instruction:
Your task is to extract the thesis of an opinionated news article by selecting some of its text segments. The thesis is a summarization of what the author wants to persuade the reader of. Your answer should consist of segments of the given text. Note that you are not allowed to combine different sentences.
question:
Privatising Mexico's oil industry spells disaster. Considering Mexico's history and the present political context, it's no surprise that the majority of the Mexican population nowadays is either deeply suspicious of President Pena Nieto or just opposed to the current fast-track drive to privatise oil and pass it into the hands of foreign oligopolies . At present, Mexico suffers from an extremely weak state where the vast majority of crimes go unaddressed because of a judicial vacuum . More than 22,000 forced disappearances have occurred since 2007 and more than 70,000 people have been killed since 2006 . Almost every week we hear about more mass graves discovered . Most recently, a massacre of students in Iguala shook the nation . Mexico also suffers from the third largest illicit economy in the world, according to the Global Financial Integrity Report . Clearly, organised crime is openly challenging and fragmenting the state . In the face of these facts even President Nieto has admitted in public speeches that Mexico's legal system is in shambles . International experience and basic common sense indicate that a country must possess a minimum standard of the rule of law in order to be able to foster social benefits for most of its population when privatising state assets . Without functional regulatory and judicial controls, it is technically and politically not feasible for any oil-funded social development fund to effectively spread wealth to future generations through new public education programmes, a modernised public health, adequate environmental standards and a much-improved physical infrastructure . Absolutely nothing today indicates that Mexico can implement privatisation of the oil infrastructure at even the most basic standards of security, transparency, effectiveness and efficiency . Yet ,  a Mexican paradox occurs . While insecurity still runs at record highs , foreign money keeps pouring in . What's going on? Since the beginning of the still unfinished democratic transition and since the economic opening to international trade of the early 1990s, Mexico managed to attract billions of dollars per year in foreign direct investment . Yet ,  most of this money has been channelled into politically managed non-competitive sectors in the hands of Mexican "state courtesans" disguised as private entrepreneurs who over the last 25 years created vast oligopolies out of the privatisation of state assets . The privatisation process in Mexico has largely been conducted through dubious procedures orchestrated by corrupt federal governments . All this happened in the midst of a Mexican economy lacking technological innovation with low productivity and where more than half of what is produced and consumed is exchanged within informal/illicit markets . Nevertheless ,  these so-called private oligopolies within the mining, banking and telecommunications industries operate in a crony capitalistic fashion by attracting foreign investors to politically protected markets in which governments (through bribes and subsidies) ensure rates of return two to five times above the international average . How can, for example, German or US oligopolies presently investing in Mexico fail to fall in love with such a "generous" corrupt system? The forthcoming Mexican oil privatisation falls comfortably within this "legally corrupt" economic framework . Yet ,  harsh social realities have a way of trumping politics most of the time . Mexican writer and journalist Ana Lilia Perez published in 2012 a book titled"The Black Cartel" in which she provides a description of massive organised crime infiltration within the top managerial echelons of the state-run oil company, PEMEX . The nature of the organised crime infiltration covers technical and political appointees at PEMEX . Moreover ,  with thorough documentation, Ms Perez provides a detailed account of how and where a large portion of the oil extracted and distributed by PEMEX is currently stolen through illegal operations . These have been linked to Mexican politicians and US and Mexican private companies selling illegal Mexican oil to the markets in Canada, Mexico and the US, with the complicity of the Mexican armed forces supposedly responsible for protecting the PEMEX infrastructure . The current illegal oil trafficking comes with high-level political corruption, intense armed conflict causing thousands of deaths per month and frequent acts of terrorism against the PEMEX infrastructure . One cannot expect this armed conflict scenario to just go away after privatisation . In this kind of context, any honest foreign investor bidding within a Mexican oil privatisation process should have his or her head checked or otherwise possess enough political clout within Mexico or the financial capacity to bribe with millions of dollars the government ladder and pay for a vast praetorian guard of security personnel to manage the armed chaos ahead . In comparison , dealing with other oil producing countries with problematic states, such as Nigeria, would seem like a walk in the park . Shareholders of oil companies can only expect low economic returns and chaos from investing in the Mexican oil sector , unless , prior to any private investment drive, an international judicial cooperation effort starts dismantling the vast organised crime networks within the Mexican oil business and beyond . This international judicial cooperation must entail the actual implementation of a serious anti-corruption programme within the Mexican state with much broader conflict of interest and traffic of influence statutes, all monitored by reputable international civil society organisations . Furthermore ,  the failure of the Mexican state needs to be corrected with the installation of autonomous investigative units for economic crimes within each Mexican region and the creation of witness protection programmes for cases of political corruption linked to organised crime . These reforms will be good for Mexican society in general and also good for the pockets of Mexican and foreign oil investors .
