Official Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Collapse Thread...They're absolutely FU&KED!!!

[Trajan]

Saudi Arabia reinstated financial allowances for civil servants and military personnel on Saturday after better-than-expected budget figures, ending unpopular cuts to a key perk triggered by low oil prices and cheering the stock market.

King Salman issued a royal decree restoring “all allowances, financial benefits, and bonuses” following calls for protests in four Saudi cities over the weekend, adding a two-month salary bonus for forces fighting in the kingdom’s intervention in Yemen.

Under the Twitter hashtag “April 21 movement”, Saudis circulated statements last week demanding the reinstatement of benefits, a halt to the sale of shares of state oil giant Aramco, a constitutional monarchy and the restoration of the powers of the religious police.

Security forces lined the streets of central Riyadh over the weekend, although no demonstrations appeared to materialise.

The decree said the cuts had come as a response to the sharp drop in the price of oil, which sank to a low of around $28 last year. Prices have rebounded since late 2016, with Brent crude now trading around $52 a barrel compared to last year’s average of $45.

Saudi Arabia restores perks to state employees to fend off unrest
Saudi Royal Family like


@4d 6f 6e 65 79 @ZoeGod

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Saudi Arabia restores perks to state employees to fend off unrest
Saudi Royal Family like


@4d 6f 6e 65 79 @ZoeGod

 

[ZoeGod]

Saudi Arabia restores perks to state employees to fend off unrest
Saudi Royal Family like


@4d 6f 6e 65 79 @ZoeGod

The thing is the price of oil isnt going up anytime soon. The reason is because of shale gas and that Iranian and Iraqi oil is flooding the market. The oil cuts that OPEC did isnt going to do much to raise the price. Time is not on their side.

 

[The Odum of Ala Igbo]

Really? If so i applude them from being proactive. Isnt Nigeria in a similar situation?

Nigeria is doomed.

 

[Serious]

Mohammed bin Salman’s treatment of domestic affairs seemed as headstrong as his treatment of foreign ones. Apparently in return for sanctioning the youngster’s accumulation of power, the clerical establishment secured the dismissal of the country’s first female minister, appointed in laxer times by Abdullah, the late king. Religious police resumed their raids on private premises. A young female accountant told us how they had detained a male colleague sharing her office, in violation of their codes. A spring festival in the south was shut down after prepubescent girls joined in a folkloric dance. McDonald’s revamped its fast-food franchises, and renovated signs segregating their counters and seating areas by sex.

At literary salons, writers recounted stories of people jailed for blaspheming. Some were fed watermelon to fill their bladders, they said, and then had their penises tied. In November 2015 Ashraf Fayadh, a Palestinian poet raised in Saudi Arabia, was sentenced to death for voicing religious doubts. “I am Hell’s experiment on the Planet Earth,” he had written in his offending volume of poems. (After much international protest and a worldwide reading of his poems, a panel of judges upheld the verdict of apostasy but commuted the sentence to eight years in prison and eight hundred lashes.) “For the first time in my life, I’m truly afraid,” a news editor told me. The dearth of names in this review is testimony to how nervous even prominent figures have become.

Having proven his conservative and repressive capabilities, MbS tacked leftward. Earlier this year, after the executions, he stripped the special unit of the morality police of its powers to arrest people and locked up popular preachers who dared challenge this change. Among them was Abdul-Aziz al-Tarifi, a prominent televangelist, who sneered, “There are some rulers who think that renouncing their religion to satisfy infidels will put an end to the pressures on them.” News of his arrest soon after was tweeted 22,000 times.

Similarly dismissive of tradition, Mohammed bin Salman pointedly gave his first on-record interview to my editor in chief, an unveiled Western woman who rejected the black abaya our minders wanted her to wear. He received her in the living room of his out-of-town rest house in a renovated desert fortress. The daggers of old battles hung from the wattle-and-stucco walls above them. IPads lay strewn on the coffee table in front of them. He expressed views in favor of reform. Curing the kingdom’s oil “addiction” would require diversifying its economy, he said, which in turn might require modernizing its rigid hierarchies. Women should have a more productive part in the kingdom’s economy. Migrants should have the rights of residents. (“All nationalities?” an alarmed interviewer on Al-Arabiya, a Saudi-owned Arabic-language channel, asked him later. “Without a doubt,” replied MbS without a twitch.)

A relaxation of the social code would have economic advantages. To discourage his citizens from frittering away their earnings on trips to Dubai or Beirut (both capitals where women can drive and people freely drink), the Saudi kingdom, he said, should construct its own tourist resorts, to keep the money at home. As part of his $5 billion plan to develop the country’s entertainment sector, he told us, he would build theme parks and resorts on the kingdom’s untouched islands in the turquoise Red Sea. Saudi pop stars—“the best in the Arab world”—who performed in the kingdom in his father’s youth might soon be allowed back to perform—perhaps before the year’s end. Footage from Mecca during his grandfather’s reign showed women riding on camels, beating drums, and selling wares in the marketplace. They might yet do so again.

