckling under repeated wars, blockade (AP) The Gaza Strip’s already feeble health system is being brought to its knees by the fourth war in just over a decade. Hospitals have been overwhelmed with waves of dead and wounded from Israel’s bombardment. Many vital medicines are rapidly running out in the tiny, blockaded coastal territory, as is fuel to keep electricity going. Just as Gaza was climbing out of a second wave of coronavirus infections, its only virus testing lab was damaged by an airstrike and has been shut. Health officials fear further outbreaks among tens of thousands of displaced residents crowded into makeshift shelters after fleeing massive barrages. The Gaza Strip’s health infrastructure was already collapsing before this latest war, said Adnan Abu Hasna, a spokesman for UNRWA, the U.N. agency that provides vital assistance to the 75% of the enclave’s population who are refugees. “It’s frightening,” he said.

Parenting under fire (Washington Post) Ayman Mghames couldn’t stop the nightly Israeli bombing that was making his 7-year-old daughter, Joury, cry. But just maybe he could turn the volume down. Just after midnight on the fourth evening of the bombardment, the Palestinian musician and rapper retrieved a pair of noise-canceling headphones. He fit them over the little ears, dialed up a YouTube video of “The Smurfs” and hit play. Mghames, 36, whose father was killed when an Israeli missile struck their house in 2009, knows well that headphones won’t protect his children from the bombs that have already killed more than 200 Gazans in the past 10 days, including more than 60 children. But like countless parents, Palestinian and Israeli, cowering in homes, shelters and stairwells under the air war raging between Israel and the Hamas militant group, he is doing anything he can to shield them from the trauma of being under fire. Dads and moms on both sides of the border have put aside their own terror to launch indoor soccer games, dance parties and cooking contests as distractions.

Israel, Hamas agree to cease-fire to end bloody 11-day war (AP) Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire Thursday, halting a bruising 11-day war that caused widespread destruction in the Gaza Strip, brought life in much of Israel to a standstill and left more than 200 people dead. Like the three previous wars between the bitter enemies, the latest round of fighting ended inconclusively. Israel claimed to inflict heavy damage on Hamas but once again was unable to halt the Islamic militant group’s nonstop rocket barrages. Almost immediately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced angry accusations from his hard-line, right-wing base that he stopped the operation too soon. Hamas, the Islamic militant group sworn to Israel’s destruction, also claimed victory. But it now faces the daunting challenge of rebuilding in a territory already suffering from poverty, widespread unemployment and a raging coronavirus outbreak. At least 230 Palestinians were killed, including 65 children and 39 women, with 1,710 people wounded, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not break the numbers down into fighters and civilians. Twelve people in Israel, including a 5-year-old boy and 16-year-old girl, were killed.

#headlines #news

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bigyack-com · 5 years ago

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Where Are the Tech Zillionaires? San Francisco Faces the I.P.O. Fizzle

SAN FRANCISCO — Seven months ago, the Four Seasons in San Francisco sent out a news release announcing the glad tidings that would come soon: New residences for the new money. Builders were hoisting glass and steel into a 43-story tower where residents would have their own on-staff wine concierge, plus Blue de Savoie French marble, German milled Poggenpohl cabinetry and Dornbracht fixtures. The building’s $49 million penthouse would be the most expensive in San Francisco. “Just in time for the coming wave of I.P.O. millionaires in San Francisco,” the Four Seasons said, promising “an elevated sales experience” to cater to “this new class of buyers.” But then the wave of tech initial public offerings — the one that was supposed to mint San Francisco’s new ultra rich — fizzled. The stock of Uber, the ride-hailing giant, has dropped nearly 30 percent since the company went public in May. Lyft shares are down nearly 40 percent. Pinterest and Slack have declined, too. San Francisco has been left as a slightly more normal town of tech workers who got rich-ish, maybe making a few hundred thousand dollars. But that doesn’t go far in a city where the median cost of a single family home is about $1.6 million. “Everyone that came back post-I.P.O. seemed to be the same person. I didn’t see any Louis Vuitton MacBook case covers or champagne in their Yeti thermos,” said J.T. Forbus, a tax manager at Bogdan & Frasco in San Francisco.Private wealth managers are now meeting with a chastened clientele. Developers are having to cut home prices — unheard-of a year ago. Party planners are signing nondisclosure agreements to stage secret parties where hosts can privately enjoy their wealth. Union organizers are finding an opportunity. Everyone had gotten too excited, and who could blame them? The money was once so close: A start-up that coordinated dog walkers raised $300 million. The valuations of the already giant ride-hailing behemoths had nearly doubled again. WeWork, a commercial real estate management start-up that owned very little of its own real estate, was valued at $47 billion. Towers rose across San Francisco to house the money. The marble was polished. The bathroom floors were warm. The private pools were being filled.“The world has changed in a year,” said Herman Chan, a real estate broker with Sotheby’s International. “We expected an upward trajectory at least, and it really kind of deflated. These companies aren’t dying but the cultural zeitgeist, that momentum of I.P.O.s, is gone. You don’t even hear anyone talking about it anymore.”The developers who had fought the odds of regulation and zoning to build their glass residences in the sky had timed their units to the I.P.O.s. But on a recent visit with the Four Seasons sales team, they acknowledged that techie wealth was not what they were seeing. Interest was mostly coming from overseas buyers, young heirs to foreign fortunes and older executives looking for city pieds-à-terre, they said. Also in time for the wave that was not a wave are more luxury towers: The Avery, The Harrison, 181 Fremont, The Mira. “The definition of luxury is scarcity, and there’s so many now,” Mr. Chan said. “Nowadays, my buyers are getting a contingency period and inspectors. Things you would never ask for before. There’s not 10 offers on a house anymore.”Case in point: A full-floor apartment in San Francisco’s poshest neighborhood of Pacific Heights was listed at $21.6 million and advertised that “a sommelier-worthy wine cellar awaits 1,500 of your most prized bottles.” But more than a year later and after a $5 million price cut, it is still on the market. Prices for the top 5 percent of San Francisco area real estate listings — the cream of the crop — rose 7 percent between 2017 and 2018. This year, they have fallen more than 1 percent, according to data prepared for The New York Times by the real estate listing service Zillow. The malaise has spread south into Silicon Valley. A $10.8 million home listing in the town of Portola Valley, Calif., was slashed to $5.7 million. The median sale price for a nearby home in San Jose, Calif., has dropped 10 percent in a year to just under $1 million, according to data from the real-estate listing site Zillow. Before the tech I.P.O.s, Deniz Kahramaner, then a real estate data analyst with the property brokerage Compass, had rallied packed rooms of real estate agents and investors about the bonanza that lay ahead. He had charts and estimates of thousands of new millionaires raising the average price of single family homes in San Francisco above $5 million.Now, he is more muted. “The I.P.O. cash-out hasn’t played out as I mentioned in my original presentation,” he said. Mr. Kahramaner added, hopefully, that it was still early. “People need more time,” he said.

