news – Page 27292

‘Omnipresence’: The NYPD’s New Secret Orwellian Tactic

As reported by John
Surico at Vice, the
NYPD has been quietly deploying a tactic called “Omnipresence,”
which involves floodlights pointed at housing projects all night
long, parked police cars on sidewalks with their menacing blue and
white lights flashing, and beat cops indefinitely stationed on
street corners as a new means of policing
pre-crime. Surico calls it “stop and frisk
2.0.”

All of the lights!

Stop and frisk as commonly understood is
barely practiced anymore, having died an
ignominious death in 2013 when
Judge Shira Schiendlin ruled that searches of black
and Latino youths based on generalized suspicion was
unconstitutional.

Former mayor and ardent stop-and-frisk
enthusiast Michael Bloomberg defended the practice on his WOR
radio show, “the kids think they’re going to get stopped, so they
don’t carry the gun. And if you can’t do that, you turn the city
over to the criminals, literally overnight.”

The post-Bloomberg NYPD is not about to let the city revert to a
scene from “The Warriors”
without a fight, so instead of instilling citizens with the fear
that they can be stopped and searched for no reason at any time,
they want the public to know that they are there, all the time, and
always watching. If that sounds Orwellian to you, you’re not alone.
Surico writes of “Omnipresence”:

“That’s the comically Orwellian (and completely fucking
terrifying) name for the freshest tactic in the NYPD playbook. To
her, the bright beams mean one thing: The cops are here until
dawn.”

Unlike stop and frisk, very little public information exists on
Omnipresence. It’s barely google-able. Surico cites a single
article in the
The New York Times as the only other major outfit to
report on it at all. The NYPD has made no public statements
explaining the tactic. It’s just there.

Perhaps Mayor Bill de Blasio and his NYPD Commissioner William
Bratton learned from the mistakes of their predecessors, who clung
to stop and frisk even as it became a public relations disaster for
them. During the trial of stop and frisk, Eric Adams, a former NYPD
captain and New York State Senator testified that then-NYPD
Commissioner
Ray Kelly hoped that stop and frisk would “instill fear” in the
young men of Gotham’s high crime areas, and that would in turn keep
guns off the street.

The experience of all-night flood lights on courtyards and the
always unnerving sight of flashing police cruiser lights might just
be instilling the fear Kelly envisioned. And by avoiding
belligerent public pronouncements of impending anarchy, the new
bosses can claim to be post-stop-and-frisk reformers.

Still, with a name like “Omnipresence,” it’s going to be hard
for the NYPD to keep this a secret for too long.

Reason TV reported on the stop and frisk trial in 2013:

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The Challenges of Defending Your Child’s Mind from Propaganda

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace.They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.

– Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations

Let’s face it, your child’s mind is fertile ground for oligarchs, corrupt politicians and any other thieving member of the so-called “ruling elite” who aim to enslave the masses both mentally and monetarily. Unfortunately, the propaganda that comes from the government and our largest corporations is perceived as being absolute truth by most people. If you’re like me, at one point in time you had to wake up to it all and accept that you had been completely brainwashed for the first few decades for your life.

On a parental level, defending my child’s mind against blatant lies and deceit from the media, military industrial complex and corporatism is really not that difficult. But what about their grandparents, cousins or the kids next door?

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The Ebola Conspiracies

Katy Hall of The Huffington Post interviewed me earlier
this week for a story about Ebola conspiracy theories. Her article
is
up now; here’s an excerpt:

Medical conspiracy theories pop up around any
widespread health scare, sometimes bolstered by the inadequate or
opaque government responses that can follow. Such theories captured
the public imagination during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s,
surfaced around the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak, and they remain a
staple of the anti-vaccination movement. Conspiracy theories
represent a way for people to try to make sense of a chaotic health
threat—especially one like Ebola that’s horrific and far from being
contained overseas.

“You’re going to have gaps in the signals that are coming in about
what’s happening in the world, and you’re going to want to fill in
those gaps somehow,” said Jesse Walker, books editor of Reason
magazine and author of The United States of Paranoia: A
Conspiracy Theory. “If you’re afraid of something, you’re
going to find a fearful pattern. Obviously infectious disease is
something people are very afraid of.”

