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Salman Rushdie, the writer marked for death by the Ayatollah of Iran for writing The Satanic Verses, is working on a new novel set in contemporary America.

His new book, The Golden House, is a thriller set against the backdrop of modern-day American culture. It covers the eight-year Obama presidency and incorporates the cultural zeitgeist. It includes the rise of the conservative Tea Party movement, 2014s GamerGate hashtag campaign, social media, identity politics, and the ongoing culture war against political correctness.

In other words, its the modern world through the lens of Salman Rushdie, an author who received numerous death threats and even attempts on his life after he penned a novel critical of Islam.

Many stores refused to carry the book following its publication in 1988, and those that did were targeted by terrorists with firebombs and explosives.

The Iranian government put out a hit on Rushdie, which lasted until 1998, calling on jihadists and their allies to take the authors life.

In more recent years, Rushdie has called for the defense of freedom of speech. As the target of assassination attempts over his ideas and writing, the Booker Prize-winning author is uniquely intimate with the subject.

During the election last year, Rushdie spoke out against the furor over the pro-Trump chalk slogans in Emory University in what became known as #TheChalkening. Campuses that saw the rising incidences of chalk messages banned the calcium carbonate writing tool.

Rushdie called the dust-up silly and said there was no reason for art to be politically correct.

When people say, I believe in free speech but , then they dont believe in free speech, he said. The whole point about free speech is that it upsets people.

Its very easy to defend the right of people whom you agree with or that you are indifferent to, Rushdie said. The defense [of free speech] begins when someone says something that you dont like.

There are no safe spaces against offensive ideas, said Rushdie.

Rushdie has come to lose his confidence in the progressive leftincluding those who once defended his controversial book. Speaking in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Rushdie expressed dismay at the leftist protests that followed the PEN writers association to honor the fallen artists and writers.

Speaking to French magazine LExpress, Rushdie said that people learned the wrong lessons from the threats he faced in the 80s and 90s.

Instead of realizing that we need to oppose these attacks on freedom of expression, we thought that we need to placate them with compromise and renunciation.

Ive since had the feeling that, if the attacks against The Satanic Verses had taken place today, these people would not have defended me, and would have used the same arguments against me, accusing me of insulting an ethnic and cultural minority, said Rushdie. We are living in the darkest time I have ever known.

In Rushdies new book, the main villain is described as a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain sporting makeup and colored hair. Make what you will of that.

The books publishing director at Jonathan Cape, Michal Shavit, describes The Golden House as being about identity, truth, terror, and lies for a new world order of alternate truths. Its out this September.

Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken mediacritic. You can reach him through social media at@stillgray on Twitterand onFacebook.

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Salman Rushdie's New Novel is About Political Correctness and the Culture Wars - Heat Street

In a sign of whats to come for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), President Donald Trump told pharmaceutical company CEOs Tuesday that his administration will be cutting regulations at a level no one has ever seen before.'

George W. Plunkitt. He Seen His Opportunities, and He Took Em.

Ryan claims that Obamacare has put Medicare under deeper financial stress. Precisely the opposite is true.

I love this new world, I no longer have to be politically correct.

Spencer and Miller first came to know each other in the late 2000s as students at Duke University, where they both belonged to the Duke Conservative Union.

Anything we can do to keep from having abortions, or to keep them from not knowing what is available, I will support.

The State of Oklahoma strongly urges you to contact them if you are pregnant.

Repealing the Affordable Care Act would result in 32 million Americans losing their health insurance by 2026, according to an analysis published [Jan. 17]by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation. The CBO also calculated that in the first new plan year after enactment, premiums for those in the individual market would have risen by 20-25 percent, and then would almost double by 2026.

Brandis could be the story of thousands of LGBTQ men and women born to evangelical families.

Jewish community centers in 17 states were evacuated [Jan. 18]following a wave of bomb threats, which echoed a similar grouping of threats on Jan. 9.

Maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predictable, lightly attended act of agitprop which claims to represent hundreds of thousands of people whonever show up.

Most Trump evangelicals I talk with love his recent executive order banning refugees from Muslim countries.

While the White House scrambled to contain the widening furor over his ban on refugees and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, the administration was laying the groundwork for a vast expansion of the nations deportation system.

The program, Countering Violent Extremism' or CVE, would be changed to Countering Islamic Extremism or Countering Radical Islamic Extremism, the sources said, and would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States.

This action benefits no one, except facilities who have harmed animals and dont want anyone to know.

Quite simply, Trump is trying to bully federal judges out ofruling against him andsuggesting those that do are not legitimate members of the federal courts.

