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South Africa part 3: Cecil Rhodes

South Africa part 3: Cecil Rhodes
To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far. -- Cecil Rhodes, Last Will and Testament
This is the 3rd post in a series on South Africa and Apartheid and so far in the first two neither Apartheid nor South Africa even exists. But we are to the mid climax. In first part we discussed how our groups of players: Afrikaners, British, Xhosa, Zulu, minor tribes, other ethnicities got to what would become South Africa. In the second part we discussed how the Zulus and Xhosa knocked themselves out of the game leaving the British and Afrikaners as the main players standing for who got rule what would become South Africa. We also discussed how the British policy was non-viable. This part is going to discuss how the British changed course and consequently won control. We are also going to get to the genesis of the Western Left's hatred of the Afrikaners and the genesis of Apartheid, We'll end on the creation of the Union of South Africa which while not the Republic of South Africa will allow me to stop talking about "Southern Africa", "territory that will become South Africa".... But unfortunately you will have to sit through this one more post where South Africa doesn't exist yet.
Cecil Rhodes was born in 1853 the sickly asthmatic 5th son of a not particularly notable clergyman. He'd remain sickly his entire life dying in 1902 at the age of 48 from the sorts of deterioration of the heart and lung one wouldn't expect to see until a man was at least well into their 90s. In that short span he would: become one of the richest men in the world; found several countries; change the entire economic structure of the territories that would become: South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe; found 2 major corporations: the British South Africa Company and De Beers; rethink British imperialism inventing what would become the British Commonwealth; becoming one of the defining figures and great visionaries of the Victorian Age; trigger the 2nd Boer War; demonstrate the strategy changing nature of the machine gun decades before World War 1; be the only genuinely important Prime Minister of the Cape Colony; invent the concept of corporate armies; play a large role in saving the South African wine industry and most importantly be the only individual getting his own post in this series. :) Rhodes was sent to South Africa at the age of 17 so that the British weather didn't kill him. Rather than doing the normal thing and spending the money (amounting to a decade or less of a comfortable middle class salary, but no great fortune) on living with some gambling and girls thrown in he decided to head to the newly discovered diamond mines in Kimberly and started buying up small diamond mining operations leveraging each mine's output and outside financing to buy the next. Later he partnered with leading financing and trading firms so by 1888 had what amounted to monopoly control of diamond industry turning De Beers into the diamond powerhouse it remains to this day though the last pieces wouldn't fall into place until 1890. He by the 1880s De Beers was throwing off enough excess profits that he could pay investors and continue expending De Beers while being able to found the predecessor to the British South Africa Company operating much further into the interior opening up Bechuanaland and Rhodesia as colonies using his own profits to fund the administrative expenses much as the East India Company had done a century earlier.
Rhodes believed that British policy wasn't viable because it was petty. A vibrant healthy economy throws off an enormous amount of tax revenue. Petty colonialism, like the kind the British were engaging in would never generate much profit because of its very short term nature. Britain should make money by investing in the local economy, spend some on upkeep, reinvesting most of the profits and just skim a little of a forever growing payout. What Britain had tried to do with the American colonies encouraging economic development was the right approach. The problem was London had been shortsighted and selfish turning the local administrators against them. The independence of the USA wasn't a strategic failure it was the result of poor tactical implementation. The problem the British were facing in Southern Africa was similar and since the policies had been similar the results would be as well. The Afrikaners had no reason to be loyal to a Britain which had spent almost a century making very clear that it had no interest in their welfare or society beyond some ports which were frankly not nearly so important since Suez had opened. Rhodes changed policy to have Britain stop acting like a colonizing power and start acting like the domestic government of South Africa as much as possible .Outlining his changes to colonial governing policy:
  • Colonial financing -- utilize profits from business ventures fund army. Rhodes' companies were good examples of this the British charter and the backing of British troops allowed him to make excess profits which allowed him to incur expenses which the previous skinflint administration could never have tolerated. For example British colonial bonds generated an average return of 4.7%. Investments in independent American bonds generated an average return of only 2.9%. The difference was not being taken into account when the Colonial Office calculated their return on investment which to Rhodes' mind was simply lousy accounting.
  • Long term investment -- In general rewire the metrics used at the London Colonial Office to focus on long term investment not short term profits.
  • Demographics -- The British were the world's first people. Physically populate as much of the world as possible. Assimilate other people's into the British way of life. In South Africa in particular he intended to win the hearts and minds of the Boer.
  • Stability -- The previous administration had focused on stability because instability created upheavals that increased administrative costs. For too long British colonial policy was to tolerate and coexist with local culture. To create a profitable economy agricultural efficiencies are going to need to be introduced. That means 90% of the natives are going to freed up to work in a manufacturing and processing workforce. It also means the agricultural tribal traditional culture is going to be completely destroyed. Instability not stability should be policy. Seek to replace local culture with British culture to enhance the potential for economic growth.
  • Glory to British not England -- English colonies exist for glory of England. British colonies self exist. England's glory is that is the Birthplace of the 1st people not how much of the world remains completely non-British while in some vague unimportant sense recognizing Victoria as their Queen.
  • Representation -- As long as colonial governments respond to a English democracy they will be unrepresentative of their people. Create a democratic institution which provides representation for all British people in a British Parliament. There should be an English parliament for England. Invite the United States to join this new institution. "Inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible, and promote the best interests of humanity" (NB: this is essentially the British Commonwealth, though of course the USA was not invited)
  • Devastating defeat of enemies -- Colonial policy was designed to solve conflict cheaply. Small military victories do not undermine the hostile's economy nor their society and thus don't accomplish much. They simply delay and prolonging the problem created by the enemy allowing the enemy to choose points in time to achieve advantage. Avoid costly wars certainly but when war is needed seek to inflict devastating defeat so the subject people realize their inferiority. This realization facilities undermining their institutions and thus during the peace their way of life easily becomes more British. Further a willingness to war like this makes challenging Britain very costly and risky for potential enemies and thus wars will be far less frequent. The financial people are correct that the aggregate cost of inflicting devastating defeats infrequently is higher than more frequent small wars but the benefits are far greater. War carried out towards devastating defeat becomes a form of investment not a pure non-productive expense.
  • Scope -- The British were far to unambitious in their aims. The goal of British colonialism should be "all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise". The scope was, "the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire"
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map of Cecil Rhodes' proposed British Empire
You'll notice that all of Africa was in the map. Rhodes was of the opinion that Africa was incredibly rich in minerals and peoples. But it wasn't exploitable for profit because of a lack of transportation infrastructure. Rhodes was pushing to start fixing this by creating a full African north-south railway connecting "Cairo to the Cape". Rhodes' BSAC conquests were designed to drive north while he used his political influence to push the Egyptian conquest further south into Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and then a business similar to BSAC run by Sir William Mackinnon to push into Uganda.
For the northward push (primarily in what today is Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana) Rhodes was directly implementing his policy using a private army funded from the British South Africa Company. The Ndebele and Shona (Zulu tribes) were handled easily by the devastating defeat principle. Rhodes' forces demonstrated how effectively Maxims (a primitive form of machine gun) and barbed wire worked against simple rifles, spears and long shields achieving kill ratios never before seen in the history of warfare. As an aside these battles against the Zulus would also be used by those military theorists and historians who correctly anticipated in the later 1890s through 1910s how devastating a war between the great powers would be using these weapons against each other. Rhodes through BSAC had managed to push north of Lake Mweru and to the Northern tip of Lake Nyasa. Which almost connected with Sudan were it not for German East Africa (Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania) in the middle. In theory an alternative route through the Belgian Congo would also work but the gold mines in Tanzania kept Rhodes focused on taking German East Africa. Further Rhodes met his match in ruthlessness when it came to the Belgians. When Rhodes' negotiating agent sought a development contract for mineral-rich Katanga (in Congo) the native ruler Msiri refused. King Leopold II of Belgium obtained the same concession by having his agent signing it to Belgium himself over Msiri's dead body in the name of the "Congo Free State".
At the same time Rhodes worked with the Colonial office and in 1890 British issued the "1890 British Ultimatum" to Portugal. This ultimatum by the British government forced the retreat of Portuguese military forces from areas which had been claimed by Portugal on the basis of historical discovery and recent exploration, but which the United Kingdom claimed on the basis of effective occupation. Portugal had attempted to claim a large area of land between its colonies of Mozambique and Angola including most of present-day Zimbabwe and Zambia and a large part of Malawi, which had been included in Portugal's "Rose-coloured Map". This ultimatum violated the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1373 which to that point had been the longest standing peace treaty in history.
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Who owned what by the early 1900s
Take a look at the map above and imagine the British controlling the north-south line connecting to a British/Portuguese line running east-west in the south and a joint French/British/Italian line running east-west in the north. From there local government and companies could construct smaller feeder lines creating a modern rail system. Hopefully and you start to see how Rhodes intended to start developing the transpiration infrastructure needed to create a strong African economy.
All this was going to be for naught though if Southern Africa ended up as a Boer state hostile to British interests on the model ZAR (Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, Transvaal Republic). So Rhodes decided to run for Prime Minister of the Cape Colony and solve the problems of British strategy explicated in part 2. The primary problem the Boer had with British government is their divide and conquer approach. The British tilted to whomever was losing (a standard British policy they would also follow in Palestine) which for decades meant treating the Boer and native Africans as both being subject peoples while favoring the native Africans against the Boer. In Rhodes mind you could not expect to get loyalty from people you were obvious disfavoring. The British were the ones turning the Boer into enemies.
So in 1892 Rhodes instituted the Franchise and Ballot Act. This was seen as a compromise between factions in the Colonial Office and the traditions in the Cape Colony for a broad democracy (anyone with £25 in property could vote) and Orange and ZAR's (Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, Transvaal Republic) more exclusive democracy. Rhodes raised the amount of property to £75, an amount specifically chosen to disempower many of the native Africans while allowing many Boers to vote. With a Boer and British based democracy locked in the Cape Colony's democratic powers could be strengthened, creating more self rule and making the involvement of the London Colonial Office less obvious. This concept of using a not explicitly racial criteria while instituting laws with racist intent is very modern.
Various Liberals in the London Colonial Office especially missionaries disagreed strongly with Rhode's policies. They had been the ones advocating for the enlightened colonialism that was British policy. Missionaries in particular saw their role as: combating godlessness, superstition and backwardness. In particular encourage better use of land; encourage paycheck work; become trusted advisor to tribal leaders. The slogan "Bring the 3Cs into Africa" referred to Commerce, Christianity and Civilization. To their mind Rhodes' vision of British Imperialism was straight up military tyranny. If followed he would make England no different than a modern day Genghis Khan, creating a empire loathed by a vast expanse of subject peoples who would unite against it from all directions. Instead interfering minimally and being seen as an ally while slowly educated the elite in British custom and religion would cause a gradual consensual change that would build British alliances that would last centuries. Plus such an approach would fulfill the Lord's Great Commission (term for Jesus' command to convert the entire world to Christianity) in a way that honored God rather than shamed him. One need only look at how the Spanish, Portuguese and Balkans had thrown off Islam after centuries to see how ineffective military tyranny was at long term conversions that didn't require force. So in their mind: No the London Office should stand by its traditional values of: monopoly companies and plantations run in (unequal) partnership with indigenous elite. free trade, free (and indeed forced) migration, infrastructural investment, balanced budgets, sound money, the rule of law and incorrupt administration. As far as their Boer, in their mind the Boer were the primary impediment to enlighten British rule in South Africa, being Christians they were obligated to agree with the missionaries on the vision of the White Man's Burden and Enlightened Empire. Rather than making concession to the Boer they needed to be crushed to demonstrate the moral difference between the Boer and the British. With Rhodes' change in policy tilting towards rather than away from the Boer the Western Left came to truly hate the Boer in 1890s. Since the point of this series is the analogy I'll add that I wrote two posts about more or less the same groups of Liberal Christians turning against Israel again having to do with Israeli/Jews discrediting Liberal Western values and thus interfering with the Great Commission: WCC churches and Quakers.
Rhodes in debates before and at the time considered this Liberal Empire stuff to be simply aspirational. Without economic interference there wasn't enough money to fund anything like what the Liberals proposed. He'd point to facts like that after a century of such rules in India they had increased the secondary schooling 7x to a whopping 2% while England with not nearly as many well funded missionary organizations was over 16%.
Rhodes hoped to unify all of Southern Africa around this compromise approach to the franchise. ZAR however rejected this compromise. By the mid 1990s approximately 1/3rd of their white population were British (Anglicans). ZAR had every intent of maintaining religious based voting criteria (i.e. citizenship in ZAR was only open to people who were members of several Dutch Reformed Churches, see part 2). Obviously for Rhodes a situation where British people were the disempowered minority was intolerable. Additionally the ZAR were maintaining an anti-Cape Colony / anti-British / anti-Rhodes trade policy. It was becoming increasingly clear there would need to be regime change. So in 1895 Rhodes organized an attempted coup d'état now called the "Jameson Raid" (yes the same Jameson who went on to be Prime Minister 1904-8 of the Cape Colony after the 2nd Boer War). The Afrikaners were more astute than natives had been caught wind of the early organization and waited until the forces were committed trapping hundreds of Rhode's people creating a great embarrassment.
Its at this point that the Boer made by far the greatest mistake of their history as a people. The 4 years between 1895-9 were when they made the choices that led to their ruin. The British were really embarrassed. A colonial governor who had a crown chartered corporation had been caught red handed engaging in a serious act of war against another sovereign state with no approval from Parliament. The Colonial Office admitted as much and forced Rhodes out of office in 1896. The Afrikaners had real negotiating leverage to work out a deal. It obviously would be extremely important that the next leader of the Cape be friendly. But they didn't decide to negotiate. Instead they started flirting with the Germans, while not actually signing a formal alliance with Germany that at least had the potential to provide them real protection. The flirtation however, turned a nasty incident into a serious threat to all British interests in Southern Africa forcing a British response. In Britain an alliance of Jingoists (populist military hawks) angry about the humiliation of 1st Boer War, Conservative Imperialists who wanted to end Boer independence especially in the ZAR (the 3 core values for Conservatives at the time were: Union with Ireland, the Empire and the superiority of the British race), Liberal Imperialists who supported Rhodes' vision and Missionaries who hated the Boer formed pushing for a war. Seeing this alliance form against them the Afrikaners did nothing to avert the danger. Rather they made a mistake many 2nd tier powers do when it comes to 1st tier powers. The Afrikaners confused the light force and weak will the 1st tier power is willing to spend on them with the amount of force the 1st tier power is capable of employing if it so chooses. Having beaten the British handily in the 1st Boer War when they were fighting the C-team (as I called in part 2) the Afrikaners grossly underestimated what they would face against a British army that had a political mandate for victory, what Britain's A-team would look like. Preparing for something slightly worse than the 1st Boer War the Boer began a serious arms buying program in 1897. ZAR also got more belligerent in their rhetoric which led to a formal alliance with the Orange State and Boer guerilla groups that could support the war effort in the Cape. The Boer had about 63k troops including some foreign troops. .
The British were determined not to lose the 2nd Boer War. This was going to be the British-A team. By the second phase of the war between British soldiers, soldiers from other colonies and local Africans providing auxiliary Boer were facing a 500-600k man army. Nor was the command third or even second rate as it had been in the 1st Boer War. For example, the top military command would be Herbert Kitchener who was fresh from the victorious Anglo-Egyptian invasion of Sudan. Kitchener after the 2nd Boer War would go on to be the Commander-in-Chief for the armies in India and a decade after that the UK's Secretary of State for War during World War 1. He's this guy:
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Kitchener famous 1914 recruiting poster
The cost to maintain that army would be £60m / year far more than Britain could ever pull out of Southern Africa (GDP and inflation adjusted the Boer War would cost the UK about $250b). The first phase of the war was a Boer offensive while the British were still deploying troops in October–December 1899. Once the British were done they conquered all pockets of resistance in the Cape and Orange as well as essentially the entire ZAR territory January to September 1900. The Afrikaners decided to fight when surrender was the better option. Leading to a guerrilla war between September 1900 and May 1902.
The British simply could not afford to keep an army of that size in the field for years dealing with guerilla tactics until the Boer admitted they were beat. Facing time pressure the British felt they had no choice but to come down hard. The British cut the guerilla war short by instituting a scorched earth policy against areas giving support to guerillas in the ZAR (most of the ZAR). ZAR men were mostly in the militias. Scorched earth destroyed the food supply in the ZAR so the British threw the women and children in concentration camps. The army hadn't prepped for needing to support massive numbers of civilians so malnutrition and disease were rampant in the concentration camps. This disease and malnutrition resulting in a camp death rate of approximately 30% annually. A policy amounting to genocide. Pro Boer forces in the UK generated widespread opposition to the camps so the military response was to not confine woman and children and instead leave civilians on the now barren earth to die of starvation and exposure. Actual POWs were deported to Bermuda and India preventing the Boer from standing any chance of liberating them. African tribes that had lost territory to the Boer began moving in. While both sides had agreed not to arm natives or recruit tribes. But the British weren't going to fight for the Boer if tribes decided to take advantage of their defeat. The Boer were quickly losing everything they were fighting for: freedom, their lands, their family, the self dependence and surrendered rather than have their population geocoded to oblivion, being left with no economy and whatever lands they managed to hold being assaulted on all sides by natives who would take it from them.
The Boer society that emerged from the surrender did not have separatist attitude. Destitute Boers now willing to work in the minds and alongside black Africans swelled the ranks of the unskilled urban poor competing with the "uitlanders" in the mines. The new economy was unambiguously focused on gold causing mine production to swell enriching the British interests. The Afrikaners were both physically and psychologically crushed, and wouldn't be causing any more problems for decades.
In the UK the war came to be seen as excessive especially as the financial cost of the war sunk in. The Conservatives' suffered a spectacular defeat in 1906 driving the Conservative Prime Minister at the time (12 July 1902 – 4 December 1905) Arthur Balfour from office. He comes up rather regularly on this sub in his later role as Foreign Minister. As the Boer are no longer resisting the British Empire the shift towards more pro-Boer policies from England continues. In 1909 the British Parliament dissolves the British colonies of: Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Orange River Colony, and Transvaal and combines them into a Federal Union of South Africa. This makes South Africa into a Dominion (essentially Australia's status at the time). Jan Smuts (an Afrikaner) resurrects Rhodes' idea of a Common Wealth and the British embrace it.
And so we conclude part 3 our story of how the British eventually won and South Africa came to exist. How the Western Left started to hate the Boer, a hatred they would resurrect later. And how the first steps towards apartheid were taken. Whew that was longer than I intended!
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DraftKings (NASDAQ: DKNG) - Deep Dive Research - Part 1

