Fraud, The Chief African Export - How Nigeria And Somalia Conned America

President Trump has called Somalia a shithole - an unruly barbaric place without civil institutions, rule of law, or any semblance of order - and from now on no Somali would be admitted across our borders. 

Yet you have to give Somalis credit.  With no more than twin Johnson 350 outboards, a few AK-47s, and a handful of rickety country fishing boats, they managed to engage in a successful piracy operation that reaped millions and reshaped commercial commerce around the Horn of Africa. 

'Intrepid little buggers' the President went on to say, and fearless they were indeed, attacking the likes of the 175,000 ton 24,000 container Maersk Bridgewater and making off with 100 containers of Braun refrigerators, 500 containers of peanut butter, and 500 containers of Volvo SUVs among other things. 

The governments of the EU and the US were reluctant to deploy navy convoys to protect their shipping, actions which would set a tricky legal precedent for public-private partnerships; and they were hesitant to use deadly force to protect cargo.

As a result cargo ships plying the lanes off the coast of Somali were sitting ducks.  By the time countries agreed on the use of limited force and joined together in strong defensive partnerships, Somali pirates had made millions and retired for greener pastures. 

Ahmed Abdi had done well in piracy during his tenure as chief gunner of his boat dubbed by colleagues 'Master of the Seas’ for its seaworthiness, speed, naval agility, and strategic offense .  Maersk captains when they saw the Jolly Roger flying on the small country craft headed their way immediately called on hands on deck, deployed power hoses, lowered spiked nets over the side, and made mayday calls to Gulf Port Operations in Mombasa. 

Abdi was particularly talented at marksmanship.  Hitting a moving target from a small boat pitching and yawing in heavy seas is no easy feat, but Abdi had some mysterious interior gyroscope which kept his aim steady and true.  

Piracy was an occupation and joy for the young Abdi, a man who had always had an adventuresome spirit, had become bored with fishing and fish mongering, jumped at the chance to be a mate on a fast boat plying the waters off the coast.  He quickly proved his mettle and was moved up in rank, seniority, and position.  As crude as this Somali piracy operation was, it had order, discipline, and a chain of command. 

As piracy was increasingly curtailed, Abdi looked for other opportunities, and found it in Minnesota where a wealthy uncle, recognizing his fearlessness, skill, savvy and courage, recruited him for the now infamous daycare scandal in Minneapolis. As on the high seas, Abdi proved himself a loyal crew member and a well-trained soldier. 

So what was it that made Somalis, natives of the worst place in the world, a true African shithole ruled by bloody militias, a lawless, tribal place of primitive violence and internecine conflict, able to have developed, engineered, and profited mightily from piracy? 

Think about it - four or five men in a leaky boat, powered by outboard engines, armed with assault rifles and grappling hooks to board captured vessels, able to do what they did. 

And then shifting gears, sussing out and quickly understanding the intellectually corrupt political ethos of Minnesota and the gullibility of progressive idealists, and engineering a fraudulent scheme that bilked millions from the taxpayer. 

It was all done with great elan and chutzpah.  There was no attempt to disguise these storefront 'daycare centers' which were nothing more than empty buildings with a placard or painted sign on the front. It was not only a brilliant, Enron, Bernie Madoff quality operation, it was a big fuck you to those pouring money their way.  The con was so obvious, so out in the open, so brazen and brass-balled that you had to admire the Third World machismo of it all.  

Arthur Olatunji, Nigerian and longtime resident of Lagos, had a similarly modest upbringing, but thanks to his ingenuity, fearlessness, and uncanny ability to evade the law, he became a trusted member of one of the most powerful crime rings in Lagos.  The ring operated much like the old Chicago Mafia - prostitution, numbers, theft, and drugs - and like them had civil and judicial authorities in their pockets.  They ruled with impunity until someone had the bright idea of making ten times the profit without having to move a foot from a computer screen, and the great Nigerian fraud began from a nasty, ramshackle hut perched over Sunshine Canal, the most pestilential neighborhood in Lagos.  

It didn't take long before the fraud went viral, international, and reached into the hundreds of millions and then billions of dollars of revenue. 

'We can't catch them', said an official of the Treasury Department in the early days of Nigerian operations. 'They're too smart'; and smart they were.  There was no pattern to their victims who came from august institutions like the World Bank to the US post office, managers and clerks, ordinary Joes and Nantucket sailors. 

In a matter of a few years, the Nigerians had penetrated and corrupted the two major credit bureaus enabling them to gain access to thousands of private accounts. Using that privileged identity, they went on a buying spree, taking advantage of eager, credulous lenders and leaving individual credit accounts at D- and F ratings. 

