In an appallingly authoritarian move, Israel has ordered Al Jazeera to shutter its offices in the country. The network, Israel says, poses a national security threat. This seems to be the first time Israel has shut down an international news network, and it is doing so in the midst of a war in Gaza — a war that Israel has made exceedingly difficult for foreign news outlets to cover. Al Jazeera is far from a perfect news source, to put it mildly. But they are also the foreign outlet doing the most in-depth, round-the-clock, on-the-ground coverage of this war. And whatever you think of their coverage or how their Qatari ownership influences it, it is profoundly undemocratic and, yes, authoritarian to shut down an entire news network because you’re unhappy with how they’ve covered your war. Israel’s arguments that Al Jazeera has put their soldiers at risk, is a Hamas mouthpiece, and is an “incitement network” simply do not justify their actions here.

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Al Jazeera, like many news networks, is a bit of a mixed bag. Many, many of their journalists have reported bravely and admirably through this war and others. Al Jazeera’s coverage of this war has been non-stop, and while I can’t find numbers, the network does seem to have many more journalists on the ground in Gaza than any other foreign news outlet. Israel has been absolutely atrocious about giving journalists necessary access to cover this war, something dozens of the world’s most prominent journalists have publicly objected to. Government actions, and particularly wars, carried out without oversight are ripe for abuses. While camera phones and social media can create something of a check, there are real limitations: “citizen journalists” simply don’t have the credibility that institutional ones do; random social media videos can be said to be any number of things, and disinformation campaigns have been rampant during this war; and in the intensity of conflict, it’s not always possible to tell exactly what one is even seeing, which is why journalistic institutions check and double-check various claims and should only publish what they can confirm. During this war, Al Jazeera journalists have time and again been the only reporters around. Their work has been brave and essential.

This is not the first time Al Jazeera has been targeted by governments. In the past, others in the neighborhood, including Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, have at various times banned the network for reasons similar to those Israel gave: threats to national security, pushing a Qatari agenda, trafficking in bias and misinformation.

Al Jazeera is a Qatari outlet, and while it claims total independence from the government, those claims have at times seemed shaky. Its coverage of this war has been exceedingly hostile to Israel (to be clear, some other outlets have been exceedingly deferential to Israel — bias is not confined to Al Jazeera) and the network has, in my opinion, sometimes been far too deferential and even sympathetic to Hamas, a pattern its engaged in with other fundamentalist groups over the years. I’ve been pretty stunned by the behavior of several Al Jazeera journalists on social media, who don’t seem beholden by many of the same rules of engagement as reporters at, say, the New York Times. I’ve observed many instances of Al Jazeera reporters sharing totally unverified information, using wildly incendiary language, and refusing to adhere to even the most basic standards of journalistic fairness — stuff that would get any reporter fired from a reputable outlet in the US (although probably not from a Fox News, or from an op/ed page). The network has at times veered into the flagrant antisemitic, including Holocaust denial.

Much more often, though, the issue seems to be clear bias rather than blatant bigotry. That said, the network’s center of gravity and its audience is not New York and New York liberals, it’s the Arab world, and their reporting, coverage, and perspective reflect all of that. What seems fair in my eyes is not the One True Definition of fairness, and what seems biased is also defined by where I sit in the world. I have bigger concerns about their transparency and accountability. Al Jazeera has gotten several big, important stories wrong in its coverage of this war, which is not all that unusual given the circumstances (I don’t think any outlet has been correct 100% of the time), but they are not always particularly great at issuing public corrections and retractions, which is a real problem. I’m not particularly confident in their fact-checking procedures or their corrections procedures. I would not make Al Jazeera my sole source of information about this war or anything else. But as one of many sources, they’re an important one. And again, they are a huge and sprawling network, employing hundreds of exceptionally honest, exceptionally talented, exceptionally brave reporters who have been on the front lines of the current conflict, and who have covered many important stories with depth and integrity.

Also: None of that is really material to the matter at hand. I present it only to say that I’m not making this argument because I’m a huge Al Jazeera fan with no qualms about their journalism; I’m making it as a matter of principle, not personal preference.

