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Javier E

Why Didn't the Government Stop the Crypto Scam? - 1 views

mattstoller.substack.com/...-didnt-the-government-stop-the

crypto government regulation capture agency history crisis corruption

shared by Javier E on 12 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, who took office in April of 2021 with a deep background in Wall Street, regulatory policy, and crypto, which he had taught at MIT years before joining the SEC. Gensler came in with the goal of implementing the rule of law in the crypto space, which he knew was full of scams and based on unproven technology. Yesterday, on CNBC, he was again confronted with Andrew Ross Sorkin essentially asking, “Why were you going after minor players when this Ponzi scheme was so flagrant?”
  • Cryptocurrencies are securities, and should fit under securities law, which would have imposed rules that would foster a de facto ban of the entire space. But since regulators had not actually treated them as securities for the last ten years, a whole new gray area of fake law had emerged
  • Almost as soon as he took office, Gensler sought to fix this situation, and treat them as securities. He began investigating important players
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • But the legal wrangling to just get the courts to treat crypto as a set of speculative instruments regulated under securities law made the law moot
  • In May of 2022, a year after Gensler began trying to do something about Terra/Luna, Kwon’s scheme blew up. In a comically-too-late-to-matter gesture, an appeals court then said that the SEC had the right to compel information from Kwon’s now-bankrupt scheme. It is absolute lunacy that well-settled law, like the ability for the SEC to investigate those in the securities business, is now being re-litigated.
  • many crypto ‘enthusiasts’ watching Gensler discuss regulation with his predecessor “called for their incarceration or worse.”
  • it wasn’t just the courts who were an impediment. Gensler wasn’t the only cop on the beat. Other regulators, like those at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve, or the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, not only refused to take action, but actively defended their regulatory turf against an attempt from the SEC to stop the scams.
  • Behind this was the fist of political power. Everyone saw the incentives the Senate laid down when every single Republican, plus a smattering of Democrats, defeated the nomination of crypto-skeptic Saule Omarova in becoming the powerful bank regulator at the Comptroller of the Currency
  • Instead of strong figures like Omarova, we had a weakling acting Comptroller Michael Hsu at the OCC, put there by the excessively cautious Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Hsu refused to stop bank interactions with crypto or fintech because, as he told Congress in 2021, “These trends cannot be stopped.”
  • It’s not just these regulators; everyone wanted a piece of the bureaucratic pie. In March of 2022, before it all unraveled, the Biden administration issued an executive order on crypto. In it, Biden said that virtually every single government agency would have a hand in the space.
  • That’s… insane. If everyone’s in charge, no one is.
  • And behind all of these fights was the money and political prestige of some most powerful people in Silicon Valley, who were funding a large political fight to write the rules for crypto, with everyone from former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to former SEC Chair Mary Jo White on the payroll.
  • (Even now, even after it was all revealed as a Ponzi scheme, Congress is still trying to write rules favorable to the industry. It’s like, guys, stop it. There’s no more bribe money!)
  • Moreover, the institution Gensler took over was deeply weakened. Since the Reagan administration, wave after wave of political leader at the SEC has gutted the place and dumbed down the enforcers. Courts have tied up the commission in knots, and Congress has defanged it
  • Under Trump crypto exploded, because his SEC chair Jay Clayton had no real policy on crypto (and then immediately went into the industry after leaving.) The SEC was so dormant that when Gensler came into office, some senior lawyers actually revolted over his attempt to make them do work.
  • In other words, the regulators were tied up in the courts, they were against an immensely powerful set of venture capitalists who have poured money into Congress and D.C., they had feeble legal levers, and they had to deal with ‘crypto enthusiasts' who thought they should be jailed or harmed for trying to impose basic rules around market manipulation.
  • The bottom line is, Gensler is just one regulator, up against a lot of massed power, money, and bad institutional habits. And we as a society simply made the choice through our elected leaders to have little meaningful law enforcement in financial markets, which first became blindingly obvious in 2008 during the financial crisis, and then became comical ten years later when a sector whose only real use cases were money laundering
  • , Ponzi scheming or buying drugs on the internet, managed to rack up enough political power to bring Tony Blair and Bill Clinton to a conference held in a tax haven billed as ‘the future.’
  • It took a few years, but New Dealers finally implemented a workable set of securities rules, with the courts agreeing on basic definitions of what was a security. By the 1950s, SEC investigators could raise an eyebrow and change market behavior, and the amount of cheating in finance had dropped dramatically.
  • By 1935, the New Dealers had set up a new agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and cleaned out the FTC. Yet there was still immense concern that Roosevelt had not been able to tame Wall Street. The Supreme Court didn’t really ratify the SEC as a constitutional body until 1938, and nearly struck it down in 1935 when a conservative Supreme Court made it harder for the SEC to investigate cases.
  • Institutional change, in other words, takes time.
  • It’s a lesson to remember as we watch the crypto space melt down, with ex-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried
  • It’s not like perfidy in crypto was some hidden secret. At the top of the market, back in December 2021, I wrote a piece very explicitly saying that crypto was a set of Ponzi schemes. It went viral, and I got a huge amount of hate mail from crypto types
  • one of the more bizarre aspects of the crypto meltdown is the deep anger not just at those who perpetrated it, but at those who were trying to stop the scam from going on. For instance, here’s crypto exchange Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who just a year ago was fighting regulators vehemently, blaming the cops for allowing gambling in the casino he helps run.
  • FTX.com was an offshore exchange not regulated by the SEC. The problem is that the SEC failed to create regulatory clarity here in the US, so many American investors (and 95% of trading activity) went offshore. Punishing US companies for this makes no sense.
Javier E