TL:DR
Hello, welcome to my first deep dive write up.
My name’s Mark and I’m an accountant with a passion for investing. About two years ago, I used to work as an auditor at a public accounting firm and have been behind the scenes at many different publicly traded and privately held companies in the U.S. My goal is to bring my unique perspective from that past experience, my current experience working in a new role at a large corporation, and my understanding of accounting to help break down some of the most exciting growth stocks on the market today.
I’m a long-term investor. I am focused on finding great companies and holding them for a long time. I’m willing to endure volatility, crazy price drops, and everything that comes with this approach as long as the facts that led me to originally invest and believe in that company have not changed. If you want to learn more about this approach. I recommend reading the book “100 Baggers” by Chris Mayer.
Introduction
I think it’s fitting that my first stock pick has to do with sports. Sports has been a part of my life since I could walk at the age of 2. First with baseball and soccer, and then later in my childhood with golf. I’ve always played American football and basketball for fun as well and have always been an avid fan of all the major sports in the US.
I started playing fantasy sports (mostly just fantasy football) about 6 years ago and have always enjoyed it. Traditionally, with fantasy football you draft a team at the beginning of the year and those are your players for the rest of the season. If you have a bad draft, oh well. You can try to improve your team with trades and free agent additions but it is tough. Leagues usually consist of 10-14 teams (each managed by an individual) and there’s obviously only one winner at the end of the season (about 4 months after the draft). This can lead to the managers of the lower performing teams losing interest as the season wanes on. I believe DraftKings’ (DK) founders saw this issue and saw an opportunity. Enter, daily fantasy sports. Now, with the DK platform you can draft a new team every week. Or if you want, every day. This allows fans of fantasy sports to engage at whichever point of the season they want and at varying financial stakes.
The Thesis Statement
For every stock pick I make, I want to provide a quick thesis statement that can serve as a reminder for why I’m buying and holding that stock for the long term. I’ll always aim to make it just a few sentences long so it can easily be remembered and internalized. This helps during times when the price may sporadically drop and you need to remember why you’re holding this position.
The thesis statement I have come up with for DK is as follows:
“DraftKings: The leader in allowing fans to engage financially with their favorite sports, teams, and players. Having money at stake makes the game a lot more interesting to watch. The era of daily fantasy sports games, online sports betting, and online betting (outside of sports), is just getting started and DK is as well positioned (or better positioned) than anyone to capitalize off of this trend.”
Notice how I said “allowing fans to engage financially” as the first sentence and not necessarily “allowing fans to gamble”. There’s a reason for that. According to US Federal Law, Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) contests have specifically been exempted from the prohibitions of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). DK has always been, and I believe will continue to be DFS contests 1st, sports betting 2nd, and other forms of gambling/entertainment 3rd. It is noteworthy that states at an individual level can still deem DFS contests illegal if they so wish, but as of this writing (11/26/20), 43 of the 50 US States allow DFS contests and DK, accordingly, is offering DFS contests in all 43 of those US States.
I’ll try to clarify the difference between DFS contests and sports betting real quick:
DFS Contest – Pay a pre-set entry fee to enter a contest. All entry fees go towards “The Pot”. “Draft” 9 players to be on your “Team” for 1 week. Enter your “Roster” into a contest with other players (could range from 1 other person to 1,000s of people, the DK user can choose). Whichever “Roster” amasses the most points for that week out of all contestants wins. The winner will get the highest payout, and depending on the nature of the contest, other top finishers will receive smaller payouts as well.
Sports Gambling – Team A is considered a 10 point favorite to defeat Team B. This means that Team A is expected, by the professional gambling line setters, to outscore Team B by 10 points. This is known as a point spread. You can bet on the underdog or the favorite. If you bet on the favorite, they have to win by more than 10 points for you to win the bet. If you bet on the underdog, you will win the bet as long as the underdog keeps the game within less than a 10 point defeat.
These are just a couple simple examples to help you see the difference. Sports Gambling (the 2nd priority of DK) is a very lucrative market just as the DFS contests are. However, in the US, Federal Laws and regulations are a lot stricter on Sports Gambling than they are on DFS. As of this writing (11/27/20), 22 states (including the District of Columbia) out of 51 possible allow sports gambling.
DK is still in the infancy stages of getting their sports gambling business going. In the 22 states where they could potentially operate, they currently have a sports gambling offering in 11 of those states. The sports gambling business model for DK can be broken into two main offerings – mobile sports betting, and retail sports betting. Mobile sports betting means you can place a sports bet online from the comfort of your own home, while retail sports betting means you must go to a casino and place a bet with the sportsbook in person. I personally believe mobile sports betting is the real potential cash cow for DK out of the two types of sports betting offerings due to the convenience and ease of access. DK is currently working on and encouraging customers to lobby their state lawmakers to legalize sports gambling in more states.
How DK makes money
At the very least, before you invest in a company, you better understand how they make money. In Chris Mayers’ excellent book, 100 Baggers, that I mentioned above, he continually references top line revenue growth as one of the main common indicators of a possible 100 Bagger. This isn’t to tell you that any stock I pick will be a 100 Bagger just because it has great top line revenue growth, but if I am looking at a growth stock to hold for the long term, revenue growth is one of the first things I look at.
For DK, their means of making money is quite simple. I already went into detail above about DFS Contests and Sports Gambling. In DK’s latest 10-Q filing with the SEC (filed 11/13/20), revenue is broken out into two main streams: Online Gaming and Gaming Software.
Online Gaming (82% of Total Revenue for 9 months ended 9/30/20):
Online gaming is the true core business of DK and includes the aforementioned DFS Contests, Sports Gambling and additional gambling (non-sports) opportunities. DK refers to their additional gambling (non-sports) as “iGaming” or “online casino”.
For the 9 months ended 9/30/20, Online Gaming revenue totaled $239M, up 30% YoY from $184M in the same prior year period. Keep in mind, that this is an increase that happened during a COVID-19 global pandemic that delayed and shortened many professional sports seasons.
Online gaming revenue is earned in a few ways that are slightly different, but very similar overall. In order to enter a DFS contest, a customer must pay an entry fee. DFS revenue is generated from these entry fees collected, net of prize payouts and customer incentives awarded to users. In order to place a sports bet (sports gambling), a customer places a wager with a DK Sportsbook. The DK Sportsbook sets odds for each wager that builds in a theoretical margin allowing DK to profit. Sports gambling revenue is generated from wagers collected from customers, net of payouts and incentives awarded to winning customers. The last form of online gaming revenue is earned in similar fashion to a land-based casino, offering online versions of casino games such as blackjack, roulette, and slot machines.
Gaming Software (18% of Total Revenue for 9 months ended 9/30/20):
While the Online Gaming revenue stream mentioned above is a Business to Consumer (B2C) model, the Gaming Software revenue stream is a Business to Business (B2B) model. The Gaming Software side of the business was born out of the acquisition of SBTech, a company from the Isle of Man (near the UK) founded in 2007 that has 12+ years of experience providing online sports betting platforms to clients all over the world. The acquisition occurred as part of the SPAC driven IPO in April of 2020 that combined “the old DK company” with SBTech so that they now are “the new DK company” listed as DKNG on the NASDAQ. SBTech is a far more important part of the story than just being 18% of today’s revenue. The reason for this is because DK will eventually (planned mid-late 2021) be migrating all of their DFS and gambling offerings onto SBTech’s online platforms. Currently, for DFS, DK uses their own proprietary platform but that will move to SBTech with the migration. Currently, for online gambling, DK uses Kambi, the same online gambling platform that services Penn Gaming (PENN), a DK rival. But that’s enough about the software migration for now, back to the Gaming Software revenue.
The Gaming Software revenue stream for DK is essentially a continuation of SBTechs’ B2B business model. DK contracts with business customers to provide sports and casino betting software solutions. DK typically enters two different type of arrangements with B2B customers when selling the gaming software:
  1. Direct Customer Contract Revenue: In this type of transaction, the software is sold directly to a business (casino for example) that wants to use the software for their own gambling operations. This revenue is generally calculated as a percentage of the wagering revenue generated by the business customer using DK’s software and is recognized in the periods in which those wagering and related activities conclude.
  2. Reseller Arrangement Revenue: In this type of transaction, DK provides distributors with the right to resell DK’s software-as-a-service offering to their clients, using their own infrastructure. In reseller arrangements, revenue is generally calculated via a fixed monthly fee and an additional monthly fee which varies based on the number of gaming operators to whom each reseller sub-licenses DK’s software.
As mentioned above, SBTech was an international company based in the Isle of Man before being acquired by DK. Thus, the majority of their business in their first 12 years of operating independently has always been international and outside of the United States. This has helped DK, which has historically been US focused, expand it’s international reach.
A perfect example of expanding this international reach occurred recently during October (technically Q4) in which DK’s B2B technology (powered by SBTech) helped enable the launch of “PalaceBet”, a new mobile and online sportsbook offering from Peermont, a South Africa based resort and casino company. The deal was headed by DK’s new Chief International Officer, Shay Berka, who previously spent 10 years working for SBTech as CFO and General Manager. Mr. Berka took on the role of DK’s Chief International Officer upon the merger in April earlier this year. I think this deal shows that DK has integrated SBTech and it’s business very well into the larger business as a whole. They are not wasting any time using their newly acquired resources to expand their reach and bring in new sources of revenue.
This is the end of my first article about DK. My goal is to drop Part 2 later this week. The focus of Part 2 will be an in depth answer of the question – “Can we 10x from here?”
Disclosure: I am/we are long DKNG. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
submitted by Historical-Comment36 to SecurityAnalysis [link] [comments]

DraftKings (NASDAQ: DKNG) - Deep Dive Research - Part 1

TL:DR
Hello, welcome to my first deep dive write up.
My name’s Mark and I’m an accountant with a passion for investing. About two years ago, I used to work as an auditor at a public accounting firm and have been behind the scenes at many different publicly traded and privately held companies in the U.S. My goal is to bring my unique perspective from that past experience, my current experience working in a new role at a large corporation, and my understanding of accounting to help break down some of the most exciting growth stocks on the market today.
I’m a long-term investor. I am focused on finding great companies and holding them for a long time. I’m willing to endure volatility, crazy price drops, and everything that comes with this approach as long as the facts that led me to originally invest and believe in that company have not changed. If you want to learn more about this approach. I recommend reading the book “100 Baggers” by Chris Mayer.
Introduction
I think it’s fitting that my first stock pick has to do with sports. Sports has been a part of my life since I could walk at the age of 2. First with baseball and soccer, and then later in my childhood with golf. I’ve always played American football and basketball for fun as well and have always been an avid fan of all the major sports in the US.
I started playing fantasy sports (mostly just fantasy football) about 6 years ago and have always enjoyed it. Traditionally, with fantasy football you draft a team at the beginning of the year and those are your players for the rest of the season. If you have a bad draft, oh well. You can try to improve your team with trades and free agent additions but it is tough. Leagues usually consist of 10-14 teams (each managed by an individual) and there’s obviously only one winner at the end of the season (about 4 months after the draft). This can lead to the managers of the lower performing teams losing interest as the season wanes on. I believe DraftKings’ (DK) founders saw this issue and saw an opportunity. Enter, daily fantasy sports. Now, with the DK platform you can draft a new team every week. Or if you want, every day. This allows fans of fantasy sports to engage at whichever point of the season they want and at varying financial stakes.
The Thesis Statement
For every stock pick I make, I want to provide a quick thesis statement that can serve as a reminder for why I’m buying and holding that stock for the long term. I’ll always aim to make it just a few sentences long so it can easily be remembered and internalized. This helps during times when the price may sporadically drop and you need to remember why you’re holding this position.
The thesis statement I have come up with for DK is as follows:
“DraftKings: The leader in allowing fans to engage financially with their favorite sports, teams, and players. Having money at stake makes the game a lot more interesting to watch. The era of daily fantasy sports games, online sports betting, and online betting (outside of sports), is just getting started and DK is as well positioned (or better positioned) than anyone to capitalize off of this trend.”
Notice how I said “allowing fans to engage financially” as the first sentence and not necessarily “allowing fans to gamble”. There’s a reason for that. According to US Federal Law, Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) contests have specifically been exempted from the prohibitions of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). DK has always been, and I believe will continue to be DFS contests 1st, sports betting 2nd, and other forms of gambling/entertainment 3rd. It is noteworthy that states at an individual level can still deem DFS contests illegal if they so wish, but as of this writing (11/26/20), 43 of the 50 US States allow DFS contests and DK, accordingly, is offering DFS contests in all 43 of those US States.
I’ll try to clarify the difference between DFS contests and sports betting real quick:
DFS Contest – Pay a pre-set entry fee to enter a contest. All entry fees go towards “The Pot”. “Draft” 9 players to be on your “Team” for 1 week. Enter your “Roster” into a contest with other players (could range from 1 other person to 1,000s of people, the DK user can choose). Whichever “Roster” amasses the most points for that week out of all contestants wins. The winner will get the highest payout, and depending on the nature of the contest, other top finishers will receive smaller payouts as well.
Sports Gambling – Team A is considered a 10 point favorite to defeat Team B. This means that Team A is expected, by the professional gambling line setters, to outscore Team B by 10 points. This is known as a point spread. You can bet on the underdog or the favorite. If you bet on the favorite, they have to win by more than 10 points for you to win the bet. If you bet on the underdog, you will win the bet as long as the underdog keeps the game within less than a 10 point defeat.
These are just a couple simple examples to help you see the difference. Sports Gambling (the 2nd priority of DK) is a very lucrative market just as the DFS contests are. However, in the US, Federal Laws and regulations are a lot stricter on Sports Gambling than they are on DFS. As of this writing (11/27/20), 22 states (including the District of Columbia) out of 51 possible allow sports gambling.
DK is still in the infancy stages of getting their sports gambling business going. In the 22 states where they could potentially operate, they currently have a sports gambling offering in 11 of those states. The sports gambling business model for DK can be broken into two main offerings – mobile sports betting, and retail sports betting. Mobile sports betting means you can place a sports bet online from the comfort of your own home, while retail sports betting means you must go to a casino and place a bet with the sportsbook in person. I personally believe mobile sports betting is the real potential cash cow for DK out of the two types of sports betting offerings due to the convenience and ease of access. DK is currently working on and encouraging customers to lobby their state lawmakers to legalize sports gambling in more states.
How DK makes money
At the very least, before you invest in a company, you better understand how they make money. In Chris Mayers’ excellent book, 100 Baggers, that I mentioned above, he continually references top line revenue growth as one of the main common indicators of a possible 100 Bagger. This isn’t to tell you that any stock I pick will be a 100 Bagger just because it has great top line revenue growth, but if I am looking at a growth stock to hold for the long term, revenue growth is one of the first things I look at.
For DK, their means of making money is quite simple. I already went into detail above about DFS Contests and Sports Gambling. In DK’s latest 10-Q filing with the SEC (filed 11/13/20), revenue is broken out into two main streams: Online Gaming and Gaming Software.
Online Gaming (82% of Total Revenue for 9 months ended 9/30/20):
Online gaming is the true core business of DK and includes the aforementioned DFS Contests, Sports Gambling and additional gambling (non-sports) opportunities. DK refers to their additional gambling (non-sports) as “iGaming” or “online casino”.
For the 9 months ended 9/30/20, Online Gaming revenue totaled $239M, up 30% YoY from $184M in the same prior year period. Keep in mind, that this is an increase that happened during a COVID-19 global pandemic that delayed and shortened many professional sports seasons.
Online gaming revenue is earned in a few ways that are slightly different, but very similar overall. In order to enter a DFS contest, a customer must pay an entry fee. DFS revenue is generated from these entry fees collected, net of prize payouts and customer incentives awarded to users. In order to place a sports bet (sports gambling), a customer places a wager with a DK Sportsbook. The DK Sportsbook sets odds for each wager that builds in a theoretical margin allowing DK to profit. Sports gambling revenue is generated from wagers collected from customers, net of payouts and incentives awarded to winning customers. The last form of online gaming revenue is earned in similar fashion to a land-based casino, offering online versions of casino games such as blackjack, roulette, and slot machines.
Gaming Software (18% of Total Revenue for 9 months ended 9/30/20):
While the Online Gaming revenue stream mentioned above is a Business to Consumer (B2C) model, the Gaming Software revenue stream is a Business to Business (B2B) model. The Gaming Software side of the business was born out of the acquisition of SBTech, a company from the Isle of Man (near the UK) founded in 2007 that has 12+ years of experience providing online sports betting platforms to clients all over the world. The acquisition occurred as part of the SPAC driven IPO in April of 2020 that combined “the old DK company” with SBTech so that they now are “the new DK company” listed as DKNG on the NASDAQ. SBTech is a far more important part of the story than just being 18% of today’s revenue. The reason for this is because DK will eventually (planned mid-late 2021) be migrating all of their DFS and gambling offerings onto SBTech’s online platforms. Currently, for DFS, DK uses their own proprietary platform but that will move to SBTech with the migration. Currently, for online gambling, DK uses Kambi, the same online gambling platform that services Penn Gaming (PENN), a DK rival. But that’s enough about the software migration for now, back to the Gaming Software revenue.
The Gaming Software revenue stream for DK is essentially a continuation of SBTechs’ B2B business model. DK contracts with business customers to provide sports and casino betting software solutions. DK typically enters two different type of arrangements with B2B customers when selling the gaming software:
​
  1. Direct Customer Contract Revenue: In this type of transaction, the software is sold directly to a business (casino for example) that wants to use the software for their own gambling operations. This revenue is generally calculated as a percentage of the wagering revenue generated by the business customer using DK’s software and is recognized in the periods in which those wagering and related activities conclude.
  2. Reseller Arrangement Revenue: In this type of transaction, DK provides distributors with the right to resell DK’s software-as-a-service offering to their clients, using their own infrastructure. In reseller arrangements, revenue is generally calculated via a fixed monthly fee and an additional monthly fee which varies based on the number of gaming operators to whom each reseller sub-licenses DK’s software.
As mentioned above, SBTech was an international company based in the Isle of Man before being acquired by DK. Thus, the majority of their business in their first 12 years of operating independently has always been international and outside of the United States. This has helped DK, which has historically been US focused, expand it’s international reach.
A perfect example of expanding this international reach occurred recently during October (technically Q4) in which DK’s B2B technology (powered by SBTech) helped enable the launch of “PalaceBet”, a new mobile and online sportsbook offering from Peermont, a South Africa based resort and casino company. The deal was headed by DK’s new Chief International Officer, Shay Berka, who previously spent 10 years working for SBTech as CFO and General Manager. Mr. Berka took on the role of DK’s Chief International Officer upon the merger in April earlier this year. I think this deal shows that DK has integrated SBTech and it’s business very well into the larger business as a whole. They are not wasting any time using their newly acquired resources to expand their reach and bring in new sources of revenue.
This is the end of my first article about DK. My goal is to drop Part 2 later this week. The focus of Part 2 will be an in depth answer of the question – “Can we 10x from here?”
Disclosure: I am/we are long DKNG. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
submitted by Historical-Comment36 to investing [link] [comments]

