Sunday Cutdown XXVIII (b) 9 June 20243
Clearing my inbox of stories I want to document
1) The brown shirts are back marching
REUTERS: The Proud Boys are back: How the far-right group is rebuilding
NETFLIX: Hitler and the Nazis
WAPO: Trump loyalist pushes ‘post-Constitutional’ vision for second term
The Joe Berlinger documentary “Hitler and the Nazis” should not be missed on Netflix. History buffs of any sort will marvel at the precise digital remastering and colorization of old film (really amazing) while everyone else will have no effort drawing parallels to today’s violent and heavily armed Alt Right in America marching in step with Trump’s GOP.
All this talk of “post-constitutionalism” from the man slated to be Trump’s Chief of Staff is right in line with the Nazi approach to gaining power in the early 1930s: create a huge sense of crisis (easy for the Nazis due to 1929 Crash and subsequent Great Depression), declare democracy “broken,” and then install an “only-I-can-fix-this” strongman president and subordinate the entire government and public to his will. Oh, and toss in a lot of promised revenge against “treasonous” and “criminal” minorities “polluting the national bloodstream” and so on.
The SA “brown shirts” (Sturmabteilung, or “storm troopers”) were an essential part of Hitler’s rise: they were there (standing back and standing by, as it were) to violently attack his political enemies — or mount something like a mass attack on the Capitol and ransack it to intimidate Congress into invalidating a clearly legitimate and accurate election.
It is both historically wrong and morally weak to shy away from these comparisons, because they are real, they are profound, and they are here.
2) From your lips to my next client’s ears
FOREIGN POLICY: Consulting Firms Have Stumbled Into a Geopolitical Minefield
The old joke about management consulting is that players in that industry often just arbitrage sensitive information across companies: in effect, sharing with the laggards the best practices of the top firms. In that way, one could argue, management consulting was lifting (or at least not lowering) all boats.
But what about when that happens in a geopolitical sense? Until recently, no big whoop, but now?
Earlier this year, McKinsey executives found themselves in serious political trouble. The Financial Times reported that their China branch had boasted in 2019 of its economic advice to the Chinese central government, while a McKinsey-led think tank prepared a book which advised China to “deepen cooperation between business and the military and push foreign companies out of sensitive industries.”
This is an unusually tricky time for anyone in this business: Are you offering your best advice or the best advice of your nation? Which strikes you as more honest or less biased?
In our system, the two have often gone hand in hand (being like America is a good gauge of being successful in US-style globalization) but less so today, given the weird grip on our strategic imagination held by such hoary old concepts at “cold wars,” “WWIII,” and “containment.” Just because Washington is living in the Cold War doesn’t mean that is the sine qua non of good management advising around the world.
I mean, look at how American politicians are attacking DEI and ESG when both are just big business adjusting to the world as they find it (when did the GOP decide that business needs to be told how to conduct business by the government?). Instead, they’re told to turn back their “cultural clocks” or — worse — embrace the reactionary notion of Whites under siege across our country. How does that narrow mindset help any business thrive? How does that make America economically strong?
So here we are today:
Once, information brokers like McKinsey could advise governments and share data across national borders with little controversy. Now, they are being forced to make hard choices—and not just by U.S. politicians. The Beijing branch of the Mintz group, a consultancy specializing in due diligence, was raided last year by Chinese authorities, which had apparently started worrying that accurate statistics about the Chinese economy were a national security threat. Bain, which provides detailed advice to corporations, was raided a month later.
This was the past:
Consultancy firms were already crucial middlemen in the globalized economy, providing advice and shaping so-called best practices. Big companies in Beijing could see what their peers in Boston were doing, and adapt it to local circumstances. Consultants began to do the same for government clients. Other major international businesses, such as accountancy firms and data brokers, got in on the action, providing governments with specialized information that they didn’t have themselves.
This is the present:
Leaders on both sides of the Pacific are ratcheting up actions aimed to limit the exchange of strategic information. Semiconductors—where the U.S. has imposed extensive restrictions on the export of tools and expertise—took the first hit. Now, business consultancies and compliance groups are in trouble. Soon, it may be everyone.
Under the great Boomer political class, we’ve managed to criminalize medical procedures and pregnancies, we’ve turned teachers into ideological punching bags, and we’ve recast immigrants as vermin to be exterminated.
Why should management consulting be treated any better?
I say, give a damn because it all matters to our collective future.
3) The climate future is rushing toward us
WAPO: The climate refugee crisis is here
AP: Panama prepares to evacuate first island in face of rising sea levels
Countries are surrendering land and even towns and portions of cities to climate change’s ongoing assault on their territorial integrity.
