#...blame it on capitalism or blame it on hubris or blame it on lack of insight... but when you discover how directly connected...

[uncanny-tranny]

On the "darker" side of being comforted by one's immortality (not in the physical, but metaphorical), I've always been comforted by bone needles.

The idea that even after death, you've still been remembered by how you are used. No, bone needles probably weren't used with human bones, but it's a reminder that you aren't just going to... disappear. I'm comforted in the knowledge that I don't end in a "me" but in a "we," in nature. Everything about me is reused material so much more ancient than I am, and knowing that, I feel so much closer to the world.

[cannoli-reader]

Disability and rehabilitation pt. 2

So my last post about Jaime Lannister on this issue got a bit long, so I split them up.  This is going to be the Wheel of Time one. And should not be long, because the Wheel of Time character I was thinking of is not nearly as significant to the series as Jaime is to his. 

It’s Siuan. I know lots of people don’t see a redemption arc there, because a lot of them don’t think she needs one.  All over the fandom, I see people raving about Siuan and how she’s so strong and lost so much and she keeps going. Okay. That’s true.  But not all virtues are exclusive to good people.  Courage does not make you a good person, for instance.  Arguably, Sammael is pretty courageous.  And neither does perseverance or tenacity.  You have to apply those traits to something more than self-preservation or personal gain.  

What I think happens with Siuan is that we get too small a sample of her actions in the beginning of the series, and find out more about her later, except the imposition of her disability rehabilitates her in the readers’ eyes, which in turn affects the hindsight view of the early books.

At the outset of the story, Siuan has been Amyrlin for about a decade, and despite the hagiography from her friends, she was not a very good one.  Siuan is not a good leader, though she can be a very good advisor and would probably make a pretty competent bureaucrat.  She is unquestionably intelligent with a good analytical mind, but that does not make her a leader.  Off-setting these strengths is that she lacks vision.  She works much better under a leader who has ideas she can work to bring to fruition.  Unfortunately, she has an inordinate amount of pride as well. And when she rises far and fast, she ends up lacking any counter-balancing wisdom.  She gets named Amyrlin at a very young age as a compromise candidate, but rather than walk softly, she takes it and runs, by all accounts being forceful in her manner, and controlling as well. In reaction to the discover of the Horn of Valere, she goes to Fal Dara herself, wreaking havoc on the surrounding environment to expedite her journey, only to bring the Black Ajah, including Liandrin and Alviarin, into the fortress which expedites the theft of the Horn.

The odd thing about Siuan’s carelessness in this regard is that she has known since shortly after getting the shawl about the Black Ajah, and worse, she herself surmised that they are aware of the Dragon’s rebirth and are actively taking measures to get rid of him. In spite of this, she is unable to give up her need to be in control, even when her position and her alienation of the Ajahs means she can’t control her personnel. Once the Black Ajah comes relatively into the open and she has to deal with it, she lets her paranoia take the wheel and, not being able to trust any Aes Sedai, nor to accept that there is nothing she can do, she hands over the investigation to three of the newest initiates of the Tower. She remains obsessed with the Black Ajah and ends up with a tunnel vision focus, to the exclusion of properly managing Tower politics. 

Her absurd solution to the Black Ajah problem, of sending Accepted after them, helps bring her down. While in the case of sending Elayne into danger, she has provided herself with plausible deniability, at least her own satisfaction, she cannot control everyone’s interest in the Daughter-heir, including her brothers and Elaida.  Siuan herself articulated the prestige Elaida has gained from bringing Elayne to the Tower, and the Red sister’s interest in Andor has cost her the Amyrlin Seat Siuan is certain Elaida wanted desperately.  The flimsy excuses Siuan finds sufficient to foist off a mere queen who has historically been devoted to the Tower don’t hold up for her sons who are present all the time and are more loyal to their sister than the Aes Sedai, much less her own rival who is far more knowledgeable about Aes Sedai affairs. 

It is her discontent with the situation that inspires Elaida to begin the legwork to depose Siuan. It is his hostility to Siuan for being kept at arm’s length that motivates Gawyn to help foil her allies’ counter-coup.

And this is also characteristic of Siuan, that she focuses on the top-down approach to problems.  When she has a plan to unify Murandy under a strong king, and she anticipates her candidate’s habit of raiding into Andor could endanger the plan, she decides to keep Andor from fighting him. Her approach is to go to Morgase and force her to keep her troops away from the area of his depredations, to minimize the risk to him. Siuan grew up in a tyrannical nation that oppresses its people and then she moved to the hierarchy-obsessed White Tower, so to her way of thinking, all you have to do is give orders to your lessers, and that’s the end of it. She makes absolutely no accommodation to Morgase, does nothing to get her to buy in to Siuan’s program, offers her nothing that we know of in exchange for compelling her to commit an egregious dereliction of her duty to her subjects.

For all that she lays the blame for Morgase’s anger toward the Tower on Elayne leaving unexpectedly, maybe she would have accepted Elayne’s absence from Tar Valon, if she was not also dealing with the biggest headache of her reign, brought on by Siuan’s high-handed interference in her rule. The riots and demonstrations against Morgase and her relationship to Elaida and Tar Valon are blamed on the Whitecloaks stirring them up, but since when are they that competent?  Eamon Valda was the one left in command in Caemlyn after Geofram Bornhald was recalled to Amador.  Straight-arrow Galad runs rings around Valda in the PR game and we’re really supposed to believe he’s responsible for swaying public opinion in the capital against a beloved and long-reigning queen? But even if Bornhald got the ball rolling in the brief time he could have been in Caemlyn, there had to be some discontent for the Children to work off of, and Morgase abandoning her borders after a meeting with the Amyrlin Seat is the best reason we have to go off of.  And of course, the Tower’s standard MO means she would not have bothered to walk back her command and let Morgase resume defending her borders after Siuan’s candidate is killed by an ordinary farmer who objected to being robbed, no matter how central the thief was to Aes Sedai plans.

It’s a major weakness of Siuan, that she thinks all she has to do is give orders.  She really makes no allowance for differences of opinion, expecting those on her side to stay on her side and to accept her commands.  She does not expect compelling Morgase to have domestic blowback. She does not expect her handling of Elayne to anger her family or to turn Elaida, who has a clearly demonstrated long-term interest in Elayne and Andor, against her.  She does not expect her high-handed manner to incite sisters against her, or her secretive behavior to give credence to the arguments for deposing her, even though she knew being deposed was a possibility.

And part of that secrecy was kind of unnecessary. Siuan was the one who determined that the Black Ajah knew the Dragon was Reborn.  Once she was Amyrlin, there was no further reason for secrecy, since the only people who didn’t know about it were the good guys. What’s more, it was, like the Murandy operation, not just wrong, but futile.  The secrecy depended on no one being able to trace her to Rand, which in turn counted on people not remembering how close she had once been to the one sister who’d been with Rand at every turn. Even after Verin pointed out how obvious the whole setup was to anyone who had been paying attention, she still tried to maintain secrecy.  And you can’t fault the Hall’s annoyance at being kept in the dark about the imminent apocalypse or the hubris of an Amyrlin a fifth the age of many of them presuming to manage Tarmon Gaidon and the Dragon Reborn all by herself.  

And the problem here is that all this stuff is backstory. Some of it we don’t learn until after she is deposed, and some of it we only learn the full ramifications of once we have a better grounding in the political realities of the setting.  When Siuan is brought down in The Shadow Rising, our perspective is from her and Min. In Siuan’s mind, of course, she’s the put-upon hero, and her frustrations are reasonable feelings, certainly not an exhibition of entitled expectation that things will go her way. When Elaida reveals that the Hall has voted her out of office, Siuan’s retort is basically “How dare you use politics against me!”  Her indignation that Elaida chose a favorable ground for fighting, that she chose to acquire allies rather than taking on Siuan alone in a personal confrontation where Siuan has all the advantage is either so astoundingly naïve as to disqualify her from ever holding office or a breathtaking piece of hypocrisy given the extent to which Siuan stretches her authority and the rules which put her above other sisters. Not to mention the tactics she will later coach Egwene to employ against people who are her ideological allies.  But without the hindsight we get from seeing a greater pattern of Siuan’s behavior as well as a deeper look at the politics of the series, she seems like a frank and well-intentioned leader who has been brought down by treachery.  In Min’s chapters, we only have Siuan’s presentation of herself and her position, as Min, like the reader, lacks much personal experience of the Amyrlin to see beyond it.  And Siuan frames her actions as helping Rand.  Which, yeah, she thinks she is doing, but just because she thinks it does not make it true.  I’m pretty sure Min’s actions in Tar Valon would have been radically different if she could have been a fly on the wall in Fal Dara when Siuan told Rand that his purpose for existing is to be her tool.  

And then Siuan gets stilled, hence the disability, and redemption in the eyes of those readers who were rubbed the wrong way by her attitude. The journey to Salidar has her one of three women traveling alone and vulnerable to violence and danger, not to mention ending up facing a trial for stuff for which she and her friends were not responsible, and then she gets to Salidar and runs smack into the prejudice of Aes Sedai against those who are not. Her old friends treat her as a lesser being, her qualities that have nothing to do with her channeling, and which are thus unaffected by her disability, are suddenly dismissed and she is treated like some ignorant hick.  All of this makes her the sympathetic underdog, and from the reader’s simplistic binary view of “Elaida, bad: anti-Elaida, good,” Siuan looks good and the reluctance of the Aes Sedai to go to war against the Tower is inexcusable, so her deceptions and manipulations are seen to be for a good cause.

But what casual readers miss is that Siuan is still making the same mistakes. She still thinks, despite her awful track record to date that it’s right and good that she control the Tower’s agenda, as she plans to put a puppet on the Amyrlin Seat to be controlled by a council she herself can manipulate. What I have never seen anyone question is, if she thought Egwene was ignorant enough to be manipulated and controlled by the council and second-hand by her, why on earth did Siuan give her a blanket writ of authority and send her off to hunt Black sisters with only a blocked wilder to manage her? Also, Egwene’s state of mind, courtesy of her Seanchan captivity, evident in her actions outside of Tar Valon and her intractability in the short time she was in the Tower, made that a particularly bad choice.

Furthermore, the meta argument in favor of Salidar over Elaida is that Elaida will try to control Rand, and while the sisters in Salidar have a similar mindset, the protagonists of that arc (Nynaeve, Elayne, Egwene, and incredibly, Siuan) believe otherwise and will prevent it.  And yet, to get her foot in the door, and access to power in Salidar, Siuan trades knowledge Rand’s whereabouts to the ruling council.  Their response was to send the incredibly arrogant Kiruna and Bera to find Rand, with their only apparent selection criterion being the number of warders the pair could bring on a trip to the Aiel Waste.  Later on, she manipulates the choice of which of Rand’s friends to send with the embassy, sending Min whom she believes to be more under her thumb and willing to spy on Rand for her, instead of Elayne, which compounds Elayne’s political problems when she goes to take the throne.

Again, Siuan’s intentions get buried by the fact that she throws in with Egwene and honestly does her best to help, but it was not really her choice, or only her choice insofar as she decided to accept it as her own idea instead of fighting a futile battle. What actually happened was that she let a wilder with little regard for the Tower or Siuan personally see through her decoy tactic, because she still has not learned that when she pretends to not be collaborating with a long-time BFF, someone is going to realize the truth.  As a result, Nynaeve has both insight into Siuan’s activities in Salidar, and the willingness to use that knowledge against her, as well as having incurred a debt beyond repayment by restoring her channeling ability. Siuan cannot say ‘no’ to Nynaeve, and Elayne is politically shrewd enough that she’ll spot attempts to wiggle around her which Nynaeve won’t.  So Siuan’s chances of manipulating or controlling Egwene are pretty much nil with Nynaeve and Elayne at her back.  Her only hope for influence is to throw herself entirely into Egwene’s cause and reap the rewards.  Not unlike Asmodean with Rand or the Forsaken in general with the Dark One.

And what about her work with Egwene? While it’s true she provided indispensable political tutelage and strategy, it’s basically the inverse of her own tenure as Amyrlin, where her supposedly good agenda was derailed by her political failure.  In this case, the excellent performance she coaches Egwene to in the political sphere belies the fact that they have no good agenda.  For one thing, they completely ignore the outside world that both of them presume the Tower has the right to order and control.  When a course of action is proposed in the Hall regarding the Black Tower, a topic of not insignificant interest to Aes Sedai (especially Aes Sedai following a woman who publicly told a group of people concerned about the presence of male channelers in their lands “We got this, mind your own business”), Egwene sits mute through the session of the Hall, because neither her own views nor Siuan’s teaching account for a policy for the Black Tower.

The sole agenda for which Siuan and Egwene are engaging in all these political machinations among the rebels is a military campaign against the White Tower, which is utterly wrong, and probably an unjust war on its own. Egwene will even later repudiate the whole campaign and denounce the very act of marching against the White Tower and besieging Tar Valon…after she has had some time away from Siuan, and Siuan’s own actions have soured Egwene on her counsel.  So either Siuan primed and aimed Egwene to plan and execute a military rebellion against the Amyrlin Seat, or else Egwene had the idea on her own and Siuan blithely went along with it and actively abetted the plan instead of counseling against it or trying to moderate it. 

What it very much looks like is that Siuan leaned into revenge more than fixing a problem.  Starting a war within the White Tower cannot be a good way to reuniting it, as people note several times over the course of the conflict when the issue of pushing the fight to an extreme comes up, but it is a better way to make sure that Elaida goes down.  After all, if they are making war on Elaida personally, the end result of the war has to be Elaida’s downfall, and a declared war against her makes it much less likely Elaida will retain power under a negotiated settlement.  And that, more than anything is Siuan’s agenda.  Just as Elaida is really out for her own glorification when she thinks about saving the Tower, Siuan’s first priority is taking out Elaida.

If saving the Tower was the priority that could still be done within the system.  At the point when Siuan arrives in Salidar and a negotiated settlement is still on the table for the dissenters gathered there, Elaida has not been in a position to do much damage.  What she has begun doing is driving apart the coalition that brought her to the Amyrlin Seat.  If the rebels got some concessions in return for their coming back, there would be no external threat to the Tower to rally support to Elaida when her actions become more extreme under Alviarin’s direction.  There would be an opposition party in the Hall to vote against her more outrageous actions.  Once out of the Hall, Elaida can’t keep holding sittings with only her own faction present, and she has been wearing away that faction with her own Siuan-like behavior.

