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From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bee: [email protected] Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.... 08/10/2014 Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 09:31:06 +0000 Attachments: Great_Newsroom_speech,America_isnt_greatest_country_GB_07_22_2014.docx; Summary_Costs_of War NCIUNE_26_2014.pdf; How Libya_Blew_Billions and Its Best_Chance_at_Democracy_David_Samuels_Bloomb erg_Businessweek_Aug_7,2014.docx; Obesity_Threatens_to_Cut_U.S._Life_Expectancy„New_Analysis_Suggests_NMIH_May_ 12„2014.docx; Sade_bio.docx Inline-Images: image.png; image(I).png; image(2).png; image(3).png; image(4).png; image(5).png; image(6).png; image(7).png DEAR FRIEND I wasn't sure how I was going to start his week's readings until I saw this picture of gospel legend Naomi Shelton and I was absolutely sure after listening to song 'Sinner"from her latest album/Cd "Cold World" who as the Mother Jones reviewer Jon Young describes, sings with a gritty warmth that will rouse believers and nonbelievers alike, while her Gospel Queens serve as a stirring foil, locating that sweet spot where church music and old-school R&B intersect. This isn't a mere exercise in nostalgia for purists, however: Exciting tracks like "Get Up, Child" and "Boundfor the Promised Land" boast propulsive grooves that will keep any party cooking with funky grace. Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens "Sinner" -- http://youtu.be/CsCEx9qKeDg EFTA01204416 As they say you can see it in her eyes. Enjoy the photo, listen to her music andfeel the gritty warmth where church musk and old-school R&B intersect. And since this is Sunday, not a bad start I would say America is in deep trouble -- economic, political, cultural, and moral. Yet few public figures are speaking honestly to us about our fallen state, much less pointing the way upward other than blaming the ills on President Obama. So leave it to a fictional character to do the job — brilliantly. In the opening sequence of the new HBO series The Newsroom, a world-beaten (as opposed to world- beating) TV news anchor finds himself on a journalism panel, seated between -- in a reflection of today's stark partisan divide -- a bleeding-heart liberal and a bombastic conservative. We should thank HBO and especially writer and show-runner for its hit television cable show The Newsroom - Aaron Sorkin — for possibly the greatest television speech ever because someone needed to say this — with candor, wisdom and a sense of reality -- on nationwide TV — That the United States isn't the greatest country in the world. Like many fans of West Wing and its creator Aaron Sorkin I looked forward to the premiere of a new HBO series, "The Newsroom" where like news anchor Howard Beale in Oscar winner Paddy Chayefsky's ground breaking and thought provoking 1974 satirical film Network starring Peter Finch — in The Newsroom actor Jeff Daniels plays a news anchor Will McAvoy who can't take the bullshit anymore during a panel discussion and tells it like this country is. When a student in the audience asks, "Can you say why America is the greatest country in the world?", initially the anchor ducks and says, "The New York Jets." Then, fantasizing a woman in the audience holding up cue cards responding to the question that say "It isn't" followed by "But it can be" (we'll learn she's his former executive producer and lover), and forced by the moderator who demands a "human moment" from him, the anchor snaps, "America isn't the greatest country, Professor," and goes on to deliver a speech, a cry from the heart, about why. EFTA01204417 After ticking off the metrics of decline ("We're seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math...forty- ninth in life expectancy," etc.), the anchor gets to the heart of the matter -- the moral heart -- which heart bears quoting in full: We stood up for what was right, we fought for moral reasons, we passed laws, struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured disease, and we cultivated the world's greatest artists and the world's greatest economy. We reached for the stars, acted like men. We aspired to intelligence, we didn't belittle it, it didn't make us feel inferior. We didn't identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn't scare so easy. Wrapping up but running out of steam, the anchor reverts to his newsman role and, in a nod to Edward IL Murrow and Walter Cronkite, says: "We were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered." Pausing, he concludes: "First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. America is not the greatest country in the world anymore." (See dip of full sequence here). Web Link: http://youtu.be/ZPHSXUS0 Ic Hearing this speech, experiencing it, the viewer (or at least this viewer) can't help but think that, yes, America would be sounder, healthier, could reverse its decline and head upward, if we did things for moral and not expedient reasons, stopped beating our chest, aspired to intelligence, etc. The list resonates. But the shame is that it took fictional cable television to say it. Menge name steeds tryState 11••••••••••nn ft , Brood Br! Wow Although we expect that Internet speeds to differ greatly from country to country, one might expect speeds to be more consistent from state to state within a single country. Not true. In 2011the cloud EFTA01204418 platform provider Akamai put together "The State of the Internet" report for the fourth quarter of 2011, suggesting that Internet speed vary widely from state to state with some states outperforming others by wide margins. Along with a list of states with the highest