So every policy move Trump makes can be used to enrich himself and his family personally with no legal obligation for anyone outside the family to know about it.

The resolution to erase the prepaid rules are just the beginning of the new administration and legislatures action to weaken the CFPBs ability to protect consumers and financial regulations.

I have a very hard time believing that the net effect of pumping $40 billion worth of weapons into the world in a single year can possibly be to reduce the level of global violence and or avoid increasing the lethality of conflict.

Where alt-facts prove more devilish than old-school lies, even the cleverly concealed ones, is in their abandonment of reality altogether, their leap from the verifiable to the realm of pure belief.

Historical studies suggest that it takes 3.5 percent of a population engaged in sustained nonviolent resistance to topple brutal dictatorships.

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The culture wars and the class war have merged - Patheos (blog)

Tom Nally, the head of TD Ameritrade Institutional, kicked off the custodian firms national conference in San Diego with an appeal to the 2,000 advisors present: Dont get complacent.

Events of the day underscored his point: The conference kicked off just as rival Charles Schwab, the largest custodian for independent investment advisors, announced they were slashing commissionson trades 22 percent to $6.95, signaling a price war between the online brokerage and custodial firms and sending TD Ameritrades stock down 12 percent the next day.

Related: The Other Regulatory Changes Coming For Advisors

On the second day of the conference, president Donald Trump ordered the Department of Labor to perform an economic and legal review of its pending fiduciary rule, slated to go into effect April 10. Most notably, the president told the DOL to delay the rule if it needed time to accomplish that goal, a signal most observers conclude will lead to a delay and possible repeal.

Despite the curveballs, Nallys message for the 2,000 advisors attending the conference was clear: RIAs are the fastest growing business channel in the industry,boosted by a cultural shift away fromthe conflicted compensation structures that bedevil the brokerage business, much of that driven by a growing public awareness around the fiduciary standard and the different compensation models between advisors and brokers.

Related: TD Bank Economist: Fiscal Policy Clouds The Future of 2017

With that greater public scrutiny around fees and services, he said, clients are more likely to focus on how much they are paying their investment advisor and what they are getting in return. Too often, he said, thats merely providing investment portfolios. Firms that charge clients a percentage of their assets under management in return for that are in danger of seeing those clients turn away.

Investors will focus on the cost of advice if you dont show them value, he said. Its important to review pricing structures and focus on articulating how your pricing structure reflects the services you deliver, he said.

Many RIAs, he said, are taking advantage of the trend to highlight their business model to clients; Nally pointed to a recent TD Ameritrade Institutional advisor survey which showed that 17 percent of RIAs plan to spend more on marketingthan any other business channel in the coming year.

To help advisors make that switch to a more client-focused practice, TD Ameritrade Institutional announced during the conference some continued improvements to many of the new offerings for advisors, particularly enhancements to the firms advisor platform Veo.

That includes VEO One, a version of VEO that brings 14 of the more widely used technology providers, including eMoney, Morningstar, Salesforce, LaserFiche, Black Diamond, Junxure and others, directly into TD Ameritrade Institutionals platform. That gives advisors a single point of sign on and automates notifications between all of the vendors for, the custodian says, a more seamless workflow experience.

Veo One Analytics is another upgrade to the Veo platform that brings all of the benchmarking data from the recently acquired research firm, FA Insights, into an interactive portal of business diagnostic and benchmarking tools. Thats designed to give advisors quick and easy access to metrics around their particular practice, including client demographics and behavior, client profitability, and how those metrics compare to other advisory firms of similar size.

TD Ameritrade Insitutional also announced they were bringing a suite of model portfolios to their iRebal rebalancing software. The Institutional Model Market Center will let RIAs put their own portfolios into iRebal, or pull from a supermarket of third-party model portfolios while still retaining trading discretion over the accounts. The company didnt reveal the list of model portfolios that will be brought onto the platform or pricing, only saying it will be cheaper than traditional outsourced money managers.

Read more:
TDAI's Nally: RIAs Winning the Culture Wars - WealthManagement.com

Hard though it may be to imagine for anyone who still recalls the 1970s and 1980s, Germanys Deutsche Bank, once upon a time a financial institution with a truly stellar reputation, has become the poster boy for money laundering.

The bank pursued thousands of transactions from its Moscow office amounting to around $10 billion that violated every rule in the book. It has been caught and fined.

The New York Department of Financial Services and the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) have respectively fined Deutsche $425 million and 163 million for a host of crimes that were initiated by the banks Moscow office.

Beyond the monetary fallout, the damage to Deutsche Banks reputation further compounds the financial problems this once mighty institution confronts.

Official bank regulators will see this case as a model for how to strengthen anti-money laundering enforcement.