Opinion | The hidden scam behind Tucker Carlson and the right's 'replacement' game - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...lson-replacement-rhetoric-scam

replacement scam racism gop immigration

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • a key fact about this narrative: It gets an important truth exactly backward.
  • The aging Whites this story targets will be relying on social insurance programs whose durability will heavily depend on immigrant taxpayers to sustain it, meaning they have a great deal to lose from decreased immigration.
  • With or without immigration, the White share of the population will decline in the coming decades, census projections show. But if immigration is reduced or eliminated, America will grow older, with many fewer working-age adults available to support an exploding number of retirees.And that would not only slow overall economic growth, multiple projections have found, but also would increase pressure for cuts in the Social Security and Medicare benefits that provide a lifeline to the older Whites most drawn to the right’s anti-immigrant arguments.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The “replacement” demagoguery seeks to exploit fears rooted in reaction to a truism: Immigrants have increased as a share of the U.S. population since national origins quotas were ended in the 1960s.
  • But as Brownstein notes, the further “browning” of America will be caused not primarily by new immigration, but rather the higher reproduction rates of immigrants already here and their descendants, relative to slower reproduction among Whites.
  • That means restricting immigration, even severely, cannot halt the transition to a majority-minority country by 2060. But it would mean a smaller workforce relative to the aging population.
  • To fully appreciate what a despicable scam this is, however, we need to look at the darker implications of the “replacement” narrative.
  • The argument isn’t just that liberals want more immigration to win future elections. It’s also that elites are deliberately importing more immigrants to threaten aging Whites’ long term survival.
  • Prominent Republicans who have echoed Carlson’s line in a deceptively softer form also trade on this idea. They have said liberals want more immigration to “permanently transform” our “political landscape” and to “remake the demographics of America” to “stay in power forever.”
  • What’s unmistakable, again and again, is the dark invocation of permanent erasure and elimination
  • There’s an audience for this: A recent survey by GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson found that nearly half of Republican respondents believe politics is about “ensuring the country’s survival as we know it.” As Anderson told Ezra Klein, there is a “real sense in the Republican coalition today that they are under siege.”
  • As Ed Kilgore writes, this intimation of an “overclass-underclass alliance” that feasts parasitically on the authentic “producerist” majority of “hard-working Americans” is a decades-old right wing populist trope that trades in “paranoia” of “uncommon power.”
edencottone

A Pro-Trump scam PAC returns with a vengeance - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.com/...rump-scam-pac-robocalls-475917

shared by edencottone on 17 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Over the past few weeks, POLITICO has received a number of robocalls from generically named political groups asking for cash in order to help in very Trump-specific missions.
  • A donation of $100, for example, would help return Trump to Twitter. Or, for a similar amount, a potential donor can “stop Kamala Harris and socialism,” the calls claim. Other calls ask for money to ensure that congressional Democrats don’t dismantle the wall Trump started building along the U.S.-Mexico border.
  • But the calls aren’t being made by Trump’s Save America political action committee. In fact, it’s not entirely clear who’s behind them. The telemarketers on the line said they were volunteers working for the Campaign to Support Republican Leaders, which is not registered with the Federal Election Commission and doesn’t have any online presence.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • A POLITICO investigation in 2019 identified Support American Leaders PAC as one of more than a dozen pro-Trump PACs with no actual ties to Trump. Such PACs, sometimes known as scam PACs, have plagued Republicans — and, to a lesser extent, Democrats — for years. They were so persistent in hitting up donors for cash under the ruse of it going to Trump’s campaign that the actual campaign felt compelled to disavow them.
  • Save America has raised more than $31 million in less than two months after Trump’s allies started it. Trump is also reportedly planning to add a super PAC to his post-presidential operation.
  • Back in 2019, a CNN investigation traced a series of mysterious robocalls claiming to raise money for Trump’s wall back to Support American Leaders PAC. Those calls used a recording of Trump’s voice to give the impression the then-president was behind their efforts.
rachelramirez

Chapter Two: She's the face of a $200 million scam - but does she exist? - 0 views

money.cnn.com/...index.html

US economic Maria Duval scam

shared by rachelramirez on 04 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Chapter Two: She's the face of a $200 million scam - but does she exist?
  • Her operation has raked in all this money -- more than $200 million in the United States and Canada alone, according to the U.S. government -- through a pretty simple scheme: sending heartfelt, personalized letters selling psychic readings, lucky numbers and trinkets that she promises will change people's lives.
  • One victim, whose letter is included as evidence in a U.S. government lawsuit, sent Duval more than $1,000 -- hoping her psychic abilities could help them win much-needed money.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Despite repeated investigations and plenty of evidence that her psychic claims are pure fiction, we have not been able to find a single government agency -- in the U.S. or abroad -- that has ever been able to corner Duval for questioning
  • She signed a settlement with the U.S. Postal Service in 2007 in which she denied any wrongdoing, but no one associated with the case would tell us where the signature came from.
  • One of the last recorded sightings of this same woman was a high-profile appearance in Russia in 2008. It was there that she predicted that an African-American would become president of the United States (just a few weeks before the election took place).
Javier E

Springtime for Grifters - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...springtime-for-grifters.html

GOP scam demagogues epistemic

shared by Javier E on 30 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • These days, in his party, being an obvious grifter isn’t a liability, and may even be an asset.
  • this doesn’t just go for outsider candidates like Mr. Carson and Donald Trump. Insider politicians like Marco Rubio are simply engaged in a different, classier kind of scam — and they are empowered in part by the way the grifters have defined respectability down.
  • About the grifters: Start with the lowest level, in which marketers use political affinity to sell get-rich-quick schemes, miracle cures, and suchlike
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • At a somewhat higher level are marketing campaigns more or less tied to what purports to be policy analysis. Right-wing warnings of imminent hyperinflation, coupled with demands that we return to the gold standard, were fanned by media figures like Glenn Beck
  • At a higher level still are operations that are in principle engaging in political activity, but mainly seem to be generating income for their organizers.
  • You might think that such revelations would be politically devastating. But the targets of such schemes know, just know, that the liberal mainstream media can’t be trusted, that when it reports negative stories about conservative heroes it’s just out to suppress people who are telling the real truth. It’s a closed information loop, and can’t be broken.
  • a lot of people live inside that closed loop. Current estimates say that Mr. Carson, Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz together have the support of around 60 percent of Republican voters.
  • the success of the grifters has a profound effect on the whole party. As I said, it defines respectability down.
  • There was a time when Mr. Rubio’s insistence that $6 trillion in tax cuts would somehow pay for themselves would have marked him as deeply unserious, especially given the way his party has been harping on the evils of budget deficits
  • Mr. Rubio sounds sensible compared to the likes of Mr. Carson and Mr. Trump. So there’s no penalty for his fiscal fantasies.
  • The point is that we shouldn’t ask whether the G.O.P. will eventually nominate someone in the habit of saying things that are demonstrably untrue, and counting on political loyalists not to notice. The only question is what kind of scam it will be.
Javier E