average Internet connection speeds -- such as Rhode Island, New Hampshire and, at the top, Delaware -- Akamai also examined the states that had the slowest average connection speeds and where the most people experienced slow speeds. While Delaware residents enjoy an average peak data rate of 36 megabits per second (Mbps), people in Arkansas can expect speeds to top out at 13.3 Mbps on average. Akamai also compiled a list of states with the highest percentage of "narrowband" connection speeds, which are speeds slower than 256 kilobits per second (kbps), according to the report. Akamai ranked the states by what percentage of all Internet connections adopted within the state in the past year were working below 256 kbps. (See the states below with the highest percentage of snail-slow connections.) To put that speed into context, researchers set a new Internet speed record in December 2011, achieving a data rate of 186 gigabits per second, equivalent to 23, 8o8 Mbps. According to a press release announcing the news that speed would allow the transfer of 100,000 full Blu-ray disks in a single day. There is a silver lining around these data, though. Akamai's report shows, there is a "clear trend" away from the adoption of very slow connections; as you'll see in the slideshow below, the percentage of Internet connection speeds working below 256 kbps have decreased from Q3 2011 to Q4 2011 in every single state on the list. Flip through the slideshow below to check out the states where you'll find the most low-speed Internet connections. Then, make sure to check out Akamai's list of the top nine countries with the fastest Internet speeds. Were you surprised by any of the states you saw? Let us know in the comments! #9: Texas Percent below 256 kbps: 2.3 percent Change From Last First Quarter: 2.2 percent decrease #8: Ohio Percent below 256 kbps: 2.3 percent Change From Last First Quarter: 3.7 percent decrease #7: Colorado Percent below 256 kbps: 2.4 percent Change from last quarter: 4.1 percent decrease #6: Iowa EFTA01204419 Percent below 256 kbps: 2.5 percent Changes from last quarter: 6.o decrease #5: Illinois Percent below 256 kbps: 2.8 percent Change from last quarter: 4.1 percent decrease #4: Alaska Percent below 256 kbps: 2.8 percent Change from last quarter: 9.1 decrease #3: Georgia Percent below 256 kbps: 2.9 percent Change from last quarter: 3.4 decrease #2: Missouri Percent below 256 kbps: 4.1 percent Change from last quarter: 3.7 percent decrease #1: District Of Columbia Percent below 256 kbps: 4.4 percent Change From Last First Quarter: 5.3 percent decrease I then compared the above list with thefastest Internet speeds in other counties. And guess what, the United States was not in the top ten. According to Akamai, most Americans surf the web at 5.8 Mbps, making the U.S. the lucky number 13 on Akamai's list. And which country is the world leader in terms of average connection speed? You'll have to look through the slideshow tofind out, but we'll hint that it's been the same country since at least 2007. Are you surprised by which nations made Akamai's current list? I was EFTA01204420 no: Singapore With an average of 30.7 megabits per second, Singapore cracked the top 10 with a peak speed that is nearly double the global average of 15.9 megabits per second. Thanks in part to its fast broadband, Singapore "is a tech hub," said David Belson, who edited the report. The country is also home to well- known techie Eduardo Saverin, who moved there and renounced his U.S. citizenship before last year's initial public offering of Facebook, which he co-founded. #9. Israel Web startup culture and fast Internet go hand in hand, said Belson, the Akamai editor. That's why it shouldn't surprise anyone that Israel made the list. The country's average peak speed was 30.9 megabits per second. 'There's good connectivity," he said. "And there are smart, very technical people." A recent study conducted by researcher Startup Genome found Tel Aviv to be the best place for startups behind Silicon Valley. #8: Bulgaria With its low taxes and cheap labor, Bulgaria is marketing itself as an attractive destination for global companies and investors. Another selling point? Its Internet speed. Bulgarian broadband reached an average of 32.1 megabits per second, an increase of 15 percent compared with the previous quarter. #7: Switzerland Befitting a major hub of the finance industry, Switzerland was clocked at 32.4 megabits per second on average. That compares with that other major hub, the U.S., which had an average peak speed of 29.6 megabits per second. #6: Belgium Belgium Internet connections peaked at an average of 32.7 megabits per second. At that speed, you could download the 2002 spy comedy "Austin Powers in Goldmember," featuring Mike Myers's Belgian baddie, in about six minutes. #5: Romania Among those in the top 10, Romania was the only one to see its average peak speed fall from the previous quarter. The country's average dropped 3.2 percent, compared with a global average decrease of 1.4 percent. Still, most countries would love to have Romania's broadband speed. With an average peak speed of 37.4 megabits per second, it was beat by Latvia by just a tenth of a megabit per second. #4: Latvia EFTA01204421 When thinking about the most technologically advanced nations, Latvia probably doesn't come to mind. But broadband lines there reached an average peak speed of 37.5 megabits per second, placing the country in the top four. "Some of the Eastern European countries that are on here have a good reputationfor Internet connectivity," Belson said. "They're smaller. They have a lot of government backing." #3: Japan The country's electronics industry