Wealth and Unions

Instead of yachts, tech workers are funding more mundane ventures like college savings plans. “This year brought a lot of people back to reality,” said Ryan S. Cole, a private wealth adviser at Citrine Capital, a wealth management firm in San Francisco. “We’ve had a lot of people fund 529 plans for their kids. Pretty boring stuff.”Some private wealth managers said they were actually somewhat relieved. “At the end of the day, it’s funny money until it’s realized," said Jonathan DeYoe, another private wealth adviser. “I’ve got Uber and Lyft clients that are disappointed. It’s a different house now. It’s a different school situation for the kids. But they’re still by and large in good places. No one’s impoverished.”And so workers who thought they would upgrade from Allbirds to Berluti shoes are remaining, after all, in the Allbirds.As some rank-and-file tech workers realize they might not get rich from company stock, the allure of working long hours without comparable real money pay is also wearing thin, said labor organizers. They have found traction this year in an industry long resistant to unions. “The incentives to take the licks that you do are in the hope of some sort of big payoff down the road,” said Paul Thurston, who focuses on unionizing San Francisco tech workers and is the organizing director at the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. Now, “the engineers and the app designer and the developers are going to be treated a lot more like the employees that they are rather than like partners, which is what they’re told pre-I. P. O.,” he said.Jonathan Wright, the organizing director of Engineers and Scientists of California, said he was in talks to unionize the workers of several big tech companies. “There’s a promise: you work 100 hours a week, you sleep under your desk, and then you’ll be rewarded with the wealth of Bezos,” Mr. Wright said. “That mythology has been fading for years. The day of the unicorn is over.”Where there is new wealth, it’s coming from the older tech companies like Apple and Alphabet, whose stocks this year have soared. And some fortunes are still being made from the I.P.O.s. While Uber’s shares have fallen, the company’s co-founder, Travis Kalanick, has sold off more than $2 billion in stock, according to securities filings. “Especially with things like Uber, almost all the I.P.O. wealth was going to a couple of people,” said Kalena Masching, a Redfin agent in San Jose. “They are not looking to buy a standard house here.”Another bright spot: female-led companies, with more becoming unicorns in 2019 than any other year, according to Aileen Lee, the venture capitalist who coined the phrase “unicorn” to refer to a private company valued at $1 billion or more.And post-I.P.O. parties are happening. They are just secret — and phone-free. “We’re signing a lot more nondisclosures,” said Jay Siegan, who curates party entertainment for corporate tech clients. “A year ago, people would set up social media stations at the party, signs with the hashtag for Instagram. Now we have clients asking guests to check their phones at the door or using those Yondr bags.”These are pouches used to lock phones en masse at concerts and events where someone might be tempted to record.

Self Reflection

However, in public, the tech world is all about reflection and self-critiquing after the year that was. The I.P.O. disappointment has gotten so extreme that two Silicon Valley techies are setting out to do what few have done before: Make fun of themselves. David Cowan, a venture capitalist with Bessemer Venture Partners, which invested in Lyft, and Michael Fertik, the founder of Reputation.com, are launching an online talk show called “The Bubble Report.” It will feature interviews with other tech executives. The point, they hope, is to poke fun at Silicon Valley from within Silicon Valley.Mr. Cowan, either in character or just being very honest, decried the falling stock prices of newly public tech companies as victims of cruel Wall Street analysts.“It should be against the law for unscrupulous analysts to assess stocks based on cash flow and profit, to impugn a company based on eight lines of a financial report,” he joked. “Imagine how much more value we’d have in the stock market if we got rid of that arcane thinking.” Mr. Fertik said his inspiration to mock his industry came in part from realizing how far from reality it had all gotten. “I want people to understand that Silicon Valley is a deeply religious place that thinks of itself as agnostic,” he said. “It has some of the strengths and many of the frailties of organized religion.”For now, most people are waking up to find they are still on Earth. This is good news for those in San Francisco who mostly viewed the tech exuberance as bad news: housing rights activists, first-time home buyers, and renters. “We are excited by any resetting of Bay Area rents that bring them down from their artificially inflated high,” said Fred Sherburn-Zimmer, the executive director of Housing Rights Committee, which fights against evictions. “Eventually all bubbles burst.” Read the full article

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weartandculture · 5 years ago

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Inson Wongsam :

Traveling and seeking on a new world

Silpakorn University during half a century ago like a small world in a narrow frame and not as open as today because communication with the outside world is difficult. The news received from Europe which is considered a civilized world. Most of them are publications especially books about art are the best medium. Aside from that, it is a story of Professor Silp Bhirasri and some students who have studied in Italy which is like a lap of western art. Being a good artist is believed to have many basic elements. One important element that helps artists to create works more efficiently is the experience of both life and art. Artists must accumulate both types of experience as fuel to drive creativity. In addition, artists must have imagination, which is an abstract world in which artists can

transform into concrete through their artistic strategies that they are good at. Lastly, the artist must have ingenious intelligence enough to collect experience. Imagine being a work of art with quality. The search for experience of life and the artistic experience of Inson is different from general people that may be obtained from reading books. Travel to study abroad traveling to experience the new world of Inson is different from general