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It is very, very easy and very, very common in moments of national crisis to cede one’s values in response to what feels like an acute threat. Those of us in the US have certainly seen this play out many times, from McCarthyism to Japanese internment to the “you’re with us or you’re against us” insanity of the post-9/11 era to the invasion of Iraq. Over and over again, the times when we suspend our principles out of fear wind up being among the ugliest and most regrettable moments in our histories.

Israel has become far less democratic since the rise of the broader Israeli right and the empowerment of Benjamin Netanyahu and his greater coalition of extremists, religious fundamentalists, and power-hungry autocrats. But Israel does still fancy itself a democracy even as it behaves less and less like one, and I imagine most people who care about its future, the wellbeing of its citizens, and the wellbeing of its neighbors very much hope it corrects from its current course. Banning a news network, even in the name of national security, is from the autocrat’s playbook, not the democrat’s.

Israel should also want to have the Arab world’s ear. Al Jazeera, for all its flaws, is a bridge — and the network does give Israeli spokespeople and the government their say. Shutting them down and raiding their offices may be a satisfying power play for reactionaries, but it doesn’t set the country on the path to what should be long-term goals: Regional normalization and peaceful coexistence.

Those goals, of course, may not be shared by Netanyahu, who seems primarily interested in staying out of jail and maintaining his grip on power. But what’s best for Bibi, it turns out, is often what’s very much not what’s best for his country.

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You don’t have to like Al Jazeera to support the network’s right to work in Israel, and in any other self-styled free and open democratic country (and in autocratic ones, too). There are a great many news outlets around the world that I think are deeply biased, bordering on dangerous, and sometimes crossing that border. But I also overwhelmingly think it’s a mistake to hand leaders the power to shut news outlets down. And it’s especially dangerous to see Israel shutting down Al Jazeera in the middle of a war in which Al Jazeera journalists have had better access than reporters from any other international network — in part because of Al Jazeera’s round-the-clock coverage of the war, and in part because Israel will simply not let most foreign journalists into Gaza to do their jobs.

Israel is now beginning its incursion into Rafah. There are not enough journalists on the ground. War, always, is hell. But it stands to reason that things get much more hellish if no watchdogs are watching.

xx Jill

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Let me ask you a question: How many all-expenses-paid vacations at luxury hunting and fishing lodges have you enjoyed over the last few years? I’m not talking about a motel in the boonies of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or a drafty log cabin on a lake in Maine or Minnesota. We’re talking about a luxury resort on 1,200 acres alongside the Yellowstone River just outside Yellowstone National Park. We’re talking about a lodge featuring rooms with stone fireplaces that go for upwards of $1,000 a night in high season, meals that include “house-cured meats from local ranches, garden-fresh produce from nearby farms, and, of course plenty of Northwest craft beers and spirits,” as the resort’s website describes the offerings.

It's called the Sage Lodge in Pray, Montana, and it’s where George Mason University sends gaggles of federal judges for a week-long “colloquium” every year or so. Paid for by the Law and Economics Center at the Antonin Scalia Law School, the “colloquium” held at the Sage Lodge in 2021, for example, featured lectures on such subjects as “Woke Law!” – and yes, the exclamation point is part of the lecture topic – by one Todd J. Zywicki, who is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School and a senior fellow at the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives of the Cato Institute. Another juicy topic covered at the Sage Lodge in 2021 was “Unprofitable Education: Student Loans, Higher Education Costs, and the Regulatory State,” also featuring a lecture by Zywicki, a topic that rings what we might call a rather different bell after the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program last year.

The Antonin Scalia Law School, by the way, was established and largely funded by the efforts of Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, who helped put together $30 million from conservative donors, including Leo himself, to rename the law school after the late legendary right-wing justice, who it will be remembered died of a heart attack in 2016 at another luxury hunting lodge, that one in Texas, while on a trip paid for by wealthy conservative “friends of the court,” I guess we could call them. The other major donor to the Scalia Law School was the Charles Koch Foundation, which threw in a handy $10 million.