may be losing its edge, but Japan's telecommunications technology is still on top of its game. The Japanese government has long prioritized Internet development as a national goal, Belson said. High-speed optic fiber runs through many parts of the country. Japanese connections reached 42.2 megabits per second on average, Akamai said. #2: South Korea Online gaming sucks up a lot of bandwidth, and there are few nations that love their games more than South Korea. It is home to several gaming competitions, such as World Cyber Games, and has entire television channels devoted to "electronic sports." The average peak connection for the country was 48.8 megabits per second. And broadband, as in several of the top-ranked nations, is relatively cheap, too. People in Seoul can get 100 megabit-per-second lines for $31.90 a month, the report said. #1: Hong Kong With its high population density and strong government support, Internet access in Hong Kong is blazing fast. And unlike Internet lines just across the border, content censorship is virtually nonexistent. (China is ranked at No. 123, Belson said.) The average peak speed in Hong Kong was 54.1 megabits per second, according to Akamai, making it No. 1 on the list. At that speed, you could download the HD movie "Battleship," which is set in Hong Kong, in about four minutes. But as the author of the article that I got this list from wrote, why would you want to? EFTA01204422  2. I had tried to ignore this false premise except that when Eugene Robinson wrote an op-ed this week in the Washington Post, I felt forced to comment on what a number of pundits on the far right is calling the "war on whites". And like Robinson said in the article, if there really were a "war on whites," as a Republican congressman Mo Brooks from Alabama ludicrously claimed last September, it wouldn't be going very well for the anti-white side. What `war on whites'? In 2012, the last year for which comprehensive Census Bureau data are available, white households had a median income of $57,009, compared with $33,321 for African American households and $39,005 for Hispanic households. The white-black income gap was almost exactly the same as in 1972; the gap between whites and Hispanics actually worsened. According to an analysis by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, the average white family has six times as much accumulated wealth as the average black or Hispanic family. Other authoritative data show that African Americans and Hispanics are far more likely than whites to be unemployed, impoverished or incarcerated. Yet Rep. Mo Brooks feverishly imagines that whites are somehow under attack and that the principal assailant is — why am I not surprised? — President Obama. Asked whether Republicans were alienating Latino voters with their position on immigration, Brooks said this to conservative radio host Laura Ingraham: "This is a part of the war on whites that's being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they're launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else. It's a part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things." Ingraham, who makes her living as a rhetorical flamethrower, actually told the congressman that his "phraseology might not be the best choice." But Brooks stuck to his appalling thesis in a subsequent interview with AL.com, saying that "in effect, what the Democrats are doing with their dividing America by race is they are waging a war on whites and I find that repugnant." EFTA01204423 Brooks is from Alabama, where public officials used fire hoses and attack dogs against black children who were peacefully trying to integrate the whites-only lunch counters of Birmingham. Where terrorists acting in the name of white supremacy bombed a historic African American church, killing four little girls. Where demonstrators marching for voting rights were savagely beaten by police and vigilantes as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Brooks is 6o, which means he lived through these events. Surely he knows that it was white-imposed Jim Crow segregation — not anything that black or brown people did — that divided America by race. At some level, he must realize that his overheated blather about a "war on whites" is not just ahistorical but obscene in its willful ignorance. But maybe not. Maybe Brooks has fully bought in to the paranoid myth of white victimhood that gives the opposition to Obama and his policies such an edge of nastiness and desperation. I do not believe it can be a coincidence that this notion of whites somehow being under attack is finding new expression — not just in Brooks's explicit words but in the euphemistic language of many others as well — when the first black president lives in the White House. The myth of victimhood is not new. Long after it was understood that slavery was morally wrong, Southern whites justified its perpetuation by citing the fear that blacks, once liberated, would surely take bloody revenge against those who had held them in bondage. Jim Crow laws and lynchings had a similar purpose. In the minds of his assassins, 4 -year-old Emmett Till was tortured and killed to protect the flower of Southern womanhood. The myth surfaces whenever Obama comments on race. When he spoke about the killing of Trayvon Martin, nothing he said was inherently controversial. But the mere fact that Obama expressed sympathy for Martin was taken by some as an attack on the forces of law and order, or an apology for hip-hop "thug life" culture, or an indication that his real agenda is to ban all handguns, or something along those ridiculous lines. When Obama was running for president, I wrote that to win