Google Shifted $23bn to Tax Haven Bermuda in 2017, Filing Shows

Google moved €19.9bn ($22.7bn) through a Dutch shell company to Bermuda in 2017, as part of an arrangement that allows it to reduce its foreign tax bill, according to documents filed at the Dutch chamber of commerce.

The amount channelled through Google Netherlands Holdings BV was about €4bn more than in 2016, the documents, filed on 21 December, showed.

“We pay all of the taxes due and comply with the tax laws in every country we operate in around the world,” Google said in a statement.

“Google, like other multinational companies, pays the vast majority of its corporate income tax in its home country, and we have paid a global effective tax rate of 26% over the last 10 years.”

For more than a decade the arrangement has allowed Google’s owner, Alphabet, to enjoy an effective tax rate in the single digits on its non-US profits, about a quarter of the average tax rate in its overseas markets.

The subsidiary in the Netherlands is used to shift revenue from royalties earned outside the US to Google Ireland Holdings, an affiliate based in Bermuda, where companies pay no income tax.

The tax strategy, known as the “double Irish, Dutch sandwich”, is legal and allows Google to avoid triggering US income taxes or European withholding taxes on the funds, which represent the bulk of its overseas profits.

by Reuters/The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Jeenah Moon/Reuters

[ed. Because, of course they did. Even after publication of the Paradise Papers and the massive repatriation tax break they got with the recent Republican tax bill.]

What Happened to 90s Environmentalism?

I grew up in the 90s, which meant watching movies about plucky children fighting Pollution Demons. Sometimes teachers would show them to us in class. None of us found that strange. We knew that when we grew up, this would be our fight: to take on the loggers and whalers and seal-clubbers who were destroying our planet and save the Earth for the next generation.

What happened to that? I don’t mean the Pollution Demons: they’re still around, I think one of them runs Trump’s EPA now. What happened to everything else? To those teachers, those movies, that whole worldview?

Save The Whales. Save The Rainforest. Save Endangered Species. Save The Earth. Stop Slash-And-Burn. Stop Acid Rain. Earth Day Every Day. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Twenty-five years ago, each of those would invoke a whole acrimonious debate; to some, a battle-cry; to others, a sign of a dangerous fanaticism that would destroy the economy. Today they sound about as relevant as “Fifty-four forty or fight” and “Remember the Maine”. Old slogans, emptied of their punch and fit only for bloodless historical study.

If you went back in time, turned off our Pollution Demon movie, and asked us to predict what would come of the environment twenty-five years, later, in 2018, I think we would imagine one of two scenarios. In the first, the world had become a renewable ecotopia where every child was taught to live in harmony with nature. In the second, we had failed in our struggle, the skies were grey, the rivers were brown, wild animals were a distant memory – but at least a few plucky children would still be telling us it wasn’t too late, that we could start the tough job of cleaning up after ourselves and changing paths to that other option.

The idea that things wouldn’t really change – that the environment would neither move noticeably forward or noticeably backwards – but that everyone would stop talking about environmentalism – that you could go years without hearing the words “endangered species” – that nobody would even know whether the rainforests were expanding or contracting – wouldn’t even be on the radar. It would sound like some kind of weird bizarro-world. (...)

So what happened?

Every so often you’ll hear someone mutter darkly “You never hear about the ozone hole these days, guess that was a big nothingburger.” This summons a horde of environmentalists competing to point out that you never hear about the ozone hole these days because environmentalists successfully fixed it. There was a big conference in 1989 where all the nations of the world met together and agreed to stop using ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, and the ozone hole is recovering according to schedule. When people use the ozone hole as an argument against alarmism, environmentalism is a victim of its own success.

So what about these other issues that have since fizzled out? Did environmentalists solve them? Did they never exist in the first place? Or are they still as bad as ever, and we’ve just stopped caring?

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: Amazon

[ed. I can think of a few other reasons (besides those mentioned in this article): a deeper knowledge of the natural world such that environmental solutions are now understood to be more complex/inter-related than initially imagined; economic productivity and financial security becoming more important (over environmental altruism); the looming climate change crisis and our inability to effectively deal with it (which is mentioned), leading to defeatism on any given single issue problem; environmental organizations pumping out alarming proclamations for so long (as a means of fund raising) that they've become mostly background noise; the same groups increasingly fractured in internal debates/fights over scientific theories and action priorities; 24/7 news coverage and the internet ramping up fears and appropriating attention on a broad range of issues (outrage fatigue); and other reasons like fake news, political polarization, corporate propaganda, etc. But too, on a positive note, the effectiveness of environmental laws and regulations over the last 50 years in ameliorating many of the worst problems.] 

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The Psychopharmacology of Everyday Life

Everyone is on drugs. I don’t mean the old-fashioned, illegal kind, but the kind made by pharmaceutical companies that come in the form of pills. As a psychoanalyst, I’ve listened to people through the screen of their daily doses; and I’ve listened to them without it. Their natural rhythms certainly change, sometimes very dramatically—I guess that’s the point, isn’t it? I have a great many questions about what happens when a mind—a mind that uniquely structures emotion, interest, excitement, defense, association, memory, and rest—is undercut by medication. In this Faustian bargain, what are we gaining? And what are we sacrificing?

There is new resistance to the easy solution of medicating away psychological problems, because of revelations about addiction and abuse, a better understanding of placebo effects, or, for example, the startling realization that antidepressants, far from saving some teenagers from committing suicide, can sometimes push them to do it, which means that these pills should not be a first line of defense. Perhaps the time is right to return to the conundrum of mind and medicine.

