Meta Reportedly Abandons Diem Stablecoin Project After Intense Government Opposition
After surviving a major re-branding and fierce opposition from regulators and central bankers, Facebook’s effort to create a global stablecoin usable on its platform has reportedly been scrapped, according to a Bloomberg report.
BBG reported late Tuesday that Facebook-owner Meta has been looking for a buyer for its Diem project after the Federal Reserve and several powerful American lawmakers (including notably Sens. Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren) produced enough resistance to the project to leave it finally dead in the water. At one point, a couple of Democratic senators sent threatening letters to people involved with the project.
The Diem Association, a cryptocurrency initiative once known as Libra backed by Meta Platforms Inc., is weighing a sale of its assets as a way to return capital to its investor members, according to people familiar with the matter. Diem is in discussions with investment bankers about how best to sell its intellectual property and find a new home for the engineers who developed the technology, cashing out whatever value remains in its once-ambitious Diem coin venture, said the people, asking not to be identified because the discussions aren’t public.
As a result, the cryptocurrency ambitions of Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg have unraveled.
Just in on @TheTerminal: *META-BACKED DIEM IS SAID TO SEEK BUYER AFTER COIN PLANS DASHED
The news has also hammered shares of Silvergate, the obscure banking partner that was supposed to issue the stablecoin, before being bogged down in resistance from regulators.
In addition to the “rebranding” (the project was originally known as Libra), the project sent anti-trust hawks into a tizzy, while central bankers accused Facebook of trying to usurp their control over the money supply. In the years since its introduction, the SEC has won the “battle of the regulators” over who will be the primary regulator of stablecoins, while the Fed has sought to create a stablecoin of its own nicknamed “Fedcoin”.
After all, it was the Fed that dealt the killing blow to the project, per BBG.
Diem said in May that an affiliate of the firm, Silvergate Bank, was to be the issuer of the Diem USD stablecoin, a type of cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar that’s typically used to buy and sell other crypto. After a lengthy back-and-forth between the Diem advocates and regulators, Fed officials finally told Silvergate last summer that the agency was uneasy with the plan and couldn’t assure the bank that it would allow that activity, the people said.
Without a green light from the bank’s regulator, Silvergate was left unable to issue the new asset with confidence the Fed wouldn’t crack down, and so the Diem effort had no coin.
Facebook had already abandoned the original Libra concept – one coin backed by a basket of global currencies – in favor of creating a more traditional dollar-linked stablecoin more in line with what the Fed might want.
So, now that Diem is up for grabs, the big question is: will the Fed step in, co-opt the technology, and use it to catch up with the PBOC, which has already produced its own “e-RMB” (even if the project appears to still be in the troubleshooting phase)?
Joe Biden last week said the American response in Ukraine would be proportional to Vladimir Putin’s actions. “It depends,” the president posited, thoughts drifting like blobs in a lava lamp. “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion…”
Alarms sounded all over Washington. The rip in the national political illusion was so severe, Republicans and Democrats were forced to come out agreeing, leaping into each other’s arms in panic. Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who increasingly looks like a man about to miss a historically important free throw, said of a potential Russian invasion, “We can make crystal clear the stark consequences of that choice.” Republican Senator Ted Cruz said Biden “shocked the world by giving Putin a green light to invade Ukraine.” The National Security Council issued a statement through Jen Psaki that any Russian move into Ukraine would be “met with a swift, severe, and united response.”
In a later press conference, Biden explained he had to cut things short because, “You guys will ask me all about Russia.” He appears days from pulling his pants down to show reporters the electrodes White House chief of staff Ron Klain has probably attached to his testicles by now.
This is a rerun of an old story, only with a weaker lead actor. Six years ago, Barack Obama gave an interview to The Atlantic quashing Beltway militarists’ dreams of war in Ukraine:
The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-Nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do… This is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.
Then as now, both blue and red propaganda outlets howled. The “core interest” of the Washington consensus is war. It isn’t just big business, but our biggest business, one of the last things we still make and export on a grand scale. The bulk of the people elected to congress and a lion’s share of the lobbyists, lawyers, and journalists who snuggle in a giant fornicating mass in the capital are dedicated to the upkeep of the war bureaucracy.
