Convoluted random thoughts put into paper, then typed using a keyboard. Sometimes I even use my phone. I write about finance, tech, politics, and culture (mostly terrible movies).
Of course, Trump's conduct towards Ukraine, which resulted in his impeachment, is the very definition of high crime and misdemeanor - - it's "worse than Nixon" (TM).
Massive, longstanding anti-government protests continue in Hong Kong and India.
Transitions like Bolivia’s tend to be fluid and unpredictable. The perception of legitimacy, or a lack thereof, can be decisive. But today’s world rarely fits the black-and-white narratives that emerged from the Cold War and that still shape expectations that coups and revolts are morality tales with clear heroes and villains.[...]
Coups often come after mass uprisings calling for change, with generals describing their interventions as temporary measures to restore democracy. And few, if any, popular uprisings succeed without military support, if only in the form of generals refusing to come to the government’s aid.
The political scientist Jay Ulfelder has referred to that as a “Schrödinger’s coup,” after the Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, writing that such cases “exist in a perpetual state of ambiguity, simultaneously coup and not-coup” with no hope of forcing the events into a “single, clear” category.
Let’s not mince words. It’s a coup. When an elected president is forced to resign by the head of the armed forces, after weeks of escalating street violence and a police mutiny, the word “coup” fits. [...]
The United States welcomed Morales’s ouster, and the U.S. presence in Bolivia, particularly in drug policy, has long been unhelpful. But “The CIA is behind everything bad in Latin America” is a lazy analysis by those who don’t care to understand the internal dynamics of other countries. It’s also one which inflates the omnipotence — and interest — of the U.S. while denying the agency of domestic actors. (The United States has not had an ambassador in Bolivia for more than 10 years, and both the DEA and USAID were kicked out of the country by Morales years ago. Far from its Cold War reputation as an all-powerful puppet master, the U.S. now treats Latin America with indifference and neglect. Today, the foreign power that matters in the region is China.)
The notion that Evo Morales was an obstacle to the exploitation of Bolivia’s lithium potential, and that his ouster in some way is meant to open the door for multinationals to tap Bolivia’s mineral wealth, is upside down. For more than a decade, Morales talked of turning Bolivia into a lithium powerhouse and made the full-scale development of the country’s mineral resources a staple of his economic vision. While Morales spoke of using these resources to benefit all Bolivians, deals that would bring the benefits he claimed never really materialized. [...]
[Globally] China dominates the production of lithium-ion batteries, for the same reason it rules so many other areas of manufacturing: moderately cheap, well-educated labor mixed with extensive infrastructure, combined with major government investment in electric vehicles. That’s an issue U.S. strategists have raised in the last few years, but the problem isn’t a lack of supply of lithium itself; China sources most of its lithium from Australia and Chile, rather than domestic mining.
Chile and Argentina have far higher-quality reserves of lithium and more favorable climatic conditions for the type of lithium mining carried out in South America. That means they are much, much more appealing as a source of lithium than Bolivia is, at least with current technology. They are also both allies of the United States, as is Australia, the other major lithium producer. In other words, there’s no need for Washington to resort to shady means to ensure a questionable source for something it already has a plentiful supply of.
During the course of the phone call from the restaurant [in Kyiv, Ukraine], [US Ambasssador to EU Gordon] Sondland also consulted with Trump on another matter of importance to the president at the time: efforts to free the American rapper A$AP Rocky from jail in Sweden at the request of reality television star Kim Kardashian.
The same day as his July 25 phone call with Zelensky, Trump lashed out at Sweden on Twitter and demanded the nation free the American rapper despite his assault charge from his role in a street brawl.
“Give A$AP Rocky his FREEDOM,” Trump tweeted. “We do so much for Sweden but it doesn’t seem to work the other way around. Sweden should focus on its real crime problem!”
Sondland, according to [American diplomat David] Holmes’s opening statement, advised Trump to “let him get sentenced, play the racism card, give him a ticker-tape when he comes home.” Sondland added that Sweden should have released the rapper on Trump’s word, but the president could at least tell the Kardashians he tried, according to Holmes’s recollection.
According to a senior White House aide, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a diplomatic issue, Sondland was involved in the A$AP Rocky effort because of his relationship with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and because Trump saw him as “the Europe guy.”
Apart from sending national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who was then his top hostage negotiator, to intervene in the matter, Trump pressured Sweden’s leader on a phone call to release the rapper, saying that the United States does a lot for Sweden and Sweden should do this for him, according to a U.S. official.
Swedish officials tried to explain they needed to let the courts deal with the matter, but Trump was angered, saying it should have been easy for the Swedish government to do as he asked, the official said. Swedish officials were baffled by Trump’s aggressive involvement in the case, the official added.