The story of psychopharmacology stretches from the advent of barbiturates at the turn of the century to the discovery in the early 1950s of the first antipsychotic, based on a powerful sedative used for surgical purposes that was described as a “non-permanent pharmacological lobotomy.” This drug, Chlorpromazine, led to the development of most of the drugs used today for psychiatric management. The proliferation of psychiatric medications, ones with supposedly less overt dangers, began in the late 1980s—at the same time, a watershed lawsuit was filed in the UK against the makers of benzodiazepines, a class of drugs used for treating anxiety and other disorders, for knowingly downplaying knowledge of their potential for causing harm. Today, psychopharmacology is a multibillion-dollar industry and an estimated one in six adults in America is on some form of psychiatric medication (a statistic that doesn’t even include the use of sleeping pills, or pain pills, or the off-label use of other medications for psychological purposes).

Until I started researching the history of psychopharmacology, I didn’t know that it was an antipsychotic that had spurred the developments of most of the medications we know so well today, such as Prozac and Xanax. But it was the issue of antipsychotics that first made me think about what we were trading as individuals, and as a society, in relying so widely on psychiatric meds. When I went to work in a psychiatric hospital during my training, nothing seemed more self-evident than the need to sedate a psychotic person. They were the most clearly “out of their mind” and the medications worked quickly to reduce psychotic symptoms, especially the auditory hallucinations that menaced these patients. How could this be wrong? (...)

I am indeed a Freudian psychoanalyst, that strange anachronism maligned by psychiatry for not being as scientific as medication supposedly is, by virtue of the control studies that can be done with drug treatments. Modern psychopharmacology goes hand in hand with a psychiatric diagnostic system that has, over time, been redefined to rely on medicating symptoms away rather than looking at the structure of the mind and its complex permutations in order to work with a patient in a deeply engaged way over the long haul. Modern psychiatry is hailed as a scientific success story, and drug companies have profited from the fact that talking therapies are often thought to take too long, their results frequently dismissed as unverifiable. I question, though, whether we should demand verified results when it comes to our mental life: Do you believe someone who promises you happiness in a pill?

Psychoanalysis still has the power to intrigue people, it seems—so embedded is it in American popular culture. Psychoanalytic language has entered the vernacular and psychoanalytic concepts permeate the way we all understand human relationships, especially sexuality. I have the sense that we need it more than ever to help us with our discontents because there is enduring value in the Freudian understanding of, on the one hand, the unceasing conflictual relationship between civilization and neurosis, and, on the other, what talking, simply talking, can do.

Freud himself was anything but hostile to psychopharmacology. Indeed, he was a notorious experimenter with drugs, especially cocaine, whose anesthetic properties and psychological effects he was one of the first to discover and champion (until, that is, a host of his friends and family to whom he administered the drug became addicted, contributing even to the death of one friend whose morphine abuse escalated after using cocaine in tandem, until he eventually overdosed). Freud himself underwent a course of experimental hormonal therapy with the first neuro-endocrinologist to see if it would improve his mood. Such research became the foundation for sex-change therapies today, along with a number of other medical discoveries that earned that doctor seven nominations for the Nobel Prize.

Freud’s beliefs about the human psyche thus did not exclude his own quite liberal experiments with medication and medical procedures. Importantly, at the end of his life, Freud chose to forgo any pain medication after almost thirty surgeries for oral cancer, so that he could think clearly with patients and continue to write—though he never ceased smoking the cigars he loved that had almost certainly caused his disease. The lesson I take from Freud is that you can choose your poison, which is the reason I wanted to turn to the topic of drugs, using what I’ve learned as a psychoanalyst over the last two decades.

We do have a choice about whether to medicate and how we do so. I think we have forgotten this because of how easy it is to obtain pills, along with the pervasive idea that our problems are simply chemical or genetic. So I want to begin by recalling what the drug panacea is treating at the most basic psychological level: pain, attention, sadness, libido, anxiety, sleep. Freud was surprisingly insightful about these crucial aspects of the psyche, even from his earliest writings before the turn of the century. By elucidating some basic psychoanalytic notions concerning the most common “troubles” of the mind, and by focusing on the different categories of medications prevalently used, I hope to disrupt our blind passion for prescriptions.

Painkillers

I’d like to begin with painkillers since they have been filling our headlines and because pain is often not thought of as having a psychological component (whereas I believe it does). Given that we have a crisis that has seen opioid-related deaths increase by 600 percent over the last four years, exceeding gun deaths and traffic fatalities in America, with 72,000 dead from overdose in 2017 alone, there is a problem with the way we medicate pain.

Pain is much more enigmatic than is commonly recognized. Why some people have a much higher threshold for tolerating physical pain than others is not fully understood. Nor do we know enough about the relationship between physical and emotional pain.

Freud recognized that pain was an important part of evolution, built into our being as a primary means of apprehending reality and adapting our behavior to avoid the threat of harm. Yet he also called pain a “failure” and a stark limit to the efficiency of the psychic system because it was, on the one hand, too easy always to “fly from pain” (in other words, to obscure it) and, on the other, too difficult to master pain since it creates indelible memory traces that do not lose their intensity even, in some cases, with the passage of time. The memory of pain is often as bad, if not worse, than the pain that was experienced. Consider post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Pain,” writes Freud, is a pure “imperative” that produces a state of “mental helplessness.” And in his view, physical pain and emotional pain are made of the same stuff—what Freud called a breach of the stimulus barrier that protects us from the outside world, where, analogous to our skin, there is a protective layer that is meant to remain intact and unperturbed. When it comes to pain, a shock to the barrier sets off a multitude of nerves that then fire too rapidly to prevent a reaction. This built-in alarm system makes a demand on a person and those around one, forcing everyone to address whatever painful circumstance has arisen.