They were master impersonators, clever and canny infiltrators, masters at disguise and concealment.  It was brilliant. 

Taken as a whole, Africa is a failed continent.  From east to west, north to south, Africa is corrupt, crime-ridden, fraudulent, exploitive, tribal, and violent.  Big Men rule for life robbing their people blind, giving them nothing of the vast mineral and energy wealth beneath the ground, taking billions in loans and grants from myopic idealist European and American donors and siphoning it off to offshore accounts and homes in the south of France. 

Yet if you look at it another way, each and every one of these dictatorships is a marvelously ingenious scam.  The World Bank alone has lost billions of investment dollars.  Governments willingly took the money, promised to abide by 'conditionalities' - reform of the judicial process, democratic elections, etc. - and to use the money wisely and efficiently.  

The smoke and mirrors were so elaborate that international bankers and foreign assistance managers never saw what was really happening. They were being taken for a ride and didn't even know it. 

So there is talent, entrepreneurial savvy, even genius in Africa; but because it is the kind we would prefer not to acknowledge, it gets lumped into broad, catch-all categories of misuse. 

It took more than just ambition that kept Mobutu, Idi Amin, Kagame, Deby, Cyril Ramaphosa and a legion of other dictators in power for so long.  It took more than opportunity to turn Nigeria and Somali into champion exporters of fraud.  The Lagos connection was so universal, so successful, and so impenetrable that the name 'Nigeria' automatically had world citizens checking their credit.   The name 'Somalia' while less potent than that of its African neighbor, still makes people take notice, watch out, and close their shutters. 

'Give credit where credit is due', noted Phillip Orkney of the Brookings Institution who wrote extensively on what he calls 'the bell curve of cultural success'.  Success, he contends, is all too often regarded through lenses of European morality and ethics.  Brilliance occurs equally in all cultures; you just have to look in the right places.

While most Africans might fall under the apogee of the curve and are a generally unimpressive lot ('Just look at the diaspora', he wrote to much criticism), those at one asymptote are as endowed, brilliant, and intellectually superior as any.  It's just that they use these talents in less than acceptable ways. 

Nigeria seems to have more of these talented entrepreneurs than most countries so the shape of the bell curve there is quite different.  Most savvy international travelers have a No Nigeria clause in all their contracts, for the minute they step off the plane they are accosted by touts, thieves, crooks, conmen, and common criminals all with a scheme, a plan, an operation to get ahead.  Nigeria is a horrible place, but as the man said, 'You've got to give them credit'. 

The same for Somalia - a shithole country no doubt, but look at the ingenious schemes for which they are responsible. Not only the lucrative business of piracy, but the more profitable and universal world of scam. 

No one in their right mind would go either to Nigeria or Somalia, but still, all in all, you've got to give them credit. 

Inuit Cuisine - Whale Blubber, Seal Liver, Michelin Stars, And The inevitable Demise Of Food Chic

Rene Philippe was chef and owner of Le Hibou, a boutique restaurant in the Mission, recently given a Michelin star for its 'unique Pan American fusion, an eclectic but creative blend of tastes from the North Slope of Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.  

 

Philippe was born and raised in Santiago de Chile, son of a renowned chef who was one of the first in the South American capital to forage for ancient Indian roots - a cuisine of the Mapuche, Aymara, and Diaguita Indians who had inhabited the Pacific coastal regions of South America more than a millennia ago.  He and ethnologist Jose Miranda de Cabeza de Vaca with support from the Department of Anthropology of Isabel La Catolica University in Santiago, carried out extensive research into the culinary culture of the early Indian tribes of the pampas and coastal waters. 

Not surprisingly, Philippe and his team came up with little - only the ordinary forager's wild sea grasses and lichen, the primitive hunter's sea rat (rattus maris) and Paleolithic fish wader's brackish cockles. Nevertheless, the wealthy, sophisticates of San Francisco always looking for something new, unusual, and unique, flocked to Le Hibou.  Wine Advocate gave it special mention in its edition on Chilean wines saying that it 'broke the barriers of old and new, ancient and modern, indigenous and popular'. 

Now, much of the attraction had to do more with cultural cachet than the cuisine itself.  The Mapuche coraille de mer, basically a barnacle ceviche with low tide undertones and served with an ocean fluke puree, would have been inedible to anyone wandering off the street looking for a filling supper; but the clientele of Le Hibou, aware of provenance and food history, far from being put off by the nasty bits, tough mollusk cartilage, and randy sea innards, raved about them.  They were, after all, eating something of uniquely indigenous origin. 

