Linkage

The Who, The Roots, Jimmy Fallon, and Elementary School musical instruments.

Pete Townshend smashes his ukulele at the end:

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!

We have the 3rd credit union failure of the year, Municipal Credit Union of New York City.

There is a story behind this, it’s the oldest credit union in New York State, and it appears that it may have been done in response to its former CEO’s embezzlement uncovered last year:

The New York State Department of Financial Services on Friday said it took possession of the $3 billion Municipal Credit Union, less than a year after its former President/CEO Kam Wong pleaded guilty to embezzling nearly $10 million from one of New York’s largest financial cooperatives.

The state agency named the National Credit Union Administration as conservator.

In 2017, the New York DFS said it had uncovered deficiencies in board oversight that had facilitated the multi-million-dollar embezzlement by Wong. He was charged by the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan with embezzlement, and he was banned from the credit union industry by the NCUA in May 2018. He pleaded guilty to embezzling nearly $10 million from MCU in November 2018.

DFS removed MCU’s supervisory committee in May 2018, and its board of directors in June 2018 due to what the regulators called severe deficiencies in their oversight of the overall management of the affairs of the credit union and designated an on-premises administrator, Mark Ricca, to oversee the general management of the credit union.

Based on ongoing supervision by DFS and the NCUA, the New York regulator made the decision Friday to appoint NCUA as conservator and terminate the administrator’s engagement.

………

A review of the MCU’s financial performance reports filed with the NCUA, however, does not show that the credit union is in any financial distress, although its net worth has declined from 8.76% in 2014 to 7.59% at the end of the first quarter of this year.

What’s more, the credit union has shown no substantial declines in its total loans or loan income though its net income decline from $17.5 million in 2017 to $11.4 million at the end of last year. At the end of the first quarter of this year, MCU recorded a net income of $2.8 million, down from the net income of $4.6 million in March 2018.

The credit union allowance for loan and lease losses jumped from $18.8 million in 2017 to $22.5 million in 2018. At the end of first quarter, its ALLL was $22.6 million, according to NCUA financial performance reports.

Last year, the credit union’s membership increased by 37%.

Walking the Walk

Thousands of workers from the University of California waged a one-day strike Thursday and found some unexpected allies out on their picket lines.

In an unusual move for a presidential candidate, the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) sent out targeted text messages and emails to its supporters in California a day ahead of the strike, urging them to join workers as they rallied against the university system in a labor dispute.

“Tens of thousands of workers in the University of California system are standing up this Thursday to stop the outsourcing and privatization of union jobs,” the email said. “We are hoping you can join these workers tomorrow.”

The note included an RSVP link and an address for a local picket.

The move apparently worked, according to John de los Angeles, a spokesperson for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299, one of the unions involved in the strike.

“I deployed a press team across the state and was in contact with them,” de los Angeles said. “They were sending me pictures of random supporters out on the line because they had received an email or text from the Bernie campaign. That happened all over the place.”

If you wonder why people are, to quote Steve Rogers, willing, “To make the sacrifice play, to lay down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over you,” for Bernie Sanders, it is because he has been laying down on the wire for us for decades.

Yes, I do realize that juxtaposing Captain America and Steve Rogers is a bit bizarre, but I’m a bit bizarre.

Manning Jailed Again

Seeing as how they already have his testimony from his plea, my only conclusion is that the prosecutors are trying to suborn perjury against Assange:

Chelsea Manning was again behind bars on Thursday night after she was jailed for a second time for contempt of court, having refused to cooperate with a grand jury.

A defiant Manning told Judge Anthony Trenga in a federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia, that she would “rather starve to death” than do what the state insisted and give testimony before the grand jury. Having already served 62 days in jail, 28 of which were spent in solitary confinement, she now faces up to 18 months more in custody.

To quote Anatole France, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”

The New Normal is Profoundly Depressing

Donald Trump has pardoned Conrad Black, the former media mogul who owned the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator before being jailed for fraud, shortly after he wrote a book praising the US president.

Black, a Canadian-born British citizen, was once known for his extravagant lifestyle as he ran an international newspaper empire that included the Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post. But he ended up serving three and a half years in prison after he was convicted in 2007 of siphoning off millions of dollars from the sale of newspapers owned by the company he controlled.