Even what we call pleasure, or the reward-system of the mind, does not always have a positive outcome, but can involve a lowering of our sensitivity to pain, allaying the alarm system. The opioid receptors of the brain do just this—something Freud called, when speaking about cocaine, the happiness of “the silence of the inner organs.” Lulling can be dulling. Freud also notes that pain and the sounds associated with it, such as screams or groans, coallesce as a first memory trace, bringing together the sensory realms of internal feeling with an acoustic correlative. Our mind creates a solid bond between pain and the sounds we associate with it, which have the power, through empathy, to immediately produce pain in others. This is what makes the cries of an infant so intolerable. So our experience of pain involves not just our own pain, but also our relation to the pain of others.

With the abuse of pain medication, then, we are not only treating our own pain, which is always somewhere between the physical and emotional, but we are also dulling the immense pain around us. Modernity has increasingly allowed a breaking through of the stimulus barrier, from the impossible demands and the chaotic pressures of contemporary life, to a sense of mounting helplessness in the face of environmental disaster, poverty, loneliness, injustice, annihilation. One could say that “all this pain” is nothing new, but the constant forced attention to the theater of it has come with easy access to a powerful antidote: the ability to medicate the pain away, not just our own, but all of it.

Fascinatingly, Freud notes in his later work “On Narcissism” that the pain arising from organic causes often increases our narcissism, making us give up our interest in the outside world—so “concentrated is his soul… in his molar’s narrow hole,” Freud quotes Wilhelm Busch on the poet who is suffering from a toothache. This is a state that, Freud says, resembles sleep, or what he called “the narcissistic withdrawal of… the libido onto the subject’s own self,” a turning-away from the world. So pain and narcissism are bedfellows—and what else is the abuse of pain medication but a synthetic version of this couplet, fulfilling the wish to keep sleeping, to keep dreaming, to turn away from the world. Overdose appears immanent in this schema, as the risk of slipping into permanent sleep, falling down the narrow hole that seems to promise the cessation of all pain.

There is an ethical twist to this understanding of narcissism’s relationship with pain. The opioid crisis enacts the paradox of a society that seeks to annihilate pain as quickly as possible, even as it refuses to care for or attend to it and its underlying causes.

Annihilating pain, or “flying” from it, will never permit us to master pain, but only increases the need for its continued obliteration. This mastery of pain Freud explained as the formation of a mental response network, which strengthens our tools for dealing with pain beyond “toxic agents or the influence of mental distraction.” Freud always advocated “work,” which was how he characterized what happens in psychoanalysis; he also said that drive or libido could be thought of as the demand that a body can make upon the mind for work—like the emotional pain that can come from others’ requiring us to revisit it again and again to try to make more sense of it.

So what are painkillers, finally? They are drive-killers, which is why their effect on sexual function and even digestion is about the ceasing of work. This suggests the acute danger of these pills, insufficiently regulated, with drug companies profiting from this simple desire: no body, no drive, no pain, no helplessness, nothing. Stretched to the logical extreme, they are about permanent sleep. Death. (...)

Antidepressants

Moving from induced mania to depression, it’s been twenty-four years since Prozac Nation was published; I never read it but practically everyone I know has been on a modern antidepressant Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) like Prozac at one point or another. Do antidepressants help with depression? It’s a touchy subject; they have clearly helped many through periods of depression, saving the lives of some who have struggled with suicidal feelings. One thing I will say is that I prefer my patients not to be on them if possible, or eventually to get off them. True, the lows aren’t as low, but neither are the highs high, and pleasure is limited to some medial zone. To borrow Sylvia Plath’s metaphor of the bell-jar, the whole system feels caught between two glass walls.

Psychoanalytic work depends on following the natural emotional rhythms of the mind, stretched between anxiety, sadness, and excitement, allowing a certain amount of tension to build at the points of blockage. This is what creates breakthroughs. With the SSRIs, it’s as though the machine becomes frictionless and idling, and the complaints—which don’t go away—spin in neutral, never gaining purchase or momentum. That said, who can afford to have lows in today’s world that demands that we always be on and productive? I understand this. I do think the demands that we make use of ourselves are excessive—and nearly a depressant in itself.

by Jamieson Webster, NYRB | Read more:
Image:Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos

Long-Term “Buy & Hold” Crushed Stockholders in Largest Markets Except US & India. But for the US, Luck’s Running Out

Ugly long-term charts that Wall Street doesn’t want us to see. And now US stocks are infected too.

How well does a buy-and-hold strategy work in the stock market over the long term – as measured in years and decades? In the largest markets around the world, it has crushed investors. There are two exceptions: the US and India. And the US is infected too.

The Everything Bubble in the US, a period of nearly 10 years when just about all asset classes have skyrocketed, was perhaps the most magnificent bubble the world as ever seen. But it peaked in 2018 and has since given up some of its gains to the wailing and gnashing of teeth on Wall Street. So it behooves us to see how this has turned out in the other major markets, and how it might turn out in the US.

