EVERYTHING TO DATE ABOUT WEWORK HAS BEEN CRAZY: Tech and finance experts are shocked by SoftBank’s ‘stone-cold crazy’ $1.7 billion golden parachute for ousted WeWork CEO Adam Neumann.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
October 23, 2019
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Artificial Intelligence Will Detect Hidden Targets In 2020 Wargame.
ILYA SHAPIRO: The Supreme Court Is Poised to Strike Down a Major Obama-Era Agency.
The CFPB is the most independent of independent agencies, with power to make rules, enforce them, adjudicate violations in its own administrative hearings, and punish wrongdoers. And yet a single director heads the agency, one who can be removed only “for cause” — malfeasance rather than, say, a change in presidential policy priorities. The CFPB doesn’t even need Congress to approve its budget, because its funding requests are rubber-stamped by another agency insulated from political control: the Federal Reserve. The CFPB has regulatory authority over 19 federal consumer-protection laws. This concentration of power in the hands of a single, unelected, unaccountable official is unprecedented and cannot be squared with the Constitution’s structure, or with its purpose of protecting individual liberty from government overreach.
The Constitution created three co-equal branches keeping one another in check to promote liberty and prevent any single person or entity from growing too powerful. During the 20th century, however, the federal government began creating “independent agencies,” typically headed by multiple commissioners appointed by the president; think of the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Federal Communications Commission.
The Supreme Court has held such multi-member commissions to be constitutional, but most of these agencies include various other mechanisms to check their powers, such as staggered terms (meaning that a new president cannot replace the whole commission at once, but can fill some seats on it); limitations on how many members of a given political party may sit on the commission at a time; and a multi-member structure through which the commission discusses potential actions and moves forward only with a majority or consensus decision.
Then Congress created the new type of agency that is the CFPB. Without multiple leaders to appoint, there can be no staggered terms, no partisanship restriction, and no discussion among commissioners.
Woodrow Wilson would have smiled, but hopefully the Supreme Court won’t.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Words Can Hurt Wednesday Edition. “We are supposed to be scandalized by all of this because OMG RAAAAACISM and stuff but the outrage falls flat when you find out that it was the Democrats who got the ‘impeachment as political lynching’ narrative going over twenty years ago.”
That was different because shut up.
October 22, 2019
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Best Headphones According to Top Record Producers.
There are some pricy models on the WSJ’s subscription-only report, but I’ve used $75 Sony MDR-V6 sets for 30 years, and haven’t heard anything good enough to bother spending more.
WORSE THAN A CRIME, IT’S A BLUNDER: Trump Warns Democrats on Dangerous Precedent They’re Setting With Impeachment.
In a similar vein, Salena Zito’s piece that Glenn linked to earlier, made me wonder if Never Trump Republicans and Democrats aren’t the new Bourbons: They’ve learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
OOPS: Russian Nuclear Sub Misfires During Putin-Supervised Drills.
The Ryazan Delta III class nuclear-powered vessel was one of five submarines, more than 100 aircraft, 200 missile launchers and 12,000 troops involved in the Grom-2019 military exercises last week. Putin supervised Grom-2019 on the last of three days of drills on Thursday.
The Ryazan submarine fired only one one ballistic missile into a test range in the Barents Sea instead of the two that had been announced by the Russian military before the launch, Vedomosti reported.
“The second R-29R [missile] did not exit the silo launcher, and the submarine returned to its home base with an unexploded missile,” it wrote, citing two unnamed sources close to Russia’s Defense Ministry.
Embarrassing.
COMMUNISM, INC: All About the Money: Why Hong Kong Matters So Much to China.
Since 1997, mainland Chinese companies have raised $335 billion by floating in Hong Kong, tapping a broader range of shareholders than they could onshore.
Over the years, the pool of capital available at home has gotten much larger. But since the Hong Kong dollar is pegged to its U.S. equivalent, and the city has no capital controls, a listing there can generate hard currency for foreign takeovers and investments. It would be harder to use a Shanghai stock sale for the same goal.
For technology firms and others, New York has been another favored listing destination, but worsening U.S.-China relations could make this more problematic. Hong Kong offers a convenient way to tap many investors who are familiar with China.
For global investors, Shanghai and Shenzhen have become more accessible. But investors typically prefer Hong Kong’s legal protections, and they have other concerns about mainland markets, including the difficulties of moving money out.
Plus: “Foreign companies and state investors have long used Hong Kong as a staging post for investing in companies or building facilities in mainland China. As it grows richer, China is also deploying larger sums abroad through foreign direct investment, which rose from $2.6 billion in 1997 to $143 billion last year, according to data from China’s Ministry of Commerce. Much of this outbound FDI goes through Hong Kong.”
Hong Kong is a goose that lays golden eggs, but also contains a poison pill.