As it is, in the same book where Siuan reaches Salidar, Elaida has promulgated a blanket amnesty to any sisters who return, so the future issue of the punishments she decrees, such as abolishing the Blue Ajah, is not a factor. Those only become so when Siuan lies about Elaida and the Red Ajah, and begins spreading the story that they created false dragons.  And knowing it’s a lie, knowing the Tower’s tradition of covering for fellow sisters and presenting a united front to the world, of not airing their dirty laundry to outsiders, can you blame Elaida? The funny thing is, Siuan herself was outraged when Rand repeated the same story to her. How did she expect Elaida to react?  Just as she did.  Siuan provoked Elaida into the same indignant reaction she herself felt, for exactly the aim of getting her to lash out, and force the rebels to stay the course out of fear. And as with much of Siuan’s actions in Salidar, you have to say “Smart move. But how does it help?” Is provoking the Amyrlin Seat to acts of tyranny conducive to unifying humanity on the verge of Tarmon Gaidon? Is maintaining the division between sisters to the benefit of the Tower? Clearly not. The only one to benefit is someone who cares much less about those issues than she does about toppling from power the woman who bested her at Tower politics and whose teaching style she resents from when she was a novice and Accepted.

Other lovely advice Siuan gives Egwene is to murder Nicola and Areina for not being protagonists. Because pretty much everything Nicola pulls to try to get ahead is very similar to Egwene. And you can’t even say she’s wrong. She’s almost 25 years old. She had a job and a fiancé. This is a grown woman by any standard you care to name, and if she is willing to take the risks of being forced, she has the right to make that call for herself. Especially with Tarmon Gaidon just around the corner.  A considerably better option than sending away girls with enough strength to reach the shawl, just because they are too boy-crazy to make good Aes Sedai, as Siuan did with Else Grinwell.  I’m pretty sure Vandene’s assessment the book before she did so was that the Tower would need every novice capable of lighting a candle, as long as they weren’t too interested in good-looking men, right?

But because of mere political inconvenience, Siuan wants to murder Nicola, removing one of the strongest living initiates in the Tower, not to mention one who’s pretty clever, and capable of outmaneuvering sisters, on top of the sheer evil of the notion. And ethically, by assuming all authority over a novice’s actions and choices, by infantilizing her as the Tower does, treating them as literal children, the Tower has a responsibility to protect them as if they were children in truth.  Murdering Nicola is as profound a betrayal of the White Tower’s duties as the crime she slanders Elaida for committing.  

And speaking of slander, in a world where oaths are taken seriously, where they are sufficient grounds to alter the sentence of a convicted criminal, Siuan swore an oath never to tell a lie. And promptly broke it the moment she was physically capable of doing so. She did not put conditions on the Oaths when she swore them, there was no expiration date, no proviso that she would only live up to them so long as she held a certain status.  She not only broke her oath; she did so to abuse others’ trust because they thought that it still held.

As an example of her teaching Egwene how to be Amyrlin, not just what to do, there is the discussion after Moghedian escapes.  Egwene, in a moment of panic, commits an egregious violation of tradecraft to meet Siuan and Leane for no real practical gain, and demands they conduct an investigation that will further endanger their covers.  Ostensibly, the subject of the investigation is Egwene’s runaway servant, which just might cause people to start wondering at the attention the issue is getting. And there is nothing to be gained by it either. As Siuan points out, none of them know what the Forsaken look like and there is nothing that could be done with anything they do learn about whoever released Moghedian. Egwene slaps down Siuan, demanding to know if the mere reassurance she would get from having slightly more knowledge than she currently does is too much to ask. But it kind of is, considering how many stand to suffer if Egwene goes down.  If Egwene can reprimand Nynaeve & Elayne for endangering her (and by extension, her whole faction’s) political position by a bargain with the Sea Folk that is nonetheless a positive good for the world, how much more does she deserve a reprimand for something equally dangerous to that position with nothing to be gained by the risk? Okay, but she’s still learning.  Whose job is it to set her straight on that?  Siuan’s. And what does Siuan tell her? That she was right to flip out on Siuan, that no one may be impertinent to the Amyrlin Seat!

Before Siuan started filling Egwene’s head with nonsense like that, Egwene understood the need for people to treat rulers and leaders like normal human beings. That is was important for her friends to treat her like their friend, instead of their office. That rulers needed to be told the truth, even if they did not like it. We see in the same book where Siuan tells Egwene not to let anyone be rude to her, Cadsuane being deliberately rude to tell Rand things he needs to hear, because he’s not going to listen to people being deferential and obsequious. Leane tried respect on coming into the tent with “Mother, this is unwise,“ and Egwne’s response is IDGaF.  She needs to hear when she’s doing something stupid, but Siuan doubles down on the Amyrlin being above normal human interaction, not least because she’s defending her own track record of arrogance and entitlement.

Recall that when Anaiya brought up her behavior as Amyrlin when she first arrived in Salidar, stating that she abused her authority and forced people to do what she wanted, Siuan’s reaction is to scoff that the Amyrlin can’t treat every sister like a buddy.  Except that’s not what Anaiya was saying at all. Siuan was acting like respect and basic courtesy are special favors to close friends.  Her reaction is more like a child using a semantic digression rather than reflect on what they did wrong. Why does she think people listened to Elaida as they did not to all the other opponents of Amyrlins who wanted to depose one? Either all but two other Amyrlins who managed to not get deposed DID treat people like girlhood pals, or else Siuan’s behavior was considerably worse than merely failing to be besties.

Just about the only positive thing we know Siuan did as Amyrlin was create the title ‘Mistress of the Kitchens’. I suppose you could count raising the Wondergirls to Accepted, but that’s more of a Doylist good idea.  From the point of view of the White Tower and forming girls into proper Aes Sedai it was a tragic blunder, and Siuan had no intention of undermining the process or protecting the girls from being conditioned into obedient sisters. She just thought that her commands took precedence over 3,000 years’ institutional experience in indoctrination.

Siuan Sanche is a rude, petulant bully, who would destroy the White Tower or the authority of the Amyrlin Seat if she cannot hold them herself. She does a poor job teaching Egwene, who reaches her greatest heights after getting away from her teaching, and blames the Siuan-led rescue in defiance of her standing orders for her inability to reunite the Tower without a fight. Upon her triumph, Egwene publicly denounces and repudiates the course of action to which Siuan counseled her. When she held power herself, Siuan presided over a world going to the dogs, and engendered resentment against the Tower and its interference in others’ affairs. Her control-freak mentality and utter lack of subtlety or diplomacy gave the Shadow opportunities to steal the Horn of Valere and break the White Tower, and they were far and away the biggest fans of her efforts to exacerbate and prolong the division.

But to all-too-many WoT fans, Siuan is an amazing person for going on and keeping up the fight in spite of all she lost. Yes. Those are great qualities.  And Eamon Valda is a blademaster, with all the discipline, dedication and perseverance that achievement entails.  What matters most about skills and personal qualities is the use to which you put them. You don’t get a pass for putting skills to bad use, for striving for unworthy goals, just because you’ve suddenly lost an ability you once took for granted. Siuan learns nothing from her loss, other than perhaps some lessons about practical politics that might have helped her avoid the loss in the first place.  She continues barreling down her path in the assumption that she knows best and she has the right to do whatever she can get away with because she knows best.  All her disability really does is rehabilitate her in the eyes of the fandom, and cover over her many, many mistakes and the reasons why the Pattern removed her from power as its own champion was rising to fix the mess that was in part her doing.

[freenewstoday]

New Post has been published on https://freenews.today/2020/12/22/opinion-boris-johnsons-horrible-year-dw-22-12-2020/

Opinion: Boris Johnson's horrible year | DW | 22.12.2020

What a year it’s been for Boris Johnson. Last Christmas he was still basking in the afterglow of a comprehensive general election victory that delivered a resounding majority for his Conservatives, made all the sweeter by the inroads the Tories made into Labour’s heartlands in northern England, tearing into the so-called red wall.

What a difference 12 months can make. For someone who prides himself on his background and knowledge of the classics, he, more than anyone, should know that arrogance and hubris is frowned upon by the deities.

DW’s Rob Mudge

Let’s grant him a little slack. To a certain extent, the coronavirus pandemic has been beyond his control. It is, after all, a natural disaster. However, his (mis)management of the crisis has been a man-made catastrophe. I, for one, have lost count of the number of U-turns he has performed in trying to reassure the British public that his government is acting in the best interests of the nation. For someone who misses no opportunity to reference the leadership and vision of his hero, Winston Churchill, he’s sorely lacking in that regard.

Boris’ Brexmas list

His track record on dealing with Brexit is arguably even more dire — for the reason alone that the interminable saga has been dragging on for over four years.

Johnson’s mantra to “get Brexit done,” to unite a bitterly divided nation and to launch a post-Brexit era of sunlit uplands rings hollow, hypocritical and downright cynical.

Lest we forget: This is the man who, in 2013, said “I’d vote to stay in the single market. I’m in favor of the single market.” Writing in the Daily Telegraph at the time, he pointed out that leaving the EU would not solve the UK’s problems.

“If we left the EU, we would end this sterile debate, and we would have to recognize that most of our problems are not caused by ‘Bwussels,’ but by chronic British short-termism, inadequate management, sloth, low skills, a culture of easy gratification and underinvestment in both human and physical capital and infrastructure.”

Honi soit qui mal y pense that he was describing his own shortcomings.

The Brexit blame game

One of the issues he raises sticks out like a sore thumb. His obstinate pursuit of short-term interests to the detriment of a lasting strategy has left the country in a shambolic state. A circumspect prime minister faced with a mounting health emergency would have asked the EU for an extension to the Brexit transition period, which ends on December 31. No doubt Brussels would have granted his wish. Instead, his solipsistic and destructive attitude tears at the fabric of British society and threatens to plunge the country into a protracted crisis.

Johnson’s main argument throughout the Brexit process has been his insistence on reclaiming British sovereignty and freeing the country from the perceived shackles of the EU. A first-year economics student could tell him that any type of post-Brexit trade deal will require the UK to make concessions on national interests. It’s called living in a globalized world.

Boris Johnson’s Brexit sunlit uplands seem to exist only in his fantasy

This is not to suggest that the EU has presented itself in the talks as a beacon of altruism. Far from it. There have been a plethora of missed opportunities, mixed messages and a fair amount of intransigence.

Fishy business

However, the EU delineated its so-called red lines back in 2017 when talks got underway. All along, Brussels made it clear that it would not budge on establishing a level playing field on trade and competition and securing EU fishing rights in a post-Brexit scenario. On the latter, just as a side note, it’s worth pointing out that the UK’s fishing industry amounts for just 0.1% of the country’s economic output. Most of the fish caught by UK fishermen is exported to the EU. Most of the fish that lands on the plates of British households is imported. To rephrase a previous Brexit metaphor: The UK can have its fish and eat it.

In finishing, let’s return to Johnson’s love of the literae humaniores. As an adherent of classical Greek language and literature, he will no doubt be familiar with the term kakistocracy — a system of government that is run by the worst, least qualified, and/or most unscrupulous citizens. Personally, I prefer the way the 19th-century word snollygoster rolls off the tongue: an unprincipled individual who is driven entirely by political gain.

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[jonjost]

Each day the headlines shout a new story: Hong Kong, Epstein, Trade War, El Paso…

The stock market leaps or plunges, a heat wave wilts half of Europe or the US. Our attentions are yanked this way and that, each event instantly transmitted across the globe and magnified in importance.   At the same time each event is instantly diminished, dwarfed by the next super-duper life-changing event.

And life goes on in its mundane manner, people talk and shop, they eat and make love and die.

We all live, not in a Yellow Submarine, but rather in a vast collective schizophrenia factory, in which each of us, in more or less everything we do, make our offering to the god of Thanatos, though most of us are blissfully unaware of it.  We flick on our computer and go on-line.  It seems effortless, and some make the argument that it is so much more efficient, more “ecological” as we don’t need to chop down trees to make paper to stick in an envelope to put in a box to go in a truck to go in a plane back to a truck to your front door.  Nope, more or less at the speed of light you can have the world’s best library at your finger tips.  And indeed you can, and like most human bookkeeping the real bill is kept well out of sight.

The real bill for our convenience is that we are – well, probably it is already past tense, but we can’t see or admit that – that we have already destroyed the little planet on which we live.

The above map indicates places in the world under severe water supply stress, places which in a few years will either have to magically find some other water source, or be abandoned.  There will be no magic.  One will note that many of these areas are among the most densely populated in the world (India, parts of China, the US southwest, parts of Europe.)  Lack of water also equals lack of food.  Great migrations will occur as those living there are forced to leave, or die from famine.  This has already birthed serious political forces, giving rise to authoritarian regimes to fend off immigrants.  In the coming decade this will become far more severe, and there will be a mass human die-off (to join the other mass extinction of other living creatures already well in process), of billions of people.

What we humans do, everyday, is what is responsible for this drastic change in the world.  It is our mix of religions, born in other times, which prompts us to reproduce, adding to the biological base-line which does so anyway, but religion socially sanctions it, even in the face of the obvious evidence of our over-populating the globe.  There are, plain and simple, way too many of us.

It is our intellectual wizardry which birthed science and its technological off-shoots, which has given us powers far in excess of our ethical capacities.  We are profoundly clever, but not wise.

And then our more recent religion of mercantilism and capitalism, which requires a belief in endless growth, and to which most humans these days subscribe.  It is as irrational as other belief systems, requiring a cinematic suspension of disbelief.  A virgin birth?  People with wings?  Sacred cows?

While powered by science which produces technological wonders, capitalism is as irrational as the metaphysical beliefs which governed humans earlier (and in many parts of the world, still do).  Detached from an intimate connection with the real world – the one of the earth and the biological processes of life and death in its cycles – our modern world has ravaged its own soil; it digs, extracts, and destroys the given world, taking its raw materials and making of them new elements, spewing these heedlessly about, poisoning the vast oceans and skies with toxins.  A great extinction, this one provoked by human actions, is already well under way.  We are drowning the world in the poisons of our cleverness. Along with most mammalian species and many others biological organisms, we will also be among its victims.

Uniquely, we can say we are responsible, for it is what we have done, collectively, over our long history (but a blip in deep geological time or even biological time), that has brought this upon us.  In the west the Greeks long ago name this: hubris.

Of course, humans being what they are, they always look for a scapegoat, someone else to blame.  It is those people who over-produce, it is those people who are different, who are to blame.  It is those people who look different, speak a different language, have different beliefs – they are to blame.

America is 4.4 % of the world’s human population; it occupies 7% of the world’s landmass.  And its society consumes 25% of the world’s resources.  It doesn’t do this our of some mystical capacity for innovation and invention and such: it does it by having, since the end of World War Two, a monopoly control over the global economy through economic extortion and blackmail in having a strangle-hold on trade through mechanisms which have made the US dollar the de facto means of exchange.  It has used this to force others to follow its dictates, and where the raw economic force does not produce submission, the USA maintains the largest, by far, military, with which it enforces America’s political diktats with violence.

  The truth is we are all to blame – some surely more than others, with Americans and Europeans especially owing to their history, but finally it is all of us.  I suspect it was evolutionarily fated, and that in many other places in our universe the same experiment has been replicated and arrived at the same conclusion.

Consciousness coupled to the basic requisites of evolutionary survival would always arrive in the same place.  We live, today, in a world which we are told is normal, the only possible world, and yet which is, with more or less every act we do – eating food brought from far away, receiving our convenient Amazon delivery, putting the garbage out in a plastic bag, driving here or there, turning on the light, or reading this – committing collective suicide.