The results and charts below exclude the effects of dividends, which would have increased returns or rather lessened the losses; and they exclude the impact of inflation which would have decreased “real” returns and increased “real” losses.

Buy & Hold in the USA: So far, so good.

The S&P 500 fell 6.2% in 2018, its first annual decline in a decade. The swoon came in the last three months, with the index falling 14.8% from the peak at the end of September.

Buy-and-hold results: If you bought an index fund at the dot.com peak in March 2000, and held it until today, you would have made 64% in 19 years.

Buy & Hold in Canada, been a drag.

The Canadian stock index TSX fell 11.6% in 2018. It has moved sharply up and down for an entire decade to end up 5% below where it had been in June 2008:

Buy & Hold in China, oh my!

Buy-and-hold did a magic job in China. The Shanghai Composite Index dropped 24.6% in 2018, closing the year at 2,494. That’s quite an accomplishment. The index is down 52% from its last bubble-peak on June 12, 2015, and down 59% from its all-time bubble-peak in October 2007. It’s now back where it had first been in December 2006.

Here’s the magnificent double-bubble and the destruction it has wreaked on buy-and-hold investors. Note that the index would have to skyrocket by 150% just to get back to where it had been at the peak in 2007:

Buy & Hold in Japan, 3 decades of destruction

The Japanese stock market is the modern record-breaker in terms of buy & hold destruction: It’s already measured in decades, and it’s still going on.

The Nikkei 225 dropped 12.1% to 20,015 in 2018 and is down 18% from its 52-week high. But the historical high of the Nikkei was 38,951 in December 1989. The index is still down 49% from that peak nearly three decades ago, and is back where it had first been in February 1987, 31 years ago when many people working in finance today hadn’t even been born.

Over the past 20 years, Japan had relatively little inflation, and so the soothing veil, finely woven out of the methodical destruction of the purchasing power of the currency, has not been thrown over the index. To get back to its peak in 1989, the index would have to soar 95%:

by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street |  Read more:
Images: Wolf Street

I Don't Hate Women Candidates - I Just Hated Hillary and Coincidentally I'm Starting to Hate Elizabeth Warren

“How does Warren avoid a Clinton redux — written off as too unlikable before her campaign gets off the ground?” — Politico, 12/31/18

I have no problem with women. My wife is a woman and I have daughters who will likely be wives and mothers of daughters one day. I only had a problem with Hillary Clinton, and my problem with her is completely separated from her gender, and is solely based on the fact that she was so dishonest when compared to other prominent politicians who ran for president. How could anyone vote for such a liar?

My hatred for Hillary wasn’t diabolical. I never bought into the whole pizzagate thing, or the whole Uranium One thing, or the whole spirit-cooking-she-drinks-blood-infused-Podesta-rice thing, and I never once believed she was the devil. I would see those posts and just be like, Huh, if people believe that stuff about her, she must be really terrible.

And I never chanted LOCK HER UP or created memes showing her in prison, but I did laugh a little at those memes, because the thought of this accomplished woman behind bars with all her agency stripped away from her was funny to me.

So I’m a perfectly reasonable, women-friendly fellow who is completely open to the idea of a woman president. And I never thought I’d hate anyone as much as I hate Hillary Clinton. But to my surprise, I’m actually starting to hate Elizabeth Warren.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve heard that Elizabeth Warren is a champion of consumers and the middle class who battled the big banks and advocates for economic reform. Nonetheless, she rubs me the wrong way. (...)

Another thing about Elizabeth Warren: She claims she advocates for the poor, yet she isn’t a poor herself. She lives in a fancy house with her fancy Harvard salary. I’m no fan of Trump, but that Elizabeth Warren is such a phony. That’s a thought, and thoughts are true, and I will never examine how that thought got into my head.

I mean, think about it for a moment. If Elizabeth Warren were so great, why would Robert Mercer be funding a super PAC whose soul purpose was to portray her as an out-of touch hypocrite? If she were a truly good leader, why would so many people like me dislike her?

I always tell my daughters they can be anything they want, so long as they don’t make other people feel uncomfortable. They can be as ambitious as they want, so long as they do it in an acceptable manner. (...)

So bring it on, ladies! I’d love to see a female President. Just not Hillary Clinton. Or Elizabeth Warren. I am totally open to all other women leaders, but I have to admit that Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar are beginning to make me angry and I’m not sure why yet, but I know the reason will become clear soon, and I’m also wondering what they might look like if someone photoshopped their heads onto the bodies of prisoners and put them behind bars.

by Devorah Blachor, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia
[ed. See also: Elizabeth Warren’s ‘likability’? The US media has learned nothing from 2016 (The Guardian) and There’s a Reason Many Voters Have Negative Views of Warren—But the Press Won’t Tell You Why (The Atlantic). And: Elizabeth Warren’s Theory of Everything (TNR) and Leader of the Persistence (Intelligencer).]

Lieke van der Vorst, Cat Woman
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See if You're Using These Popular Android Apps That Overshare Info to Facebook

A recent Privacy International study found that 42.55% of the free apps in Google Play could share data with Facebook, and many popular apps share data with Facebook the second they’re opened.

According to the study, 61% of the apps the group tested automatically transferred data to Facebook the moment the user opened the app, regardless of whether or not that person has a Facebook account or if they’re logged into that account on the device.