………

Black was jailed after being found guilty of conspiring with fellow executives to siphon off funds from the sale of media businesses. Two of Black’s three fraud convictions were later voided, and his sentence was shortened. Black was released from a Florida prison in May 2012 and deported.

He said he thought it was a prank by British tabloid journalists when he received the call from the White House informing him that he was about to be pardoned.

This is so depressing on so many levels and in so many ways.

Not Enough Bullets

Generic drug makers conspired to raise the price of their drugs by over 1000%.

Capitalism, you gotta love it, huh?

Leading drug companies including Teva, Pfizer, Novartis and Mylan conspired to inflate the prices of generic drugs by as much as 1,000 percent, according to a far-reaching lawsuit filed on Friday by 44 states.

The industrywide scheme affected the prices of more than 100 generic drugs, according to the complaint, including lamivudine-zidovudine, which treats H.I.V.; budesonide, an asthma medication; fenofibrate, which treats high cholesterol; amphetamine-dextroamphetamine for A.D.H.D.; oral antibiotics; blood thinners; cancer drugs; contraceptives; and antidepressants.

“We all know that prescription drugs can be expensive,” Gurbir S. Grewal, the New Jersey attorney general, said in a statement. “Now we know that high drug prices have been driven in part by an illegal conspiracy among generic drug companies to inflate their prices.”

Can we PLEASE start jailing the executives who do this?

It’s a criminal conspiracy, and should be treated as the crime that it is.

Play the Sad Trombone Music

Uber and Lyft approved alleged war criminal to drive

He’s accused of war crimes and torture, but he drove for more than 18 months, raising questions about the thoroughness of the background check process https://t.co/XDEa9eAvoI pic.twitter.com/y7zY17hAaq

— CNN (@CNN) May 14, 2019

Also, Yes

It looks like Uber’s IPO is turning into a complete cluster-f%$#:

Few things prove the ancient warning “Be careful what you wish for” like a Wall Street sure thing that blows itself to smithereens.

For example, the Uber initial public offering.

Investment and tech gurus spent five years hawking Uber as a world-changing business and Uber stock as a stairway to fortune. Contrary voices were heard in the marketplace, it is true, but they were few and far between and in any event drowned out by the drum-beating from the other side.

But now the public market — the defining arbiter of the value of an enterprise, at least as a snapshot — has spoken, and its judgment is harsh.

On Tuesday, Uber closed at $39.96 after trading as low as $36.85, well below its close Friday, its first post-IPO trading day. This is a very eloquent price: It speaks volumes about the judgment of venture investors, about the credibility of private-market valuations of companies, and about Wall Street underwriting.

Remember that Uber was viewed as the ultimate “unicorn,” a term for venture-funded companies with private valuations higher than $1 billion. Onlookers gathered, like gawkers at a shop window, to watch how this unicorn would be transformed into a bellwether in the public markets.

………

Let’s examine Uber’s numbers. At $39.96, Uber is calculated to have a total market value of about $67 billion. That sounds like a lot for a company that has never made money and in fact lost more than $800 million in its last reported quarter, the fourth quarter of 2018.

But the market valuation is a sharp reduction from Uber’s putative value during its private-market era, which ended Friday. In that era, the company’s backers were talking about a valuation as high as $120 billion. That was the peak, but starting about five years ago the company’s putative value never fell below $68 billion.

The company has no path to profitability, there are very little in the way of barriers to entry, and every “disruptive innovation” that were used to justify its high private valuation was either abusive or outright illegal.

If it crashes and burns, it will be a well deserved end to a pox on transportation.

PGE: Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!

The investigation is complete, and Cal Fire has determined that PGE, and its poorly maintained infrastructure, are responsibe for the disastrous Camp fire:

Investigators with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection have concluded that Pacific Gas & Electric equipment caused the devastating Camp fire that destroyed nearly 14,000 homes and killed 85 people, most of them elderly, last year.

The conclusion of the Cal Fire probe marks a milestone in the recovery from the worst wildfire in modern California history.

“Cal Fire has determined that the Camp fire was caused by electrical transmission lines owned and operated by Pacific Gas and Electric located in the Pulga area,” the agency said in a news release Wednesday.

PG&E filed for bankruptcy protection in part because of losses from the Nov. 8 fire, which scorched more than 153,000 acres and has put new pressure on utilities to improve the safety of their power distribution systems.

Scores of lawsuits have been filed against the state’s biggest utility on behalf of people who lost their homes, loved ones and pets. They accuse the utility of failing to properly maintain its equipment.