For Deutsche Bank, this latest scandal is a major blow. For other global banks, this is a definite warning that the U.S. and the U.K. authorities are taking a much closer look at the legitimacy of international banking transactions. This is long overdue.

One of the first finance leaders I met in Frankfurt on arriving there in 1970 as the new European Business Correspondent for The Times (UK) was Hermann Josef Abs. He was Deutsche Banks venerable chairman emeritus at the time.

His bank dominated its domestic business turf, with huge shareholdings in such giant corporations as Daimler-Benz and Krupp.

To move beyond the home turf, Deutsche subsequently launched a major strategy to become a powerful global bank. Today, Deutsche Bank is in shambles.

Under Abs and a series of subsequent CEOs, the bank secured an excellent reputation for integrity and financial strength. Today, the opposite is the case.

John Cryan is the man who now must bring stability to a fallen institution, let alone seek to revive some of its former glory. His bank posted a loss of 1.9 billion in the final three months of 2016.

Cryan, who joined DB as co-CEO in mid-2015, became the chief executive officer last May. He must move rapidly to restore business profitability, strengthen the capital base and, perhaps most difficult of all, build a new culture among employees.

Deutsche urgently needs to replace its anything goes, ethics-free short-term profit maximization culture with a focus on two core values, trust and honesty.

In the four years to the end of 2015, Deutsche Bank transferred about $10 billion of unknown origin, from Russia to offshore bank accounts in a manner that is highly suggestive of financial crime, according to the FCA.

Very substantial sums of cash were transferred from Moscow through Deutsche Bank in the UK to overseas bank accounts in such places as Cyprus, Estonia and Latvia.

According to the New York state regulator, The bank has conducted its banking business in an unsafe and unsound manner, failing to maintain an effective and compliant anti-money laundering program. The bank failed to maintain and make available true and accurate books, accounts and records reflecting all transactions and actions.

The banks two previous chieftains, Josef Ackermann and Anshu Jain, are responsible for many of the problems the institution now confronts and the lax management culture described in the devastating charges now brought by the New York and U.K. regulators, which Cryan now has to clean up.

Specifically, Deutsche Bank was accused of inadequate customer due diligence, which means it disregarded know-your-customer (KYC) rules. These rules demand that banks only accept deposits when the customer can prove the legal origin of the funds.

In a finding that would have left former CEOs like Abs speechless and shell-shocked, the regulators reviewed Deutsches anti-money laundering policies and procedures and found them deficient. DBs customer and country risk rating methodologies were flawed.

Managing and restructuring anti-money laundering management systems in a major bank is a very substantial and costly task and DB is bound now to make wholesale reforms.

Other major banks, if prudent, should be reviewing their own systems.

Some may believe that President Donald Trump, with his declared opposition to business regulation, will restrain the zeal of U.S. banking regulators.

This may not be the case, however, when it comes to money laundering given White House concerns about terrorism, including illicit financing of terrorist actions.

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Deutsche Bank's Culture Wars - The Globalist

The South got something to say.

Andre 3000s infamous response to a hostile Manhattan crowd at the 1995 Source Awards tends to be remembered as prophecy. The quote rarely gets cited directly, but you can hear its puckish echoes anytime someone declares Rae Sremmurd the best duo since Snoop and Dre, or defends Rich Homie Quan forgetting Biggie lyrics, or proclaims Migosare better than the Beatles. Theres something perpetually vindicating about the South, especially Atlanta, eclipsing New York, Los Angeles, and rock, as the epicenter of rap, of music, of culture. Donald Glovers Atlanta plays this game quite adeptly, fueling Atlantas mystique even as itsneers at the sus beliefs that keep that mystique alive. Whats lost in the jokes, the trolling, and the thinkpieces, though, is that Andre 3000 wasnt prophesying: he was picking a side in a culture war.

Culture wars in rap are both high-stakes and utterly insignificantEast vs. West, Lyrics vs. Personality, Written vs. Freestyled, Underground vs. Mainstream, Street vs. Club, Mixtape vs. Album, Thrift Shop vs. Swimming Pool, Detroit vs. Everybodybut the thrust of each skirmish is who, what, or where gets to define rap, for perpetuity, or for the moment.