Some of those apps send detailed information to the social network that might be considered sensitive. For instance, Kayak sends Facebook information about people’s flight searches, including their departure city, date, and airport as well as where they plan on going, how long they’d like to stay, and how many people they’re traveling with. It also shares information about the type of ticket someone is searching for.

Other popular apps that the study determined send data to Facebook include MyFitnessPal, Duolingo, Skyscanner, TripAdvisor, Spotify, Yelp, Shazam, and Indeed.

Facebook has reportedly corrected the issue through a new version of its developer kit, but these apps have yet to implement it, or at least aren’t implementing it properly, Engadget reports.

The issue does not appear to impact iOS versions of the apps.

You can check out the full report for free here. It’s also created detailed reports for all of the apps that transmit data to Facebook immediately when the app is opened.

by Emily Price, Lifehacker |  Read more:

Image: Pexels

Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters

[ed. Turn it up. See also: Indigo Burrell]

Simon Prades
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Political Apology of a Lingerie Model

In the middle of this summer, I was booked to shoot for a new lingerie brand. The rate was on the low side (about 60% of industry standard pay per hour), but I’m a fresh college grad reluctant to turn down good money, so I agreed. The day before the shoot, the casting director contacted me and said that they couldn’t pay me, but would be able to offer trade. (Instead of money, would I accept compensation in bras?) That really doesn’t cut it, but I conceded. I had already committed, and didn’t want to develop a reputation as difficult or flaky that would injure me in the long run. Plus, she emphasized that the founders didn’t have two pennies to rub together, and as the editor of a magazine run entirely on volunteer labor, I sympathize with the underfunded. They couldn’t pay for a makeup artist, so I would do my own makeup beforehand. I brought my own jeans. I would be in and out in two hours.

When I got there, I was stunned to find that they had rented an enormous, beautiful studio for multiple days and many thousands of dollars. The place was littered with technicians strapped with expensive, bulky video equipment, which also surprised me. There was a makeup artist with an assistant and a full kit, a hair stylist, a clothing stylist, and catering that cost twice my day rate. Later that evening, the French supermodel Camille Rowe was flying in to be photographed for the launch. The makeup artist leisurely redid my entire face, and over two hours had passed before I even started shooting.

I took some quick, run-of-the-mill photos before moving to video—which no one had told me I was expected to do. I was shoved into a too-small bra because they didn’t have my size, and positioned on a solitary stool, lit so my face acquired the beautiful, highly-detailed stoicism of a Time magazine cover. I was asked to state my name and bra size—confidently, looking directly at the camera, as though I had overcome some challenge—and then interrogated about my inevitably vexed relationship to my breasts and the modern bra market. Every question was a leading one: “Isn’t it horrible that…?” “Don’t you wish…?” And nearly every one was completely asinine, treating complicated feminist social problems with simple capitalist remedies. No, my life has not been marred by traumatizing bra shopping experiences. I like the two bras that I own and I bought them painlessly on the Internet. No, they’re not particularly uncomfortable. I can’t speak to the epiphany I experienced when you told me my “true size,” because your system of measurement is just as arbitrary as everyone else’s. No, I don’t understand how a new bra will somehow shield me from the wandering eyes of men I don’t want while attracting the men I do. I don’t understand how it’s possible to be sexy “for myself.” (I’m sure the videographer’s botox and lip fillers were “for herself,” too.) And I definitely don’t see how the freedom of movement I’m supposed to gain with a more comfortable bra remotely simulates the real freedom I desire.

Of course I did not say these things; I dissimulated, I think rather badly. At the end of the video, I had to rhapsodize about the superiority of this too-small bra I’d worn for a total of ten minutes to every other bra I’ve ever used, and describe how I’ve been rescued from the sexual oppression of men and bra-makers, which (surprise!) makes me look and feel hotter than ever. The final question was, simply, “How do you feel?” I begged myself not to say “liberated” or “unburdened,” which created an awkward pause. So I blabbed, “I feel independent?” and scurried out red-faced. I have yet to receive my payment in bras.

I have made a small career in the industry of creating advertisements for female consumers, which means that I have broader knowledge of the stuff of buzzy fashion startups and social media influencers than I’d like to admit. The baffling cocktail of feminist problems packaged in pro-capitalist solutions typified by this lingerie branding is nothing new, and has only proliferated in recent years. But this shoot felt like a particular violation; even worse than the egregious labor practices and obvious abuse of my work was the expectation, without my consent, that I was to narrativize my experience as a woman, using my own name, in such a way as to suggest that the real struggles of women against patriarchal oppression could be alleviated, magically, by buying a bra that costs more than ninety six percent of those purchased annually by American women. Speaking under beams of hot studio light, ineptly attempting to strike the perfect balance of elegance and false bravery culminated in a scene so extreme in its failure to approximate genuine social good that it toppled into bathos.

I refuse to participate in “brand partnerships,” which require people (overwhelmingly women) to use their identities on social media to market brands and influence the consumer behavior of their followers in exchange for promotion and free product. I still field requests for this regularly. A particularly ridiculous proposition I received last week was from a company that sells loose leaf tea that supposedly “enhances female intuition, self-reflection, and witchyness.” I am constantly receiving targeted ads from high-end cosmetics brands, urging me to bite the bullet and give myself “what I deserve.” The hugely popular women’s luxury coworking space The Wing recently held an event promoting the American Express Platinum credit card veiled as a day of “Extreme Self-Care.” Even the fifteen-year-old teen star Jojo Siwa is versed in the argot, insisting that her pricey and coveted line of technicolor hair bows is a “symbol of power, confidence, believing-ness.” The supermodel Emily Ratajkowski, who trumpets her identity as an activist, feels compelled to designate her every move (usually her frequent and “controversial” displays of nudity) as a feminist act. Defending a video in which she massages herself with oiled spaghetti while gazing hungrily at the camera, she wrote on Instagram: “Being sexy is fun and I like it…Feminism is about the choices we make, and the freedom we have to make personal choices without judgment or retribution.”