answer:
Clearly, organised crime is openly challenging and fragmenting the state Almost every week we hear about more mass graves discovered


question:
Yes, too many of us are in pointless jobs - but don't despair. In his usual prescient fashion, Guy Debord once lamented that "young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit . Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit." The Situationists' vision of the future was not, as I'm sure you've guessed, an optimistic one , but it's nice to see that their spirit is alive and well on the London underground . "How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels that one's job should not exist?" a poster asks , as part of a campaign called #bullshitjobs devised by the anarchist magazine Strike! Another poster reads:"The moral and spiritual damage that comes from the situation is profound . It is a scar on our collective soul . Virtually no one talks about it." And a third:"It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all working." Just what every commuter needs on their first day back at work, you might think . But I love these subvertisements, mainly because they are right . No one talks about the soul-crushing sadness experienced by the chronically exhausted and unfulfilled hordes . Forget the garbage disposal : we're in urgent need of an army of pooper-scooper-wielding refuseniks , because bullshit jobs are everywhere . Of course , complaining about any of this or doing something as daring as opting out finds you guilty of the most conspicuous of crimes against capitalism: laziness . Or a suspicious lack of ambition, resulting in the label of "scrounger" if you're working class and that of "pampered entitled millennial with no moral backbone" if you're middle class . But don't despair : humans have an incredible capacity for survival . There are ways to endure the pointlessly mundane jobs that many of us do . Here are my tips :. One of the most level-headed people I know sets very little store in his job when it comes to defining himself as a human being . Instead ,  it's the things he does outside of work that he regards as his main means of personal fulfilment . Guy Debord regarded maximum pleasure as the central aim of any revolution , so start your own personal one, via music or reading or sex or anything that you enjoy doing creatively . Then pour your soul into these activities instead of thinking about work . If you can do one of these activities during working hours , even better . Not people who use the word "facetime" as a way of describing hanging out, or talk about things "going forward" . These people will be first up against the wall . I mean family and friends, people you love . Love is the answer (actually, anaesthetising yourself with drink and drugs is the answer , but unfortunately it's less slimming) . This sounds flippant but can actually be an effective means of delaying job- induced madness . A friend who worked stacking shelves in Tesco overnight was able to keep his sanity by pretending he was playing a game of foodstuff-sized Tetris . In a similar vein, you could see how many Cradle of Filth lyrics you can subtly weave into your customer service emails, wreak subtle psychological havoc upon your colleagues, or, if you're a hairdresser , deliberately give everyone terrible haircuts for your own amusement (my hairdresser has been doing this for years) . The biggest modern lie is the one told by the Steve Jobses of this world : that, career-wise, we must do what we love in order to experience true happiness . It's a lovely thought but, unfortunately for the generation sold this nonsense by idealistic baby-boomers, a fulfilling job is a luxury, not a given . Instead , as some means of twisted compensation, we're offered slave wages, zero-hours contracts and made-up job titles . But as depressing as things look, it's important to keep hold of those youthful aspirations and harness them , if not for financial profit, then for sanity's sake . It's exhausting , I know, especially as in Britain we work the longest hours in Europe . You are right to be furious . We all are . In the words of the retro anarchist-punk soundbite dusted off by Russell Brand:"Let's have a revolution, yeah?" (At least after a short nap .) Let's continue to campaign for better and more flexible working hours, wages that people can actually survive on, and freedom from harassment and exploitation . Let's vote . Let's join our unions . Let's take the bastards to tribunal (whoops, no legal aid) . Because if you're going to do a bullshit job , you might as well get what you can out of it .