Introducing: The Royal Family of Monaco

Prince Rainier III (1923-2005)
Rainier’s mother, Princess Charlotte, was actually illegitimate. Her father Louis II, getting older and with no legitimate children, legitimized her and made her his heir. She never took the throne, and in fact renounced her rights to her son, Rainier, the day before his 21st birthday.
Rainier became the Sovereign Prince of Monaco upon the death of his grandfather in 1949.
During WW2, Rainier served in the Free French Army. During the 40s and 50s he was in a long term relationship with the French film actress Gisele Pascal. Rainier’s sister, Princess Antoinette, wanted her own son to ascend to the throne, and spread rumors that Pascal was infertile. The rumors along with her treatment by the press and public ended their relationship.
After the war Monaco, a country who made its money primarily as a gambling origin, was in crisis as wealthy Europeans found their funds diminished after the war. To restore Monaco’s treasury Rainier decided to promote Monaco as a tax haven, and he personally took control of SBM (the company who owns the Monte Carlo Casino, Opera, and Hostel de Paris) in 1964. Prince Albert still retains a large share of the company and profits from it today.
Marriage:
Everyone knows this one. Rainier married American film star Grace Kelly in 1956.
Their marriage is rumored to have been turbulent. It is said that Grace struggled with adjusting to royal life, regretted ending her film career, and that Rainier had extramarital affairs. Her children have stated that though she was a loving mother, they spent more time with nannies than with their parents.
Grace's dress is iconic, but here you go if you want to revisit some photos from that day.
Rainier smoked up to 60 cigarettes per day, and in the last years of his life his health steadily declined. On March 8th, 2005 he entered the hospital for a lung infection and by the end of the month he was on a ventilator suffering from renal and heart failure. On March 31st he officially announced his son Albert, as regent, and on April 6th he died.
The Constitution
Monaco’s constitution stated that Monaco is a constitutional monarchy ruled by the hereditary princes of the Grimaldi. If the reigning prince were to die without leaving a male heir, Monaco, according to the treaty, would be incorporated into France. In 2002, realizing he had a 43 year old bachelor son, Rainier amended the constitution to allow the crown to pass to his daughters should Albert not marry.
Grace, Princess of Monaco (1929-1982)
Grace was born in Philadelphia to an affluent and influential family. Her father was an Olympian and a Democratic nominee for Mayor of Philadelphia and was appointed by President Roosevelt as National Director of Physical Fitness. Her mother taught physical education at the University of Pennsylvania and coached women’s athletics at Penn.
Her Uncle, George Kelly, was a Pulitzer prize winning dramatist, screenwriter, and director and used his influence to gain Grace admission to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Grace became one of the biggest movie stars of her generation.
In 1955 she was sent to the Cannes Film Festival and invited to appear in photos with Prince Rainier. After a year-long courtship, they were married in 1956.
Grace was not allowed to continue her acting career after her marriage. She instead devoted herself to her role as Princess, become heavily involved with the Red Cross of Monaco and the Rainbow Children Coalition.
On September 13, 1982, Kelly was driving back to Monaco after spending time at her country home. During the drive she had a stroke, lost control of her vehicle, and drove off the mountainside. She died a day later.
An article on their relationship
Prince Albert II (b. 1958)
Prince Albert is one of the wealthiest royals in the world with a net worth at more than $1B. He attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, studying political science, economics, music, and English literature, and completed his education with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science. He toured Europe in 1979 as part of the Amherst College Glee Club.
Albert competed in the bobsleigh for five consecutive Winter Olympics on behalf of Monaco, and was their flag bearer at the 1988, 1994, and 1998 Olympics. He is also a judo black belt.
He became Prince of Monaco when his father died in 2005.
Marriage:
Prior to his marriage his status as a bachelor was a hot topic of discussion. He was known to date well-known fashion models and actresses, however at age 53 had never married. It was rumored that Albert was gay, something he expressed great frustration with in the press. In 2006 he attended the opening ceremony of the Torino Olympics with South African swimmer Charlene Wittstock. They were engaged in 2010, and married in 2011.
There are rumors that Charlene tried to flee the country the day before their wedding. It is reported that the future bride, after discovering Albert may have fathered yet another child during their relationship, attempted to flee as many as three times before their wedding, however was always intercepted at the airport. It is also said she attempted to seek refuge at the South African embassy, and that officials in Monaco ended up hiding her passport so she could not leave the country.
Moreover, during their wedding, Charlene openly cried at parts, and Prince Albert was caught on camera begging her to kiss him. Honestly, she looked pretty miserable the whole time. The palace has denied all of these claims.
During their honeymoon, they stayed in separate hotels
Here's everything you ever needed to know about their wedding
Watch it
Prince Albert is passionate about the environment and an avid sportsman. Prince Albert speaks French, English, German, and Italian. He speaks English with basically no accent thanks to his American mother.
Illegitimate Children
In 2005, the day before Prince Rainier died, Albert publicly acknowledged he had fathered a son out of wedlock. In 2006, he confirmed he had also fathered a daughter. These children were barred from the line of inheritance because of a 2002 constitutional amendment requiring an heir’s parents to be married.
Alexandre (b. 2003)
Alexandre’s mother (Nicole Coste) was a flight attendant for Air France and met Prince Albert when he was a passenger on a flight. He asked for her number, the beginning of a years-long affair. The relationship ended at the insistence of Prince Rainier. Albert visited Alexandre and Nicole often, however when he refused to acknowledge Alexandre publicly, Nicole sold an interview and pictures to the media. Albert was in mourning for his father and made no public comment, but later did acknowledge paternity. Alexandre and Nicole live in France at an estate given to them by Albert.
Jazmin (b. 1992)
Jazmin’s mother, Tamara, met Albert while working as a waitress. Albert knew of Jazmin and visited her, however did not acknowledge her publicly until she was in high school to protect her identity. In 2006 the French magazine Voici published photographs of Jazmin and her mother on a visit to Monaco, outing her as Albert’s daughter. She has attended events with Albert and Charlene, and is listed as a sponsor for her father’s royal foundation.
An interview with Jazmin
Princess Charlene (b. 1978)
Born in Zimbabwe, Charlene’s family relocated to South Africa in 1989. She represented South Africa at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, finished fifth in the 4x100 meter relay.
Albert and Charlene met at the Mare Nostrum swimming competition in Monaco in 2000, however were not seen together until 2006.
Charlene converted to Roman Catholicism for her wedding, and has learned French and Monegasque after her move to Monaco. She is an ambassador for the Special Olympics, patron of the South African Red Cross, and is passionate about sport.
In recent news, she completed “the crossing” water bike challenge, a 180 kilometer water bike race for charity.
An interview with Charlene and Albert on the 1st birthday of their twins
Albert and Charlene have 2 children:
Hereditary Prince Jacques *twin* (b. 2014)
Princess Gabriella *twin* (b. 2014)
Gabriella was born 2 minutes before her brother, however because of the constitution her brother will inherit the throne. They are super sweet together and you see them at events often.
Princess Caroline of Hanover (b. 1957)
Caroline is the eldest child of Rainier and Grace Kelly, however because of the constitution her brother, Albert, sits on the throne of Monaco. She served as de facto first lady of Monaco until the marriage of Albert and Charlene.
Until the birth of her niece and nephew she was heir presumptive to the throne, although she had only held that title since 2005 after the change of the constitution to include female heirs.
Caroline received her French baccalaureat in 1974, and received a degree in Philosophy from Sorbonne University. She is fluent in French, English, Spanish, German, and Italian. Her hobbies include horseback riding, swimming, and skiing.
Marriages:
Married Phillippe, a Parisian banker, in 1978. The couple divorced in 1980 with no children.
Married Stefano in 1983, the sportsman heir to an Italian industrial fortune. The two had to marry in a civil ceremony rather than a religious ceremony because Caroline, a Catholic, was divorced. Caroline was 3 months pregnant at the time of their wedding.
They have three children:
  1. Andrea Casiraghi (1984)
  1. Charlotte Casiraghi (1986)
  1. Pierre Casiraghi (b. 1987)
Note: The Casiraghi’s are all very beautiful and very fashionable but I don’t want to go much into them here because they are so far down the line of succession. They’re fun to follow for their fashion if you have the time to check them out.
Married Ernst August, a Prince, in 1999. They have one daughter, Princess Alexandra.
Caroline is thus a Princess twice-over, through her family and through her husband. She and Ernst August have been separated since 2009 however are still legally married, thus she retains the title of Princess Caroline of Hanover.
Read about all of her weddings here
See her speaking in English around 12:00 here
Princess Stephanie (b. 1965)
Stephanie was in the vehicle with her mother when Grace died. She suffered a fracture of the neck.
She has studied classical dance and piano, and competed in gymnastics and horse riding. She interned at Christian Dior and debuted as a model in 1984. She has a swimwear and perfume line, and owns cafes and stores in both Monaco and Barcelona. She also has sold more than 2 million copies of her song, Ouragan, and sold 1.5M copies of her album Besoin. She recorded “In the Closet” with Michael Jackson, however is listed as “mystery girl” in the credits.
Marriages/Relationships:
Stephanie married her former body guard, Daniel Ducruet, in 1995. When Rainier learned of their relationship Daniel was not only still his employee, but had a pregnant girlfriend too. Stephanie gave birth to their two children “out of wedlock” because Rainier refused to grant permission for them to marry, however eventually relented. The two divorced a year later after Ducruet was photographed naked with a stripper.
Read more
They have two children:
  1. Louis (b. 1992)
  1. Pauline (b. 1994)
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Stephanie and Jean never married, however have a child together. He was Rainier’s Head of Security. She did not identify him on the birth certificate and it was not confirmed that he was Camille’s father until she confirmed it herself on her Instagram.
More about Jean
​
Stephanie met elephant trainer (yeah, you read that right) when she presented him with the award for “best animal tamer” at the Monaco Circus Festival in 1997. Franco, a decade older than Stephanie, was married with two children at the time. Franco left his family for Stephanie, moving her and her three children into his circus caravan in Zurich. Marrying in 2001, their relationship lasted 18 months until their divorce.
An interview with Stephanie in English in 1990
Why is he a Prince and not a King?
From vogue:
It goes back deep into the history of Monaco. Monaco has always been a tiny nation, and, for protection, allied itself with (or, at some points, was flat-out annexed by) big powerful countries, with big powerful rulers—aka kingdoms, or, a nation ruled by a king or queen. So Monaco’s rulers styled themselves as prince and princess. That, by definition, made the nation a principality, or one ruled by prince or princess.
Regardless, Albert actually plays a bigger role in the day to day operations of the country than most of his European peers. Legislative power is divided between the Prince who initiates the laws, and the National Council who votes on them. Executive power is retained by the Prince, and he has full judiciary powers.
Jewels
See their tiara collection
I think the Ocean Tiara, gifted to Charlene for her wedding, is particularly interesting. You either love it or you hate it.
The Grimaldi Curse
What do you think?
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Mecha, Samurai, and Psychics OH MY....