I am grateful for the fact that I am just one of many to condemn the utter bastardization of radical feminism that has dominated the fourth wave, where tag lines like “the woman’s choice,” which originated in battles over health and marital legislation, now defend arguments like Ratajkowski’s: that women should be free to do whatever they want without judgment or retribution because their gender identity inexplicably transcends the capacity for destructive behavior. Critics often call it “lifestyle feminism.” Lifestyle feminism was first discussed by bell hooks in Feminism Is for Everybody, where it denoted a feminism so drained of any commitment to radicalism or self sacrifice that it becomes merely aesthetic—serving a decorative function in atomized lives.

by Sophia Richards, Politics/Letters |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

1MDB and Goldman Sachs: A Pioneering Twist on Third-World Corruption

Goldman Sachs, which has survived and thrived despite countless scandals over the years, may have finally stepped in a pile of trouble too deep to escape.

There’s even a Donald Trump angle to this latest great financial mess, but the outlines of that subplot – in a case that has countless – remains vague. The bank itself is in the most immediate danger.

The company’s stock rallied Thursday to close at 165, stopping a five-day slide in which the firm lost almost 12 percent of its market value. The company is down 35 percent for the year, most of that coming in the past three months as Goldman has been battered by headlines about the infamous 1MDB scandal.

Just before Christmas, Malaysian authorities filed criminal charges against Goldman, seeking a stunning $7.5 billion in reparations for the bank’s role in the scandal. Singapore authorities also announced they were expanding their own 1MDB probe to include Goldman.

In the 1MDB scheme, actors tied to former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak allegedly siphoned mountains of cash out of a state investment fund. The misrouted money went to lavish parties with celebrity guests like Alicia Keys, a $35 million jet, works by Monet and Van Gogh, property in New York, Los Angeles and London, and (ironically) the funding of the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.

The cash for this mother of all bacchanals originally came from bonds issued by Goldman, which earned a whopping $600 million from the Malaysians. The bank charged prices for its bond issuance that analysts believe were suspiciously high – like a massage price that suggests you’re probably getting more than a massage.

Najib lost re-election in May, ending a 61-year reign for his party. National anger over 1MDB was a major reason for his downfall. The prime minister was allegedly central to the scam, which involved luring investors to national development projects that mostly never took place.

His election loss was a turning point. Until that time, international authorities had been unable to obtain cooperation from the Malaysian government, which under Najib insisted no crime had been committed. (...)

“It completely reversed the situation,” says John Pang, a former policy adviser to the prime minister’s office in Malaysia. “Before, you essentially had the victim saying there was no crime. Now, you had the Justice Department meeting with a 1MDB task force in Kuala Lumpur.”

The change resulted in a string of new indictments, suits and prosecutions surfacing in the second half of 2018. At year’s end, Goldman is known to be under investigation in the U.S., Singapore and Malaysia, while 1MDB probes are ongoing in at least 10 countries. Goldman has seen two ex-employees criminally charged in the U.S. since the summer, one of whom pleaded guilty.

What really set Wall Street afire was a pair of fall revelations. On November 8th, the Wall Street Journal reported longtime Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein – who stepped down on October 1st to “pursue other interests” – met on more than one occasion with one of the most infamous figures in the 1MDB scandal, Low Taek Jho, better known as “Jho Low.”

In that same week, Bloomberg reported Blankfein was an “unidentified high-ranking executive” in court filings associated with the case.

In December, outside analysts predicted the bank might need to set aside $1 billion or more for penalties. The company is having ongoing conversations with the Justice Department, but has not discussed numbers yet.

In addition to the Malaysian action seeking $7.5 billion, the company is facing two more class-action lawsuits filed by investors, and a significant amount of negative press.

For all that, the scandal is still not well understood. 1MDB was a twist on third-world kleptocracy, one that exposed a new flaw in the global financial system.

Dictators have always plundered national riches. But they could only steal assets that existed. For instance, in former Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko shifted profits of mineral sales to private accounts. In the Philippines, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos swiped proceeds of sales of sugar, tobacco, bananas, coconuts and everything else they could get their hands on. Saddam Hussein stole oil revenues.

Malaysia is rich in copper, timber and oil. But Najib and his cohorts didn’t have to steal any of those resources.

“He didn’t steal diamonds or bananas. He stole debt,” says Pang. “This is something completely new. And he couldn’t have done it without a bank the size of Goldman.” (...)

1MDB was a sovereign wealth fund, “owned and controlled by the Malaysian government, through its Ministry of Finance,” as our Justice Department put it in one of its court filings.

This fund was ostensibly created for development projects on behalf of the Malaysian people, in areas like “energy, real estate, tourism and agribusiness.”

Over the course of three major bond issues, 1MDB raised about $6.5 billion from investors around the world. According to the U.S. government, about $2.7 billion of that money was misappropriated and “distributed, in part, as bribes and kickbacks” to help keep the scheme going.