In addition to talking with me, Hall interviewed
Conspiracy Theories author Mark Fenster, who had some
sensible things to say about the fears fueling some of the Ebola
theories that have been floating around. Check the rest of the
piece out
here.

Bonus link: The inevitable plug for the new, expanded

paperback edition of my conspiracy book.

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Goldman Sachs Is Buying Carl Icahn’s “High Yield Bond Bubble”

High-yield bond issuance has surged in recent days as 'wide' spreads have encouraged investors to take the dip once again (despite firms' record leverage and increasing desperation to roll the wall of maturing debt). However, it's not all guns blazing, as one manager noted, "while the market reopens, it reopens with issuers having to be a little more investor friendly." Despite Carl Icahn's warning that "the high-yield bond market is in a major bubble that's gonna burst," Bullard's "QE4" comments sparked Goldman to add US junk bonds and Aberdeen says selling EU and buying US corporate debt "is the trade that kind of screams at you right now." The dash-for-trash down-in-quality is back as CCC-demand surges and, as one trader notes the market's schizophrenia: "one day the market feels like it is shut down and you can’t sell anything and you wake up this morning and you can price any part of the curve."

There is nothing to fear but the lack of The Fed itself…

On the one hand…

Carl Icahn:

"The Fed is really holding the market up…. The Fed turned this market around here because it let it be known that the Fed funds rate isn't going to be raised in March. I am concerned about the high yield market, I think that's in a major bubble, but nobody knows when it's gonna burst…"

and on the other…

Goldman Sachs Asset Management:

GSAM dded to its U.S. junk bond holdings amid recent selloff, according to money manager’s head of Asia-Pacific fixed income Philip Moffitt, seeing U.S. as ‘Beacon’ amid the recent rout.

High-yield bonds more attractive than investment-grade debt, Moffitt says in interview in Sydney

Says underlying structure of U.S. growth is quite strong

GSAM is “reasonably constructive” on high-yield market in Asia

Says he’s “worried about China” and expects a higher risk premium on assets related to the country

Aberdeen Asset Management:

New issuance has been heavy but concessions generous: "There was a good 10 to 15 basis-point concession probably because the underwriters on both wanted to get the deals done, done properly, and have them trade well."

"We have been sort of on the margin selling a little bit of euro to buy dollar securities but it hasn’t been wholesale yet. But that is the trade that kind of screams at you right now."

"Defaults are going to remain quite benign and with yields approaching 6.5 percent for high yield, it is tough not be interested in talking about good double BB and single B companies,” he said from London. “I still think high yield’s good value, and it is a lot better now."

"We are using this as an opportunity to put money to work, we are reducing some of our loan exposure and buying high-yield bonds. Where we have the discretion to add high yield to our investment-grade accounts, we are using that as well.”

And then there's this from Citi's Matt King:

The following sums up the scizophrenia nicely:

“The market is very forgiving,” Timothy Cox, executive director of debt capital markets at Mizuho Securities USA Inc. in New York, said in a telephone interview. “One day the market feels like it is shut down and you can’t sell anything and you wake up this morning and you can price any part of the curve. The market is very open.”

As everyone jumps back on the down-in-quality, dash-for-trash trade:

57% of two-way flow in single-Bs has been client buying, followed by 53% in CCCs, Trace shows.

* * *
On a side note, the marked swings in Treasuries of the last 3 days suggest notable rate-locks as banks hedge (and unwind) rate risk from the expected issuance (hedge into issuance, unwind on post)

* * *

And remember, our dream-crushing discussion of the rise in cash on corporate balance sheets

US companies are carrying far more net debt than in 2007

Another curiosity is this notion that US companies have substantially reduced their debt pile and are therefore cash rich. The latter is indeed true. Cash and equivalents are at historically high levels, but rarely do those who mention the mountains of corporate cash also discuss the massive increase in debt seen over the last couple of years.

