Who is Peter Mandelson, Starmer’s pick for U.S. ambassador?

From his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein to amassing a web of corporate interests, can Labour’s “prince of darkness” be trusted in Washington?

By Solomon Hughes

February 6, 2025

Source: Declassified UK

ARCHIVED Department of Energy and Climate Change - Peter Mandelson. Flickr.

Peter Mandelson, Keir Starmer’s choice for British ambassador to the US, co-owns a business that helps companies “see opportunities in politics, regulation and public policy”.

Mandelson, who has a long history of favouring corporations in often scandalous situations, looks set to keep his shares in this company while supposedly representing the UK.

He founded his lobbying company, Global Counsel, in 2010, creating a lucrative business from his political contacts built up while a minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. 

Mandelson stood down from Global Counsel’s board last year – probably in preparation for a post with Starmer’s government – but remains one of the two largest shareholders of the firm, owning over 25% of the company. 

According to Companies House he is a “person with significant control” of Global Counsel. 

I asked the Foreign Office if Mandelson must give up his ownership of Global Counsel to be ambassador. 

They did not answer directly, telling me: “There is an established regime in place for the management of interests held by ambassadors or High Commissioners. This ensures that steps are taken to avoid or mitigate any actual, potential or perceived conflicts of interest.”

The Foreign Office would not give any more detail of this “regime”.

Conflict of interest?

It seems likely Mandelson will remain a Global Counsel owner while US ambassador as long as he puts aside active involvement in the company and informs civil servants of any awkward moments.

Global Counsel’s latest accounts say they are expanding to grab “the significant market opportunity arising from increasing geo-political uncertainty and the need for companies globally to pre-empt and react to the consequential change”including “opening offices in Washington DC”. 

In other words, they are focussing on the US just as Mandelson gets the top UK job in Washington.

The risk that Mandelson will use his time as ambassador to make friends with multinational and US corporations rather than represent UK interests seems obvious.

Mandelson has repeatedly left his public appointments due to scandals, so an early return to Global Counsel is possible. 

Global Counsel’s recent clients include Palantir, the defence oriented US tech company owned by Trump supporting billionaire Peter Thiel currently chasing NHS contracts, and Sequoia Capital, a US tech investor that is a “partner” of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Peter Mandelson’s rise

Mandelson was one of the architects of Blair’s “New Labour”. Once a teenage Communist Party member, undoubtedly very clever and drily funny, Mandelson used his knowledge of the Left to steer Labour sharply rightwards.

His manoeuvring earned him the nickname the “prince of darkness”. In politics his one consistent manoeuvre was making Labour suck up to big business, often with bad results.

Back then the US Embassy wanted Blair’s Labour government to accommodate American utility company Enron. They had a bad reputation, including involvement with human rights abuses. 

Other Labour ministers kept Enron at a distance, but Mandelson met them, backed them and allowed them to open power stations and buy Wessex Water. 

In 2001 Enron was exposed as more than a bad company: they were a criminal conspiracy built on financial fraud that collapsed in scandal. 

Mandelson also had responsibility for the “Millennium Dome” – a bizarre corporate sponsored celebration of the year 2000 that swallowed up government attention and ended in shambolic failure.

The Jeffrey Epstein connection

Mandelson had to leave Cabinet twice because of scandals about relations with businessmen. But his most scandalous association with a businessman was revealed long after he left government.

US financier Jeffrey Epstein mixed his business dealings with sex trafficking and exploiting underage girls. Emails between Epstein and US bank JP Morgan show he was close to  Mandelson. 

In 2009 Epstein emailed JP Morgan bankers boasting about their friendship, saying “Well for all intends [sic] and purposes Peter Mandelson is now deputy prime minister.” 

Mandelson seemed willing to overlook Epstein’s offences to be close to a financial ‘mover and shaker’.  

Emails suggest Mandelson stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in 2009, while Epstein was in prison for soliciting prostitution from a minor. 

Epstein also said Mandelson stayed with him in Paris in 2011 – when Epstein was a registered sex offender – and referred to him as “Petie” in emails to JP Morgan bankers.

Cashing in

Mandelson helped lead Labour to defeat in 2010, then left politics (albeit keeping a seat in the Lords) to found Global Counsel. It made Mandelson wealthy. Latest accounts show the firm has a £16m turnover and currently owes Mandelson £1.3m.

Starmer’s announcement specifically cited Mandelson’s role as “co-founder of Global Counsel” when appointing him ambassador, but the firm’s record raises multiple potential conflicts of interest.

Global Counsel’s website says the firm “advises international clients on Russian market entry, the impact of Russian sanctions and navigating Russian policymaking”. 

A 2020 Guardian investigation based on leaked documents showed in 2015 and 2016 Global Counsel helped gig-economy taxi firm Uber build Russian business as Mandelson “used his access to pro-Kremlin oligarchs, including some now under sanctions”.