Other monies reportedly ended up in the hands of a small group of corrupt insiders close to Najib, who then laundered the cash via one of the great spending sprees of our time.

The key figure was Jho Low, who is currently an international fugitive and allegedly spent awesome sums ripped from the 1MDB pot. The chubby-cheeked Low, tabbed the “Billion Dollar Whale” in a book about the scandal by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope, is said to have used 1MDB funds to become an instant “Asian Great Gatsby,” traveling the planet and hurling cash in all directions, including parties in Vegas and London. The book claims he spent up to $500,000 on single parties that featured performances by the likes of Lady Gaga and Dr. Dre. Low was basically the Malaysian version of Jeff Spicoli hiring Van Halen to play his birthday party.

The idea that a figure as prominent as Blankfein might have granted a meeting to so incautious a figure as Low – who reportedly once used stationary from the Sultan of Brunei to procure seats at the London nightclub Chinawhite – is part of what has Wall Street so shaken. It’s a little like hearing the Pope was taking selfies at the Adult Video awards. (...)

What was in it for the bank? About $600 million in fees. Goldman may have made some of that money on gains while it held the bonds, i.e. not all of that widely quoted sum was a pure fee. Also, the deal was unusual in that the bank purportedly held all the risk on the bonds for a long time, as much as a year in the third transaction.

Still, Goldman charged Malaysia what by all accounts was a beyond-exorbitant price. The Billion Dollar Whale authors asserted the bank earned “two hundred times the typical fee.”

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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Athletes Don’t Own Their Tattoos. That’s a Problem for Video Game Developers.

When LeBron James bounds down a basketball court, he is both a transcendent athlete and a prominent palette for dozens of tattoos. His mother’s name, Gloria, rests on a crown on his right shoulder and his forearms bear a portrait of his son LeBron Jr. and 330, an area code for his hometown, Akron, Ohio.

Although those tattoos have personal connections, they may not truly be his.

Any creative illustration “fixed in a tangible medium” is eligible for copyright, and, according to the United States Copyright Office, that includes the ink displayed on someone’s skin. What many people don’t realize, legal experts said, is that the copyright is inherently owned by the tattoo artist, not the person with the tattoos.

For most people, that is not a cause for concern. Lawyers generally agree that an implied license allows people to freely display their tattoos in public, including on television broadcasts or magazine covers. But when tattoos are digitally recreated on avatars in sports video games, copyright infringement can become an issue.

“Video games are an entirely new area,” said Michael A. Kahn, a copyright lawyer who represented the designer of the face tattoo on the boxer Mike Tyson. “There is LeBron James, but it’s not LeBron James. It’s a cartoon version of him.”

Electronic Arts, a game developer and publisher, recreates more than 100 tattoos in its FIFA and UFC games, including the colorful sleeve on the right arm of the soccer star Lionel Messi and a heart-eating gorilla on the chest of the fighter Conor McGregor. Yet only a handful of players in its Madden football games are depicted with their real-life ink.

Spokesmen for Electronic Arts did not respond to requests for comment. The company faced a copyright infringement lawsuit after the cover of the game NFL Street included an illustration of the running back Ricky Williams and some of his tattoos, but the artist withdrew his claim in 2013.

Players’ unions, many of which license the players’ likenesses to video game publishers, and sports agents have advised athletes to secure licensing agreements before they get tattooed. Artists have an incentive to sign rather than pass up a client who could be a billboard for their work.

Gotti Flores said he has spent at least 40 hours tattooing the N.F.L. receiver Mike Evans, one of the few players with tattoos in Madden. He was surprised, he said, that he had to give permission for his work to be reproduced in the game.

“Really it didn’t even matter to me,” said Mr. Flores, who signed a waiver for no compensation. “It was dope to have my tattoos on there.”

Not all tattoo licensing happens so amicably.

by Jason M. Bailey, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Harry How/Getty

I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon.

Holiday parties were right around the corner, and I needed a cover story. I didn’t feel like admitting to casual acquaintances, or even to some good friends, that I drive a van for Amazon. I decided to tell them, if asked, that I consult for Amazon, which is loosely true: I spend my days consulting a Rabbit, the handheld Android device loaded with the app that tells me where my next stop is, how many packages are coming off the van, and how hopelessly behind I’ve fallen.

Let’s face it, when you’re a college-educated 57-year-old slinging parcels for a living, something in your life has not gone according to plan. That said, my moments of chagrin are far outnumbered by the upsides of the job, which include windfall connections with grateful strangers. There’s a certain novelty, after decades at a legacy media company—Time Inc.—in playing for the team that’s winning big, that’s not considered a dinosaur, even if that team is paying me $17 an hour (plus OT!). It’s been healthy for me, a fair-haired Anglo-Saxon with a Roman numeral in my name (John Austin Murphy III), to be a minority in my workplace, and in some of the neighborhoods where I deliver. As Amazon reaches maximum ubiquity in our lives (“Alexa, play Led Zeppelin”), as online shopping turns malls into mausoleums, it’s been illuminating to see exactly how a package makes the final leg of its journey.

There’s also a bracing feeling of independence that attends piloting my own van, a tingle of anticipation before finding out my route for the day. Will I be in the hills above El Cerrito with astounding views of the bay, but narrow roads, difficult parking, and lots of steps? Or will my itinerary take me to gritty Richmond, which, despite its profusion of pit bulls, I’m starting to prefer to the oppressive traffic of Berkeley, where I deliver to the brightest young people in the state, some of whom may wonder, if they give me even a passing thought: What hard luck has befallen this man, who appears to be my father’s age but is performing this menial task?