From Panama:
On a tiny island off Panama’s Caribbean coast, about 300 families are packing their belongings in preparation for a dramatic change. Generations of Gunas who have grown up on Gardi Sugdub in a life dedicated to the sea and tourism will trade that next week for the mainland’s solid ground.
They go voluntarily — sort of.
The Gunas of Gardi Sugdub are the first of 63 communities along Panama’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts that government officials and scientists expect to be forced to relocate by rising sea levels in the coming decades.
From Brazil:
Catastrophic flooding in southern Brazil has forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. Many say they won’t go back.
This is fear on the march:
“I can’t live with this fear of water, fear of rain.”
This is a key concept driving my book’s logic:
The World Bank has estimated that more than 216 million people could be driven from their homes by sea level rise, flooding, desertification and other effects of warming temperatures. The Institute for Economics and Peace said the figure could reach 1.2 billion people. A future characterized by “climate refugees,” the European Parliament reported, was coming.
Just like farmers driven off the land by climate change, those forced from shorelines (where a stunning percentage of many states’ populations live, as in 40% of America) will be put on the move — a significant portion of them becoming, in my term, “geopolitical orphans.”
The WAPO story is about a Brazilian city of 1.3m souls:
Where the people of Canoas and other cities will go is unclear. For now, hundreds are reported to be living in tents or in cars or underneath a bridge. Tens of thousands more are in shelters for the displaced. Many more with relatives.
You think we have immigration/asylum pressures now from our neighbors to the south. This is just the beginning.
4) Tiger v. dragon
ORF: To Stay or To Go: Decoding Chinese Enterprises’ ‘India Dilemma’
NYT: Wall Street Lands on India, Looking for Profits It Can’t Find in China
H/T Steve Grundman.
The tectonic shift of foreign direct investment targeting China to FDI targeting India is well underway as Wall Street chases the next great source of cheap labor in the system, thanks to India’s unfolding demographic dividend:
Mumbai has been India’s commercial hub for eight decades, but it was relatively unfamiliar to global finance until the past two years.
Chinese companies are facing a “dilemma”:
In recent years, India has become a hot investment destination for Chinese companies. While Chinese investments in India have come under greater scrutiny following the 2020 Galwan incident, this has done little to reverse Chinese enterprises’ strong appetite for the Indian market. At the same time, Beijing is increasingly concerned that in their rush to capitalise on the Indian market, Chinese companies are embracing the ‘Make in India’ policy and inadvertently supporting India’s ambition to replace China as the world’s leading manufacturing hub.
I wrote about this in America’s New Map:
This is the inevitability both sides now face: India’s economic rise, fueled by favorable demographics once similarly exploited by China, will require massive foreign direct investment (FDI) flows from abroad to achieve its full potential—just like China did …
For now, China’s FDI in India in no way matches its trade volume, because New Delhi is highly fearful of Chinese ownership (much like the United States is today and was in decades past regarding Japan). While such concerns are natural, they put India’s economic rise at risk. Right now, one million Indians enter that country’s workforce every month, meaning New Delhi faces the same bide-your-time prelude to its rise that (a) Deng’s China faced with America, and (b) Alexander Hamilton’s America once faced with Great Britain. Tricky stuff indeed …
If the United States is to play a beneficial role in managing the China-India competition, it will be in steering both sides toward a mutually beneficial relationship wherein last-in China now sponsors next-up India. We may assume that Beijing will resist this economic logic because, after all, America long invested in China, only to later feel “betrayed” by its lack of Americanization.
This is the most important superpower relationship in the world right now and going forward. American strategists, narrowly viewing the world from the perch of the Taiwan scenario, see America-v-China as the key showdown of this century. They are wrong.
The future of this planet depends far more on how China and India get along.
Global business management consultants know this; military strategists on all sides simply do not get it.
Guess which expert community represents a greater threat to our collective future?
5) Mao’s Cultural Revolution digitalized
NYT: Xi Jinping’s Recipe for Total Control: An Army of Eyes and Ears
BUSINESS INSIDER: The rise of ChatCCP
NYT: As China’s Internet Disappears, ‘We Lose Parts of Our Collective Memory’
H/T Jeffrey Itell.
We are now seeing who really is Xi Jinping’s “daddy.”
The man grew up amidst Mao’s Cultural Revolution, where “re-education camps” proliferated across the land. They represented Mao’s fear of lost revolutionary spirit and of his own diminished power. It was a great leap backward and it decimated the country and its economy — such as it was.
But that choice and that approach imprinted on young Xi, despite his family’s personal woes: when in doubt, go Old School and beat it into them.