Why are we talking about luxury hunting lodges and right-wing “colloquiums” for judges? Because one of our favorite federal judges, Aileen Cannon of Florida, currently presiding over the case against Donald Trump over the secret documents he kept at Mar-a-Lago, was a guest at that same 2021 “colloquium” at the Sage Lodge, and the one held in 2022 as well. The thing is, Cannon failed to file the form known as a Privately Funded Seminar Disclosure Report, which lists whoever paid for the judge to attend the seminar, who the speakers were and what topics were discussed.

This is my weekly Salon column. To read the rest of it, follow the link below:

All-expenses-paid-for Aileen Cannon

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Abortions bans are designed and written to allow for all kinds of horrors: Women losing their organs, women bleeding out without help, women losing their lives. But they’re also written to empower abusive men. After all, the very foundation of an abortion ban is an assumption that a woman’s body does not belong to her. Abusive men agree.

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And so it’s perhaps not a huge surprise that several men have indeed taken advantage of these laws in an effort to control their ex partners. And it’s also not particularly surprising — although it is appalling — that they’ve found support and legal representation from some of the most powerful people in the US anti-abortion movement.

One man in Texas sued his wife’s friends for allegedly helping her to get abortion pills (she was trying to leave him, saying that, duh, he was abusive); Jonathan Mitchell, an anti-abortion lawyer who wrote the Texas abortion bounty law and also represents president Donald Trump, represented him. Another Texas man murdered his girlfriend after she traveled to Colorado for an abortion. And now, a third Texas man found out his ex girlfriend was planning to travel out of state to end her pregnancy, and he also hired Jonathan Mitchell to help stop her. Mitchell has splashed her name all over public court filings, and even though she has not actually broken the law (traveling out of state for an abortion is perfectly legal), he’s seeking to depose her and any of her “accomplices” in what can only be described as a blatant campaign of harassment and abuse, on behalf of an nauseatingly controlling man.

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A commenter to a previous piece on my Facebook page made an observation. I write way too much about the ex-president. That’s a fair criticism. I’ll gladly take that on, acknowledge it, and own it. I do write too much about that man and wish I didn’t have to at all. As much as he might be a subject of this piece, he is not the subject of this piece. This piece is not so much about him, but about you.

Of course, the you in this case is what I lovingly call the pejorative you. That means it’s not about everyone, but just those that still choose to follow him. It has gone well beyond ideology at this point. It has moved beyond ideology and into idolatry. They say the self-own is the cruelest own of all.

Millions of people wear adult diapers. I don’t wear them myself, but I have had occasional bouts with digestive issues. Various medications have had any number of side effects and those were some of the more serious ones. Some people have other health problems that require their use. So, I am not going to judge anyone that has a medical need to wear them.

So, I try really hard not to poke fun. The key point here is that every time someone points out a flaw or human weakness in the dear leader they adopt that as a sign of strength. Trump passes gas and some have suggested (people are saying) that he stinks because he has likely soiled himself. Instead of admitting that maybe he is not the best person for the job we just kind of assimilate this knowledge into our new schema. To translate that into plain English we can simply say “real men wear diapers.”

Thus the continuing spiraling nature of our politics and our culture proceeds without abatement. Therefore if you have control of your bodily functions, have basic knowledge of science, history, and current events then you aren’t really a man. If you have basic empathy for others and compassion for people that might be struggling then you aren’t a real man.

Let me be very frank. Normal people don’t do this. You will not see liberals. progressives, and leftists doing this. We don’t have bumper stickers on our cars. We don’t have signs for the yard. We don’t own any tee-shirts, hats, or flags that we fly from the home or on the back of our pickup truck. We actually don’t have a pickup truck, but that’s not the point.

People in cults do this. So, this isn’t about him. It’s about you. It’s about your desperate need to support everything and anything that comes out of his mouth (or any other portion of his body). I am trying as hard as I can to be respectful here. This is not a good look for you. You aren’t owning the libs. You are owning yourself. The self-own is the cruelest own of all.