Another Migos moment is underway, with the release of their latest LP, Culture, and its startling how starkly it contrasts the Migos moments of the past. Migos ended their debut album with a cautious reflection on their success. Now Im having recognition, Quavo crooned on Recognition, more surprised than triumphant. Back then, that surprise made sense. In 2013, on the strength of Versace Migos spread like e. coli in a water park, infecting rappers high and low. But there was skepticism from the start, from dunderheads like Ebro, who openly mocked Migos in an early interview, to backhanded love from places like the Washington Post, where Versace was deemed a flukey success, and the Fader, where Migos were described as getting by on drive and force of personality more than anything else. In 2014, Migos persisted, signing a distribution deal with Lyor Cohens 300 Entertainment, churning out five mixtapes, and riding high on singles Fight Night and Handsome and Wealthy, both of which cracked the Billboard Hot 100. But even they had begun to be touched by the skepticism. How long you think we gonna last? Quavo asked an interviewer toward the end of the year.

By the time Yung Rich Nation was released in the summer of 2015, Migos seemed to be edging toward the periphery. Offset was in jail again following an incident in Statesboro, Georgia, and the album itself was strangely contained, trading the mania and grit of their previous work for polished tracks with slower, bouncier deliveries. Plus, it lacked a strong single. They found their stride in dabbing, making a third song about it (Look at My Dab) and eventually embarking on the Dab Tour, but even as dabbing spread to athletes and politicians, the moment felt marred by how clearly Migos needed the attention. Y.R.N. 2, released in early 2016, was just as longing. We the ones came up with dabbin, we put em on trap fashion, Quavo scoffed on YRN 2 Intro, still seeking recognition.

Culture comes at a time of ubiquitous Migos appreciation, from Donald Glover, from the charts, and from social media. Riding high on Bad and Boujee Migos has earned a platinum certification and grassroots calls to replace Lady Gaga at Super Bowl LI are emerging. If Migos were looking for an opportunity to sneer down from the mountaintop, to definitively declare themselves better than the Beatles, the doubters, and the biters (especially biter-supreme Drake, who took seven years to score a No. 1 single as the primary artist; Migos took four), now would be the time. But Quavo, Takeoff, and Offset arent cynics. Culture is welcoming and assured, above the fray and beyond the conversation.

The album is introduced by DJ Khaled, who appears in full pundit mode to denounce fuckboys and doubters, but his cameo is satirical. Culture album coming soon, Takeoff says, as if the album will be released in some distant future. Quavo and Offset act just as indifferently, punching in and out with a few bars apiece. Khaleds made a career out of blurring the line between self-parody and calculated branding, but Migos choose a different route. Uninterested in either the highs or lows of the culture wars, Migos opt out, leaving the gassing to the blowhards. Its a subtle move and it immediately lowers the temperature in the room, allowingCulture to settle into casualness rather than stiffen into belligerence. The album is a city-sized no flex zone.

Musically, Culture doesnt take many quantum leaps from Y.R.N. 2, but there are some tiny refinements. Migos has been injecting more dead air into their songs since Yung Rich Nation, inserting pauses between rhymes and lightening the density of the vocal layering. This approach pays dividends on songs like T-Shirt and Brown Paper Bag. On T-Shirt Takeoffs opening verse is both choppy and fluid, backed by Auto-Tuned harmonizing from Quavo, which treads along the synths without disturbing Takeoffs punctuated ad-libs. Previous songs (see Trap Funk, Night Time) would have filled all that empty space like a slumlord in winter. The chorus of Brown Paper Bag is just as porous. Brown (brown), paper (paper), bags (bags), Offset calmly says. Bad and Boujee is the greatest testament to this tweak. The verses are full of choice gaps that give the song a blas feel despite its blitzkrieg rhyming. Yeah, that way, Quavo raps after a flurry of rhymes.

The other upgrade is a constant shift in performance order and a few tracks where not everyone contributes. Before Back to the Bando, which was recorded while Offset was incarcerated, the bulk of Migos songs began with Quavo and ended with Offset, with either Quavo or Takeoff handling the chorus. Unequal contributions within a group are acceptable when there are real gaps in skill (see Ratking, Odd Future, Wu-Tang, etc.), but its always a triumph when gaps are closed. Quavo still handles most choruses, but Offset and Takeoff really hold their own here, their strengths on full display on songs like Call Casting and Deadz.

Overwrought bores like What the Price, All Ass, and Kelly Price bring the album to a lull, but even thats forgivable, more sedate than nauseating. Migos lack the audacity of a Kanye, or the ambition of a Kendrick, or the cunning of a Drake, so it doesnt make sense to judge this album based on how it does or doesnt transform culture. Migos arent disruptors or visionaries or auteurs and they dont have to be. Theyre workmen, punching in and punching out, finding success not in leaps forward but in measurable steps.

We tend to think of culture in terms of objects and events, inventions and discoveries, but culture is also defined by repetition, reiteration, recurrence. Migos built a career out of consistency. Let them have their moment.

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Migos Are Above the Culture Wars - Complex