Their main purpose is growing the defense budget and militarizing the missions of other government agencies (from State to the Department of Energy to the CIA). Washington think-tanks exist to factory-generate intellectual justifications for foreign interventions, while attacking with ferocity — as if they were emergencies like pandemics or deadly hurricanes — the appearance of ideas like the “peace dividend” that threaten to move any of their rice bowls to some other constituency.
Both Biden’s comments and the “Obama doctrine” were fundamental betrayals, presidents saying out loud that there existed such a thing as “our” interests separate from Washington’s war pig clique. The latter group somehow believes itself impervious to error, and takes extraordinary offense to challenges to its judgment, amazing given the spectacular failures in every arena from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria.
These people consistently lose popularity contests to cannibals and fingernail-pullers, and their playbook — one play they run over and over, never deviating despite decades of disaster — is designed to reduce every foreign policy situation to contests of force. Their wag-the-dog thinking always argues the right move is the one that allows them to empty their boxes of expensive toys, from weapons systems to Langley-generated schemes for overthrows, which a compliant press happily calls regime change.
Obama looked at the big, muddy stretch of land atop the Black Sea called Ukraine and asked if its strategic importance was worth war. Meaning, real war, with an enemy that can fight back, not third-world pushovers in Iraq or Libya who offer as much resistance as the British colonial enemies Blackadder’s officers once described as being “two feet tall and armed with dried grass.” His answer was an obvious no. Ukraine has less strategic importance to the United States than Iraq, Afghanistan, even Kuwait for that matter.
No one will say it out loud, but the greatest argument against U.S. support for military action of any kind in Ukraine is the inerrant incompetence of our missions and the consistent record of destabilizing areas of strategic interest through our involvement, including in these two specific countries. At the moment the Berlin Wall fell the United States had almost limitless political capital with these soon-to-be ex-Soviet territories. We blew it all within a few years. Now that we’re really in trouble in Ukraine, why would we keep to the same playbook that got us here?
Our plan with every foreign country that falls into our orbit is the same. We ride in as saviors, throwing loans in all directions to settle debts (often to us), then let it be known the country’s affairs will henceforth be run through our embassy. Since we’re ignorant of history and have long viewed diplomats too in sync with local customs as liabilities, we tend to fill our embassies with people who have limited sense of the individual character of host countries, their languages, or the attitudes of people outside the capital.
Instead of devising individual policies, we go through identical processes of receiving groups of local politicians seeking our backing. We throw our weight behind the courtiers we like best. The winning supplicants are usually Western educated, speak great English, know how to flatter drunk diplomats, and are fluent in neoliberal wonk-speak.
We back Our Men in Havana to the hilt, no matter how corrupt they may become in their rule, a process we call “democracy promotion.” The cycle is always ends the same way, whether we’re talking about Hamid Karzai or Ayad Allawi or Boris Yeltsin. The white hat ally turns out to be either overmatched or a snake, usually the latter, and siphons off Western aid to himself and his cronies in huge quantities while smashing opposition by any means necessary. That brutality and corruption, combined with efforts to implement our structural adjustment policies (read: austerity, and the de-nationalization of natural resources) inevitably results in loss of popular support and/or the rise of opposition movements on the right, the left, or both.
Rising discontent in turn inspires further requests from the puppet for security aid, which we happily provide, since that ultimately is the whole point: selling weapons to foreigners to fill those Washington rice bowls. You will soon hear it in the form of increased calls for defense spending amid the Ukraine mess, but we’ve been at it forever.
We started selling drones to “allies” under Obama and escalated the practice under Trump with billions in sales to peaceful democratic havens like the UAE, who had already used them to massacre civilian populations, children included, in Yemen. We continued escalating such sales under Biden, adding countries like Qatar to our list of excellent customers in part with the idea of using the country as a base for “over-the-horizon” strikes in an Afghanistan bereft of “boots on the ground.” Even after our disastrous wars finish, we find ways to continue them.
This is relevant to Russia and Ukraine because we’ve cycled through at least half of the usual failure process with both countries. Just a couple of decades ago we essentially controlled the Kremlin, but so completely mismanaged that situation with aggressive backing of a notoriously corrupt Yeltsin regime that Vladimir Putin was able to consolidate power with widespread backing of a public initially much disposed to us. Ukraine we treated as a pawn nation from the start, backing a series of leaders who shamelessly looted the country before forcing them into a miserable Sophie’s Choice, about which the American public still knows little.