he would have to be perceived as "the least-aggrieved black man in America." He has tried his best, but for some people it's not enough. There are other reasons why the myth of white victimhood is gaining strength — economic dislocation, rapid immigration from Latin America, changing demographics that will make this a majority- minority country before mid-century. But I can't help feeling that Obama's race heightens the sense of being under siege. Congressman Brooks, you're talking pure gibberish. But thanks for being honest. Eugene Robinson ****** EFTA01204424  AT LEAST $128 BILLION IN BANK SETTLEMENTS SINCE '09 Bank of America-$61,199,000,000 Citigroup-$1o,088,000,00o JPMorgan-$31,480,000,000 BNP Paribas-$9,000,000,000 Wells Fargo-$5,841,000,000 Credit Suisse-$2,500,000,000 HSBC-$1,920,000,000 Deutsche Bank-$1,900,000,000 Morgan Stanley-$1,250,000,000 UBS-$780,000,000 Barclay's-$773,000,000 INC Bank-$619,000,000 Commerzbank-$600,000,000 Goldman Sacks-$550,800,000 Standard Charter-$440,000,000 Web Link: http://infogr.amitk-in-bank-settlements-since-2008-aphre=web Since 2009, big banks in the U.S. and Europe have paid at least $128 billion to regulators, according to data compiled by the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and The Huffington Post, for issues tied to the housing collapse and other financial misdeeds, including aiding and abetting money laundering and tax evasion. Bank of America's reported $17 billion settlement over bad mortgages would be the biggest in a string of increasingly expensive bank punishments. But don't cry for the banks -- they seem more than capable of handling it. While $128 billion may be an incomprehensible sum to most of us, it's worth considering just how monumental these banks are in comparison. Since 2009, the American banking industry alone has racked up nearly $503 billion in profits, according to FDIC quarterly data through the first quarter of 2014. (Worth noting: Many of the banks listed in the graphic above are foreign). These fines have made occasional dents in some quarterly earnings, but they're effectively drops in the banks' buckets compared to their greater profits. EFTA01204425 Bank of America's reported $17 billion settlement would be more than double its roughly $7.5 billion in profit over the past year, according to a HuffPost tally of BofA's recent financials. But the bank's bottom line has been hurt by squirreling away cash for this settlement. It is telling that, on the same day news of this possible settlement broke, federal regulators agreed to let the bank raise its dividend - - clearly $17 billion is not going to break the bank. It's also worth noting that estimates of the total amount of fines vary based on how banks are included and how many smaller fines are tallied. The authors of this report said that they could be undercounting the total, and will be updating the graphic as new information comes in. Still the underlying lesson should be that as long as there are no criminal prosecutions and serious jail time associated with the malfeasance paying fines, even large fines, will continue to be the cost of doing business and little will change and this is my rant of the week... WEEK's READINGS OBAMA WEIGHS IRAQ AIRSTRIKES ISIS Takes Iraq's Biggest Dam... Seizes Country's Largest Christian Town... Targets Ethnic Minority... Thousands Flee Horror, Trapped In Mountains... Humanitarian Disaster... Children Dying Of Thirst... White House: 'No American Military Solutions'... France Will Support Kurds In Fight... These where the headlines on Thursday's Huffington Post Another creep to war Because halfway around depending on where you live in the country the White House is being pressured into some sort of military action even though no one can explain or guarantee how these actions achieve their short-term goal or will lead to a lasting peace. Therefore if this is truly the case, I ask why do anything? By evening the President alerted the public that that he had authorized humanitarian airlifts (relief supplies) to members of the ancient Yazidi sect, tens of thousands of whom are massed on a desert mountaintop seeking shelter from fighters who had ordered them to convert or die, as well as U.S. air strikes to halt the Islamist advance, protect Americans and safeguard hundreds of thousands of Christians and members of other religious minorities who have fled for their lives. And by Friday morning both supplies were dropped and two F/A-i8 aircraft from an aircraft carrier in the Gulf dropped laser-guided 500-pound bombs on a mobile artillery piece used by the ISISL fighters to shell Kurdish forces defending Arbil. American taxpayers have already wasted somewhere in the neighborhood of $4.375 trillion with a total cost of potentially $7.9 trillion (see attached Summary) as hundreds of thousands of soldiers have returned home with all types of complications as a result of multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. This does not include the almost 7000 American troops who died fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, from every part of the country, and a great majority were young men who were married with children leaving families with a lifetime of pain. And although the official figure of wounded soldiers is only 32021, most experts say the number is far more than 100,000. And while the mortally wounded US soldier is the "gold standard" of war deaths for many Americans, the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced fatalities among large and unrecognized numbers of private contract workers. In April 2014, the over 61,000 contractors in Afghanistan outnumbered the uniformed US EFTA01204426 troops