people traveling by airplane or international boat. But Inson chose to travel by motorcycle. Inson is therefore the creator of the legend in the modern art industry of Thailand and is an endless story to this day The land that Thai artists in the past have dreamed of visiting the most is Italy, France and various countries in Europe, especially Italy, which is considered the most charming because it is the birthplace of genius artists like Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), as well as Professor Silpa Bhirasi (CorradoFeroci: 1892-1962) Inson has a strong desire to travel to the land of art himself but traveling across the continent more than half a century ago is not as easy as today. It is even more difficult to travel through the streets through different terrain. He must meet people of many nationalities and languages, and the most important thing is that having money is a very important factor and knowledge of foreign languages but both is not a stumbling block for him because he thinks money can be obtained if skilled and intelligent. As for language, the same thing is because “language .. (dogs) can learn” when he is a human, why can not learn the language of people together Inson wants to travel to a new world that he has never seen on land which is very difficult for general people but Inson intends to prove his ability to do so. Inson therefore began to plan his travel carefully by offering travel to Berie Lucker, a Lambretta scooter dealer, the company has given a scooter for use in traveling. In addition, Inson also requested funds from Esso Company Limited to ask for support in the amount of travel oil which also received a good response Therefore, the problem of the traveling vehicles therefore disappeared but still having problems with personal expenses while traveling Inson solved the problem by bringing more than 200 pieces of his art into works on paper that can be conveniently rolled into a cylinder tied to the car. Inson’s works include printmaking, line drawing, and sketching. These works, Inson, are displayed in various locations. To sell to make money as traveling expenses From New Delhi Inson to travel to Lahore, Karachi. Inson exhibited at The Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, Pakistan (1957). ) Upon arrival at Tehran, Iran. Inson exhibited with Preecha Na Bangnoi (an old friend at Silpakorn University) at Gilgamesh Gallery, Teharan. (2032) When traveling to Turkey, Inson exhibited solo works at the Consulate de France Istanbul, Turkey (1963) When traveling to Athens, Greco-Inson exhibited works at Plaka Art House in Athens (1963) only in Greco, which is the source of civilization of that world Inson was especially impressed. He stayed in Athens for about 2 months to admire the great Greek art. He then traveled to live with Corfu fishermen for 6 months because he was impressed with the beautiful nature andfriendliness of the fishermen. On Corfu Island, Inson met an American artist named Alexander Is a New Yorker and was the person who bought a certain amount of Inson’s print work with the promise that once he returns to New York, he will pay later and will accept the client on Corfu Island, Inson created a new set of woodblock prints. To keep selling as a factor in traveling further throughout the journey of Inson must overcome many obstacles. For example, while traveling to Istanbul Turkey’s capital runs out of money, can’t sell photos So there is no money He had to live with a fish seller and ask for bread and grilled fish every day without paying.by deferment to the fish dealer that if able to sell the image, fish and bread will be paid. Soon Inson was starving Esso Company in Bangkok sent 200 US dollars to bid for Inson’s work in Bangkok, giving him money to pay for bread and grilled fish. About suffering because of lack of money during that trip Inson must always experience He told me that he once lacking money, without money to buy food, had to fast for two days without knowing where to make money from the picture, it can not be sold in the end, must use the walk in the community then lay down on the ground to ask for attention when he saw that somebody came to see it enough Therefore got up and opened to receive donations in hats. In this way he can survive. Aside from fasting sometimes without money Inson must sleep under the bridge. These things require a strong and witty mind to perform in order to survive. However, finally, Inson traveled to Rome. Around August 1963 (1973), it took time to travel from Bangkok to Rome. Italy for almost 2 years. Seems to be the first person in the world to ride a scooter from Thailand to Italy. By using a scooter produced in Italy and sent to sell in Thailand, is the first person to successfully drive back to its place of origin In Rome’s journey to Rome was like worshiping sacred things in the city of art. Inson desires to reach Geovenni,near Florence, home to Professor Silp Bhirasri. The visit to the birthplace of Professor Silp is Damrong Wong- upparaj, another student of Professor Silp Bhirasri. Traveled to join with Even if the professor had already left this world but to pay respect to the master at the front of the house would be a great joy for both of them while in Florence, Italy, Inson and Damrong displayed art at the Numero Gallery in Florence (1963). Their artistic performances were a tribute and remembrance of their teachers. After Damrong went back to Thailand. While Inson desires to travel to Paris France instead of Rome because at that time, Paris was like the capital city of modern art Rome is just a glorious past. For this reason, Paris is his dream destination. Inson traveled to Austria and exhibited solo works at the Gallerie Fuchs in Vienna, Austria (1957), then traveled to Switzerland and France by train because the scooters are no longer in a condition to travel long distances Go Inson gave to the Thai Embassy in Rome and traveled to various countries in Europe until finally Paris, France. While Inson traveled to Paris He almost didn’t have any money. But luck always stayed with Inson. He has worked in a Vietnamese restaurant as a waiter and promoted to Chef Resulting in food to eat and income. Then, after 6 months, he resigned to work that he was skilled at, namely painting, decorating, welding, advertising signs, Inson stayed in Paris until 1966. During that time Have the opportunity to study art at L'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts De'coralifs until graduation. After that, Inson exhibited art works at the Gallery de Huat Pave, Paris (1966) and many other times which is quite successful. Giving him the capital to pursue his dreams in another hemisphere, New York, USA. Inson sets out from Paris, the center of 19th-century modern art. To New York City, the center of modern art in the 20th century. Inson traveled with an American woman named Barbara Wood (Brabala Wood) who studied art in France While he only has one dollar Many years in foreign countries, he knows that finding money is not difficult. Finally, Inson was able to build a studio in the East Village successfully He stayed in New York for about 6 years before moving to New Jercy Inson lives in the United States for about 7 years (1967-1974), living with Barbara.

Inson and Barbara have a son, Inson Wood (now director of architecture and design, David Easton Incorpolation Graduated from Cornell University and a masters degree from Harvard University). Barbara lives with cancer while his son was 14 years old. Inson married another American woman named Laula Lipnin but parted ways when Inson returned to Thailand in 1974. While residing in New York Inson has held solo exhibitions and collaborations with other artists many times, such as solo performances at Lichfield Gallery Conn, and collaborated with Brazilian artists (1967), showing solo works at Eleven Gallery New York (1968), showing joint work with Phanom Suwananat (1914-present, an old friend at Silpakorn University studying at New York City at that time Currently residing in the United States of America) at De Mena Gallerly, New York City (1969).Living in New York City is not that easy but with being a life fighter and capable around the example Allowing to survive in every situation Starting from renovating the hair salon to a studio and showroom that he produced using the knowledge inherited from his father who is a silversmith. The knowledge gained from Silpakorn University and design, studying from Paris. By Inson, using scrap brass, copper to make earrings, necklaces, bracelets using plating methods into various colors doorknob, window hook and scrap materials used to make candlesticks, place trees and other home decorations, and Inson’s studios are receiving attention, and there are enough customers to help Inson live without difficulty. The But with the hustling lifestyle of the big cities, he saw that living in a capitalist world characterized by competition and cost of living is difficult, stressful, leading to various diseases. Finally, he saw that If living in a drought-free world Would not be good for his sensitive mind Inson decided to return to his homeland. In order to return to their roots in the year 1974 after living abroad for more than ten years. The thing that Inson brought back was Life experience and art experience Without assets and money Inson said that “… When going empty-handed, coming back empty-handed …”.