Lawsuits are still pending, but the current schedule if for a congestion pricing scheme to begin in Manhattan on June 30. An online issue of Vital City published on May 1 has a group of short and readable explainer articles on aspects of the plan.

In the opening essay, Josh Greenman lays out the basics this way:

The congestion pricing plan has twin, closely related objectives: to reduce stubbornly high automobile traffic in Manhattan, and to raise at least $1 billion, and ideally more, in capital funding annually to support public transit. MTA officials expect the plan to reduce the number of vehicles entering the central business district by 17%. The program’s final details go like this: Cars will pay $15 to enter Manhattan at 61st Street and below during daytime hours (5 a.m. to 9 p.m.), and $3.75 during off-peak hours (9 p.m.-5 a.m. on weekdays, and 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. on weekends). At peak times, motorcycles will pay $7.50; small trucks and charter buses, $24; and large trucks and tour buses, $36. Ubers, Lyfts and for-hire vehicles will charge $2.50 per ride, and yellow taxis, $1.25 per ride. There will be no tollbooths: Automated license-plate-reading cameras at 110 locations will photograph vehicles’ license plates

There are of course a bunch of little exceptions, and if you want to dig deeper into details, read Greenman’s article. Here, I want to mention some of the issues that come up in other articles.

On Day 1 of the program, there will be extra charges and probably all kinds of practical problems, while any benefits of additional funds for mass transit will take time. This may not be a politically sustainable equilibrium. Howard Yaruss suggests offering an immediate carrot: as one example, make all of New York City mass transit free on Sundays.

At best, the congestion charge is only going to take a moderate bite out of Manhattan traffic. Sam Schwartz notes that in the decade up to 2019, the number of cars entering Manhattan’s central business district declined–and traffic congestion got worse. A substantial part of the problem was the rise in ride-share traffic, and if autonomous vehicles arrive in Manhattan, the congestion could worsen further.

New York has been using cameras that take a picture of license plates to enforce speeding laws, and there has been a large rise in the number of cars with license plates that are unreadable for many possible reasons: Buy a fake plate on eBay? Buy a legitimate paper license plate in states that allow it? Hang a bike rack over the license plate? For $100, buy an electronic gizmo that makes your plate unreadable to the camera? Use certain coatings or covers that makes a plate unreadable? Just slop some mud on the plate? Drive without a license plate? Reading license plates to collect the congestion toll will have problems, too.

The projected additional funding for NYC mass transit will increase its capital budget by a little less than 10%. More broadly, as funds become available from the congestion toll, what parts of the NYC mass transit system will see noticeable short-term benefits?

Traffic will reroute in creative ways to minimize or avoid the toll, creating new bottlenecks and issues. As one example, people may commute to upper Manhattan (outside the toll zone) or to other parts of New York City, avoid paying the toll, and then take mass transit the rest of the way. If cars are discouraged from commuting into Manhattan, it may be that trucks find it easier to drive into Manhattan. Fewer cars may also open up opportunities for lanes dedicated to buses, or to expanded walking and bike paths, or allow restaurants to keep serving outdoors.

Henry Grabar points to the interaction of congestion pricing and the rules that govern parking. In describing New York City, he writes:

The City manages 19,000 lane miles and 3 million parking spaces; streets make up an astounding 36% of Manhattan. The unthinking allocation of most of that space to private cars — those in motion, but in particular, those that are parked — has long presented one of the city’s greatest opportunities for improvement. … The city can resolve that issue by borrowing a technique from Vancouver: Issue low-cost permits to current car-owning residents, and give them and low-income households an option to renew at that rate in perpetuity. But after that initial period, start charging applicants a market price for a limited number of permits. Gradually, old-timers move away and the system transitions into one where street space is appropriately priced, and the city can easily weigh the distribution of new permits against other curb priorities in terms of space and money. It’s hard to take away parking privileges, but it’s easy not to grant them in the first place. 

Congestion pricing is a bundle of complexities, and a bundle of winners and losers. I don’t live in or near New York, so I’m delighted to watch the experiment play out from a distance. In addition, I’m not hearing a lot of other ideas that offer the possibility of reducing congestion and increasing mass transit in the city. But it also seems like the kind of idea that could be tripped up by practicalities.