  The Schizophrenia Factory Each day the headlines shout a new story: Hong Kong, Epstein, Trade War, El Paso... The stock market leaps or plunges, a heat wave wilts half of Europe or the US.

[mikemortgage]

Terence Corcoran: Don’t blame ‘rich’ bankers for the 2008 global crash. Blame socialism

Here’s something you probably don’t want: another take on the causes and significance of the Great ’08 Financial Collapse to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the destruction of Lehman Brothers. The Wall Street giant blew up on Sept. 15, 2008, leaving a trillion-dollar global financial mushroom cloud that almost (they say) destroyed the world economy.

Assorted columnists have been reworking the ground over the last few weeks, their wisdom, or lack thereof, piled on top of a bazillion words produced over the past 10 years by journalists, academics and insiders. Searching Lehman Brothers on Amazon produces a list of 224 books, most of them pointing to free-market capitalism and too-big-to-fail Wall Street banking sleazeballs as the primary causes of the greatest financial and economic scare since the Great Depression.

However, there appears to be a growing awareness that the underlying causes of the 2008 global financial disaster had little to do with free markets, executive compensation, corporate giganticism, banker malfeasance or the other mythical beasts of business that have been blamed for the financial collapse.

That the collapse of Lehman Brothers was the final explosive device that rocked the world financial system is beyond dispute. But why and how Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail is another story told with new insight in the latest book, The Fed and Lehman Brothers: Setting the Record Straight on a Financial Disaster, by Johns Hopkins University economist Laurence Ball. In Ball’s view, Lehman did not have to fail and was instead executed by agencies of the U.S. government.

Those agencies were the Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke, the New York Fed under Timothy Geithner and the U.S. Treasury under Hank Paulson. Ball’s research uncovers scores of contradictions and self-serving, even deceptive actions on the part of three players. In the end, political rather than financial judgments drove them to make bad decisions for the wrong reasons.

They forced Lehman to file for bankruptcy on Sept. 15th after bailing out others, including Bear Stearns, a few days earlier. A day later, they rescued insurance giant AIG. The reasons for letting Lehman fail, says Ball, were concocted and unsupportable:

“The truth is that Lehman’s failure could have been avoided, and that policymakers did not have to be particularly clever to achieve that outcome,” he writes. “Lehman only needed the kind of well-secured liquidity support that the Fed provided liberally to other financial institutions… Indeed, Lehman probably could have survived if the Fed had merely not taken actions to restrict its access to the Primary Dealer Credit Facility on September 14.”

Former Bank of England governor Mervyn King, in his book on the crisis, The End of Alchemy, wrote that allowing Lehman to go into bankruptcy “triggered a run on the U.S. banking system (that) took off with extraordinary speed.” That run spread around the world.

The long-term impact of the Lehman fiasco has yet to play out. In its aftermath, central banks and government agencies have been handed massive new regulatory powers over financial firms and markets. In Ball’s view, these new powers contain the seeds of further crises.

He argues that the post-collapse legislative extravaganza, the 2,300-page Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act of 2010, entrenches the idea that the Fed should not be allowed to rescue financial institutions. Future crises are inevitable, says Ball, but “under these rules, future Fed leaders may be helpless to counter runs on financial institutions,” even when rescues can be backed by collateral.

The main opposition to bailouts, then and now, is political. The prime motivations for Dodd-Frank were rampant anti-bank sentiment and a populist rage against the rescue of wealthy bankers and their cronies. Bernie Sanders called it “socialism for the rich.” The current standard-bearer of the anti-banker, anti-corporate movement, Elizabeth Warren, recently said: “Ten years ago, a bunch of enormous banks got taxpayer bailouts while American consumers got a punch in the gut.” And a recent Financial Times recap on the Lehman anniversary blamed the financial collapse on “hubris, greed, opacity — and tunnel vision among financiers.”

But the real causes of the 2008 disaster have already been devastatingly exposed by British regulatory expert Oonagh McDonald. In two books (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Turning the American Dream into a Nightmare and Lehman Brothers: A Crisis of Value), McDonald lays out the disastrous confluence of bad policies, manipulative personalities and what can only be described as a run of political game-playing and borderline corruption within the U.S. political system.

In her book on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored mortgage enterprises at the heart of the crisis, McDonald documents the populist political origins of the housing and mortgage policies that fostered the subprime-mortgage meltdown that led to Lehman’s collapse and the subsequent stock-market crash. She pinpoints 1995 as the launch toward the crisis. That’s when then president Bill Clinton outlined his “National Home Ownership Strategy,” or what McDonald refers to as “the affordable housing ideology.”

In Clinton’s words: “This is the big deal. This is about more than money and sticks and boards and windows. This is about the way we live as people and what kind of society we’re going to have.” George W. Bush later expanded that effort with a program called “Blueprint for the American Dream” of home ownership.

Massive national institutional resources — government and private — were ultimately corralled and coerced into government-mandated programs that were ultimately designed to provide mortgages to people who had no money to make down payments and insufficient income to carry a mortgage. Between 1995 and 2007, trillions of dollars flowed into housing people could not afford.

The scale of this national campaign, incorporating both small banks and massive banks through scores of government agencies and financial firms, beggars description. In a juicy appendix, McDonald lists the political contributions of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other mortgage players. In the years prior to the crash, Fannie Mae donated more than $80 million in political contributions. Millions more poured in from local government and private players.

The idiocy of the policies apparently eluded even the Fed, where then chairman Bernanke defended the advantage of subprime lending policies that made “homeownership possible for households that in the past might not have qualified for a mortgage.” That rise in home ownership — from 65 per cent in 1995 to 69.2 in 2005 — later evaporated. By 2014, notes McDonald, the ownership rate had collapsed to 63.9 per cent, a function of the credit crisis and the necessary restructuring that followed the bad policies.

In the end, the bailouts were not examples of “socialism for the rich.” The root cause of the 2008 financial crisis was a massive and misguided decade-long succession of policy manipulations aiming to provide backdoor redistribution to the poor. The objective was to funnel capital to fund mortgages and housing for people who could not afford them.

The crisis of 2008 was not a product of capitalism or markets or the inherent greed of bankers. It grew out of populist political posturing and manipulation of the market economy to attain social objectives. It was a colossal failure of socialism for the poor.

from Financial Post https://ift.tt/2Q9QoBZ via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

[ntrending]

‘Nobody thought it would come to this’: Drug maker Teva faces a crisis

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/nobody-thought-it-would-come-to-this-drug-maker-teva-faces-a-crisis/

‘Nobody thought it would come to this’: Drug maker Teva faces a crisis

Three days after Teva’s announcement, some workers burned tires outside a Teva plant while others tied up rush-hour traffic with street protests. It went beyond workers, with people across the country taking part in a half-day strike that closed banks, government institutions, the stock exchange and Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv.

Teva employees continued to protest for days. “There is uncertainty, fear,” said Lital Nahum, a 25-year-old lab worker who was sitting on a wall outside a Teva plant in Jerusalem last week, as two dozen other striking workers milled around. “Nobody thought it would come to this.”

With domestic plants targeted for closing, many people argued that Teva factories in India and Ireland should be closed before any in Israel. Mr. Netanyahu agreed and said that the government would use “various means at our disposal” to urge the company to keep its plants in Jerusalem open.

Mr. Netanyahu did not specify what those means might be, but a guilt trip appeared to be his only weapon. Teva has enjoyed tax breaks and subsidies worth nearly $6 billion over the past decade.

Whatever approach Mr. Netanyahu used, it did not work. A meeting on Dec. 19 with Kare Schultz, Teva’s recently hired chief executive, yielded little more than a curt statement from the prime minister’s office announcing plans for studying ways to provide fired workers with training and to help them find new jobs.

Mr. Schultz, in a statement of his own, sounded like a man ready to carry out the unhappy task he had been hired to perform. “Unfortunately, Teva is unable to consent to the request of the prime minister and ministers and avoid the closure of the plant in Jerusalem,” he said in the statement. He described this and other measures as “painful but absolutely vital,” and he added that it was “designed solely to achieve our shared aspirations to sustain Teva as a strong global company, managed out of and based in Israel.”

This is a crushing moment for a company that has been the pride of Israel for decades. Its origins date to 1901, when its predecessor opened in Jerusalem as a drug wholesaler, distributing products throughout the area on camels and donkeys.

Teva went public in 1951 on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Its biggest break came in 1967, when Israel passed a law allowing domestic manufacturers to make clones of drugs produced by foreign pharmaceutical companies. Many of those companies had ceased doing business in the country in response to the Arab boycott. Teva gained expertise in producing copycat drugs and its revenue soared.

“I used to say that we should thank God for bringing us the Arab boycott,” Eli Hurvitz, who retired as Teva’s chief executive in 2002 after more than 25 years at the helm, said in 2004. “Without it, our company wouldn’t exist.”

Through aggressive expansion, Mr. Hurvitz built Teva into the world’s largest producer of generic drugs. By the time he died in 2011, one in six prescriptions in the United States — for arthritis, diabetes, epilepsy, high blood pressure and the list goes on — were Teva drugs.

A businessman and a Zionist, Mr. Hurvitz built factories in economically distressed parts of Israel, hoping to employ citizens in need. He insisted that Teva’s soul and brain remain in Israel, even as the company built factories and hired thousands of workers around the world.

The company has edged away from having an Israeli-centric identity, in ways small and large. Mr. Schultz, the new chief executive, is Danish, and although he is not the first foreigner to hold the job, he is the first non-Jew. This has led to some grumbling among Teva employees, who believe that he lacks an emotional stake in the country.

But several pharmaceutical experts have applauded his arrival. They say that his track record at Novo Nordisk, the drug company based in Denmark where he spent much of his career, is impressive, and that an unsentimental eye is precisely what Teva needs.

“He’s very blunt and direct and that works very well in Israel,” said Ronny Gal, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein. “But cuts are just a way to balance the books, not a long-term strategy. So there will be a long process of recovery. I expect twists and turns for years to come.”

Teva’s most immediate problem is its $35 billion debt. The company is so squeezed for cash that it might have to renegotiate deals with banks and even bond holders, said Sabina Levy, the head of research at Leader Capital Markets, an Israeli brokerage.

“There are not a lot of other things the company can do right now,” she said. “They can’t bring another growth driver into the company in a short period of time. And they don’t have the cash to buy a growth driver. The only thing they can do is cut costs.”

Some high-profile pundits in Israel have inveighed against Teva’s leadership, blaming greed and hubris for the company’s predicament. But even detractors acknowledge the challenges facing the generic-drug market. Prices have been on a downward trend since 2010, mostly because retail chains have combined with pharmacy-benefit managers and drug wholesalers, creating buying giants with vastly enhanced bargaining power.

There is also a significant threat to Teva’s balance sheet that has been looming for years. The company sells a branded drug that it patented called Copaxone, which treats multiple sclerosis. A huge success, Copaxone has provided as much as 40 percent of Teva’s operating profit in some years.

Copaxone went off patent this year and generic-drug makers are now producing their own versions, eroding Teva’s profits. This may be the essence of turnabout as fair play, given that Teva has been cashing in on expiring patents for decades.

Teva’s management anticipated the patent and pricing issues well in advance, and decided that the company should buy its way out of the problem through major acquisitions. Several of those deals are now considered disasters, none moreso than the $40.5 billion acquisition of Actavis from Allergan, a rival generic-drug maker, in July 2015.

At the time, a former Teva chief executive, Jeremy Levin, described it as a great deal — for Allergan. He and others believed that given the continuing decline in generic prices, Teva had vastly overpaid for the acquisition. Other critics have long said that pursuing market share in the generic-drug business was a mistake.

“Israel is a high-cost country compared to China and India and in the end commodity competition isn’t for us,” said Benny Landa, an industrialist and outspoken Teva shareholder. “What Israel is outstanding at is innovation, science, creativity, developing new things — specialty drugs which have high margins.”

For now, Teva executives have little choice but to manage the fallout from a restructuring plan that is intended to save $3 billion by 2019.

In an industrial section of Jerusalem this week, a sign on the locked gates at a Teva plant declared, “With great sorrow and heartfelt pain we announce the passing of Teva Jerusalem, of blessed memory.” A large banner proclaimed the support for Teva from the fans of the popular Beitar Jerusalem soccer team.

“The former management made bad decisions and the chain reaction led to the collapse here,” said Aharon Cohen, 33, a machine operator for the past four years, who was protesting last Wednesday. “Of course it’s a betrayal. There are married couples working here, people have loans and mortgages.”

Share & Written By CNBC

[deniscollins]

‘Nobody Thought It Would Come to This’: Drug Maker Teva Faces a Crisis

The pharmaceutical company Teva has enjoyed government tax breaks and subsidies worth nearly $6 billion over the past decade, but is experiencing an economic downturn. In choosing which plants to close, would you close plants: (1) based on costs and strategic planning issues, or (2) show favoritism in keeping domestic plants open over plants abroad? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

To the rest of the world, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries is simply one of the world’s biggest makers of generic drugs. In Israel, it is the corporate version of a national celebrity.

The first homegrown, global success story and one of Israel’s largest employers, Teva is both a source of pride and a symbol of the country’s financial ambitions. Its place in the Israeli public’s imagination is similar to the one General Motors, in its heyday, occupied in America — but in a nation with a population about the size of New York City’s. The company’s shares are owned by so many pension funds that it is known informally as the people’s stock.

Today, many of those people are furious. Management missteps and tectonic shifts in the pharmaceutical business have battered Teva, which faces declining prices for generic drugs and the loss of a patent on a major branded drug. More than $20 billion has been shorn from the company’s market capitalization since 2017 began, cutting Teva’s value roughly in half.

Everyone in Israel knew that layoffs and plant closings were coming, but what was expected was something akin to painful trims. Instead, on Dec. 14, Teva announced what amounted to an amputation.

Roughly 14,000 jobs will be slashed, about one-fourth of the company’s worldwide work force, with 1,700 of those jobs based in Israel. Manufacturing plants will close and parts of the company will be sold. Bonuses were canceled and the stock’s dividend was suspended.

About the only positive reaction to this news came from investors, who sent Teva shares up about 14 percent. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that he would urge the company to “retain its Israeli identity,” words that seemed to mollify no one.

Three days after Teva’s announcement, some workers burned tires outside a Teva plant while others tied up rush-hour traffic with street protests. It went beyond workers, with people across the country taking part in a half-day strike that closed banks, government institutions, the stock exchange and Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv.

Teva employees continued to protest for days. “There is uncertainty, fear,” said Lital Nahum, a 25-year-old lab worker who was sitting on a wall outside a Teva plant in Jerusalem last week, as two dozen other striking workers milled around. “Nobody thought it would come to this.”

With domestic plants targeted for closing, many people argued that Teva factories in India and Ireland should be closed before any in Israel. Mr. Netanyahu agreed and said that the government would use “various means at our disposal” to urge the company to keep its plants in Jerusalem open.