Why there are no criminal indictments against PGE executives, when it is clear that their neglect of their infrastructure was a deliberate business strategy, and it is equally clear that fires were the results, and that it was foreseeable that people would die as a result, and people DID die as a result.

This appears to me to be a reckless disregard for human life, and that appears to make it some sort of felony to me.

These guys need to be in the dock.

And this is Even Weirder………

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Olliver North was fired as head of the NRA, which is in dire financial straits.

Well, documents have leaked from the NRA, and they reveal what appears to be extensive looting of the organization by Wayne LaPierre, and that Oliver North was fired trying to raise these issues, so Oliver North was on the side of the proverbial angels, at least in the context of the NRA.

Oliver North is the good guy?  In anything?

What the F%$#?????

We live in a topsy-turvey world.

Also, the level corruption in the NRA makes Somalia look like the epitome of good governance.

Still, lots of schadenfreude here at the troubles of the NRA is currently experiencing, the New York AG is investigating them as well.

They deserve any misery that the universe can inflict on them.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Alabama’s new anti-abortion law is too extreme for Pat Robertson.

What the f%$#?

Longtime televangelist Pat Robertson decried Alabama’s new abortion ban as “extreme,” saying on his show on Wednesday that the state legislature has “gone too far.”

Alabama’s law, which has been passed by the legislature and signed by the governor, includes a penalty of up to 99 years in prison for doctors who perform abortions and has no exceptions for rape or incest, Robertson noted on his show.

“They want to challenge Roe vs. Wade, but my humble view is I don’t think that’s the case I’d want to bring to the Supreme Court because I think this one will lose,” Robertson told viewers of CBN’s “The 700 Club” on Wednesday.

Let me repeat this:  What ……… the ……… f%$#?

Trumps Tax Cuts at Work

Remember when AT&T said that the Trump tax cuts would mean 7,000 new jobs and billions in new investment?

Well, the numbers are in, 23,000 job cuts and cut $1.4 billion in capital investments.

Well, I guess that senior executives want to cash in their stock options before tax rates go up again:

AT&T has cut more than 23,000 jobs since receiving a big tax cut at the end of 2017, despite lobbying heavily for the tax cut by claiming that it would create thousands of jobs.

AT&T in November 2017 pushed for the corporate tax cut by promising to invest an additional $1 billion in 2018, with CEO Randall Stephenson saying that “every billion dollars AT&T invests is 7,000 hard-hat jobs. These are not entry-level jobs. These are 7,000 jobs of people putting fiber in ground, hard-hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year.

The corporate tax cut was subsequently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump on December 22, 2017. The tax cut reportedly gave AT&T an extra $3 billion in cash in 2018.

But AT&T cut capital spending and kept laying people off after the tax cut. A union analysis of AT&T’s publicly available financial statements “shows the telecom company eliminated 23,328 jobs since the Tax Cut and Jobs Act passed in late 2017, including nearly 6,000 in the first quarter of 2019,” the Communications Workers of America (CWA) said yesterday.

………

“AT&T’s annual report also shows the company boosted executive pay and suggests that after refunds, it paid no cash income taxes in 2018 and slashed capital investments by $1.4 billion,” the CWA wrote.

AT&T reported $21.6 billion in capital expenses in 2017 and $21.3 billion in 2018, a cut of $300 million. CWA told Ars that the cut is $1.4 billion when “excluding federal government reimbursements for the construction of FirstNet,” AT&T’s government-funded public safety network.

AT&T capital spending is already down more than $900 million this year, as the telco reported Q1 2019 capital expenditures of $5.18 billion, down from $6.12 billion in Q2 2018.

This is not managing a business, this is looting.

We need to repeal SEC Rule 10b-18, which legalized stock buybacks. (Previously they were considered a form of insider trading)

The rule, adopted in 1982, has diverted trillions of dollars from investments in new plants and equipment to self dealing by senior management.

Unparalleled Self Owning, Or Masterful Trolling

On Reddit, user u/Strikeactionemployer completely owns himself, blithely suggesting that he listened to his accountant, and not his lawyer (Solicitor, it’s the UK).

It’s a director for a firm who tried to screw his employees, and then fired them when they went on strike, which, shockingly enough, is illegal in the UK, and then he tried to loot the company, declare insolvency, and then restart the corporation with its old asset.