อินสนธิ์ วงศ์สาม กับการเดินทางและการแสวงหาบนโลกใหม่

มหาวิทยาลัยศิลปกรเมื่อครึ่งศตวรรษที่ผ่านมา เหมือนโลกใบเล็กๆ ที่อยู่ในกรอบแคบๆ ไม่เปิดกว้างเหมือนปัจจุบัน เพราะการสื่อสารกับโลกภายนอกนั้นกระทำได้ยาก ข่าวสารที่รับมาจากยุโรปซึ่งถือเป็นโลกอารยะนั้น ส่วนมากเป็นสิ่งพิมพ์ โดยเฉพาะหนังสือเกี่ยวกับศิลปะเป็นสื่อที่ดีที่สุด นอกจากนั้นก็เป็นคำบอกเล่าของศาสตราจารย์ศิลป์ พีระศรีและศิษย์บางคนที่ผ่านการศึกษาจากประเทศอิตาลี ซึ่งเป็นเสมือนตักศิลาของศิลปะตะวันตก

การเป็นศิลปินที่ดีนั้นเชื่อว่าต้องมีองค์ประกอบพื้นฐานหลายประการ องค์ประกอบสำคัญประการหนึ่งที่ช่วยเสริมให้ศิลปินสามารถสร้างสรรค์ผลงานได้อย่างมีประสิทธิภาพคือ ประสบการณ์ ทั้งประสบการณ์ชีวิตและประสบการณ์ศิลปะ ศิลปินต้องสะสมประสบการณ์ทั้งสองประเภทไว้เป็นเชื้อเพลิงขับเคลื่อนการสร้างสรรค์ นอกจากนี้ ศิลปินจะต้องมี จินตนาการ ซึ่งเป็นในโลกแห่งนามธรรมที่ศิลปินสามารถแปรเป็นรูปธรรมด้วยกลวิธีทางศิลปะที่ตนถนัดและเชี่ยวชาญ ประการสุดท้ายศิลปินต้องมี ปัญญา ที่แยบยลพอที่จะมีประมวลประสบการณ์ จินตนาการให้เป็นศิลปกรรมออกมาได้อย่างมีคุณภาพ การแสวงหาประสบการณ์ชีวิตและประสบการณ์ทางศิลปะของอินสนธิ์ต่างไปจากคนทั่วไปที่อาจจะได้จากการอ่า��หนังสือ เดินทางไปศึกษาต่อต่างประเทศ การเดินทางไปแสวงหาประสบการณ์จากโลกใหม่ของอินสนธิ์ต่างจากคนทั่วไปที่เดินทางโดยเครื่องบินหรือเรือโดยสารระหว่างประเทศ แต่อินสนธิ์เลือกเดินทางด้วยรถจักรยานยนต์ อินสนธิ์จึงเป็นผู้สร้างตำนานให้กับวงการศิลปะสมัยใหม่ของไทยจนเป็นเรื่องเล่าขานไม่รู้จบมาจนทุกวันนี้

ดินแดนที่ศิลปินไทยในอดีตใฝ่ฝันที่จะไปเยือนมากที่สุดคือ อิตาลี ฝรั่งเศส และประเทศต่างๆ ในยุโรป โดยเฉพาะอิตาลีนั้นถือว่ามีมนต์เสน่ห์มากที่สุด เพราะเป็นถิ่นกำเนิดอัจฉริยะศิลปินอย่าง มีเกลันเจโล บูโอนาร์โรตี (Michelangelo Buonarroti : 1475-1564) เลโอนาร์โด ดา วินชี (Leonardo da Vinci : 1452-1519) รวมถึงศาสตราจารย์ศิลป์ พีระศรี (Corrado Feroci : 1892-1962) อินสนธิ์มีความปรารถนาอย่างแรงกล้าที่จะเดินทางไปยังดินแดนแห่งศิลปะเหล่านั้นด้วยตนเอง แต่การเดินทางข้ามทวีปเมื่อกว่าครึ่งศตวรรษที่ผ่านมาไม่ง่ายเหมือนทุกวันนี้ ยิ่งยากลำบากมากขึ้นเมื่อต้องเดินทางไปตมถนนผ่านภูมิประเทศที่แตกต่างกัน ต้องพบกับผู้คนหลายชาติ หลายภาษา และสิ่งสำคัญต้องมี เงิน ึ่งเป็นปัจจัยที่สำคัญยิ่ง และความรู้เรื่องภาษาต่างประเทศ แต่ทั้งสองสิ่ง ไม่ได้เป็นอุปสรรค์สำหรับอินสนธิ์เพราะเขาคิดว่า เงินนั้นสามารถหาได้หากฝีมือและมีปัญญา ส่วนเรื่องภาษาก็เช่นเดียวกันเพราะ “ภาษา..(หมา) เรียนได้” ในเมื่อเขาเป็นคนทำไมจะเรียนรู้ภาษาของคนด้วยกันไม่ได้

อินสนธิ์ต้องการเดินทางไปยังโลกใหม่ที่เขาไม่เคยเห็นทางบก ซึ่งเป็นเรื่องยากมากสำหรับคนทั่วไป แต่อินสนธิ์มุ่งมั่นที่จะพิสูจน์ความสามารถว่า เขาทำได้ ดังนั้น อินสนธิ์จึงเริ่มวางแผนการเดินทางอย่างรอบคอบ โดยเสนอการเดินทางแก่บริษัท Berie Lucker ซึ่งเป็นผู้จำหน่ายรถสกูตเตอร์แลมเบรทตา บริษัทฯ ได้มอบรถสกูตเตอร์ให้ใช้ในการเดินทางคันหนึ่ง นอกจากนี้อินสนธิ์ยังขอทุนจากบริษัท เอสโซ จำกัด เพื่อขอการสนับสนุนที่น้ำมันในการเดินทางจำนวนหนึ่ง ซึ่งก็ได้รับการตอบสนองด้วยดีเช่นเดียวกัน ดังนั้นปัญหาเรื่อง ยานพาหนะในการเดินทางจึงหมดไป แต่ยังมีปัญหาเรื่องเงินค่าใช้จ่ายส่วนตัวระหว่างการเดินทาง ซึ่งอินสนธิ์แก้ปัญหาด้วยการนำผลงานศิลปะของเขามากกว่า ๒๐๐ ชิ้น เป็นผลงานบนกระดาษที่สามารถม้วนใส่กระบอกผูกติดกับรถได้สะดวก ผลงานที่อินสนธิ์นำไปได้แก่ ภาพพิมพ์ วาดเส้น และงาน สเก๊ตช์ ผลงานเหล่านี้อินสนธิ์นำไปจัดแสดงตามสถานที่ต่างๆ เพื่อจำหน่ายหาเงินมาเป็นค่าใช้จ่ายในการเดินทาง