Mr. Netanyahu did not specify what those means might be, but a guilt trip appeared to be his only weapon. Teva has enjoyed tax breaks and subsidies worth nearly $6 billion over the past decade.

Whatever approach Mr. Netanyahu used, it did not work. A meeting on Dec. 19 with Kare Schultz, Teva’s recently hired chief executive, yielded little more than a curt statement from the prime minister’s office announcing plans for studying ways to provide fired workers with training and to help them find new jobs.

Mr. Schultz, in a statement of his own, sounded like a man ready to carry out the unhappy task he had been hired to perform. “Unfortunately, Teva is unable to consent to the request of the prime minister and ministers and avoid the closure of the plant in Jerusalem,” he said in the statement. He described this and other measures as “painful but absolutely vital,” and he added that it was “designed solely to achieve our shared aspirations to sustain Teva as a strong global company, managed out of and based in Israel.”

This is a crushing moment for a company that has been the pride of Israel for decades. Its origins date to 1901, when its predecessor opened in Jerusalem as a drug wholesaler, distributing products throughout the area on camels and donkeys.

Teva went public in 1951 on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Its biggest break came in 1967, when Israel passed a law allowing domestic manufacturers to make clones of drugs produced by foreign pharmaceutical companies. Many of those companies had ceased doing business in the country in response to the Arab boycott. Teva gained expertise in producing copycat drugs and its revenue soared.

“I used to say that we should thank God for bringing us the Arab boycott,” Eli Hurvitz, who retired as Teva’s chief executive in 2002 after more than 25 years at the helm, said in 2004. “Without it, our company wouldn’t exist.”

Through aggressive expansion, Mr. Hurvitz built Teva into the world’s largest producer of generic drugs. By the time he died in 2011, one in six prescriptions in the United States — for arthritis, diabetes, epilepsy, high blood pressure and the list goes on — were Teva drugs.

A businessman and a Zionist, Mr. Hurvitz built factories in economically distressed parts of Israel, hoping to employ citizens in need. He insisted that Teva’s soul and brain remain in Israel, even as the company built factories and hired thousands of workers around the world.

The company has edged away from having an Israeli-centric identity, in ways small and large. Mr. Schultz, the new chief executive, is Danish, and although he is not the first foreigner to hold the job, he is the first non-Jew. This has led to some grumbling among Teva employees, who believe that he lacks an emotional stake in the country.

But several pharmaceutical experts have applauded his arrival. They say that his track record at Novo Nordisk, the drug company based in Denmark where he spent much of his career, is impressive, and that an unsentimental eye is precisely what Teva needs.

“He’s very blunt and direct and that works very well in Israel,” said Ronny Gal, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein. “But cuts are just a way to balance the books, not a long-term strategy. So there will be a long process of recovery. I expect twists and turns for years to come.”

Teva’s most immediate problem is its $35 billion debt. The company is so squeezed for cash that it might have to renegotiate deals with banks and even bond holders, said Sabina Levy, the head of research at Leader Capital Markets, an Israeli brokerage.

“There are not a lot of other things the company can do right now,” she said. “They can’t bring another growth driver into the company in a short period of time. And they don’t have the cash to buy a growth driver. The only thing they can do is cut costs.”

Some high-profile pundits in Israel have inveighed against Teva’s leadership, blaming greed and hubris for the company’s predicament. But even detractors acknowledge the challenges facing the generic-drug market. Prices have been on a downward trend since 2010, mostly because retail chains have combined with pharmacy-benefit managers and drug wholesalers, creating buying giants with vastly enhanced bargaining power.

There is also a significant threat to Teva’s balance sheet that has been looming for years. The company sells a branded drug that it patented called Copaxone, which treats multiple sclerosis. A huge success, Copaxone has provided as much as 40 percent of Teva’s operating profit in some years.

Copaxone went off patent this year and generic-drug makers are now producing their own versions, eroding Teva’s profits. This may be the essence of turnabout as fair play, given that Teva has been cashing in on expiring patents for decades.

Teva’s management anticipated the patent and pricing issues well in advance, and decided that the company should buy its way out of the problem through major acquisitions. Several of those deals are now considered disasters, none moreso than the $40.5 billion acquisition of Actavis from Allergan, a rival generic-drug maker, in July 2015.

At the time, a former Teva chief executive, Jeremy Levin, described it as a great deal — for Allergan. He and others believed that given the continuing decline in generic prices, Teva had vastly overpaid for the acquisition. Other critics have long said that pursuing market share in the generic-drug business was a mistake.

“Israel is a high-cost country compared to China and India and in the end commodity competition isn’t for us,” said Benny Landa, an industrialist and outspoken Teva shareholder. “What Israel is outstanding at is innovation, science, creativity, developing new things — specialty drugs which have high margins.”

For now, Teva executives have little choice but to manage the fallout from a restructuring plan that is intended to save $3 billion by 2019.

In an industrial section of Jerusalem this week, a sign on the locked gates at a Teva plant declared, “With great sorrow and heartfelt pain we announce the passing of Teva Jerusalem, of blessed memory.” A large banner proclaimed the support for Teva from the fans of the popular Beitar Jerusalem soccer team.

“The former management made bad decisions and the chain reaction led to the collapse here,” said Aharon Cohen, 33, a machine operator for the past four years, who was protesting last Wednesday. “Of course it’s a betrayal. There are married couples working here, people have loans and mortgages.”

[grosserfluss]

30 days of suikoden challenge , day 5 ——

favorite star of destiny from suikoden iv

here we gooo the original shitty poncy noble turned antag turned redemption arc also known as my favorite character in s4 and the hands down best unit you can’t tell me otherwise drumrooolll.......... snowe vingerhut!

to be perfectly honest, snowe has one of the best narrative arcs not only in s4, but in my opinion in all of suikoden overall. it’s not only realistic and suitably solemn, but executed in a fashion that makes it believable. considering he’s just about one of the only characters in s4 who experiences any character development whatsoever ( i’m kind of tempted to say the only one...... ), it’s like the development team just put literally all their energy into making his story fantastic and then forgot about everyone else. perks: snowe is fucking amazing. cons: everything else kinda sucks character-wise. not that i’m saying the other characters are exceedingly dry and boring; there are definitely still good eggs in the cast. but none of them get character development; they pretty much stay static throughout the game. nor are they particularly dynamic in and of themselves. snowe is pretty much the only one who doesn’t feel like a trope.

he starts out the game winning trophies in the World’s Worst Best Friend contest left and right. though he’s lazlo’s best friend, it’s pretty much a given that he considers him more of a shadow than how one would really treat their friends. he’s so spoiled and self-absorbed that he never gives a thought to what lazlo thinks or wants — it’s pretty much all about himself and how lazlo can make him look good. he’s not mean to him, perse, but he clearly walks all over him and one gets the impression that he hangs out with him because he likes him, yes, but also because lazlo lets him have his way and because snowe looks good next to him. not surprisingly, he’s also an extremely shallow and immature individual, only allowed to take charge of missions and be in command because his daddy dearest has direct influence on the navy. 

of course, he lets his privileges go to his head — he believes he should be in charge, that everyone should think the best of him, and is just brimming with poncy young nobleman bravado. of course all the other trainees are going to listen to him and support him, because he’s clearly qualified and they’re his friends! the game sets him up wonderfully as a character, and then comes the brilliant moment at the beginning when he drastically fucks up a simple delivery mission when their ship gets attacked by pirates.

here, we find out ( we’d gotten inklings before, but it never really showed itself until this point ) that snowe is a Coward with a capital c. the moment pirates attack, he’s paralyzed by fear and inaction. when people ask him for orders, he totally blanks. and then when lazlo takes over command, snowe is appalled that he “shows him up”. realizing that no one is listening to him ( while he fucking complains about his arm not being able to move, once again showcasing how self-centered he is ) he decides to just abandon ship in a dinghy by himself. later, the player gets satisfaction in watching the commander chew him the fuck out for abandoning ship when he was captain, and praise lazlo for actually getting shit done and fending off the pirates. this moment, of course, becomes the catalyst for all of snowe’s feelings of jealousy as the commander begins to place more trust in lazlo’s abilities ( rightfully, because snowe is a fucking weenis. )

it’s little surprise, then, that when commander glen dies and the rune of punishment transfers over to lazlo, that snowe, not knowing what happened, blames the commander’s death on his friend, resulting in lazlo’s exile. while snowe seems to express some kind of guilt over causing his friend’s exile in what had been a moment of blind panic, he also seems to selfishly realize that this is also the perfect opportunity for him to regain his former esteem with lazlo gone. 

however, no one is surprised when snowe continuously proves himself incompetent over and over again. he gets ousted from the razril and ends up hopping around to a bunch of different places, trying to make a name for himself and get back some of the prestige he once had, joining up with pirates and even the kooluk empire in an attempt to make something out of himself and continue to compete with lazlo. over and over, lazlo and his army encounter him, and each time snowe expresses envy that his best friend is able to be so successful, raising up and leading a unified army, while he continues to fail. he asks “why you?” to which the player doesn’t really have an answer other than snowe’s a fucking immature jackass, but he tries so hard and fails so pathetically because of his lack of understanding that you can’t help but feel sorry for him at the same time, because he just doesn’t get it. he refuses to join you each time out of resentment and jealousy, and you can either kill him or let him go.

if you choose to let him go each time, sending him away in a sad little dinghy after sparing his life, and recruit all the other 107 stars, snowe is your 108th star. i think this is really fitting and symbolic because it’s like your reward for uniting all these people is the chance to give your best friend an opportunity to redeem himself, the one who has clearly thought little of you and sabotaged you since the beginning of the game. the suikoden games focus a lot on the theme of forgiveness — riou and jowy in s2, most notably — but s4′s forgiveness is done so well because, unlike jowy, the player probably doesn’t want to forgive snowe for what he’s done. he was so awful in the beginning, and is the reason lazlo was cast out of razril. he’s been so jealous of you the whole game. but if you choose to be sympathetic to him, you get what becomes a truly equal friendship. the game doesn’t just depict forgiveness for an otherwise sympathetic character, it asks for it from the player for a character who 100% doesn’t deserve it.

and the moment is a truly pitiful one. after you’ve gotten all 107 stars, you’re given the chance to find snowe literally floating on some driftwood in torn up rags for clothing. you’re the leader of a strong, unified army, and he’s hit rock fucking bottom, and when he stands before you and all the people he’s wronged, he knows how low he’s fallen and he’s clearly humbled. he has nothing to say other than “i’m at your mercy”, and when you choose to forgive him and let him join you, he says “i have no choice but to acknowledge how powerless i am. i knew it...i knew it all along”, indicating that he is finally mature enough to realize that everything he’s been doing was out of inferiority complex, and he realizes his mistakes. he thanks you ( for possibly the first time?? ), which shows he’s finally not taking things for granted anymore. the knights surround him in a show of acceptance, and it’s so emotional jfc my heart.

my favorite thing is that his growth comes across in lazlo’s co-op attack with him too. at the beginning of the game, your “friendship” co-op animation consists of lazlo going in and doing all the work, and then snowe coming in and delivering the showy final blow. when you get him again at the end, the co-op has changed to “true friends” and the animation is also different — the two of you are now working together, each pulling his own weight. ( it’s legit one of the best co-ops honestly the dmg output is cray ). i’ve always enjoyed this subtle indication of not only his character development, but also the development of lazlo’s friendship with him to something far more healthy and equal than it used to be.

plus, the fact that you can fish for his alternate outfits that he’s worn throughout the game and dress him up differently is fun. i always put him in his kooluk outfit cause he looks so spiffy and i feel so bad leaving him in those rags haha. he’s also an outstanding unit in my opinion, easily one of the best by end-game. he’s not versatile, but he’s a really powerful melee fighter, and i always stick a fury rune on him and have him doing upwards of 800-1000 dmg per hit, easy. for my play style ( aka. make each unit unto their own one-man army ) snowe is like. the bomb diggity.

so basically, snowe is euram barows but about 20x better. euram was clearly trying to follow the same narrative path as snowe — underdog nobleman who obviously doesn’t have much talent and is trying to sabotage the protag but realizes his mistakes in the end and learns humility. the difference is that snowe, while certainly pathetic and worthy of scorn from the player, is never reduced to farce the same way that euram is. while the player has a hard time taking euram’s bombastic personality and slapstick actions seriously, snowe's repeatedly failed attempts to make something of himself are 100% serious. thus, his endgame redemption feels much more believable than euram’s, which felt really shoehorned in. snowe also shows more inklings of development throughout the game — though he continues to be resentful and envious each time you encounter him, he slowly loses the hubris of early game and starts to visibly question himself well before you get to recruit him, setting up for the moment of his recruitment very nicely. it doesn’t feel sudden or forced at all, unlike euram where it was sort of like you hit a switch and suddenly he got a lobotomy or smth and is now redeemed.

i’ve already written way too much but basically snowe is, in my opinion, the best example of character development and personal narrative in the suikoden series. his early-game self is infuriating, but believable, and his progression through the game is organic and equally well-executed. his redemption is really a redemption — unlike jowy and sialeeds, he didn’t have good intentions for his bad actions. he straight up did awful things and was a pretty awful person. there’s no reason we or lazlo should forgive him. but the point of real forgiveness isn’t to forgive someone you already want to forgive. unlike any other suikoden game, s4 presents us with a character who didn’t have any good, ethical, grey-area reasons for doing what he did, and asks us to forgive him anyway. and when we do, he truly learns from his mistakes and becomes a better person. yells into the void i love snowe!!!