Mecha, Samurai, and Psychics OH MY....
Hello and welcome to the second part of our WW3 diaries. We hope you have had a happy, healthy holiday season.
The Rising Sun
While the Allies and Soviets were fighting, the forces of Reaction were watching, waiting for their opportunity to strike. The African League, a collection of Nationalistic dictatorships lead by Ethiopia’s Haille Salessie, met in secret with the Japanese, now known as the Empire of the Rising Sun. Along with certain right wing backers from Europe, a plan was forged to enter the war and forever snuff out the flames of Democracy and Communism. This plan would result in the creation of the Axis of Authority. Japan, the most powerful Axis nation, dreamed of world conquest based on Emperor Yoshiro’s dream of Japanese Destiny. Having fought in WW2 on the side of the Allies for the sake its Korean possession, the Empire retreated into Isolation right after. Ten years later, their march forth with their army of Mechas (aided by the Psychic Yuriko) would begin. The League, for its part, simply wanted the Allies and Soviets expelled from Sub-Saharan Africa.
On New Year’s eve 1965, Japanese forces led by Japan’s head Shogun, Shinzo Nagama and Shiro Kamina lead a force that infiltrated the Naval Base at Vorkuta along with Shinobi Ninjas and destroyed the Skeleton Fleet there, making way for the landings. Soon all of Siberia had fallen with Vladviostok completely surrounded. Meanwhile Prince Tatsu’s prototype Mecha, the Shogun Executioner was smuggled into Odessa and went on a horrific rampage that haunts the Union and the world to this day, completely destroying the city before the Soviets could destroy it. The Soviets held up a furious defense at both Leningrad and Stalingrad. Leningrad would hold the line until the Empire withdrew in April while Imperial Forces abandoned their assault on Stalingrad in February.
Concurrently, South Korea would initiate an invasion of North Korea with Japanese assistance and would overrun the DMZ in a matter of hours. Within a few weeks the Imperial and Joseon forces would set upon Pyongyang. However, North Korean General Park Kang “The Beast” Dae organized a desperate defense of the city with the help of his elite commandos “The Bloody 9th” and the city would hold against the imperial advance.
While the Empire was attacking the Soviets, their forces also had their eyes set on the Allies. Ignoring China, the Empire overran the Philippines in short order followed by Cambodia. By March, the main assaults had begun with Thailand and Australia, the two major Allied countries in the region. In Australia, the Empire unleashed one of its massive Floating Fortresses Menji to attack and support the invasion force at Darwin. By April 1965, the decision was made by the Australians to fall back to Brisbane, while Thailand and New Zealand would soon fall. With Darwin in their possession, the Japanese would begin landing their own settlers in a process known as Nissanization, an idea pioneered by Prime Minister Nobosuke Kishii. The onslaught was so sudden even North and South Vietnam agreed to a ceasefire to defend their nations.
A Great Crusade
Allied Forces at this point were comfortable striking back at the Soviets. Invasion plans were put together and on June 6, 1965, American Peacekeeper Col. Edward Hill would launch his “Great Crusade” at Normandy. Little did anyone know the nefarious trap that Cherdenko would set. Cherdenko had numerous squadrons of Badger class bombers prepared with a chemical weapon known as Defoliant, basically Insecticides on Steroids, ready to strike down on the Marines landing on the beach. While some were shot down in the air, the Beaches of Normandy would soon become toxic but other landings in the area would succeed. Overall the Soviets, despite their gamble, are overrun. Simultaneously, numerous Allied officials are rescued from Cannes where a good portion of the Command had gone underground during the Molniya, including Supreme Commander Robert Bingham. By September 1965, the order was given to retake Paris. However the entrenchment of the Soviets resulted in a bloody battle, and the result was the destruction of most of the city, including the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe.
The Cuban Kirov Crisis
On October 7, 1965, ACIN was alerted that a secret Kirov base had been built in Cuba and that Kirovs carrying Vacuum Imploders [remember Nukes aren’t a thing yet] and were heading for Miami and other cities. Luckily, Infinite Realms’ prototype Achilles Fighter was deployed and destroyed 3 of the 4 Kirovs although an imploder detonated off the coast of Miami. Major Giles Price of the Peacekeepers and Alex Manning oversaw the counter attack which quickly saw the fall of the Communist regime and the Castro brothers were cryofrozen. The American operative Tanya Adams would quickly track down Che Guevara in Bolivia and ensure he got “a Bolivian Army Ending” which would be a huge setback for Latin Communism.
Not to be outdone by the Peacekeepers, Ranking House Intelligence Committee member Nicholas S. Laramore used the fall of Cuba as a recruiting tool to reach out to the Cuban American community and successfully got journalist Giraldo Rivera installed as Governor along with the Union Party’s first Latina Regional Commissioner Tonia Tecerro as Lt. Governor. They would invite rebels such as William A. Morgan, Eloy G. Menoyo, and Eduardo Arocena (the latter of whom would be put in charge of hunting Communists on the island) into the Cuban government.
One of Laramore’s goals was to use the occupation of Cuba as an eventual testing ground for the party’s Civil Defense Units which were still being developed in the early stages. Furthermore, Laramore reached out to right wing leaders in Latin America including Chilean Air Force General Augusto Pinochet, Argentinian President Jorge Rafael Videla, Col. Omar Torrijos as well as then-Minister-of-War Artur Costa Da Silva of Brazil. Both of the later would eventually join the Allies as a result and the former would take more immediate actions that would plunge the Southern Cone into a state of war.
The Combine Shines
The Japanese would make probing attacks into South America as well, sending an invasion force to take the Galapagos Islands but find themselves countered by the Technocratic Combine’s new navy. The Combine, not having relations with either the Allies or Soviets since indirectly fighting them 2 years prior, went to war with the Empire on their own to defend their islands. They would prevail against the Imperial offensive though they lacked the ability to retaliate in the Pacific.
Bless the Rains down in Africa
Meanwhile, in Africa, the forces of the League (led by Idi Amin and Jonas Savimbi) deployed against the Portuguese Colony of Mozambique as well as Rhodesia, the Union of Socialist African Republics, the mostly privatized Congo, and the Allied States of South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana. The Rhodesians begrudgingly let the Allies use their airspace meanwhile the Congo relied on Mercenaries from the Italian PMC Legion Security. Mozambique would fall in short order but the lines began to stall elsewhere.
Japanese territory in dark orange. Allied in Blue, Syndicate in Cyan and Soviets in Red with Chinese and Koreans in darker tones of red
That's all for this time, stay tuned for next time when we explore the dangers of Tortoises.
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In-laws investment dilemma

Wondering if anyone can offer some advice, as apart from a small stocks and shares ISA my husband and I have never had money to invest nor has any direct family on either side. However, my in-laws have just sold their family home in Zimbabwe to move closer to my brother in law and family in South Africa. They have the money from the sale in a bank account in Guernsey that they have had since the 90’s. They will need some about £60k for a flat in South Africa and they have about £15k in an account they can access for their day to day which leaves about £100k they want to invest. They have asked my husband to look into a few schemes friends or friends have recommended mainly in property schemes offering 15% returns, but both my husband and I on google searches think these are just too risky and most rather not above board (maybe we are just too risk averse!).
My in laws have worked hard and my husband is keen to help them find something less of a gamble that keeps them ticking over in retirement. They don’t have pensions really to speak off so this is all they have both late 60’s/70’s and frugal.
So my questions are firstly can we invest moment in the UK from Guernsey without triggering some kind of money laundering flag with the bank and if we can what should we be looking out for or doing.
Honestly this is the nicest problem we and most people have had all year what to do with money when so many people worry about not having enough of it.
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Authoritarian neoliberalism and capitalist transformation in Africa: all pain, no gain

Post Below contains excerpts from Graham Harrisons paper : Authoritarian neoliberalism and capitalist transformation in Africa: all pain, no gain
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World Bank And SAPs :
Neoliberalism was, ab initio, a global project, not a ‘western’ one. The clearest example of this is the introduction of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in Africa from 1979 onwards .SAPs were credit packages designed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, disbursed to debt-distressed African countries and conditioned on the adoption of a set of policies which had as their overarching aim the neoliberalization of development strategy.
Policy changes included central bank independence, the removal of exchange rate controls, the introduction of technologies to promote fiscal discipline and the reduction of budget deficits, the abolition of quotas and lowering of tariffs on international trade, the opening up of economies to foreign direct investment, the elimination of price controls, the removal of state-owned trading agencies, and the privatization of state-owned enterprises.
But, the fact that over 200 SAPs were (in some degree) implemented in Africa during the 1980s and hundreds more agreements with ‘social’ and ‘poverty reduction’ components followed in the 1990s shows very clearly how Africa was at the forefront of the neoliberal project from the latter’s very origins.
The first neoliberal crises occurred in Africa as currencies went into freefall, low rates of growth dipped further, commodity price spikes scoured real disposable income levels, and more generally people’s livelihoods became even less stable (Mkandawire & Olukoshi, 1995).
Food riots generated violent police responses (Lawrence, 1986; Walton & Seddon, 1994), drastic policy measures were imposed by increasingly centralized cabals focused on the Ministry of Finance and/or the Presidency, and new or revived forms of struggle over new opportunities for enrichment by factionalized elites rendered governance partial, incoherent, violent, and unpredictable. Accountability of the government to citizens was constantly undermined by accountability of the government to the World Bank, IMF, and aligned bilateral donors.
Formal constitutional and legal measures to introduce multi-party politics made little difference to these substantively authoritarian practices, a condition described by Mkandawire as choiceless democracy (Mkandawire, 1999).
In a nutshell, for Africa, neoliberalism has largely been realized through centralized and undemocratic state practices that resemble authoritarianism. Not only did it generate massive amounts of social harm and instability, but it also generated at best weak responses in terms of economic recovery, reduced debt, or a recovered inflow of foreign direct investment (Bond, 2006; Bush, 2004).
Welcome to the desert of the neoliberal real :
Reem Koolhass asserted that ‘Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather, we may be catching up with Lagos.’ This stylized provocation has some insight that we can bring to bear on our interest in the interplay of neoliberalism and authoritarianism.
It suggests that Africa’s especially intense and protracted subjection to the neoliberal project offers possible meanings to the fortunes of the project in other places. We can identify three cardinal examples of this.
(1) The neoliberal project is intrinsically crisis-ridden (Harvey, 2007). Indeed, the notion of ‘crisis’ is something of a misnomer for what are often more akin to permanent and severe instabilities. Neoliberalism is crisis. The currency crashes, recessions, turbulent governance, and civil instability that visited African countries throughout the 1980s are examples of phenomena that might now properly be understood as global and immanent to the neoliberal project. Analogous neoliberal crises have taken place in Latin American economies in the mid-1980s, Russia and the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s, South-east Asian countries in the late 1990s,
No sensible economist is arguing that the causes and conditions of the 2008 crisis have been resolved. Crisis and austerity are a way of life (Evans & McBride, 2017). The specifics of these crises are hardly all the same but they are underpinned by laissez-faire macroeconomics, the rising power of finance capital, and global deregulation.
The neoliberal project has bequeathed the world an era of uneven and combined permanent crisis management (McNally, 2009). It is no exaggeration to say that the neoliberal project generates a systemic intensification of economic crisis in order to survive those crises, and in the process creates the possibility of more forceful realizations of its worldview (Crouch, 2011; Mirowski, 2013).
(2) The implementation of neoliberalism involves impositions and coercions by the state. These vary widely in form and intensity but the impositional and coercive reflex is immanent to the neoliberal project, not incidental or momentary trait. It might involve the removal of policies from public accountability, the creation of neoliberal cabals (sometimes labelled as ‘champions’ and ‘change agents’ in neoliberal Doublespeak) to propound reforms, the deployment of the police to enforce policies that generate social protest, the recourse to global regulatory change in order to present policies as inevitable fate rather than political decision, and the creation of ‘shadow elites’ who straddle thinktanks, universities, private capital and governments to shore up the power of the neoliberal project. And it might involve bare dispossession (Harvey, 2004).
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(2) (1) On ROLL BACK : In the 1980s, issuing out of the general anti-statism which was galvanized by the ‘Berg Report’ (World Bank, 1981), structurally adjusting African states underwent a forcible ‘roll-back’ in their activities and material base (Woodehouse, 2003). The emaciation of (often already weak and unstable) African states tended to exacerbate deeper governance crises in which the core authority and institutional coherence of state seemed uncertain.
‘Roll back’ generated forms of governance that were evacuated even of the minimal and procedural accountabilities embedded within single-party states. As a result, subsequently, those who designed and enforced neoliberalism through the IFIs steered lending strategies towards a reconstruction of the state. This reconstruction facilitated two things. Firstly, a stronger infrastructure for capitalist rule of law: more censuses and surveys, more effective tax-raising administration, and more coherent and transparent investment and property law, an increasingly powerful technocratic mode of governance (Harrison, 2007). Secondly, a more proactive bundle of institutions to incentivize and enhance private investment and entrepreneurialism: investment promotion centres, support for the development of information communication technologies and training to socialize an entrepreneurial sociability amongst small- and medium-sized enterprises, the creation of special economic zones (near ports or along corridors) that become subsidized ‘hotbeds’ for new investment, and the development of myriad public-private partnerships in which services are contracted to private businesses (Mawdsley, 2015). Some references by IFIs and Western donors to democracy, civil society, and participation were in reality very much second-order concerns compared with the principal objectives of creating a Hayekian strong state (cf. Gamble, 1996) and a governance regime to promote market societies.
These two objectives – a leaner and stronger state purposed with the social engineering of a market society – easily resided in a centralized project of statebuilding, prosecuted by centralized and technocratic governing elites (see also Kreitmeyr, 2018).
(3) The neoliberal project is unstable and expansive. The foundational motivation of neoliberalism’s advocates draws focus onto fundamental changes in the state and the economy, but the focus hardly remains there. As a form of social engineering, it might be that neoliberalism projects itself through instruments such as education (Brown, 2015), training and the promotion of human capital and resilience (Joseph, 2013), techniques of incarceration (Wacquant, 2009), the provision of certain kinds of social support which either generate entrepreneurial behaviours through microfinance (Bateman, 2010) or intensified labour through ‘workfare’ (Perelman, 2011; Standing, 2011), and the deployment of psychosocial ‘nudges’ which have as their target the brain’s cognitive functions. There is no necessary sequencing of these facets of intervention: they are likely to be prosecuted in varied and partially-coherent combinations depending on all manner of contextual circumstances. What they represent is neoliberalism’s universal scope of ambition. As this totalizing project endures and expands, its frontiers are extensive (all countries, all societies) and intensive (all facets, every individual). Africa offers long-standing and striking examples of this expansiveness.
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African countries that have endured neoliberal social engineering for decades have witnessed a shift from macroeconomic, through institutional and social, and into individual change. Africa is the world-regional best exemplar of neoliberalism’s dark rendering of Samuel Beckett’s well-known aphorism: try again, fail better.
In summary, Africa shows clearly three constitutive features of the neoliberal project: its proclivity for crisis, its authoritarian tendencies, and its desire to expand from core macroeconomic strategy into as many aspects of socio-political life as possible. Not only does Africa demonstrate these properties in neoliberalism, it also provides important insights as to how well the project fares, not least because Africa has endured an exceptionally long-lasting and virulently implemented version of neoliberalism. What Africa shows to the rest of the world is a state of affairs in which protracted neoliberal reform generates short intervals of growth usually concentrated on narrow bases such as an export price change, large investment, or specific and largely isolated economic sectors (Bracking, 2016).
This has generated some material improvements in people’s well-being and a reduction in extreme poverty. But, it has also generated sporadic economic decline; a continued uncertainty in livelihoods accompanied by processes of social differentiation; intensified work; a rise in fraudulent, corrupt and get-rich-quick strategies which often lead to wealth being taken out of country (Ndikumana & Boyce, 2011); growing depletion of natural resources (Woodehouse, 2003); and a continued dependence on international resources and validation to sustain basic budgetary and expenditure processes. This has also generated its own social resistances (Branch & Mampilly, 2015; Harrison, 2002). Taking these patterns together, it is clearly the case that authoritarian neoliberalism in Africa has most definitively not generated any evidence of a capitalist development (Bush, 2007; Rowden, 2013; Wengraf, 2018).
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Discussion/ Salient point: Society cannot get back to normal unless random arbirtrary mass lockdowns and restrictions are ruled unconsitutional

The biggest reason we cannot have stable societies with all this going on.
How can you even create a single job in this environment? Who in their right mind will have savings or which bank will grant a loan to make a business where the government can just shut you down indefinitely because of "case" (oh there's 50 positive PCR tests out of 100,000, shut it down!!!).???
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The best place for a society to be is for lockdown measures to be not even on the table whatsoever.
It's politicians that are killing people in nursing homes or letting cancer patients get killed and causing mass employment. The simple reason is that as soon as lockdowns are an 'option' they become politicised. It doesn't matter that they are enacting policies that are causing mass destruction. All that matter is the narrative. The narrative is that "COVID is causing the damage".
The biggest hoodwink in human history was convincing people that shutting down the entirety of society was not the gamble. Even though it rested on several assumptions: That COVID had not already long been spreading to reach the peaks we were at, that it would spread perfectly through the entire population and somehow heterogenity, natural resistance and other factors didn't exist, it rested on the assumption that magically an "Army of contact tracers" will mean the virus will never exist again despite long pervading society, it rested on the idea that human beings can be turned off then on again like a computer, it rested on the child like assumption that spread would just continue infinitely exponentially leaving millions dead..
Lockdowns being an option ruin societies look how Scotland has to constantly "one-up" Englands restrictions to show they are "tough on COVID".
Politicians are playing with peoples lives. You even see it in the states. It doesn't matter that Florida has a lower death rate and is more populous and has more old people (and people overall) than new york. It's just political. Despite the death rate being low because the virus has long run it's course in NY the narrative is "deathsantis" is "murdering people for stocks". Serious mainstream papers like The Atlantic called Georgia opening long after the 'two weeks' and "experiment in human sacrifice".
We are at the point where they are enacting prohibition laws, they just copy measures other countries do just do be seen "doing" something. South Africa banned alcohol before their rules were overturned, suddenly now everyone is copying that to have measures they can point to to show they are "tough". We even have singing banned in pubs, music banned to.. The most arbitrary things.
It shows this is not driven by facts and has become mired in politics. Bars are an easy scapegoat in this puritan hysteria, anything that is seen as joyous must be causing COVID, anything that reminds us of "living", not just safetyism and fearing each other as disease vectors. The worst thing is the doubling down and ass covering. We have second waves of lockdowns because politicians want to justify the first and escape the narrative of "we'd be in a better place if we locked down early so don't do it late this time"
Nobody is talking about this, that's why the economic damage is just going on and on. This is going to cause YEARS of depression that long go on after the hysteria has vanished. When the restrictions keep going on and the government printed money dries up, people will change their tune.
The places that will do best are places where lockdown is simply declared unconditional like South Africa, things going through the courts will be the best long term remedy. SA had the lockdown declared "irrational and unconstitutional".
The best thing is for the idea of lockdowns to be totally off the table. Nobody can gain political capital by saying the other party has "blood on their hands" because they can't lockdown. We won't have the UK's situation where politicians are literally having a two party conversation with the media. They leak restriction plans to the media, gauge if there is a lot of media pushback, then later enact them. It's sickening. It's pure craven politics. And peoples lives are destroyed over it.
Remember, if there was an outbreak of Ebola on buses, the government wouldn't need to tell people to avoid buses, nobody wants to bleed out of their f\**ing eyeballs and die horribly.* Likewise, we see that the places where they never locked down did just fine.
Remember it was political from the start. Social distancing was the ultimate theft of political capital. The governments scored points by demanding people do something they were ALREADY doing.
Who walks around breathing down other peoples necks at less than 1.5m away constantly????
Sorry to go on a bit, it's just maddening we are where we are. I want to screenshot all the madness that occurred. It will go in history books. The constant fear peddling, if they don't have transmission they will print "100 people exposed to COVID" if they have low numbers of cases they will make 20 more cases "50% rise in coronavirus cases in X", no huge second wave? No matter they will portray standard ICU statistics as a sudden apocalyptic unprecedented occurrence.
The final takeaway is the media truly are scoundrels and have been the enemy of the people in this crisis from the start, all they have done is beg for oppression on our behalf, blame us rather than use their power to pressure the governments real scandals (DNRS and no doctors visiting in UK care homes and positive patients sent there) and always make sure to pit people against each other.
This could all be avoided if lockdowns simply weren't constitutional at the start or the courts scrutinised them.
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John Glenn: A Presidential Retrospective