In 2013, Ukraine was proceeding down a path of integration into the E.U. Paul Manafort client Viktor Yanukovich, always described in America as an outright puppet of Moscow, was actually a proponent of Euro-integration at this point. “Yanukovich cajoled and bullied anyone who pushed for Ukraine to have closer ties to Russia” is how Reuters correspondent Liz Piper described his attitude, quoting him as saying to those wanting to go back to Russia’s arms, “Forget about it.. forever!” But Putin’s ferocious tactics, including intense economic and military threats, pushed Yanukovich to back out of the EU deal, and take instead an economic trade package with Russia that included $15 billion and the lowering by a third the price the country paid for natural gas from Russia.
This, in turn, spurred a Western response via the “Maidan revolution,” really a U.S.-backed coup, in which Yanukovich was replaced with someone more suitable to our foreign policy geniuses. “Yats is our guy” is how our current undersecretary for political affairs Victoria Nuland put it, insisting that Arseniy Yatsenuk be Ukraine’s next leader, even though Ukrainians might have preferred former boxer Vitaly Klitschko. When apprised some of the E.U. countries were uncomfortable with a coup, Nuland famously said, “Fuck the E.U.” Forget gunboats, here was F-bomb diplomacy!
Putin responded by annexing Crimea, which in turn led to the moment when Barack Obama made his decision to drop the bluff and stop the escalation. His reasoning was simple: Ukraine was always going to matter more to Russia than to the United States, and when push came to shove, he, Obama, wasn’t going to war over it. Moreover, because the hawks in Washington would never come out and say they would, either – “If there’s somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it,” he challenged – the issue instead would keep being presented as an improper defiance of consensus:
There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow… And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses… You are judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons.
Obama was nearing the end of his term. In saying all this he was probably motivated in part by a desire to spite the Hillary Clinton loyalists in the national security establishment he imagined would soon be taking over. They had crossed him on several important issues, including the question of whether or not to cooperate with Russia on Syria, and he was taking his soon-to-be-freed petty side out for an early test drive. But he wasn’t wrong to identify that Washington bureaucrats were more wedded to the militarization playbook than the public interest.
Six years later, even the NatSec dingbat brigade knows the public won’t buy the idea of risking nuclear war over Ukraine, which is why they’re pulling out stops to Twitterize the situation by introducing piles of other arguments and hypotheticals, like that the mad dictator won’t stop in Kyiv. “He wants to evict the United States from Europe,” said former intelligence officer, Brookings fellow, and ubiquitous Russiagate character Fiona Hill just wrote in the New York Times. This is absurd, but we will surely go through the process now of being told this is Hitler all over again, that Biden must be more Churchill than Chamberlain, etc. Headlines about $200 million in arms sales to Ukraine will turn to $500 million, a billion, etc., and other regional allies will be hit up with fresh sales calls.
Normally it’d be clear how this story ends, but Biden’s “gaffe” raised real concern that the war party will overcompensate with a catastrophic macho gesture (news that Biden is now “weighing” the deployment of more troops and warships to the region should fill all with confidence, for instance). There are people in Washington who think a pipeline of Javelin missile sales is worth having to watch for Russian subs popping up in New York harbor, and they are the same people in charge of this very heavy decision on the horizon.
There are people who will read this and cry, “Where’s your outrage against Vladimir Putin? Why don’t you denounce him?” To which I say, fine, I denounce him. Then what? When you’re done wailing, you’re still faced with deciding whether or not to go to war with Russia, which is not a real choice, unless you’re an idiot or General Jack Ripper-insane. Unfortunately, the Nulands and Blinkens who’ll be making this call just may fit those descriptions.
The ostentatious incompetence of the foreign policy establishment, which America got to examine in technicolor during the War on Terror, was one of the first triggers for the revolt against “experts” that led to the election of Donald Trump. Once, these were drawling Republican golfers who got hot reading Francis Fukuyama, thought they could turn Baghdad into Geneva, and instead squandered trillions and hundreds of thousands of lives pushing Iraq back to the eighth century.
The more recent crew is made up of Extremely Online, Ivy-educated fantasists who rarely leave their embassies abroad and view life as an endless production of Sloane or The Good Fight, soap operas about exclusive clubs of fashionably brainy pragmatists with the guts to color outside the lines and “get things done.” Lines like “Yats is our guy” make them tingly. This is perhaps the only subset of people on earth arrogant and dumb enough to think there’s a workable plan for pulling off a shooting war with Russia.