Where is Felicity Huffman's spouse, William H. Macy, in the college admissions scandal?... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-90f0-0ccfeec87a61_story.html

college admission scandal culture parenting

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Why was Felicity Huffman’s husband, an equally famous actor, not also charged with trying to bribe and fraud his kids’ way into college?
  • “Oh, I bet I know why,” sighed one friend, currently mired in her own kids’ school applications. “It’s because the moms have to do everything, including organize the crime.”
  • Macy, for what it’s worth, actually appeared to be a very involved parent. In the recorded phone calls, it was SPOUSE who brought up that his kid needed high enough scores for Georgetown. It was SPOUSE who declared the kid would perform better if the family could finagle an extended two-day SAT testing period, usually reserved for students with learning disabilities.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Huffman’s “Housewives” character spent one episode trying to bribe her twins’ way into a private school, BuzzFeed points out (for $15,000 — is that how Huffman knew it was the going rate?), and so, the story goes, of course Huffman would do the same in real life.
  • The most vomitous line in the whole indictment comes from a dad — New York attorney Gordon Caplan — who tells a witness on the phone, “To be honest, I’m not worried about the moral issue.”
  • Radar ran an anonymously sourced article in which a family friend says Macy “didn’t know the details, but he knew she was trying to do something. . . He wasn’t fully aware of what she was planning.” Truly, I’m not sure which is a worse scenario for Macy: that he blithely participated in an alleged illegal plot, or that he blithely participated in an entire phone call in which the alleged illegal plot was hatched and apparently didn’t know what anyone, including himself, was talking about.
  • in terms of moral dissonance, Felicity Huffman is the most surprising villain, and the one whose motives I keep trying to unpack.
  • Huffman created the website What the Flicka, dedicated to parenting. Specifically, to being a mom. Even more specifically, to being a real, relatable, imperfect mom.
  • WhatTheFlicka.com is a land of sardonic coffee mugs and wine-o’clock-Wednesdays, and scented candles with names such as “Juice Cleanse” that purport to smell like “greens, mint, and regret.” The articles about parenting have headlines such as “10 ways I’m totally screwing up my kids” and “10 reasons to dread summer with kids” and “9 ways parenthood is like ‘Game of Thrones.’ ”
  • In other words, the site buys into a children-are-a-battlefield theory of parenting. Parenthood is impossible, and making it to bedtime without becoming an alcoholic is an excellent reason to reward yourself with a martini. We are all a hot mess!
  • In Felicity’s mind, did she do something at odds with her theory of motherhood, or was the alleged scamming an extension of it? Was allegedly buying her kids’ way into school a twisted, privileged version of, Ladies, amiright, sometimes we serve frosting for dinner and sometimes we bribe Georgetown?
  • “Ruh Ro!” she chirpily wrote in an email to her contact in the scam. “Looks like [my daughter’s high school] wants to provide own proctor.” It was a problem to be solved, practically and without much fuss.
katherineharron

Trump's comments send a signal to his supporters about how to react if Biden prevails -... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 24 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Trump's intransigence, included in his latest assault on perfectly legitimate mail-in ballots on Wednesday, posed a grave threat to the democratic continuum that has underpinned nearly 250 years of republican government.
  • "Well, we're going to have to see what happens. You know that I've been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster,"
  • "(G)et rid of the ballots and you'll have a very ... there won't be a transfer, frankly. There'll be a continuation."
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Trump's near simultaneous warning on Wednesday that he thinks the election will end up being decided by the Supreme Court also raises the risk of a constitutional imbroglio likely to be worse than the disputed 2000 election.
  • His rhetoric escalated as he yet again politicized the effort to quell the pandemic by threatening to override regulators on the question of whether a newly developed vaccine would be safe in a highly irregular move.
  • his anti-democratic instincts and prioritization of his own political goals amid a national emergency show he plans to allow nothing -- not the health of Americans, the sanctity of US elections or the reputation of the Supreme Court -- to prevent him from winning a second term.
  • Trump's latest attempts to create uproar came amid new efforts to subvert the traditional mechanisms of government for his own gain
  • Trump is advancing a fake reality that Covid-19 is dying out at a moment when alarm bells are ringing about a possible winter second wave
  • The revelations from inside the West Wing, which came a day after the United States recorded its 200,000th death from the pandemic, show how the White House effort to end the crisis has been systematically repurposed to service Trump's hopes of a second term
  • Trump has spent years weaponizing executive power for his political and personal gain: he was impeached, after all, for trying to get Ukraine to interfere in the election,
  • he is driving America to a dangerous place in the weeks leading up to the election, and that the most tense and divisive days for many years could be ahead
  • Washington was already on edge, given the raised stakes of a looming election and the sudden vacancy on the Supreme Court, which is promising the most confrontational confirmation battle in years
  • Trump is well within his rights to nominate a replacement for Ginsburg -- a move that will enshrine an unassailable conservative majority, potentially for decades.
  • But the President's suggestion that the Supreme Court could be called in to adjudicate the election threatens to trigger new fury over the nominating process. If a candidate is installed in the coming weeks it will raise the possibility that a new justice who is recently beholden to the President for a lifetime appointment could be called upon to rule on his political fate in a clear and obvious conflict of interest.
  • "I think this will end up in the Supreme Court and I think it's very important that we have nine justices," Trump said, referring to the election
  • "because I think this scam that the Democrats are pulling, it's a scam, this scam will be before the United States Supreme Court and I think having a four-four situation is not a good situation if you get that."
  • In recent days, the President has declared the US is turning the "corner" on the pandemic, even though experts warn that a second wave of infections could build off an already elevated base and lead to tens of thousands more deaths.
  • Political interference also rippled through Trump's response to reports that the Federal Drug Administration was considering tougher standards for a Covid-19 vaccine to ensure that volunteers used to test it did not suffer side effects.
Javier E