This was after Russia had invaded Crimea. Mandelson’s friendship with now-sanctioned Kremlin-friendly oligarch Oleg Deripaska was key to putting Uber in touch with firms like now-sanctioned state-owned bank Sberbank.

Until June 2017 Mandelson was also personally a director of Sistema, an oligarch-owned Russian industrial conglomerate with defence interests which was sanctioned by the UK and US after Russia’s Ukraine invasion.

Angering Trump

Team Trump are reportedly angry with Starmer’s choice of Mandelson for ambassador, objecting to his links with China, seen by the Republicans as a dangerous rival nation.

Mandelson personally wrote advice for “Chinese investors” on how to “navigate populism” and deal with “Trump’s isolationist policies” on the Global Counsel website.

Global Counsel’s recent clients include Chinese social media firm TikTok and, reportedly, Chinese clothing giant Shein. Until 2023 Mandelson was president of the Great Britain China Centre, a Foreign Office body encouraging China-UK trade. 

Trump’s administration is also trying to bully Starmer’s government, so Mandelson’s appointment has become another flash point.  

For their part, Team Starmer seem deeply committed to giving old “New Labour” figures jobs regardless of the consequences – perhaps because they depend heavily on ageing Blairites for a political direction, or perhaps because they hope they too will be offered similar positions by a future Labour government even if their careers end in scandal.

There are suggestions Trump will refuse to accept Mandelson as an ambassador. It seems equally likely the public denigration is designed to make Mandelson into a more easily cowed, lame-duck ambassador. 

It doesn’t seem hard to persuade Mandelson to represent US corporate interests, no matter how bad they are for UK public policy. 

After all, recent clients of Mandelson’s firm Global Counsel include JP Morgan, the Bank of America and “Fair Civil Justice”, a campaign launched by an arm of the US Chamber of Commerce to try to stop “joint action” lawsuits against big businesses, which critics say would have stopped campaigns against injustice like that of the imprisoned Sub Postmasters.

Elon Musk says DOGE's work will be public — legally, it has to be

Elon Musk's plans for DOGE could change if a federal law comes into play.

Brent D. Griffiths 

Dec 8, 2024

BUSINESS INSIDER


Legal experts say it is obvious that Elon Musk's DOGE falls under a federal transparency law.

The Federal Advisory Committee Act was created to bring order to outside forces weighing in on policy.

The law would require DOGE to hold public meetings and balance its membership.


Disrupting the federal government might be harder than Elon Musk thought.

President-elect Donald Trump appointed Musk and former 2024 challenger Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the sweeping "Department of Government Efficiency," which aims to cut $2 trillion out of the federal budget.


According to legal experts, Musk and Ramaswamy's work may be complicated by a decades-old government transparency law — the exact type of bureaucracy the world's richest man has chafed against when his companies have tangled with the Securities and Exchange Commission or the FAA.

Congress wrote the Federal Advisory Committee Act in 1972 to rein in the larger number of outside advisors who weighed in on policy matters either at the president's or a specific Cabinet agency's behest. It is designed for panels like DOGE, which are led by people outside the federal government. Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that they would not officially join the Trump administration.

"Though not much information has come out yet about DOGE, it certainly looks like it is not going to be a department or government agency, it will be an advisory commission, and for that reason, it will fall under FACA's purview," Jason Arnold, an associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, told Business Insider.

Musk wrote on X last month that DOGE would post its "all actions" publicly online, but it's unclear if that means the billionaires will fully comply with the law.
The law says Musk and Ramaswamy need to appoint a Democrat.

The advisory act would affect DOGE's operations almost immediately. The law requires that panels that fall under its definition be comprised of a balanced membership in terms of "the points of view represented."

If Trump formally authorizes DOGE after he is sworn in next month, his initial order would need to take this into account. For example, when President Obama created the Bowles-Simpson commission in 2010, his executive order required the 18-member panel to include Republicans and Democrats. The commission, tasked with getting the nation's finances in order, was also co-chaired by a Democrat, former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles, and a Republican, former Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming.

So far, Trump has named William Joseph McGinley, a long-time attorney for Republican causes, to be DOGE's general counsel. Musk has already said that DOGE is looking for staffers willing to work 80-plus hours a week for no money.

"Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero. What a great deal!" Musk wrote on X.

DOGE just got a new hire

Elon Musk says DOGE can 'gut the federal government' with a recent Supreme Court ruling. Some lawyers disagree.

Posting DOGE's activities online might not be enough.

If DOGE complies with the act, it would also have to try to hold public meetings.

Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, Bowles-Simpson's actual name, held six public hearings and culminated its work with a final report that caused a political uproar over its recommendations to raise the Social Security retirement age, increase the federal gas tax, and cut Pentagon spending. The act requires at least 15 days of formal notice before a meeting and for explanations to be provided if the panel moves to conduct a private session.