In early August, Sweden released A$AP Rocky from jail after he was detained for a month on assault charges. According to the official familiar with the episode, Trump was frustrated that he didn’t get enough credit for securing the rapper’s release.
'“I think people forget I worked for 10 years as a management
consultant,” Romney said, referring to his time at Bain & Company.
“Which meant I was able to make no decisions, I was able to get nothing
done, and I had to try and convince people through a long process.” In
retrospect, it seems, he was destined for the U.S. Congress.'
I don't know about you, but to me, it feels like the past couple of years have been, or will be, significant turning points in world history.
Let's take the future of work, for instance. A depressing Deloitte report from April suggests that, in essence, there will be more work for the same (or less) pay going forward. Looking from my own personal perspective, as a (finance) professional working in Indonesia for 15+ years, I'm already seeing big changes. As long as I can remember, every engineering student's dream is to have a comfy career at a foreign oil company; nowadays, the likes of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, and Schlumberger have mostly pulled out of the country, thanks to mismanagement/bad policy domestically, and more interesting shale developments in other parts of the world. Just ten years ago, management/MBA students all flocked to investment banks, management consulting, or private equity jobs. Today, those IB shops have shuttered their Jakarta offices, and PE outfits have stayed quiet (maybe unexciting IRR numbers are part of the reason?). Consulting is still around, but in a much smaller scale: mostly serving government contracts. The dream jobs today? Startups! Wonder how long this trend will last (/cough WeWork) -- so let's all enjoy this Softbank subsidy while it's still there.
Don't forget BREXIT -- yes it's still in the news, and it's still happening...someday? We've grown tired of the (usually racist) rhetoric, failed House of Commons votes, and endless delays -- basically all the bad stuff that leads to Boris Johnson. But when the dust settles, Brexit will most likely be the biggest moment in European history since the WWII. There will be dislocation regardless of what happens end of this month, and who knows what/where dominoes will fall next. Grexit was an over-hyped dud, but London is Europe's financial powerhouse!
.@EUCouncil will meet this week (17-18 October) for the last scheduled #EU leaders’ meeting before 31 October.
At least it's made a celebrity out of John Bercow.
Also don't forget CHINA!
Hong Kong has been Asia's financial capital for my entire lifetime. I've only been there only 3 times in the past 20 years on brief business trips, but I found the city safe, welcoming, easy to navigate -- always familiar. Back in 1997, I was too young to understand what the handover meant, but looking at it now after 5 months of unrelenting protests -- and no sign of Beijing giving in -- in all likelihood, Hong Kong's stature will be forever diminished. Bigly. All the locals with means have already fled, bringing along their fortune outside the reach of CCP's grabby hands. China will be pained by this, given its insurmountable homemade economic problems. And the rest of Asia will not escape unharmed. Even Lebron James feels the pain.
[You may think] China has a Streisand-effect problem, in which trying to censor an event creates even more publicity. But that assumes the Chinese government doesn’t understand the Streisand effect, and that can’t be right, because if one government understands attention dynamics online, it’s China’s. [...] the Chinese government has been very good at burying important news by distracting from it with other, flashy but unrelated news. This shows a subtle and powerful understanding of the Streisand effect: Instead of censoring, China diverts attention. It’s actually a myth that everything is censored in mainland China. The government tends to let some things circulate, partly as a means to gauge public opinion, which helps solve the problem that plagues all authoritarian governments: They become blind to trouble spots.
[...] maybe we are entering a new age when China will push around Western companies to make its point. For all we know, Xi Jinping is looking across the Pacific at the crumbling governance, the failing infrastructure, the hollowed-out manufacturing capacity, the myriad elite failures, and the general decay in Western societies and has decided that the time is here to confidently declare that if you want to do business with China, its China’s way or the (crumbling) highway. He might have decided that the time when it needed to deploy strategic silence on the divergence in stated values is over, essentially telling us “Free speech, free shmeech” and getting away with it.
Or, alternatively, in this truly global and interconnected world, China might be experiencing its own form of failure and weakness, with a more and more centralized rule pushing a cult of personality around the leader. After all, China has its own problems with decadence, corruption, and inequality. Many high-level officials have families with multiple passports and expansive overseas wealth. A mixture of authoritarian malaise and loss of agility might be causing the country to lash out, without proper strategic analysis. This same dynamic seems to be at work in China’s approach to the Hong Kong protests, which could have been defused early through a few symbolic concessions. It’s as though China doesn’t even understand a city that is under its own jurisdiction.
We've all been here. At first your new partner is exciting and great on Fox News. A year later you're sleeping in separate bedrooms and you start thinking about your ex https://t.co/9L6CGGA0HV