The truth is there’s nothing to be done at this point. We had our chance. Both Russia and Ukraine should have been economic and strategic allies. Instead, we repeatedly blew opportunities in both places by trying to flex more and more muscle in the region (including, ironically, via election meddling). Now there’s no winning move left. Conceding this means abandoning conventional wisdom, and the people we’re now relying on to see the light have shown little ability to do that.
In a situation with only two choices, bad and horrifyingly worse, God help us if the playbook wins again.
Merrill Lynch MD Fired After Racist Smoothie Shop Tirade Lands Him In Jail
Finmeme accounts have had a ball over the weekend sharing the latest salacious citizen video purporting to expose a respected member of the financial services community as a racial-epithet-slinging madman.
Over the weekend, a clip of a man later identified as James Iannazzo of Merrill Lynch went viral in the latest example of a clip of an aggravated store patron hurling insults, and objects, at baristas just trying to make it through a shift. At one point in the clip, the man calls the young woman, with whom he’s engaged in a screaming match, a “f**king immigrant loser” and an “ignorant high school kid”.
He also called one of the workers a “f**king bitch” before throwing the smoothie at her.
The incident took place at Robeks in Fairfield, Connecticut at around 1430ET on Saturday. The 48-year-old financial adviser was later arrested and charged with a hate crime (an extremely serious charge), according to the NY Post.
The tabloid reported that the heated argument exploded after Iannazzo stormed into the store and accused its workers of serving him a smoothie with peanuts, which caused his allergic son to have a reaction that required hospitalization.
Police later confirmed that while Iannazzo did order the drink without peanut butter, he apparently neglected to say that his son had the allergy (remember, when you’re dealing with young retail and restaurant workers, a correct order is often too much to expect, meaning that it’s up to you to make sure staffers understand the seriousness of a mistake in this department).
Viral footage showed Iannazzo standing behind the counter at the store, demanding to know which of the four employees working that afternoon had made the drink. The store workers shouted back, Iannazzo asked to speak with the manager, and pretty soon, it was a full-fledged shouting match.
Footage of the ordeal had been viewed more than 2.6 million times on Twitter by early Monday, and clips have also circulated to millions on TikTok. As a result, Bank of America released a statement confirming that Iannazzo is no longer with the wealth management unit.
“Our company does not tolerate behavior of this kind. We immediately investigated and have taken action. This individual is no longer employed at our firm,” a statement said.
According to a LinkedIn profile purportedly belonging to him, Iannazzo had been with Merrill since 1995; his profile presently lists him as a managing director.
A lawyer representing Iannazzo released the following statement in his client’s defense: “When faced with a dire situation, Mr. Iannazzo’s parental instinct kicked in and he acted out of anger and fear. He is not a racist and deeply regrets his statement and actions during a moment of extreme emotion.”
Iannazzo reportedly turned himself in to police after initially fleeing the store.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former director of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and current board member at Pfizer, said that declining COVID-19 cases should signal to policymakers that it is time to lift more pandemic-related restrictions.
“I think certainly on the east coast where you see cases declining dramatically we need to be willing to lean in and do that very soon I think as conditions improve we have to be willing to relax some of these measures with the same speed that we put them in place,” he told “The Squawk Box” in a Monday interview when asked about whether mask mandates should be dropped.
Gottlieb said that “a lot of the acrimony” in the United States stems from a lack of “clear goalposts” about when some of the measures will end.
The former FDA commissioner also cited the Connecticut government’s recent decision to rescind vaccine mandates for state workers as a policy that other policymakers should adopt in the near future as COVID-19 cases decline nationwide.
“The only way to get compliance from people and get accommodation [is] if we demonstrate the ability to withdraw these [mandates] in the same manner in which we put them in,” Gottlieb added.
The call for COVID-19 restrictions to be dropped comes as the overall infection rate in the United States has sharply declined in recent days. Data from the Johns Hopkins-run Our World in Data shows that 4,110 out of every one million Americans recorded infections on Jan. 10, but that rate was 2,643 as late as Friday and dropped to 615 per one million as of Sunday.