จากกรุงนิวเดลลีอินสนธิ์เดินทางต่อไปยังเมืองละฮอร์(Lahore) การาจี อินสนธิ์จัดแสดงผลงานที่ The Arts Council of Pakistan นครการาจี ประเทศปากีสถาน (พ.ศ. ๒๕๐๕) เมื่อเดินทางไปถึง กรุงเตหราน ประเทศอิหร่าน อินสนธิ์จัดแสดงผลงานร่วมกับปรีชา ณ บางน้อย (เพื่อนเก่าที่มหาวิทยาลัยศิลปากร) ที่ Gilgamesh Gallery, Teharan. (พ.ศ. ๒๕๗๕) เมื่อเดินทางไปถึงประเทศตุรกีอินสนธิ์จัดแสดงผลงานเดี่ยวที่ Consulate de France นครอิสตันบูล ประเทศตุรกี (พ.ศ. ๒๕๐๖) เมื่อเดินทางไปถึงกรุงเอเธนส์ ประเทศกรีช อินสนธิ์จัดแสดงผลงานที่ Plaka Art House กรุงเอเธนส์ (พ.ศ. ๒๕๐๖) เฉพาะในประเทศกรีชซึ่งเป็นแหล่งอารยธรรมของโลกนั้น อินสนธิ์ประทับใจเป็นพิเศษ เขาอยู่ที่เอเธนส์ประมาณ ๒ เดือน เพื่อชื่นชมศิลปกรรมที่ยิ่งใหญ่ของกรีก จากนั้นเขาเดินทางไปอาศัยอยู่กับชาวประมงบนเกาะคอร์ฟู (Corfu) เป็นเวลานานถึง ๖ เดือน เพราะประทับใจธรรมชาติอันงดงามและความเป็นมิตรของชาวประมง ที่เกาะคอร์ฟูอินสนธิ์ได้พบกับศิลปินชาวอเมริกันคนหนึ่งชื่อ อเล็กซานเดอร์ เป็นชาวนิวยอร์ก และเป็นผู้ที่ซื้อผลงานภาพพิมพ์ของอินสนธิ์ไปจำนวนหนึ่ง โดยสัญญาว่าเมื่อเขากลับไปถึงนิวยอร์กแล้วจะจ่ายเงินให้ภายหลังและจะรับอินสนธิ์ไปอยู่ด้วย

ที่เกาะคอร์ฟูอินสนธิ์ได้สร้างงานภาพพิมพ์แม่พิมพ์ไม้ชุดใหม่ขึ้นจำนวนหนึ่ง เพื่อเก็บไว้จำหน่ายหาเงินเป็นปัจจัยในการเดินทางต่อไป ตลอดการเดินทางของอินสนธิ์ต้องฝ่าฟันอุปสรรคนานัปการ เช่นขณะเดินทางไปถึงอิสตันบูล เมืองหลวงของตุรกีเงินหมดขายรูปไม่ได้ จึงไม่มีเงินติดตัว เขาต้องอาศัยอยู่กับพ่อค้าขายปลาและขอขนมปังกิน��ับปลาย่างทุกวันโดยไม่ต้องจ่ายเงิน โดยผัดผ่อนกับพ่อค้าปลาว่า หากขายรูปได้จะจ่ายค่าปลาและขนมปังให้ อินสนธิ์อดอยากอยู่ได้ไม่นาน บริษัทเอสโซ จำกัด ในกรุงเทพก็ส่งเงินค่าประมูลผลงานของอินสนธิ์ที่กรุงเทพไปให้ ๒๐๐ ดอลลาร์สหรัฐ ทำให้เขามีเงินจ่ายค่าขนมปังและปลาย่าง เรื่องความทุกข์ยากเพราะขาดเงินระหว่างการเดินทางนั้น อินสนธิ์ต้องประสบอยู่เสมอ เขาเล่าให้ฟังว่า ครั้งหนึ่งขาดเงินไม่มีเงินซื้ออาหารต้องอดอาหารถึงสองวัน โดยไม่รู้จะหาเงินมาจากไหนรูปก็ขายไม่ได้ในที่สุดต้องใช้วิธีเดินไปในชุมชน แล้วล้มตัวลงนอนดินเพื่อเรียกร้องความสนใจ เมื่อเห็นว่ามีคนมามุงดูพอสมควรแล้ว จึงลุกขึ้นเปิดหมวกรับบริจาค ด้วยวิธีนี้ทำให้เขามีชีวิตรอดไปได้ นอกจากเรื่องอดอาหารแล้ว บางครั้งไม่มีเงิน อินสนธิ์ต้องอาศัยนอนตามใต้สะพาน สิ่งเหล่านี้ต้องอาศัยจิตใจที่แข็งแกร่งและไหวพริบปฎิภานอย่างมากจึงจะเอาชีวิตรอดได้ อย่างไรก็ตาม ในที่สุดฮก็เดินทางไปถึงกรุงโรม ประมาณเดือนสิงหาคม พ.ศ. ๒๕๐๖ (ค.ศ. ๑๙๖๓) ใช้เวลาในการเดินทางจากกรุงเทพฯไปถึงกรุงโรม ประเทศอิตาลีเกือบ ๒ ปี ดูจะเป็นคนแรกของโลกที่ขี่รถสกูตเตอร์จากประเทศไทยไปถึงประเทศอิตาลี โดยใช้รถสกูตเตอร์ที่ผลิตในอิตาลีแล้วส่งมาขายที่เมืองไทยอินสนธิ์เป็นคนแรกที่ขับกลับไปถิ่นกำเนิดของมันได้สำเร็จ