there. An estimated 6,790 contractors working for the US have been killed in the two war zones; the true number is likely much larger as many are citizens of other countries and their deaths or injuries have not been reported. Going back to the lead article in The Huffington Post on Thursday — U.S. Weighs Airstrikes, Humanitarian Aid In Iraq — which said that the White House was weighing direct military strikes to stem an Islamic militant group's gains in Iraq, as well as humanitarian relief for thousands of displaced religious minorities in the country's north, according to U.S. defense officials and others familiar with the administration's thinking. And that the President was huddled with his national security team Thursday morning to discuss the crisis as the Islamic State group made further gains. And that the contemplated airstrikes would mark a significant shift in the U.S. strategy in Iraq, where the military fully withdrew in late 2011 after nearly a decade of war. But everyone know that airstrikes alone won't keep the insurgents from returning. That requires boots on the ground.... And if I remember correctly ISISL crossed the border into Iraq in late May and in early June with less than several thousand combatants they somehow took over Mosul which was being defended by Iraqi troops ten times their size. Even if the defenders were only three times their size in numbers the fact that government soldiers dropped their guns and abandoned their post without much of a fight is indicative that infighting between Maliki government and former supporters are eventually going to lose to either ISISL or some other cohesive group. Mission creep often begins with humanitarian aid. And I have no problem with humanitarian aid as I worked with a group who organized one of the first conveys of humanitarian aid into Benghazi in 2011. But I also witnessed a weak central government squander its honeymoon of opportunity to the point that the country is currently in chaos. So humanitarian aid will not stop the insurgency. The war will go one and like the weapons that Iraqi army abandoned in Mosul a good chunk of the humanitarian aid will end up as booty for the insurgents. So what should the President Obama and the White House have done? To be honest I don't know. What I do know is that whatever is done we should be very cognizant of the potential of mission creep because the last thing that America needs today is to put American troops on the ground in the Middle East or for that matter anywhere in the world no matter how badly they are needed or requested. If troops are needed in Iraq let the Arab League lead the charge. And if the Arab League are afraid to go it alone, have them ask for UN peace keepers to at least set up a buffer zone. And again, let's not allow this week's humanitarian aid and air strikes end with boots on the ground in Iraq or anywhere else. 2How Libya Blew Billions and Its Best Chance at Democracy Knowing that I am a supporter of the new leadership in Libya, this week a Libyan friend sent me an article from Bloomberg BusinessWeek by David Samuels - How Libya Blew Billions and Its Best Chance at Democracy. I began supporting my friends in Libya when they were called the rebels and helped organize the first humanitarian covey into Benghazi. I further arranged for these same Libyan friends to come to New York, meet with the leadership of the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and others to garner support for their cause, culminating with a reception at the United Nations for 270 invited VIPs and international press on June 15, 2011. So like Amr Farkash the investment banker for HSBC in London mentioned in the article, when in October 2011 I heard that Muammar Qaddafi, the dictator who had subjected Libya to his bizarre and often terrifying rule for 42 years, was dead, I too was elated by the news. EFTA01204427 In the weeks that followed Qaddafi's death, my same friends some of whom had lived in witness protection in the US, UK and elsewhere like Farkash were seized by a vision of returning home to rebuild the country. And I am sure that like Farhash many envisioned personal riches because Libya is a rich country with more oil than Nigeria with a population of 6 million which is less than Lagos. Libya with a relatively well-educated population in need of seemingly every kind of consumer product and service, for which the country would easily be able to pay by continuing to pump its usual 1.3 million to 1.5 million barrels of oil per day. Furthermore, the Central Bank of Libya, according to Reuters, had more than $ioo billion in foreign reserves, mostly money collected from oil sales under Qaddafi. The Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), the overseas investment arm of the Qaddafi government, had about $70 billion invested with blue-chip Western companies such as Societe Generale and Goldman Sachs, and an additional $50 billion or more invested throughout Africa. And in Libya, every asset you could imagine was dirt-cheap. "It was a clean page," as Farkash remembers. "You could startfrom scratch." And like Farhash, many of my ex-patriot Libyan friends returned to Libya some went into government and the others into business as it seem opportunity was everywhere. "You could smell that there were deals everywhere. Attractive deals," Farhash recalls, who started a Libyan investment bank with two friends opening offices in Tripoli and Benghazi, with the aim of encouraging direct foreign investment in Libya. "Deals about to be done, and deals waiting to be done." Land was inexpensive and increasing by the day in value, he says. You could fill your gas tank for $5. But instead of