Tag: hit&run

Putin’s Potential Penthouse in Trump Tower Moscow Launches Investigation: Reason Roundup

While Donald Trump was running for president in 2016, lawyer Michael Cohen was negotiating not just for a massive Trump-branded hotel in Moscow but also for Vladimir Putin to get a $50 million penthouse there, reports Buzzfeed.

Now the newly Democrat-controlled House of Representatives is itching to investigate. “We’re way beyond bribery,” says Rep. Eric Swalwell (D–Calif.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “If a candidate for president is offering a foreign adversary a $50 million gift while that adversary through his own backchannels is offering support of the campaign, that’s betrayal at the highest level; that’s conspiracy.”

Swalwell and other members of the House Intelligence Committee say they will investigate beginning in January.

According to Buzzfeed, Cohen and Felix Sater “worked furiously behind the scenes into the summer of 2016 to get the Moscow deal finished—despite public claims that the development was canned in January, before Trump won the Republican nomination.” The idea behind giving Putin the penthouse was to attract other wealthy and important Russians there, Sater says.

Trump insists the deal was all “very legal and very cool.”

“….Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia,” Trump tweeted at 4:59 a.m. Friday morning. “Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn’t do the project. Witch Hunt!”

On Thursday, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the project. This comes on the heels of his August plea to tax evasion, bank fraud, and campaign finance violations related to his work paying off Trump’s former lovers. Now, Cohen admits that he and others in the Trump organization were still negotiating with Russia through at least June of 2016 and that Cohen regularly briefed Trump and his family on the matter.

When asked shortly after inauguration, Trump had said he had “nothing to do with Russia. Haven’t made a phone call to Russia in years. Don’t speak to people from Russia. … I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does.”

Conor Friedersdorf suggests why this may be so damning: it means Russia had leverage over Trump since then. “That he lied has long been clear—all sorts of people with whom he dealt had extensive, well-documented dealings with Russia and Russians,” writes Friedersdorf.

But additional evidence that he lied was revealed Thursday [by Cohen], who admitted that he negotiated on Trump’s behalf to build a skyscraper in Moscow; that his efforts lasted until at least June 2016; that he briefed Trump and members of Trump’s family about the matter; and that he later lied to Congress, to avoid contradicting Trump’s political message.

Consider the implications. At the very beginning of Trump’s presidency, as soon as he lied in that press conference, Vladimir Putin and Russian intelligence possessed the ability to unmask Trump as a liar to the American public, revealing damaging information to Congress and the public about which they had previously been ignorant.

[…] As it would turn out, that was merely the beginning of their leverage. In September 2017, Donald Trump Jr. gave sworn Senate testimony that may be contradicted by Thursday’s revelations, raising the prospect that the Russians have been in possession of evidence suggesting that the president’s son may have committed a felony. And once Cohen lied to Congress about the matter, the Russians were in a position to expose the unlawful behavior of Trump’s personal attorney.

Lawyer Ken White (aka Popehat) writes that once again, we’re faced with “developments that would, under normal circumstances, end a presidency,” and there’s a chance that “they still might.”

FREE MINDS

CNN is taking some heat for firing Marc Lamont Hill, a regular contributor who on Wednesday advocated for a boycott of Israel and a “free Palestine from the river to the sea.” From Mediaite:

His comments sparked an immediate backlash, with many noting “from the river to the sea” is a phrase used by Hamas and other anti-Israel terror groups. The phrase implies the replacement of Israel by a Palestine stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—though Hill disputes this characterization of his comments.

Hill responded:

FREE MARKETS

Links between life expectancy decline, opioid pills, and prohibition. Life expectancy in the U.S. is down again, for the third year in a row, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “After peaking at 78.9 years in 2014, it has dropping to 78.6 years in 2017,” notes Ron Bailey. “This follows decades of increases.” What gives?

While a fiercer than usual outbreak of influenza contributed to the decline last year, the main causes are rising suicides rates and the increasing number of deaths from drug overdoses associated with opioids. Overdose deaths in 2017 rose to 70,237, up from 63,632 the year before. But overdose deaths associated with legal opioids did not significantly change from 2016. The increase came almost entirely from street drugs. And why was there a rise in the use of black market fentanyl and heroin? The biggest reason is most likely the drug war.

People in government have been keen to blame—and sanction—prescription pill makers and sellers, when it’s their own prohibition policies driving this opioid-related death trend.

“Of the 47,600 opioid-related deaths the CDC counted in 2017,” writes Jacob Sullum, “60 percent involved the drug category that consists mainly of illicitly manufactured fentanyl and its analogs” while just “30 percent involved the category that includes the most commonly prescribed pain medications…and some of those deaths also involved fentanyl or heroin.” A dramatic rise in opioid deaths last year can be attributed almost entirely to to fentanyl and its analogs. Sullum:

The Trump administration nevertheless wants to reduce opioid prescriptions by a third during the next three years. But opioid prescriptions, measured by total morphine milligram equivalents (MME) sold, have already fallen by a third since 2010, as indicated by the green area in the chart (with units, in billions of MME, on the right axis). During that period, opioid-related deaths more than doubled. Does this seem like a winning strategy? Far from reducing deaths involving opioids, the crackdown on pain pills has pushed nonmedical users into the black market, where the drugs are much more dangerous because their potency is highly variable and unpredictable.

QUICK HITS

• Clive and Ammon Bundy are condemning Trump’s immigration policies and rhetoric:

• Illegal immigration is at a 10-year low.

• An effort to rechristen the street in front of the Saudi embassy as Jamal Khashoggi Way just got approval from a neighborhood commission in D.C. It must now be approved by the city council, mayor, and Congress.

• Happy holidays from Jacobin magazine!

• In case you want a refresher: “Everyone Who’s Been Charged as a Result of the Mueller Investigation.”

• The latest G-20 summit kicks off in Buenos Aires toady:

• A New York City Councilman wants to fight racism by banning cash-free restaurants.

• A good thread on Section 230:

• Conservative Twitter personality Laura Loomer chained herself to the company’s New York City headquarters door yesterday to protest the decision to ban her from the site. The cops showed up but Twitter is declining to press charges.

• College majors are shifting:

• Huh.

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Conservatives Are Wrong to Call for Government ‘Trust Busting’: New At Reason

One bedrock principle of American conservatism has been its commitment to a freer marketplace. As Ronald Reagan noted, “The societies that have achieved the most spectacular, broad-based progress are neither the most tightly controlled, nor the biggest in size, nor the wealthiest in natural resources.” What unites them, he added, is their belief “in the magic of the marketplace.” In an about face, conservatives these days are increasingly likely to view markets as a dangerous form of dark magic that must have more government control.

For instance, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and prominent right-of-center blogger, last week penned a USA Today column arguing that President Donald Trump ought to follow the lead of trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt and use his power to bust Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google. TR was a Republican, but he was a progressive, which makes him an odd hero for conservatives. Busting might sound benign, but it means government regulation and control.

Reynolds describes these “new tech monsters” as monopolies and quotes TR complaining that “when aggregated wealth demands what is unfair, its immense power can be met only by the still greater power of the people as a whole.” This kind of rhetoric usually emanates from the political Left, which finds every inequity in the capitalistic system to be unfair. Its solution—and it always amounts to the same basic solution—is to empower the government (working on behalf of “the people as a whole”) to tax, regulate and even commandeer private companies.

Nevertheless, many populist Trump supporters likely are nodding their heads in agreement to this proposal. In fact, blustering about the tech industry has become something of a talking point on the right. The reasoning has little to do with principles and more to do with expediency. They don’t like that these big, mostly Bay Area firms seem to be run by progressives. They argue that such companies have used their market power to “censor” conservative opinions. These critics offer some compelling examples of troubling behavior, even if they need a lesson in word usage. Censorship is when government limits speech. And these firms are not monopolies. They are successful private businesses, but others are free to compete with them, writes Steven Greenhut.

View this article.

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Are You Tired of The Great American Shouting Match?: Please Support Reason

It’s our annual webathon, during which we ask readers to support our journalism with tax-deductible donations (go here to give; scroll down to see swag levels). This is a good time to go back to the very beginning of Reason:

Introducing REASON: We accept the responsibility that others have defaulted on. Others preferred to smear the issues with irrelevancies and falsifications. We don’t. Others preferred to be incomprehensible and incoherent. We don’t. Others preferred to ignore your mind. We won’t.

When REASON speaks of poverty, racism, the draft, the war, student power, politics, and other vital issues, it shall be reasons, not slogans, it gives for conclusions. Proof, not belligerent assertion. Logic, not legends. Coherence, not contradictions. This is our promise; this is the reason for REASON.

Those paragraphs are from the first issue of Reason, which debuted in the generally awful year of 1968 (the second paragraph is emblazoned our own brand-new T-shirt, and complimentary with a $250 donation). We’ve come a long way since then, as a magazine and as a country. Founded by the late Lanny Friedlander, a 20-year-old student at Boston University, Reason started out as a mimeographed ‘zine but now is nothing short of a multimedia juggernaut. The monthly magazine is flourishing, and so are our website, video platform, and podcasts. Fifty years ago in America, the Vietnam War was raging and the draft seemed inescapable; pot and homosexuality and abortion were completely or mostly illegal; women and blacks were shut out from anything approaching full participation in society. The media were dominated by a handful of broadcast networks, newspapers, and publishing houses. Airlines, interstate trucking, and phone service, along with most of the economy, were regulated to the hilt. Freak flags were starting to fly, but really just barely.

We didn’t know it then, but what we might call The Great American Shouting Match was just getting started, between parents and kids, squares and hippies, main frames and personal computers, gray-flannel suits and blue jeans, beehivers and bra burners…the unbuttoning of everything was underway. That’s mostly been a good thing, for individuals and society. It’s been a messy evolution, for sure, with a lot of mistakes, dead-ends, and failures; but we are, in powerful and incalculable ways, more able to develop and speak our minds than we were a half-century ago. We’re also more able to live however we want. One quick example: Around the time of Reason‘s founding, a majority of states prohibited unmarried women from legally purchasing birth control (that “right” would only be fully established in 1972 by a Supreme Court ruling).

One of the reasons I’m proud to work at Reason is that we’ve played a consistent role in advancing the rights of individuals to live however they want, as long as it’s peaceful and consensual. From our earliest days, we advocated equality for women, gays, and racial and ethnic minorities even as our counterparts on the right and left remained trapped in older ways of thinking (blacks wanted to live in ghettos, women didn’t really want to work outside the home, homosexuality was a mental illness, right?). The same goes for arguing for the rights of entrepreneurs to come up with new ways of doing business, even or especially when innovation challenges established interests. Yet Reason has never simply or mindlessly argued for mere iconoclasm, either. We just think that people should be more free.

That commitment to individualism—and hence tolerance and pluralism—is matched by how we strive to express ourselves: “Proof, not belligerent assertion. Logic, not legends. Coherence, not contradictions.” Do we live up to those ideals 100 percent of the time? No, but in a world seemingly populated exclusively by troops of howler monkeys flinging rhetorical feces at one another, we don’t argue from mere authority, tradition, or attitude. We present the best-available evidence and lay out our case for this or that point of view, policy, or position. We can respect the past and learn from it without being trapped by it (the conservative’s problem) without insisting on redesigning society from scratch (the progressive’s problem).

This is the golden age of distrust, of “belligerent assertion” in Lanny Friedlander’s term. Nobody believes anyone anymore, and the volume on most discussions of politics and culture is turned up to 11, especially among lefties suffering from Stage 4 Trump Derangement Syndrome and right-wingers obsessed with dunking on the libs.

When you support Reason, you’re not just helping us imagine, investigate, and champion a world of “Free Minds and Free Markets,” you’re also making a statement about how we should comport ourselves as a society. You’re saying no to The Great American Shouting Match and the rank polarization and politicization of everything. You’re saying yes to a future that is more free, more fair, and ultimately more fun.

Here’s what different gift levels get you:

$50 Reason bumper sticker.

$100 All of the above PLUS a Reason magazine subscription (includes print or digital; digital includes access to archives of 50 years of Reason magazine). Receive invitations to Reason events in your area.

$250 All of the above PLUS a newly designed Reason T-Shirt (see image).