Outside the United States, more and more European countries have moved to rescind certain COVID-19-related rules, including vaccine passports and mask mandates. For example, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that starting Jan. 27, people in England won’t have to wear masks in public or show proof that they’ve been vaccinated to enter some venues.
But on Monday, World Health Organization’s (WHO) director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned that more COVID-19 variants may emerge and alleged that it’s dangerous to assume Omicron is the last one or that “we are in the endgame.”
“There are different scenarios for how the pandemic could play out and how the acute phase could end. But it’s dangerous to assume that omicron will be the last variant or that we are in the endgame,” Tedros told a WHO board meeting. “On the contrary, globally, the conditions are ideal for more variants to emerge.” He didn’t provide evidence or data to back up his claim.
Ron Paul On Biden Administration’s Ukraine Freak-Out: Pretense For War?
The Biden Administration, followed by lapdog UK, appears determined to ratchet up tensions in Ukraine to the point where war is inevitable. From the publicity stunt of evacuating the US Embassy in Kiev to – laughably – accusing Moscow of planning a Ukraine coup, a Biden Administration sinking in public opinion quicksand appears to be grasping for the war option.
But…even Ukraine is putting on the brakes! Is war actually inevitable, or will the endless posturing and atmosphere of tit-for-tat threats, now including military deployments to Eastern Europe by NATO, result in last minute de-escalation and diplomatic breakthrough…
Ron Paul On Biden Administration’s Ukraine Freak-Out: Pretense For War?
The Biden Administration, followed by lapdog UK, appears determined to ratchet up tensions in Ukraine to the point where war is inevitable. From the publicity stunt of evacuating the US Embassy in Kiev to – laughably – accusing Moscow of planning a Ukraine coup, a Biden Administration sinking in public opinion quicksand appears to be grasping for the war option.
But…even Ukraine is putting on the brakes! Is war actually inevitable, or will the endless posturing and atmosphere of tit-for-tat threats, now including military deployments to Eastern Europe by NATO, result in last minute de-escalation and diplomatic breakthrough…
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons maintains a website and publishes the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, both of which host information concerning “important medical, economic, and legal issues about vaccines,” According to the Association, its perspective on these issues should not be considered “anti-vaccine,” but rather in favor of “informed consent based on disclosure of all relevant legal, medical, and economic information.” Representative Adam B. Schiff is a Member of the House of Representatives from California’s 28th Congressional District and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Joined by an individual, Katarina Verrelli, who has sought vaccine-related information online, the Association sued Representative Schiff, individually and as a Member of Congress, seeking damages as well as injunctive and declaratory relief. The Association and Verrelli alleged that Representative Schiff wrote letters on February 14, 2019, to Google and Facebook “encourag[ing] them to use their platforms to prevent what [Representative] Schiff asserted to be inaccurate information on vaccines.” Shortly after, Representative Schiff wrote essentially the same letter to Amazon, and thereafter posted the letters on the House.gov website in a press release as well as on the social media website Twitter.
In the letters, as reproduced in the press release, Representative Schiff expressed concern about the danger of vaccine hesitancy and the prevalence of vaccine-related misinformation on internet platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Google’s search engine. He stated: “As a Member of Congress who is deeply concerned about declining vaccination rates around the nation, I am requesting additional information on the steps that you currently take to provide medically accurate information on vaccinations to your users, and to encourage you to consider additional steps you can take to address this growing problem.” He requested that the companies respond to a list of questions regarding the companies’ policies about and approaches to vaccine-related misinformation. [More factual details omitted here, because they are repeated below. -EV] …
The court concluded that plaintiffs lacked standing to sue Rep. Schiff, because they didn’t plausibly allege enough evidence that the injury to them stemmed from his actions; here is part of the court’s reasoning:
The Association complains of being “de-platform[ed]” and “disfavor[ed]” by the social media sites and search engines through which it promotes its vaccine-related information. But any actions limiting the accessibility of the Association’s web content were not taken by Representative Schiff; instead, as the amended complaint acknowledges, they were taken by independent third parties Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and YouTube.
Nonetheless, appellants maintain that the companies’ adverse action against the Association’s content is ultimately attributable to Representative Schiff’s statements, which they view to have implicitly threatened and coerced the technology companies. The amended complaint appears to allege a primary theory of causation based on two sets of statements by Representative Schiff.