collecting weapons the National Transitional Council, then Libya's chief governing body, decided to give every family a cash payout of $2,400 from the national treasury. An outlay of billions. As months passed, the system of cash giveaways by the central government became institutionalized, with payments—easily exceeding $20 billion in total—being distributed to the general populace of Libya but also additionally to anyone who claimed to have fought or been injured in the revolution. While many of the so-called revolutionaries had only a distant connection to overthrowing Qaddafi, they formed the core of the militias, which set themselves up as permanent fixtures in Libya's cities in place of the army and the police, whose members had been sent home or jailed for collaboration with Qaddafi, regardless of whether they had actually done anything wrong. "Anyone could stop you on the street and ask you for identification," Farkash says. Out of fear, he usually complied. The militias began fighting each other for territory and for the cash payouts from a central state authority that was effectively held hostage as billions of dollars per month were drained from its treasury. Farkash says that learned that people were being tortured in underground prisons in Benghazi in June 2012. What made the discovery particularly upsetting was that the largest of these torture chambers was located in the 17th of February revolutionary camp, right down the street from the apartment where he was living. Farkash had always thought of the 17th of February crew as the good guys. "I didn't sleep that night,"he says. "Thefirst thing that ran through my mind was, `If that's happening now, what difference does it make that there was also injustice in the time of Qaddafi?' "The person who told him about the torture chambers was a member of the Libyan state security apparatus, and Farkash was afraid to act. "I realized it was too dangerous to say anything," Farkash says, still looking horrified. "This was not why I came back over. I don't want to be part of a new nation that is being built on torture and injustice." Farkash left Libya two days later—then changed his mind and went back. He decided to dose up shop in Benghazi, where his family is from, and join his partners in Tripoli. The capital city felt safer because of the presence of foreign embassies, which employed their own security forces. He shared an apartment with a friend who worked as a reporter for the New York Times and CNN. Night after night EFTA01204428 after work he watched footage of the street battles fought by militias who had little training in warfare, but all the equipment of a modern army. In the homes of friends and business associates, he saw heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, and shoulder-held antitank missiles. He left soon after, for good. "These are rockets used in war,"he says. "They have them stored in their houses. So if these people get pissed, what will they do with it?" In the last few months, the Libyans have been finding out. Warring militias have destroyed large sections of Tripoli's international airport with mortars, shoulder-launched missiles, rockets, and tanks. The fighting made the news again in July when a rocket or shell set a large oil depot on fire, sending clouds of choking black smoke over Tripoli. Shortly thereafter, 27,000 Libyans fled the fighting on foot in a single day, arriving as refugees in neighboring African countries. In just one week in July, according to a brief issued by the Soufan Group, a consultancy specializing in the Middle East, more than 6o people were killed in Benghazi, and the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, and Canada have evacuated their diplomatic personnel. Libyan oil production has declined to about 300,000 barrels a day, and a half-dozen prominent figures on the Libyan political scene, whose names had appeared in optimistic Western newspaper articles about the brave Libyans who opposed Qaddafi and fought for a more equal and democratic future, have been murdered. Their deaths have passed without any demonstrations or other significant forms of public notice inside Libya, a measure of how irrelevant the causes for which Libyans fought three years ago have become. Libya's Wealth Most of them soled area from tDyss forolon Mmelment program were tenon In 1116 LAMM gOvemmOnt 2010 Owl Maude,ants Mid Me Ocienan Sachs end sing Wallin Sion anti mono of the Limon stale litho third quarter Och.Zor are nee of WARM.. not Max* assets Mid by SO440 GRAM for soma' companies under IMMO Inrtre nominal the Oaddan foray or rprernment *Melia'. ewestIcaban by the U.S. thiooistys Department ol Justke for ramp's' Fossil* viol/Mons of the Fannon COrroM Societ6 Gonna Practices Act Irryestrnent Ut)yan IWO:0MM AUttrOfity n caStircevrvoshitiki GoOman by the CentralBank or UbYa Ocf+Zi BOW,. Untrozcm Assets b Africa Bonds Cast, AlematheInvestments $7.2b $20.2b -$50b $3.2b $59& m $3.7b OPIANISCR Merl red 000Mee /CT ..194.0C onavortnMan1.