In fact, debt levels have been growing to such an extent that net debt (i.e. excluding the massive cash pile) is 15% higher than it was prior to the financial crisis.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1wmPvq7 Tyler Durden

Video: The Hard-Won Beauty of Entrepreneurship

In the latest video from Reason, we profile a couple
millenial-aged entrepreneurs and find out what motivated them to
take the huge emotional and financial risks entailed with starting
a business. Watch above or click on the link below for video, full
text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and more Reason TV
clips.

View this article.

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Meet Janet Dupree:72, Alcoholic, HIV-Positive, $16,000 In Student Debt: “I Won’t Live Long Enough To Pay It Off”

One would think that Janet Lee Dupree, 72, a self-professed HIV-infected alcoholic, would be slowly putting aside material worries as she prepares to set the intangibles in her life in order for one last time. One would be wrong.

Janet Dupree has had her wages garnished

As she admits, “I am an alcoholic and I have HIV,” she tells the BBC. “That’s under control.” So what is the cause of most if not all consternation in the final days of Dupree’s life? “I was sick and I didn’t worry about paying back the debt.” As a result, Dupree defaulted on her loan, and since she turned 65 she has had money withheld from her Social Security benefits.

“Just recently I received a notification that they are going to garnish my wages because I am still working,” says Dupree, who works 30 hours a week as a substance abuse counsellor.

The debt in question: Dupree owes $16,000 in student loans she acquired in 1971 and 1972.

Or make that “student loans” – debt which is crippling the last days of a person who hasn’t seen the inside of a classroom in four decades.

Dupree, who lives in Citra, Florida, admits she forgot for many years that she had borrowed the money – originally $3,000 – in order to complete her undergraduate studies in Spanish.

The stunning story of how the exponentially rising…

… notional amounts of (anything but) student debt is crushing millions of Americans as recounted by the BBC:

Outstanding student loan debt in the US amounts to $1tr
3% of households headed by individuals 65 or over carry student debt (706,000 households)
24% of households headed by individuals 64 or under carry student debt (22 million households)
The outstanding federal debt for older adults grew from $2.8bn in 2005 to $18.2bn in 2013
27% of federal student loans held by individuals aged 65 to 74 are in default, compared to 12% of loans to people between the ages of 25 and 49

In 2005, older adults owed $2.8bn (£1.61bn) in federal student debt. By 2013, that figure that had ballooned to $18.2bn, according to a report released last month by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

These seniors account for 706,000 households in the United States – small compared to the 22 million households with non-seniors who hold student load debt, but a growing problem. People over 65 also defaulted on their student loan debt at a much higher rate than other segments of the population, says Charles Jeszeck, author of the GAO report.

Students in the US often take out loans, both privately funded and financed by the US Department of Education, to pay their school fees. While other loans, such as a home mortgage, can be forgiven if a borrower files for bankruptcy, student loans cannot.

According to the GAO study, the number of individuals whose Social Security benefits were offset to pay student loan debt increased from about 31,000 to 155,000 between 2002-13. Jeszeck tells the BBC that this situation can cause considerable problems for older adults who, like Dupree, may have to extend their working life well beyond retirement age.

“They face the potential of reduced social security benefits and a lower standard of living, possibly a poverty-level standard of living in retirement,” Jeszeck says.

Rosemary Anderson, 57, says she is fortunate not to have defaulted on her student loan, but she already knows she will grow old with a debt “hanging over her head”.

Between 1991-2000 she borrowed $64,000 in order to complete both her undergraduate and her graduate studies in organisational behaviour and development.

Soon after, though, she began what she calls a “steep decline into financial hell”.

She says she divorced her husband of 24 years, had health issues that prevented her from working full time, and had her salary reduced when the financial crisis hit.

Anderson, who works as a member of the emergency management team at the University of California, Santa Cruz, couldn’t afford her monthly loan payments, so she entered into a series of deferment options with the Department of Education.

Today, she owes $128,000 and is hoping to get additional help from the government in reducing that amount.

The vast majority of older borrowers took out their loans in order to pay for their own studies, although a small percentage used the loans for their spouses, children or grandchildren.

Many borrowed money to pay for mid- or late-career retraining, or may have acquired loans with a very long repayment term. Others defaulted at a younger age, were unable to dig themselves out of the problem and carried it through into retirement.