 

Philippe had spent time in the Amazon jungle, hoping to find some traces of early Jivaro cuisine, but the forest cui - a wild muskrat-sized rodent grilled over hibiscus root and banyan coal - just wasn't up to his standards.  No matter how he prepared it, forest cui never lost its peculiar gaminess, said to be derived from its fondness for bat ordure.  This species of cui was more scavenger than forager, and its diet was noxious. 

In any case, Philippe had had enough of South America and turned his attention to the far north and the Eskimo populations above the Arctic Circle.  There, in the harsh, spare, inhospitable environment of the ice, there was only whale blubber and seal meat to eat with the occasional Spring-foraged and -cured seaweed. Far above the tree line, fire was an impossibility, so everything was eaten raw without seasoning; and so making a palatable entree for patrons in San Francisco would be a challenging affair. 

Yet Philippe knew his clientele and how mind-over-matter was the ethos of American haute cuisine. It mattered less what the offerings tasted like than what they looked like and more importantly their history.  To enjoy the same meal that the Inuit ate in Inukjuak their farthest north Arctic settlement was a particular treat. 

Now, eating a slab of whale blubber straight would not be in the cards, no matter how much its indigenous origins prevailed, so Philippe took some liberties and his presentation was worthy of Rene Redzepi, the Danish forager and culinary innovator par excellence.  Philippe carved the blubber into geometric shapes, arrayed them in designs reminiscent of the whalebone scrimshaw carvings of the Inuit, and garnished them with sprays of early sea grass sprouts.  Salt was offered as a garnish, to be taken lightly before each mouthful of blubber and offsetting the dense fat taste of the 'meat'.  Vodka was obligatory. 

Le Hibou was so successful that reservations were taken only three months in advance with the caveat that no menus would be published until the day before dining.  Diners would have to trust Phillipe and his growing reputation. 

Few diners were disappointed and willingly spent the $300 for the standard prix fixe menu.  The cadre of the restaurant added to its appeal.  Never trendy or kitschy in a tribal way, Phillipe's art director collected the most exemplary pieces from Amazon and Alaskan tribes mixed in with Hopi, Ute, and Apache traditional beadwork.  It was an ensemble of cadre, atmosphere, ornamentation, presentation, and history that kept patrons coming back. 

Coincidentally at the same time of the rise of Le Hibou and other imitative restaurants in the Bay Area, there was a counter-revolutionary movement called Back To Basics - comfort food, home cooking, and the fragrance of Mom's kitchen and baking bread. 

Tom O'Neill of the independent Bay Area Journal set the table, i.e. lambasted the pretentious, absurdly priced, nonsensically crafted offerings of San Francisco's nouvelle cuisine in a recent article:

Foraging is no more than a high pretense charade fueled by gullibility, credulousness, and ignorance.  The tomfoolery at Le Hibou is vaudevillian, popular bottom feeding worse than blackface, the Three Stooges, and Freaks all put together.  Who could possibly fall for the gross, inedible offerings of the place?  Holding back gullet spasms and involuntary retching is the most one can hope for at $300 a pop.  You can fool all of the people all of the time, said P.T. Barnum of 'a sucker is born every minute' fame, and Le Hibou and its host Rene Philippe were prime examples.  

Following in a series on a return to home cooking, O'Neill went on to praise meatloaf, mac 'n' cheese, pot roast, Salisbury steak, butterscotch pudding and much more.  A new restaurant in the Mission, Dot's Kitchen, featured these and other familiar items from the Fifties and became the retro hit of the year.  The decor was Formica counters, steel-and-plastic chairs, plastic tablecloths, friendly service and no fanciful preambles about provenance or animal history.  

No 'My name is Bruce and I'll be your waiter tonight', no miniscule detail about garnishes, coulis, or chef's inspiration.  Just plain meals on plain plates in a homey atmosphere. 'Finally', wrote San Francisco Chronicle food critic, Abel Nikken, 'a restaurant we can all enjoy'. 

Foodies sniffed at the very idea.  They had left the soggy, floury, bready, unappetizing meals of the Fifties far behind, or so they thought; and were surprised at a) how successful Dot's kitchen and its spawn had become; and b) how the patronage of Le Hibou and its ilk dwindled to almost nothing. 