Trump's chickens may be coming home to roost. But the system has already failed. - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-the-system-has-already-failed

US political system trump

shared by Javier E on 22 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • more fundamentally, that Trump got within 100 miles of the White House to begin with represents a massive failure of the system.
  • I say that because there was little mystery about how spectacularly corrupt he was — not just boorish, sexist and racist, but someone who had spent a career lying in public and engineering one grift after another to exploit people and cheat the gullible out of their money, whether it was Trump University or the Trump Institute or the Trump Network, or his habit of refusing to pay contractors, the exploitation of foreign models, or his foundation that was essentially a scam, or his apparent eagerness to have sketchy figures from the former Soviet Union use his properties for money laundering. We knew it all.
  • whatever chance we have at true accountability may only come because Trump and those around him aren’t capable of mounting a competent conspiracy or an effective coverup.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Trump spent a lifetime learning that the rules didn’t apply to him, which may have been why back in 2015 the idea that he could become president didn’t sound as crazy to him as it did to everyone else. Then he proceeded to teach us all how weak the safeguards against a corrupt demagogue becoming president really are. His party couldn’t stop him from winning its nomination, the media let his history of corruption slide while vivisecting his opponent for ludicrously trivial misdeeds, some timely intervention from the FBI director gave him a last-minute boost, and the electoral system allowed him to triumph despite winning the votes of 3 million fewer Americans than his opponent.
  • now, Trump’s last line of defense (apart from his willingness to use the powers of his office to protect himself) is the Republican Congress, an uncommonly craven collection of politicians. Fortified by a conservative media raising an increasingly urgent drumbeat of demands to hold fast, they will stand by Trump’s side because abandoning him poses the greater risk of backlash from their constituents, no matter what he is revealed to have done. So long as there are enough of them in office, Trump will be safe.
  • When it’s all over, we’ll ask, “Did the system work?” I think we already know the answer.
mimiterranova

COVID-19 Cases Surge In U.S. As Vaccinations Fall Below Government Predictions - 0 views

www.npr.org/...icial-to-overturn-georgia-vote

COVID-19 Vaccine Cases Politics

shared by mimiterranova on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • President Trump tweeted Sunday morning that the count of cases and deaths in the U.S. is "far exaggerated" and criticized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's method.
  • The grim milestones are piling up as the United States experiences another surge in coronavirus cases. Nearly 300,000 new cases were reported on Saturday. The cumulative death toll crossed more than 350,000 the same day, according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 dashboard.
  • "The numbers are real," Fauci said. "We have well over 300,000 deaths. We're averaging 2-3,000 deaths per day. ... Those are real numbers, real people and real deaths."
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Fauci also spoke about a new, more contagious variant of the coronavirus that has been detected in dozens of countries, including the U.S. "It does not appear to be more virulent, namely making people sicker or greater incidence of dying," Fauci told NBC's Chuck Todd. "Nor does it seem to elude the protection that's offered by the antibodies that are induced by the vaccine."
  • Many people are holding out hope that the COVID-19 vaccines will help quell the pandemic.
  • More than 4.2 million people have received the initial vaccination dose as of Saturday, according to the CDC. That number is far below the government's goal of having 20 million people in the U.S. vaccinated by the end of December.
  • "I want people to understand that the projections we were putting out were based on what we could control at the federal level. And we did deliver on 20 million doses delivered, but you're always going to have more doses allocated versus delivered. Delivered versus shots in arms," Adams said.
  • That approach has led to jammed phone lines, websites crashing and in some cases, people camping out in counties that took a first-come, first-served approach. In terms of what happens next with the booster shot, Zaragovia says Florida residents will have to wait for more information
  • While vaccinations continue, public health officials say it's still important to continue social distancing practices, including wearing masks, washing hands and watching how close people get to others.
  • President-elect Joe Biden opposes the death penalty and has said he will work to end its use, but as President Trump's administration accelerates the pace of federal executions in the closing days of his presidency, activists and progressive lawmakers are feeling more urgency to push Biden to act immediately upon taking office.
  • "Ending the barbaric and inhumane practice of government-sanctioned murder is a commonsense step that you can and must take to save lives," the lawmakers write. "We respectfully urge you to sign an executive order on Day 1 to place an immediate moratorium on the country's cruel use of the death penalty and signal your commitment to dismantle its use altogether."
  • The lawmakers are calling on Biden to "end the federal death penalty" on his first day in office. That's something that he wouldn't be able to do alone. "A U.S. president does not have the power to abolish the federal death penalty," Dunham said. "The only way that the federal death penalty can be abolished is an act of Congress signed by a president, or from a court decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. It's clear from the current composition of the Supreme Court that that's not going to happen, so the only way that the Biden administration would be able to end the federal death penalty would be to have some sort of bipartisan support in Congress."
katherineharron