honorable mentions: kika, elenor silverberg, nalkul, ted, helmut

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Note that the title begins with an indefinite article for there are many roots of evil, but the one most invasive and destructive is America’s corpocracy. It is the mother root with two branches that are slowly snuffing out America and the world with it. Those two branches are corporate America and government America. This essay is about the first, corporate America, and specifically, evil corporate leadership, defined here as profoundly immoral, socially irresponsible, and harmfully consequential behavior. There are many scholarly theories of leadership, but neither a scholar nor theory is needed, just ordinary common sense to define leadership. It is simply “the capacity to control the means to get desired ends.” One sentence replaces thousands of pages in dozens of books I have read on the subject. I may have just saved you a lot of unnecessary reading. Great Corporate Leadership: Where? If, instead of being evil, corporate leadership were great we could have great corporations. But we don’t—let me know if you know of any. A great corporation would be one that uses positive means to achieve positive ends. Another way to put it is that a great corporation would be one that is socially responsible, and no corporation can ever meet all six of my criteria for corporate social responsibility. Here are the six: A socially responsible corporation: 1. stays financially viable over the long haul; 2. Provides socially beneficial products and/or services without, 3. knowingly causing any physical, psychological, financial or ecological harm, 4. without externalizing costs (e.g., job outsourcing, waste disposal), 5. without seeking or depending on “warfare welfare” or other government favors such as corporate personhood, campaign financing, lobbying, subsidies, revolving doors, laissez-faire regulations, or criminal immunity, and, 6. conducts business ethically and legally while treating all stakeholders fairly and with dignity. If a corporation and its leadership fail to meet any one or more of those criteria they are socially irresponsible. And the fewer they meet the more evil they are. And all corporations I have ever studied, observed or experienced have flunked one or more of the six. I once followed up on two scholars’ separate lists of what they claimed to be 100 some great corporations due to their sustained profits. Their conventional bottom lines were indeed in the black, but these corporations’ unconventional bottom lines were indeed in the red, falling below the acceptable line of good corporate behavior as evidenced by the incidents in “The Different Police Gazette” to be shown later in this essay. They ought to tell us that corporate greatness requires far more than just being money deep. What exactly keeps corporations from being great? After all, they have the capacity, or power, to become great if that were their aspiration and thus their standard of performance. But neither their aspiration nor standard of performance call for being a socially responsible corporation. Fattening their conventional line is their Holy Grail. But that is not a sufficient answer to the question. The conventional bottom line and the primacy given to it are just two of several intrinsic factors preventing corporate greatness. Other intrinsic factors include a hierarchical organizational structure, or pyramid, in which wrongdoing of any kind is orchestrated at and denied by the top while being carried out at the bottom; rewards for “negative” success (i.e., ill begotten success); and, above all, evil leadership. The latter thrives in a pyramid. Here’s how it works in a pyramid: An ignoble expectation or order starts somewhere higher up and goes down the pyramid in one version or another until it gets to the doers who cannot get rid of it without doing its bidding or getting fired. Here is an illustrative scenario: Top Level-Unrealistically high goals are set without issuing an explicit order to cut legal or ethical corners. Next Level- Translates goals into specific targets and gives hints or wink and nods on unethical or unlawful means of accomplishing them. Next Level- Tells subordinates, the doers, to “do whatever is necessary” or may even spell out the necessary means, such as get the “toxics dumped at night,” or “keep two sets of books.” Thus, the expectation/order may start implicitly, gets less implicit, and eventually becomes blunt as it cascades downward.  However it is couched, the expectation/order is expected to be met or else.  Moral considerations become situational, and the situation is defined by the boss next up the line. As for the intrinsic barrier, evil leadership, we shall return to and expand on it momentarily.. Then there are several extrinsic barriers to greatness that ought to be obvious to anyone reading this essay. They include government handouts even for, or especially for, corporate failures, government either looking the other way, giving wrist slaps, or making lawful in so many different ways what should be unlawful corporate wrongdoing that ranges from the “ordinary” to the truly evil, and, of course, global gobbling capitalism. A Topsy-Turvy Metaphor Roots thrive at the bottom, so my metaphor is topsy-turvy. The evil roots of corporate leadership thrive at the top, as I have illustrated. Evil corporate leadership is synonymous with evil corporations for the latter are under the stewardship of the former. I have never been an insider at the top echelons of corporate pyramids, but I have studied them enough to understand the people there and their internal workings. What follows next are a few pertinent generalizations that obviously do not apply in every instance. What I call “warped” boards of directors tends to have limited influence on who gets to be the CEO. Directors are generally handpicked and usually back the CEO. The average tenure of nearly one-half million CEOs in America is about 10 years, and then a new CEO is ensconced. Nearly 70% of all CEOs are bred internally, which means they have back stabbed and clawed their way to the top. There’s no need to pity discarded CEOs. Their severance pay is more than the average American could amass in several lifetimes. So CEOs come and go, but only the faces and names change. Their “PMU” or psychological make-up stays basically unchanged, one that only their grandmothers could love. CEOs tend to be imperious, if not before getting to the top spot, then while in it by being seduced by the power of the position itself. CEOs personal flaws don’t stop there. From my extensive review of the literature I have concluded that CEOs tend to be greedy, irresponsible shepherds of “their” companies (actually owned by investors), lack of virtue, materialistic values, moral frailty, narcissism (including unbridled hubris), narrowly educated and narrow-minded. These flaws usually go together. A CEO with one tends to have all of the rest, too. The flaws are not unique to the corner office but are more pronounced and more destructive there. Conceivably great corporations could exist if they followed my models proposed elsewhere for corporate reform and for a socially responsible capitalism, but those proposals will never materialize so there is no point in referencing them here. Then, too, Americans could continue weaning themselves away from corporations by turning to alternative forms of business such as cooperatives. That trend is occurring slowly but will never replace the corporation as a mode of doing big business. The Different Police Gazette Given the ubiquity of evil doing at the top of the corporate pyramid and the corresponding evil doing of government, is it any wonder why I was able for many years long ago to compile a different police gazette, one that records the corpocracy’s crimes and other forms of evil doing? I was motivated to do so because “our” government records everything about us but corporate crime, probably because doing so would clearly implicate government as an accomplice and often an instigator (as in forever buying weapons from the weapons’ makers). While my compilations have tapered off considerably over the last decade or two, the gazette would be book size had I continued to this day. I am going to close this essay with a decidedly non-scientific sampling of incidents of corporate evil doings from my gazette as shown in Exhibit A. I simply chose some incidents and stopped choosing more when I got tired of choosing, an escape I could never get by with writing for so-called scientific journals. You will notice some redundancy among the incidents because the more egregious industry-wide incidents are repeated when found in the industry-specific entries. While many of the incidents were the doings of people below the CEO, we can be sure the CEO didn’t disapprove. All of the incidents are taken directly from my files and are unedited, yet they clearly speak for themselves in their raw form, like unwashed and naked filth. By the time you finishing reading them you may feel more outraged and worried than before. Blame it not on me but on the corporate Devil. The incidents are numbered across categories to facilitate any referencing. As you pour over the incidents think about how they deviate from the criteria of social responsibility and from the following universal moral values found by Michael Josephson, the lawyer turned ethicist (that’s a bizarre twist), to traverse time and place: accountability, commitment to excellence, concern for others, fairness, honesty, integrity, law abiding, loyalty, promise keeping, and respect for others. As you go along consider flagging the top 10 or so incidents that you judge to be the most evil in their intentions, in their means, and in their consequences, and perhaps also the 10 least evil ones in your judgment. I refuse to pick the 10 least evil ones. Evil is evil and I wouldn’t wish any of them on anyone. The first group of incidents depicts the two scholars’ picks of “great corporations” that I cited earlier. Exhibit A. Sampling “The Different Police Gazette” Incidents from the Purportedly “Great” Corporations 1. Involved in antitrust lawsuits and settlements. 2. Accused of breach of contract and fraud in dealing with retailers. 3. Violated securities laws. 4. Falsification of financial accounting. 5. Infringement of copyrights and patents. 6. Disbarred from further government contracts (must have really irritated Uncle Sam). 7. Employment discrimination lawsuits. 8. False advertising consent decrees. 9. Filing lawsuits against public complaints. 10. Forcing applicants to sign dispute resolution agreements. 11. Hiring illegal aliens. 12. Implanting “spy” chips in products. 13. Privacy violation lawsuit settlements. 14. Serious malpractice lawsuits. 15. Serious product failures and liability settlements. 16. Racial profiling and redlining. 17. Selling returned merchandise as new. 18. Sexual harassment suits. 19. Stonewalling investigations. 20. Union busting. Incidents from Industry in General 21. Tell-tale documents were shredded to impede governmental investigation. 22. Knowing company was about to collapse, top management officials cashed over one billion dollars in stock options while preventing employees from selling company stock in their retirement plans. 23. During settlement talks on severance pay for workers, labor lawyers weren’t told about the lavish bonuses received by top management. 24. Board of directors twice voted to suspend its own code of ethics to allow for unethical activities. 25. Fabricated earnings to hide debt and inflate profits to give top management a windfall. 26. Pocketed millions in tax money from a subsidiary. 27. Puts positive spin on layoff notices. 28. Buys cheap labor overseas. 29. Hijacks the constitution (e.g. in proclaiming free speech). 30. Shapes the political agendas of both parties. 31. Lobbies for favors (e.g., subsidies) and against regulations. 32. Privatizes public services. 33. Gets favors through campaign financing. 34. Holds high government posts via the ‘‘revolving door.” 35. Ghost writes regulations favorable to corporate self-interests. 36. Stonewalls government investigations. 37. Creates monopolies. 38. Promotes excessive consumerism. 39. Bullies vendors (e.g. suppliers and dealers). 40. Scams state and local governments for subsidies. 41. Abandons communities in bad times. 42. Plunders and poisons natural resources. 43. Treats workers as vassals. 44. Sells databases of personal information to parties known for defrauding the public. 45. After years of under-funding their pension plans, now go to bankruptcy court to dispose of employee pensions. 46. Freezes pension plans. 47. Fails to provide meal breaks to nearly 116,000 hourly workers as required by a state law. 48. Designs complex rebate rules to keep redemption rates low. 49. Initiates layoffs to take advantage of huge tax breaks meant to generate cash for hiring. 50. Retrieves foreign-held profits at a huge discount off the normal tax rate. 51. Gives kickbacks to buyers in foreign countries 52. Violates a USA embargo to deal with the embargoed country. 53. Foreign branch of a U.S. corporation aided the suppression and torture of troublesome workers during that country’s dictatorship. 54. Outsources to contractors in other countries knowing about their inhumane treatment of workers. 55. Brags to news media about its progressive stance in preferring to mediate instead of going to court, when in reality the company mediates only if there’s a good chance of losing in court. 56. Company buys a landmark plant located in one state, closes it down, lays off loyal workers with long service, opens facility in a less-taxing, adjacent state, and uses same product name to market to both states. 57. Fires whistleblowers after slowly and deliberately covering tracks to disguise the decision. 58. Underpays female workers. 59. Using illegal immigrants as slave labor. 60. Sold off a division and then declared that its employees had “resigned,” allowing it to confiscate their pensions. 61. CEOs engaging in insider trading. 62. Reduces allowable sick days. 63. Substantially increases employee contributions to and deductibles under their health insurance coverage. 64. Executives reaped millions with little financial risk by creating shell or phantom partnerships; 65. Establishes phony ethics and social responsibility programs. Incidents from Some More Certain Life Threatening and Ending Industries Agriculture/Chemical/Food Industries 66. Sued a farmer claiming he was using the company’s patented seeds. 67. Outspending food safety and organic advocacy groups nearly seven to one to defeat a ballot initiative mandating labeling of food containing GMOs. 68. Industry is playing with “genetic fire.” 69. Controlling our everyday food-buying choices with misleading messaging, artificially low prices, and heavy control over legislation and regulation. 70. Causing more climate change from production and waste than any other source.. 71. Clearing two acres of rain forest each minute to raise cattle or crops to feed them. 72. Polluting 35,000 miles of American rivers with animal waste. 73. Using 100 times more water and 5 times more land to raise animal protein than plant protein. 74. Causing billions of dollars to be spent yearly for healthcare, subsidies, environmental damage, and more from producing and consuming foods laced with pesticides, antibiotics and GMOs. 75. Factory fishing ships over fishing the world’s oceans probably leading in a few decades to the extinction of all commercially fished species. 76. Using unsafe antibiotics and growth hormones on animals. 77. Produced as much potentially harmful waste as a city of half a million. 78. Manufacturing unhealthy pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers for feed production. 79. Using forced labor living in shanties. 80. Refusing to compensate veterans and families for exposure to Agent Orange. 81. Producing and selling artificial sweeteners linked to cancer. 82. Making oil-based plastics that are never biodegradable and that release cancer-causing benzene into the environment for a thousand years. 83. Purchasing, trading and profiting from palm oil grown on stolen lands. 84. Sold millions of pounds of ground meat tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella. 85. Backing bills in various statehouses that would criminalize undercover investigations of livestock farms’ atrocious operations. 86. Hijacking a cultural exchange program to get a source of cheap labor. 87. Mass producing toxic chemicals. 88. Aggressively running small farms out of business or forcing them into factory farming. 89. Fooling the public with slogans like “life sciences.” 90. Coercing, infiltrating and bribing government officials around the globe to get their genetically modified products approved. 91. Smuggling its product into countries. 92. Using the “revolving door” to assume policy making positions and then squelching subordinates’ warnings about industry products. 93. Cooking the books of their research studies and/or hiding the damaging results. Pharmaceutical Industry 94. Selling pills that kill about 100,000 Americans annually. 95. Using improper techniques to test drugs. 96. Intimidates and threatens their in-house scientists. 97. Used falsified trial results to swindle the U.S. government out of hundreds of millions of dollars for an inadequate vaccine. 98. Used animal antibodies to artificially inflate test results. 99. Hires ghost writers to write up studies avoiding unfavorable findings and signs on academics as “authors.” 100. Withheld data on side effects from final report to FDA. 101. In submitting a new generic product for testing, hid regular brand under the pill coating fearful that the generic brand wouldn’t pass the test. 102. Heavily outsources drug development to foreign suppliers, some with dubious records of quality control in order to reduce costs and increase profits. 103. Fabricated drug safety data and lied to the FDA. 104. “Sells” a disease (e.g., “it’s under-recognized”) to justify a new drug. 105. Gets quick FDA approval by saying its products are duplicates of other products previously approved. 106. Routinely bribing doctors with luxury vacations and paid speaking gigs. 107. Helping doctors over-bill the state for medicines bought by the doctors. 108. Providing drugs to doctors at a discount so they can be sold to patients at a big profit. 109. Rewarded doctors handsomely for doing nothing more in their drug “research” than write down brief notes of their observations of patient outcomes. 110. Skirting the rules against advertising drugs for unapproved uses by sponsoring seminars where doctors are paid to make presentations promoting their drugs, including the “off label” uses. 111. Marketed a drug that is more expensive than alternative drugs and deadly among adults and children. 112. Sponsors health and illness awareness days in public schools and then blitzes them with promotions. 113. Secretly puts media stars on their payrolls to slyly slip in lines about some real or fake ailment and a drug cure on TV. 114. Spends sizeable percent of research on “me-too” drugs designed to make a profit, but are therapeutically useless. 115. Sales reps tells purchasers how to bill the government at full prices for free or discounted non-prescription products. 116. Charges what the market will bear rather than keep price increases in line with inflation. 117. Markets “off-label drugs,” versions of drugs different from those tested by federal regulators. Uses consumers’ private medical information for commercial purposes. 118. Raises drug prices before new legislation passed seeking to curb drug prices. 119. Sued to stop a program that lets states create preferred drug lists for Medicare patients and then demanded steep discounts from drug companies that want to get on the list. 120. Opposed pending legislation to create lists of preferred, lower-cost drugs for Medicare patients and hid their intent by secretly funding advocacy groups believed to oppose the same legislation but for different reasons. 121. Hires PR firms to establish diseases as “public health threats” and massive direct-to-consumer advertising. 122. The industry was aware for at least a decade of animal studies linking breast implants to cancer and other illnesses, but women were not told of the risks until years later. 123. Responded to questions about product safety and lawsuits with a full-court press to keep internal memos and studies from reaching the public. 124.Began buying the new ingredients of one of its key drugs from a new supplier and never followed up on the ingredient’s effects until reports of serious problems patients were experiencing. 125.Finally owned up to deadly products in wake of bacteria scandal. 126.Knew for 20 yrs that its product was unreliable, but didn’t believe it would cause a health problem, did very little testing, and stonewalled in liability case before finally trying to make amends. 127.Relied on its deceptive practices to earn billions of dollars selling potentially dangerous drugs to unsuspecting consumers and medical patients; didn’t deny any of it, simply paid the paltry fine, apologized to its customers, and continue doing wrongdoing as usual. 128.Compounds drugs that are often too week or too strong. 129. Sold a concentrated product even though executives were warned of the dangerous side effects. 130.Diluted cancer drugs to boost profits. 131.Mislabeled and adulterated several of its drugs used by millions of consumers and then masterminded a massive cover up of its activities. 132. Made a drug that caused thousands of deformities and then was again involved years later in yet another disputed drug case in court. 133. Hid behind court secrecy proceedings in defending itself against hundreds of lawsuits brought by patients and thus avoided the disclosure of several important documents sought by the congressional investigative committee. 134. Sells to other countries a drug taken off the US market because of concerns about the drug’s adverse effects. 135. Knew of many deaths among overseas users of one of its drugs before the FDA approved the drug for domestic sale. 136. The industry blocked state legislation designed to lower drug prices for state residents w/o insurance coverage. 137. Cut off supplies to Canada licensed pharmacies that continue to sell its lower-priced medicines to Americans. 138. Falsified production records to meet federal standards. 139. Kept a book entitled “Off-the-Record Production” in which unauthorized production changes and manufacturing short-cuts were secretly recorded. 140. Abandoned its headquarters in a town after getting big tax breaks and forcing people to move out of their homes so it could locate on their land. Big pharma has over 600 lobbyists in the nation’s capital and outspends all other industries in lobbying politicians. As a result of its lobbying, the industry succeeded in: 141. Defeating mandatory discount pricing. 142. Protecting drug patents in trade agreements. 143. Preventing medicare price negotiations with companies. 144. Prohibiting government listing of preferred drugs. 145. Delaying availability of generic pediatric drugs. 146. Speeding up government drug safety reviews. 147. Defeating bill to make generic drugs more accessible. 148. Making it harder for government to issue warning letters. 149. Easing restrictions on direct-to consumer advertising. 150. Easing licensing and continuous reviews of new sites for making drugs. 151. Getting government to drop price controls. 152. Being allowed to pay fee for faster reviews. 153. Making it easier for brand-name makers to sue generic makers. War/Gun/Ammunition Industries 154. Places through the revolving door key people in influential government positions. 155. Goes around DoD to Congress to sell an expensive airplane DoD didn’t want anymore. 156. Lobbied to prevent foreign sale of the world’s most expensive weapon from being halted. 157. Pays picayune fines for defrauding the government. 158. Makes and sells weapons riddled with flaws and way above promised cost. 159. Named the “war profiteer of the month.” 160. Invested heavily in and profited immensely from adding spy contractor on its resume. 161. Gave a 10-year employee a layoff notice the very day the employee returned from bereavement leave following the death of the employee’s young son. 162. Provides technology to government for spying on anyone it wants to spy on. 163. Tells government what its annual war/security budget should be, what its war/security purchases should be, for what purposes, and how much they should cost, and what minimal legislation and oversight would be acceptable. 164. Strategically locating their facilities in their Congressional districts and States to ensure that contracts will be steered to them. 165. Give politicians junket trips and other goodies. 166. Exports for sale more weapons than any other country. 167. War industry’s investor relations people tell investors war is good for returns on their investing. 168. Gun industry executives say mass shootings are good for business. 169. The multi-billion dollar gun industry uses the NRA as their official pimp. 170. Bullies politicians into passing laws making it easier to sell more rifles and handguns. 171. Promotes gun sales by stoking fear and racism. 172. Links patriotism with gun ownership. 173. Got the U.S. Supreme Court to misinterpret the 2nd Amendment. 174. Slowly kills people from after effects of atomic testing and nuclear weapons development. 175. Makes and sells products that kill more Americans than auto deaths. 176. Makes and sells products deliberately intended to kill. 177. Makes products deliberately intended to spy. Incidents from Some Other Industries Energy/Extractive Industries 178. Controls supply and manipulates prices of critical resources. 179. Spilling countless barrels of oil offshore and onshore. 180. Despoiling mountain sides scraped clean to get coal. 181. Leaving elevated levels of arsenic and other heavy metals in groundwater near natural gas fracking sites. 182. Permanently contaminating aquifers. 183. Authorized an air raid during an anti guerilla operation at a village in South America where one of its pipelines is located, killing many civilians, including children. 184. Poorly designing and operating pipelines that burst and release contaminating spills. 185. Delays for years cleaning up after major spills. 186. Using super-hazardous, poisonous chemicals to extract oil. 187. Utility company cuts a secret quid quo pro deal with the government in exchange for price concessions. 188. Operated a nuclear power plant in violation of federal fire regulations and then lied about it to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 189. Used inadequate and falsified tests of the reliability of its nuclear power plant. 190. Hires a consulting company to teach nuclear power plant operators how to deceive the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 191. Knowingly sold transformers containtaining hazardous levels of PCBs, then acted as if they did no wrong when signing the consent decree. 192. Underground coal mine operators systematically cleaning dust samples before sending to federal safety inspectors. 193. An oil company executive personally ordered the rigging of gasoline pumps to shortchange customers. 194. Uses goon squads to intimidate, threaten, and harm striking miners protesting company policies and conditions. 195. Exaggerated the amount and success of its environmental cleanup after one of its tankers spilled an unprecedented amount of oil. 196. Plant managers retaliated against a technician at a nuclear plant who had publicly complained about safety by ordering him to do useless work in a room filled with toxic and radioactive materials. 197. Oil companies pressure dealers to keep long hours and push sales. 198. Oil companies raise prices in a time of pending war. 199. Energy company spins off an insurance company subsidiary, deliberately neglecting to tell buyers that there might be millions of dollars in suits for asbestos claims filed against the subsidiary. Financial Industry 200. Created and marketed fantasy financial products plummeting U.S. into 2nd greatest depression. 201. Planning on confiscating customer deposits. 202. Bank rolling the polluting coal industry. 203. Peddling falsified debt documents to collection firms. 204. Getting default payments by filing thousands of collection lawsuits against consumers expecting them not to contest the claims. 205. Selling unreliable credit card debts. 206. Succeeded in getting law separating depositing and investing banking overturned. 207. Big banks lobbying to end competitive credit unions. 208. Acquired risky loans to grow faster and increase executive compensation. 209. Preying on customers, hiding costs and penalties, downplaying the effects of variable rates, and pressing unaffordable loans for the purchase of fraudulently overvalued homes. 210. Publishes favorable but false stock ratings. 211. Helping corporations devise shelters letting them operate tax free while exaggerating profits. 212. Confuses policyholders about their benefits’ forms 213. Unduly denies insurance coverage. 214. Constantly raising deductibles while shrinking coverage. 215. Auto insurers coercing car repair shops to using cheap and sometimes dangerous parts. 216. Disputing in court and finally settling personal injury claims. 217. Overcharging policy holders. 218. Requiring in some areas, unlimited personal injury protection and no-fault coverage. 219. Hem hawing in honoring claims and short changing legitimate claims. 220. Using various tactics to reduce, avoid, or stall home insurance claims in an effort to boost their own earnings. 221. Home insurers routinely refusing to pay market prices for homes and replacement contents. 222. Changing insurance policy coverages with no clear explanation. 223. Asking claims adjusters to lie to customers and to overestimate their losses and vastly overprice premiums. 224. Soaking credit card holders with excessive rates. 225. Mortgage brokers rewarded for putting borrowers into the costliest loans possible. 226. Falsifying home mortgage program to increase defaults and then “sending foreclosure notices, scheduling auction dates, and even selling consumers’ homes prematurely. 227. Finances wars. 228. Launders drug money. Media/Entertainment Industries 229. A few big corporations control the news media. 230. Hollywood submits its war glorifying movie scripts to the military for review and gets access to dazzling military equipment to use for props in profitable movies. 231. Telephone company removes pay phones from low-income districts to prevent people from using them as  “offices”  to  receive incoming calls. 232. Prominent newspaper belatedly and half-heartedly acknowledges its mistake in rushing to judgment based on questionable sources to publish very derogatory info about a person. 233. Newspaper publishes ads designed to look like news. 234. Network shows commercials disguised as talk shows, panel discussions, self-improvement seminars, etc. 235. Pays sources for information. 236. Editor prods reporters to be news hounds who stretch limits to get a source, a document, a witness. 237. To scoop the competitors, a mass media organization goes forward with a story before they had all the facts. 238. Plays to the lowest common denominator of audience/readership with sensationalism, sex, and violence. 239. National TV network shows reenactment of a newsworthy event without telling viewers it wasn’t live. 240. Knowingly misled the public on reasons for the Iraq war. Transportation Industry 241. Builds cars “unsafe at any speed.” Does anything more need to be added? Well, yes. 242. A financially ailing airline routinely ignored vital repairs and maintenance to minimize downtime of planes and then falsified records to make it appear as if the work had been done. 243. Airline, knowing a flight departure will be delayed, boards passengers anyway to prevent them from seeking alternative flights. 244. Car maker stages a large truck being dropped from a crane onto a new model without telling viewers the car had been reinforced to withstand the impact. 245. A worker was crushed to death because an automaker was lax in ensuring safety measures in one of its plants. 246. Automaker set back the odometer settings and sold the cars as new to dealers. 247. Automaker knew millions of its transmissions were faulty. 248. Automaker knowingly allowed plant workers to be overexposed to deadly levels of lead and arsenic. 249. US tire manufacturer recalls its tires on foreign cars abroad after safety problems arise but delays a much more costly recall of domestic tires until after mounting fatalities cause publicity and outcries. 250. Automakers sometimes instruct their dealers to fix certain common defects free of charge or at reduced cost but only if auto owners demand that the repair be made under warranty. 251. Automaker goes to court to try and bar the use of cheaper copycat repair parts not made by the automaker. 252. It wasn’t until after pressure from federal and state authorities along with consumer advocate groups that an automaker recalled thousands of ambulances to correct mechanical defects that had resulted in some fires and injuries. 253. Ever since the early 20th century when auto and bus makers tore up the trolley tracks, the transportation industry has been hitting the public, especially the poor, below their belt. 254. Imposing demanding and unrealistic schedules on truck drivers. 255. Skimping on truck fleet maintenance overhauls. The End—Except for an Addendum Incidents from many more industries could have been added to the 255, but it would have been more of the same generally, and there is more than enough evil to have read in one setting! You will have noticed the incidents involving corporations where they mistreat their own people. I am reminded of Alice in the Dilbert comic strip bellowing “I am not a resource!” in reaction to the company’s “Human Resource Department.” Alice, be glad you don’t work for a real corporation! And since corporations treat their own people so badly, it should come as no surprise how much they mistreat America and the world at large. The evil in the gazette is not evil in the abstract. It is evil that reaches out and afflicts you, me and particularly the powerless in so many different short-term and long-term ways through getting us killed, poisoned, injured, starved, homeless, unemployed, bankrupted, deceived, short changed, and ad infinitum. And it is not going to stop until—. http://clubof.info/

