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.

Leave a comment

Share

Give a gift subscription

It’s International Workers Day, still celebrated as the May Day public holiday here in Queensland, at least when the Labor party is in office. So, it’s a good day for me to set out some tentative thoughts on work and its future.

Via Matt McManus, I found this quote from Marx ‘Fragment on Machines”.

The hand tool makes the worker independent — posits him as proprietor. Machinery — as fixed capital -posits him as dependent, posits him as appropriated

Reading this, it struck me that, whereas mainframe computers were archetypal examples of impersonal and alienating machines, personal computers are, or can be, regarded as extensions of their users, that is, as tools. Employers have long struggled to exert control over office computers and the workers who use them, making them extensions of the machine that is corporate IT. But these efforts have always been resisted, and have broken down, to a large extent, with the shift to remote work. My intuition, following Marx, is that this development presages a bigger shift in the relationship between between workers and bosses.

As far as neoclassical economics in the strict sense is concerned, it makes no real difference whether workers work on machines owned by their employers or using their own tools. In the first case, the wage is a simple payment for labour, and all the surplus from the enterprise goes as capital income to the employer. In the second case, the workers’ wage will include a ‘rental price’ for the use of tools, along with the ordinary labour wage. All that matters is that each factor of production should earn its marginal product.

Economists, including those classed as ‘mainstream’, have long recognised that the simple neoclassical model is inadequate. Beginning with a classic paper by Chicago economist and Nobel award winner Ronald Coase, it has been recognised that if the neoclassical model was a complete description, there would be no reason for firms, with their internal command structures, to exist. There is no a huge literature on transactions costs, principal-agent relationships and other ways of understanding the relationship between workers and bosses.

But as far as I am aware, the machine-tool distinction hasn’t been addressed in this literature, at least not explicitly. For bosses, a central feature of the machine, exemplified by the Taylorist time-and-motion expert, is the capacity for detailed control over the work of those employed to tend it. With a skilled worker using their own tools, such detailed control isn’t possible. In simple forms of production, where output can be measured easily, control over work can be replaced with production quotas or piecework payments. But in with collective products and where quality is hard to measure, such straightforward methods of control are no longer feasible. Workers can demand, and receive, more autonomy and require more motivation than simple monetary rewards and penalties.

In the case of computers, bosses have done their best to fight back with various forms of spyware and remote control. But this has turned out to be costly and counterproductive. As far as I can tell, most of these attempt have been abandoned. Similarly, despite repeated ‘back to the office’ announcements, backed up by dire threats, working arrangement seem to have reached an equilibrium of 2-3 days a week as the median, with the weekend increasingly starting early on Friday afternoon, rather than at the traditional 5pm.

The direct effects of these changes are confined to those workers (around 50 per cent of the total) for whom computers are the central tool. But when these developments coincide with a period of low unemployment, and with the new opportunities for organization offered by an era of universal Internet access, there are signs of a broader shift in the balance of workplace power, including a resurgence in support for unions.

Because, Texas, y’all.

Former Attorney General William Barr has made it clear that Donald Trump should, in his view, never again be allowed access to power — but that was before Trump secured the nomination. Now, he’s on an apology tour, making excuses not only for everything Trump has done to America but for the decision to support him for the presidency again.

The general theme of Barr’s arguments is that sure, he admits Trump called for executing people and attempted a coup, but he wasn’t successful at either, so it’s all okay.

Barr was confronted by a story shared by former Trump insider Alyssa Farrah-Griffin, who alleges that the then-president called for an execution when he realized someone had leaked to the press that he retreated to a safe room under the White House during protests in the area.

He said he couldn’t remember that specific incident, but he also wouldn’t deny it, and in fact, admitted that this was a typical sort of thing for Trump to suggest. He said:

“I don’t dispute it. The president would lose his temper and say things like that. I doubt he would have actually carried it out…He would say things like, similar to that…but I wouldn’t take him literally every time he did it.”

Why not?

Barr says, “Because at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be carried out.”

BREAKING: According to former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr , Donald Trump on multiple occasions floated the idea of executing individuals who disagreed with him. Every American needs to see this so they know how dangerous Trump is. pic.twitter.com/UW5pQbxCxv

— Biden’s Wins (@BidensWins) April 27, 2024

That’s not all Barr defended. Pressed on whether he can really justify supporting a candidate who is facing 88 felony charges and disrupted the peaceful transfer of power, the former Attorney General was all-in.

Barr claims to genuinely believe that Biden’s administration is somehow more dangerous than Trump’s actions.

CNN Anchor Kaitlyn Collins pressed him, asking, “Worse than subverting the peaceful transfer of power?”

Barr didn’t deny Trump attempted exactly that. His defense was, “Well, did he succeed?”

Kaitlan Collins: “So you’re voting for someone…tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, who can't even achieve his policies, that lied about the election…Someone who’s facing 88 criminal counts?”

Bill Barr: “The answer to your question is YES”pic.twitter.com/KxCYomILe7

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) April 27, 2024

In fact, the former Attorney General made a valiant effort to list the actions that he believes are more of a threat to democracy than Donald Trump.