answer:
In a similar vein, you could see how many Cradle of Filth lyrics you can subtly weave into your customer service emails, wreak subtle psychological havoc upon your colleagues, or, if you're a hairdresser The biggest modern lie is the one told by the Steve Jobses of this world


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Joan Didion as the new face of Celine? That's so smart. In dark days, the heart cleaves disproportionately to Lilliputian scraps of good news and so it was that as events played out in Paris last week, I kept thinking of the writer Joan Didion, the star of Celine's latest ad campaign, tiny in black, her porcelain face half obscured by sunglasses as big and as inky as the dinner plates in the kind of restaurants frequented by Patrick Bateman in American Psycho . Oh, the brilliance of Didion! I like to think of myself as wholly resistant to the wicked wiles of big fashion , but this campaign seemed somehow to have got through , and I was all aflutter . What, I wondered, was the provenance of the socking great pendant that hung about her neck in Juergen Teller's photograph? Was it by Celine or was it, as they say, model's own? Could I find something similar on eBay? All day long, between work and news bulletins, I restlessly Googled various combinations of the words "buy", "vintage", "bronze", "large" and "locket" . The coverage of the Paris fashion house's decision to make the author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album and The Year of Magical Thinking its new face has focused mostly on her age . Didion is 80 ; when she began her career as a writer at American Vogue in the late 50s, the personnel director of the magazine's owner, Conde Nast, would from time to time stop her in the hall and ask her when she had last called her mother . Apparently, we should celebrate Teller's photograph of her as a particularly exalted example of fashion's increased willingness to embrace models with wrinkles, liver spots and histories that trail all the way back to the days when women still wore white gloves and little hats to work . At last, the thinking goes, fashion has realised that beauty may also come with silver hair . What? You don't buy that? Well, then . Think of it this way . At least it seems finally to have grasped that women don't simply give up shopping the moment they turn 50 . But it's not Didion's age that interests me . It's her status as a writer and thinker . By choosing her- acclaimed and bestselling, but also trenchant, highly mannered and somewhat complicated - Celine's creative director, Phoebe Philo, is sending out quite a bracing message , even if the semaphore in which it's written will, alas, be largely illegible to those who know nothing of Didion . There' s something going on beyond the cunning commercial appeal to the kind of conflicted consumer who values the inner life as much as the outer  - I mean the kind of woman whose "buttery" leather tote must be big enough to contain at least one hardback if it is not to make her feel guilty for the rest of her life . Isn't this campaign also in the business of suggesting that to be clever and a touch difficult(Didion is nothing if not unpredictable) is to be timelessly beautiful? That this is, in fact, a state to which women might like to aspire? Oh, Phoebe! If only I could afford your gorgeous, minimalist gear , I would dash out and buy something right now just to say thank you . And yet how often have I chickened out? How often do I try, even now, to wear pretty clothes, fun clothes, to embrace colour and print and embroidery? To toddle along in shoes in which I cannot run or even, if I'm honest, walk? Like most professional women who are neither beautiful nor willing to play dumb all of the time, I fear being thought ugly or uncompromising or seeming as if I have not made an effort . I fear, if you will, being seen to be picking a fight, whether by the way I speak or the way I dress . I guess you could say that I wear the swishy frock and high heels the better that I might be allowed, sometimes, to speak my mind . I adore the way that Didion, half child and half sphinx, thinner than a cigarette, looks . But she is not, and never has been, classically beautiful . Nor is she willing to play the fool . She is discreet, but never decorous ; she is fierce, preternaturally observant and, sometimes, a little self-obsessed . And her clothes - unfussy, elegant, practical, a touch forbidding - reflect this . What Teller's photograph says to me is: approach with caution; subject may bite . I love the continuity in this, the wholeness, the confidence in the way that the clothes are an extension of the personality - and I salute Phoebe Philo for recognising it, for extolling it to the world as worthy of admiration, as a thing to be replicated by those women who have the pluck, if not exactly the hard cash .
answer:

In dark days, the heart cleaves disproportionately to Lilliputian scraps of good news