การเดินทางไปกรุงโรมของอินสนธิ์เสมือนการไปนมัสการสิ่งศักดิ์สิทธิ์ในนครแห่งศิลปะอินสนธิ์ปรารถนาจะไปให้ถึงเมือง Geovenni ใกล้เมืองฟลอเรนซ์ถิ่นกำเนิดของศาสตราจารย์ศิลป์พีระศรี การไปเยือนบ้านเกิดของศาสตราจารย์ศิลป์นั้น มีดำรง วงศ์อุปราช (พ.ศ. ๒๔๗๙-๒๕๔๔) ศิษย์อีกคนหนึ่งของศาสตราจารย์ศิลป์ เดินทางไปสมทบด้วย แม้ศาสตราจารย์ได้จากโลกนี้ไปแล้วก็ตาม แต่การได้ไปคารวะอาจารย์ถึงหน้าบ้านคงเป็นความปลื้มปิติของคนทั้งสองอย่างยิ่ง ระหว่างที่อยู่ในเมืองฟลอเรนซ์อิตาลีอินสนธิ์และดำรงได้จัดแสดงผลงานศิลปะที่ Numero Gallery เมืองฟลอเรนซ์ (พ.ศ. ๒๕๐๖) การแสดงงานศิลปะของทั้งสองคนเป็นการแสดงคารวะและระลึกถึงอาจารย์ของเขาทั้งสอง หลังจากนั้นดำรงก็เดินทางกลับประเทศไทย ขณะที่อินสนธิ์ปรารถนาที่จะเดินทางไปกรุงปารีส ประเทศฝรั่งเศสแทนที่จะอยู่กรุงโรม เพราะช่วงเวลานั้นกรุงปารีสเป็นเสมือนนครหลวงของศิลปะสมัยใหม่ กรุงโรมเป็นเพียงอดีตที่เคยรุ่งโรจน์เท่านั้น ด้วยเหตุนี้ กรุงปารีสจึงเป็นจุดหมายปลายทางที่เขาใฝ่ฝัน อินสนธิ์เดินทางต่อไปยังประเทศออสเตรีย และได้จัดแสดงผลงานเดี่ยวที่ Gallerie Fuchs กรุงเวียนนา ประเทศออสเตรีย (พ.ศ. ๒๕๐๗) จากนั้นเดินทางต่อไปประเทศสวิสเซอร์แลนด์ และฝรั่งเศส ด้วยรถไฟ เพราะรถสกูตเตอร์ไม่อยู่ในสภาพที่จะใช้เดินทางไกลได้อีกต่อไป อินสนธิ์จึงมอบให้สถานเ��กอัครราชทูตไทยในกรุงโรม แล้วเดินทางไปยังประเทศต่างๆ ในยุโรปจนภึงกรุงปารีสประเทศฝรั่งเศสในที่สุด ขณะที่อินสนธิ์เดินทางไปถึงกรุงปารีส เขาแทบไม่มีเงินติดตัวเลย แต่โชคมักเข้าข้างอินสนธิ์เสมอ เขาได้ทำงานในร้านอาหารเวียดนามเป็นเด็กเสิร์ฟ และได้เลื่อนตำแหน่งเป็นกุ๊ก ทำให้มีอาหารกินและมีรายได้ จากนั้น 6 เดือน เขาจึงลาออกไปทำงานที่ใช้ความสามารถตามที่เขาถนัดคือ งานทาสี ตกแต่ง เชื่อมโลหะ ทำป้ายโฆษณา อินสนธิ์พำนักในกรุงปารีสจนถึง พ.ศ. 2509 ระหว่างนั้นเข้ามีโอกาสได้เข้าศึกษาศิลปะเพิ่มเติมที่ L’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts De’coralifs จนสำเร็จการศึกษา หลังจานั้นอินสนธิ์จัดแสดงผลงานศิลปกรรมที่ Galleries de Huat Pave กรุงปารีส (พ.ศ.2509) และที่อื่นๆอีกหลายครั้ง ซึ่งประสบความสำเร็จพอสมควร ทำให้เขามีทุนเดินทางตามความฝันในอีกซีกโลกหนึ่งคือ นิวยอร์ก สหรัฐอเมริกา

อินสนธิ์ ออกเดินทางจากกรุงปารีสซึ่งเป็นศูนย์กลางของศิลปะสมัยใหม่คริสต์ศตวรรษที่19 ไปสู่มหานครนิวยอร์กซึ่งเป็นศูนย์กลางของศิลปะสมัยใหม่คริสต์ศตวรรษที่ 20 อินสนธิ์เดินทางไปพร้อมกับสตรีชาวอเมริกันชื่อ บาร์บาร่า วู๊ด(Barbara Wood) ที่ไปศึกษาศิลปะในฝรั่งเศส ขณะที่เขามีเงินเพียงหนึ่งดอลล่าร์เท่านั้น หลายปีในต่างแดนทำให้เขารู้ว่าการหาเงินไม่ใช่เรื่องยาก ในที่สุดอินสนธ์ก็สามารถสร้างสตูดิโอที่หมู่บ้านตะวันออก(East Village)ได้สำเร็จ เขาพำนักในนิวยอร์กประมาณ 6 ปี ก่อนจะย้ายไปอยู่ที่ มลรัฐนิวเจอร์ซี(New Jercy) อินสนธิ์ใช้ชีวิตอยู่ในสหรัฐอเมริกาประมาณ 7 ปี(พ.ศ.2510-2517) โดยใช้ชีวิตร่วมกับบาร์บาร่า อินสนธิ์และบราบาลามีบุตรชายด้วยกันหนึ่งคนชื่อ อินสนธ์ วู๊ด (ปัจจุบันเป็นผู้อำนวยการฝ่ายสถาปัตยกรรมและการออกแบบบริษัทDavid Easton Incorpolation สำเร็จการศึกษาจากมหาวิทยาลัยคอร์แนลและปริญญาโทจากมหาวิทยาลัยฮาวาร์ด) บราบาลาเสีชีวิตด้วยโรคมะเร็งขณะที่ลูกชายมีอายุได้ 14 ปี อินสนธิ์ได้แต่งงานกับสตรีชาวอเมริกันอีกคนหนึ่งชื่อลอร์ลา ลิพนิน(Laula Lipnin) แต่แยกทางกันเมื่ออินสนธ์เดินทางกลับประเทศไทยในปี 2517 ระหว่างที่พำนักในนิวยอร์ก อินสนธ์ได้จัดแสดงผลงานเดี่ยวและผลงานร่วมกับศิลปินอื่นๆหลายครั้ง เช่น การแสดงเดี่ยวที่ Lichfield Gallery Conn และแสดงผลงานร่วมกับศิลปินบราซิล (พ.ศ.2510) แสดงผลงานเดี่ยวที่ Eleven Gallery นครนิวยอร์ก (พ.ศ.2511) แสดงผลงานร่วมกับพนม สุวรรณนาถ (พ.ศ. 2457-ปัจจุบันเพื่อนเก่าที่มหาวิทยาลัยศิลปากรไปศึกษาอยู่ที่นครนิวยอร์กขณะนั้น ปัจจุบันพำนักอยู่ในประเทศสหัฐอเมริกา) ที่ De Mena Gallerly นครนิวยอร์ก(พ.ศ.2512) การใช้ชีวิตในนครนิวยอร์กไม่ง่ายนัก หากแต่ด้วยความเป็นนักสู้ชีวิตและมีความสามารถรอบตัวอย่างอินสนธ์ ทำให้เข้าเอาชีวิตรอดได้ทุกสถานการณ์ เริ่มตั้งแต่ปรับปรุงร้านทำผมให้เป็นสตูดิโอและห้องแสดงเครื่องประดับตกแต่งที่เขาผลิตขึ้นโดยใช้ความรู้ที่ได้รับสืบทอดมาจากบิดาที่เป็นช่างเงิน ความรู้ที่ได้มาจากมหาวิทยาลัยศิลปากรและการออกแบบที่ร่ำเรียนมาจากปารีส โดยอินสนธิ์นำเศษทองเหลือง ทองแดง มาทำเป็นต่างหู สร้อย กำไล โดยใช้วิธีชุบให้เป็นสีต่างๆ นำลุกบิดประตู ตะขอเกี่ยวประตูหน้าต่าง และเศษวัสดุเหลือใช้มาทำเป็นเชิงเทียน ที่วางต้นไม้ และของแต่งบ้านอื่นๆทำให้สตูดิโอของอินสนธิ์ได้รับความสนใและมีลูกค้ามาอุดหนุนพอที่จะช่วยให้อินสนธิ์มีชีวิตอยู่ได้โดยไม่ลำบากนัก แต่ด้วยวิถีชีวิตที่เร่งรีบบีบคั้นของเมืองใหญ่ทำให้เขาเห็นว่า การมีชีวิตอยู่ในโลกทุนนิยมที่เต้มไปด้วยการแข่งขันและค่าครองชีพสุงนั้นยากลำบาก เครียด จนนำไปสู่โรคภัยต่างๆจนในที่สุดเขาก้เห็นว่า หากอยู่ในโลกที่แล้งน้ำใจต่อไป คงไม่เป็นผลดีต่อจิตใจที่อ่อนไหวของเขา อินสนธิ์จึงตัดสินใจเดินทางกลับมาสู่มาตุภูมิ เพื่อคืนสู่รากเหง้าของตนในปี พ.ศ. 2517 หลังจากใช้ชีวิตในต่างแดนนานกว่าสิบปี สิ่งที่อินสนธ์นำติดตัวกลับมาคือ ประสบการณ์ชีวิตและประสบการณ์ศิลปะ โดยปราศจากทรัพย์สินและเงินทอง อินสนธิ์กล่าวไว้ว่า “…เมื่อไปมือเปล่า ก็กลับมาตัวเปล่า…”