'Fickle', said one Sausalito foodie who had recently redone her kitchen with a six-burner Viking stove, a walk-in refrigerator, two spacious food islands, track lighting, two bakery-quality ovens, a sous vide cooker, and a Japanese fermenter and spent thousands in the process. 'Food connoisseurs will be back' but the return never happened.  Le Hibou went out of business, Rene Phillipe went to upstate New York  to work at his American family's lumber company, and Dot of Dot's kitchen turned her small SF enterprise into a national chain.  

What goes around comes around, goes the old saw; and after years of exploring the outer reaches of the food culture, Mom's pot roast and apple pie were back.  It was about time, but also predictable. Classic Renaissance cuisine turned Baroque and then in a final paroxysm became Rococo.  After that overdone, excessive, self-indulgent period, food returned to normalcy, or at least some semblance of it. 

American cuisine followed the same trajectory and although Rene Philippe did not know it, he was the last of the Rococo restaurateurs. 

Off His Rocker - A Psycho-Social Analysis Of President Donald J Trump

Bob Muzelle was disconsolate as he watched the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House, a 'Celebration of Victory', the President called it - heroic triumph over oppression in Venezuela and Iran, the removal of brutal dictator, and the liberation of the common people.  'A victory for democracy' the President said, 'and a victory for America'. 

 

How like him, thought Bob - arrogant fool, war-mongering adventurist, small-minded emperor - to launch an unprovoked attack on a sovereign country.  Yes, one with flaws like any other, but one simply playing out its own particular geopolitical vision, one based on profound religious principles, historical legacy, and cultural integrity. The attack was one more sign of a mentally unhinged man, a fantasy despot, an insane inmate of a garbled, distorted world. 

There are two schools of thought within the progressive community - one is that the man is evil in the manner of Adolph Hitler, a once in a generation a ghoulish twist of human nature that produces someone not only without morality, but a devilish disregard for the very idea of good. 

Hitler's camps were nothing compared to the gulags and gas chambers envisaged by a man bound and determined to destroy every last vestige of communitarian good, to send aspiring, morally legal immigrants back across the border in cattle cars to a certain death; to round up people of color and the other-gendered and intern them in reservations in the far north. 

The other school of thought is that the President is mentally deranged, and that his insanity, fueled by arrogant, unchecked ambition, gets worse by the day.  There is a significant body of literature defending this thesis, and each and every one of his initiatives have been analyzed, disaggregated, parsed, and reviewed through a psychiatric lens, and the results are revealing. 

Perhaps the most widely circulated is an article written by Prof. Ellington Porter, Dean Emeritus at Harvard medical school, Nobel Prize nominee, and distinguished author of a series or articles on the President in The American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry. The article, excerpted below, referring to the President's attack on gender fluidity, details what Prof. Porter describes as classic sexual displacement disorder:

Sexual displacement disorder - an aggressively corrosive mental aberration that has its root causes in Freudian imbalance (ego, id, and superego disassembled, rearranged, and misaligned in chaotic disorder) whereby the patient can no longer adjust to changing sexual paradigms and assumes, rather arrogates to himself, the moral authority to destroy them to satisfy his own puerile frustrations. Stemming from sexual arousal rooted in mother-love and sexual animus derived from overweening male dominance, the disorder is most manifest in those with the power to realize the distorted vision caused by it. 

 

'No wonder', said Bob to a colleague at his non-profit, Scientists for Social Responsibility, a group dedicated to among other things, the promotion of a more congenial and relevant sexual paradigm. There was no such thing as 'sexual immutability', the discarded idea that biology determines outcome and that sexuality naturally occurs along a spectrum.  

No matter who did what to whom, it was kosher in psycho-sexual terms.  The President in the throes of his sexual displacement disorder was attempting to upset the applecart and return sexual ethos to antediluvian times.  

'I knew it', said Bob. 

'Aggressive transference disorder', was the way another psychiatric expert described the President's national and international machismo.  Both his assault on the bureaucracy and his punishing blows to Iran were deep-seated psychological distortions.

Kettle drums, tympani, oboes, and trumpets all following their own score  and producing a cacophony of atonal aggression.  The man's mind (referring to the President) must be truly addled at moments of destructive decisions.  'Raze them, destroy them, turn them into rubble, detritus, bits and pieces of meaningless brick and mortar', he said referring to Elon Musk's dismantling of the government bureaucracy. 'Assemble phalanxes of bulldozers, deploy wrecking balls and charges of explosives, leave nothing standing'.  