For more on congestion pricing, see:

• “What if the Argument Was About Whether to Remove Congestion Pricing?” (May 24, 2019)
• “The Stockholm Congestion Charge” (May 2, 2018)
• “The Pricing Answer to Traffic Congestion” (July 17, 2017)

The post Congestion Pricing in Manhattan: About to Arrive? first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Big story yesterday:  a rich guy, who engaged in a years-long scheme of fraud and international law breaking involving laundering money for drug running, child prostitution, terrorism, and Russian oligarchs, got off with a slap on the wrist.  This rich guy is a crypto billionaire, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the founder and former CEO of the Binance crypto exchange.  You may recognize his name as the guy who, with a single tweet in November of 2022, brought down his fellow crypto zillionaire Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and his crypto exchange, FTX.  SBF was arrested in December of 2022 and accused of perpetrating a multi-billion dollar fraud.  He was convicted late last year and sentenced to a 25-year term in federal prison and ordered to repay $11 billion in forfeiture of the money he swindled from investors.

So why, you might ask, was CZ Zhao on the front page of the New York Times financial section this morning above a story announcing that he had been sentenced to only four months in prison for committing crimes that put billions in his pocket?  Well, he is one well-connected dude, according to the Times, which breathlessly reports that Zhao has been visiting Telluride, Colorado, and Moab Utah, and has been meeting with such Silicon Valley luminaries as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, “chatting” about start-ups and “planning his next act.”

Listen to this and see if it doesn’t sound like it came straight from a PR release Zhao paid some crisis management firm several hundred grand to generate for him:  Zhao “has a $33 billion fortune, according to Forbes, and he announced last month that he was starting a new web platform to promote online education.”

Just wow.  Having pledged to donate “99 percent” of his fortune – something SBF was also famous for promising -- Mr. Zhao, a Chinese-born “businessman” with citizenship in both Canada and the United Arab Emirates, is now all up in creating something called “online education.”  The Times also assures us that “many crypto entrepreneurs, investors and dignitaries have continued supporting Mr. Zhao, court records show.”  Gee, I wonder why?  They wouldn’t be among the “dignitaries” who didn’t lose their shirts trading cryptocurrencies on one or both of Zhao’s Binance crypto exchanges, would they?

These “dignitaries” sure do stick together, don’t they?

According to the plea agreements Binance and Zhao signed onto yesterday, here’s what Zhao did.  He set up one company called Binance.com that allowed anyone to trade in cryptocurrencies on its exchange, and when I say anyone, I mean child sex traffickers, ISIS terrorists, al Qaeda operatives, members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, and drug lords, Russians located in Crimea and the Russian-held territories in Donetsk and Luhansk, and people in other regions of the world under U.S. sanctions such as Syria, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, and Iran.  He didn’t register his business with the FTC, the SEC, he didn’t abide by any FinCen regulations, and he didn’t carry out what is called “KYC” or Know Your Customer queries and registrations.  He just let anybody from anywhere trade on his exchange and awarded many of them so-called “VIP” status, allowing them privileges not available to lesser investors. 

When all this came to the attention of U.S. regulators, Zhao and Binance announced they were setting up a division in this country known as Binance.US that would do all the registering and identity-checking that the other Binance didn’t do.  Then they proceeded to tell their U.S. VIP account users who had provided KYC identity data to Binance how to keep using the international Binance.com account secretly.  This they accomplished by calling the VIP account holders on the telephone, “so they would leave no trace” according to the plea agreement.  People who had money in offshore accounts would be handled by the “VIP team” who would help the user to register a “new separate account for the offshore entity and transfer the users VIP benefits to that account while the user transferred their holdings to the new account.”

Confusing enough?  Going through the plea agreement describing the nature of the Binance scam is like reading Sanskrit…all of it on purpose, because it was being done to get around U.S. regulations and help the U.S. account holders make more money that they wouldn’t have to report to U.S. entities such as…uh, could it be the IRS?  Gotcha.  What it accomplished is described in the plea agreement this way: “help users continue to access Binance.com despite the purported block” that was supposed to force them to use the part of Binance that was properly registered in the U.S. and followed all reporting requirements.