It’s really too long to summarize, but this comment explains why you should read this:

I just want to say that if you’re for real about this, this is absolutely hilarious. On the flipside, if this is a very elaborate exercise in trolling, I’m even more impressed, since you’ve put in time and effort over a year to set this up which is much further than the overwhelmingly vast majority of trolls will go, and you’ve also captured the exact tone of greedy bewilderment that most company directors have in real life.

Read in chronological order, including the completely unsympathetic comments.

It is a thing of beauty.

So much ownership in so little space.

H/t Charles Saroff for the tip.

Being Evil

What a surprise, Google has been giving free advertising to one of those phony anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers.

To paraphrase the late Abe Vigoda, “It wasn’t only business,” it’s the deliberate promotion of deceptive advertising ti promulgate some sort of nefarious corporate agenda:

Google has given tens of thousands of dollars in free advertising to an anti-abortion group that runs ads suggesting it provides abortion services at its medical clinics, but actually seeks to deter “abortion-minded women” from terminating their pregnancies.

The Obria Group, which runs a network of clinics funded by Catholic organisations, received a $120,000 Google advertising grant in 2015, according to a public filing. In 2011, it received nearly $32,000. Such grants are designed to support and expand the reach of non-profits around the world.

Obria was awarded the 2015 grant despite the fact Google had faced intense criticism a year earlier, after a pro-choice group found the platform was running deceptive ads for clinics that appeared to offer abortions and other medical services, but instead focused on counseling and information on alternatives to abortion.

In some cases, such clinics, known as crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), are located close to Planned Parenthood clinics and provide some medical treatment, such as pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and prenatal counseling. But they also seek to deter women who enter from seeking abortions and do not offer referrals for alternative treatment.

Obria runs a network of clinics across the US, many of which suggest on their websites that they offer abortion. The clinics are actually opposed to abortion and all forms of contraception.

………

Obria did not return a request for comment.

The group recently faced scrutiny after it was awarded $1.7m in federal funds – known as Title X funding – meant to support healthcare providers that offer family planning services. Obria does not offer birth control, including condoms, in its clinics, offering “natural family planning” methods instead.

………

Google continues to feature ads for the clinics that appear to violate its policies. In one such case, an ad for a Texas clinic called the Grapevine Women’s Clinic pops up if a user does a local search for “abortion clinic”.

I don’t know what there game is, nor do I care.

I just know that they have aligned themselves with the folks who read The Handmaiden’s Tale, and said, “I want me some of that.”

Anti-trust enforcement anyone?

Matt Taibbi at the Top of His Form

I think that John Hickenlooper, among other, have just stunned Taibbi with his stupidity than Thomas “The Mustache of Idiocy” Friedman ever did.

It appears that the former Colorado Governor, and avid supporter of the fracking industry, is now implying that the Vermont Senator will invoke Stalin type purges and another Holodomor.

In any case, the result has seen Tabbi at his best:

Bernie Sanders has accomplished something no one in American politics has managed for decades: He’s uniting Democrats and Republicans.

It’s early yet, but talking points for the 2020 campaign season are emerging on both sides of the aisle. Republicans and Democrats both have been trying to sell the rise of politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and others as stalking horses for the overthrow of capitalism.

………

This is absurd to the point of being funny: First of all, the press has been dumping on Sanders almost recreationally for years now. Meanwhile, fear of litigation has kept the press away from business exposés for decades. Whole genres of corruption go uncovered, from child labor that makes your consumer goods (enjoy that child-mined cobalt ore in your cellphone!) to war profiteering to pollution to industrial accidents. Few news organizations have even one labor reporter anymore. The last collective bargaining session that made a front page probably involved the NFL.

………

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Colorado-governor-turned-presidential-candidate John Hickenlooper — who sells himself as a “pragmatic progressive” — went after Sanders in New Hampshire, though not by name.

“You have to hand it to the GOP for achieving the near-impossible,” Hickenlooper said in early May. “Just years after the collapse of the Soviet Union…who would have imagined the Koch brothers and Donald Trump could help resuscitate the discredited ideas of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin?”

Of course, Hickenlooper went on to say, he wasn’t trying to cast aspersions on Sanders as a human being by comparing him to Stalin, who murdered 20 million people. “Do I respect him?” Hickenlooper said. “Absolutely. Do I respect his supporters? Absolutely.” However, he said, he thinks Sanders is wrongly “demonizing the private sector” with ideas that will “hurt working people.”