First, Representative Schiff sent the information-gathering letters to several major technology companies, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon, and shared copies of those letters as well as the responses in press releases posted on the House.gov website and in social media posts.
Second, several months later, Representative Schiff made remarks at a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee, of which he is the chair, “challeng[ing] the immunity” that certain technology companies enjoy under the Communications Decency Act, According to appellants, the companies understood that Representative Schiff was threatening to support changes to Section 230 if the companies declined to comply with his “wishes on other fronts,” including his concerns about “disfavored material on vaccinations on their platforms,” and his statements intimidated and “coerce[d]” the companies “to censor content that he opposes.”
Yet appellants’ allegations have not presented a plausible account of causation. Even assuming the Association’s content was indeed demoted in search results and on social media platforms, the technology companies may have taken those actions for any number of reasons unrelated to Representative Schiff. Appellants offer no causal link that suggests it was an isolated inquiry by a single Member of Congress that prompted policy changes across multiple unrelated social media platforms.
The timeline of events in the amended complaint also undermines any possibility that the companies acted at Representative Schiff’s behest in particular. For example, the amended complaint quotes Google’s response to Representative Schiff’s letter, which explained: “[W]e are and have been demonetizing anti-vaccination content under our longstanding harmful or dangerous advertising policy.”
Likewise, the amended complaint itself acknowledges that several of the other adverse actions by the technology companies occurred before the June 2019 Intelligence Committee hearing. For example, Facebook announced its new policy of prioritizing government-sponsored vaccine information in search results in March 2019, and Twitter introduced its search-results disclaimer directing users to government-sponsored vaccine information in May 2019. Even assuming some of the policy changes to which appellants object were anticipatory in nature, the decisions by the companies seem to have occurred before Representative Schiff even sent the letters, and many took place before the hearing that purportedly coerced the companies to adopt Representative Schiff’s preferences.
Generously construing the allegations of the amended complaint, the Association also appears to suggest that causation is satisfied because Representative Schiff coordinated the “drafting and timing” of the letters with the tech companies before releasing them, and that the letters were “a substantial factor motivating” the companies’ “actions to suppress vaccine-related information.”
But this is exactly the kind of allegation the Supreme Court rejected in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly (2007). After all, “a conclusory allegation of agreement at some unidentified point does not supply facts adequate to show illegality.” As in Twombly, these allegations are “merely consistent with,” but do not “plausibly suggest[],” the kind of coordinated action that would supply a causal link between Representative Schiff’s statements and the technology companies’ actions. Indeed, it is far less plausible that the companies’ actions were a response to one legislator’s inquiry than that they were a response to widespread societal concerns about online misinformation….
The FBI confirmed its agents searched the Illinois headquarters of the Center for COVID Control amid a federal investigation into the multimillion-dollar testing business.
“The FBI was conducting court-authorized law enforcement activity in Rolling Meadows [on Jan. 22],” FBI Chicago spokespeople told media in confirming the search of the business.
Yvonne Gamble, a spokesperson for the Health and Human Services (HHS) inspector general, said HHS agents and the FBI had searched the Rolling Meadows, Illinois, facility.
Annie Thompson, a spokesperson for the Illinois attorney general, told USA Today that the office is “working with the FBI and other law enforcement partners and will not comment on ongoing investigations as we work to hold accountable individuals who engage in unlawful conduct.”
The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services stated on Jan. 21 that it’s investigating “numerous complaints” associated with laboratories and testing sites run by the Center for COVID Control.
“We take seriously any allegations of fraud or misbehavior by COVID-19 testing sites. CMS’s Center for Clinical Standards and Quality investigates these kinds of complaints and is aware of several alleged instances of misconduct by this company’s labs,” Dr. Lee Fleisher, chief medical officer and director of the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality for CMS, told CNN in a statement.
The agency “identified non-compliance” on behalf of the Center for COVID Control “and is waiting on an allegation of compliance from the laboratory to address the deficiencies cited,” Fleisher said, without elaborating.
Earlier in January, the Center for COVID Control’s founder and CEO, Aleya Siyaj, announced that the company would suspend operations between Jan. 14 and Jan. 22 due to “unusually high patient demand” that has caused staffing shortfalls.
“Center for COVID Control is committed to serving our patients in the safest, most accurate and most compliant manner,” Siyaj said. “Regrettably, due to our rapid growth and the unprecedented recent demand for testing, we haven’t been able to meet all our commitments.”