Georgia secretary of state says Lindsey Graham implied he should try to throw away ball... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

georgia

shared by katherineharron on 17 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger stood firm Monday on his account that Sen. Lindsey Graham had hinted that he should try to discard some ballots in Georgia, where a recount is underway after the state went for President-elect Joe Biden in the presidential election.
  • "He asked if the ballots could be matched back to the voters," Raffensperger told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room" Monday evening.
  • I got the sense it implied that then you could throw those out for any, if you look at the counties with the highest frequent error of signatures
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • "It was just an implication of, 'Look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out.' "
  • Graham had cast doubt on Georgia's signature-matching law in a conversation on Friday, and had also floated the possibility that biased poll workers could have counted ballots with inconsistent signatures.
  • There has been no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, and fraudulently altering a federal election vote tally is a federal crime.
  • Graham denied Raffensperger's claim on Monday, telling CNN that he had said he wanted to understand the process for verifying the signatures on mail-in ballots
  • Asked if he was trying to pressure the secretary of state to toss legal ballots, Graham said, "That's ridiculous."
  • "What I'm trying to find out was how do you verify signatures on mail-in ballots in these states that are the center of attention? So like when you mail in a ballot, you got to have some way to verify that the signature on the envelope actually matches the person who requested the ballot," Graham said
  • "So they expanded mail-in voting, and how you verify the signatures to me is the big issue
  • Raffensperger told Blitzer that Georgia's election systems already require signature matches when voters request mail ballots and when completed ballots are returned to election systems. He also said the online absentee portal has a photo ID.
  • "We feel confident the election officials did their job," he said.
  • On Friday, CNN projected that Biden will win Georgia and its 16 electoral votes. Unofficial results put Biden ahead of Trump by about 14,000 votes, or about 0.3 percentage point.
  • due to the tight margin, state officials decided to use the preplanned audit process to recount every ballot in the presidential race.
  • At least six small counties in Georgia have finished their presidential recounts without finding any discrepancies.
  • A seventh county, Floyd, reported that 2,600 uncounted ballots had been found during their recount -- the ballots hadn't been scanned when the county tallied its early vote. An investigation is underway but human error has been deemed responsible.
  • Experts say it would be nearly impossible for Trump to overcome his 14,000-vote deficit in a recount.
  • "We want to make sure this vote is very accurate. We understand the national importance of this, and we're in the process of doing it," he told Blitzer on Monday. "The counters will be done by the 18th and we will certify this by the 20th."
  • Raffensperger, among other things, defended the integrity of absentee ballots, signature verification, and the vote counting machines
  • Raffensperger responded that his team "secured and strengthened absentee ballots for the first time since 2005" by outlawing absentee ballot harvesting and also addressed the "disinformation about signature match," writing that "GBI trained elections officials match your signature twice before any vote is cast."
  • He also posted links to news articles debunking Trump's tweets, including one alleging the Dominion voting software used in Georgia for the presidential election "deleted" and "switched" millions of votes
Megan Flanagan

WikiLeaks hack collateral damage can be deeply personal - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US wikileaks hack privacy

shared by Megan Flanagan on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • type your name into WikiLeaks to see what damage the day's hacked emails might hold for you.
  • ype your name into WikiLeaks to see what damage the day's hacked emails might hold for you.
  • the emails include the private information of a large number of bystanders, ranging from email addresses to financial data.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Because you say that to your friends, you confide in your friends, and who knows what's in there of your personal life and your professional life."
  • The Clinton campaign has refused to confirm or deny the authenticity of any of the emails
  • The website has faced criticism in the past for its tendency not to screen releases for personally identifiable information or security sensitivities,
  • Podesta emails -- which go back to the 2008 race -- have contained personal email addresses and even cellphone numbers for a wide range of DC personalities,
  • including personal security and financial fraud.
  • information introduces these peripheral individuals to a range of risks.
  • sensitive financial information was contained in the emails published online.
  • the possibility that they may be targeted by phishing or scams to try to lure them into further traps.
  • the dangers can increase to identity theft and the risk extended to family, friends and professional contacts.
  • I've got all kinds of new security provisions, new computers, and I'm changing how I use email.
  • "I hired a cybersecurity firm and I'm not rich," he added. "I've spent for me what's an enormous amount of money."
  • I figured out that a new batch of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, had been released, including a note I wrote to Podesta with my cell number.
  • all the contents of your emails for 10 years dumped out into public, think about how that feels.
  • saying the First Amendment freedom trumps personal privac
  • 'It's like somebody robbed a bank and as they're running away the money is spilling out of the backpack and instead of catching the criminal everyone is stopping to chase the money.'
Javier E

This new revelation should cripple Donald Trump. But it won't. Here's why. - The Washin... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ld-trump-but-it-wont-heres-why

demagogue campaign 2016

shared by Javier E on 14 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Trump’s GOP rivals and the Super PACs hoping to stop him have previously attacked Trump for other similar revelations, declaring him a hypocrite and a phony who is conning working class voters by pretending to be on their side. But such attacks don’t appear to work. Why not
  • in a perverse way, revelations like these actually bolster his message, rather than undercutting it. Trump’s argument is that he has a unique grasp, via direct experience and participation, of all the ways in which our political and economic system is rigged to make it easier for people such as himself to fleece working Americans. This understanding of how the game really works positions him well to fix it. He has been in on the elites’ scam for decades, and now, having made a killing off of it, he’s here to put an end to it.
  • Trump has made this argument explicitly, again and again and again, in multiple different ways. At the most recent GOP debate, Trump effectively declared that he understood better than any other candidate that politicians are bought and paid for — because he has bought and paid for politicians himself!
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Trump also rebuffed criticism of his reliance on immigrant labor here and foreign labor abroad by arguing that “because nobody knows the system better than me…I’m the one that knows how to change it.
  • Trump recently acknowledged that he’s been milking the system for a very long time, but turned that, too, into an argument for his candidacy. “I’ve always been greedy. I love money, right?” he said. “But you know what? I want to be greedy for our country.”
  • attacks on Trump’s less-than-pristine ways of acquiring his wealth, which are designed to portray him as a sleazy, greedy profiteer, lead a lot of GOP voters, particularly his supporters, to say: “So Trump is a sleazy, greedy, profiteer? Good — please be sleazy, greedy and profiteering on my behalf.”
Javier E