CHANGE: Proposed Trump Administration Plan Would Require DNA Samples from Detained Migrants. “While the administration says the proposal will help solve crimes, the move is likely to anger rights advocates.”
There’s no right to enter the country illegally.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Sofia Vergara Ordered to Pay Ex Nearly $80,000 Amid Frozen Embryos Legal Battle.
HMM: Venezuela’s Guaido holds ‘exploratory’ talks with China, Russia. “Oil-rich Venezuela’s economy is crumbling amid a political standoff between leftist President Nicolas Maduro and Guaido, the national assembly speaker widely recognized as the country’s legitimate leader.”
Well, no.
The economy isn’t crumbling due to a political standoff. There’s a political standoff due to the crumbling economy after years of increasing socialism.
JEFF DUNETZ: It’s Fun Time: Tulsi Declares War On Hillary And Democratic Establishment. “If you need any more evidence that Gabbard is correct and Hillary is just being an idiot is that Joy Behar agrees with the former secretary of state. ‘She hasn’t denied it,’ Behar said. ‘She’s just going after Hillary. I just think that she could be a useful idiot the way that Trump is a useful idiot to the Russians’.”
Corn, popped.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Andrew Yang: Decline of Journalism a ‘Tragedy’ for American Democracy.
It’s been so long now though that I’m pretty much over it.
IT COULDN’T HAPPEN TO A NICER NETWORK OR A NICER ANCHOR: Norah O’Donnell Is Killing What’s Left of the CBS Evening News.
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Rich Chinese outnumber wealthy Americans for first time.
China has roughly four times our population, and an economic system rigged in favor of the very few with Party privilege. If there’s a surprise here, it’s that it took them this long.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Trudeau and Liberal Hypocrisy About Race Survive in Canada. “Justin Trudeau won re-election, but it wasn’t easy for him. His party’s struggles provided some great early-week entertainment. The internet responded swiftly to the news that a politician who has most recently been plagued by a blackface scandal would now be forced to form a ‘minority’ government.”
Heh.
OOPS: Flavored vapor still for sale in Boulder through ban loophole.
After consulting with City Attorney Tom Carr, Red Star leaders determined the shop could continue to offer its do-it-yourself vapor mixes under Boulder’s prohibition of flavored vapor sales, which kicked in Thursday after city council agreed to new rules in response to parent concerns of skyrocketing youth use.
While Boulder sought to exile vapor products tasting like anything other than tobacco itself, its new law evidently failed to catch many Red Star products with the regulation. They remain legal to sell in Boulder because its tasteless nicotine-based product is sold separately from the flavoring agent, allowing customers to simply mix the contents of the two distinct containers together and then vape and still stimulate taste buds. The city’s ban apparently only applies to pre-mixed flavored products.
Someday, some government, somewhere will pass the exact right law to make prohibition work with no loopholes or unintended consequences worse than the thing they tried to prohibit.
This is not that day.
JUDICIAL WATCH: New Benghazi Documents Confirm Clinton Email Cover-Up.
Judicial Watch today released new Clinton emails on the Benghazi controversy that had been covered up for years and would have exposed Hillary Clinton’s email account if they had been released when the State Department first uncovered them in 2014. The long withheld email, clearly responsive to Judicial Watch’s lawsuit seeking records concerning “talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack,” contains Clinton’s private email address and a conversation about the YouTube video that sparked the Benghazi talking points scandal (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). This Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit led directly to the disclosure of the Clinton email system in 2015.
The Clinton email cover-up led to court-ordered discovery into three specific areas: whether Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server was intended to stymie FOIA; whether the State Department’s intent to settle this case in late 2014 and early 2015 amounted to bad faith; and whether the State Department has adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch’s request. The court also authorized discovery into whether the Benghazi controversy motivated the cover-up of Clinton’s email. (The court ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”)
She’ll prove beyond a shadow of a doubt and with geometric logic that the Russians did it.
THEY NEVER REST: No More Cooking With Gas: Environmental Activists Going After The Appliances Consumers Love.
Consumers are getting caught in the crossfire of environmental activists’ war against natural gas and the new battlefield is in the kitchen.
Environmentalists began collaborating with state government officials from across the United States at a closed-door gathering in New York this summer to lay out the plans for policies that would prevent consumers from using natural gas to cook their food or heat their homes.
The conference included representatives from the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Energy Foundation, and the World Research Institute among others, according to open records recently obtained by free market group Energy Policy Advocates and reviewed by the Washington Times.
It was hosted by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) at their Pocantico Center in Tarrytown, N.Y. where they paid for all logistical costs and emails show they also offered to cover the airfare of state government officials who needed financial assistance.
They failed to stop America’s energy boom on the supply side, so they’re going after it on the demand side.