Later, the company stated that “it is extending its pause on operations” and “remains committed to providing the highest level of customer service and diagnostic quality and will not resume collection of patient samples until staffing resources permit CCC to operate at full capacity.”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison also filed a lawsuit against the firm earlier in January, claiming it had failed to deliver COVID-19 test results, had delivered them in an untimely manner, or had provided falsified results.
People reported receiving COVID-19 results that were “riddled with inaccurate and false information including listing the wrong test type and false dates and times for when samples were collected from consumers,” his lawsuit read. Others got negative results when they hadn’t submitted samples to be tested, according to the suit.
Meanwhile, the Oregon Department of Justice told local media it would investigate the company for possible violations of state law.
The Center for COVID Control didn’t respond to a request from The Epoch Times for comment by press time.
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons maintains a website and publishes the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, both of which host information concerning “important medical, economic, and legal issues about vaccines,” According to the Association, its perspective on these issues should not be considered “anti-vaccine,” but rather in favor of “informed consent based on disclosure of all relevant legal, medical, and economic information.” Representative Adam B. Schiff is a Member of the House of Representatives from California’s 28th Congressional District and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Joined by an individual, Katarina Verrelli, who has sought vaccine-related information online, the Association sued Representative Schiff, individually and as a Member of Congress, seeking damages as well as injunctive and declaratory relief. The Association and Verrelli alleged that Representative Schiff wrote letters on February 14, 2019, to Google and Facebook “encourag[ing] them to use their platforms to prevent what [Representative] Schiff asserted to be inaccurate information on vaccines.” Shortly after, Representative Schiff wrote essentially the same letter to Amazon, and thereafter posted the letters on the House.gov website in a press release as well as on the social media website Twitter.
In the letters, as reproduced in the press release, Representative Schiff expressed concern about the danger of vaccine hesitancy and the prevalence of vaccine-related misinformation on internet platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Google’s search engine. He stated: “As a Member of Congress who is deeply concerned about declining vaccination rates around the nation, I am requesting additional information on the steps that you currently take to provide medically accurate information on vaccinations to your users, and to encourage you to consider additional steps you can take to address this growing problem.” He requested that the companies respond to a list of questions regarding the companies’ policies about and approaches to vaccine-related misinformation. [More factual details omitted here, because they are repeated below. -EV] …
The court concluded that plaintiffs lacked standing to sue Rep. Schiff, because they didn’t plausibly allege enough evidence that the injury to them stemmed from his actions; here is part of the court’s reasoning:
The Association complains of being “de-platform[ed]” and “disfavor[ed]” by the social media sites and search engines through which it promotes its vaccine-related information. But any actions limiting the accessibility of the Association’s web content were not taken by Representative Schiff; instead, as the amended complaint acknowledges, they were taken by independent third parties Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and YouTube.
Nonetheless, appellants maintain that the companies’ adverse action against the Association’s content is ultimately attributable to Representative Schiff’s statements, which they view to have implicitly threatened and coerced the technology companies. The amended complaint appears to allege a primary theory of causation based on two sets of statements by Representative Schiff.
First, Representative Schiff sent the information-gathering letters to several major technology companies, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon, and shared copies of those letters as well as the responses in press releases posted on the House.gov website and in social media posts.
Second, several months later, Representative Schiff made remarks at a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee, of which he is the chair, “challeng[ing] the immunity” that certain technology companies enjoy under the Communications Decency Act, According to appellants, the companies understood that Representative Schiff was threatening to support changes to Section 230 if the companies declined to comply with his “wishes on other fronts,” including his concerns about “disfavored material on vaccinations on their platforms,” and his statements intimidated and “coerce[d]” the companies “to censor content that he opposes.”
Yet appellants’ allegations have not presented a plausible account of causation. Even assuming the Association’s content was indeed demoted in search results and on social media platforms, the technology companies may have taken those actions for any number of reasons unrelated to Representative Schiff. Appellants offer no causal link that suggests it was an isolated inquiry by a single Member of Congress that prompted policy changes across multiple unrelated social media platforms.
The timeline of events in the amended complaint also undermines any possibility that the companies acted at Representative Schiff’s behest in particular. For example, the amended complaint quotes Google’s response to Representative Schiff’s letter, which explained: “[W]e are and have been demonetizing anti-vaccination content under our longstanding harmful or dangerous advertising policy.”