I finished a successful Glenn playthrough last night and afterwards I was thinking about just how bonkers his achievements were and how he would be regarded by history. So, I wrote this, exploring just that kind of thing! Spoilers for the President Glenn path obviously, and I fudged the fact that content ends and leaves things dangling as him winning a third term in office.
Coming into office off the back of the most disruptive decade in American politics since the Civil War, inheriting the legacy of the astonishingly unpopular and constitutionally questionable policies of Strom Thurmond, the expectation was that the incumbent President would be one who would have to devote all their efforts to simply stabilizing the situation and beginning to restore some measure of trust and confidence in US politics. A competent, cautious man might have attempted just that. John Herschel Glenn Jr. was not that man - Glenn was rather a man of vaulting ambitions and boundless optimism, who believed that the only way for trust and confidence to be restored was with the boldest vision he could imagine.
Glenn’s rise to the Presidency was almost as meteoric as the event which made him a household name; the veteran of the Second World War who went on to become a test pilot and thereafter the first man in space recalls he had no political ambitions before President Nixon’s decision to defund NASA in the wake of the Reich’s arrival on the moon in 1962. Glenn was, to be sure, distraught by losing this milestone achievement to the Germans, but he was far more upset by what he regarded as Nixon’s total capitulation on all matters of space which stemmed from Kollner’s historic steps on our lunar neighbor. Even after this his political ambitions were not about election but in his attempt to make enough of a fuss to see NASA’s budget and remit protected, but it was soon clear to him that he could not achieve that in his existing capacities no matter how hard he tried. Here we see the twin, seemingly opposed character traits that would define Glenn’s presidency; he came to the conclusion that he could only make the changes he thought necessary in elected office, preferably at a very high level, in the course of an afternoon, but once the decision was made he drew plans that spanned decades and exhibited the utmost patience in pursuing them.
Glenn knew he would struggle to reach the Presidency from a standing start, and he further believed that even if he made it his lack of political experience would mean he would use the office inefficiently and be vulnerable to political manipulation by more experienced actors. So, he set his sights at a lower level, and announced his campaign for the governorship of Ohio in mid-1962. Ohio’s favorite son would immediately attract criticism for what was regarded by many as a vanity project, but Glenn had prepared for this possibility - he had spent weeks working with friends, his wife Annie, and a small cadre of political advisors to draw up a suite of plans that he could pursue as governor, plans which were the kind of effective low-level policies that would help the average Ohioan in their day to day life. Storming out of the gates with a primary campaign to highlight these ideas, he rapidly quelled enough of the criticism to be seen as a legitimate and credible candidate, and that was all he needed. Though joining the Republican Party he was able to win over enough of the Democrat wing of the RDs to become the candidate for Governor, usurping presumptive candidate Jim Rhodes, and took up the race against the NPP. It was a close race - by the time November rolled around, the Nixon government had got its first taste of scandal and controversy, and it dented RD prospects nationwide. By less than a single percentage point, John Glenn won the race and had taken his first small step on his long plan.
As it happened, the events of the 60s would prove so disruptive that Glenn’s timetable could be rapidly accelerated. Conversations with his early allies have told us he originally intended on pursuing the Presidency in 1972 or 76, depending on the political landscape at the time — he intended to secure his base of support, make the political contacts needed, and gain extensive experience. That America would enter the costly war in South Africa and the less costly, but still unpopular, war in Indonesia was unknown at this point, but it was only the tip of the iceberg of what would occur in that tumultuous decade. Barely a year and three months into his Governorship, the Presidency would be rocked as Nixon resigned before he could be impeached, and worse, his Vice President John Fitzgerald Kennedy would be assassinated just weeks later by a disgruntled Guyenese nationalist. JFK’s death would put the Presidency in the hands of John McCormack, who had never had ambitions on the office and saw his role purely as one of salving the country’s hurt and trying to bind the Republican-Democrats back together going into the November elections of 1964. He failed dreadfully on both counts; his pardon of Nixon was widely derided, and JFK’s brother Robert Francis Kennedy would defect to the NPP over Nixon’s vetoing of the Civil Rights Act — RFK had been JFK’s Chief of Staff and closest friend, and he was strongly motivated to see through his beloved brother’s vision. The NPP had struggled to find the kind of charismatic leader they would need, and Bobby Kennedy was the perfect choice. The race was hard fought but RFK became President with over 360 EC votes, a healthy margin, and the political landscape was drastically shaken up.
Though not nearly as shaken up as it would be a few years later. Bobby Kennedy’s policies were inherited in part from his brother, and he had a core of rage that held the Nixon Administration responsible for Jack’s death. This anger drove him to being a devoted progressive, spurred by the NPP-C wing of the party, and he enacted policy after policy to drive through a comprehensive Civil Rights Act in 1967, an act Glenn voiced support for and said “If I were in the Senate, I’d be voting for this. Bobby Kennedy might be from a different party from me but he’s a good man with some good ideas.” And a few weeks later, RFK would meet the same fate as his brother, gunned down by a fanatic segregationist as he exited a hotel with his own Vice President, Hubert Humphrey.
The country was stunned. Just as sunlight had seemed to break through the clouds, and the Kennedy administration was working to fully implement his Civil Rights policies while also continuing some economic reforms, another President, another Kennedy, had been killed in America’s streets. Not only that but the VP was dead too, leaving the succession to someone who was never on a Presidential ticket for the second time in four years. Strangely, the next in line declined the role, refusing to elaborate on his reasons, meaning it fell another rank to the South Georgia Senator Strom Thurmond. (It would not be until 1987 that the explanation for this and Thurmond’s blackmail efforts would come to light — his already disgraced name falling even further, especially in an era of rapidly increasing acceptance of gay rights. It would also spark countless conspiracy theories that Thurmond had arranged the assassinations himself, though there has never been any corroborating evidence to that effect.)
President Thurmond had one mission and one mission only - to roll back the Civil Rights Act and all associated policies. He would ensure that he restored and reinforced segregation, Jim Crow, and all the other racist policies that RFK had almost killed, and he had no care for what the cost to the law or Constitution might be. Though initially popular and viewed with cautious optimism for his tender eulogy of Bobby Kennedy and hints that he considered himself a caretaker president akin to McCormack, he moved rapidly behind the scenes to secure his power and enact every policy and pass every bill he could in pursuit of his goals. The Congress, shellshocked by the last few years, seemed to have given him a more-or-less free hand as he appealed to the need for leadership and to show a united American government to the people in order to restore faith. He was also completely unafraid to use Executive Orders in whatever capacity he thought he might benefit from. By the end of Thurmond’s presidency barely a year after he took the office, the Constitutional order had been upturned. Maps were redistricted with offensive transparency. Those Thurmond considered politically opposed to him - minorities of all kinds as well as Republican and NPP-C voters - were disenfranchised to the best of his ability. Most infamously of all, and the policy which pushed America from protests to riots in all 49 states, he used an Executive Order to stack the Supreme Court with four additional Judges, all of them arch-conservatives who would reliably rule in favor of the segregationist, anti-black cause.
Amidst all this, Glenn’s opportunity had come early and he seized it with both hands. Painting himself as a moderate who disdained most political labels in favor of effective policies regardless of their origins, he was quickly adopted as the exact kind of all-American guy needed by the Republican-Democrats. He had been a competent and well-liked Governor that had pushed Ohio’s quality of life up, poverty rates down, and enticed lucrative aerospace and other high-tech industries to the state. He was an American war hero, and an American hero generally, his name still carrying plenty of currency from the old feats in NASA. In short he ticked all the boxes — Existing fame, proven record (if shorter than some would like), mass appeal, visionary even as he was a level-headed straight talker. Exactly what the country needed, or so the RDs gambled.
Meanwhile the NPP was riven between the Centrists and Far Right, the latter eventually claiming ascendancy as their ranks were filled by defecting Democrats who were now looking to the best place to secure what Thurmond had set in motion. Glenn would thus go up against the Far Right’s Margaret Chase Smith. Much has been made about to what extent Smith’s sex factored into her defeat, and certainly scholarship has demonstrated it played a role, but the scope of Glenn’s victory on Election Day was tremendous and far more than could be accounted for by sexism alone. Winning over 400 EC votes, Glenn came into office with one of the strongest mandates in American history, and he wasted no time.
Though restoring NASA had always been John Glenn’s dearest purpose, and his earliest moves were centered around setting that institution back into motion, he had no shortage of other challenges and ideas to meet them. Indeed, while NASA busied itself with actually using its new influx of cash to rebuild, rehire or hire new staff, and overhaul its facilities, Glenn pursued something that made a far greater difference to the man and woman in the street, a project Glenn termed “Closing the empathy deficit”. Long argued about by American administrations and their Congresses, Glenn had seen how harmful the absence of a solid safety net was to Ohioans, and Ohio was one of the union’s richer states at the time.
Though in regular contact with NASA’s director and personal friend James Webb, Glenn had no distractions on the legislative front. He pursued reform with a zeal, and within mere months had secured the passage of the most comprehensive reform to American benefits in history. Pensions were increased and protected, and poor Americans would still be able to claim pension sufficient for a dignified retirement even if they had not been able to pay in whilst younger. Medicare was a transformative healthcare coverage policy that provided coverage to all Americans over the age of 65 and all Americans with disabilities, and implemented controls on insurance companies outside of that to help insulate people from predation or excessive prices. The Americans with Disabilities Act (1969) was also implemented as part of this legislative fusillade, which Glenn insisted must include those who acquired disabilities during their lives as well as those who were disabled from birth, as some in Congress had argued against. Glenn’s wife, Annie, had grown up with an extreme stutter that left her preferring to communicate without speaking, and the President’s disability policy is widely acknowledged to have been at the least inspired by her, and perhaps to some extent guided by her advice and experiences.
By the summer of 1969, then, Glenn had already implemented large changes to America, and his popularity steadily rose. In Congress, he was usually disliked by the NPP-FR and struggled to attract votes from Democrats even though they were notionally a part of his party, but he had massive support from the Republicans and found a common cause with the NPP-C. The rising Social Democratic movement of America was represented by this wing of the NPP and were more than happy to support Glenn’s reforms, even as many of them wished he’d go further. Joyfully, the President was able to return his attentions to the institution he most loved, NASA. After months of work the institution was ready to go, and Glenn authorized the commencement of America’s return to space with the Minerva Program. The unmanned Miverva I was prepared, launched, and America once again broke the bonds of Earth and had a presence in space. It was well understood that even going so far as to get a man back in orbit would be a serious undertaking and NASA would need, in essence, practice before it could attempt that. Minerva was only the first step in this long road, but it was one that boosted NASA’s profile and popularity. Soon new missions were planned, and before long there seemed to be a launch almost daily. His duties precluded Glenn from viewing them all personally, but there was almost always a TV showing the latest launch in the White House.
Satisfied with the ongoing progress Glenn turned back to Earthly concerns, this time looking at matters relating to nuclear power and weaponry. The destruction of Oahu had made Americans deeply leery of anything with the word “nuclear” in its name, but President Glenn had been convinced of the merits of nuclear power and worked hard to bring that word to the public. Here, he struggled, even after recruiting the Disney Corporation to produce educational propaganda — tedious in the extreme in the eyes of kids, but lauded by parents for being a balanced, unsensational, and honest look at the topic. He faced significant opposition from mining and power concerns, however, and though successful in the abstract, nuclear power never really took off under the Glenn presidency the way he had hoped. Militarily, he authorized a significant increase to America’s stockpiles, expensive but hardly something that most would argue against, given the ongoing threats of the Nazi Reich and the Empire of Japan. That he had a greater plan in mind was known only to himself and a couple of closest aides.
It was at this point that almost everything was derailed. In the Middle East, decades of Italian rule and control came to a violent and sudden end as revolutions and civil wars ripped through the entire Arab world, and then beyond. Violence occurred in Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the Gulf States, Iraq, and Iran, all of it amid and exacerbating a tremendous spike in the prices of crude oil. The Oil Crisis had numerous causes and many dimensions, but the effect for John Glenn was that it put everything else on the back burner. None of his ambitions or plans mattered a whit if the country ground to a halt, and that’s exactly what it was doing, as people couldn’t fill their cars and industries couldn’t keep the lights on. Emergency measures were implemented, including price controls, then rationing, massive investment in the Texan oil fields, and similarly massive investments into synthetic oil production. It was a chaotic period lasting months, but in time the situation stabilized and the domestic oil situation became a tolerable one. Belts were tightened countrywide, and smaller cars rapidly became the vogue for new buyers while existing plans for gas-guzzlers were scrapped by companies like Ford, but the worst of the crisis had been kept from America’s shores.
And then, Americans were back in space. Only in orbit at first under the Daedalus Program, but then the Diana Program aimed for the moon, taking up where the Apollo Project had been looking just before Nixon aborted it. Americans could not be first to the moon, but they could reach it, and that was almost as important. Regrettably, the first great tragedy struck the space program during this period - Diana II, intended to perform a lunar flyby and return to Earth, exploded in flight 194 seconds after liftoff. The three astronauts aboard died, and immediately the political and media classes pounced on Glenn. Support for NASA drained precipitously, and questions about why money and lives were being spent in this way were widespread. The President managed to divert the issue somewhat by lionizing the deceased, and when one of the widows spoke up in favor of continuing the project and how her husband would have wanted to carry on, the furor abated somewhat. NASA was now on notice, but it was not doomed.
If there were fears Diana II would hurt Glenn’s re-election chances, they were swept away in a tidal wave of support for the man himself. A growing number of people supported the President primarily for his space program, referred to as the ‘geeks’, but the great majority regarded it more ambivalently. To some it was a positive thing but not the priority, whilst to others it was the President’s pet project that could be tolerated as long as he didn’t get lost in the clouds. But the first Glenn term had shown he had no such shortcomings. SSA, Medicare, and the ADA had transformed the lives of millions of Americans. He had not yet fully reckoned with the legacy of Thurmond, but things were certainly better for black Americans than they had been four years earlier, and Glenn was clearly no committed segregationist or racist - thus he carried the vote across the entire country, with the sole exception of California, who were strong supporters of the NPP and their hardline goal of reclaiming the Treaty Ports and revenging America against Japan. That was the sole state that went for Jeane Kirkpatrick, resulting in an EC vote of 494 for Glenn and 40 for Kirkpatrick.
Just months later Diana IV would vindicate the President, the space program, and NASA. Buzz Aldrin was not the first man on the moon, but he and Michael Collins were the first Americans, and when they planted the flag on February 13th 1973 it established that the United States was not only back in action, but a serious contender for space. It was smiles all round as the men returned to parades and dinners and events the likes of which Americans hadn’t seen in decades, and John Glenn’s boyish glee was visible to all. But it was a real achievement, one that seemed to restore a sense of confidence to the American people, and more people moved from simply letting the President have his toys to support, and more moved from casual support to strong support, and more and more young people proudly proclaimed themselves geeks while speaking of internships at NASA, JPL, and the other centers of American aerospace.
Glenn’s second term saw a new wave of domestic legislation, for despite the continuing claims of opponents he had no desire to see things on the ground slide backwards. First he looked to ongoing problems in healthcare; whilst Medicare was largely working well and its initial problems had been ironed out, there were lingering difficulties. Foremost among these was in drug pricing. Seeking to gain ever more profits, Big Pharma had begun jacking up prices at an unsustainable rate, leaving more and more Americans unable to pay for their medication and taking bigger chunks out of Medicare into the bargain. John Glenn was incensed by this and it has been argued since that this was the real moment of his ‘radicalization’, which drove him from a reformist to someone more aligned with the NPP-C than his own party. As the pharma companies began funding anyone opposed to Glenn and the RDs, speaking out on the disastrous consequences they foresaw, and accused him of fascistic overreach, he deployed everything he had to crush Big Pharma’s opposition, and when they began to fear he was winning and offered a compromise that would cover price controls on prescription medication but not others, he rejected it out of hand where once, it is believed, he would have taken the deal readily. Major price controls were introduced despite the howls of protest from big business. But Glenn was not done.
Now that he had experienced first-hand the full fury of American business he had lost any love for them, and grown significantly more aligned with criticisms of business practice stemming from the left. In characteristic John Glenn fashion he did not rest after his victory, nor did he even take aim at a small target, but rather he went right for the jugular. He would destroy Right to Work. Right to Work was so named because it was claimed to give Americans the right to work without being forced to join a union to do so, as had been the case in several industries before such legislation was entered. In practice, it was a lynchpin of American business’s strategy of crushing unions altogether, and keeping them weak and ineffective where they could not be eradicated. Glenn was no hardline Bukharinist, but the experiences with the drug price fight had convinced him that big business had too much power and the American worker had too little, and he sought to redress this.
Surprisingly this passed with little trouble. Reeling from the previous fight with the President, big business seemed caught on the back foot, and he had huge popular support. In Congress he was able to count on the full support of the 18 NPP-Cs, one of the two NPP-FRs who was in the body at the time, and 43 of the 45 Republicans. Altogether, with some Democrats also convinced to come over, the vote passed by 68-30, and Right to Work was dead. His subsequent efforts on Social Security were even more intense and more dramatically successful, and there was a massive “Glennite” or “Glennist” tide across the country where, quite aside from questions of nuclear power or space exploration, the President’s domestic proposals found huge support and popularity. Social Security was a tremendous undertaking that far outmatched the scope of his first term reforms, though it was informed by them and incorporated them into a larger structure. Unemployment benefits would rise, healthcare coverage would continue to expand (The first ‘public option’ arose here, with a special insurance provider available to any employee of the Federal Government), and most dramatically, it featured the introduction of a six-hour workday. This last reinvigorated the strength of big business, who threatened opposition and promised doom, but Glenn was never a man to do things by halves and his will was unbreakable, and he had experienced those howls before only to find them impotent in the face of public support. Though initially a step too far for some in his own party, the President appealed directly to the public to write to their Congresspersons and Senators in support of the policy, and the Glennite tide became one of mail that inundated the country’s leadership, convincing them that it was not going to be electoral suicide to support it.
Less noticed, and more of interest to the accountants and lawyers of the country, were efforts to rationalize and better codify the tax system. Though few actual tax rises took place (hence the lack of public interest), the closing of loopholes, simplification of the code, and increasing the ability of Americans to either easily do their own taxes or to allow the government to do it for them helped bring in greater revenues. More importantly was the general state of the economy - after years of work and investment, and a whole host of new measures to help the poorest Americans, the introduction of Social Security was followed just months later by a glowing report on the state of American poverty. Where the poverty rate had peaked as high as 45%, and was in the high 30s when Glenn first took office, it had now dropped to below 25%, a milestone that widely reassured the public of Glenn’s projects and plans while taking the legs out from criticisms of how much was being spent. After all, a richer society means a higher tax take, but you have to invest to get to that society - so the argument went, and so America in the 1970s seemed to prove. Even those who remained in poverty were seeing increases in their quality of life, and abject penury had been cut significantly even where it had not been replaced by affluence.
Meanwhile, the frontier of space was looking to its greatest challenge yet, and NASA had spent its time marshalling resources, conducting the needed research, and experimenting with any number of plans and components and mission profiles. Dianas V and VI had taken Americans to the moon and conducted vital experiments, but Glenn, James Webb, NASA as a whole, and now most of the country, wanted to see America not just take second place or catch up with the Nazis, but to fling themselves into first place. The German Reich had emerged from their bloody Civil War almost a decade ago but the orthodox Fuhrer Bormann had no seeming interest in returning to space, and the collapse of the Reich into the German Civil War of 1963-65 had done major harm to their economic and industrial base, meaning it would have been domestically unpopular to spend money on a race deemed long since won rather than on the ongoing project of rebuilding cities from Hamburg to Munich. Thus, without any real rivals at the time, NASA turned their eyes to the great prize, Mars. The Ares Project began.
Still proceeding at a breakneck pace, Ares was intended to get a human to Mars in just four missions. This has since come in for much criticism, and labeled as a desire to get it done while Glenn was still in office rather than to do it with maximum safety. In the event, however, NASA was either competent enough, lucky enough, or both, to avoid any major disasters like Diana II in the Ares Project. The four missions were to proceed as follows;
Ares I - An unmanned probe designed to both test mission parameters and part performance, whilst also taking the best possible orbital pictures of Mars to examine potential landing sites. Ares II - An unmanned probe which would attempt a landing near a selected landing site, equipped with a rover for scientific work. Ares III - An unmanned package which contained the bulk of materials and supplies needed to establish Hellas I, the prospective Mars base where the astronauts would dwell and work during their time there (The realities of orbital mechanics meant it was far less efficient to try and return immediately than to remain on Mars for a time and return at a later point where planetary alignments were better) Ares IV - The lander unit, return rocket, and the three astronauts would be aboard.
Every mission went perfectly. Every step seemed to fall into place. NASA had attracted the best and brightest by this point, and it paid them well, but they were motivated by more than financial reward now and devoted themselves utterly to the task. Even so, James Webb later said “I don’t want to downplay the extraordinary efforts that everyone at NASA made to achieve this incomparable milestone, but it did feel at times that we were proceeding with the blessing of our great almighty God.” Whether by grace or effort or pure luck, the Ares missions succeeded and even as Glenn was embroiled in scandal back home, the stars continued to inch closer.
That scandal was Glenn’s major defeat that stemmed from his efforts to nationalize the entire country’s uranium mines. His longtime nuclear weapons plan had been proceeding somewhat in the background, seen as simply an unpleasant reality that had to be done by most of the public, who would rather not think about such things when life elsewhere was continuing to improve. The project, even after purchasing Canadian, Australian, and South African uranium in bulk, was facing ongoing shortages of the material. Glenn was pushing for increased production from domestic mines, and seemed to be succeeding, until he got the bill. Rates were double the existing costs, and the mining concerns were quite happy to demand this price from the government under the guise of needing to undertake expansions in pursuit of Glenn’s production demands. Had the price hike been more reasonable, or had the mining concerns come to Glenn to explain and negotiate on such lines, it seems certain the President would have acquiesced. To be slapped with something so extortionate without warning, however, provoked his ire. Normally a man with a strong handle on his emotions, aides would later describe Glenn as “stormy” and “voluminous” over the matter.
By now used to bold moves and cutting Gordian knots, Glenn believed he saw an obvious, if drastic solution. The nation’s defense hinged on the nuclear stockpile. The nuclear stockpile hinged on the production of uranium. Ergo, the production of uranium was a matter of national defense, and the President had the authority to nationalize the industry if it was required for that end. The uproar was immediate and massive, but Glenn persisted, and when no offer at compromise was forthcoming he pushed through with the policy. The mining bosses had a powerful route that other big businesses who had faced Glenn’s policies lacked, however, in the form of legal argument. Given the seriousness of the matter and the importance of national defense it rushed through the courts with incredible speed, before finding itself before the Supreme Court, a place still filled with the packed Judges of Strom Thurmond.
It was not known beforehand which way they would break. On the one hand they were seen as steadfast allies of the NPP, meaning overwhelmingly concerned with matters of defense - but on the other, they were seen as friends of big business as well as leery of the President’s progressive bent. In the end, the 8-5 ruling went for the mining companies thanks to arguments that, as there was no ongoing conflict that directly involved the USA, the President’s attempts to invoke the country’s security could not apply.
Before the day was out, a new offer had landed on the President’s desk, not double but triple the original prices.
It was a massive defeat for the President and one which shook him deeply. He had been America’s golden boy until that moment, a unifier, a man of vision and drive, a man who was trying his best to make life better for ordinary people. He now learned that his ambitions could be checked, and that said roadblocks could be insurmountable. But John Glenn was no Strom Thurmond. Despite his anger, he accepted the ruling and paid the mining companies, and if he was to exact a revenge it would be both done legally and done for the good of the country, not to settle a personal grudge.
This drama was not the best base from which to break with centuries of American tradition and announce his bid for a third term as President, but that is just what President Glenn did to party leaders in early 1976 as they were discussing who would attempt to succeed him to the White House. This caused more hubbub and dissent, but there was never any law against it, and Glenn argued that in the absence of any obvious candidate who could succeed him they may as well stick with the man who was still polling pretty well. The Democrats were incensed by this and driven still further from the Republicans, but the Republican segment of the RDs agreed with his suggestion, on condition that he renounce any possibility of pursuing a fourth term.
The political and media elites had a similar reaction, ranging from outrage to mere grumbling that Glenn would dare attempt something George Washington had made verboten at the country’s founding. But there was still no law against it, and the administration argued that John Glenn came into office with a number of promises, promises he was keeping, but which required one more term to see through to fruition. The NPP opposition decried this as a dangerous overreach, whilst those less opposed to Glenn himself voiced worries that it set an ill precedent and questioned the man’s humility. The NPP would this time abandon the Far Right after two consecutive losses to Glenn, and instead put forward Michael Harrington, who had unsuccessfully pursued their nomination in 1968. This made for an unusually civil and friendly Presidential campaign — Glenn did not go so far as Harrington wanted on most issues, but by this point there was no great gulf ideologically between Glennite Republicanism and the Social Democrats of the NPP-C. After their first debate the viewing figures tanked as the men got dragged into details on broader topics they more or less agreed on, and neither seemed inclined to attempt any serious attacks on the others, though Harrington did try to needle the President over his pursuit of a third term somewhat. Only in foreign affairs did they different significantly, with Harrington making some gains by proposing a nuclear drawdown while pressing Japan conventionally over the Treaty Ports while Glenn maintained his hardline pro-nuclear stance.
The consequence of this was not just a calm election, but one with much lower turnout than any election for decades by percentage. The more radical right stayed home as they saw no candidate for them, as did the harder edge of the Democrats, while the apparently lower stakes than usual meant an awful lot of people decided to enjoy election day with other matters. For the first time Glenn did not achieve a total blowout victory, winning 345 EC votes, but this still gave him a strong mandate to finish his work.
Glenn’s third term would be his most dramatic, and most tense, and would culminate in what has since been argued to be the greatest diplomatic achievement of any American President even as he oversaw America’s greatest scientific achievement. His first task, he decided, was to finish the work of building up American nuclear stocks. He now had an endgame in sight, and was gradually bringing more people into the high-stakes game he intended to play as he moved the pieces into place. A secretive incursion into the remnants of Nazi Africa secured a major uranium mine that helped bolster American production, and it soon became obvious that the US nuclear triad was no longer merely overwhelming, but had become outright apocalyptic. Even if no other powers fired back, the American stockpile alone would be sufficient to end human life on Earth, and most other forms as well. So armed, Glenn began to put out feelers and turned his attention to domestic matters while the diplomats began their work.
Domestically, the legacy of Thurmond had faded over the eight years of Glenn’s presidency. Tactics such as redistricting must be updated as populations move around, and a great many legal challenges had succeeded in weakening all of Thurmond’s projects at local and state levels. His tangle with the Supreme Court had brought the whole affair directly into Glenn’s sights, and he resolved that when he left Washington four years hence, he would leave behind a transparent, honest, and scrupulously clean capital. He had never been a corrupt man himself, and having brought in a fresh staff for almost every role in the White House in 1969 had helped sweep some of the corruption out by itself, but there was still work to do. Investigations were begun, houses were cleaned, and the Senate Ethics Committee was refreshed and newly empowered. A long-term project to review constitutional matters with a goal to preventing excesses like President Thurmond’s or corruption like Nixon’s was established. And in his last major effort against corruption, Glenn banned outright the practice of lobbying, a move which massively diminished the power of corporations or similar actors to unduly influence elected officials where the common American could not. America, finally, emerged from most of the shadows cast by the 1960s and entered a new era of clean and honest politics, one where districts would be drawn to maximize democratic representation rather than suppress it and where the size of the purse had much less influence on the size of the voice.
The Supreme Court provided a major stumbling block, however, and Glenn and his administration were never able to navigate a satisfactory course through that particular issue. If it was allowed to stand, what was to prevent a future President from stacking the court further, even to farcical levels? But there was no apparent way to reduce the size of the Court as it stood, not when doing so would involve the removal of sitting Justices. This was a matter left to a future administration, in the end.
(Continued in comments)
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Authoritarian neoliberalism and capitalist transformation in Africa: all pain, no gain