The Department of Education says it is “committed to working with older borrowers to help them understand and manage debt”, as William Leith, chief business officer for federal student aid, explained in a recent Senate hearing where different measures were discussed.

A department spokesperson told the BBC that there are “many repayment options available, including those based on income, as well as forgiveness programmes”.

Meanwhile, Rosemary Anderson is worried. She says never imagined that she would have this problem at her age.

She feels fortunate to have a job but recognises that she will have to continue working as long as she is physically able to.

“Retirement is not part of my vocabulary,” she says.

“I will never live long enough to pay off my loan.”

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Phoenix Creating Mental Health Board for PD After Fatal Shooting of Hammer-Wielding Woman

In August Officer Percy Dupra shot and killed Michelle Cusseaux in Phoenix, Arizona, after the woman
allegedly wielded a hammer while police were executing an order to
bring her to a mental health facility. This week the city announced
reforms in response to the shooting.

The Phoenix New Times
reports:

“August 14, 2014, was a tragic day not only for the Cusseaux
family, but for our department as well,” [Police Chief Daniel]
Garcia said at a press conference yesterday, where Cusseaux’s
mother was in the audience.

The main change going forward is the creation of a mental health
advisory board that reports directly to the police department.

“This is not a task force, this is not a temporary board,” Mayor
Greg Stanton said. “This is a board that’s going to be made up the
top mental-health professionals in our community, providing
constant guidance to the police department.”

According to the police department, all cops received two hours
of mental health training after the Cusseaux shooting. Police will
also try to minimize their involvement in mental-health crises—cops
were there to take Cusseaux to a mental hospital on a court
order.

For those not convinced the advisory board, made up mostly of
local mental health providers, the city has apparently used them
for the police department before. From the Times:

Councilman Michael Nowakowski said he was placed on a police
advisory board 20 years ago, and it’s still active.

“I know that these advisory boards work,” he said. “These
advisory boards have direct communication to the chief and top
administrators of the Phoenix Police Department. This is where
change happens.”

Garcia says more reforms are on the way but wouldn’t say
specifically how the shooting of Cusseaux informed the reforms,
because that shooting is still being investigated.

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California Pension Fund Mystified That Folks Are Upset About Budget-Busting Bonuses

That will be an extra $75 a month for flag-raising duties. In August, Victor Nava of the
Reason Foundation
highlighted what is ultimately the destruction of a significant
feature of California Gov. Jerry Brown’s modest public employee
pension reforms. He sought to stop one source of pension
spiking—the pursuit of temporary bonuses and extras in pay that
ultimately permanently boost an employee’s pension payout—by
requiring pensions to be calculated from base pay, not including
these bonuses.

No problem, said the California Public Employees’ Retirement
System (CalPERS). They’ll just declare all sorts of bonuses to be
part of their base pay and force them right back into the pension
calculations. CalPERS voted to have 99 bonuses sometimes given to
certain public employees for various tasks that most of us would
classify as expected job duties (like officers directing traffic)
as part of their base pay. And so California’s multi-billion-dollar
pension crisis gets worse.

Today the Los Angeles Times follows up on the fears
raised by Nava to explore the potential financial impact of this
vote. Note that CalPERS doesn’t know the potential cost to
taxpayers of the decision they made. They voted without any sort of
estimate. So the Times took the city of Fountain Valley,
an Orange County community with a population of around 55,000, and
had CalPERS
determine what the bonuses are going to cost:

CalPERS found the Fountain Valley perks could hike a worker’s
gross pay as much as 17%. About half the city’s workforce received
the extra pay that will also increase their pensions, most of them
police and fire employees.

Fountain Valley taxpayers are spending between $147,000 and
$179,000 in total compensation, pension and other benefits for each
full-time officer on its force, according to city documents.
Sergeants, lieutenants, two captains and the chief receive
more.

CalPERS executives told the Times they didn’t
understand why people are so upset with them:

The action simply clarifies the 2012 reform law, which was
designed to stem rising pension costs, said Brad Pacheco, a
spokesman for the agency.

