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No Saudi #Aramco IPO? No problem, potentially, for Saudi Arabia’s investment dreams
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/business/dealbook/saudi-arabia-aramco-ipo.html

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The world’s largest initial public offering is on hiatus. The spending it was to enable may not be.

Saudi Arabia planned to take its giant oil company, Saudi Aramco, to the public markets. It was to be the linchpin of a grand economic vision, generating billions of dollars to pay for future-proofing the kingdom’s economy, including huge investments in technology.

It is now postponed, leaving a large funding shortfall. But Saudi Arabia is pursuing alternative transactions that could ensure its dreams aren’t dashed:

• Saudi Aramco is in discussions to buy a large stake in Sabic, a publicly traded chemical company. Sabic’s controlling shareholder is Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund. While the size of that potential acquisition is unclear, media reports say it could be as big as $70 billion.

• The Public Investment Fund is in talks to raise $11 billion in bank loans from international lenders, according to The Financial Times. It would be the first time the sovereign wealth fund borrowed money.

• Saudi Aramco could still sell a stake in itself. Big companies in China and Russia reportedly expressed interest in an investment in the past. It isn’t clear how much a sale would raise, but it would almost certainly run to billions of dollars.

The Saudi government planned to sell about 5 percent of Saudi Aramco on public stock markets. If the oil giant could have fetched a $2 trillion valuation — and there has been skepticism over that figure — the kingdom would have received roughly $100 billion.

The three new moves, if they were to happen, could yield almost as much as Saudi Aramco’s I.P.O. would have. The Saudi government would then have the financial firepower to pursue its grand economic goals, collectively known as #Vision_2030.

That means money to invest in Silicon Valley start-ups. Or to create a giant new city that runs on clean energy and robots.

Or to even help Elon Musk take Tesla private. Saudi Arabia already has a nearly 5 percent stake in the carmaker, and Mr. Musk has said it is interested in helping fund a buyout. But the Public Investment Fund has yet to send such a signal, and is reportedly in talks to invest in a Tesla rival.

#arabie_saoudite

Review: ‘America to Me’ Is a Searing Lesson in School Inequity - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/arts/television/america-to-me-review.html

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When does racial inequality begin? To answer the question, you could go back centuries. Or, as the empathetic, eye-opening documentary series “America to Me” does, you could go back to school.

The filmmaker Steve James, who followed two African-American high school basketball players in “Hoop Dreams,” spent a year with students, teachers and parents at Oak Park and River Forest (O.P.R.F.) High School in suburban Chicago. In this integrated, progressive school he finds a community of white and black students whose education is not separate, but whose experience is not equal.

O.P.R.F. is the sort of school you might think would have race figured out better than others. In the 1960s, its community resisted white flight as black families moved in, along with liberal whites. Now, the school has a faculty conscious of diversity and reflective about bias.

But for all the good intentions, students of different races find themselves on different tracks, in different classes, with different outcomes, in a school that one teacher says “functions as two schools in one.”

[...]

“America to Me” is full of moments like this, where you see how racial imbalances are perpetrated by people who don’t see themselves as perpetrating them. It just somehow happens, they believe. Technically.

[...]

Part of the point of a series like this is that its issues have been relevant for generations. But “America to Me” rings especially urgent now, when charges of “reverse racism” fill our politics; when a majority of white people believe that whites are the victims of racial discrimination; when the cry “Black Lives Matter” gets dismissed with “Actually, All Lives Matter.” (The series begins with the aftermath of a controversy over a B.L.M. assembly open only to black students.)

All these reactionary arguments feel like a demand that we declare racism solved, settled — that the past is past, and whatever happened, happened.

“America to Me” is ample evidence that in fact, what happened keeps happening — even if it happens in more subtle ways, with coded language and among people who talk the talk of inclusion. It’s an invaluable look at where inequity begins, as well as the difficulty of getting to the place where it ends.

#inégalités #racisme #école #Etats-Unis

Opinion | The New Socialists - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/opinion/sunday/what-socialism-looks-like-in-2018.html

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Throughout most of American history, the idea of socialism has been a hopeless, often vaguely defined dream. So distant were its prospects at midcentury that the best definition Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, editors of the socialist periodical Dissent, could come up with in 1954 was this: “Socialism is the name of our desire.”

That may be changing. Public support for socialism is growing. Self-identified socialists like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib are making inroads into the Democratic Party, which the political analyst Kevin Phillips once called the “second-most enthusiastic capitalist party” in the world. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the country, is skyrocketing, especially among young people.

What explains this irruption? And what do we mean, in 2018, when we talk about “socialism”?

Another part of the story is less accidental. Since the 1970s, American liberals have taken a right turn on the economy. They used to champion workers and unions, high taxes, redistribution, regulation and public services. Now they lionize billionaires like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, deregulate wherever possible, steer clear of unions except at election time and at least until recently, fight over how much to cut most people’s taxes.

Liberals, of course, argue that they are merely using market-friendly tools like tax cuts and deregulation to achieve things like equitable growth, expanded health care and social justice — the same ends they always have pursued. For decades, left-leaning voters have gone along with that answer, even if they didn’t like the results, for lack of an alternative.

It took Mr. Sanders to convince them that if tax credits and insurance exchanges are the best liberals have to offer to men and women struggling to make stagnating wages pay for bills that skyrocket and debt that never dissipates, maybe socialism is worth a try.

Like the great transformative presidents, today’s socialist candidates reach beyond the parties to target a malignant social form: for Abraham Lincoln, it was the slavocracy; for Franklin Roosevelt, it was the economic royalists. The great realigners understood that any transformation of society requires a confrontation not just with the opposition but also with the political economy that underpins both parties. That’s why realigners so often opt for a language that neither party speaks. For Lincoln in the 1850s, confronting the Whigs and the Democrats, that language was free labor. For leftists in the 2010s, confronting the Republicans and the Democrats, it’s socialism.

To critics in the mainstream and further to the left, that language can seem slippery. With their talk of Medicare for All or increasing the minimum wage, these socialist candidates sound like New Deal or Great Society liberals. There’s not much discussion, yet, of classic socialist tenets like worker control or collective ownership of the means of production.

#Politique_USA #Bernie_Sanders #Alexandria_Ocasio_Cortez #Rashida_Tlaib