Post Below contains excerpts from Graham Harrisons paper : Authoritarian neoliberalism and capitalist transformation in Africa: all pain, no gain
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World Bank And SAPs :
Neoliberalism was, ab initio, a global project, not a ‘western’ one. The clearest example of this is the introduction of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in Africa from 1979 onwards .SAPs were credit packages designed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, disbursed to debt-distressed African countries and conditioned on the adoption of a set of policies which had as their overarching aim the neoliberalization of development strategy.
Policy changes included central bank independence, the removal of exchange rate controls, the introduction of technologies to promote fiscal discipline and the reduction of budget deficits, the abolition of quotas and lowering of tariffs on international trade, the opening up of economies to foreign direct investment, the elimination of price controls, the removal of state-owned trading agencies, and the privatization of state-owned enterprises.
But, the fact that over 200 SAPs were (in some degree) implemented in Africa during the 1980s and hundreds more agreements with ‘social’ and ‘poverty reduction’ components followed in the 1990s shows very clearly how Africa was at the forefront of the neoliberal project from the latter’s very origins.
The first neoliberal crises occurred in Africa as currencies went into freefall, low rates of growth dipped further, commodity price spikes scoured real disposable income levels, and more generally people’s livelihoods became even less stable (Mkandawire & Olukoshi, 1995).
Food riots generated violent police responses (Lawrence, 1986; Walton & Seddon, 1994), drastic policy measures were imposed by increasingly centralized cabals focused on the Ministry of Finance and/or the Presidency, and new or revived forms of struggle over new opportunities for enrichment by factionalized elites rendered governance partial, incoherent, violent, and unpredictable. Accountability of the government to citizens was constantly undermined by accountability of the government to the World Bank, IMF, and aligned bilateral donors.
Formal constitutional and legal measures to introduce multi-party politics made little difference to these substantively authoritarian practices, a condition described by Mkandawire as choiceless democracy (Mkandawire, 1999).
In a nutshell, for Africa, neoliberalism has largely been realized through centralized and undemocratic state practices that resemble authoritarianism. Not only did it generate massive amounts of social harm and instability, but it also generated at best weak responses in terms of economic recovery, reduced debt, or a recovered inflow of foreign direct investment (Bond, 2006; Bush, 2004).
Welcome to the desert of the neoliberal real :
Reem Koolhass asserted that ‘Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather, we may be catching up with Lagos.’ This stylized provocation has some insight that we can bring to bear on our interest in the interplay of neoliberalism and authoritarianism.
It suggests that Africa’s especially intense and protracted subjection to the neoliberal project offers possible meanings to the fortunes of the project in other places. We can identify three cardinal examples of this.
(1) The neoliberal project is intrinsically crisis-ridden (Harvey, 2007). Indeed, the notion of ‘crisis’ is something of a misnomer for what are often more akin to permanent and severe instabilities. Neoliberalism is crisis. The currency crashes, recessions, turbulent governance, and civil instability that visited African countries throughout the 1980s are examples of phenomena that might now properly be understood as global and immanent to the neoliberal project. Analogous neoliberal crises have taken place in Latin American economies in the mid-1980s, Russia and the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s, South-east Asian countries in the late 1990s,
No sensible economist is arguing that the causes and conditions of the 2008 crisis have been resolved. Crisis and austerity are a way of life (Evans & McBride, 2017). The specifics of these crises are hardly all the same but they are underpinned by laissez-faire macroeconomics, the rising power of finance capital, and global deregulation.
The neoliberal project has bequeathed the world an era of uneven and combined permanent crisis management (McNally, 2009). It is no exaggeration to say that the neoliberal project generates a systemic intensification of economic crisis in order to survive those crises, and in the process creates the possibility of more forceful realizations of its worldview (Crouch, 2011; Mirowski, 2013).
(2) The implementation of neoliberalism involves impositions and coercions by the state. These vary widely in form and intensity but the impositional and coercive reflex is immanent to the neoliberal project, not incidental or momentary trait. It might involve the removal of policies from public accountability, the creation of neoliberal cabals (sometimes labelled as ‘champions’ and ‘change agents’ in neoliberal Doublespeak) to propound reforms, the deployment of the police to enforce policies that generate social protest, the recourse to global regulatory change in order to present policies as inevitable fate rather than political decision, and the creation of ‘shadow elites’ who straddle thinktanks, universities, private capital and governments to shore up the power of the neoliberal project. And it might involve bare dispossession (Harvey, 2004).
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(2) (1) On ROLL BACK : In the 1980s, issuing out of the general anti-statism which was galvanized by the ‘Berg Report’ (World Bank, 1981), structurally adjusting African states underwent a forcible ‘roll-back’ in their activities and material base (Woodehouse, 2003). The emaciation of (often already weak and unstable) African states tended to exacerbate deeper governance crises in which the core authority and institutional coherence of state seemed uncertain.
‘Roll back’ generated forms of governance that were evacuated even of the minimal and procedural accountabilities embedded within single-party states. As a result, subsequently, those who designed and enforced neoliberalism through the IFIs steered lending strategies towards a reconstruction of the state. This reconstruction facilitated two things. Firstly, a stronger infrastructure for capitalist rule of law: more censuses and surveys, more effective tax-raising administration, and more coherent and transparent investment and property law, an increasingly powerful technocratic mode of governance (Harrison, 2007). Secondly, a more proactive bundle of institutions to incentivize and enhance private investment and entrepreneurialism: investment promotion centres, support for the development of information communication technologies and training to socialize an entrepreneurial sociability amongst small- and medium-sized enterprises, the creation of special economic zones (near ports or along corridors) that become subsidized ‘hotbeds’ for new investment, and the development of myriad public-private partnerships in which services are contracted to private businesses (Mawdsley, 2015). Some references by IFIs and Western donors to democracy, civil society, and participation were in reality very much second-order concerns compared with the principal objectives of creating a Hayekian strong state (cf. Gamble, 1996) and a governance regime to promote market societies.
These two objectives – a leaner and stronger state purposed with the social engineering of a market society – easily resided in a centralized project of statebuilding, prosecuted by centralized and technocratic governing elites (see also Kreitmeyr, 2018).
(3) The neoliberal project is unstable and expansive. The foundational motivation of neoliberalism’s advocates draws focus onto fundamental changes in the state and the economy, but the focus hardly remains there. As a form of social engineering, it might be that neoliberalism projects itself through instruments such as education (Brown, 2015), training and the promotion of human capital and resilience (Joseph, 2013), techniques of incarceration (Wacquant, 2009), the provision of certain kinds of social support which either generate entrepreneurial behaviours through microfinance (Bateman, 2010) or intensified labour through ‘workfare’ (Perelman, 2011; Standing, 2011), and the deployment of psychosocial ‘nudges’ which have as their target the brain’s cognitive functions. There is no necessary sequencing of these facets of intervention: they are likely to be prosecuted in varied and partially-coherent combinations depending on all manner of contextual circumstances. What they represent is neoliberalism’s universal scope of ambition. As this totalizing project endures and expands, its frontiers are extensive (all countries, all societies) and intensive (all facets, every individual). Africa offers long-standing and striking examples of this expansiveness.
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African countries that have endured neoliberal social engineering for decades have witnessed a shift from macroeconomic, through institutional and social, and into individual change. Africa is the world-regional best exemplar of neoliberalism’s dark rendering of Samuel Beckett’s well-known aphorism: try again, fail better.
In summary, Africa shows clearly three constitutive features of the neoliberal project: its proclivity for crisis, its authoritarian tendencies, and its desire to expand from core macroeconomic strategy into as many aspects of socio-political life as possible. Not only does Africa demonstrate these properties in neoliberalism, it also provides important insights as to how well the project fares, not least because Africa has endured an exceptionally long-lasting and virulently implemented version of neoliberalism. What Africa shows to the rest of the world is a state of affairs in which protracted neoliberal reform generates short intervals of growth usually concentrated on narrow bases such as an export price change, large investment, or specific and largely isolated economic sectors (Bracking, 2016).
This has generated some material improvements in people’s well-being and a reduction in extreme poverty. But, it has also generated sporadic economic decline; a continued uncertainty in livelihoods accompanied by processes of social differentiation; intensified work; a rise in fraudulent, corrupt and get-rich-quick strategies which often lead to wealth being taken out of country (Ndikumana & Boyce, 2011); growing depletion of natural resources (Woodehouse, 2003); and a continued dependence on international resources and validation to sustain basic budgetary and expenditure processes. This has also generated its own social resistances (Branch & Mampilly, 2015; Harrison, 2002). Taking these patterns together, it is clearly the case that authoritarian neoliberalism in Africa has most definitively not generated any evidence of a capitalist development (Bush, 2007; Rowden, 2013; Wengraf, 2018).
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Anonymity by State/Country: Comprehensive Global Guide III

Ever since i started playing regularly, i've researched anonymity in places. Here is what i have for each state plus a bunch of other countries. If anything is outdated or incorrect, please comment.
United States
Alabama: No current lottery. Source: https://www.wtvy.com/content/news/Lottery-bill-other-legislation-is-likely-dead-in-Alabama-legislature-569059451.html
Alaska: No current lottery/Not Anonymous. "Unlike most other states, Alaska doesn’t have a state-sponsored lottery." Source: https://www.lotterycritic.com/lottery-results/alaska/ Alaska does permit charities to run lotteries, the largest one is Not Anonymous. Source: http://www.lottoalaska.com/
Alaska's governor has proposed a bill to create an official Alaska State Lottery. Source: https://apnews.com/78cacca5137f6b47e41be2de37600044
American Samoa: No current lottery. Source: https://simonsblogpark.com/onlinegambling/simons-guide-to-gambling-in-american-samoa/amp/
Arizona: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner for all wins of $100,000 and over. Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/arizona-becomes-latest-state-shield-lottery-winners-names-n995696
Arkansas: Not Anonymous/Other entities unclear. "Winner information is subject to disclosure under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A winner who receives a prize or prize payment from the ASL grants the ASL, its agents, officers, employees, and representatives the right to use, publish (in print or by means of the Internet) and reproduce the winner’s name, physical likeness, photograph, portraits, and statements made by the winner, and use audio sound clips and video or film footage of the winner for the purpose of press releases, advertising, and promoting the ASL". Source: https://www.myarkansaslottery.com/claim-your-prize
California: Not Anonymous/Only individuals can claim. “ The name and location of the retailer who sold you the winning ticket, the date you won and the amount of your winnings are also matters of public record and are subject to disclosure. You can form a trust prior to claiming your prize, but our regulations do not allow a trust to claim a prize. Understand that your name is still public and reportable”. Source: https://static.www.calottery.com/~/media/Publications/Popular_Downloads/winners-handbook-October%202018-%20English.pdf
Colorado: Not Anonymous/Anonymous via trust. “As part of the Open Records Act, we are required to release to the public your name, hometown, amount you won and the game you played. This information will be posted on coloradolottery.com and will be furnished to media upon request.” Source: https://www.coloradolottery.com/en/games/lotto/claim-winnings/ Source: https://denver.cbslocal.com/2016/01/15/in-colorado-and-other-states-lottery-winners-can-keep-names-secret/
Connecticut: Not Anonymous/Anonymous via a trust or LLC, "Certain information about our winners is public information: Winner's name and place of residence, date of claim, game played, prize amount won, and the selling retailer's name and location. While most winners claim prizes using their individual names, some winners come forward using other legal entities (i.e., trusts, business partnership) to claim their prizes. In those instances, the Lottery will promote the win using that legal entity's name. For more information about such instances, please consult your personal accountant or legal advisor.” Source: https://www.ctlottery.org/Content/winner_publicity.aspx
Delaware: 100% Anonymous if requested by winner. "Many winners have chosen to remain anonymous, as allowed by state law, but their excitement is yours to share!" Source: https://www.delottery.com/Winners and https://www.delottery.com/FAQs
DC: Not Anonymous/Anonymous via a trust or LLC. Anonymous question is not directly answered on lottery website. "In the District of Columbia, specific lottery winner information is public record." However, a Powerball Jackpot win was claimed via a LLC in 2009. Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/04/AR2009050402008.html
Florida: Not Anonymous/Anonymous via LLC. "Florida Lottery winners cannot remain anonymous. Florida law mandates that the Florida Lottery provide the winner's name, city of residence, game won, date won and amount won to any third party who requests the information; however Florida Lottery winners' home addresses and telephone numbers are confidential." Source: http://www.flalottery.com/faq
The Florida Lottery allows trusts to claim it, however winner information is still released in compliance with the law. A $15 Million jackpot was claimed by an LLC. Source: https://www.fox13news.com/amp/consumehit-the-lottery-remain-anonymous-not-in-florida Source: http://flalottery.com/pressRelease?searchID=199128
Georgia: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner for all prizes over $250,000. Source: https://www.stl.news/georgia-governor-signs-bill-allowing-lottery-winners-remain-anonymous/121962/
Guam: Anonymity appears to be an option. Source: https://www.kuam.com/story/11218413/guamanian-wins-big-in-sportsbingo-but-has-yet-to-claim-2m-prize
Hawaii: No current lottery. Source: https://www.kitv.com/story/40182224/powerball-or-mega-millions-lottery-in-hawaii
Idaho: Not Anonymous."By claiming a winning lottery ticket over $600, winners become subject to Idaho’s Public Records Law. This means your “win” becomes an offcial Idaho public record. Your full name, the town where you live, the game you won, the amount you won (before and after taxes), the name of the retailer where you bought the ticket, and the amount the retailer receives for selling the ticket are all a matter of public record." Can seek anonymity if you have specific security concerns (rarely granted). Source: https://www.idaholottery.com/images/uploads/general/winnersguideweb.pdf
Illinois: Not Anonymous/Anonymous if requested by winner for all wins over $250,000 however info will be released to a FOIA request. "However, Murphy also cooperated with the Illinois Press Association in adding an amendment that ensures that Freedom of Information Act, an act designed to keep government agencies transparent by allowing the public to access any public record by request, supersedes the privacy law, according to attorney Don Craven, the press association’s legal counsel." Source: https://www.thetelegraph.com/news/article/Hidden-riches-Big-lottery-winner-in-Beardstown-13626173.php
Indiana: Not Anonymous/Anonymous via LLC or trust. "Indiana law allows lottery jackpot winners to remain anonymous, with the money being claimed by a limited liability company or legal trust." Source: https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-indiana-mega-millions-winners-20160729-story.html
Iowa: Not Anonymous/Can use a trust to claim but information will be released. "When you win an Iowa Lottery prize of $600 or more, you have to fill out a winner claim form that includes your name, address and Social Security number before you can claim your winnings. Iowa law makes the information on that claim form public, meaning that anyone can request a copy of the form to see who has won the prize. We redact sensitive information, such as your Social Security number, from the form before we release it, but all other details are considered public information under Iowa law (Iowa Code Section 99G.34(5)." Source: https://www.ialotteryblog.com/2008/11/can-prize-winne.html.
For group play, "Prizes can be paid to players who play as a group. A check can be written to an entity such as a trust or to a single individual." Source: https://ialottery.com/pages/Games/ClaimingPrizes.aspx
Kansas: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. "Kansas is one of a handful of states that does not have this requirement. If you win a prize in Kansas, you may request that your identity not be released publicly." Source: https://www.kslottery.com/faqs#faq-8
Kentucky: Anonymity appears to be an option. Anonymity or who can claim is not addressed on lottery website. But multiple instances of winners claiming anonymously have been reported in the news. "Kentucky Lottery spokesman Chip Polson said the $1 million Powerball winner claimed the prize on May 15 and the Mega Million winner claimed the prize on May 12. He confirmed that both players wanted their identity to remain a secret." Source: https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/2017/05/19/two-1-million-lottery-winners-who-bought-tickets-louisville-want-privacy/101870414/
Louisiana: Not Anonymous/Anonymous via trust. "Under the Lottery's statute, all prize payment records are open records, meaning that the public has a right to request the information. Depending upon the amount won and public or media interest in the win, winners may NOT be able to remain anonymous. The statute also allows the Lottery to use winners' names and city of residence for publicity purposes such as news releases. The Lottery's regular practice is not to use winner information in paid advertising or product promotion without the winner's willingness to participate. Source: https://louisianalottery.com/faq/easy-5#35 Source: https://louisianalottery.com/article/1050/the-williams-trust-claims-share-of-50-million-powerball-jackpot
Maine: Not Anonymous/Anonymous via trust. "In the event that Maine does have a Mega Millions winner, he or she can opt to remain anonymous — but Boardman says that’s never happened. “What a winner could do in Maine is they could file their claim in the name of a trust, and the trust becomes the winner. So that’s how a winner could claim their ticket anonymously,” he says." Source: https://www.mainepublic.org/post/lottery-official-reminds-mainers-they-re-exceedingly-unlikely-win-16-billion-jackpot
Maryland*: Not Anonymous by Law, Anonymous in Practice. "However, the legal basis for this anonymity in Maryland is thin. The Maryland Lottery does not advertise that lottery winners may remain anonymous, but it posts articles on its website about winners and notes those winners who have “chosen to remain anonymous:” Source: https://www.gw-law.com/blog/anonymity-maryland-lottery-winners
*"Please note that this anonymity protection does not apply to second-chance and Points for Drawings contests run through the My Lottery Rewards program. Those contests are run as promotions for the Lottery. As such, they are operated under a different set of rules than our draw games and scratch-off games. The rules of participating in our second-chance and Points for Drawings contests state that winners' identities are published."" Source: https://www.mdlottery.com/about-us/faqs/
Massachusetts: Not Anonymous/Anonymous via trust "Lottery regulations state that a claimant's name, city or town, image, amount of prize, claim date and game are public record. Therefore, photographs may be taken and used to publicize winnings." Source: https://www.masslive.com/news/2018/05/lottery_sees_increase_in_winne.html
Michigan: Not Anonymous for Powerball and Mega Millions/100% Anonymous if requested by the winner for all other winners over $10,000. "Winner Anonymity. Michigan law requires written consent before disclosing the identity of the winner of $10,000 or more from the State lottery games Lotto47 and Fantasy 5. You further understand and agree that your identity may be disclosed, and that disclosure may be required, as the winner of any prize from the multi-state games Powerball and Mega Millions." Source: https://www.michiganlottery.com/games/mega-millions
Minnesota: Not Anonymous. Anonymity or who can claim is not addressed on lottery website but lottery blog states "In Minnesota, lottery winners cannot remain anonymous. A winner's name, city, prize amount won and the place that the winning ticket was sold is public data and will be released to media and posted on our website." Source: https://www.mnlottery.com/blog/you-won-now-what
Mississippi: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. "In accordance with the Alyce G. Clarke Mississippi Lottery Law, the Mississippi Lottery will not disclose the identity of the person holding a winning lottery ticket without that person's written permission." Source: https://www.mslotteryhome.com/players/faqs/
Missouri: Not Anonymous. "At the Lottery Headquarters, a member of the Lottery's communications staff will ask you questions about your win, such as how many tickets you bought, when you found out that you won and what you plan to do with your prize money. This information will be used for a news release. You will also be asked, but are not required, to participate in a news conference, most likely at the store where you purchased your winning ticket." Source: http://www.molottery.com/whenyouwin/jackpotwin.shtm
A Missouri State Legislator has submitted a bill to the State House to give lottery winners anonymity. Source: https://www.kfvs12.com/2020/02/25/mo-house-considers-legislation-protect-identity-lottery-winners/
Montana: Not Anonymous/Anonymous via trust. "In Montana, by law, certain information about lottery winners is considered public. That information includes: the winner's name, the amount won and the winner's community of residence. Winners may choose to claim as an individual or they may choose to form a trust and claim their prize as a trust. If a trust claims a lottery prize, the name of the trust is considered public information. A trust must have a federal tax identification number in order to claim a Montana Lottery prize." Source: https://www.montanalottery.com/en/view/about-faqs
Nebraska: Not Anonymous/Anonymous via LLC. Anonymity or who can claim is not addressed on lottery website but a winner created a legal entity to claim anonymously in 2014. "Nebraska Lottery spokesman Neil Watson said with the help of a Kearney lawyer, the winner or winners have created a legal entity called Carpe Diem LLC." Source: https://journalstar.com/news/state-and-regional/nebraska/m-nebraska-powerball-winner-to-remain-anonymous/article_a044d0f0-99a7-5302-bcb9-2ce799b3a798.html
A Nebraska State Legislator has now filed a bill to give 100% Anonymity to all winners over $300,000 who request it. Source: https://journalstar.com/news/state-and-regional/nebraska/anonymity-for-lottery-winners-bill-would-give-privacy-to-those/article_1cdba44d-c8bb-5971-b73f-2eecc8cd4625.html
Nevada: No current lottery. Source: https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/casinos-gaming/heres-why-you-cant-play-powerball-in-nevada/
New Hampshire: Not Anonymous/Anonymous via a trust. Anonymity or who can claim is not addressed on lottery website but a winner successfully sued the lottery and won the right to remain anonymous in 2018. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/03/12/winner-of-a-560-million-powerball-jackpot-can-keep-the-money-and-her-secret-judge-rules/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.bec2db2f7d2c
New Jersey: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Source: https://www.nj.com/politics/2020/01/win-big-you-can-claim-those-nj-lottery-winnings-anonymously-under-new-law.html
New Mexico: Not Anonymous. “Winners of $10,000 or more will have name, city, game played, and prize amount and photo on website.” Can seek anonymity if you have specific security concerns (rarely granted). Source: https://www.nmlottery.com/uploads/FileLinks/82400d81a0ce468daab29ebe6db3ec27/Winner_Publicity_Policy_6_1_07.pdf
New York: Not Anonymous/Anonymous via a LLC. Anonymity or who can claim is not addressed on lottery website but per Gov. Cuomo: "For the past 40 years, individuals wishing to keep their name and information out of the public view have created LLCs to collect their winnings for them." Source: https://nypost.com/2018/12/09/cuomo-vetoes-bill-allowing-lotto-winners-to-remain-anonymous/
North Carolina: Not Anonymous. "North Carolina law allows lottery winners' identity to remain confidential only if they have an active protective order against someone or participate in the state's "Address Confidentiality Program" for victims of domestic violence, sexual offense, stalking or human trafficking." Source: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article54548645.html
North Dakota: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Source: https://www.kfyrtv.com/home/headlines/ND-Powerball-Winners-Have-Option-to-Remain-Anonymous-364918121.html
Northern Mariana Islands: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Source: https://www.nmsalottery.com/game-rules/
Ohio: Not Anonymous/Anonymous via trust. Anonymity or who can claim is not addressed on lottery website but appears to have an anonymous option. "The procedure from there was a little cumbersome. I needed to create two separate trusts. One trust was to appoint me, as the trustee on behalf of the winner, to contact the Lottery Commission and accept the Lottery winnings. The secondary trust was set up for me as trustee of the first trust, to transfer the proceeds to the second trust with the winner as the beneficiary. This enabled me to present the ticket, accept the proceeds, and transfer it to the winner with no public record or disclosure." Source: https://www.altickcorwin.com/Articles/How-To-Claim-Lottery-Winnings-Anonymously.shtml
Oklahoma: Not Anonymous/Anonymous via trust or LLC. In accordance with the Oklahoma Open Records Act and the Oklahoma Education Lottery Act, the name of any individual, corporation, partnership, unincorporated association, limited liability company, or other legal entity, and their city of residence will be made public. Source: https://www.lottery.ok.gov/playersclub/faq.asp Source: https://oklahoman.com/article/5596678/lottery-winners-deserve-some-anonymity
Oregon: Not Anonymous. "No. Certain information about Lottery prizes is public record, including the name of the winner, amount of the prize, date of the drawing, name of the game played and city in which the winning ticket was purchased. Oregon citizens have a right to know that Lottery prizes are indeed being awarded to real persons. " Source: https://oregonlottery.org/about/public-interaction/commission-directofrequently-asked-questions Can seek anonymity if you have specific security concerns (rarely granted). Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3353432/Man-living-Iraq-wins-6-4-million-Oregon-jackpot.html
Pennsylvania: Not Anonymous/Anonymous via trust. Source: https://lancasteronline.com/news/local/trust-that-won-powerball-no-relation-to-manheim-township-emerald/article_29834922-4ca2-11e8-baac-1b15a17f3e9c.html
Puerto Rico: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/puerto-rico-powerball-winner-claims-prize-chooses-stay-anonymous-n309121
Rhode Island: Not Anonymous/Anonymous if requested but all info is subject to FOIA. "While the Lottery will do everything possible to keep a winner's information private if requested by the winner, in Rhode Island and most other states, this information falls under the Freedom of Information Act, and a winner's name and city or town of residency must be released upon request." Source: https://www.rilot.com/en-us/player-zone/faqs.html
South Carolina: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Anonymity or who can claim is not addressed on lottery website but appears to have an anonymous option based on prior winners. Source: https://myfox8.com/2019/03/15/the-anonymous-south-carolina-winner-of-the-largest-lottery-jackpot-is-donating-part-of-it-to-alabama-tornado-victims/
South Dakota: Not Anonymous for draw games and online games/100% Anonymous for Scratchoffs if requested by the winner. "You can remain anonymous on any amount won from a scratch ticket game. Jackpots for online games are required to be public knowledge. Play It Again winners are also public knowledge." Source: https://lottery.sd.gov/FAQ2018/gamefaq.aspx.
Tennessee: Not Anonymous/Can use a trust but info subject to open records act. Anonymity is explicitly noted as not being allowed on the official lottery website. Source: https://www.tnlottery.com/faq/i-won
However if it is claimed via a trust then the lottery will not give out your information unless requested to do so. "The TN lottery says: "When claiming a Lottery prize through a Trust, the TN Lottery would need identity documentation for the grantor and all ultimate beneficiaries. Once we are in possession of these documents and information, records are generated. If a formal request is made by a citizen of Tennessee, the Trust beneficiary's name, city and state must be made available under the Tennessee Open Records Act." Source: https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/in-tennessee--can-a-lottery-jackpot-be-claimed-whi-2327592.html
Texas: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner for $1 million or more IF the winner claims it as an individual AND chooses the Cash option. Not Anonymous if claimed by a trust or LLC or if the winner chooses the Annuity option. Source: https://www.txlottery.org/export/sites/lottery/Documents/retailers/FAQ_Winner_Anonymity_12112017_final.pdf
Utah: No current lottery. Source: https://www.lotterycritic.com/lottery-results/utah/
Vermont: Not Anonymous/Anonymous via trust. “The name, town and prize amount on your Claim Form is public information. If you put your name on the Claim Form, your name becomes public information. If you claim your prize in a trust, the name of the trust is placed on the Claim Form, and the name of the trust is public information.” Source: https://vtlottery.com/about/faq
Virginia: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner for prizes over $10 million. "A new law passed by the Virginia General Assembly and signed by the Governor prohibits the Virginia Lottery from disclosing information about big jackpot winners." "When the bill goes into effect this summer, the Virginia Lottery will not be allowed to release certain information about winners whose prize exceeds $10 million, unless the winner wants to be known." Source: https://www.13newsnow.com/article/news/local/virginia/new-virginia-law-allows-certain-lottery-winners-to-keep-identity-private/291-c33ea642-e8fa-45fd-b3a4-dc693cf5b372
US Virgin Islands: Anonymity appears to be an option. A $2 Million Powerball winner was allowed to remain anonymous. Source: https://viconsortium.com/virgin-islands-2/st-croix-resident-wins-2-million-in-latest-power-ball-drawing/
Washington: Not Anonymous/Can use a trust but info subject to open records act. "As a public agency, all documents held by Washington's Lottery are subject to the Public Records Act. Lottery prizes may be claimed in the name of a legally formed entity, such as a trust. However, in the event of a public records request, the documents forming the artificial entity may be released, thereby revealing the individual names of winners." https://www.walottery.com/ClaimYourPrize/
West Virginia: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner for prizes over $1 million and 5% of winnings remittance. "Effective January 1, 2019, House Bill 2982 allows winners of State Lottery draw games to remain anonymous in regards to his or her name, personal contact information, and likeness; providing that the prize exceeds one million dollars and the individual who elects to remain anonymous remits five percent of his or her winnings to the State Lottery Fund." Source: https://wvlottery.com/customer-service/customer-resources/
Wisconsin: Not Anonymous/Cannot be claimed by other entities. "Pursuant to Wisconsin’s Open Records law (Wis. Stats. Secs. 19.31–19.39), the Lottery is required to disclose a winner’s name, likeness and place of residence. If you win and claim a prize, the Lottery may use your name, likeness and place of residence for any purpose without compensation to you.
Upon claiming your prize, you waive any claims against the Lottery and its representatives for any and all liability which may result from the disclosure or use of such information." "The original winning ticket must be signed by a single human being. For-profit and non-profit entities, trusts, and other non-human beings are not eligible to play or claim a prize." Source: https://wilottery.com/claimprize.aspx
Wyoming: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. "We will honor requests for anonymity from winners. However, we certainly hope winners will allow us to share their names and good news with other players." Source: https://wyolotto.com/lottery/faq/
Other countries
Australia: 100% Anonymous if requested by winner. "The great thing about playing lotto in Australia is that winners can choose to remain anonymous and keep their privacy, unlike in the United States where winners don't have such a choice, and are often thrown into a media circus." Source: https://www.ozlotteries.com/blog/how-to-remain-anonymous-when-you-win-lotto/
Bahamas: No current lottery. Source: https://thenassauguardian.com/2013/01/29/strong-no-vote-trend-so-far-in-gaming-referendum/
Bahrain: Not Anonymous. Source: https://bdutyfree.com/terms-conditions1#.X8ru92lOmdM
Barbados: Not Anonymous. "No. Barbados Lottery winners cannot remain anonymous. The Barbados Lottery mandates the winner’s name, address, game won, date won and amount won be provided; however Barbados Lottery winners' home addresses and telephone numbers are confidential." Source: https://www.mybarbadoslottery.com/faqs
Brazil: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Source: https://www.lotterycritic.com/lottery-results/brazil-lottery/
Canada: Not Anonymous. Every provincial lottery corporation in Canada requires winners to participate in a publicity photo shoot showing their face, their name and their municipality. Can seek anonymity if you have specific security concerns (rarely granted). Source: https://consumers.findlaw.ca/article/can-lottery-winners-remain-anonymous/
Carribbean Lottery Countries (Antigua/Barbuda, Anguilla, St. Kitts/Nevis, St. Maarten/Saba/St. Eustatius, and Turks/Caicos): Not Anonymous. "No. Caribbean Lottery winners cannot remain anonymous. The Caribbean Lottery mandates the winner’s name, address, game won, date won and amount won be provided; however Caribbean Lottery winners' home addresses and telephone numbers are confidential." Source: https://www.thecaribbeanlottery.com/faqs
China: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Must appear in a press conference and photo but allowed to wear disguise. Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/01/22/china-lottery-winners-mask/22108515/
Cuba: No current lottery. Source: https://oncubanews.com/en/cuba/society-cuba/cuban-traditions/lottery-the-national-game-infographics/
EuroMillions Countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and UK*): 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Source: https://www.euro-millions.com/publicity
*United Kingdom: Excludes
*Caymen Islands, and Falkland Islands: No current lottery. Source: https://calvinayre.com/2018/11/02/business/cayman-islands-move-illegal-gambling-doesnt-address-real-issue/ Source: https://simonsblogpark.com/onlinegambling/simons-guide-gambling-falkland-islands/amp/#lottery-falkland-islands
*Anguilla, and Turks & Caicos: Not Anonymous. Source: https://www.thecaribbeanlottery.com/faqs
EuroJackpot Countries (Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands*, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden): 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Source: https://www.euro-jackpot.net/en/publicity
*Netherlands: Excludes
*St. Maarten, Saba, and St. Eustatius: Not Anonymous. Source: https://www.thecaribbeanlottery.com/faqs
Fiji: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Source: https://fijisun.com.fj/2012/11/08/3m-lotto-win-here/
Georgia (Kartvelia): Anonymity appears to be an option. "2.9.1. Prizes and Winners. Each Bidder shall provide details of:....how winners who waive their right to privacy will be treated;" Source: https://mof.ge/images/File/lottery/tender-documentation.pdf
Greece: Anonymity appears to be an option. "The bearer of the ticket shall keep the details of the ticket confidential and not reveal them to any third party." Source: https://www.opap.gen/identity-terms-of-use-lotto
Guyana: Not Anonymous. Source: https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2013/05/16/winner-says-he-was-too-busy-to-collect-78m-lotto-prize/
India*: Not Anonymous. Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35771298
*: Only available in the states of Kerala, Goa, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, West Bengal, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Manipur, Sikkim, Nagaland and Mizoram. Source: https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/lottery-mizoram-nagaland-sikkim-kerala-975188-2017-05-04
Indonesia: No current lottery. Source: https://apnews.com/45eb94ff1b1132470a7aa5902f0bc734
Israel: Not Anonymous by Law, Anonymous in Practice. “[A]lthough we have this right, we have never exercised it because we understood the difficulties the winners could encounter in the period after their win. We provide details about the winner, but in a manner that doesn’t disclose their identity,” Dolin Melnik, then-spokesperson for Israel’s Mifal Hapayis lottery told Haaretz in 2009." Source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/why-the-israeli-lottery-gives-winners-masks/
Jamaica: Not Anonymous. First initial and last name of winner was released but winner was allowed to wear a mask for photo. Source: https://news.e-servicis.com/news/trending/lottery-winner-takes-prize-in-scream-mask.1S/
Japan: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Source: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/09/08/business/japans-lottery-rakes-declining-revenues-younger-generation-gives-jackpot-chances-pass/#.XRYwVVMpCdM
Kenya: Not Anonymous. "9.1 When You claim or are paid a prize, You will automatically be deemed to grant to O8 LOTTO an irrevocable right to publish, through all types of media broadcasting, including the internet, for the purposes of promoting the win, Your full name (as well as Your nick name), hometown, photograph and video materials without any claim for broadcasting, printing or other rights" Source: https://mylottokenya.co.ke/terms-conditions
Malaysia: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Source: https://says.com/my/news/a-24-year-old-malaysian-woman-just-won-more-than-rm4-million-from-4d-lottery
Nagorno-Karabakh: Not Anonymous. Source: http://asbarez.com/120737/artsakh-lottery-winner-claims-car-prize/
New Zealand: 100% Anonymous if requested by winner. Source: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10383080
North Korea: Not Anonymous. Source: https://www.nknews.org/2018/11/north-korean-sports-ministry-launches-online-lottery/
Northern Cyprus: Anonymity appears to be an option. Source: https://www.pressreader.com/cyprus/cyprus-today/20181124/281590946615912
Oman: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Source: http://www.omanlottery.com/
Philippines: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Source: https://www.rappler.com/nation/214995-ultra-lotto-winners-claim-winnings-pcso-october-2018
Qatar: Not Anonymous. Source: https://www.qatarliving.com/forum/qatar-living-lounge/posts/qatar-duty-free-announces-latest-us1-million
Romania: Anonymity appears to be an option. Source: https://www.thelotter.com/win-lottery-anonymously/
Russia: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Source: http://siberiantimes.com/otheothers/news/siberian-scoops-a-record-184513512-roubles-on-russian-state-lottery/
Samoa: Not Anonymous. Source: https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/191796/samoa%27s-lotto-winner-still-a-mystery
Saudi Arabia: No current lottery. Source: https://www.arabnews.com/police-arrest-lottery-crooks-victimizing-expats
Singapore: Anonymity appears to be an option. Source: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/did-you-win-here-are-results-of-136m-toto-hongbao-draw
Solomon Islands: No current lottery. Source: http://www.paclii.org/sb/legis/consol_act/gala196/
South Africa: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Source: https://www.thesouthafrican.com/powerball-results/powerball-winner-r232-million-found-lottery-details/
South Korea: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Source: https://elaw.klri.re.keng_mobile/viewer.do?hseq=38378&type=sogan&key=5
Sri Lanka: Anonymity appears to be an option. Source: http://www.thesundayleader.lk/2010/01/31/where-do-all-the-lottery-winners-go/
Taiwan: 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner. Source: http://m.focustaiwan.tw/news/asoc/201806250011.aspx
Trinidad and Tobago: Anonymity appears to be an option. Source: https://trinidadexpress.com/news/local/student-wins-the-million-lotto/article_3f3c8550-570d-11e9-9cc3-b7550f9b4ad4.html
Tuvalu: No current lottery. Source: http://tuvalu-legislation.tv/cms/images/LEGISLATION/PRINCIPAL/1964/1964-0004/GamingandLotteries_1.pdf
United Arab Emirates: Not Anonymous. Source: https://www.ndtv.com/indians-abroad/shojith-ks-in-sharjah-uae-wins-abu-dhabi-duty-free-big-ticket-4-million-jackpot-rejects-calls-2032942
Vatican City: Anonymity appears to be an option. Source: https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2018/12/04/popes-white-lamborghini-up-for-raffle-winner-gets-trip-to-rome/
Vietnam: Anonymity appears to be an option. Source: https://ampe.vnexpress.net/news/news/vietnamese-farmer-identified-as-winner-of-4-million-lottery-jackpot-3484751.html
Windward Lottery Countries (Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines): Not Anonymous. "Prize winners asked to do so by Winlot must give their name and address, and satisfactory establish their identity. All winners of the Jackpot (Match 6) prize will be photographed. Note that Winlot and CBN reserve the right to publish the names, addresses and photographs of all the winners." Source: http://www.stlucialotto.com/snl/super6_rules_regs.php
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gambling law in south africa video