………

The irony of all of this is that Sanders, who is painted as a sort of extremist menace and El Coco-style monster from whom we should hide the children, would have been considered a tepid Republican back in the Fifties, when the original red scare was at its peak.

………

Bernie Sanders may not be the answer, but he isn’t Stalin, and voter attitudes aren’t changing because people are romanticizing the Great Terror. We’ve just had awful leadership for so long that demanding fairness and competence from politicians has started to seem like a radical idea. It isn’t, but get used to being told it is, until the next election at least.

Read the whole thing.

It is a truly trenchant indictment of the whole “Socialism” hysteria that the pundits are trying to convince the rest of us means something.

In the Annals of Stupidity

The idea that we should reconfigure cities to accommodate the limitations of robot cars is stupid.

It’s History Schmistory stupid:

Special report Behind the mostly fake “battle” about driverless cars (conventional versus autonomous is the one that captures all the headlines), there are several much more important scraps. One is over the future of the city: will a city be built around machines or people? How much will pedestrians have to sacrifice for the driverless car to succeed?

………

But the driverless car has to deal with pedestrians, as Christian Wolmar discussed at The Register last week: “The open spaces that cities like to encourage would end as the barricades go up. And foot movement would need to be enforced with Singapore-style authoritarianism.”

………

“The randomness of the environment such as children or wildlife cannot be dealt with by today’s technology,” admits Volvo’s director of autonomous driving, Markus Rothoff. The driverless car can’t hear you scream. Tests are not being conducted in real pedestrian-congested conditions.

The cheat is: just get rid of the people around cars, so you don’t need to solve these problems.

When people talk about the future of self-driving cars in the foreseeable future,  this is what they mean.

If this sounds far fetched, I will remind you that there is a recent historical precedent:  In the early 20th century, they restructured the city, and criminalized what had been ordinary walking:  They called it “Jaywalking”.

Do not underestimate the willingness of people who profit from driverless cars to restrict the rest of us, and to place the costs on society as a whole.

They have done it before.

Something Is Very Wrong

It looks like Boeing altered changed the operation of trim and autopilot switches in the 737 MAX for no discernible reason.

This makes no sense, which leads me to believe that, somehow or other, this was driven by some sort of bizarre business case:

In the middle of Boeing 737 cockpits, sitting between the pilot seats, are two toggle switches that can immediately shut off power to the systems that control the angle of the plane’s horizontal tail.

Those switches are critical in the event a malfunction causes movements that the pilots don’t want. And Boeing sees the toggles as a vital backstop to a new safety system on the 737 MAX – the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) – which is suspected of repeatedly moving the horizontal tails on the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines flights that crashed and killed a total of 346 people.

 But as Boeing was transitioning from its 737 NG model to the 737 MAX, the company altered the labeling and the purpose of those two switches. The functionality of the switches became more restrictive on the MAX than on previous models, closing out an option that could conceivably have helped the pilots in the Ethiopian Airlines flight regain control.

 Boeing declined to detail the specific functionality of the two switches. But after obtaining and reviewing flight manual documents, The Seattle Times found that the left switch on the 737 NG model is capable of deactivating the buttons on the yoke that pilots regularly press with their thumb to control the horizontal stabilizer. The right switch on the 737 NG was labeled “AUTO PILOT” and is capable of deactivating just the automated controls of the stabilizer.

 On the newer 737 MAX, according to documents reviewed by The Times, those two switches were changed to perform the same function – flipping either one of them would turn off all electric controls of the stabilizer. That means there is no longer an option to turn off automated functions – such as MCAS – without also turning off the thumb buttons the pilots would normally use to control the stabilizer.

 Peter Lemme, a former Boeing flight-controls engineer who has been closely scrutinizing the MAX design and first raised questions about the switches on his blog, said he doesn’t understand why Boeing abandoned the old setup. He said if the company had maintained the switch design from the 737 NG, Boeing could have instructed pilots after the Lion Air crash last year to simply flip the “AUTO PILOT” switch to deactivate MCAS and continue flying with the normal trim buttons on the control wheel. He said that would have saved the Ethiopian Airlines plane and the 157 people on board.

………

Lemme said he’s surprised that Boeing made the change to take away the functionality that could have allowed the pilots to shut off MCAS without shutting off the electric switches at their thumbs.