On Economic Arrogance - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...on-economic-arrogance.html

economics economic policy trump gop regulation growth

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • unwarranted arrogance about economics isn’t Trump-specific. On the contrary, it’s the modern Republican norm. And the question is why.
  • The Trump team is apparently projecting growth at between 3 and 3.5 percent for a decade. This wouldn’t be unprecedented: the U.S. economy grew at a 3.4 percent rate during the Reagan years, 3.7 percent under Bill Clinton. But a repeat performance is unlikely.
  • For one thing, in the Reagan years baby boomers were still entering the work force. Now they’re on their way out, and the rise in the working-age population has slowed to a crawl. This demographic shift alone should, other things being equal, subtract around a percentage point from U.S. growth.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Furthermore, both Reagan and Clinton inherited depressed economies, with unemployment well over 7 percent. This meant that there was a lot of economic slack, allowing rapid growth as the unemployed went back to work. Today, by contrast, unemployment is under 5 percent, and other indicators suggest an economy close to full employment. This leaves much less scope for rapid growth.
  • The only way we could have a growth miracle now would be a huge takeoff in productivity — output per worker-hour. This could, of course, happen: maybe driverless flying cars will arrive en masse. But it’s hardly something one should assume for a baseline projection.
  • belief that tax cuts and deregulation will reliably produce awesome growth isn’t unique to the Trump-Putin administration.
  • We heard the same thing from Jeb Bush (who?); we hear it from congressional Republicans like Paul Ryan. The question is why. After all, there is nothing — nothing at all — in the historical record to justify this arrogance.
  • Yes, Reagan presided over pretty fast growth. But Bill Clinton, who raised taxes on the rich, amid confident predictions from the right that this would cause an economic disaster, presided over even faster growth. President Obama presided over much more rapid private-sector job growth than George W. Bush, even if you leave out the 2008 collapse. Furthermore, two Obama policies that the right totally hated – the 2013 hike in tax rates on the rich, and the 2014 implementation of the Affordable Care Act – produced no slowdown at all in job creation.
  • Meanwhile, the growing polarization of American politics has given us what amount to economic policy experiments at the state level. Kansas, dominated by conservative true believers, implemented sharp tax cuts with the promise that these cuts would jump-start rapid growth; they didn’t, and caused a budget crisis instead. Last week Kansas legislators threw in the towel and passed a big tax hike.
  • At the same time Kansas was turning hard right, California’s newly dominant Democratic majority raised taxes. Conservatives declared it “economic suicide” — but the state is in fact doing fine.
  • It would be nice to pretend that we’re still having a serious, honest discussion here, but we aren’t. At this point we have to get real and talk about whose interests are being served.
  • Never mind whether slashing taxes on billionaires while giving scammers and polluters the freedom to scam and pollute is good for the economy as a whole; it’s clearly good for billionaires, scammers, and polluters.
  • And on such matters Donald Trump is really no worse than the rest of his party. Unfortunately, he’s also no better.
Javier E

In No One We Trust - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...in-no-one-we-trust

trust inequality banking economics history

shared by Javier E on 25 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • that doesn’t mean we should stop striving for a bit more trust in our society and our economy. Trust is what makes contracts, plans and everyday transactions possible; it facilitates the democratic process, from voting to law creation, and is necessary for social stability. It is essential for our lives. It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round.
  • , as more and more people lose faith in a system that seems inexorably stacked against them, and the 1 percent ascend to ever more distant heights, this vital element of our institutions and our way of life is eroding.
  • But events — and economic research — over the past 30 years have shown not only that we cannot rely on self-interest, but also that no economy, not even a modern, market-based economy like America’s, can function well without a modicum of trust — and that unmitigated selfishness inevitably diminishes trust.
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  • Adam Smith argued forcefully that we would do better to trust in the pursuit of self-interest than in the good intentions of those who pursue the general interest. If everyone looked out for just himself, we would reach an equilibrium that was not just comfortable but also productive, in which the economy was fully efficient. To the morally uninspired, it’s an appealing idea: selfishness as the ultimate form of selflessness. (Elsewhere, in particular in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Smith took a much more balanced view, though most of his latter-day adherents have not followed suit.)
  • This cascade of trust destruction was unrelenting. One of the reasons that the bubble’s bursting in 2007 led to such an enormous crisis was that no bank could trust another. Each bank knew the shenanigans it had been engaged in — the movement of liabilities off its balance sheets, the predatory and reckless lending — and so knew that it could not trust any other bank
  • Things didn’t turn out well for our economy or our society. As millions lost their homes during and after the crisis, median wealth declined nearly 40 percent in three years. Banks would have done badly, too, were it not for the Bush-Obama mega-bailouts.
  • bankers used their political influence to eviscerate regulations and install regulators who didn’t believe in them. Officials and academics assured lawmakers and the public that banks could self-regulate. But it all turned out to be a scam. We had created a system of rewards that encouraged shortsighted behavior and excessive risk-taking. In fact, we had entered an era in which moral values were given short shrift and trust itself was discounted.
  • THE banking industry is only one example of what amounts to a broad agenda, promoted by some politicians and theoreticians on the right, to undermine the role of trust in our economy. This movement promotes policies based on the view that trust should never be relied on as motivation, for any kind of behavior, in any context. Incentives, in this scheme, are all that matter.
  • So C.E.O.’s must be given stock options to induce them to work hard. I find this puzzling: If a firm pays someone $10 million to run a company, he should give his all to ensure its success. He shouldn’t do so only if he is promised a big chunk of any increase in the company’s stock market value
  • Of course, incentives are an important component of human behavior. But the incentive movement has made them into a sort of religion, blind to all the other factors — social ties, moral impulses, compassion — that influence our conduct.
  • Similarly, teachers must be given incentive pay to induce them to exert themselves. But teachers already work hard for low wages because they are dedicated to improving the lives of their students. Do we really believe that giving them $50 more, or even $500 more, as incentive pay will induce them to work harder? What we should do is increase teacher salaries generally because we recognize the value of their contributions and trust in their professionalism. According to the advocates of an incentive-based culture, though, this would be akin to giving something for nothing.
  • This is not just a coldhearted vision of human nature. It is also implausible. It is simply impossible to pay for trust every time it is required. Without trust, life would be absurdly expensive; good information would be nearly unobtainable; fraud would be even more rampant than it is; and transaction and litigation costs would soar.
  • When 1 percent of the population takes home more than 22 percent of the country’s income — and 95 percent of the increase in income in the post-crisis recovery — some pretty basic things are at stake. Reasonable people, even those ignorant of the maze of unfair policies that created this reality, can look at this absurd distribution and be pretty certain that the game is rigged.
  • Trust between individuals is usually reciprocal. But if I think that you are cheating me, it is more likely that I will retaliate, and try to cheat you. (These notions have been well developed in a branch of economics called the “theory of repeated games.”) When Americans see a tax system that taxes the wealthiest at a fraction of what they pay, they feel that they are fools to play along.
  • a deeper rot takes hold: Attitudes and norms begin to change. When no one is trustworthy, it will be only fools who trust. The concept of fairness itself is eroded. A study published last year by the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the upper classes are more likely to engage in what has traditionally been considered unethical behavior. Perhaps this is the only way for some to reconcile their worldview with their outlandish financial success, often achieved through actions that reveal a kind of moral deprivation.
  • As always, it is the poor and the unconnected who suffer most from this, and who are the most repeatedly deceived. Nowhere was this more evident than in the foreclosure crisis.
  • The banks figured out how to get court affidavits signed by the thousands (in what came to be called robo-signing), certifying that they had examined their records and that these particular individuals owed money — and so should be booted out of their homes. The banks were lying on a grand scale, but they knew that if they didn’t get caught, they would walk off with huge profits, their officials’ pockets stuffed with bonuses. And if they did get caught, their shareholders would be left paying the tab
  • But perhaps even more than opportunity, Americans cherish equality before the law. Here, inequality has infected the heart of our ideals.
  • I suspect there is only one way to really get trust back. We need to pass strong regulations, embodying norms of good behavior, and appoint bold regulators to enforce them.
Javier E