Thanks for asking!

The hero’s journey, according to Joseph Campbell, features a descent into the belly of the beast: Think of Jonah in the whale, or me locked in the cargo bay of my Ram ProMaster on my second day on the job, until I figured out how to work the latch from the inside. During this phase of the journey, the hero becomes “annihilate to the self”—brought low, his ego shrunk, his horizons expanded. This has definitely been my experience working for Jeff Bezos.

During my 33 years at Sports Illustrated, I wrote six books, interviewed five U.S. presidents, and composed thousands of articles for SI and SI.com. Roughly 140 of those stories were for the cover of the magazine, with which I parted ways in May of 2017. Since then, as Jeff Lebowski explains to Maude between hits on a postcoital roach, “my career has slowed down a little bit.”

by Austin Murphy, Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Prince

[ed. See also: Willing And Able and Te Amo Corazón]

How Vaping Giant Juul Explains Everything That's Wrong With Our World

Twelve years ago, e-cigarettes couldn’t be found in America. Three years ago, Juul didn’t exist. But last Friday, Marlboro manufacturer Altria bought a 35 percent stake in the vaping juggernaut for $12.8 billion. The deal values Juul at $38 billion, a similar market capitalization to that of Target, MetLife, Delta Air Lines, and Ford. Fifteen hundred Juul employees split a $2 billion dividend as a result, becoming instant millionaires overnight.

Juul was an inviting target for Altria because it has captured close to three-quarters of the total e-cigarette market, according to Nielsen data, up from only 2 percent in 2016. Revenues for Juul increased almost 800 percent from 2017 to 2018, with its most explosive growth happening among teenagers. While e-cigarettes don’t contain cancer-causing tobacco, they do hook users to a drug that’s hard to quit. By one measure, nearly 20 years of falling cigarette use among 12th-graders has been wiped out by the rise of Juul.

The return to nicotine addiction among adolescents is happening alongside the rapid-fire monopolization of a brand-new market. While traditional tobacco companies all tried their hand at e-cigarettes, there was no legacy of dominant players in the sector and no major barrier to rivals. The fact that an industry established a decade ago so quickly whittled down to one dominant player, which an incumbent cigarette giant then bought into, suggests that our Second Gilded Age is a monopoly-creation machine.

This is not how markets are supposed to work. Regulators had — and still have — multiple opportunities to prevent both concentration in the e-cigarette market and profiteering off children. But competition authorities have taken such a hands-off attitude toward the economy, that we’re on the verge of witnessing Big Tobacco co-opt the very sector that was supposed to kill it off.

When launched in 2015, Juul was another of Silicon Valley’s attempts to “disrupt” an established market — in this case, cigarettes. The company, based in San Francisco, positioned itself as a savior for public health, because unlike cancer-causing tobacco sticks, vaporizer devices distribute nicotine without tar or other carcinogens. In fact, the original intention of e-cigarettes when patented by a Chinese pharmacist in 2003 was to convert tobacco users. Juul claims it “has helped more than one million Americans switch from cigarettes.”

By the time Juul came on the market, the major cigarette companies were all experimenting with their own e-cigarettes. Lorillard acquired a brand named blu, which at the time was the market leader. Altria acquired Green Smoke and launched its brand MarkTen. R.J. Reynolds created Vuse. British American Tobacco had a brand called Vype. There were also numerous other competitors, including Ruyan, E-Swisher, Logic, and NJOY. But because America has effectively abandoned competition policy, it took only two years for Juul to take over the market. Altria, in fact, discontinued its own e-cigarette brands this month, prior to taking a stake in Juul. (...)

Juul devices look like thumb drives and can be recharged in a USB port. Users insert “pods,” which contain as much nicotine as a pack of cigarettes. Flavors include traditional tobacco styles like menthol, but also mango, fruit, cucumber, and creme. The vapor is odorless and evaporates quickly. The company maintained an active social media presence promoting vaping, with fan accounts driving the virality even further.

You could say that Juul just built a better mousetrap, but all of Juul’s elements seem designed to appeal to teenagers, who can conceal the devices easily, take quick puffs at school or at home, and enjoy the dessert-like flavors. Because the prices are fairly high — $20 a device, and $30 for a four-pack of pods — Juul’s spread has been largely limited to affluent teens. But “juuling” has become a verb, a sure sign that the brand has taken over a market.

And while juuling isn’t as dangerous as smoking tobacco, it carries its own health risks while delivering a highly addictive substance that a savvy company can translate into overwhelming profit. Instead of the original intent to convert adult smokers, Juul appears to be tapping into a generation of new nicotine users. (...)

For Altria, the play is clear: Use Juul as an escape hatch if declining cigarette sales continue, and perhaps as a gateway back into cigarettes, as addicted teens chase a nicotine fix. It wasn’t the only cigarette company with the idea; Altria beat out British American Tobacco for Juul in a bidding war, according to the Financial Times. Another escape hatch is marijuana. Earlier in December, Altria also took a $1.8 billion stake in Cronos, a Canadian cannabis grower, seeking to capitalize on legalization efforts. Similarly, AB InBev, the maker of over 500 beer brands, just reached a deal with cannabis company Tilray to create pot-infused drinks for the Canadian market.

by David Dayen, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images