CalPERS always assumed that new employees would continue to
benefit from bonuses just as those hired earlier did, Pacheco
said.

“We just changed the definition of ‘base pay’ to include things
that are obviously not base pay. Why is everybody so upset with
us?”

When it comes to salary negotiations though, you better believe
all those bonuses (and the fact that they permanently boost
pensions) will not be part of the numbers tossed out so that
employee representatives can make wages appear more modest.

The Times notes that pension contributions from the
state and municipal governments within California have jumped from
$1.9 billion to $8.1 billion in 10 years. That’s not even getting
into the massive problem of growing health care costs for
government employees.

Nava noted some of the justifications for bonus pay in his
August story, but the Times has a longer list
here.

Below, Reason Foundation Vice President of Policy Adrian Moore
discusses how to end the public sector pension crisis:

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Philly Police Have Paid Out $40 Million in Lawsuits Since 2009

Newly-released documents indicate that misconduct
by police officers has cost the city of Philadelphia $40 million in
lawsuits since the beginning of 2009. That’s about $19,000-worth of
bad cops every single day for nearly six years. Excessive force
alone has cost the city more than $13,400,000.

The data comes from Tom Feathers at MuckRock, a
blog dedicated to making Freedom of Information requests. Feathers

explains how he came up with this enormous number:

MuckRock analyzed lists of civil lawsuits brought
against the cities’ police departments, which were obtained through
public records requests. The data only includes cases brought since
Jan. 1, 2009, not all cases closed since 2009.

We sorted out cases brought as a result of alleged actions that
we determined to be police misconduct – wrongful shooting deaths,
excessive force, illegal searches, etc.

We chose not to include lawsuits that appeared to arise out of
negligence rather than intentional police actions, such as car
crashes involving police cruisers.

In some instances, where the nature of the case could not be
determined, we excluded lawsuits.

In total, MuckRock sifted through 1,745 cases, and
determined that 1,223 were clear cases of misconduct. “Of those,
the city settled 584 and lost two, roughly 48 percent, at an
average of $69,401 per lawsuit,” writes Feathers.

He
highlights the two most expensive cases, each of which cost $2.5
million. Officer Larry Shields, who was involved in another
shooting the month prior, entered the apartment of a man named
Stephen Moore and “opened fire without saying a word.” Another case
involved an officer unloading 62 rounds into two men on a chase,
killing one. Officers claimed they saw the men reach for guns, but
no weapons were ever found.

Philadelphia’s costly problem can’t be explained away by a
couple of big cases, though. Feathers contextualizes it. He put
together data on “Indianapolis, San
Francisco, San
Jose, and Austin,”
which have “a combined population more than double Philadelphia’s
estimated 1,526,006 residents.” They have in total settled or lost
only 122 misconduct cases, a mere 20 percent of Philadelphia’s.

So, what are law enforcement officers guilty of? As stated
above, excessive force has cost the city over $13 million. That’s
because the city has settled 223 cases of it, by far the most
frequent type of misconduct. Next is assault and battery at 160
cases. There have been a relatively small number of shootings – 29
to be exact – but those have actually been the costliest, with the
city paying out $13,800,000.

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Steve Chapman: Should We Strip Terrorists of Citizenship?

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz doesn’t trust
Barack Obama to protect Americans against Ebola, defeat the Islamic
State, oversee the IRS, or revamp the health insurance system. He
decries the expansion of federal power Obama has brought about. But
Cruz wants to give him another power by letting him decide that
some Americans will no longer be Americans.

That’s the implication of the senator’s Expatriate Terrorist
Act, which would let the government go to court to revoke the
citizenship of anyone who joins or aids a foreign terrorist group
that targets Americans. Cruz thinks this step is necessary to
prevent citizens who leave to fight for the Islamic State from
returning to carry out “unspeakable acts of terror here at
home.”

It’s not necessary, in strict point of fact, writes Steve
Chapman. Federal law already makes it a crime to murder Americans
and to provide material assistance to terrorist organizations. So
anyone who becomes a terrorist for the Islamic State can be
arrested and prosecuted and incarcerated for a long time.

View this article.

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