MbS’s new education minister, an academic whose book Wahhabi censors had banned for criticizing clerical control over curricula, spoke of breaking the preachers’ stranglehold by opening branches of American universities in the kingdom. An Information Ministry official showed me architects’ drawings for a Royal Arts Complex that he said would wean the kingdom off “ISIS values.” Saudi Arabia had closed its last public cinema in the 1970s, but the new complex would have both a movie theater and an opera house. One day, the official said, it might stage La Bohème. “We want to break the social resistance that prevents women driving, provide an alternative to the conservatives, and work gradually to eliminate extremism,” he told me. Another official added that MbS’s recent acquisition of a $3.5 billion stake in Uber, the cell phone app for ordering taxis, would give women greater freedom of movement.

An adviser to Mohammed bin Salman compared the young prince to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who turned his sleepy creek of Dubai into a libertine metropolis. But for all his talk of theme parks, the only one near completion is Diriya, the reconstructed town outside Riyadh where his forefathers and the founder of the Wahhabis, Ibn Abdel Wahhab, sealed their pact in 1744. In the 1980s, Saudia Arabia’s King Fahd built an opera house that never opened because of religious objections and remains a gleaming white elephant on the outskirts of Riyadh. Advisers who had anticipated an announcement that women would be allowed to drive sounded glum when MbS dismissed the idea.

There are private beaches where local women can wear bikinis, but the kingdom seems unprepared for mass domestic tourism on a scale that proliferates elsewhere in the Middle East. Such a development, a Jeddah hotelier told me, would happen “only over the graves of the religious establishment.” As MbS attempts to placate both camps, he risks satisfying none.

Each year, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second city, hosts a festival recalling pre-Wahhabi times. Under the seemingly innocuous slogan Kunna Kidda, “That’s How We Were,” charitable associations funded by local businessmen evoked memories of a more pluralist past. From the glistening white square where the regime stages its executions, I joined the crowds floating through the arched gates into the Old City. In blown-up sepia photographs lining the port city’s historic alleys, religious buildings flattened when the al-Sauds and their conquering puritans descended from the desert highlands in 1925 rose again. Beneath lattice balconies, families stopped to marvel at Sufi lodges and the domed shrine of Eve, the first woman—toppled by zealots who frown on saint-worship. Inside a glass case running the length of a house, mannequins flaunted the colorful capes women wore before the Wahhabi sheikhs mandated that they wear black. Recalling a time when Jeddah was Arabia’s diplomatic capital, spotlights illuminated the whitewashed buildings that were once the American and British consulates, as well as the residence of the Ottoman caliph, the steps of which were so shallow that a camel could plod to the fifth floor.

Excited girls, outnumbering the men in their segregated stands, cheer comedians on an open-air festival stage. Between acts, a DJ spins discs, defying the ban on music. “Suck me,” screech its English hip-hop lyrics. After the show, the more adventurous of both sexes then mingle onstage, taking group selfies. “The festival is our answer to the desert tribes who disparage our cosmopolitan port city ways,” one of the organizers tells me.

His remarks underlined just how much resistance Wahhabis face in a peninsula relandscaped as their own. Mecca’s ancient hill has been laid low and its old town leveled to make way for sixteen towering apartment hotels, and shrines to the Prophet’s descendents, historically venerated by Sunnis and Shia alike, have been bulldozed. “The crime has been committed,” says a Jeddah art curator and conservationist, who on his office wall has a painting of a group of bland hotels looming over the Kaaba—the inner sanctum of Mecca’s Grand Mosque—and shrouding its black sanctity in shadow. “Our task is to salvage what remains.”

But unlike the Islamic State, which in two years of depredation has purged its territory of Muslim and non-Muslim nonconformists, Wahhabis have failed to suppress the peninsula’s many cultures and sects, despite a century of rule. Zaidis, in their wan-colored adobe houses beneath the shadow of Yemen’s mountains, and the Nakhawila, Medina’s indigenous Shias, continue to visit the graveyards where the shrines of the Prophet’s family once stood. On Thursday nights, their Sufi neighbors recite their zikr, or mystical incantations—deemed profanities by the Wahhabis—to the beat of the daf, or traditional drum. In Medina, erudite advocates of conservation, drawn primarily from the shurafa, the pre-Wahhabi nobility of Hijaz, successfully lobbied the authorities not to let the Wahhabis demolish the Prophet Muhammad’s house as part of their expansion.