It's not hard to see how the public disclosure requirements could become a political headache for Trump's White House, especially if DOGE considers changes to Social Security and Medicare. Unlike most traditional Republicans, Trump has shied away from embracing major reforms to the popular programs. Ramaswamy told Axios that DOGE would look elsewhere for cuts.

Trump and his two advisors have already sparked the ire of some Republicans on Capitol Hill by promising they may try to unilaterally cancel spending, a process known as impoundment that Congress made mostly illegal in 1974.
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Musk and Trump could still try to ignore the law.

Just because DOGE looks to fit the definition of the advisory act, doesn't mean the law's application is a simple business. In describing the law, the Congressional Research Service, lawmakers' nonpartisan research arm, concluded that it may ultimately fall to the courts to determine if FACA applies.

Arnold said if Trump and Musk go this route, it may take years to resolve the dispute. This, along with some of the act's vagueness in areas like what constitutes balanced membership, leaves some loopholes.

"There are a lot of flaws with the law, one of them is that there are no penalties for violations," said Arnold, who researched FACA for his book "Secrecy in the Sunshine Era." "It's almost up to the goodwill or the legal concerns of the administration to follow through."

The Trump transition team and McGinley did not respond to Business Insider's requests for comment. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for Ramaswamy, told USA Today everyone around DOGE "is committed to making sure all DOGE activities are conducted properly and in full compliance with ethical and legal requirements."

Past White Houses have tried to argue they could do business behind closed doors. President Clinton fought off attempts to argue that then-first lady Hillary Clinton's participation in closed-door discussions over the administration's healthcare plan ran afoul of the act. President George W. Bush's White House engaged in a years-long legal fight over whether it needed to disclose details from his energy task force which Vice President Dick Cheney chaired. It was later revealed that then-Enron CEO Ken Lay was among a host of fossil fuel executives who met with the secretive panel.

When Obama formed the Bowles-Simpson commission, then-House Minority Leader John Boehner called on the White House to make sure the panel didn't try to do its work behind closed doors.

"If it is your intent to have all proceedings of the Commission adhere to FACA, will the Commission notice all meetings in the Federal Register 15 days in advance, open all meetings to the public, and make all meeting minutes available for public inspection?" Boehner wrote to Simpson and Bowles in 2010.

Musk is already getting to work on DOGE. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa are expected to lead their respective chambers' work with the panel. Musk was on Capitol Hill this week to discuss what his department will do — those talks were behind closed doors.

"There won't be a lot of detail for the press today, and that's by design," House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters. "This is a brainstorming session."

The DOGE is a Scam Designed to Protect Other Scammers

By Marco Rosaire Rossi

December 8, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Coolarts223/DeviantArt

Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is a classic Orwellian institution. It isn’t a governmental department, nor is it designed to promote efficiency. A genuine executive department would require an act of Congress, including the ability to overcome the Senate filibuster. Its leadership would also require senatorial approval, and—as in some cases—assurances that it can operate in a bipartisan manner. These are all things that Trump obviously does not want. Instead, the DOGE is nothing but a glorify advisory committee. Considering its leadership, none of its recommendations are likely to promote governmental efficiency. What is expected to come out of the DOGE is a plan to weaken the federal government’s regulatory capacities, especially as it relates to the financial sector. 

It is important to note that there is already a government agency—a real one!—that audits the federal government and recommends ways to cut waste: the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Originally titled the Government Accounting Office, the GAO was founded in 1921 as part of the Budget and Accounting Act, which also created the critically important Office of Management and Budget. For the last century these agencies have coordinated the process of budget management and evaluated the efficaciousness of government programs and agencies. Recently, several of the GAO’s reports have concluded that many governmental agencies are not meeting their mission, but the main culprit behind these substandard results is not excessive regulations, but inadequate funding.

As an example, on February 12, 2024, the GAO released its report on the Internal Revenue Source’s (IRS) audit rates. It found that between 2012 and 2022, the agency closed 16,812 audits of taxpayers who made between $500,000 and $1 million, but only closed 2,933 audits of taxpayers who made over $10 million. Essentially, the wealthier a taxpayer was, the less likely that person would be audited. The main reason for this discrepancy was that the IRS lacked the resources to challenge the potentially fraudulent tax filings of multimillionaires and above. Biden attempted to address this issue by including new IRS funding in the bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act. Meanwhile, Trump has promised to repeal the law.  

Such fair analysis is not part of the purview of the DOGE. Rather, it is there to create an ideological patina for eliminating agencies that have been a target of conservatives, especially those agencies that could a hinder the ability of DOGE’s leadership to make money. 

Recently, Elon Musk, one of two chairs of the DOGE, has called for the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB was formed in the aftermath of the Great Recession to ensure that banks could no longer engage in the type of widespread fraud—including flagrantly misleading consumers as to the terms of their mortgages—that led to the housing market crashing.