But that’s just U.S. users.  Between August 2077 and April 2022, there was approximately $106 million in Bitcoin transferred from “wallets” in Hydra, “a popular Russian darknet marketplace frequently used by criminals that facilitated the sale of illegal goods and services,” according to the DOJ. That would be sex trafficking, drugs, weapons sales…you get the picture. 

So, what’s going on with all this financial gobbledygook?  Binance was sitting there moving money around the world using cryptocurrency – Bitcoins and other types – much of it funny money from sanctioned countries and outlaw groups and individuals that couldn’t move money through normal banking channels because banks, especially U.S. banks, were all registered with the proper federal agencies and would have to report the arrival or departure of any funny money from, say, Crimea or Iran or Syria or North Korea.

The point is, money is not any good to you unless you can use it.  Say you’ve got a few tens of millions sitting around in cash bundles you “earned” by trading little girls or boys who you’ve moved secretly from, say, Crimea or Eastern Ukraine to Europe to be used for prostitution.  You want to use your “earnings” to buy real estate in, say, the South of France, or you want to buy a Ferrari or an expensive Mercedes.  You buy some Bitcoins from Binance, and Binance takes a fee for that transaction.  Then you trade them, again using Binance, to someone in, say, France, who pays you in Euros, and Binance takes a fee on that transaction.  Then you sell your Bitcoins for Euros in France, and Binance takes a fee there, too, and you’ve got Euros you can deposit in an account in France and write a check to buy your house in Nice or Aix or your Ferrari or Mercedes. 

CZ Zhao is said to be worth 33 billion dollars.  At least some of his billions came from fees on those kinds of transactions, from crooked money laundering, to put it in simple, easy to understand terms. 

Why would CZ Zhao spend all the time he spent figuring out how to set up “Tier One” and “Tier Two” accounts at Binance, with “VIP Benefits” and private phone calls to account holders to tell them how to move their Bitcoins from accounts with their names on them to accounts with the only identity being an untraceable email address – untraceable to anyone but members of the Binance “VIP team” they talked to on the phone using an encrypted program such as WhatsApp.

Because the more Bitcoins he sold and the more trades he generated put more money in his pocket.

“A short prison stint,” the New York Times reports, “‘is a small price to pay to be a billionaire for life,’” said John Reed Stark, a former Securities and Exchange Commission official and a critic of the crypto industry. “‘The industry just does not care about the extraordinary crypto crime wave ushered in by people like CZ.’”

Yesterday, CZ Zhao, he of the Telluride trips and the Silicon Valley billionaire meetings, signed his plea agreement promising to pay a fine of $50 million and serve four months in some white-collar jail cell, and have the company where he used to be CEO disgorge $4 billion in ill-gotten profits. So where is good ole’ CZ today?

Waiting to make arrangements with the Department of Justice for the date he reports to the white-collar cell, because of course guys like CZ Zhao get to pick when they report to prison.  In the meantime, Ronghui Gu, a computer science professor at Columbia University, tells the New York times that his friend CZ Zhao is “looking for opportunities to invest in the large data centers that power A.I. applications.”  You know the kind of data centers he’s talking about:  the kind that his pal Sam Altman will need to build to run OpenAI, where the two of them will add to their already bulging billionaire “wallets” as they’re called in Bitcoinese. 

Oh, by the way, Ronghui Gu is the co-founder of a startup company called CertiK, which his pal CZ Zhao helped to finance through Binance.  The business of CertiK is making sure billions of dollars don’t get lost in zillions of lines of crypto-code, because of course it is.

There is a lot that is wrong with this country, but one of the really really big things wrong with it is these kinds of guys making billions and billions of dollars moving money around the world and not giving a half a shit where it came from, who got hurt to generate it, and where it’s going, as long as a percentage of it ends up in their pockets.

Welcome to the new future, same at the old future.

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