Some even detect a growing acceptance of other religions and a reexamination of the Wahhabi doctrine—cited by a senior royal—that non-Muslim worship should not be allowed in the entire peninsula. (“If Saudi Arabia had lands in Africa, we would undoubtedly have opened a church there,” he said.) The kingdom includes perhaps the largest and fastest-growing Christian community in the Middle East. Despite the formal ban on non-Muslims in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, non-Muslim domestic servants and drivers live and work in the shadow of Mecca’s Grand Mosque. Though Christians are forbidden from worshiping publicly, congregations at weekly prayer meetings on foreign compounds can be several hundred strong. “A generation ago we pretended Christmas didn’t exist,” says a Saudi businessman who has two live-in Christian servants from the Philippines. “Now we give them Christmas presents, and host Winter Festival receptions for our Christian employees.”

Do you actually read all this shyt

 

[dtownreppin214]

IMF: Saudi Middle Class Needs to Live Without State Help

Skyscrapers in the financial district of Riyadh last year. PHOTO: BLOOMBERG NEWS
By
Nikhil Lohade
Updated May 2, 2017 1:15 a.m. ET
0 COMMENTS

DUBAI—The sharing of oil wealth through government jobs and lavish subsidies is no longer sustainable for Saudi Arabia and its neighbors in the Middle East, the International Monetary Fund said, urging the countries to focus on rolling out ambitious diversification plans.

“The challenge, therefore, is to develop a new model of economic growth that is both resilient and inclusive,” the IMF said in its latest outlook report for the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan. “In particular, there is a need to reduce the dependence on oil and generate private sector jobs for the rapidly growing labor force.”

In recent years, Saudi Arabia and several other Gulf states cut spending to cope with a sharp drop in oil income, which accounts for a major portion of government revenue. Saudi Arabia, for instance, canceled bonus payments and curbed allowances for state employees in September, months after cutting subsidies for fuel, electricity and water.


But in a surprise move late last month, King Salman reinstated allowances and bonuses for state employees, citing an increase in revenue and a decline in the kingdom’s budget deficit.

Members of Saudi Arabia’s working middle class—a majority of whom are employed by government related entities and accustomed to generous state assistance—had become more conscious about their spending in recent months. Usually reluctant to grumble about economic hardships, many Saudi nationals criticized the reduction in public welfare, especially as the cuts didn’t appear to affect the wealthy.

The restoration of allowances and bonuses to state employees is expected to bolster consumer spending and help revive growth in the kingdom. It will also help calm nerves as Saudi Arabia continues to spend billions abroad, including on a costly and unpopular war in Yemen.

Like many countries in the Middle East and North Africa region, Saudi Arabia unveiled last year an ambitious plan to reshape its oil-dependent economy, known as Saudi Vision 2030. The overhaul is being led by Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, King Salman’s son and a possible successor.

As those austerity measures took effect, Saudi Arabia’s budget deficit shrank last year to about $79 billion from a record $98 billion in 2015. Saudi Arabia expects to run a deficit of about $53 billion in 2017.

The impact of the resumption of perks to state employees and the kingdom’s plans to balance its finances by 2020 weren’t immediately clear.

“Countries need to maintain their focus on implementing their economic diversification plans—and the supporting structural reforms—to strengthen economic resilience,” the IMF said.

They should prioritize growth-friendly measures such as further energy-price reforms, additional cuts to current spending and measures to increase revenues, including via improved tax administration, the IMF added.


The IMF expects Saudi Arabia, the largest economy in the Middle East, to grow 0.4% this year and 1.3% in 2018, down from its January estimate of 2.3% for next year, due to lower oil production and the continuing austerity drive in the kingdom.

This dip in growth is expected for most energy-selling countries in the region, the IMF added, after Saudi Arabia last year agreed with other major crude exporters to cut production in an effort to lift prices. The production cuts have helped oil prices stabilize in recent months after they fell by about half since the middle of 2014. Saudi Arabia expects that agreement to be extended by another six months when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries meets in May.

The production-cut agreement has helped improve the outlook for oil in the near term, but prices over the medium term are expected to remain low and highly uncertain, the IMF said. “So further sustained fiscal adjustment remains critical,” it added.

 

[Sukairain]

Riyadh is more hosed by the day and time is running out fast

 

[afterlife2009]

 

[Meta Reign]

 

[FaTaL]

Is it true 80 percent of the workers in Saudi Arabia are foreign?

 

[FaTaL]

The thing is the price of oil isnt going up anytime soon. The reason is because of shale gas and that Iranian and Iraqi oil is flooding the market. The oil cuts that OPEC did isnt going to do much to raise the price. Time is not on their side.

How is shake oil competitive against Saudi oil when it takes so long to refine ?

 

[hashmander]

i felt better about laughing at these fukks before Unintelligent Orange became our president.

 

[ℒℴѵℯJay ELECTUA]

Is it true 80 percent of the workers in Saudi Arabia are foreign?

around that like with the wealthy gulf states.

 

[afterlife2009]

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

:jordanlmao: