Tag: news

Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions

Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

New on the Short Circuit podcast: A special live episode at University of Georgia Law featuring Prof. Michael Wells of UGA, Prof. Eric Segall of Georgia State, and Andrew Fleischman of Ross & Pines. Thanks to FedSoc and ACS for sponsoring the event!

  • Washington, D.C. wine bar that hosts private events for international delegations and domestic public interest groups sues President Trump, alleging that he and the Trump International Hotel engaged in unfair competition by using the perception that, by patronizing the hotel, lobbyists and diplomats would ingratiate themselves to the president. The president removes the case to federal court, where it is dismissed for failure to state a claim: D.C. Circuit: Which was the correct result. Merely having a famous proprietor is not unfair competition. (No word on how control of the world’s most powerful military should weigh into the analysis.)
  • In a short opinion, the Second Circuit politely reminds district courts that they really oughtn’t dismiss cases under the Rooker-Feldman doctrine anymore.
  • Drug dog alerts to package arriving in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Turns out there are no drugs, but there are gun parts and ammunition. A search of another package from the same sender turns up similar contraband, leading to the sender’s arrest for illegal transport of a firearm. Defendant: They’re the U.S. Virgin Islands, so the border exception to the warrant requirement doesn’t apply. The evidence should be thrown out. Third Circuit: There are different kinds of borders, and although the Virgin Islands are a U.S. territory, Congress has established a customs border between them and the mainland, so the evidence stays in.
  • In a short opinion, the Sixth Circuit also politely reminds district courts that they really oughtn’t dismiss cases under the Rooker-Feldman doctrine anymore. Judge Sutton concurs to politely remind district courts that, for the love of all that is holy, they need to knock this off already.
  • Nashville, Tenn. officer, responding to an alarm at a night club, arrests man outside, declines to investigate man’s story that he spent the night working in the club and his belongings are locked inside. (Criminal charges are dropped.) A Fourth Amendment violation? Although the officer was “either mentally deficient or dishonest” during deposition, the district court grants the officer qualified immunity. But the Sixth Circuit reverses, explaining that the officer’s refusal to consider the circumstances was the “antithesis of probable cause.” But the dissent argues that the officer should be forgiven because it was late at night and cold outside; it’s the club manager who’s to blame.
  • Battle Creek, Mich. officer, responding to reports of an armed man at a drive-thru liquor store, finds a teenage boy armed with a black BB gun. In a two-second flurry, the boy discards the gun and the officer shoots the boy. The precise sequence of events is disputed. Sixth Circuit: Because everything happened so quickly, the officer gets qualified immunity. Dissent: “It should go without saying that reasonable police officers do not shoot disarmed young boys with upraised hands.”
  • After three and a half years of litigation and more than a thousand docket entries in this protracted attorneys’ fees dispute, the Seventh Circuit delivers a well-deserved bench slap to the opposing counsel from hell (who still walks away from it all with $800,000 in attorney’s fees).
  • Eight years after the death of his wife, Illinois criminal defense lawyer is charged with her murder. After two trials, he is finally acquitted in March 2017. Shortly thereafter he sues the police, the coroner, and others, alleging they had framed him. Must the judge recuse herself because her daughter is an attorney at the Exoneration Project, a group funded by the lawyer’s lawyers? Seventh Circuit: No, the daughter has been screened off from the case. Her merely being related to the judge isn’t enough to merit recusal, nor is the judge’s previous attendance at an Innocence Project fundraising dinner at which the plaintiff and other exonerees were honored.
  • After a Dallas, Ore. school district adopts a new policy allowing a transgender male high school student to use boys’ bathrooms and locker rooms, the parents of students who feel uncomfortable changing clothes in front of someone born biologically female sue, alleging a host of constitutional objections, along with a Title IX claim. Ninth Circuit: We recognize the sensitivities of all involved, but the claims fail.
  • After YouTube restricts access to and demonetizes educational videos by conservative group Prager University, PragerU sues, alleging that YouTube violated the group’s First Amendment rights and violated the Lanham Act by falsely advertising that it is committed to free speech. Ninth Circuit: Friendly reminder that the First Amendment restricts only government action. YouTube may be a virtual public square, but that doesn’t make it a state actor. As for YouTube’s “braggadocio” about its commitment to free speech, that’s all nonactionable puffery.
  • After pulling a woman over for a busted taillight, LAPD officers arrest her for an outstanding warrant. She informs them that, due to a shoulder injury, she cannot place her hands behind her back. They ignore this and her cries of pain, handcuff her behind her back. Excessive force? District court: Qualified immunity—no case says cops can’t do that. Ninth Circuit: Uh, no. We’ve said for more than 20 years that cops can’t handcuff a suspect in a way to cause pain if there’s no immediate threat. Might’ve violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, too.
  • Allegation: A week prior to teen’s homicide trial, Hobbs, N.M. auto shop owner produces invoice showing that the car police suspected was used in drive-by shooting was in fact in the repair shop—something police could easily have verified the day after the shooting, nine months earlier. Police obtain a warrant for business records related to repair of the car and enter the owner’s residence (which is on the same property as the shop) with guns drawn, seize all electronic devices. An unreasonable search and seizure? Retaliation for producing exculpatory evidence? District court: Can’t sue over that. Tenth Circuit: Can’t sue over that.
  • Wichita, Kan. police shoot and kill an unarmed man as he walks to a parking garage after last call. Police say the man had a gun, and they saw him shoot it. Everyone else says he didn’t and, therefore, couldn’t. Medical experts say the police shot that man at least three times while he was lying face down on the ground. Tenth Circuit: The officers are entitled to qualified immunity for (1) shooting an unarmed man and (2) failing to warn him before they opened fired. But no qualified immunity for (3) shooting while the man posed no threat, lying on the ground. Dissent: “The Constitution clearly prohibited both officers from shooting an unarmed individual posing no threat to anyone.”
  • When a quinquagenarian detainee at Cobb County, Ga. jail politely asks a guard to make a phone call, the guard shoves the detainee to the concrete floor, breaking his hip. Then, as the man howls in pain, the guard tries to drag him to his feet and berates him. This being the twelfth time the guard had been investigated for violating jail policies and the sixth time he was found to have violated them, he’s fired. Eleventh Circuit: The detainee can sue the (now-ex) guard. Partial dissent: He should be able to sue the supervisors, too.
  • In 2016, railroad asks the feds for permission to convert a 1.2-mile stretch of track in Miami into a recreational trail. Abutting landowners: Whoa, the railroad got permission (in 1924) to conduct trains through our backyards. If they want to use the land for something else, the gov’t must pay just compensation. Federal Circuit: Florida law does indeed give landowners bordering railroads an ownership interest up to the center line of the right of way. (N.B.: We have it on good authority that nearly every other state has a similar law.) The suit should not have been dismissed.

When the port district officials in Louisiana condemned Violet Dock Port’s port business, the company was awarded almost $30 mil in just compensation after a trial. The port district took the property (and continues running the port business at a profit), but there’s a twist! Despite the judgment, the district says it doesn’t want to pay anything for the property and nobody can make it. Which, argues the Institute for Justice in this amicus brief filed with the Fifth Circuit, is only half right.

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Crispin Odey’s Flagship Fund Nets 5% Weekly Gain As ‘Leveraged-Long’ Hedge Funds Pummeled By Record Pullback

Crispin Odey’s Flagship Fund Nets 5% Weekly Gain As ‘Leveraged-Long’ Hedge Funds Pummeled By Record Pullback

Crispin Odey, one of the most well-known permabears in the hedge-fund industry, has been vindicated this week as stocks cemented their worst run since the financial crisis.

As the Financial Times reports, Odey, who has bet against everything from Tesla to the British pound in recent years, posted a 5% gain in his European fund this week thanks to the short-seller’s bets against Tesla and shale stocks.

Odey

Though few funds have advertised their performance amid the market carnage – as Bloomberg reported earlier this week, many funds upped their leverage as stocks soared to record highs before the big market rout.

Hedge funds, which use borrowed money to amplify returns, went risk-on in a major way this month. Net leverage, a measure of industry risk appetite that takes into account long versus short positions, rose by about 5 percentage points, one of the fastest expansions in years, according to data compiled by Morgan Stanley’s prime brokerage unit.

To be sure, Odey needs the party to continue to push his fund back into the green for 2020 (he’s still down 5% for the year). But if investors don’t get the Sunday-evening ‘coordinated central bank action’ that CNBC has seemingly brainwashed the market into expecting (many believe it triggered Friday’s intraday relief rally). However, if Jim Bullard’s comments from earlier today are truly representative of how the doves on the FOMC are feeling, the three rate cuts priced into the Fed funds futures market might seem overly optimistic.

When his peers started to seem overly long, Odey’s fund was one of a handful of traders taking the other side.

Per the FT:

“We went into coronavirus with the market incredibly bullish, everyone was long,” Mr Odey said in an interview. “I’m more cautious than most people.”

Odey believes markets are headed for more pain, as the coronavirus outbreak, and the ensuing supply- and demand-side shocks, make it impossible for companies to deliver on the market’s elevated earnings-growth expectations.

He said that last year’s rally in markets – the S&P 500 delivered a return of 29% – was driven by the expansion of price/earnings multiples rather than earnings, which meant that investors were paying more for the same streams of profits.

“What you really needed for this year [2020] was for earnings to come through,” he said. “Earnings are just not coming through – it’s going to be the opposite. The question is, does another dose of monetary madness offset the willingness of the market to really look at what’s really going on?”

Odey’s fund lost 10.1% last year after gaining a staggering 53% in 2018. The year got off to a pretty brutal start as Odey’s bet against Tesla drove his fund deep into the red. But with markets in turmoil, perhaps more investors will start to take notice of themes like the threat of ‘Falling Angels’ triggering a blowup in the corporate credit market.

Most of this money hasn’t gone into capital spending and expansion to boost profits and revenue, Odey claims. Instead, companies have lavished borrowed money on stock buybacks.

“We [the economy] have long ago stopped allocating capital efficiently,” he said. “A long time after savings have gone, credit will still be there, and it’s horrible.”

With so many weak spots, one can’t help but wonder whether this might really be the start of the “profound 25-year bear market” that Odey once predicted.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 02/28/2020 – 15:55

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3ceJs1v Tyler Durden

Trump Admin Considering Tax Cuts, Pressuring Powell To Cut Rates In Hopes Of Containing Coronavirus Fallout

Trump Admin Considering Tax Cuts, Pressuring Powell To Cut Rates In Hopes Of Containing Coronavirus Fallout

It appears that every response offered by the Trump administration to contain the coronavirus pandemic, is wrong.

In a late Friday article, the WaPo reported that the Trump administration officials are holding preliminary conversations about economic responses to the coronavirus, and with stocks suffering their worst week since the collapse of AIG, “among the options considered are pursuing a targeted tax cut package”. Additionally, Trump cronies are also discussing whether the White House should lean even harder on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, even though in a surprise announcement on Friday afternoon, Fed Chair Powell the central bank on Friday afternoon said it would step in if necessary.

While the explanation is hardly necessary, the WaPo also points out that “these ideas would not be designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus, but they would seek to arrest the economic fears spreading through the economy. And some of the ideas would need cooperation from Congress or the Fed, as the White House has limited powers to unilaterally rewrite tax policy or direct the central bank to act.”

And yet the reason why the market barely even glanced at this report from WaPo, is that if a business revenue has collapsed as global supply chains implode and as consumer demand tumbles as Americans opt to stay locked up inside until the pandemic passes, there is no pre-tax income, and thus no taxes to pay, so cutting the tax rate has zero effect on anything.

What’s worse, if this is the best the Trump admin can come up with, it means the president refuses to even acknowledge how serious the situation is, when instead by this point Trump should at least be grasping the catastrophic dilemma the entire world is now facing, one which BofA called “an impossible trade-off” facing authorities:

  • Adopt the Draconian quarantine measures seen in China and trigger a global recession as worldwide economic activity grinds to a halt
  • Risk a pandemic by failing to take more aggressive action on Covid-19, also resulting in a global recession

That Trump is unwilling to proceed with either one of these two options – and only two as there is nothing more Trump can do absent pulling a page from the Hong Kong playbook and handing out $10,000 to every US citizen – means that the Coronavirus pandemic in the US will only get worse… assuming the CDC ever starts running the right tests to find out just how many Americans are infected.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 02/28/2020 – 15:41

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32DnbWF Tyler Durden

Hey, It’s Not Just Coronavirus!

Hey, It’s Not Just Coronavirus!

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Whatever the Democratic Party is infected with may be worse than covid-19. The symptoms presented point to a rare illness known as kuru. By now, we all understand that diseases easily jump between continents in this era of incessant air travel. The National Institute of Health’s MedlinePlus bulletin has this to say about it:

Kuru is found among people from New Guinea who practiced a form of cannibalism in which they ate the brains of dead people as part of a funeral ritual. This practice stopped [allegedly] in 1960, but cases of kuru were reported for many years afterward because the disease has a long incubation period…. Kuru causes brain and nervous system changes similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease… bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also called mad cow disease. The main risk factor for kuru is eating human brain tissue, which can contain the infectious particles.

Does this account for the public’s preoccupation with Zombies? Is something deeply sinister roiling in the dark interstices of American life?

The public still doesn’t know for sure what was going on in the congressional SCIF chamber (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) deep in the Capitol’s sub-basement back in January, where Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) was busy spirit-cooking impeachment testimony. Was something else bubbling away on his Coleman stove down there? Say, a fricassee of Jeffrey Epstein’s frontal lobes? Did Nancy Pelosi come back for seconds? Her subsequent behavior implicates acute kuru infection, the inappropriate laughter, slurred speech, tardive dyskinesia, paranoia.

Healthline.com reports:

The name kuru means ‘to shiver’ or ‘trembling in fear.’ The symptoms of the disease include muscle twitching and loss of coordination. Other symptoms include difficulty walking, involuntary movements, behavioral and mood changes, dementia, and difficulty eating. The latter can cause malnutrition. Kuru has no known cure. It’s usually fatal within one year of contraction.

See how this neatly corresponds to the 2020 campaign, nomination, and election cycle. That is, the symptoms will become more pronounced as the year rolls out, culminating with a cluster of fatalities in early November. Election fatalities, that is, and then perhaps the death of the old party itself. Signs and omens abound.

Note, for example, the op-ed column Thursday by New York Times regular Gail Collins.

Take a close look at that photo.

Some analysts might simply see a pooch-faced old biddy exuding the vapors of smuggery, but a trained diagnostician would detect prodromes of kuru in the unnatural squint and the inappropriate expression of mirth, considering the grave subject of the op-ed is a high-order threat to global stability, surely no laughing matter.

Manifestations of kuru were clearly evident in this week’s Democratic candidates’ debate. Joe Biden has been obviously ill for months — though I suspect he remains in the contest solely to avoid being deposed for his money-laundering activities in Ukraine while vice-president. Mr. Biden shocked the nation Tuesday night, declaring that roughly half the US population, 150 million people, died as a result of gun violence last year. Wow, and nobody noticed? That would be an event comparable to “the Rapture,” and yet somehow the mainstream media missed the story — though, let’s face it, they do miss an awful lot these days. In another strange incident, Mr. Biden introduced himself as a “candidate for the senate.” Is there some law against running for two political offices simultaneously? Did The Washington Post check with the Delaware Board of Elections? Or is the former veep just hallucinating?

Judging by his utterances, Bernie Sanders appears to be another advanced case. (Let’s be honest, he’s presented symptoms of kuru for decades.) This week, they were especially florid in the irrepressible rhapsodizing over Fidel Castro and the achievements of his regime in advancing Cuban literacy. One wonders how many Cuban-American voters in Dade County, Florida, read about that on their Apple news-feed. Did Bernie’s campaign staff tell him that he didn’t need Florida to win the election, or are they infected, too? Advice to Bernie Bros and sundry supporters: if you attend any of the Super Tuesday meet-and-greets for the candidate, avoid the chopped liver canapes. They may be somebody’s medulla oblongata.

Even Mike Bloomberg seemed to have something wrong with him, as when he virtually bragged to a national TV audience that he paid $50-million dollars to “buy” the 2018 Democratic Party midterm election victory. There’s a sound-bite he’ll never recover from! But my diagnostician’s eye suspects another little known and exotic disorder: Latah, defined in Wikipedia as follows:

Latah…. [A] condition in which abnormal behaviors result from a person experiencing a sudden shock…. Latah is considered a culture-specific startle disorder…. Similar conditions have been recorded within other cultures and locations. For example, there are the so-called Jumping Frenchmen of Maine, imu among women of the Ainu people of Japan, mali-mali or silok among Filipinos, and bat-schi among Thais. Persons with latah make movements reminiscent of behaviors normally peculiar to certain childhood developmental stages. The person is unlikely to remember anything occurring during the episode.

Having to suffer the aspersions of all those kuru sufferers lined up against him behind their podiums, Mr. Bloomberg apparently snapped. Washington DC is a hot zone for many poorly understood diseases of the mind. Perhaps the White House corona virus team can spare a few NIH clinicians to look into these troubling matters.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 02/28/2020 – 15:30

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2I6HimI Tyler Durden

Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions

Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

New on the Short Circuit podcast: A special live episode at University of Georgia Law featuring Prof. Michael Wells of UGA, Prof. Eric Segall of Georgia State, and Andrew Fleischman of Ross & Pines. Thanks to FedSoc and ACS for sponsoring the event!

  • Washington, D.C. wine bar that hosts private events for international delegations and domestic public interest groups sues President Trump, alleging that he and the Trump International Hotel engaged in unfair competition by using the perception that, by patronizing the hotel, lobbyists and diplomats would ingratiate themselves to the president. The president removes the case to federal court, where it is dismissed for failure to state a claim: D.C. Circuit: Which was the correct result. Merely having a famous proprietor is not unfair competition. (No word on how control of the world’s most powerful military should weigh into the analysis.)
  • In a short opinion, the Second Circuit politely reminds district courts that they really oughtn’t dismiss cases under the Rooker-Feldman doctrine anymore.
  • Drug dog alerts to package arriving in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Turns out there are no drugs, but there are gun parts and ammunition. A search of another package from the same sender turns up similar contraband, leading to the sender’s arrest for illegal transport of a firearm. Defendant: They’re the U.S. Virgin Islands, so the border exception to the warrant requirement doesn’t apply. The evidence should be thrown out. Third Circuit: There are different kinds of borders, and although the Virgin Islands are a U.S. territory, Congress has established a customs border between them and the mainland, so the evidence stays in.
  • In a short opinion, the Sixth Circuit also politely reminds district courts that they really oughtn’t dismiss cases under the Rooker-Feldman doctrine anymore. Judge Sutton concurs to politely remind district courts that, for the love of all that is holy, they need to knock this off already.
  • Nashville, Tenn. officer, responding to an alarm at a night club, arrests man outside, declines to investigate man’s story that he spent the night working in the club and his belongings are locked inside. (Criminal charges are dropped.) A Fourth Amendment violation? Although the officer was “either mentally deficient or dishonest” during deposition, the district court grants the officer qualified immunity. But the Sixth Circuit reverses, explaining that the officer’s refusal to consider the circumstances was the “antithesis of probable cause.” But the dissent argues that the officer should be forgiven because it was late at night and cold outside; it’s the club manager who’s to blame.
  • Battle Creek, Mich. officer, responding to reports of an armed man at a drive-thru liquor store, finds a teenage boy armed with a black BB gun. In a two-second flurry, the boy discards the gun and the officer shoots the boy. The precise sequence of events is disputed. Sixth Circuit: Because everything happened so quickly, the officer gets qualified immunity. Dissent: “It should go without saying that reasonable police officers do not shoot disarmed young boys with upraised hands.”
  • After three and a half years of litigation and more than a thousand docket entries in this protracted attorneys’ fees dispute, the Seventh Circuit delivers a well-deserved bench slap to the opposing counsel from hell (who still walks away from it all with $800,000 in attorney’s fees).
  • Eight years after the death of his wife, Illinois criminal defense lawyer is charged with her murder. After two trials, he is finally acquitted in March 2017. Shortly thereafter he sues the police, the coroner, and others, alleging they had framed him. Must the judge recuse herself because her daughter is an attorney at the Exoneration Project, a group funded by the lawyer’s lawyers? Seventh Circuit: No, the daughter has been screened off from the case. Her merely being related to the judge isn’t enough to merit recusal, nor is the judge’s previous attendance at an Innocence Project fundraising dinner at which the plaintiff and other exonerees were honored.
  • After a Dallas, Ore. school district adopts a new policy allowing a transgender male high school student to use boys’ bathrooms and locker rooms, the parents of students who feel uncomfortable changing clothes in front of someone born biologically female sue, alleging a host of constitutional objections, along with a Title IX claim. Ninth Circuit: We recognize the sensitivities of all involved, but the claims fail.
  • After YouTube restricts access to and demonetizes educational videos by conservative group Prager University, PragerU sues, alleging that YouTube violated the group’s First Amendment rights and violated the Lanham Act by falsely advertising that it is committed to free speech. Ninth Circuit: Friendly reminder that the First Amendment restricts only government action. YouTube may be a virtual public square, but that doesn’t make it a state actor. As for YouTube’s “braggadocio” about its commitment to free speech, that’s all nonactionable puffery.
  • After pulling a woman over for a busted taillight, LAPD officers arrest her for an outstanding warrant. She informs them that, due to a shoulder injury, she cannot place her hands behind her back. They ignore this and her cries of pain, handcuff her behind her back. Excessive force? District court: Qualified immunity—no case says cops can’t do that. Ninth Circuit: Uh, no. We’ve said for more than 20 years that cops can’t handcuff a suspect in a way to cause pain if there’s no immediate threat. Might’ve violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, too.
  • Allegation: A week prior to teen’s homicide trial, Hobbs, N.M. auto shop owner produces invoice showing that the car police suspected was used in drive-by shooting was in fact in the repair shop—something police could easily have verified the day after the shooting, nine months earlier. Police obtain a warrant for business records related to repair of the car and enter the owner’s residence (which is on the same property as the shop) with guns drawn, seize all electronic devices. An unreasonable search and seizure? Retaliation for producing exculpatory evidence? District court: Can’t sue over that. Tenth Circuit: Can’t sue over that.
  • Wichita, Kan. police shoot and kill an unarmed man as he walks to a parking garage after last call. Police say the man had a gun, and they saw him shoot it. Everyone else says he didn’t and, therefore, couldn’t. Medical experts say the police shot that man at least three times while he was lying face down on the ground. Tenth Circuit: The officers are entitled to qualified immunity for (1) shooting an unarmed man and (2) failing to warn him before they opened fired. But no qualified immunity for (3) shooting while the man posed no threat, lying on the ground. Dissent: “The Constitution clearly prohibited both officers from shooting an unarmed individual posing no threat to anyone.”
  • When a quinquagenarian detainee at Cobb County, Ga. jail politely asks a guard to make a phone call, the guard shoves the detainee to the concrete floor, breaking his hip. Then, as the man howls in pain, the guard tries to drag him to his feet and berates him. This being the twelfth time the guard had been investigated for violating jail policies and the sixth time he was found to have violated them, he’s fired. Eleventh Circuit: The detainee can sue the (now-ex) guard. Partial dissent: He should be able to sue the supervisors, too.
  • In 2016, railroad asks the feds for permission to convert a 1.2-mile stretch of track in Miami into a recreational trail. Abutting landowners: Whoa, the railroad got permission (in 1924) to conduct trains through our backyards. If they want to use the land for something else, the gov’t must pay just compensation. Federal Circuit: Florida law does indeed give landowners bordering railroads an ownership interest up to the center line of the right of way. (N.B.: We have it on good authority that nearly every other state has a similar law.) The suit should not have been dismissed.

When the port district officials in Louisiana condemned Violet Dock Port’s port business, the company was awarded almost $30 mil in just compensation after a trial. The port district took the property (and continues running the port business at a profit), but there’s a twist! Despite the judgment, the district says it doesn’t want to pay anything for the property and nobody can make it. Which, argues the Institute for Justice in this amicus brief filed with the Fifth Circuit, is only half right.

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Bernie Sanders Signal-Boosts Boston Activists Fighting 10,000 New Homes That Would Replace a Dilapidated Horse Racing Track

Activists in Boston are trying to delay the construction of a 10,000-unit development project on a mostly dormant race track. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) just weighed in on their side, raising the disquieting prospect that the Democrats’ presidential frontrunner could become the nation’s NIMBY-in-chief.

In early February, the Boston-area group Lawyers for Civil Rights filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). It claims that city housing officials failed to provide meaningful and inclusive opportunities for community participation during their (still ongoing) review of the proposed Suffolk Downs development project.

“We need affordable housing for all instead of more gentrifying luxury developments for the few,” Sanders tweeted alongside an article about the group’s HUD complaint. “I stand with the longtime residents of East Boston fighting displacement from the communities they have spent generations building.”

The project itself would displace no one. The 161-acre site on the edge of East Boston currently hosts only a race track, a clubhouse, a vacant administration building, and horse barns described in city documents as “dilapidated and unsuitable for further use.” HYM Investments wants to redevelop the area into a mixed-use development sporting 10,000 new housing units, plus retail, office, and hotel space.

In keeping with Boston’s inclusionary zoning requirements, the Suffolk Down development includes 930 below-market-rate units that would be reserved for tenants making no more than 70 percent of the area’s median income ($55,550 for a single person). HYM would also contribute $5 million to a housing stabilization fund, with the money going to convert existing rental housing into income-restricted units. That’s supposed to create an additional 500 affordable units.

HYM would spend $41 million on off-site roadway improvements, $20 million on public transit in Boston and neighboring Revere (where part of the Suffolk Downs site is located), and $3 million in operations subsidies to a rail transit line servicing the area. The developer intends to use union labor and to contribute $2 million to trade apprenticeship and workforce development programs. HYM has also agreed to reserve a certain portion of its construction jobs for local residents, people of color, and women.

A spokesperson for HYM told Reason that the project has already received its needed permits from the city of Revere and the state of Massachusetts; it hopes to get Boston’s approval in the next few months.

The activists’ complaint argues that the project needs to be delayed because of some translation issues. Close to half the residents of the East Boston neighborhood that borders the Suffolk Down site primarily speak a language other than English (mostly Spanish or Arabic). The complaint argues that the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) failed to adequately translate enough of the project documents, or didn’t translate them quickly enough, to allow for limited-English-proficiency speakers to meaningfully participate in community review of the project.

Their complaint says that interpreters at public hearings were often unable to translate technical terms about the project into Spanish and that translation equipment was either unavailable or was “was hampered by high levels of static and failed batteries.”

They also say that none of the project documents were translated into Arabic.

This failure to offer adequate translation services, they claim, has so hampered community input that it amounts to national origin–based discrimination in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The activists are asking that city officials halt their review of the project and that HUD suspend all funding to Boston housing agencies until an investigation can be completed.

“We are not anti-development. We are pro-growth—smart and equitable growth,” said Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, in a press release announcing the complaint. “By failing to hire interpreters versed in the language of planning or zoning, or to translate key documents, the BPDA is effectively excluding immigrant residents of East Boston from the development process. Under well-settled federal law, this exclusion constitutes national origin discrimination.”

In addition to the translation issues that the group has raised, an October letter from Lawyers for Civil Rights raised a number of other demands. Among them: that HYM make a larger housing stabilization payment, that its affordable units be reserved for those making 30 percent of area median income, that the city enforce a carbon-neutral standard on the development, and that private security guards hired by HYM to protect its construction receive implicit bias training.

HYM has addressed some of these concerns in updates to in a revised Master Plan dated from last week, including a promise to ensure more documents are translated into Spanish and any other language spoken by more than 5 percent of the East Boston neighborhood.

The development agency has responded to the complaint by stressing the things it has done to accommodate non-English speakers during the review process. The Boston Business Journal reports that “each BPDA public meeting for Suffolk Downs has included Spanish-language translation, and there have been two meetings exclusively in Spanish, the agency said. Numerous project documents are also available in both English and Spanish.”

A cynical observer might conclude that Lawyers for Civil Rights is using its HUD complaint to gain leverage over HYM.

Delays to construction projects are expensive. If federal housing regulators decide there’s reasonable cause to believe that shoddy translation services amounted to illegal discrimination, the project could be gummed up in administrative hearings or even a Department of Justice–led civil lawsuit.

At some point, HYM might decide that the demands being made on its project are less costly than the legal delays they have to put up with. This is hardly an uncommon tactic. Labor unions in California, for instance, routinely use the threat of environmental lawsuits to get developers to agree to hire all union labor.

Private parties can also file their own discrimination lawsuits within two years of the alleged discrimination. The time it takes for HUD to process a discrimination complaint isn’t included in that two-year deadline.

Why would Sanders weigh in on this case? There’s obviously a political incentive. The Massachusetts Democratic primary is on Tuesday. While Sanders is currently favored to win that contest, he’ll still be competing for progressive votes with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) on her home turf. Signal-boosting the local left’s efforts isn’t likely to hurt his chances.

Sanders also has a long history of demonizing developers and lending support to NIMBYs who oppose market-rate housing construction on principle. His comments about how the Suffolk Downs project will lead to displacement and gentrification fit neatly into that worldview.

The HUD complaint notes that East Boston has seen a growing number of cases where longtime tenants are evicted en masse from their homes, presumably so that the units can be renovated and leased out to higher-paying tenants. Allowing Suffolk Downs to go forward without additional affordability requirements or other concessions, the activists argue, will just mean more of the same.

But allowing a massive development right next to a poorer neighborhood would be great way to reduce evictions. This is the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) argument at its most basic. If you don’t build housing for better-off people, they’ll respond by bidding up the prices on existing units, which then leads to evictions and displacement.

Sanders’ willingness to parrot NIMBY talking points bodes ill for what housing policy would look like under his administration if he were to win the White House. The Lawyers for Civil Rights argument bases its discrimination claims on past executive orders and regulations, which HUD officials will rely on when adjudicating the complaint. As president, Sanders would be in a position to issue new regulations and guidance that could make proving housing violations easier, potentially empowering anti-development activists across the country.

Given the severe and worsening housing affordability problems the country is facing, that could be disastrous.

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ZeroZeroZero Plunges Viewers into the Dark, Gritty, Unglamorous Heart of Narcotrafficking

ZeroZeroZero. Available Friday, March 6, from Amazon Prime.

Amazon Prime’s ZeroZeroZero might be the most extensive collection of narcotrafficker aphorisms ever, sort of a Red Book of the cocaine trade.

There’s “Disappointment allows not for mercy,” from an Italian godfather whose family disposes of its mistakes by feeding them to pigs. (And by mistakes, I do not mean impure batches of coke.) There’s a self-important American deal broker who likes to say that “what we do keeps the entire worldwide economy afloat” without identifying who, exactly, plays the role of the Federal Reserve in his dope version of “too big to fail.” He’s also the one who explains the Narcotrafficer Code of Honor: “It doesn’t mean you have to be good, just upright.”

The problem with that one is that very few of the characters in ZeroZeroZero are upright for long, in any sense of the word: They’re loyal only to cash flow and almost all of them end up prone, either in coffins or pigs’ digestive systems.

ZeroZeroZero—the show’s name is a reference to another trafficker saying, a play on the rating system for Italian baking flour, in which “zero, zero” is the top grade—is a grim, gritty and gory tale of the cocaine trade. It has none of the glamor or high-octane sexuality of Scarface or Miami Vice. The bosses mostly live not in capacious art-deco palaces but in drab fortifications; they wear not Armani but body armor; they spend their spare time not nuzzling supermodels but in paranoid contemplation of who might be plotting against them.

Correction: The word “paranoid” is not appropriate, for these enemies are all too real. The central motif of Zero is betrayal. Every character is machinating against every other, or soon will be; neither blood nor money ensures loyalty. Both the traffickers and the cops who hunt them are soulless. Zero is a riveting program, but only because the plot is sociopathically intense; there’s nobody to root for, or even against. Every time you think you’ve identified the character who’s the absolute bottom-dwelling dregs of the bunch, the plot will twist toward even more depravity.

Based on the 2013 novel of the same name by Italian journalist Robert Saviano, Zero is the story of the damage wrought by a single shipment of 5,000 kilos of cocaine that impels three sets of characters on a collision course. The cocaine has been ordered by a craggy old Calabrian mafioso known as Don Minu (Italian actor Adriamo Chiaramida), who has emerged from a secret fortified cave after the end of a gang war and wants to get back into the game. But the payment for the drugs is hijacked by his grandson Stefano (newcomer Giuseppe De Domenico), seeking vengeance for an old family feud and not at all averse to getting rich in the process.

The missing money creates headaches, the .38-caliber kind, for the Lynwoods, the New Orleans shipping family that brokered the cocaine deal between the Italians and the Mexican producers of the drug. Patriarch Edward (Gabriel Byrne) wants to stay in the cocaine business because a single load brings in as much as his legal shipping business nets in a year. His daughter and second-in-command Emma (Andrea Riseborough, Black Mirror) argues that the Lynwoods have no experience with the hardball part of the business and would be better off getting out. Son Chris (Dane DeHaan, True Blood) has been systematically excluded from the drug operations because the family fears the stress will trigger the crippling Huntington’s disease gene he inherited from his mother, but he knows a lot more than anybody’s aware.

The final side of this triangle is a squadron of Mexican anti-drug police whose skill with torturing informants and planting wiretaps has enabled the cops to listen in on the negotiations over the drugs and missing money. Sergeant Manuel Contreras (Harold Torres, El Chapo), the leader of the squad, is a man of intense religious faith, but as might be guessed from his nickname—Vampiro—its theology is of uncertain direction.

The multinational team of writers and directors, including Saviano himself, that produced Zero have employed an elliptical form of story-telling that often circles back onto itself—particulary in the early episodes, when the various collections of characters haven’t encountered one another yet. But they pull it off much better than you might expect, and Zero is far easier to follow than any number of flashback-driven U.S. shows on the air at the moment.

Their tightly drawn approach to the screenplay does not allow the cast any scenery-chewing theatrics or peak emotional moment, but all of the actors are quite adept at projecting a taut air of menace and, occasionally, fear. Not since The Wire has a TV series more explicitly portrayed the corruption and violence that the war on drugs visits on both its players and its bystanders. “Certain things, among decent people, should never happen,” one of Zero‘s narcotraffickers muses to another. Oh, but they do, over and over.

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BBC Claims Iranian Government Is Lying About Outbreak: Real Death Toll Is 210, Not 34

BBC Claims Iranian Government Is Lying About Outbreak: Real Death Toll Is 210, Not 34

Given the Iranian regime’s recent history of brazenly lying to the public despite its obvious culpability, we were certainly intrigued when a local lawmaker in Qom told reporters that at least 50 people had died from the coronavirus in his city alone.

Iranian authorities denied these reports, claiming the lawmaker had no way to prove whether certain individuals had died of the virus, or some other cause.

Then on Friday, they raised the death toll to 34, which is slightly more modest, if still atrocious by international standards.

Now, a team of journalists working for BBC Persia (which we didn’t realize was a thing until now) have reportedly confirmed at least 210 virus-linked deaths in Iran after canvassing workers at dozens of hospitals around the country.

The story is written in Farsi, and Google’s “translate” function isn’t super helpful in converting the script. But judging by the quantity of text, the report appears to be relatively short and too the point.

The outbreak is the latest in a series of disasters that the regime has been battling since President Trump reimposed sanctions on its oil trade. These include, but are not limited to: Accidentally shooting down a Ukrainian passenger plane, and allowing some of its top government officials to be exposed and infected by the coronavirus.

Cities across Iran cancelled Friday prayers this week, an extremely rare occurrence which rarely, if ever, happens. As Iran’s neighbors close their doors to the burgeoning outbreak, some experts are estimating that the total number of cases in the country could be closer to 10,000, much higher than the fewer than 400 cases on the ‘official’ rolls.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 02/28/2020 – 15:15

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/39fyYxe Tyler Durden

Bernie Sanders Signal-Boosts Boston Activists Fighting 10,000 New Homes That Would Replace a Dilapidated Horse Racing Track

Activists in Boston are trying to delay the construction of a 10,000-unit development project on a mostly dormant race track. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) just weighed in on their side, raising the disquieting prospect that the Democrats’ presidential frontrunner could become the nation’s NIMBY-in-chief.

In early February, the Boston-area group Lawyers for Civil Rights filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). It claims that city housing officials failed to provide meaningful and inclusive opportunities for community participation during their (still ongoing) review of the proposed Suffolk Downs development project.

“We need affordable housing for all instead of more gentrifying luxury developments for the few,” Sanders tweeted alongside an article about the group’s HUD complaint. “I stand with the longtime residents of East Boston fighting displacement from the communities they have spent generations building.”

The project itself would displace no one. The 161-acre site on the edge of East Boston currently hosts only a race track, a clubhouse, a vacant administration building, and horse barns described in city documents as “dilapidated and unsuitable for further use.” HYM Investments wants to redevelop the area into a mixed-use development sporting 10,000 new housing units, plus retail, office, and hotel space.

In keeping with Boston’s inclusionary zoning requirements, the Suffolk Down development includes 930 below-market-rate units that would be reserved for tenants making no more than 70 percent of the area’s median income ($55,550 for a single person). HYM would also contribute $5 million to a housing stabilization fund, with the money going to convert existing rental housing into income-restricted units. That’s supposed to create an additional 500 affordable units.

HYM would spend $41 million on off-site roadway improvements, $20 million on public transit in Boston and neighboring Revere (where part of the Suffolk Downs site is located), and $3 million in operations subsidies to a rail transit line servicing the area. The developer intends to use union labor and to contribute $2 million to trade apprenticeship and workforce development programs. HYM has also agreed to reserve a certain portion of its construction jobs for local residents, people of color, and women.

A spokesperson for HYM told Reason that the project has already received its needed permits from the city of Revere and the state of Massachusetts; it hopes to get Boston’s approval in the next few months.

The activists’ complaint argues that the project needs to be delayed because of some translation issues. Close to half the residents of the East Boston neighborhood that borders the Suffolk Down site primarily speak a language other than English (mostly Spanish or Arabic). The complaint argues that the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) failed to adequately translate enough of the project documents, or didn’t translate them quickly enough, to allow for limited-English-proficiency speakers to meaningfully participate in community review of the project.

Their complaint says that interpreters at public hearings were often unable to translate technical terms about the project into Spanish and that translation equipment was either unavailable or was “was hampered by high levels of static and failed batteries.”

They also say that none of the project documents were translated into Arabic.

This failure to offer adequate translation services, they claim, has so hampered community input that it amounts to national origin–based discrimination in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The activists are asking that city officials halt their review of the project and that HUD suspend all funding to Boston housing agencies until an investigation can be completed.

“We are not anti-development. We are pro-growth—smart and equitable growth,” said Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, in a press release announcing the complaint. “By failing to hire interpreters versed in the language of planning or zoning, or to translate key documents, the BPDA is effectively excluding immigrant residents of East Boston from the development process. Under well-settled federal law, this exclusion constitutes national origin discrimination.”

In addition to the translation issues that the group has raised, an October letter from Lawyers for Civil Rights raised a number of other demands. Among them: that HYM make a larger housing stabilization payment, that its affordable units be reserved for those making 30 percent of area median income, that the city enforce a carbon-neutral standard on the development, and that private security guards hired by HYM to protect its construction receive implicit bias training.

HYM has addressed some of these concerns in updates to in a revised Master Plan dated from last week, including a promise to ensure more documents are translated into Spanish and any other language spoken by more than 5 percent of the East Boston neighborhood.

The development agency has responded to the complaint by stressing the things it has done to accommodate non-English speakers during the review process. The Boston Business Journal reports that “each BPDA public meeting for Suffolk Downs has included Spanish-language translation, and there have been two meetings exclusively in Spanish, the agency said. Numerous project documents are also available in both English and Spanish.”

A cynical observer might conclude that Lawyers for Civil Rights is using its HUD complaint to gain leverage over HYM.

Delays to construction projects are expensive. If federal housing regulators decide there’s reasonable cause to believe that shoddy translation services amounted to illegal discrimination, the project could be gummed up in administrative hearings or even a Department of Justice–led civil lawsuit.

At some point, HYM might decide that the demands being made on its project are less costly than the legal delays they have to put up with. This is hardly an uncommon tactic. Labor unions in California, for instance, routinely use the threat of environmental lawsuits to get developers to agree to hire all union labor.

Private parties can also file their own discrimination lawsuits within two years of the alleged discrimination. The time it takes for HUD to process a discrimination complaint isn’t included in that two-year deadline.

Why would Sanders weigh in on this case? There’s obviously a political incentive. The Massachusetts Democratic primary is on Tuesday. While Sanders is currently favored to win that contest, he’ll still be competing for progressive votes with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) on her home turf. Signal-boosting the local left’s efforts isn’t likely to hurt his chances.

Sanders also has a long history of demonizing developers and lending support to NIMBYs who oppose market-rate housing construction on principle. His comments about how the Suffolk Downs project will lead to displacement and gentrification fit neatly into that worldview.

The HUD complaint notes that East Boston has seen a growing number of cases where longtime tenants are evicted en masse from their homes, presumably so that the units can be renovated and leased out to higher-paying tenants. Allowing Suffolk Downs to go forward without additional affordability requirements or other concessions, the activists argue, will just mean more of the same.

But allowing a massive development right next to a poorer neighborhood would be great way to reduce evictions. This is the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) argument at its most basic. If you don’t build housing for better-off people, they’ll respond by bidding up the prices on existing units, which then leads to evictions and displacement.

Sanders’ willingness to parrot NIMBY talking points bodes ill for what housing policy would look like under his administration if he were to win the White House. The Lawyers for Civil Rights argument bases its discrimination claims on past executive orders and regulations, which HUD officials will rely on when adjudicating the complaint. As president, Sanders would be in a position to issue new regulations and guidance that could make proving housing violations easier, potentially empowering anti-development activists across the country.

Given the severe and worsening housing affordability problems the country is facing, that could be disastrous.

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ZeroZeroZero Plunges Viewers into the Dark, Gritty, Unglamorous Heart of Narcotrafficking

ZeroZeroZero. Available Friday, March 6, from Amazon Prime.

Amazon Prime’s ZeroZeroZero might be the most extensive collection of narcotrafficker aphorisms ever, sort of a Red Book of the cocaine trade.

There’s “Disappointment allows not for mercy,” from an Italian godfather whose family disposes of its mistakes by feeding them to pigs. (And by mistakes, I do not mean impure batches of coke.) There’s a self-important American deal broker who likes to say that “what we do keeps the entire worldwide economy afloat” without identifying who, exactly, plays the role of the Federal Reserve in his dope version of “too big to fail.” He’s also the one who explains the Narcotrafficer Code of Honor: “It doesn’t mean you have to be good, just upright.”

The problem with that one is that very few of the characters in ZeroZeroZero are upright for long, in any sense of the word: They’re loyal only to cash flow and almost all of them end up prone, either in coffins or pigs’ digestive systems.

ZeroZeroZero—the show’s name is a reference to another trafficker saying, a play on the rating system for Italian baking flour, in which “zero, zero” is the top grade—is a grim, gritty and gory tale of the cocaine trade. It has none of the glamor or high-octane sexuality of Scarface or Miami Vice. The bosses mostly live not in capacious art-deco palaces but in drab fortifications; they wear not Armani but body armor; they spend their spare time not nuzzling supermodels but in paranoid contemplation of who might be plotting against them.

Correction: The word “paranoid” is not appropriate, for these enemies are all too real. The central motif of Zero is betrayal. Every character is machinating against every other, or soon will be; neither blood nor money ensures loyalty. Both the traffickers and the cops who hunt them are soulless. Zero is a riveting program, but only because the plot is sociopathically intense; there’s nobody to root for, or even against. Every time you think you’ve identified the character who’s the absolute bottom-dwelling dregs of the bunch, the plot will twist toward even more depravity.

Based on the 2013 novel of the same name by Italian journalist Robert Saviano, Zero is the story of the damage wrought by a single shipment of 5,000 kilos of cocaine that impels three sets of characters on a collision course. The cocaine has been ordered by a craggy old Calabrian mafioso known as Don Minu (Italian actor Adriamo Chiaramida), who has emerged from a secret fortified cave after the end of a gang war and wants to get back into the game. But the payment for the drugs is hijacked by his grandson Stefano (newcomer Giuseppe De Domenico), seeking vengeance for an old family feud and not at all averse to getting rich in the process.

The missing money creates headaches, the .38-caliber kind, for the Lynwoods, the New Orleans shipping family that brokered the cocaine deal between the Italians and the Mexican producers of the drug. Patriarch Edward (Gabriel Byrne) wants to stay in the cocaine business because a single load brings in as much as his legal shipping business nets in a year. His daughter and second-in-command Emma (Andrea Riseborough, Black Mirror) argues that the Lynwoods have no experience with the hardball part of the business and would be better off getting out. Son Chris (Dane DeHaan, True Blood) has been systematically excluded from the drug operations because the family fears the stress will trigger the crippling Huntington’s disease gene he inherited from his mother, but he knows a lot more than anybody’s aware.

The final side of this triangle is a squadron of Mexican anti-drug police whose skill with torturing informants and planting wiretaps has enabled the cops to listen in on the negotiations over the drugs and missing money. Sergeant Manuel Contreras (Harold Torres, El Chapo), the leader of the squad, is a man of intense religious faith, but as might be guessed from his nickname—Vampiro—its theology is of uncertain direction.

The multinational team of writers and directors, including Saviano himself, that produced Zero have employed an elliptical form of story-telling that often circles back onto itself—particulary in the early episodes, when the various collections of characters haven’t encountered one another yet. But they pull it off much better than you might expect, and Zero is far easier to follow than any number of flashback-driven U.S. shows on the air at the moment.

Their tightly drawn approach to the screenplay does not allow the cast any scenery-chewing theatrics or peak emotional moment, but all of the actors are quite adept at projecting a taut air of menace and, occasionally, fear. Not since The Wire has a TV series more explicitly portrayed the corruption and violence that the war on drugs visits on both its players and its bystanders. “Certain things, among decent people, should never happen,” one of Zero‘s narcotraffickers muses to another. Oh, but they do, over and over.

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