Musk’s animosity toward the CFPB is shared by his co-chair, Vivek Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy, who describes himself on X as a “Small-government crusader,” retweeted an article on Musk’s statement, writing “CFPB started under Elizabeth Warren less than 20 years ago, and consumers are no better off for its existence. Quite the contrary, actually.” Two days prior to his retweet,

 Ramaswamy posted a clip from billionaire and venture capitalist Marc Andreeesen, claiming that the CFPB was under the “personal control” of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), that it got “to do whatever it wants,” and that it was responsible for major financial institutions “debanking” Trump supporters. None of which is true.  

In reality, the CFPB has been a critical agency defending everyday consumers against the abuses of the financial industry. Since its creation, the CFPB has saved Americans $17.5 billion, and imposed another $4 billion in civil penalties. The money from the civil penalties goes into a Victims Relief Fund, which provides compensation for consumers who were scammed by financial companies. This past year, the CFPB finalized rules that forced credit card companies to reduce their late fees from an average of $32 to $8. The new regulations are expected to save Americans billions.

Most recently, the CFPB released a new rule that would regulate data brokers. Under the new regulations, data brokers would be classified as “consumer reporting agencies.” This means that they would be obligated to ensure the accuracy of their data, had to guarantee that users had access to their own data, and were prevented from selling personal data to unsavory clients. The move is likely to have immense downstream impacts in protecting average Americans. Indeed, organized criminals regularly buy or steal personal information from data brokers to target victims. In one example, hackers were able to steal 3 billion records—including social security numbers—from an insecure data broker. In another, a federal judge’s son was murdered by a man who tracked down his victim after freely purchasing his private information from a data broker.

Noteworthy, Musk’s statement against the agency comes less than a week after the CFPB finalized its regulatory rules regarding digital wallet apps. The new rules grant the CFPB regulatory oversight over these apps in the areas of privacy, surveillance, errors, fraud, and termination of services. Musk has been vocal about the fact that part of the reason he purchased X was to transform the social media platform into an “everything app,” which would allow digital wallet services.

Furthermore, only a month after Musk purchased X (when it was still Twitter), the social media platform had to pay a $150 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission for asking users for personal information with the stated purpose of securing their accounts, only to then use that information for targeted ads. What X did was illegal, but perhaps the more damaging aspect is the relationship that the platform has with its “service providers.” It is likely that few X users realize that by signing onto the platform, they forfeit their information to several data brokers, who—until recently, when the CFPB decided to regulate them—paid X for that information with very little oversight.

Trump might adopt populist rhetoric, and holler against the “deep state,” but his policy objectives are clearly directed at benefiting America’s most wealthy. The DOGE, headed by fellow billionaires Musk and Ramaswamy, isn’t designed to make the federal government work better for average Americans, who are right to expect that their hard-earned tax dollars are being used wisely. It’s the opposite. It is designed to delegitimize any federal regulatory agency that interferes with the ability of companies to scam, swindle, and scrounge Americans out of their money.

‘No Propaganda on Earth Can Hide the Wound That Is Palestine’: Arundhati Roy’s PEN Pinter Prize Acceptance Speech

'I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.'

By Arundhati Roy

October 14, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Arundhathi Roy accepts the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. She is holding a portrait of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, British-Egyptian writer and activist, named Writer of Courage by her. Photo: www.englishpen.org



Writer and activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. This is an annual award set up by English PEN in the memory of playwright Harold Pinter. Shortly after having been named for the prize, Roy announced that her share of the prize money will be donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. She named Alaa Abd el-Fattah, British-Egyptian writer and activist, a ‘Writer of Courage’ who she would share her award with. The following is her acceptance speech for the prize, delivered on the evening of October 10, 2024, at the British Library.

I thank you, members of English PEN and members of the jury, for honouring me with the PEN Pinter Prize. I would like to begin by announcing the name of this year’s Writer of Courage who I have chosen to share this award with.

My greetings to you, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, writer of courage and my fellow awardee. We hoped and prayed that you would be released in September, but the Egyptian government decided that you were too beautiful a writer and too dangerous a thinker to be freed yet. But you are here in this room with us. You are the most important person here. From prison you wrote, “[M]y words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.” We are listening, Alaa. Closely.

Greetings to you, too, my beloved Naomi Klein, friend to both Alaa and me. Thank you for being here tonight. It means the world to me.

Greetings to all of you gathered here, as well to as those who are invisible perhaps to this wonderful audience but as visible to me as anybody else in this room. I am speaking of my friends and comrades in prison in India – lawyers, academics, students, journalists – Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut. I speak to you, my friend Khurram Parvaiz, one of the most remarkable people I know, you’ve been in prison for three years, and to you too Irfan Mehraj and to the thousands incarcerated in Kashmir and across the country whose lives have been devastated.

When Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN and of the Pinter panel first wrote to me about this honour, she said the Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer who has sought to define ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’ through ‘unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination’. That is a quote from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

The word ‘unflinching’ made me pause for a moment, because I think of myself as someone who is almost permanently flinching.

I would like to dwell a little on the theme of ‘flinching’ and ‘unflinching’. Which may be best illustrated by Harold Pinter himself:

“I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

“The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

“Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.”

Remember that President Reagan called the Contras “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” A turn of phrase that he was clearly fond of. He also used it to describe the CIA-backed Afghan Mujahideen, who then morphed into the Taliban. And it is the Taliban who rule Afghanistan today after waging a twenty-year-long war against the US invasion and occupation. Before the Contras and the Mujahideen, there was the war in Vietnam and the unflinching US military doctrine that ordered its soldiers to ‘Kill Anything That Moves’. If you read the Pentagon Papers and other documents on US war aims in Vietnam, you can enjoy some lively unflinching discussions about how to commit genocide – is it better to kill people outright or to starve them slowly? Which would look better? The problem that the compassionate mandarins in the Pentagon faced was that, unlike Americans, who, according to them, want ‘life, happiness, wealth, power’, Asians ‘stoically accept…the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives’ – and force America to carry their ‘strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide.’ A terrible burden to be borne unflinchingly.

And here we are, all these years later, more than a year into yet another genocide. The US and Israel’s unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon in defence of a colonial occupation and an Apartheid state. The death toll so far, is officially 42,000, a majority of them women and children. This does not include those who died screaming under the rubble of buildings, neighbourhoods, whole cities, and those whose bodies have not yet been recovered. A recent study by Oxfam says that more children have been killed by Israel in Gaza than in the equivalent period of any other war in the last twenty years.

To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide – the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews – the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another.

Like every state that has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in history, Zionists in Israel – who believe themselves to be “the chosen people” – began by dehumanising Palestinians before driving them off their land and murdering them.

‘What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?’. Photo: X/@UNRWA

Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians ‘two-legged beasts’, Yitzhak Rabin called them ‘grasshoppers’ who ‘could be crushed’ and Golda Meir said ‘There was no such thing as Palestinians’. Winston Churchill, that famous warrior against fascism, said, ‘I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time’ and then went on to declare that a ‘higher race’ had the final right to the manger. Once those two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, dogs and non-existent people were murdered, ethnically cleansed, and ghettoised, a new country was born. It was celebrated as a ‘land without people for people without a land’. The nuclear-armed state of Israel was to serve as a military outpost and gateway to the natural wealth and resources of the Middle East for US and Europe. A lovely coincidence of aims and objectives.

The new state was supported unhesitatingly and unflinchingly, armed and bankrolled, coddled and applauded, no matter what crimes it committed. It grew up like a protected child in a wealthy home whose parents smile proudly as it commits atrocity upon atrocity. No wonder today it feels free to boast openly about committing genocide. (At least The Pentagon Papers were secret. They had to be stolen. And leaked.) No wonder Israeli soldiers seem to have lost all sense of decency. No wonder they flood the social media with depraved videos of themselves wearing the lingerie of women they have killed or displaced, videos of themselves mimicking dying Palestinians and wounded children or raped and tortured prisoners, images of themselves blowing up buildings while they smoke cigarettes or jive to music on their headphones. Who are these people?

What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?

The answer, according to Israel and its allies, as well as the Western media, is the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th last year. The killing of Israeli civilians and the taking of Israeli hostages. According to them, history only began a year ago.

So, this is the part in my speech where I am expected to equivocate to protect myself, my ‘neutrality’, my intellectual standing. This is the part where I am meant to lapse into moral equivalence and condemn Hamas, the other militant groups in Gaza and their ally Hezbollah, in Lebanon, for killing civilians and taking people hostage. And to condemn the people of Gaza who celebrated the Hamas attack. Once that’s done it all becomes easy, doesn’t it? Ah well. Everybody is terrible, what can one do? Let’s go shopping instead…

I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.

When US President Joe Biden met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet during a visit to Israel in October 2023, he said, ‘I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.’

Unlike President Joe Biden, who calls himself a non-Jewish Zionist and unflinchingly bankrolls and arms Israel while it commits its war crimes, I am not going to declare myself or define myself in any way that is narrower than my writing. I am what I write.

I am acutely aware that being the writer that I am, the non-Muslim that I am and the woman that I am, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible for me to survive very long under the rule of Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian regime. But that is not the point here. The point is to educate ourselves about the history and the circumstances under which they came to exist. The point is that right now they are fighting against an ongoing genocide. The point is to ask ourselves whether a liberal, secular fighting force can go up against a genocidal war machine. Because, when all the powers of the world are against them, who do they have to turn to but God? I am aware that Hezbollah and the Iranian regime have vocal detractors in their own countries, some who also languish in jails or have faced far worse outcomes. I am aware that some of their actions – the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7th by Hamas – constitute war crimes. However, there cannot be an equivalence between this and what Israel and the United States are doing in Gaza, in the West Bank and now in Lebanon. The root of all the violence, including the violence of October 7th, is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its subjugation of the Palestinian people. History did not begin on 7 October 2023.