Xi fears a future (domestic consumption-led growth) where the Party serves consumers instead of the other way around. So he’s going to his go-to, this-is-how-I-was-brought-up answer: ever tightening ideological control, here through a pervasive digitalization of mass surveillance — a model he wishes to export to any Global South nation that his trade and investment can lure and ultimately capture (a huge theme of my book).
Our first-blush reaction is to be afraid — be very AFRAID!
But, on China’s side, this is a fear-threat reaction in which technological advance is subordinated to political control. That route never wins on the big stage because market-driven competitors will outperform the reactionaries every time — thank God.
One does not centrally-plan technological revolutions, last time I checked.
And don’t toss the making of the atom bomb in my face with some reference to the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer: that tail-end Charley effort stood on the shoulders of hundreds of great scientists working across the world for decades. Weaponizing is not the same thing as discovering — much less inventing. Read Richard Rhodes’ history and it will all become clear.
Much will be lost in Xi’s quest, which is ultimately self-destructive and self-limiting. His continuing reign is NOT a sign of China’s growing power but of its growing weakness. [Same is true of an America if it is to be re-ruled by Trump.]
This is why we need not go all wobbly with hysterics on “World War III,” “containment,” and a “new Cold War.” We can be more mature about this than that.
6) Sweating the climate details
WAPO: Schools that never needed AC are now overheating. Fixes will cost billions.
NYT: The Stench of Climate Change Denial
H/T Bruce Whitehill.
Schools too hot for kids to learn and septic tanks overflowing from torrential rains and/or flooding.
Climate change is finding expression all around us.
Hot weather is not a new concern for school districts. But as the burning of fossil fuels heats the planet, it’s delivering longer-lasting, more dangerous heat waves, and higher average temperatures. Across much of the northern United States, where many schools were built without air conditioning, districts are now forced to confront the academic and health risks posed by poorly cooled schools. Fixing the problem often requires residents to pass multimillion dollar school repair bonds, which can be hard to do. Climatic change is arriving faster than most can adapt.
“Faster than most can adapt.”
That’s a telling phrase.
Remember, climate change offers Nature the following choice: adapt, move, or die.
For humans, adapt mostly means “pay up.” And when you can’t, you move.
7) Come and they will build it
REUTERS: Post-COVID, China is back in Africa and doubling down on minerals
REUTERS: Leaders gather in China for smaller, greener Belt and Road summit
There is no way China is ever giving up on trying to rule the Global South. Beijing’s party bosses see it as insurance against regime-change pressures from the West.
When a Russia is de-globalized from the West, it can turn to the East, but China cannot do the same. The East alone simply isn’t big enough to support China’s economic trajectory.
So, the South it is.
As for the most immediate prize for China’s quest to dominate high tech (information, transportation, renewable energies …), metals are the clear strategic target.
8) They comes in all flavors
NBC NEWS: Asian Latinos are a growing but ignored demographic, new analysis shows
This reminds us that Latinos are not a race but an ethnic group of diverse races.
Asians, for example, have been coming to Latin America and living there and intermarrying there for a VERY LONG TIME. They are not a bug but a feature of Latino culture.
The population’s trajectory has roots in a lengthy history of Latino and Asian or Pacific Islander citizens interacting while meeting a labor demand in the U.S., according to Kandamby. There are records of Chinese immigrants, targeted by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, settling in towns on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border and Punjabi and Mexican farmworkers intermarrying in California’s Imperial Valley in the early 1900s.
In fact, grouped by state, a third of Asian Latino Americans reside in California, the data brief states. Texas and Hawaii are the next highest.
This group is young and growing fast:
The UCLA analysis also states the current Latino-Asian or Pacific Islander population skews pretty young. Nearly half are age 18 or younger.
China will seek to take advantage of this throughout LATAM. Will America do the same or continue to demonize immigrants as our strategic answer to such developments?
9) The desert takes the weak (and discarded)
WAPO: With Europe’s support, North African nations push migrants to the desert
More evidence of a North turning to killing unwanted climate refugees:
“There is Algeria, follow the light,” the Tunisian official barked at the Black migrants. “If you’re seen here, you’ll be shot.”
That’s the advice of a smuggler upon dumping African migrants off in the Saharan Desert — with the operation being funded by European governments to the north.
The draconian practices being deployed in at least three North African nations to dissuade sub-Saharan migrants from risky crossings to Europe.
The clandestine operations mainly targeting Black migrants had a silent partner: Europe.
Some amazing WAPO reporting.
