The Upside Roundup – 5 Things I Like This Week, September 25
Rolling Stone’s Greatest Albums, The FinCEN Files, and Nikola's Founder Resigns
It’s been a week since Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and the tributes to her greatness have been popping up everywhere. When she is ultimately buried on Tuesday, she will be the first woman to lie in state. Lying in state is a tribute that is reserved for only the most decorated government officials and military officers. Her status as a cultural icon was cemented during her dissent of the voting rights case, Shelby Counter vs. Holder, and from then on, she became known as Notorious RBG. Her absence in the Supreme Court opens up a pivotal decision about the future of this country. The choice to replace her is going to be a contentious one, another escalation of the tensions that characterize the state of the two-party system in our country to go along with the arguments over the proper stimulus package to implement and who the choice will be to lead the country into the next four years.
1. The Fallout From the Breonna Taylor Announcement
· Breonna Taylor’s mom, Tamika Palmer, spoke out against the justice system, saying that she had no faith in Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron. During her first public appearance since the Louisville police officers were not directly charged for their role in Taylor’s death, she insisted that Cameron wasn’t experienced enough and that it was a mistake for him to shift responsibility of the case to a grand jury. On Wednesday, the grand jury came to the conclusion that the officers were justified in their use of force because they were acting in self-defense in response to being shot at by Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. Palmer’s statement was read by her sister Bianca Austin on Friday at Jefferson Square Park in Louisville. Of the three officers involved in the incident, only Brett Hankison is facing criminal charges. He was fired from the police force in June.
· Trevor Milton, the man behind the trendy electric truck company Nikola, voluntarily stepped down as the company’s executive chairman earlier this week. The announcement was spurred by the revelation that their Nikola One truck never worked, even though Milton debuted the truck in a 2016 promotional video and claimed that is was fully functional. The fraud was uncovered by the short-selling firm Hindenburg Research, and was admitted to by Milton. Stephen Girsky, a former executive at General Motors, is going to replace Milton and take over as the new chairman of Nikola. Supporters of Nikola are defending the company because plans to commercialize the Nikola One were eventually scrapped in favor of new products like the Nikola Two and the Nikola Badger pickup. Even though Nikola has lost nearly half its value in a month, it is still worth $10 billion despite the fact it hasn’t delivered a single truck yet.
3. An Inside Look at the Shaq-Kobe Dynasty
· The Lakers are one win away from the NBA Finals, and if they can avoid being the third straight victim to blow a 3-1 lead to the Denver Nuggets, LeBron James will be gunning for his fourth ring. The possibility of facing his former team, the Miami Heat, in the championship round makes for a satisfying end to one of the most unconventional seasons in NBA history. The James/Anthony Davis dynamic duo may make Lakers fans nostalgic of the Shaq/Kobe era, especially given the way this Lakers season has taken on added meaning in the wake of Bryant’s death in February. In this article on ESPN, Jeff Pearlman offers an excerpt from his book, Three-Ring Circus: Kobe, Shaq, and the Crazy Years of the Lakers Dynasty, which just came out. The story goes into everything from Kobe’s time in Italy to his first meeting with Shaq, their epic battle for supremacy during the their dynasty, as well as the eventual separation in 2004.
· Suspicious transactions worth over $2 trillion dollars were discovered through a dual investigation by BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). Their investigation brought to light how some of the biggest players in finance have helped support the work of terrorists and drug kingpins and how the US government essentially turned a blind eye to the matter. The information was revealed through the “FinCEN Files” and describes over 200,000 transactions that took place from 1999 to 2017. The files are based on Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), which banks compile and submit to the government when they track potentially suspicious activity. FinCEN, or the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, receive millions of SARs each year. Banks like JP Morgan Chase, HSBC, and Deutsche Bank were listed as perpetrators of money laundering, but they didn’t file the SAR associated with the transactions until they had already cleared.
5. Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All-Time
· Every eight years or so, Rolling Stone Magazine decides to update its list of the greatest albums of all-time. That time is now. Originally released in 2003, and updated in 2012, the list needed to be refreshed again. This time around, the magazine decided to make the list from scratch, and got input from more than 300 artists to compile the rankings, including Beyonce’, Taylor Swift, and Raekwon. The rebooted version that was released earlier this week features 154 new entries that weren’t included in the 2003 and 2012 versions of the list. The top-10 doesn’t have any releases from this century, but has five albums from the 70’s, and two each from the 60’s and 90’s. The most recent album to place on the list was Kanye West’s 2010 album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which came in at #17, back when Kanye actually made good music.