I ask you, which of us sitting in this hall would willingly submit to the indignity that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to for decades? What peaceful means have the Palestinian people not tried? What compromise have they not accepted—other than the one that requires them to crawl on their knees and eat dirt?

Israel is not fighting a war of self-defence. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region.

‘Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this.’ Photo: Ahmed Abu Hameeda/Wikimedia commons

Since October 7th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator.

Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.

Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this. We have watched those marches of hundreds of thousands of people – including a young generation of Jews who are tired of being used, tired of being lied to. Who would have imagined that we would live to see the day when German police would arrest Jewish citizens for protesting against Israel and Zionism and accuse them of anti-Semitism? Who would have thought the US government would, in the service of the Israeli state, undermine its cardinal principle of Free Speech by banning pro-Palestine slogans? The so-called moral architecture of western democracies – with a few honourable exceptions – has become a grim laughingstock in the rest of the world.

When Benjamin Netanyahu holds up a map of the Middle East in which Palestine has been erased and Israel stretches from the river to the sea, he is applauded as a visionary who is working to realize the dream of a Jewish homeland.

But when Palestinians and their supporters chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, they are accused of explicitly calling for the genocide of Jews.

Are they really? Or is that a sick imagination projecting its own darkness onto others? An imagination that cannot countenance diversity, cannot countenance the idea of living in a country alongside other people, equally, with equal rights. Like everybody else in the world does. An imagination that cannot afford to acknowledge that Palestinians want to be free, like South Africa is, like India is, like all countries that have thrown off the yoke of colonialism are. Countries that are diverse, deeply, maybe even fatally, flawed, but free. When South Africans were chanting their popular rallying cry, Amandla! Power to the people, were they calling for the genocide of white people? They were not. They were calling for the dismantling of the Apartheid state. Just as the Palestinians are.

‘Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams’. Photo: Shome Basu in Dhaka.

The war that has now begun will be terrible. But it will eventually dismantle Israeli Apartheid. The whole world will be far safer for everyone – including for Jewish people – and far more just. It will be like pulling an arrow from our wounded heart.

If the US government withdrew its support of Israel, the war could stop today. Hostilities could end right this minute. Israeli hostages could be freed, Palestinian prisoners could be released. The negotiations with Hamas and the other Palestinian stakeholders that must inevitably follow the war could instead take place now and prevent the suffering of millions of people. How sad that most people would consider this a naïve, laughable proposition.

As I conclude, let me turn to your words, Alaa Abd El-Fatah, from your book of prison writing, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. I have rarely read such beautiful words about the meaning of victory and defeat – and the political necessity of honestly looking despair in the eye. I have rarely seen writing in which a citizen separates himself from the state, from the generals and even from the slogans of the Square with such bell-like clarity.


“The centre is treason because there’s room in it only for the General…The centre is treason and I have never been a traitor. They think they’ve pushed us back into the margins. They don’t realize that we never left it, we just got lost for a brief while. Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams. We never sought the centre because it has no room except for those who abandon the dream. Even the square was not big enough for us, so most of the battles of the revolution happened outside it, and most of the heroes remained outside the frame.”

As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now Lebanon, quickly escalates into a regional war, its real heroes remain outside the frame. But they fight on because they know that one day—

From the river to the sea

Palestine will be Free.

It will.

Keep your eye on your calendar. Not on your clock.

That’s how the people – not the generals – the people fighting for their liberation measure time.


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Arundhati Roy
(born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, activist and a world citizen. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel The God of Small Things. Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father, a tea planter by profession. She spent her childhood in Aymanam, in Kerala, schooling in Corpus Christi. She left Kerala for Delhi at age 16, and embarked on a homeless lifestyle, staying in a small hut with a tin roof within the walls of Delhi's Feroz Shah Kotla and making a living selling empty bottles. She then proceeded to study architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture, where she met her first husband, the architect Gerard Da Cunha.The God of Small Things is the only novel written by Roy. Since winning the Booker Prize, she has concentrated her writing on political issues. These include the Narmada Dam project, India's Nuclear Weapons, corrupt power company Enron's activities in India. She is a figure-head of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism.In response to India's testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a critique of the Indian government's nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The Cost of Living, in which she also crusaded against India's massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. She has since devoted herself solely to nonfiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays as well as working for social causes.Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.In June 2005 she took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq. In January 2006 she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of essays, 'The Algebra of Infinite Justice', but declined to accept it.

Op-Ed: Underpaid, understaffed, wage theft, and prices out of control. Happy?