Nothing could be more expressive of aggressive transference disorder than this, a perfect example of childish behavior rooted in forced sexual abstinence and censorious inhibition of sexual desire.  The sexually frustrated child becomes the destroyer.  He, in his savagery, wants to repay his parents, particularly his father, for such denial of natural biological urges.  This wanton adult destruction is seen again and again in boys never allowed to be men. 

 

 

All this was particularly interesting because the Trump team had called the inveterate, inalterable hatred of him Trump Derangement Syndrome, for there was really no better term to describe the febrile, inchoate, unhinged attacks on the President.  Those for whom each and every move made by the President was wrong, destructive, anti-democratic, and hateful; and who had no policy direction other than that, were indeed demented.

‘This happens', wrote Arnold Israel, Professor Emeritus of Social Psychology at Brandeis, 'in not a few cases.  Ironically the offhanded political swipe at the President's hectoring accusers - Trump Derangement Syndrome - is not too far off the mark.  The virulent, passionate hatred experienced by many in today's political climate can have far-reaching psychological effects'. 

The progression from concern, to extreme agitation, to downright, unsupported hatred in the political advocate parallels certain classic psychological disorders - a kind of early schizophrenic response triggered by exogenous, environmental forces but resonating from deep within the psyche of the disturbed individual. 

Was the professor implying that there was something of group hysteria in Trump hatred?  A certain psychotic personality that many progressives shared; and sensing this commonality grouped together in a kind of psycho-traumatic cabal?

So when Trump read some of the academic hyperbole centered around his mental competence, he had to laugh. First, for the last four years the country had been led by a true mental incompetent, a brain-addled, synapse-less moron; then a banshee who couldn't make sense out of 'See Dick run' was put up to run against him; then TDS, and the frosting on the cake, screeds from tenured academic has-beens.  What a joke. 

Nevertheless Bob and most of his colleagues, took the accusations seriously.  He, having dismissed religion long ago in pursuit of a secular utopia, could not possibly subscribe to the evil scenario. There was no such thing in the world and at best, a la Aquinas, only an absence of good, and certainly no immanent innate diabolical evil. The Hitlers, Stalins, and Pol Pots were no sweethearts, but certainly not visitations of the Devil. 

No, Trump was cracked, mentally aberrant, subject to more psychological ills than could fill a textbook. What these esteemed professors had written was spot on.  The man was crazy. 

'Reversal of fortune', wrote Hayden Marks of Duke, Trump Derangement Syndrome turned on its head to describe the man himself. 

A nutcase, a fruitcake, brain addled idiot...Pardon my French which many would say uncalled for given the academic aerie from which I speak; but irony has a way of calling the shots, and there is no more deranged man on the planet than Donald J Trump. 

 

From there, Marks went on to list. policy by policy, program by program, fiat by fiat, the disordered, mentally deranged mind of the President. 

Former President Richard Nixon perpetuated The Madman Theory of foreign policy.  He wanted the Soviets to think that he was mad enough pull the trigger for no reason at all, a bout of indigestion, a bad night's sleep, an argument with his wife. 

Nixon, of course, was not in the least bit crazy, and he was one of the most calculatingly devious presidents of all time; but he knew the value of the possibility. Nor is Donald Trump crazy, just unconfined by any of the usual prevaricating nonsense of internationalists.  When asked what would be his response to Iran's firing missiles in retaliation to his airstrikes, he said 'I'm going to bomb the shit out of them', and the mullahs had to take him seriously. A scorched earth assault was not beyond him. 

There were some of Bob's progressive colleagues who believed both theories - that Trump was evil and he was nuts - all the more reason to hate the man.  So fevered were their delusions, so rabid was their incoherent, unfounded hatred, so absolutely venomous were their attacks, that they couldn't see straight let alone think straight. 

The final statement on the matter was Arnold Israel's piece on 'The Irony Of Madness', a disquisition on the turn of the screw.  Trump critics, for all their fevered hatred, for all their deranged righteousness, were the madmen, and the President, as sane as a judge, had the last laugh. 

'These harpies', wrote Israel, 'these wicked sisters, this cabal of madness has ironically redefined political loss of marbles'. 

Nowhere in the annals of forensic psychology in the pages of group hysteria, has such a clear expression of demented, unhinged mania been noted.  The irony, of course, is that these critics in their madness have ascribed their very insanity on the President who is as sane, strategic, and schooled in Clausewitz and Machiavelli as any President in history'

 

The Pennsylvania Avenue parade finished up with a flourish.  The band's oom-pah-pa trailed off, the baton twirlers became but faint silhouettes in the distance, and the street was again quiet.  Bob turned and walked away.  Was he becoming mad?