• MIKA 0A0CD OkRaCOPC•Orre CISICSINROt Ofitintnin Libya's economic future, once touted as the brightest in Africa, looks equally bleak. At the time of Qaddafi's death reported that the dictator had stashed tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars away in overseas accounts that the country desperately needed to pay its bills. After the dictator was toppled, you would think that the search for this hidden personal fortune would be a major priority. But with people fighting over who should be given the right to go after this floc, billion plus little has been recovered and the longer time passes the less likely it will. As a result, less than $1 billion has been recovered although a £io million ($17 million) London townhouse belonging to Qaddafi's son Saadi and two bank accounts containing almost €ioo million ($134 million) belonging to Qaddafi's EFTA01204429 son Mutassim, who was killed during the uprising. The accounts were located in Malta, a common offshore home for hidden bank accounts and shell companies. So far the Libyan government has failed to get Malta to release the funds, and the transcripts of the trials are a hilarious primer in the art of not asking inconvenient questions when large amounts of money are wired from strange locations to accounts held by the son of a notorious dictator. While the amounts involved in these cases are large by normal standards, they barely add up to $i billion—pocket change for the oil-rich dictator and his petro state. "A lot of the smokescreens you are seeing are masking the biggest robbery in the history of humanity," says Libyan-born Hafed al-Ghwell, a member of the World Bank's Development Research Group. (Al-Ghwell adds that he doesn't speak on behalf of the World Bank.) He is talking about the disbursal of state assets under the new country's leadership, if it could be called that. "I can tell you financially that, in terms offoreign reserves, Libya had close to $125 billion to $130 billion until the end of last year. These numbers are verifiable." In addition to the country's foreign currency reserves, the economist estimates that the LIA has from $55 billion to $6o billion in various portfolios. "They do not know what assets they have,"he says. Tens of billions of dollars, he adds, were invested in hotels, telecommunications companies, and other assets in Africa that may not be traceable. Still, a close reading of the LIA ledgers, which were leaked to a nongovernmental organization and are now available online, reveals that if tales of Qaddafi's hidden fortune proved to be a myth, the rumors that tens of billions of dollars were looted from Libyan accounts are entirely real. And it didn't begin with the collapse of the country. Not often spoken of is the deal that Seif Qaddafi on behalf of his father made with the British government in March 2003, that lifted Western sanctions in exchange for Libya turning over two men suspected of facilitating the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. On the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, Seif offered: In exchange for taking steps to further open to the West, his father would be willing to come clean about Libya's weapons of mass destruction—which, unlike Saddam Hussein's programs in Iraq, turned out to be far more advanced than the West imagined. In addition to secret WMD facilities hidden in the Sahara, Qaddafi had something else of interest: billions of dollars in oil wealth that the regime was desperate to invest in banks, stocks, hedge funds, property markets, infrastructure projects, advanced fighter planes, and almost anything else that Western governments and corporations had to offer. The resulting gold rush was so wildly lucrative, and obscenely unprincipled, that it continues to reverberate at the highest levels of global finance and politics a decade later. After British Prime Minister Tony Blair left office in 2007, he joined JPMorgan Chase's investment banking unit in London and became a frequent visitor to Libya. According to documents made available by the muckraking nonprofit Global Witness, Blair, accompanied by British police, would fly into Tripoli on a Bombardier Challenger 3oo jet hired by the elder Qaddafi, where he'd be transported from the airport to the British Embassy and treated like a visiting head of state. H e'd stay at the British ambassador's residence and meet regularly with Seif, who oversaw the activities of the $70 billion LIA, as well as with Seifs close friend, Mustafa Zarti, the deputy head of the LIA. While Blair has said that his trips to Tripoli didn't involve doing deals with the LIA, the careful wording of his denials doesn't contradict the assessment of a senior British diplomat quoted in a Sept. 17, 2011, article in the Sunday Telegraph who described Blair's visits as devoted to lobbying for J.P. Morgan, the investment banking unit of JPMorgan Chase. EFTA01204430 In France, a growing scandal led magistrates in April 2013 to open an investigation into the allegation that former President Nicolas Sarkozy accepted tens of millions of euros in Libyan state funds to finance his surressful campaign in 2007. It became headline news on June 30, 2014, when police took Sarkozy's lawyer into custody and held him for 48 hours. Criminal charges have thus far been filed against 10 people, including Sarkozy's former campaign manager. Goldman Sachs charged $350 million in fees for trades that lost the Libyans 98 percent of their $1.3 billion investment Blair's, Sarkozy's, and JPMorgan Chase's efforts to profit from association with the Qaddafis may have been unseemly, but they don't appear to have violated U.S. law. Other financial institutions may have crossed a legal line: The LIA is suing Goldman Sachs and Societe Generale in London, while the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating several U.S. companies, including hedge fund Och-Ziff Capital Management and the asset advisory firm Blackstone Group, for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Publicly traded Och-Ziff has warned shareholders that its future results may be affected by the Justice Department's probe. Goldman Sachs, Och-Ziff, Societe Generale, and Blackstone declined to comment. Of the nine companies to which the LIA entrusted its $70 billion bankroll, almost all appear to have lost incredible amounts of money while