A year-long joint investigation by The Washington Post, Lighthouse Reports and a consortium of international media outlets shows how the European Union and individual European nations are supporting and financing aggressive operations by governments in North Africa to detain tens of thousands of migrants each year and dump them in remote areas, often barren deserts.
As I say in the brief, the killing has already begun, and it is being conducted through proxies with EU financing here:
The E.U. provided more than 400 million euros to Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania between 2015 and 2021 under its largest migration fund, the E.U. Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, an initiative to foster local economic growth and stem migration. In addition, the E.U. has funded dozens of other projects that are difficult to quantify and track due to a lack of transparency in the E.U.’s funding system.
To confront a surge of irregular migration last year, Europe moved to deepen its partnerships in North Africa, offering an extra 105 million euros to Tunisia last year and signing a deal in February with Mauritania to provide an additional 210 million euros.
European governments was this problem gone, and it is willing to pay for this execution-by-desert approach.
“The fact is European states do not want to be the ones to have dirty hands. They do not want to be considered responsible for the violation of human rights,” said Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche, a human rights and legal expert at France’s Jean Moulin Lyon 3 university. “So they are subcontracting these violations to third states. But I think, really, according to international law, they are responsible.”
Migrant murder for hire. Don’t even bother digging a hole in the desert.
Whites paying Arabs to kill Blacks. There’s your dystopian future of North-South disintegration in the Eur-African vertical:
“When they see a Black guy, they come,” said Lamine, a 25-year-old from Guinea who, since early 2023, said he has been repeatedly detained and beaten in Rabat, then dumped in the interior by Moroccan forces despite having refugee papers from UNHCR.
Letting the desert kill them is almost Biblical.
10) Fixing a mineral deficiency
PITTWIRE: Making batteries takes a lot of lithium. Some of it could come from wastewater.
Necessity strikes again as the mother of inventiveness:
Most batteries used in technology like smart watches and electric cars are made with lithium that travels across the world before even getting to manufacturers. But what if nearly half of the lithium used in the U.S. could come from Pennsylvania wastewater?
A new analysis using compliance data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection suggests that if it could be extracted with complete efficiency, lithium from the wastewater of Marcellus shale gas wells could supply up to 40% of the country’s demand.
Already, researchers in the lab can extract lithium from water with more than 90% efficiency according to Justin Mackey, a researcher at the National Energy Technology Laboratory and PhD student in the lab of Daniel Bain, associate professor of geology and environmental sciences in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
A long time mantra of mine (Seek and ye shall find) regarding “resource wars.”
11) Ghost fleets to fight ghost fleets!
HOUSTON.COM: Ghost fleets might be future for navies around the world
NEWSWEEK: 'Exodus' of Russian Ships From Black Sea Fleet's Reserve Base Sparks Rumors
The Russians are basically pulling their manned ships out of harm’s way in the Black Sea, reflecting their growing vulnerability to unmanned/drone strikes.
A battlespace too dangerous for battleships. Amazing, right?
Answer: unmanned ships as the future of sea control and attack.
Not exactly a future world run by pirates, is it?
The many, the cheap, and the unmanned, and the disposable.
Art Cebrowski would be proud.
12) A rain forest without rain
GUARDIAN: More than third of Amazon rainforest struggling to recover from drought, study finds
A rainforest needs rain about 70% of the time, which means the Amazon (lungs of the world) is in deep trouble as climate change creates mega-droughts along lower latitudes.
The findings of a recent study:
More than a third of the Amazon rainforest is struggling to recover from drought, according to a new study that warns of a “critical slowing down” of this globally important ecosystem.
The signs of weakening resilience raise concerns that the world’s greatest tropical forest – and biggest terrestrial carbon sink – is degrading towards a point of no return.
It follows four supposedly “one-in-a-century” dry spells in less than 20 years, highlighting how a human-disrupted climate is putting unusually intense strains on trees and other plants, many of which are dying of dehydration.
In the past, the canopy of the South American tropical forest, which covers an area equivalent to about half of Europe, would shrink and expand in tandem with the annual dry and rainy seasons. It also had the capacity to bounce back from a single drought.
But in recent times, recoveries have become more sluggish because droughts are growing more intense in the south-east of the Amazon and more frequent in the north-west.
The term of art in the study: “dieback”: “a condition in which a tree or shrub begins to die from the tip of its leaves or roots backward, owing to disease or an unfavorable environment.”
Get used to hearing that word.
We are living in a world featuring more and more dieback.
Your first item make me nervous, generally you are pretty sanguine about our ability to push through the friction and angst of politics to get to the generally positive impacts of the strategic dynamics you outline. Seems like the "brown shirts" and their goals would provide a pretty stark impediment, one about which you are increasingly concerned.