[jeremyau]

The $99 Billion Idea

By Brad Stone | January 26, 2017

From Bloomberg Businessweek

In January 2009 the three founders of a little-known website called Airbedandbreakfast.com decided at the last minute to attend the inauguration of Barack Obama. Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk were all in their mid-20s and had no tickets to the festivities, or winter clothes, or even a firm grasp of the week’s schedule. But they saw an opportunity. Their online home-sharing company had limped along for more than a year with little to show for it. Now the eyes of the world would be on the nation’s capital, and they wanted to take advantage.

They found a cheap crash pad in D.C., an apartment in a drafty three-floor house near Howard University that, like so many other homes during that desperate time, was in foreclosure. The rooms were unfurnished save for a pullout sofa, which the three founders gave to their friend and adviser, Michael Seibel, who ran the streaming-video site Justin.tv. At night they crowded onto the hardwood floor on inflatable beds.

Their host was a tenant waiting for eviction. He lived in the basement apartment and had used the AirBed & Breakfast website to rent out the empty first floor and, to three other guests, his own bedroom, living room, and walk-in closet. Sensing a promotional opportunity, Chesky e-mailed the staff of Good Morning America about the closet, and a producer included it in a roundup of unusual accommodations for the inauguration.

By day the founders and Seibel passed out AirBed & Breakfast fliers at the Dupont Circle Metro station. “Rent your room! Rent your room!” they cried to the bundled-up commuters, who mostly ignored them. At night they met other AirBed & Breakfast hosts in the city, talked their way into inaugural parties, and answered multiple e-mails from a disgruntled customer—the guest in the basement bedroom. The woman had driven her Volkswagen bus from Arizona to D.C. with her support dog, a Chihuahua, and she wasn’t keen on the crowded accommodations. In a barrage of complaints, she said she was certain she smelled marijuana, that the juice she’d left in the fridge had been taken, and that the house didn’t comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

At one point she threatened to call the police. Chesky, Gebbia, and Blecharczyk sat just a few feet above her head, typing out apologetic replies.

On the day of the inauguration, they awoke at 3 a.m. to claim a good viewing spot on the National Mall. They walked 2 miles to get there, buying hats and face masks at a kiosk along the way. By 4 a.m. they’d found a space on the green in the area open to the general public, a few football fields away from the presidential podium.

“We just kind of sat back to back in the middle of the Mall and tried to stay warm,” says Chesky, the chief executive officer of the startup, now named Airbnb. “It was the coldest morning of my life. Everyone cheered when the sun came up.”

Airbnb founders (from left) Chesky, Gebbia, and Blecharczyk.

Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick also attended the festivities that week. A friend on the inaugural committee, the investor Chris Sacca, had persuaded them to come. Kalanick, a Los Angeles native who’d recently sold his startup to web infrastructure company Akamai, made a $25,000 donation to the inaugural committee and split the expense with Camp. They were both in their early 30s and, despite the global economic meltdown, full of optimism about the transformative effects of technology. They were largely ambivalent about politics but didn’t want to miss a historic moment or, just as urgently, a seminal party.

They also arrived in D.C. fully unprepared. The night before the inauguration, they found themselves stuck in a line outside the Newseum, trying to get into a party hosted by the Huffington Post. It was windy and cold, and they had only one wool hat between them, which they took turns wearing, 10 minutes each, while frantically texting one of the party’s hosts, asking to be allowed inside.

On the big day, Camp and Kalanick woke up late. Kalanick had rented a swank home near Logan Circle on the vacation-rentals website VRBO, but it was a few miles away from the Mall, and no taxis were available. They ended up sprinting down the wide D.C. avenues. When they finally got to their seats, perched with Sacca and his high-powered Silicon Valley friends above the inaugural platform, the sweat on their bodies cooled, giving way to a chill. “By the end of the day, I was definitely sort of pre-hypothermic,” Kalanick says. “Everyone was like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ”

At the time, Camp had been trying to get Kalanick excited about a business idea he was developing that would allow anyone with a smartphone to call a black town car with a click of a button. Kalanick was interested but not particularly enthusiastic, conceding that it was a good idea, just not a big one. He had his own startup ideas, including one that he called “Pad Pass,” a network of furnished high-end apartments.