$500 All of the above PLUS books by Reason authors.

$1,000 All of the above PLUS a private lunch in Washington, DC with a Reason editor and an invitation to Reason Weekend 2019 in Phoenix, Arizona.

$5,000 All of the above PLUS 1 ticket to Reason Weekend for first-time attendees

$10,000 All of the above PLUS 2 tickets to Reason Weekend for first-time attendees.

Your support is vital to everything we do—and massively appreciated.

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Kurt Loder Reviews The House That Jack Built

Lars von Trier’s blithely vile new serial-killer movie, The House That Jack Built, made its one-day-only U.S. debut in a few lucky cities on Wednesday. It was an unrated “director’s cut” of the film—the same one that triggered walkouts at the Cannes Film Festival last May—and it will be succeeded on December 14th by an R-rated version that will linger in theatres for as long as anyone sees a point in screening it, writes Kurt Loder.

View this article.

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Joshua Browder Is Building You a Robot Lawyer: New at Reason

Joshua Browder was drowning in parking fines when he realized the British government’s labyrinthine appeals process could be navigated more quickly by software than by a person. As a teenager he built the DoNotPay app to do just that. But three years later, Browder has much bigger ambitions: He’d like to see robot lawyers replace humans, doing all manner of legal work for (virtually) free.

Now 21, the Stanford-trained wunderkind is developing artificial intelligence-driven algorithms to help American and British residents navigate the web of laws that can turn a small mistake, such as a traffic ticket accidentally left unpaid, into a bench warrant. And he’s particularly interested in helping people make sense of the two countries’ immigration systems.

“One of the biggest projects we have coming up is helping people who need to get their relatives into the United States legally,” he says. “In the past we’ve also helped refugees claim asylum in the U.K., and also helped homeless people claim government housing. All of these processes are so bureaucratic that if you have no resources at all, it really is impossible to get the help you need.”

In August, Browder spoke to Reason‘s Justin Monticello at his team’s Palo Alto headquarters—the same house Mark Zuckerberg rented during his first summer there—about the project.

View this article.

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Brickbat: It’s Not My Job

British policeLeaders of London, England’s Metropolitan Police have warned they may tell officers to stop trying to arrest resisting suspects unless they start getting support from the public. The remarks came after several incidents of officers being assaulted while people filmed the confrontations but did not intervene. “We don’t come to work to get assaulted, and if we’re not going to be backed up in what we’re doing then what is the point?” said Ken Marsh, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation.

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Gonzaga University Won’t Let Ben Shapiro Speak on Campus

GonzagaGonzaga University will not allow its chapter of the College Republicans to host conservative pundit Ben Shapiro.

An administrator of the private, Catholic school in Spokane, Washington, cited safety concerns and the potential for Shapiro’s visit to create a “hostile environment” on campus.

“Gonzaga’s events policy requires us to consider whether an event would pose substantial risk to the safety of any member of our campus community,” wrote Judi Biggs Garbuio, according to Campus Reform.

It’s not clear whose safety Biggs Garbuio believes is threatened by Shapiro’s presence. Her message to the College Republicans seems to suggest concern about both disruptive leftist protesters and what Shapiro might say. Neither are good reasons to deny students a chance to hear from Shapiro: One gives veto power to the mob, the other conflates words with violence.

Gonzaga is a private university and can do as it pleases, of course. I will note, however, that Gonzaga’s broad conception of public safety is selective. Concerns about a hostile environment and unspecified risks to members of the community did not stop the administration from hiring former Mizzou professor Melissa Click.

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Illegal Immigrants Are at a 10-Year Low, So Can We Chill for a Minute?

A funny thing happened on the way to stringing razor wire, splitting up families, and sending the military to police the United States’ border with Mexico: The number of illegal immigrants—especially from Mexico—in America continued its decade-long decline. Via Pew Research:

The number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. fell to its lowest level in more than a decade, according to new Pew Research Center estimates based on 2016 government data. The decline is due almost entirely to a sharp decrease in the number of Mexicans entering the country without authorization.

