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“No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious & charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.” – Kurt Vonnegut
“A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.” – Theodore Roosevelt
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Consulting on Corruption: McKinsey & Company is an American management consulting firm operating worldwide, conducting qualitative and quantitative analysis to evaluate management decisions across public and private sectors. For much of its 93-year existence, McKinsey was a mid-sized partnership focusing on its role as counselor to top executives at giant multinational corporations. Partners prided themselves on turning down business they felt was beneath the firm.
After the Cold War’s end in 1989, new global markets opened up. McKinsey began aggressively expanding, vastly enlarging its global footprint. It pushed into less familiar territory, like emerging economies, and into sectors, like government contracting, that the firm had traditionally eschewed. Government contracts generally require more disclosure, bring more scrutiny, and are subject to more rules than corporate ones. McKinsey was taking on work it wouldn’t have previously due to the political risk involved.
In the past decade the global consulting behemoth has worked for corruption-plagued governments from South Africa to Mongolia. The New York Times delved into the South African scandal with an eye toward how a company like McKinsey could have become so enmeshed in illegal government contracting. ProPublica takes an in-depth look at another of the company’s conspiratorial yet fascinating entanglements with a foreign government, this time Mongolia. The company’s explanation for the former is it may have committed errors in judgment, “missed some warning signs,” but did nothing illegal. For the latter, the company said it had simply failed to conduct adequate ‘due diligence’ on a government adviser or his private company; it had ‘relied on outside legal advice’ that all was well; it ‘failed to see some warning signs’ but certainly had no knowledge of any unethical or illegal activity.
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We’re No Longer Mates: Australia and the US are old allies, but economic considerations are proving more significant than historical alliances. Australia has not adopted the bellicose anti-China language of President Trump, nor has it tried using tariffs to force the Chinese to yield to its demands. China has become Australia’s largest export market. For example, the last decade of Australian wine exports to America fell by 37 percent, while exports to China rose by 959 percent. Like other longtime US allies around the globe, Australia is simply preparing for a world in which America is no longer the economic center. (NYT) Additional read: China’s Propaganda Machine Takes Aim at U.S. Over Trade War: Nationalism has surged as commentators attack “Giant Baby Trump” and vow to resist American demands. (NYT, $)
Move Over Coachella: India’s elections are so big they’ve become a tourist attraction. The country has almost 900 million eligible voters, and with nearly six weeks of rallies, speeches and voting, a handful of tour operators have started offering political tours. This election season people can experience what now resembles a festival — of democracy. Tours are happening across the country, in both rural and urban constituencies, and for Indians and foreigners alike. Voting ends Sunday, and ballots will be counted May 23. (NPR)
Well, Oil Be Damned: Saudi Arabia said Monday two of its oil tankers had been damaged in an act of sabotage. On Tuesday Yemen’s Houthi rebels carried out multiple drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities. A Houthi spokesman tweeted that the drone strikes were in response to Saudi “aggression” and “genocide” in Yemen. The Houthis are backed by Iran, but it was unclear whether the attacks were related to increasing tensions between Iran and the US and its allies in the Persian Gulf. Both sides said Tuesday they are not looking for a war, but the Trump administration has not ruled out increasing the American military presence in the region. (NYT)
Good Luck Corrupting This, Russia: Some 427 million people in the European Union’s 28 member states can vote from May 23 to 26 to elect a new EU legislature. That number includes nearly 50 million Brits who can vote for 73 lawmakers. Britain was due to leave the bloc in March. But by delaying Brexit and taking part in the vote, Britain forced the EU to postpone the redistribution of 27 of 73 UK seats to other countries. Once Brexit happens, newly elected UK lawmakers would have to quit, 27 of the 73 would be reallocated, and the remaining 46 seats would just disappear. Since there are still unknowns in the process, countries receiving extra seats will cast ballots for them, but the newest lawmakers won’t be seated until Britain actually leaves. It’s complicated. (Reuters)
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Kids Exposed To Radiation, Parents Reactions Are Nuclear: The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant near the village of Piketon, Ohio was one of three large US plants that supported the nation’s nuclear weapons program. It enriched uranium from 1954 to 2001. After the plant was shuttered a government contractor decommissioned and demolished the plant. In 2017 a government contractor was allowed to bury onsite in liner-protected cells as much as 1.3 million cubic yards of radioactive material, chemically contaminated waste and construction debris. Government studies and reports said the Piketon disposal site would be safe for the community. Local officials and a consultant the village hired said it would not. They said the government’s own geological report showed that bedrock under the site is fractured and the groundwater in the area would be put at risk if the landfill ever leaks.
On Monday the local school district declared in a letter that Zahn’s Corner Middle School in Piketon would be shut down for the remainder of the school year because of possible radioactive contamination from the nearby former nuclear plant, now waste disposal, site. The district said enriched uranium and neptunium-237, highly carcinogenic radioactive chemicals, were detected not only inside the building but also at a Department of Energy air monitor adjacent to the school. More than 350 children attended the school. Pike County is east of Cincinnati and has a population of about 28,000. Between 2010 to 2014, the cancer incidence rate in the county was almost 488 per 100,000, 10 percent higher than the national average. It is also one of the poorest counties in Ohio. (Columbus Dispatch, NBCNews)
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I Am Elder Man: Knowing that “every eight seconds, a baby boomer turns seventy-three” is to understand why scientists at MIT and Harvard University and elsewhere are hard at work studying aging — why it happens, and what can be done to either slow it down or minimize the effects — not so much for the purpose of extending life itself (that we’ve already done) but to extend life’s youthful functioning, or at least the enjoyment of youthful functioning vs. the inevitability of aged disfunction. Joseph Coughlin is the founder and director of the AgeLab at MIT. He’s developed a “sudden aging” suit he calls the AGNES, for Age Gain Now Empathy System. Donning the AGNES suit simulates what it’s like to be in an “old” body. It includes yellow glasses, which convey a sense of the yellowing of the ocular lens that comes with age; a boxer’s neck harness, which mimics the diminished mobility of the cervical spine; bands around the elbows, wrists, and knees to simulate stiffness; boots with foam padding to produce a loss of tactile feedback; and special gloves to “reduce tactile acuity while adding resistance to finger movements.”
Coughlin established the AgeLab to engineer and promote new products and services specially designed for the expanding market of the aged. The AGNES suit is one of many instruments and appliances available to instruct, among others, visiting entrepreneurs. It’s the failure of industry and engineering to address the actual problems of aging — the problems summed up by the aggravations of the AGNES suit — that makes Coughlin impatient with scientific speculations about extending life. “We’ve already extended life! What we need is not to put off death a little longer but to write a new narrative of aging as it could be.” What we need is the ability to recapture that feeling of youthful freedom that comes with the removal of the aging suit. (New Yorker)
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