By Paul Wallis
September 19, 2024

DIGITAL JOURNAL


UK nurses will stage a second unprecedented strike amid an increasingly acrimonious fight with the government for better wages

- Copyright AFP/File ISABEL INFANTES

If you search the words “underpaid, understaffed, and wage theft” you’ve given yourself a lifetime job researching them. The words mean a totally dysfunctional environment where organizational failure is unavoidable. This is global. It’s also happening with a backdrop of out-of-control prices for just about everything.

The word is “systemic”. It can’t be any sort of coincidence that these things are so common. That’s particularly the case in the ultra-cheapskate US, where “employment at will” apparently means a license to gouge workers.

It goes well with the mantras of “hate the public, hate the staff and hate the customers”, though. There’s that adorably delicate subtle ambience of sleaze and greed.

Meanwhile, in the unreal world, CEO wages have risen 1085% since 1978, where workers’ wages have risen 24%, according to one source. That’s probably a massive underestimate. Many people have asked why so few people who do so little make so much.

There’s no rational answer to that question. There’s no particular reason why a herd of deformed meeting-dwellers should get paid anything. They don’t actually do their own jobs. They delegate to lesser cretins, and that’s all they need to do.

In the days of Rent A Meaningless Degree, it’s inevitable that the talentless take over. (A degree is meaningless when given to an idiot.) As long as no competent people are involved, everything’s sweet until it all inevitably falls over. This is underperformance on a truly colossal scale.

It’s also hyper-obstructionist by intent. Cheaper tech, better time management, better productivity, better business models, you name it; they just don’t happen. For example – There’s no good cost-effective business reason for “back to the office”. Those places cost millions, and all that’s likely to happen is that diseases spread a lot faster. The upkeep of the buildings is obscene, the liabilities endless, and you’re paying for it.

If there was ever a species of serial underachievers on Earth, this is them. They have political ideologies to back them up. They’re in luck, too. In a deregulated environment, you can’t pull the plug on insane prices and unearned wages. This isn’t socialism; it’s common sense and business best practice, and you can guess how popular that is right now.

Why the cheapskate stuff, you may wonder in your palatial hollowed-out grain of rice? To create entirely fictional numbers, and maybe rip off some poor people. The appearance of success isn’t success, but it looks like it. Most of these guys can’t even make sense of their own balance sheets.

Most of the stockholders in this cartoon can’t read them either. So, everyone’s happy. They get paid for this fictional fantasy. World Com, Enron, Lehmann Bros, you live or die by the numbers. It’s more likely you create the numbers and vanish before the crash and burn kicks in.

Many businesses are going broke and being exposed to serious legal actions thanks to this culture. A lot of businesses are basically doing business for their inner parasites, not for themselves. Eventually, long afterward, it shows on the balance sheets, but you can see the problem.

Never mind the rhetoric. More outraged verbiage is hardly enough. The fact is that there are plenty of simple solutions to this mess:

All of these things are breaches of applicable laws in some form. Therefore, as a business, you have a perfect in-house excuse to sue and sack the parasites.

Fines don’t scare anyone. Therefore, you shut down the business until compliance. That’ll scare the guys who own the businesses out of these bad habits fast enough.

You create a nice bonny bouncing stack of case law and penalties to cover underpayment, understaffing, and wage theft, This is “strategic” case law for pests. At the moment you could get any number of cases for all these issues, preferably class actions.

It’s all easily fixable. Now let’s see what happens.

Machine learning technique predicts likely accounting fraud across supply chains

Tsinghua University Press

 

image: 

Overview of the FraudGCN approach. The researchers constructed three types of ‘sub-graphs’ depending on the type of relationships between companies: with accounting firms; along supply chains; and throughout an industry. The training direction of the machine learning model is depicted by red arrows. Grey circles (‘nodes’) represent fraudulent firms and white circles represent normal firms

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Credit: Big Data Mining and Analytics, Tsinghua University Press

As the perpetrators of accounting fraud become ever more sophisticated in their techniques, fraud detection needs to step up its game. Thankfully, a group of researchers have devised a new machine learning ‘detective’ that is able to analyze not just fraud at a single firm, but predict likely fraud across whole supply chains and industries.

 

A paper describing the team’s approach was published in the journal Big Data Mining and Analytics on August 28.

 

Financial statement fraud, or, more commonly, accounting fraud may be a less frequent form of corporate fraud, but it is by far the costliest crime in the world. Perhaps the most famous cases of white-collar crime are at base such accounting fraud, when an enterprise manipulates the figures on its financial statements or other valuation date in order to make it appear more profitable than it is.

 

The collapse of US energy firm Enron, the largest bankruptcy in US history, came from their cooking of the books in collusion with their accounting firm. In 2008, Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy due to insolvency, having concealed approximately $50 billion in debt through balance sheet fraud. In the late 2010s, American investment advisor Bernie Madoff managed to cheat clients out of a whopping $65 billion.