Me and My Jetta: How VW Broke My Heart - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tta-how-vw-broke-my-heart.html

VW scandal car pollution

shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Those of us who purchased the Jetta TGTBT (too good to be true) are now stuck with vehicles we cannot drive without making other people our victims. That’s because the copious NOx and hydrocarbons they emit become low-level ozone pollution. Ozone clings over urbanized areas — notably the Boston-to-Washington corridor and much of California — and the deaths it causes are a lot more real than the “kills” taking place around a Volkswagen conference table. Human-caused ozone pollution inflames and injures lungs, aggravates cardiovascular disorders, and contributes to the 500,000 or so asthma hospitalizations every year, many of them among children under 15. According to a 2013 study in the journal Environmental Research Letters, it also kills about 470,000 people a year worldwide.
  • I stayed awake much of Monday night fretting about this, and about a poisonous stew of corporate scandals — the news that Johnson & Johnson, my old paragon of corporate decency, had deliberately promoted off-label sales of a drug that caused old people to suffer strokes, and teenage boys to develop breasts; the smart-aleck investor who jacked up the price of a 62-year-old drug by 4,000 percent; Takata’s exploding airbags; G.M.’s deadly ignition switches; and of course the guy who knowingly sold tainted peanut butter that killed nine people and sickened hundreds.
  • we need to acknowledge that some of our favorite phrases — “clean diesel,” “green car” and apparently also “corporate responsibility” — are just a contradiction in terms. But that shouldn’t let us off the hook either. Every time we complacently accept some company’s green-scamming promises, we allow ourselves to become the gullible partners in crimes against one another, and the Earth. And that makes us all just a nation of willing fools.
rachelramirez

Trump University's Shady Faculty - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...niversity-s-shady-faculty.html

trump trump university politics US

shared by rachelramirez on 08 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Photo Illustration by The Daily Beastwritten by
  • The Shady Faculty of Trump University
  • According to seminar transcripts filed in one class-action lawsuit against Trump University and reviewed by The Daily Beast, Harris told students that at 19, he found himself homeless and was forced to seek shelter in the grimy New York City subway. But his life changed, he said, when he met a “nice gentleman” who taught him about the real estate business.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Despite becoming the top instructor at an institution that billed itself as a university, he didn’t have a background in education or even, according to his story, a college degree.
  • When he was hired in 2008, he was already a convicted felon—for aggravated assault, recent depositions in the Trump University case reveal. And according to 2011 divorce filings in Gwinnett County, Georgia, Harris threatened to kill his ex-wife and tried to have her Range Rover repossessed the day after she filed for a restraining order.
  • The school, which has been defunct since 2011, is currently the subject of two class-action lawsuits in California and a $40 million suit brought by Eric Schneiderman, the Attorney General from New York.
  • Trump University began in earnest on May 23, 2005, a for-profit venture with a website, TrumpUniversity.com, and a collection of courses—on entrepreneurship, real estate, and marketing—available on CD-ROM for $300 a pop.
  • From the outset, Trump University’s roster of brainy professors was a selling point. In a promotional video
  • Sonny Low, who paid $25,000 for a Trump mentorship in 2010, reported that Nowlin didn’t even “appear knowledgeable” about real estate or investing, according to one class-action lawsuit against Trump University.
  • Attendees were required to sign a waiver promising not to sue the company if they later faced legal troubles, the Enquirer reported.
  • Students started with a $1,495 three-day seminar, before some instructors, according to court papers, goaded them into buying mentorship packages totaling up to $34,995.
  • The lawsuits against Trump University claim some pupils, encouraged to increase their credit limits and to max out their credit cards, paid twice as much.
  • Trump decided to go in another direction, according to Schank. There would be no more online courses, no more lectures from ivy league professors, no more books—just seminars, with speakers like Harris
  • On social media, he posed for photos in a plush, white bathrobe on a manicured lawn, flanked by a shiny silver Hummer and Mercedes-Benz. He told students they could live like him, too, and vowed to teach them to earn $25,000 a month, according to court filings.
  • At some point, Harris was also employed by Armando Montelongo Seminars, a venture similar to Trump University and also facing lawsuits from disgruntled students who claim they were scammed.
Javier E