“I don’t get it at all,” Lemme said. “I don’t see what the benefit was for making that change. It was like change for change’s sake.”

Seriously, what the F%$# were they thinking?

Let the Looting Begin

At the core of the failure of the California High speed rail project is costly and largely incompetent consultants:

When California shifted its bullet train plan into high gear in 2008, it had just 10 employees to manage and oversee design of the largest public construction project in state history.

Consultants assured the state there was little reason to hire hundreds or thousands of in-house engineers and rail experts, because the consultants could handle the heavy work themselves and save California money. It would take them only 12 years to bore under mountains, bridge rivers and build 520 miles of rail bed — all at a cost of just $33 billion.

State officials followed that advice, and for the next several years, development of the nation’s first high-speed rail line was overseen by a minuscule government staff.

Now, more than a decade later, that decision has proved to be a foundational error in the project’s execution — a miscalculation that has resulted in the California High-Speed Rail Authority being overly reliant on a network of high-cost consultants who have consistently underestimated the difficulty of the task.

………

But significant portions of this work have been flawed or mismanaged, according to records reviewed by The Times and interviews with dozens of people involved in the project. Despite repeated warnings since 2010 about weaknesses in its staffing, the rail authority believed it could reduce overall costs by relying on consultants and avoiding a large permanent workforce. But that strategy has failed to keep project costs from soaring. Ten years after voters approved it, the project is $44 billion over budget and 13 years behind schedule.

A reckoning may be coming very soon, however.

Gov. Gavin Newsom recently told The Times that he would be taking aim at the consultants when the rail authority sends a major project update to the Legislature on May 1, including a detailed plan on building a partial operating system from Bakersfield to Merced for $16 billion to $18 billion.

“I’m getting rid of a lot of consultants,” Newsom said. “How did we get away with this?”

But actually reducing the role of consultants will be problematic because they have become cemented into place.

………

The rail authority’s consultants are hardly household names, but they are politically powerful and made major contributions to support the 2008 political campaign for the bullet train bond. They have staffed their ranks with former high-level bureaucrats, and their former executives have occupied key government posts.

………

To be sure, consultants are a routine part of many state construction projects. In California, however, high-speed rail is in a league of its own when it comes to reliance on outside staffing.

………

“If you depend on consultants to know what you are doing, then you are in real trouble,” said Bent Flyvbjerg, an Oxford University professor who has studied high-speed rail projects around the world. “A good balance is where the owner is not outsourcing all the knowledge. A bad balance guarantees a bad outcome.”

Brian Kelly, chief executive of the rail authority, acknowledges that “the balance needs to be remedied.”

Gee, you think?

It turns out that corruption is why we cannot make things in the United States anymore.

I Wonder How Much He Got from the House of Saud

Rep. Ed Royce, a senior Republican who, at the time, chaired the Foreign Affairs Committee, gave a speech on the House floor in November 2017 imploring his fellow lawmakers to maintain support for the Saudi Arabian-led war in Yemen. Royce warned that foreign adversaries — namely, Iran — could gain a foothold in Yemen through the Houthi rebels.

“Part of the problem here is the leaders of the Houthi militia were indoctrinated in Qom, in Iran, as part of an Iranian attempt to construct a Hezbollah-like proxy in Yemen,” warned Royce, suggesting that the rebels in Yemen were merely Iranian cutouts, something experts dispute.

The inflammatory line had been scripted by a lobbyist for Saudi Arabia — like much of Royce’s impassioned speech. “During the 1990s, the leaders of the Houthi militia were indoctrinated in the Iranian city of Qom as part of an Iranian attempt to construct a Hezbollah-like proxy in Yemen,” says a set of lobbyist talking points obtained by The Intercept.

Royce had received talking points earlier that day from a lobbyist retained by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, according to federal disclosure forms, in order to undermine congressional opposition to the Yemen war.

………

The talking points provided to Royce are among the many hidden ways in which Saudi money has quietly influenced the debate.

“The fact that Rep. Royce is repeating word for word talking points from wealthy law firm Hogan Lovells, not his own unique thought and hearing what his constituents have to say, speaks to the very stifling our democracy suffers from,” said Heather Purcell, a spokesperson for Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who introduced the bill Royce was speaking against.

Our “Friends” in Riyadh, huh?

The sooner that the House of Saud falls from power the better.