charging sky-high fees. According to an audit conducted by KPMG, Societe Generale managed to lose more than half of a $1.8 billion investment, while charging the Libyans tens of millions for its financial expertise. London-based investment management firm Permal Group, which received $300 million from LIA, lost 4o percent of it while earning $27 million in fees. BNP Paribas lost 23 percent: "Highfees have been directly responsiblefor the poor results," the auditor noted. Credit Suisse lost 29 percent of the funds that it managed. Millennium Global Investments, based in London, apparently lost all of a $100 million investment in its emerging credit fund, while a $300 million investment in Lehman Brothers vanished from the books after Lehman collapsed in 2008. Credit Suisse and Permal did not respond to a request for comment. Millennium could not be reached. But the outstanding single offender was Goldman Sachs, which charged $350 million in fees for a series of trades that lost the Libyans 98 percent of their $1.3 billion investment. The Goldman fleece, as it might be known, was masterminded by Youssef Kabbaj, an executive in charge of North Africa, and Driss Ben-Brahim, the firm's emerging-markets thief. Ben-Brahim, a good-humored trader educated in France, had made headlines in England in 2004 when Goldman awarded him a bonus of £30 million; in 2006, British newspapers reported he received a £50 million bonus. "We were in awe of Driss," a former LIA executive later told the Wall Street Journal. "He was like a rock star." According to court documents filed by the LIA in London, Kabbaj and Ben-Brahim, who are both native Arabic speakers, courted the star-struck Libyans by taking them on a trip to Morocco, where Ben-Brahim's father was born, and by offering them gifts such as after-shave lotions and chocolates. From January to June 2008, Goldman set up a $1.3 billion investment in options contracts on Citigroup, UniCredit, Banco Santander, Allianz, Electricite de France, Eni, and a basket of currencies, based on the thesis that the assets would rise in value. They went down. By February 2010, the value of the Libyan investment was $25.1 million . Kabbaj and another Goldman employee traveled to Tripoli to explain the losses to Zarti, who cursed at and physically threatened the two men. The Goldman Sachs executives were terrified enough to request the protection of bodyguards until they could flee the country. EFTA01204431 In an apparent attempt to fix its relationship with Libya—which, after all, had proven to be supremely profitable—Goldman Sachs then offered to pay a $50 million fee to a Dutch fund called Palladyne International Asset Management, through which the LIA had already invested $300 million. Goldman could hardly have been interested in Palladyne because of the fund's financial acumen: According to an audit conducted on behalf of the LIA, 45 percent of the funds, virtually all from Libya, invested in Palladyne were held in cash, while the rest of the investments didn't do particularly well: "To date we have paid in excess of $3.8m in fees, for losing us $30 million," an LIA investigator noted in a report. What made Palladyne notable was that it was owned by Ismael Abudher, whose father-in-law Shukri Ghanem was the longtime head of Libya's National Oil and a trusted member of Qaddafi's inner circle. In April 2012, shortly after Qaddafi's death, Ghanem was found floating face-down in the Danube River in Vienna. Palladyne did not immediately respond to comment. According to a detailed lawsuit filed in March in U.S. District Court in Connecticut by a trader named Dan Friedman, who was hired by Palladyne in 2011, the company "lacked both the management competence and the infrastructure to manage money." Friedman, who's suing the recruiter who hooked him up with the firm, alleges in the complaint that, "Palladyne was the asset management company equivalent of a Potemkin village, fronting for a kickback and money-laundering scheme." The complaint offers an unusually intimate account of a corporate mirror world in which recruitment meetings, trading strategies, and the company's vaunted "man-and-machine" trading model were used as props to disguise good, old-fashioned theft. Palladyne's true purpose, Friedman alleges, was to serve as the investment bank version of the fake betting joint in the film The Sting, while laundering "money defalcatedfrom Libyan government oil revenues by thefamily andfriends of Muammar Ghaddafi" and serving as the "recipient and guardian of bribes and kickbacksfrom companies doing business with the Ghaddafi regime (or hoping to do business with them) or the state oil company run by Abudher'sfather-in-law." According to reports published in the financial press, the SEC is investigating whether Goldman's payment to Palladyne violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. "People were making crazy amounts of money for introductions to the Libyans," says Mohammed Rashid, an Iraqi-born Kurd based in London, who arranged the meetings between Blair and Seif. Rashid is now a financial adviser to wealthy individuals and entities from the Middle East and to Europeans and Americans who wish to do business with them. According to him and others who have direct knowledge of those transactions, paying money to fixers, matchmakers, advisers, and consultants was a common practice, and such connections were eagerly sought. One London banker says consulting fees for such transactions could range anywhere from 2 percent to 5 percent of the initial investment. None of which would have mattered as much if the performance of the investments wasn't so dismal. And if the West relieved Libya of a