Note that we reached peak illegals (and peak illegal Mexicans) back in 2006 or 2007, right around the time the housing bubble popped and what eventually become the financial crisis started kicking into high (low?) gear. Between 2007 and 2016, the number of unauthorized Mexican immigrants declined from about 6.9 million people to 5.5 million people. These days, illegals are most likely to come from Asia (especially China and India) and to enter the country with legal documents, such as a tourist, student, or work visa and then overstay. Deportations peaked in 2013, when Barack Obama was running the show.

Why has illegal immigration from Mexico declined? According to Pew’s Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohn, illegals missed their families. One also presumes that the sluggish U.S. economy presented fewer opportunities.

According to Mexican government survey data [from 2009 to 2014], most returnees said they left the U.S. of their own accord, and the majority cited family reunification as the main reason for going to Mexico. However, 14% said they came back because they were deported.

At the same time, the number of illegals from Central America (chiefly Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala) has increased over the past decade, from 1.5 million people to about 1.85 million.

Why might more Central Americans’ be heading north? Mostly because those countries have gotten poorer over time, often due to U.S. intervention. Reason‘s Shikha Dalmia explains, in the 1980s,

President Ronald Reagan, eager for a showdown with the [Soviet Union, funded]…the Contra insurgency against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and paramilitary operations to prop up the U.S.-friendly regimes of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

The upshot was civil war and a complete social breakdown from which these countries have never recovered.

As Princeton’s Doug Massey noted at a recent immigration conference (that I co-organized on behalf of Reason Foundation), in the 1960s, the GDP of these “frontline countries” was equivalent to those of “non-frontline states” such as Costa Rica, Belize, and Panama. Now the latter cohort’s GDP is almost three times greater. Likewise, while the homicide rate of non-frontline states is 19.7 per 100,000, it is 43.5 per 100,000 for the frontline states. San Pedro Sula, the Honduran city where the caravan started, has become the murder capital of the world.

Prior to Reagan’s intervention, migration from Central America was negligible.

People troubled by illegal immigration may find comfort in the trend line of the past decade. But to me, the decline is worrisome. Our problems are only beginning when people stop choosing to come here, whether legally or not. Increased living standards follow economic growth, which follows population growth. And population growth follows immigration. Contra nativist Rep. Steve King (R–Iowa), the only proven way you can maintain your “civilization” is with somebody else’s babies. And for all the fears of literal and figurative invasions by supposedly unassimilable Mexicans and Central Americans, crime and most other social pathologies have been declining regardless of the flow and ebb of immigration (both legal and illegal). The real immigration crisis is when newcomers stop showing up.

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NYC Councilman Proposes Cash-Free Business Ban to Battle ‘Insidious Racism’

With many establishments moving away from accepting physical currency, a New York City councilman has proposed legislation that would prohibit businesses from going cash-free.

New York City Councilman Ritchie Torres (D–15) introduced a bill Wednesday that would make it “unlawful” for restaurants and retailers “to refuse to accept payment in cash from consumers.” Businesses found to be in violation would have to pay a $250 fine the first offense, and a $500 fine for each repeated offense.

Torres told Grub Street he sees cash-free policies as “racially exclusionary in practice.” According to a 2015 study from the Urban Institute, 11.7 percent of New York households had no bank accounts. The survey did not break down its results by race, though a national survey released last month by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) did: Roughly 6.5 percent of American households were unbanked last year, the FDIC said, including 16.9 percent of black households and 14 percent of Hispanic households.

Cashless businesses “gentrify the marketplace,” Torres told Grub Street. “On the surface, cashlessness seems benign, but when you reflect on it, the insidious racism that underlies a cashless business model becomes clear,” he added.

Torres’ legislation, cosponsored by six other councilmembers, is actually pretty mild, all things considered. A similar bill proposed in Washington, D.C., earlier this year would have made it illegal for companies to either refuse cash or offer discounts for paying in cash, with both violations punishable by fines ranging from $1,000 to $8,000. A cash-free business ban introduced in Chicago last October, meanwhile, threatened daily fines of $2,500, as well as the potential revocation of offending businesses’ licenses.

Both bans have yet to be enacted. In fact, cash-free businesses are largely legal in 49 states. Only Massachusetts has a law on the books banning establishments from refusing cash.