 

It is not only investors who are hurt by financial statement fraud. Hundreds of thousands of jobs can be lost, communities devastated, and, in the most extreme cases, through knock-on effects, it can threaten the stability of national economies.

 

Despite the threat that such fraud poses, it remains very hard for authorities to catch. Red flags such as a sudden surge in a company’s performance just before the end of a reporting period, or soaring sales growth while competing firms’ sales remain sluggish could turn out to be just the result of good luck or a superior product. And so for decades forensic auditors have used statistical analysis to spot manipulation.

 

But such efforts are enormously labor intensive and require trawling through huge volumes of data. As a result, authorities tend to depend upon random audits, but this means that most firms most of the time go unchecked.

 

“Making matters even worse, in recent years, fraudsters have become increasingly sophisticated in the techniques they deploy,” said Chenxu Wang, lead author of the paper and an associate professor with the School of Software Engineering and the Key Lab of Intelligent Networks and Network Security at Xi’an Jiaotong University. “It’s an unending, mathematical arms race between the authorities and the fraudsters.”

 

“What is needed is an effective and accurate algorithm to automatically identify accounting fraud, and leave the days of random auditing behind,” said Mengqin Wang, also of Xi’an Jiaotong University.

 

A number of mathematicians and computer scientists specializing in the topic have achieved some success in this regard by the use of machine learning. But up to now, this approach has only been applied to individual firms.

 

“This overlooks the often-intricate relationships between different firms that may also offer up indicators of fraud,” said Yi Long, another team member, but from Shenzhen Finance Institute, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. “An accounting firm that colludes in financial statement fraud with one company has an increased likelihood of engaging in fraudulent activities with other companies.”

 

And it is not just between accounting firms and their clients where the fraudulent relationships are propagated. Accounting fraud practices can spread up and down supply chains, or, be perpetuated horizontally across industries.

 

But to incorporate data beyond a single firm means a commensurate increase in the computational expense. Moreover, existing machine-learning approaches suffer from a severe imbalance in the samples used to train the computer model how to classify something as fraudulent because normal, non-fraudulent samples significantly outnumber actual fraud cases. This imbalance can lead to biased computer models that prioritize the majority “class,” the non-fraudulent cases, making it difficult to accurately detect fraudulent activities.

 

To overcome all of these challenges, the research team developed a machine-learning technique combined with mathematical methods taken from the realm of graph theory.

 

The cutting-edge artificial intelligence financial-fraud ‘detective’ they devised involves a “graph,” a structure that mathematically represents the connections or relations (described as “edges”) between different companies, individuals and products (described as “nodes”). And multi-relational graphs allow for multiple types of edges, allowing the representation of diverse relationships between nodes, and offer a more comprehensive representation of the complexity of connections among them.

 

And the detective itself, called “FraudGCN” is a graph convolutional network, or GCN, a type of neural network designed to operate on graph-structured data. Unlike traditional neural networks that operate on grid-like data such as images, GCNs can operate on data represented as graphs.

 

FraudGCN itself constructs a multi-relational graph representing various industry connections, supply chain links, and shared accounting firm auditing practices, and by doing so capture rich information arising from these relationships, in particular details uncovered in particular ‘neighborhoods’ of nodes in the graphs. By aggregating such information, FraudGCN not only enhances the ability to identify patterns indicative of existing likely fraudulent activities, but also predict where they are likely to arise.

 

Finally, unlike previous efforts at machine-learning assisted fraud detection, FraudGCN is able to handle addition of new nodes without the need for the model to be retrained, enhancing its adaptability and scalability.

 

The team trialled FraudGCN on a real-world dataset from Chinese listed companies to assess its performance, and found that it beats state-of-the-art approaches by between 3.15% and 3.86%.

 

Moving forward, the team hope to develop their approach to be able to deal with medium-sized enterprises, not just larger ones.

 

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About Big Data Mining and Analytics

Big Data Mining and Analytics (Published by Tsinghua University Press) discovers hidden patterns, correlations, insights and knowledge through mining and analyzing large amounts of data obtained from various applications. It addresses the most innovative developments, research issues and solutions in big data research and their applications. Big Data Mining and Analytics is indexed and abstracted in ESCI, EI, Scopus, DBLP Computer Science, Google Scholar, INSPEC, CSCD, DOAJ, CNKI, etc.

About SciOpen 

SciOpen is an open access resource of scientific and technical content published by Tsinghua University Press and its publishing partners. SciOpen provides end-to-end services across manuscript submission, peer review, content hosting, analytics, identity management, and expert advice to ensure each journal’s development. By digitalizing the publishing process, SciOpen widens the reach, deepens the impact, and accelerates the exchange of ideas.

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Journal

Big Data Mining and Analytics

DOI

10.26599/BDMA.2024.9020013 

Article Title

Multi-Relational Graph Representation Learning for Financial Statement Fraud Detection

Article Publication Date

28-Aug-2024