Yet here in Washington was clear evidence that Camp’s car service was needed. A car that could be summoned, tracked, and rated via a smartphone would be a godsend for getting around big cities, especially during huge events such as inaugurations.

“See?” Camp said to Kalanick, as the crowd chanted “O-bam-a! O-bam-a!” and the world waited for the new First Family to take the stage. “We really need this.”

Camp even had a name for his high-tech car service: Uber.

That was eight years ago. Much has changed since—the president, for starters. But few companies have altered city life as deeply and as swiftly as the two started by the entrepreneurs shivering anonymously in the crowd that day. Airbnb and Uber, their headquarters only a mile apart in San Francisco, are among the fastest-growing startups in history by sales, market value, and number of employees. Together they embody the third phase of internet history, the post-Google, post-Facebook era of innovation.

They’ve attained these heights, and a combined worth of $99 billion, despite owning little in the way of physical assets. Airbnb can be considered one of the biggest hotel companies in the world—currently valued at $30 billion, about the same as Marriott International—yet it possesses no actual hotel rooms. Its founders are billionaires three times over, at least on paper. Uber is among the world’s largest car services, yet it doesn’t employ professional drivers or own any vehicles (save for a small, experimental fleet of self-driving cars). Uber is valued at $69 billion, more than any other privately held tech startup in the world. Kalanick and Camp have an estimated net worth of about $6 billion each.

Both startups offered age-old ideas (share a vehicle, rent your home) with new twists and fostered a remarkable degree of openness among strangers. And both companies have been generating nearly nonstop controversy in every urban market they enter. They’ve come to represent, at least to some, the hubris of the techno-elite. Critics blame them for destroying the basic rules of employment, exacerbating traffic, ruining neighborhoods, worsening housing shortages, and generally bringing unrestrained capitalism into liberal cities. Airbnb and Uber didn’t anticipate this degree of pushback, which might have undone less zealous, more circumspect entrepreneurs.

So how did it all happen? How did each company maneuver past entrenched, politically savvy incumbents to succeed where others had failed? How much of their success was luck?

There are two little-known chapters in the histories of Uber and Airbnb, two pivotal moments when each discovered the secret weapon that would drive its rise. Both stories are at odds with the creation tales the founders like to tell, and both are crucial to understanding how these two companies defied odds, mayors, and city councils, and became widely admired, bitterly resented, and valued into the stratosphere.

The Growth Hacker

By the spring of 2009, the newly renamed Airbnb was small and struggling. After graduating from Y Combinator, a startup school in Silicon Valley, Chesky, Gebbia, and Blecharczyk worked out of their apartment on Rausch Street in San Francisco’s South of Market district. They hadn’t solved the chicken-and-egg problem that confronts any new online marketplace: To get listings, you need customers, and to get customers, you need listings. The few apartments on the site drew few guests looking for travel accommodations, and the lack of guests didn’t inspire potential hosts to make their homes available to total strangers over the internet.

“Every day I was working on it and thinking, ‘Why isn’t it happening faster?’ ” Chesky says. “When you’re starting a company, it never goes at the pace you want.  … You start, you build it, and you think everyone’s going to care. But no one cares, not even your friends.”

He and his co-founders like to recount their early misadventures trying to ignite the business. They sold boxes of presidential-themed cereal, Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s. While Blecharczyk stayed behind to code, Chesky and Gebbia kept trying to build up early listings by visiting New York, Las Vegas, and Miami, among other cities, and organizing meetups with any potential hosts they could find. They also cold-called property-management companies, asking them to add multiple listings to the site, then abandoned that tactic when Chesky concluded these types of listings didn’t represent “the spirit of what Airbnb was”—hosts inviting travelers into their homes and facilitating authentic travel experiences.

Screenshot taken before the company name was shortened to Airbnb.

An early Airbnb PR stunt: Presidential-themed cereal. (Cap’n McCain’s not pictured).

The official company history focuses on Chesky and Gebbia’s prodigious ability to light up an online community through clever design and their enticing ideology of a new, open, noncorporate world order. But what really got it all going was the more technical, clever, and some might say devious work of Blecharczyk.

Just 24 at the time, Blecharczyk had coded the entire site himself, using what was then a new open source programming language called Ruby on Rails. He devised a flexible, global payment system that allowed Airbnb to collect fees from guests and then remit them to hosts, minus commission, using a variety of online services such as PayPal. He’d also presciently hosted the site on Amazon Web Services, a new division of the e-commerce company that allowed businesses to rent servers via the internet only as needed, a huge cost savings that would become standard practice for an entire wave of new businesses.

“Joe and I would have crazy dreams and visions,” says Chesky of his co-founder. “Nate would find a way to make the wildly impractical possible.”

But that wasn’t the full extent of Blecharczyk’s talents. He was born in Boston, the son of a homemaker mom and an electrical-engineer dad who worked for a local industrial equipment manufacturer. His father, Paul, would have his sons do mechanical tasks around the house, and he brought home discarded equipment, such as an old Xerox copier, and encouraged them to take it apart in the backyard. “There is no job too big or too small for PB and sons,” he would say to his boys.

Soon, young Nate was consumed with computers. According to family lore, he was home sick from middle school one day at age 12, when he took a book about computer languages off his dad’s shelf and devoured it. For Christmas, he asked for a book about Microsoft’s programming language QBasic, and he plowed through that one in three weeks.

Rooms available, New York, January 2016

115k

40k

Hotels

Airbnb

Data: Str, inside airbnb.com

Blecharczyk ran cross-country at his Boston public high school and excelled in his classes, but at home he had a far less conventional life. After learning to code, he started writing increasingly sophisticated programs and giving them away on the internet, asking for voluntary donations. One early piece of shareware allowed computer users to place digital sticky notes on their screens. Later, another program of his interfaced with America Online, which was then walled off from the broader web, and gave programmers a way to send internet messages into the e-mail and IM accounts of AOL members.

Soon after he posted that program, Blecharczyk got a phone call. The caller had seen the e-mail tool and offered him $1,000 to write something similar. When he told his dad about the offer, Paul Blecharczyk responded: “Son, no one from the internet is going to pay you $1,000.”

Blecharczyk wrote the program anyway and got his money. He later found out his customer had himself been hired to create it and was merely subcontracting out the work (and was surely paid more than a grand). The customer then introduced Blecharczyk to his client and to other potential clients, and suddenly Blecharczyk was earning considerable money coding a variety of tools for a nascent industry. Its practitioners innocuously dubbed it “e-mail marketing.” The world came to know it as something else: spam.

Continuing with this side work through college, Blecharczyk eventually developed a suite of e-mail marketing products to help spammers organize and orchestrate their campaigns and maneuver around internet service providers that were desperately attempting to shut off the deluge. The orders poured in, as did the cash.

The spam operation earned Blecharczyk close to $1 million, he says, and paid his college tuition and more

His company went by several names at various times, including Data Miners and, eventually, Global Leads, which he incorporated in the State of Massachusetts after his freshman year at Harvard in 2002. At first he couldn’t accept credit cards, Blecharczyk recalls, so he had customers enter their bank account details on his site, and then he printed the bank numbers on blank OfficeMax checks, wrote down the amounts he was due—typically around a thousand dollars—and went to the bank to deposit them. “Amazingly, this is legal,” he says, recounting his early success with delight. “I was literally printing money!”

At the end of every week and after every three months, he gave his parents a financial report. Naturally, Paul and Sheila Blecharczyk were mystified. “This was a whole new world,” Blecharczyk says. “I don’t think anyone really knew what to expect or what this was.”

The spam operation earned Blecharczyk close to $1 million, he says, and paid his college tuition and more. It also earned him a spot on an online blacklist called Register of Known Spam Operations, maintained by a London-based anti-spam organization called the Spamhaus Project. On its page devoted to Data Miners, Spamhaus alleged: “Data Miners (aka: Nathan Underwood Blecharczyk) is one of the main sources of broken/open e-mail relays (used by spammers), and the tools to help locate and exploit them,” meaning Blecharczyk was finding SMTP servers that had an open connection between sender and receiver, which allowed him to slip in spam e-mails. Blecharczyk says he shut his business down in 2002 to focus on his college studies, because the work was taking up all his time.

He discusses all this years later from Airbnb’s offices and is unapologetic about how he earned his first considerable fortune. “All this was new,” he says. “There were frankly no rules around it.” That is technically true—the Federal CAN-SPAM Act that made sending or facilitating spam a federal crime wasn’t passed until 2003. But for years before that, spam was a well-known scourge that frustrated e-mail users and overwhelmed internet companies.

“It’s part of being a pioneer,” Blecharczyk says. “It’s not just exciting to build things but to explore new fields and to recognize what comes with that is a lot of uncertainty. That’s very true today, and it has been true of Airbnb. It’s a whole new concept.”

When he graduated from college, Blecharczyk wasn’t just a skilled programmer but also the embodiment of a new Silicon Valley hero: the growth hacker. Growth hackers use their engineering chops to find clever, often controversial ways to improve the popularity of their products and services. Blecharczyk’s talents are recognizable behind two of Airbnb’s early, crafty schemes to usurp Craigslist, which had a far larger audience at the time.

In late 2009, a few months after Airbnb graduated from Y Combinator, Craigslist users in some cities began to notice something annoying. Whenever anyone posted a property for rent on Craigslist, even if that person had specified that he didn’t want to receive unsolicited messages, he would get an e-mail touting Airbnb. If the apartment was listed in, say, Santa Barbara, the e-mail would read: “Hey, I am e-mailing because you have one of the nicest listings on Craigslist in Santa Barbara and I want to recommend you feature it on one of the largest Santa Barbara housing sites on the Web, Airbnb. The site already has 3,000,000 page-views a month.”

All these e-mails were identical except for the city, and they typically emanated from a Gmail account bearing a female name.

Blecharczyk at home, 1999.

Photograph: Courtesy Airbnb

Dave Gooden, another online real estate entrepreneur, recognized the soaring popularity of Airbnb in 2010 and became curious about it. Suspecting what was going on, he posted a few dummy listings on Craigslist, and then wrote a blog post in May 2011 about his findings. He concluded that Airbnb had registered Gmail accounts en masse and set up a system to spam everyone who posted on Craigslist. In his opinion, Airbnb’s activity was a nefarious “black-hat” operation. “Craigslist is one of the few sites at massive scale that are still easily gamed,” he wrote. “When you scale a black hat operation like this you could easily reach tens of thousands of highly targeted people per day.”

After Gooden’s post, a few technology blogs picked up the story and Airbnb was put on the defensive. Its explanation, which is somewhat difficult to believe, was that it had hired contractors who may not have been up to the company’s ethical standards. “One of the lessons you learned is you have to be very close, provide constant management and guidance to the people you’re working with,” Chesky said when I asked him about it onstage at an industry event after Gooden’s blog post.

A few years later, Blecharczyk offered a little more detail. They’d hired foreign contractors on Elance, an online staffing service, and were paying them per lead, or for every new host that would list on Airbnb. “Many companies bootstrap themselves off of finding a user segment on Craigslist and then building a better experience,” he says. The whole effort, he insists, was ineffective because Craigslist users were typically looking for long-term tenants, or roommates, rather than vacationers. “It did not end up driving any meaningful business,” he says.

But another strategy unquestionably did. A few months after the bulk e-mailing campaign to Craigslist users, Airbnb tried a new tactic. Instead of luring Craigslist users to Airbnb, the company did the opposite: It allowed Airbnb users to take a streamlined version of their elegant listing and cross-post it with a single click on Craigslist. “Reposting your listing from Airbnb to Craigslist increases your earnings by $500 a month on average,” the site informed prospective hosts. “By reposting your listing to Craigslist, you’ll get the benefit of more demand, while still being able to use Airbnb to manage and moderate your inquiries.”

The tool, which Chesky says was originally the idea of adviser Seibel, was a boon for the company. It established Airbnb as a way to create more visually appealing Craigslist ads and, in effect, dropped ubiquitous Airbnb ads into the network of its largest competitor. “It was a kind of a novel approach,” Blecharczyk says. “No other site had that slick an integration. It was quite successful for us.”

“I have never dealt with a company as disingenuous as Airbnb has been over and over and over again”

– New York State Senator Liz Krueger

Other growth hackers noticed this and applauded it as a sophisticated technical achievement. Craigslist has different versions of its site in hundreds of cities, each with different web domains and menu formats. Blecharczyk had designed a way for Airbnb to post seamlessly onto the right site. “It’s integrated simply and deeply into the product, and is one of the most impressive ad-hoc integrations I’ve seen in years,” wrote Andrew Chen, a fellow growth hacker who now works at Uber, in an admiring blog post. “Certainly a traditional marketer would not have come up with this, or known it was even possible. Instead it [would] take a marketing-minded engineer to dissect the product and build an integration this smooth.”

Airbnb removed the tool in 2012 after Craigslist objected to these kinds of tactics, but by then it was too late. Like sucking through a straw, Airbnb was pulling listings and users over from Craigslist. It helped, of course, that its site was better designed and far easier to use and that it was constantly working to provide easier forms of payment, better mobile apps, and a safer experience where hosts and guests used their real identities and reviewed one another.

Most listings, Airbnb

1 Paris

2 London

3 New York City

4 Rio de Janeiro

5 Los Angeles

Data: airdna.co

Blecharczyk also ran productive online ad campaigns during these early years. If people searched Google for an apartment in Boston, for example, Airbnb ads would pop up at the top of the page. Blecharczyk and his marketing team became experts at finding the cheapest and most frequently searched keywords and at generating crisp ads that sometimes directly attacked rival home-listing sites. “Better than Couchsurfing.com!” some of Airbnb’s early search ads blared. Dan Hoffer, a Couchsurfing co-founder, e-mailed Chesky to complain about this technique. He says Chesky apologized, stopped the campaign, and sent him two boxes of Obama O’s as a peace offering.

Blecharczyk pioneered a clever use of Facebook’s early rudimentary ad system, which for the first time allowed companies to tailor and target ads to the interests and hobbies that members specified in their profiles. If a user said he liked yoga, for example, he would see an ad from Airbnb on Facebook that announced “Rent Your Room to a Yogi!” If a person liked wine, he’d see “Rent Your Room to a Wine Lover!”

Facebook ads were cheap, and people tended to respond to these eerily targeted messages. By February 2011, Airbnb had passed 1 million nights booked. Less than a year later, in January 2012, it passed 4 million. The chicken-and-egg problem was solved.

Travis’s Law

It started with a tweet. On Jan. 11, 2012, almost three years after Camp and Kalanick discussed the idea for a luxury car-hailing service while freezing at the Obama inauguration, a short, cryptic message from a rider-advocacy group called D.C. Taxi Watch quoted the top taxi official in the U.S. capital.

“Chairman Linton: @uber DC is operating illegally,” it read.