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BRENDA LEE - ALL ALONE AM I

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nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany · 6 years ago

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Britain After Brexit: Welcome to the Vulture Restaurant

Digital Elixir Britain After Brexit: Welcome to the Vulture Restaurant

Yves here. We pointed out some time ago that the idea that the UK would get a favorable trade deal with the UK post-Brexit, and particularly post a crash-out, was bonkers, so it’s good to have official confirmation, even if it comes from the likes of Larry Summers. The US typically dictates terms in bi-lateral trade deals, allowing at most only a bit of face-saving terms-tweaking at the margin. The power imbalance will be even more pronounced in trade negotiation in the wake of Brexit because the UK will be desperate to cinch a deal quickly, and the urgency will give the US even more leverage.

More quotes from the Summers interview on BBC Radio 4, courtesy Al Jazeera:

“I’m not sure what Britain wants from the United States that it can plausibly imagine the United States will give.”

“If Britain thinks that the American financial regulators – who have great difficulty coming together on anything – are going to come together to give greater permissions and less regulation of UK firms, I would call that belief close to delusional.”

Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal found a whimsical Brexit angle today, although it could just as easily have been spun as gallows humor: Tired of Waiting for Brexit, Britons Munch Through Nutella Stockpiles (any Northern Ireland readers may take umbrage at “Britons”):

Britain’s Brexit preppers have been stockpiling for months. Now their revolution is eating itself.

Fed up with waiting for the U.K. to leave the European Union and mindful of product expiration dates, stockpilers are using up foodstuffs they had squirreled away in case of a blunt exit leaves them cut off from imported treats, or spikes the price of necessities, like toilet paper and tea.

The chance of a no-deal divorce hasn’t diminished and may only have been postponed until Oct. 31, but some preppers can’t resist breaking into their stashes.

Elizabeth Priest, 29, found it easy to eat into her stockpile because she had socked away delectable items such as Nutella and mozzarella from Italy, lactose-free milk from Denmark and an awful lot of tea—not, say, Spam.

“Because we bought nice things, we weren’t facing down this nasty stockpile of tinned ham,” says the writer from Hastings on Britain’s southern coast. She brewed the last of her 200 stockpiled tea bags on June 29, three months to the day after Britain was meant to leave the EU.

Returning to the theme of this post, it’s not clear what could be strip mined from the UK. Unlike Russia post the collapse of the USSR, there aren’t natural resources that to be bought on the cheap and sold in world markets. North Sea oil is largely played out. UK manufacturing capacity will become much less valuable due to post-Brexit non-tariff trade barriers. Sadly, the big wealth opportunities may lie in moves like acquiring real estate and squeeing already not-well-housed working people with higher rents, and dismantling the NHS.

By Adam Ramsay, the co-editor of openDemocracyUK and also works with Bright Green. Before, he was a full-time campaigner with People & Planet. You can follow him at @adamramsay. Originally published at openDemocracy

“Britain has no leverage, Britain is desperate … it needs an agreement very soon. When you have a desperate partner, that’s when you strike the hardest bargain.” So warned former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers on Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme this morning, as new foreign secretary Dominic Raab jets off on a tour of North America to investigate potential trade deals.

“Britain has much less to give than Europe as a whole did, therefore less reason for the United States to make concessions,” said Summers, a senior figure in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. “You make more concessions dealing with a wealthy man than you do dealing with a poor man.”

Summers is of course right. But he makes a key mistake. He assumes that Raab, Johnson and the new cabinet care about defending the interests and autonomy of most people in the UK. He seems to be under the impression that Brexit was about taking back control.

In reality, the brand of Brexit promoted by Tory hardliners has long been about pulling Britain under the shadow of American capital. Not as a 51st state, with votes and constitutional rights, but as an outhouse for US business, a sort of colder, paler version of Puerto Rico.

We will be forced to accept US-style deregulation, with its poor standards for workers and consumers. We will have our assets stripped clean off the bone. Even before Brexit, we are fast becoming a pawn in the Pentagon’s global games.

We won’t become Americans, though. We’ll have no say in the standards that will govern our new Atlantic common market. Nor will we be permitted to help decide who stands in the planet’s biggest pulpit. Nor will we have much significant say in our own foreign policy. The UK has chosen to shift from participating in one power block to sitting on the outer edges of another.

Victory of the Lobbyists

If that wasn’t clear before (though it was), the events surrounding the arrival of Boris Johnson in Downing Street have confirmed it.

During the leadership election there was, of course, the failure to defend Kim Darroch, the British ambassador to the US. Then there is the ongoing confrontation with Iran, in which Britain’s post-empire is being enlisted in the schemes of US neoconservatives. There is the revelation that a new US pro-Brexit campaign group has launched, and Steve Bannon’s insistence on ‘Today’ that Boris Johnson should deliver a “no deal, hard out”.

Over the past three years, we’ve seen Britain’s lobbying industry and think-tanks auction their access to our politicians off to US corporations and oligarchs – from the firm which ran Johnson’s leadership campaign bragging in Washington about its ability to shape Brexit for US business, to the Institute for Economic Affairs offering to broker meetings between senior ministers and US companies wishing to get their piece of the Brexit pie.

We’ve seen one former Washington lobbyist – Shanker Singham – move to London and secure unprecedented access to our politicians, even writing the so-called Malthouse compromise, while lobbyists also drove the team that ensured their preferred candidate was elected prime minister.