Gambling laws in South Africa are legislated in the National Gambling Act of 2004. According to this Act, which was amended in 2018, online gambling (or interactive gaming) and online casinos are illegal. While online gambling isn’t permitted within the borders of South Africa, South African players don’t have to worry. Before we get started with our Gambling Laws in South Africa article we’d like to make you aware that gambling within the borders of South Africa is 100% legal. We’ll be focusing on some recent changes that are in reference to betting with overseas companies from within South Africa. Gambling Laws in South Africa – The Changes The National Gambling Act from 2004 made the online gambling illegal. According to the updated law from 2011 any form of online gambling in South Africa were considered as completely illegal. But the law hasn't restricted the players and nowadays there are plenty South Africans who break the law and exercise online gambling. The focus of restriction is falling mainly on the online casinos than on the players. The National Gambling Board (NGB) oversees gambling in South Africa on a national level. Nine provincial gambling boards, one for each province, establish control through the issuing of licenses. Read more information on the different South African gambling regulatory authorities on our Betting Law page. About The National Gambling Board is responsible for the oversight of the regulation in the gambling industry throughout the country and to preserve the integrity of South Africa as a responsible global citizen. South Africa Gambling History; Year Event; 1673: First gambling restrictions in the law, gambling in South Africa was banned by the Dutch settlers. The return of gambling did not occur until 1866-1867. 1965: Gambling act – gambling is banned. All forms of gamblnig are banned in South Africa, except for horse racing. 1994-96 In 1965, the South Africa Gambling Act was passed. All forms of gambling, except horse racing were officially banned. This did not stop the gambling-loving nation from playing at makeshift casinos and the popularity of gambling simply continued to grow. The 1965 Gambling Act saw horse racing become legal in South Africa but other games were completely banned. Of course, as tends to happen when governments place a ban on any popular form of entertainment, people sidestepped the government and started setting up casinos that were illegal and by the time the 1994 democratic elections came along, there were thousands of these establishments in operation. The South African Gambling Act of 1965 ruled gambling as illegal. Gambling, such as horseracing, was legal. The reason for this is because horseracing is considered a sport. In the 1970s, there were a number of illegal casinos created, with the number rising until there were about 2,000 illegal casinos in the mid 90s. Online gambling in South Africa remained illegal, except for sports betting which still required online sportsbooks to get a license in one of the South African provinces. All other typical casino games, such as poker , slots, roulette, or blackjack are strictly forbidden.

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