Yet the rise of cash-free businesses can be explained without resorting to accusations of racism. For one thing, there’s a lot of time, effort, and money that goes into accepting and processing cash. “Cash has to be handled. It has to be stored in a [point of sale] system. It has to be counted at least every shift. At the end of the day it has to counted and tallied into a sales report,” John Gordon, founder of Pacific Management Consulting Group, a restaurant consulting firm, told Reason‘s Christian Britschgi in October 2017, around the time that Chicago’s ban was proposed. Gordon also explained that cash can be miscounted or stolen, and that some businesses need to pay for armored trucks to take their cash to the bank.

Many companies launch with cash-free payment models to protect their employees; the absence of cash transactions has long been cited as a safeguard for Uber drivers, for instance.

Going cash-free is easier for many types of businesses, but it can also make things easier for consumers. Non-cash forms of payment are getting faster by the day, meaning cash-free establishments can offer faster service. Plus, consumers can more easily keep track of what they’re spending.

But what about the alleged discrimination against poor people and minorities? Well, as Britschgi argued in July, it’s not as if retail businesses want to turn away paying customers. It is conceivable, though, that the businesses going cash-free are the ones where people rarely pay in cash anyway. For those establishments, it just makes more sense to eliminate cash transactions altogether.

It’s also worth noting that cash-free establishments tend to be on the pricier side. Is going cash-free, then, a form of price discrimination? Maybe, but I don’t see very many politicians trying to regulate how much restaurants can charge for food.

Moreover, statistics suggest the number of people without bank accounts is steadily decreasing. The 6.5 percent of unbanked households in the country as of 2017 is down from 7 percent in 2015, 7.7 percent in 2013, and 8.2 percent in 2011. In New York, meanwhile, the unbanked rate dropped from 14.3 percent in 2011 to 11.7 percent in 2013.

Businesses owners, not politicians, should decide what forms of payment they’ll accept, and consumers who prefer to pay in cash can take their business elsewhere. The market is pretty good at these kinds of transactions, especially since private establishments have to compete to stay in business.

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Chicago Mayoral Candidate Wants To Settle City Debts by Taxing the Neighbors

Bill DaleyChicago has declined in population for the third year in a row, according to the census, marking it as a significant outlier in America’s urban centers. It’s saddled with enormous debts, partly due to unpaid pension obligations, and the city is trying everything from taxing sodas and human waste, to holding citizens’ cars for ransom, in order to make money.

One candidate to succeed Mayor Rahm Emanuel (soon to be heading for the exit himself) has a novel idea to fix the city’s financial woes: stealing from the neighbors.

Candidate Bill Daley, son of former Mayor Richard J. Dailey, brother of former Mayor Richard M. Daley, and Emanuel’s successor as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff (can Chicago’s political dynasty get any more incestuous?), is proposing a commuter tax to try to get more money from suburbanites who work in the city of Chicago. “We have to find new revenues, and everything is on the table,” he said in a speech.

A city inspector in 2010 determined that a 1-percent commuter tax could potentially raise $300 million dollars. Except, the Chicago Tribune notes that when Philadelphia instituted a commuter tax, it saw job losses, and other cities who have done the same “are generally considered economically stagnant and have lost a substantial percentage of their populations since 1950.”

Yet, when asked if he thinks a commuter tax would drive business out of the city, Daley said he didn’t think it would.

It’s a baffling response given Chicago’s current trend of population loss, one matched by the surrounding areas and the state of Illinois. Why would you even think about giving people another reason to avoid going to the city? Why would you think people would accept this given that the current economic climate is already driving people out the door?

Adding a bit more absurdity is the fact that Daley’s plan to deal with Chicago’s crime problem is to spend even more money on a new department at City Hall to fight crime. That means more city government employees and therefore even more public employee pension obligations! (Oh, and he’s blaming the crime problems on not having enough gun control.)

Daley did say that he was also potentially supportive of changes to the Illinois state constitution that currently prevent the state and cities from scaling back any pensions or benefits for government employees, a rule that is driving the state to ruin. But in the absence of that change, adding to the pension crisis via a new city bureaucracy and then trying to get even more money from a reduced population seems remarkably irresponsible.

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