Michelle Obama just said what we're all thinking - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...st-said-what-were-all-thinking

civility millennials disillusionment crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 05 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • A generation of millennials feels let down by our elders, experts, institutions or some combination of the three: those whom we were asked to look up to and trust in the most important arenas of life. Their supposedly surefire paths to success (or at least stability) now feel more like scams. We’re building up to a backlash.
  • Disappointment in the promises of mainstream politicians, for example, manifested in support for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and in the rapid rise of New York Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D) in 2018. Her democratic socialist politics are a repudiation of what the establishment would have us accept. We’re hoping that she — one of us — will upend the system.
  • Further, our frustration with those who promised that politeness and order would bring about justice is revealing itself in a backlash against “civility” as such. We’re not willing to wait a decorous few days before castigating George H.W. Bush. We don’t feel guilty running Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) or White House press secretary Sarah Sanders out of a restaurant. Decorum may be nice, but the promises heaped upon it were lies.
Javier E

Washington Governor Jay Inslee Is Running for President - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...579217

climate change governor politics

shared by Javier E on 02 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • OLYMPIA, Wash.—What if a meteor were hurtling toward the Earth, about to kill millions and reshape life on the planet as we know it?
  • And what if the president, instead of doing anything to help, made it worse in just about every way, and called it a hoax (and any solutions a scam) instead of the very real, very clear disaster taking shape?And what if all the Democrats running to beat him in the next election went on and on about how concerned they were and how it’s our most pressing problem—but none had ever done much more than talk about the problem, and for the most part only started doing that in just the past few years?
  • That’s where Jay Inslee thinks America is when it comes to climate change. And that’s why he’s going to run for president.
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  • When it comes to climate change, there now appears to be “an appetite for someone who has credibility and a long track record and, most importantly, a vision statement. It’s changed to show an opening in a Democratic primary, I believe.”
  • as the 2018 midterm campaigns came to an end, he read through searing international and federal climate-change assessments, took a trip to view the wildfire damage in California, and thought through the larger moment for the country—and he shifted.
  • Inslee is the only one who has actually run a government that has made climate-change policy central. He points to the towns in Washington that have become solar-cell farms, among other accomplishments.
  • He plans to focus on the threat that climate change poses to the environment and national security—the mega-storms and fires causing millions in damages, the weather changes that will cause mass migrations, the droughts that will devastate farmers in America and around the world.
  • Inslee would propose a mix of government investments and incentives to spur other investment, restrictions on power plants and emissions, and programs to promote R&D and job growth. An endless number of jobs can be created in the climate arena, Inslee says. It’s the way to make a real dent in income inequality and have the Democratic Party bring tangible solutions to communities in rural America that have been left behind.
  • He was elected governor in 2012 and has, without much national notice, pursued arguably the most progressive and greenest agenda in the country, with fields of solar panels, fleets of electric buses, and massive job growth to show for it. And years before anyone was tweeting about the “Green New Deal,” Inslee wrote a climate-change book while he was in Congress: Apollo’s Fire, a 2007 blueprint for how much economic and entrepreneurial opportunity there is in saving the planet.
  • Even more so, he wants to talk about the risk to American opportunity. “We have two existential threats right now: one is to our natural systems, and one is to our economic systems,
  • Among the qualities that 500 Iowa caucus-goers said they were looking for in a candidate, “someone who will reestablish America’s leadership in the fight against climate change” scored highest.
  • Inslee’s answer to that anticipated attack is “the other Washington”: the experiment in progressive governance that he’s led for the past six years that’s cut against the conventional wisdom of economics. On his watch, the state has boosted health care, increased access to early-childhood education and college, raised the minimum wage, expanded paid family leave, invested in infrastructure, and established in-state net neutrality, all while leading the country in job growth, overall personal-income growth, and GDP.
Javier E

The College-Bribe Scandal Is About Class Inequality - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...584797

college admission cheating inequality scandal class

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • there are two deeply connected structural problems. The first is that the price of admission has gone up. The second is that the moral center of the meritocracy has collapsed.
  • Back in 1988, buying a spot at Harvard cost $2.5 million—or at least that’s what the case of Jared Kushner suggests, according to reporting from ProPublica’s Daniel Golden. But in this affidavit, William Singer—identified as “Cooperating Witness 1”—informs one of his parental conspirators that it takes “in the many millions” now to accomplish the same trick
  • Much more sensible to fork over something between $400,000 and $1.2 million, as Singer’s clients allegedly did.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this scandal, like so many others, is firmly rooted in rising inequality and the class system that has come with it.
  • But rising inequality has also produced a large upper-middle class—the 9.9 percent—and it is made up of some much more ordinary characters:
  • Nice people. People with good families, good degrees, living in good neighborhoods. People who have learned how to use all those good things as weapons in the struggle to preserve privilege.
  • Go to your nearest geographic database and look for the neighborhoods with the highest median home prices, the best-rated public schools (for the little people), and the highest number of advanced degrees per capita. Yep, they’re right there in the affidavit: Mill Valley, Atherton, La Jolla, and Newport Beach in California, and Greenwich, Connecticut.
  • There are two kinds of families in America now, down from an infinity or so. There are the “good” families that mostly have two parents and invest huge amounts of their own money and time, and of their nanny’s time, in the cultivation of their offspring
  • And then there are the families that have been stuck into the bottom 90 percent of the economic pile.
  • For the “good” families, getting kids into the “good” schools isn’t just about loving the kids. It’s proof of status
  • Meanwhile, the rest of America’s families haven’t got the time or money for the helicopter bills, they are much more likely to find themselves in single-parenting situations, and they have longer commutes from neighborhoods with less desirable schools. They are the ones who are counting on public schools to prepare their children for the future, and on colleges to give their children a chance to do good things. And they are the ones that this system, and the 9.9 percent, is shafting on an epic scale.
  • The core of the problem that emerges with rising inequality is that it makes everybody unreasonable. And it’s a very short step from unreasonable to flat-out immoral.
  • The defendants here are all winners in the meritocratic system. But even they think merit has nothing to do with it. “The way the world works now is pretty unbelievable,” says one parent, as he arranges a scheme to pass off his athletically challenged scion as a sports icon. “The whole world is scamming the system,” Cooperating Witness 1 assures another client. Indeed.
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