At the time, Uber was operating in only six U.S. cities and was moving cautiously. Although Kalanick and his colleagues had come to distrust taxi ordinances as schemes designed to protect incumbents and their shoddy levels of service from new competition, they examined local laws closely and were flexible when required. Uber was by and large a law-abider, not a law-bender. That was about to change.

Kalanick: Granada Hills High School, Los Angeles, class of 1994.

The Uber app’s “de Blasio mode” was a dig at the New York City mayor.

The tweet was sent from inside the drab, postwar D.C. Taxicab Commission headquarters in Anacostia. The city’s taxi drivers had packed a normally sleepy hearing to make their voices heard. Uber’s town-car drivers, they argued, had been illegally operating for the past two months.

Ron Linton, appointed only six months before by Mayor Vincent Gray to head the taxicab commission, was inclined to agree. Linton, in his early 80s, was an avuncular policy planner and longtime reserve officer in the city police department who wore a stern disposition and an obvious toupee. He fashioned himself an agent of change and was determined to modernize the capital’s pitifully antiquated taxis, which ignored minority neighborhoods and didn’t accept credit cards. Back then they didn’t even have dome lights or a uniform color to distinguish them from other cars.

But Linton was hellbent on reforming the industry from the inside and preserving the jobs of the region’s 8,500 licensed drivers. Uber is “operating illegally, and we plan to take steps against them,” Linton assured the boisterous drivers at the meeting, which was duly tweeted by D.C. Taxi Watch.

That morning, Uber’s then D.C. general manager, Rachel Holt, was just settling into her new office. As in the other cities Uber had entered, the maze of local taxi regulations didn’t seem to explicitly prohibit the company’s service. In D.C., yellow cabs had to use taxi meters to calculate fares, while limos could charge only a prearranged fare. But there was a third classification in the bylaws, under section 1299.1 in the District of Columbia Municipal Regulations, which seemingly contradicted the other two rules by stipulating that sedans carrying six passengers or fewer could charge on the basis of time and mileage. Uber’s approach clearly qualified.

After she saw the tweet, Holt e-mailed Linton’s office asking for a clarification. She was told she would hear back within 48 hours. That was a Wednesday, and Linton was true to his word. On Friday, his office tipped local press to assemble outside the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue. The chairman then ordered an Uber town car from the Cleveland Park neighborhood and took it to the hotel, where he was met at the circular driveway by five hack inspectors from the D.C. Taxicab Commission.

As three reporters watched, the officers slapped the stunned driver with $1,650 in fines for driving an unlicensed vehicle in the District and not having proof of insurance on hand, among other infractions. Then they impounded his car for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day long weekend. Standing in front of the press, Linton slammed Uber for unleashing regulatory havoc in the city. “What they’re trying to do is be both a taxi and a limousine,” he said. “Under the way the law is written, it just can’t be done.”

Holt, who’d arrived three minutes late to the scene after being alerted by the driver that trouble was afoot, was perplexed. According to the actual citations, Linton was going after the driver himself, a Virginia resident, not Uber, and he was doing it based on one of the city’s more arcane and senseless rules—that limo drivers must present a fare to the passenger in advance, rather than using a meter that measures time and distance. The fines seemed mostly aimed at intimidating drivers and keeping them from signing up with Uber. Nothing Linton did affected whether Uber could continue to operate in the city, much less slow its rapidly growing business there.

Over the next few months, Uber’s business in D.C. grew briskly. By then the issue of Uber’s regulatory status had fallen into the lap of a D.C. city councilwoman, Mary Cheh, the chairperson of the Committee on Transportation and the Environment.

She’s a graduate of Harvard Law and a Democrat who’d struggled for years to drag anachronistic D.C. cabs into the modern age. “Even while Uber was coming around, I was in the process of trying to reform the taxicab industry, which was in the 20th, maybe the 19th, century,” she says. She was also a pragmatist who sought peaceful compromise among many of the powerful local taxi interests in what was turning into a radioactive topic. That spring she sent a letter to Linton and the D.C. Taxicab Commission, asking them to stop towing Uber cars, and then started working toward a compromise among all the parties, including those who were increasingly incensed by Uber’s success.

Dummy fixed to a taxi during a protest in France, January 2016.

Photographer: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images

What was needed, she reasoned, was an unambiguous clarification of Uber’s legal status that cut through the contradicting regulations and allowed it to operate in the city. Cheh spent the week after Memorial Day 2012 negotiating with Uber executives, and the result of those talks, Cheh thought, was an elegant short-term compromise that she called the “Uber amendments.” The regulations would give Uber legal sanction to operate. But they also added a price floor, which required Uber to charge several times the rate of a taxicab.

What happened next would mold the political tactics of Uber and many of the tech startups that sought to emulate it.

In San Francisco, Kalanick had never fully agreed to a minimum fare. Now recognizing the approaching competition from companies such as Hailo, a competitor in the U.K., and realizing that services like UberX would require aggressive price cuts, he decided he wanted to fight—to the consternation of his own lobbyists, who’d already provisionally agreed to Cheh’s deal.

Kalanick started hurling rhetorical hand grenades, labeling Cheh’s proposal a “price fixing scheme” on Twitter and accusing the councilwoman of “doing everything to protect the taxi industry.”

But Uber was going to need more than tweets to sway the D.C. City Council, so Kalanick decided to go right to his customer base. He sent an impassioned e-mail to thousands of Uber users in D.C., complaining that the City Council would make it impossible for the company to lower fares and ensure reliable service. “The goal [of the Uber amendments] is essentially to protect a taxi industry that has significant experience in influencing local politicians,” he wrote, basically accusing Cheh and her colleagues of corruption.

Then he supplied the phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and Twitter handles of all 12 members of the City Council and urged his customers to make their voices heard.

On Uber’s website the next day he posted an open letter to the council members, writing ominously, “Why would you so clearly put a special interest ahead of the interests of those who elected you? The nation’s eyes are watching to see what D.C.’s elected officials stand for.”

Cheh was taken aback by the ferocity of the response. Within 24 hours the council members received 50,000 e-mails and 37,000 tweets with the hashtag #UberDCLove. When they arrived for the last session of the summer on July 10, Cheh’s colleagues all turned to her in confusion and fear. The overwhelming response from its customers in the capital presaged the political campaigns Uber would later mount in places such as London, New York, Florida, and California.

Cheh’s price-floor idea was gone by midmorning, and an alternative amendment was proposed allowing Uber to operate legally in D.C. until the matter was revisited at the next meeting in September.

Kalanick got plenty of advice from his lobbyists in advance of his testimony that month in the historic Wilson Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Play it straight. Just stick to the talking points and don’t engage in a philosophical back-and-forth. The real advocacy takes place in other forums. In public hearings, try to act benign and respectful.

He started testifying at 1:15 p.m., after a morning that had included appearances by Linton, various drivers, and Hailo founder Jay Bregman, who wore a suit and tie and pointed out that Hailo worked harmoniously with regulators in London and Dublin and planned to do so in D.C. as well.

But Kalanick wasn’t in the mood for gentle courtship. Facts and intellectual arguments, not charm, were his weapons, and unlike Bregman, he wasn’t ready to kiss any political rings. Wearing a blue blazer, white shirt, and no tie, he interrupted Cheh’s first question with the words “I would disagree with that characterization.” Things went downhill from there.

“You wanted to make sure that there was a minimum fare on our services so that only rich people could use Uber, not people of middle income,” Kalanick told her.

Cheh pointed out that the proposed and discarded price floor was meant as a way to ensure a peaceful transition to a more permanent arrangement. “I know that you like to cast this as some sort of fight,” she said. “Do you understand that? I’m not in a fight with you.”

“When you tell us how to do business, and you tell us we can’t charge lower fares, offer a high-quality service at the best possible price, you are fighting with us,” Kalanick replied.

“You still want to fight!” Cheh said in exasperation. The conversation turned to surge pricing, Uber’s controversial practice of charging more—sometimes a lot more—during rainstorms, blizzards, presidential inaugurations, and other times of peak demand. “I am curious about whether that is somehow a kind of gouging,” she said. “If there’s more demand, why should the rider have to pay more money?”

Kalanick launched into an explanation of the economy of Communist Russia and how long lines formed at stores for essentials such as toilet paper. “It’s because the price of toilet paper was too low,” he said. “There wasn’t enough supply. Everybody could afford toilet paper, but they could never get it because there were too many people that wanted it and not enough people willing to supply it. And so that’s kind of the situation that gets created when you’re not able to change price.”

“So they didn’t have any toilet paper,” Cheh said with mock amazement.

“It was a rough situation,” Kalanick replied. “Look, price controls by governments, you know, they don’t always go well. In fact, I’d say 99 percent of the documented cases don’t go well.”

“But what I’m trying to figure out is why you get the advantage,” Cheh said, as she recalled standing in a long hot line in 1968 to view Robert Kennedy lying in state after his assassination and being horrified as vendors jacked up their prices for water. “I’m not sure I fully agree with you that this is really an economic mechanism that makes everybody happy!”

In San Francisco, Salle Yoo, Uber’s relatively new chief counsel, was watching a webcast of the hearing. According to an Uber lobbyist named Marcus Reese, at around this point in the testimony, she started texting him, asking him to pull Kalanick from the stand as soon as possible. “He’s in the middle of a public hearing,” Reese texted back. “I can’t just walk up to him and say you’ve got to go!”

Trips per day, New York, November 2016

337k

216k

Yellow cabs

Uber

Data: New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission

Pro-taxi councilman Jim Graham, wearing a taupe suit and a gold bow tie, was sitting to Cheh’s right. “I’m trying to make a point,” he scolded Kalanick. “And the point that I’m trying to make is that if you remain unregulated, and the taxicabs remain increasingly more regulated, there’s a fundamental inequity to that.” He urged Kalanick to reconsider a minimum fare. “I don’t want this city to be [all] Uber. I really don’t. Because there’s too much of a history of our taxicab industry.”

“If you allow competition, what you’ll get is a better taxi industry,” Kalanick said.

“You can’t have competition where one party is unbridled and able to do whatever they please whenever they want to do it and the other party has their hands and feet tied,” Graham said. “That’s not competition.”

“That means drivers are making a better living and riders are getting a better service,” Kalanick said. “And that doesn’t sound bad to me.”

Graham said that many taxi businesses in the District were small businesses. “This is a good thing. This is something we want to protect and nurture. This is not something we want to destroy for the sake of some kind of consolidation into a big company.” Kalanick tried to interrupt him. Graham snapped, “May I be a member of this committee, please? Do you mind?”

Kalanick laughed. “Go ahead.”

After Kalanick left the stand, Graham, visibly infuriated, suggested reinstating and even increasing a proposed minimum fare. Janene Jackson, a deputy chief of staff to Mayor Gray, came up to Reese and Claude Bailey, a well-known local lawyer that Uber had also hired, and offered her own memorably harsh review of the testimony. “Never bring that guy back here!” she said, according to Reese. Later, Jackson couldn’t recall saying that specifically. “The hearing was probably a bad one, because I have no recollection of it, except that he pissed almost everyone off,” she tells me.

And yet. By December, with Uber growing by 30 percent to 40 percent each month in the capital, Cheh and her colleagues, knowing that its users were ready and willing to defend the service, succumbed to the tide of political advocacy and essentially rolled over. On Dec. 4, the Public Vehicle-for-Hire Innovation Amendment Act defined without ambiguity a new class of sedans that could be dispatched via a smartphone app and could charge by time and distance.

It passed the Washington, D.C., City Council unanimously, garnering even Graham’s vote, without debate. “The real issue is how receptive the government is to the progress of the people,” Kalanick told me a few years later. “It’s not about the city council or the government, it’s actually about how the incumbent industry is persuading them, let’s say, to do what I would consider the wrong thing.” Ultimately, he added, “D.C. was very receptive. But it took them time to see it and feel it.”

When traditional advocacy failed, Uber mobilized its users and directed their passion toward elected officials. The company wasn’t the first to employ this tactic, but it quickly became among the best at it, leveraging it in early battles with Cambridge, Mass., Philadelphia, and Chicago—and usually winning.

Kalanick had broken every rule of advocacy. Nevertheless, Uber’s lawyers and lobbyists, who’d begged him, unsuccessfully, to seek compromise and testify with humility, began to whisper in reverent tones about a new political dictate that contravened all their old assumptions. Travis’s Law. It goes something like this:

Our product is so superior to the status quo that if we give people the opportunity to see it or try it, in any place in the world where government has to be at least somewhat responsive to the people, they will demand it and defend its right to exist.

Over the years, Chesky and Kalanick struck up a sporadic friendship. Every few months or so, they would go out to dinner in San Francisco, first by themselves, then with other entrepreneurs or with their girlfriends to discuss their companies’ twin successes and their common experiences battling regulators and lawmakers. “I think we learned a lot by watching each other,” Chesky says. “There are only so many people in the world that you can relate to [who share] your position.”

Employees at both Airbnb and Uber remember these dinners well. Says one Airbnb executive who was also close to Uber employees: “Brian would come back saying, ‘We have to be tougher!’ and Travis would come back saying, ‘We have to be nicer!’ ”

Kalanick’s realization may have come too late. His company's reputation as a ruthless aggressor was molded by such tactics as introducing ride-sharing in Europe, where it was expressly illegal, and adding a “de Blasio mode” to its app over the summer of 2015. It was a dig at New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, which showed a hypothetical alternate reality with 25-minute wait times for Uber cars, should his proposed vehicle cap be put in place. As the D.C. City Council had done years before, de Blasio meekly withdrew the proposal when confronted with a torrent of criticism and activism from Uber drivers and riders.

Uber’s top destinations, by number of rides

1 Los Angeles Intl. Airport

2 San Francisco Intl. Airport

3 JFK Intl. Airport

4 O’Hare Intl. Airport

5 Newark Liberty Intl. Airport

Data: Uberestimate.com

Chesky and his team watched Uber’s travails, following Kalanick’s series of defiant stare-downs with city councils and regulators, and insisted somewhat dubiously that Airbnb’s approach was different and softer than Uber’s. “They have their own way of seeking growth,” says Jonathan Mildenhall, who joined Airbnb as chief marketing officer in 2014. “I think for us, our community and the humanity of our community actually drives a lot of the things we do. So we approach any kind of awkward situation or any challenge with a lot of empathy and a lot of open collaboration. ... We don’t want to kind of bulldoze our way into success. We actually want to partner our way in.”

Airbnb’s reputation survived this period of feverish empire building far better than Uber’s. But like Uber, when confronted by laws it found unjust, or perhaps just inconvenient, Airbnb didn’t slow down. As Airbnb grappled with unfriendly governments in New York and other cities, it turned out that the upstarts were far more alike than Chesky and his colleagues cared to admit.

From the book The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone.

© 2017 by Brad Stone. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown & Co., New York, N.Y. All rights reserved.

Editor: Jim Aley

Illustrations: Simon Abranowicz

Development: James Singleton and Blacki Migliozzi

Photographs: Getty Images (8)