Likewise, the amended complaint itself acknowledges that several of the other adverse actions by the technology companies occurred before the June 2019 Intelligence Committee hearing. For example, Facebook announced its new policy of prioritizing government-sponsored vaccine information in search results in March 2019, and Twitter introduced its search-results disclaimer directing users to government-sponsored vaccine information in May 2019. Even assuming some of the policy changes to which appellants object were anticipatory in nature, the decisions by the companies seem to have occurred before Representative Schiff even sent the letters, and many took place before the hearing that purportedly coerced the companies to adopt Representative Schiff’s preferences.
Generously construing the allegations of the amended complaint, the Association also appears to suggest that causation is satisfied because Representative Schiff coordinated the “drafting and timing” of the letters with the tech companies before releasing them, and that the letters were “a substantial factor motivating” the companies’ “actions to suppress vaccine-related information.”
But this is exactly the kind of allegation the Supreme Court rejected in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly (2007). After all, “a conclusory allegation of agreement at some unidentified point does not supply facts adequate to show illegality.” As in Twombly, these allegations are “merely consistent with,” but do not “plausibly suggest[],” the kind of coordinated action that would supply a causal link between Representative Schiff’s statements and the technology companies’ actions. Indeed, it is far less plausible that the companies’ actions were a response to one legislator’s inquiry than that they were a response to widespread societal concerns about online misinformation….
Leon Black Officially Sues Fellow Apollo Co-Founder Josh Harris, Accuses Him Of “Trying To Destroy Me”
The last time we checked in on the burgeoning feud between Apollo co-founders Leon Black and Josh Harris, the former was accusing the latter of engineering a campaign of media manipulation to sow lies about Black in the press. Clearly, having suffered immense reputational harm from his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein (whom he paid a princely 9-figure sum supposedly for tax-related guidance), Black is looking for a scapegoat. And while Black had previously only alleged that his former business partner had been plotting against him, now he’s apparently taking these allegations even further by alleging that Harris had been “trying to destroy me”.
Even more importantly, details in the expanded complaint offer new insights into the battle between the two for control of Apollo, a struggle that ultimately led to both men being ousted, while the firm wound up being managed by a third co-founder, Marc Rowan.
Black accused Harris of attempting to organize “a coup” against him.
“While the amended complaint made for an interesting read, it changes nothing: These allegations are desperate and completely false,” a representative for Harris said in a statement Monday. It added that Harris has never met or spoken with Ganieva or her representatives and “had no involvement of any kind” in the filing of her claims.
As Black tells it, Harris – seeking leverage – tried to challenge a report produced by law firm Dechert which found that Black paid Jeffrey Epstein $158 million for tax advice, while not engaging in any wrongdoing. The maneuver unfortunately backfired, but Harris was undeterred. He later conspired with Geneva and PR whiz Steven Rubenstein to “assisnate [Black’s] character and extort even more from him,” Black’s lawyers said in a filing.
The lawsuit even referenced Shakespeare’s “Othello”, a classic tale of revenge.
“Like Shakespeare’s Iago, enraged by being passed over for promotion, he turned his wrath on his mentor and leader,” Black’s legal team wrote of Harris in the filing. “Harris convened a veritable war cabinet of advisers to take on the founder, the report, and Apollo itself – his very own company.”
The lawsuit refers to the ever expanding “war council” that drew in other business and public relations executives, also naming Steven Rubenstein, whose firm has long worked for Apollo performing media relations, as a defendant.
In a response, Harris insisted that he had been “upfront” with Black about his concerns about the Epstein relationship.
“Josh Harris shared with Leon Black the same concerns voiced by many of Apollo’s shareholders and limited partners about Mr. Black’s deep and extensive relationship with Jeffrey Epstein,” according to the statement. “The notion that Mr. Harris was motivated by anything other than the best interests of the company is false – Black’s relationship with Epstein was disqualifying, plain and simple.”
Black’s team also accuses Harris of trying to convince Alex Spiro of Quinn Emanuel to take a case “adverse to Leon Black”.
Meanwhile, as Black officially adds Harris as a defendant in the suit, at least one MSNBC reporter noted that Black had quietly removed Wigdor, the firm representing Ganieva against him, from the suit.