And now that they’ve got their Johnson in place lobbyists have taken over the cabinet.

We’ve seen Trump confirm that “everything” – including the NHS – “will be on the table” in a US trade deal, before his spin-doctors reminded him that he’s not supposed to say that out loud.

“Britain Trump”

We see it in the ascent of Johnson himself – a rise which has coincided with the arrival in the UK of the sorts of institutions and culture we’re more used to watching from a safe distance across the Atlantic. On openDemocracy, we’ve revealed how Definers Public Affairs, the smear machine which destroyed Hillary Clinton, has set up shop in the UK, how a US-style super PAC is being rolled out across Europe and how Brexit is the biggest outsourcing of public policy in British history.

Johnson, who has surfed this wave, has been anointed “Britain Trump” by his US admirer. It’s a fair nickname, not because they have the same character, but because they both epitomise the elitist myths embedded in their respective national characters. Trump is the millionaire’s son who pretends to be rich because of merit, the brash bully-boy billionaire in a culture whose dream equates wealth and cruelty with merit and success.

Johnson, on the other hand, comes from the school on whose playing fields the battle of Waterloo was mythologically won. He epitomises an Anglo-British exceptionalism built on a mystical link between nation, royalty and aristocracy: a link forged in the failed revolution of the civil war and bought with imperial plunder, and which reminds the British bourgeois of an era when you didn’t need to do your homework to attain power – you got it by dint of your nation, gender, class and skin colour.

Likewise, their identikit ideologies are the same: oligarch enrichment woven round national mythologies.

Johnson pretends to be a free trader in the way that earlier British politicians claimed to support free trade whilst using their military might to force China to buy opium, commit genocide in Tasmania and smash up cotton looms in India. Trump claims to be a protectionist just as earlier US presidents used a pretence of isolationism to pretend they weren’t building an empire, at the same time preaching that the US was manifestly and justifiably destined to conquer the whole North American continent, committing genocide against Native American peoples as they did so.

Both Trump and Johnson have been contorted by the distorting lenses of their respective nationalisms, confusing many into thinking that they ooze truth or charm or talent. Strip off those red white and blue tinted goggles and you quickly see them for what they are: rich racists willing to trample anyone to secure the world for their kind.

Ultimately, they both represent the same interwoven set of interests: oligarchs, mafiosi, disaster capitalists, Gulf oil millionaires, hedge fund speculators and any other corner of the elite which has spotted that the neoliberal era is coming to an end, they have few places left to invest and their best option is to hide away as much money as they can behind the biggest walls they can build.

This is what Johnson meant when he said “fuck business” – that he and his friends no longer have anything invested in traditional industries, so are happy to see them disappear. It is why Trump is perfectly happy to fuck America’s car industry as he slashes tax for the hyper-rich.

Useful Scraps of Empire

At openDemocracy, we’ve revealed how millions of pounds were pumped into the Leave campaigns in the first place. That money came through the same British Overseas Territory and Crown Dependency secrecy areas that the billionaires of the world use to stash the cash they can no longer figure out how to get a return from – the same post-empire that the Pentagon is so keen to get a closer grip on.

For while the UK’s network of semi-colonies is useful as a money-laundry for the world’s oligarchs, we’ve seen in recent weeks how it plays a different strategic role, too – why America might see it as a valuable asset to begin to enclose under its wings.

When the British territory of Gibraltar captured an Iranian tanker, supposedly to enforce an EU embargo against oil to Syria, it did so despite the fact that Iran isn’t in the EU, and the EU doesn’t force non-members to comply with its embargoes. The Spanish have, according to The Guardian, claimed that the UK is acting under the influence of the US, and the former Swedish prime minister and senior EU figure Carl Bilt has hinted as much. It looks very much like this wasn’t so much an act of British foreign policy as one of submission to the US Department of Defense.

Britain captured Gibraltar in 1704 because of its strategically important location. To this day, one-third of the world’s oil and gas passes through its straits. Likewise, another strategically vital waterway will define this conflict: the Gulf of Oman, which connects the Strait of Hormuz to the Arabian sea. Oman isn’t formally a British territory, but it has been a de facto UK colony since the nineteenth century, with London helping to prop up the slave-owning ruling family over two centuries. As Ian Cobain has outlined, its current sultan was put in place by an MI6 coup in 1970.

The relationship remains strong. Shell owns 30% of the national oil company and Britain’s military presence is significant. According to Duncan Campbell, the journalist who originally revealed the existence of GCHQ, the Snowden leaks revealed Oman hosts a vital British intelligence base, tapping the vast number of communications cables that run under the Gulf. Last year, the UK opened a permanent naval base in the country, and in February this year, the British government announced it had signed an historic defence agreement with the sultanate, “bringing us even closer to one of our most important partners”.

For those with long memories, this might start sounding familiar: the 45-minute claim intended to frighten the British into accepting the 2003 Iraq war was based on the claim that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction could be ready to deploy not against London, but against the British Overseas Territories in Cyprus.

If the Pentagon is to keep a firm grip on the world, Britain’s post-imperial web of semi-colonies will be vital fingerholds, and Brexit offers the US a unique opportunity to expand its control over the UK and its overseas assets.

The Great British Asset Striptease

This wasn’t inevitable. In theory, Brexit could genuinely have been about ‘taking back control’ for the British people. It would be possible to turn the UK into a new Cuba, for instance, substituting home-grown products for international imports. Not a suggestion that would please the millions of Leave voters who opted to quit the EU essentially because they wanted to become another Japan instead: wealthier than the UK, industrialised, with less income inequality, richly forested and deeply racist.

But these are not the options before us.

Instead, Brexit means plonking the corpse of post-imperial Britain in a vulture restaurant for US asset strippers, and pretending not to notice that China perches nearby, ready to pluck at whatever it fancies too.

The Great British Asset Striptease isn’t new, of course. For decades, the country has mostly stayed afloat in the world by auctioning off the plunder we accumulated through centuries of empire. As Joe Guinan and Thomas Hanna point out, the Treasury has calculated that Britain sold off 40 per cent of all assets privatised across the OECD between 1980 and 1996.

But as the new foreign secretary heads off on his ‘everything must go’ tour of North America, the people of the UK are going to have to fight hard to stop him selling the whole country to Trump and his friends. Just as thousands mobilised against the EU-US trade deal known as TTIP, we’re going to have to stand together and fight against any UK/US trade deal. We’re going to have to fight to protect our public services and our workers’ rights and our ecosystems from the new plunderers of the planet. Because Britain doesn’t have any power in its negotiations with Trump. And we have a government that will be delighted to turn the country into an offshore theme park for American, Saudi and Chinese billionaires.

Britain After Brexit: Welcome to the Vulture Restaurant

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