On this week's Intercepted podcast (MP3) (previously), host Jeremy Scahill (previously) takes a long, deep look at the history of McKinsey and Company, whose consultants are the architects of ICE's gulags, a failed, high-cost initiative to curb violence at Rikers Island that used falsified data to secure ongoing funding — a company whose internal documents compare management consultants to "the Marine Corps, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Jesuits" and whose government contracts bill out freshly hired, inexperienced junior consultants at $3m/year.

Propublica's meticulously researched and reported story about McKinsey's roles in designing ICE's detention centers, advising ICE to skimp on supervision, food and medical care, is as unimpeachable as all of Propublica's work.

Consulting giant McKinsey is embroiled is a string of scandals, from the revelation thatit designed ICE's gulags to the news that it charged New York $27.5m for a fraudulent (and worse-than-useless) violence reduction program for Rikers Island, to the news that it charges US governments $3m/year for advice from fresh-out-of-college, inexperienced 23-year-olds.

Consulting giant McKinsey — notorious price-gougers and architects of ICE's gulags — took on a contract to help reduce violence at Riker's Island, and, $27.5m later, produced nothing but a set of trite and pointless recommendations that were largely ignored, backed by "research" that both McKinsey personnel and Riker's guards helped to falsify.

McKinsey made more than $20m helping ICE design its gulags, advising them to skimp on medical care, food and supervision in a cost-savings measure. But if Uncle Sugar really wants to save some money, it should fire McKinsey, which is by far the most expensive consultancy with a US government contract.

Obama brought McKinsey and Co, the giant management consulting firm, into ICE to effect an "organizational transformation," so they were already in place when Trump took office, and as Trump pivoted to concentration camps, McKinsey had some suggestions to save money: cut back on food, medicine and supervision.

In a deeply researched longread, New York Times investigative reporters Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe document in fine detail the role played by the ubiquitous McKinsey and Company in legitimizing, coordinating, and supercharging the world's most notorious human-rights-abusing regimes, from Saudi Arabia to China to Russia.

Mastercard is spying on you. No surprise there. But did you know it uses what it learns to squeeze as much money from you as possible? It's practice of using AI-powered systems that decide you should pay more for cat food because you once Googled "luxury pet spas," is known as surveillance pricing, and the FTC has finally decided to look into the matter. — Read the rest

Seven cases of Malaria, America's first in decades, are reported in Florida and Texas. Officials in Sarasota County, Florida, and the Texas Department of Health confirm the transmission happened locally. The Centers for Disease Control has issued a nationwide alert for the disease. — Read the rest

Meet Paul Saladino, also known as the "Carnivore MD," who recently posted a video titled, "Here's how I poop" for his 1.3 million Instagram followers. In the post and the video he urges his followers not to use toilet paper because it's "filled with hormone disrupting compounds." — Read the rest

Food inflation in the UK has been on a steady rise, and the situation is only getting worse. According to the Office for National Statistics, food inflation reached a staggering 18.2% in February. This dramatic increase is primarily attributed to poor crops resulting from bad weather in southern Europe and Africa, leading to the rationing of fruits and vegetables in UK supermarkets. — Read the rest

Appetites for fast and ultra-fast fashion continue to grow. Statista recently published this chart forecasting the growth of the worldwide fast fashion market through 2026. In 2021 the market value was 91 billion USD; this is expected to grow to over 133 billion USD by 2026. — Read the rest

Senators Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, and Thomas R. Carper have sent a letter to the White House Designated Agency Ethics Official, titled 'Ensure COVID-19 Decisions Serve the American Public, Not President Trump's & Jared Kushner's Financial Interests.

UPDATE JAN 29 2020
From Sephora's PR agency:

I caught your recent story on BoingBoing regarding Avast. Wanting to see if it is possible for you to make a correction to the piece? Sephora is not a past, present or potential client.

In Q2 2018, Chinese investors sank $2.87b into AI startups; in Q2 2019, it was $140.7m.

Anand Giridharadas (previously) is the Aspen Fellow/McKinsey consultant turned anticapitalist gadfly whose brilliant book Winners Take All exposes the "philanthrophy" of the ultra-rich as a form of reputation-laundering with the side benefit of allowing some of history's greatest monsters to look at themselves in the mirror.

Anand Giridharadas is the Aspen Institute Fellow and former McKinsey consultant whose book Winners Take All is a must-read indictment of the way that charitable activities are used to launder the reputations of billionaires who have looted and boiled our planet, amassing titanic fortunes while starving the public coffers, and still retaining sterling reputations and massive influence thanks to the trickle of funds they release through "philanthropy."

With the World Economic Forum kicking off in Davos, Switzerland — where the super-rich are already decrying Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's massively popular 70% tax-rate on earning over $10,000,000 — it's a great time to revisit Anand Giridharadas's must-read 2018 book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, in which the former McKinsey consultant and Aspen Institute fellow catalogs the way that the super-rich have starved their host-nations of the funds needed to operate a functional civilization, and then laundered their reputations by dribbling back some of that looted booty in the form of "philanthropic donations" that always seem to redound to their personal benefit.

Anand Giridharadas was a former McKinsey consultant turned "thought leader," invited to the stages of the best "ideas festivals" and to TED (twice), the author of some very good and successful books, and as a kind of capstone to this career, he was named a fellow to the Aspen Institute, an elite corps of entrepreneurs who are given institutional support and advice as they formulate "win-win" solutions to the world's greatest problems, harnessing the power of markets to lift people out of poverty and oppression.

Didier Ghez is a dedicated Disney historian who has embarked on a massive, multi-volume history of the art of Disney in his They Drew As They Pleased series from Chronicle Books; I enjoyed the first three volumes of the series, but volume 4, The Hidden Art of Disney's Mid-Century Era: The 1950s took my breath away.