They include an imaginary open border (he doesn’t seem to have any comment on Trump leaning on House Republicansto stop border legislation though), regulations on what appliances one can have (regulations that also don’t aRepublicans to), and regulations on the kind of vehicle one can own (by which he seems to mean updated emissions standards and support for electric vehicles, not actual prohibitions).

Watch him work really hard to come up with that short list of made-up problems below.

Barr: We have regulations coming fast and furious. telling people were kind of stoves they can use and what kind of cars they have to drive and eliminating cars and so forth yeah, those are those are the threats to democracy pic.twitter.com/cIZRyVcVyo

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 27, 2024

It’s difficult to take Barr’s apology tour seriously when he struggles to pretend that his invented grievances outweigh the danger of an incipient fascist like Donald Trump to our democracy. He should have been content to simply beg forgiveness for all that he did as Attorney General to enable the former president while he was in office, and kept his voting preferences to himself.

For clarifications, comments, & typos, email: editor@occupydemocrats.com.

The post MURDEROUS: Former A.G. Barr says Trump wanted to EXECUTE his enemies appeared first on Occupy Democrats.

One of the nasty truths about our two nastiest presidents is that getting close to them would likely end you up in jail.  Both presidents were Republicans.  Both were preternaturally corrupt.  And both demanded the kind of loyalty from their subordinates that required you, when asked, to commit crimes in furtherance of the ambitions of the boss.

If you worked in the West Wing for Richard Nixon, you got Watergate on you like grease from French fries.  Forty officials who served in the Nixon administration were either indicted or jailed.  Sixty-nine people in all were charged with crimes, when you included the Watergate burglars and ancillary campaign workers like Donald Segretti.  Of those, 48 were found guilty, including former Attorney General John Mitchell, and top presidential aides H.R. Haldeman, John Erlichman, Charles Colson, and White House lawyer John Dean.  Nixon lawyer Herbert Kalmbach also went to jail for his boss, as did one of Nixon’s former cabinet secretaries, Maurice Stans, who served as Commerce Secretary before he resigned to help Kalmbach move funny money around in the Nixon reelection campaign.

Now history, specifically Republican history, is repeating itself with Donald Trump.  The Republican party is up to 58 indictments associated with Trump’s attempted coup following his loss of the 2020 election.  Eighteen people were indicted this week in Arizona for their roles in attempting to overturn the election results in that state.  Those charged include four of Trump’s attorneys: Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Christina Bobb, and Jenna Ellis; Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows; and Trump campaign aides Boris Epshteyn and Mike Roman.  Also indicted were the 11 Republican party members who signed the fake elector forms that were engineered from the Oval Office by Kenneth Chesebro and Donald Trump.  Chesebro, who was also indicted in Georgia on similar charges and pleaded guilty, is suspected of cooperating in the Arizona indictments.

In Michigan, 16 Republicans were indicted last July for their roles in the fake elector scheme.  One has pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against the others.  The 16 were charged with forgery, conspiracy to commit forgery, election law forgery and conspiracy to commit election law forgery.  They face as many as 14 years in prison for the charge of “meeting covertly in the basement of the Michigan Republican Party headquarters on December 14th, and signed their names to multiple certificates stating they were the ‘duly elected and qualified electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America for the State of Michigan.’”  None were certified or duly elected electors in the state of Michigan.  On Wednesday, it was revealed that Donald Trump is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Michigan fake elector scheme, as are Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and Jenna Ellis.

Last August, 19 people were charged in Georgia in a RICO indictment alleging they conspired in an elaborate scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state.  Those charged include Trump, Giuliani, Meadows, Ellis, Chesebro, Sidney “The Kraken” Powell, former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, the aforementioned Michael Roman, and David Shafer, Chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.  Several have pleaded guilty and are cooperating with prosecutors, including Powell, Chesebro, and Ellis.

Six Republican fake electors were charged last December with felony forgery and “uttering a forged instrument” in Nevada.  The felonies could result in prison terms from one to five years. 

Ten top Republicans in Wisconsin may face indictment in the fake elector scheme in that state. Attorney General Josh Kaul will not “confirm or deny” there is an investigation of the fake electors in Wisconsin, but rumors are running rampant that Wisconsin may join the four other battleground states that have charged people in the wide-ranging scheme that was engineered out of the Oval Office by Donald Trump.

So that’s 58 members of the Republican Party who are facing felony indictments for their loyalty to Donald Trump.  Experts in election law say it is unlikely that fake Republican electors from Pennsylvania and New Mexico will be indicted because the elector documents they signed were crafted to be used only if they ended up being recognized as “duly elected and qualified as electors” in their states.  Because their loyalty to Trump was technically conditional, they will probably avoid being charged and facing prison like their Republican brethren in other states.

Poison.  Nixon was poison to the people who worked for him and were loyal to him, and so was Trump, and so is Trump today.  The chief financial officer of his company, the Trump Organization, is currently serving time on Rikers Island in New York for falsifying documents and lying for Trump. 

We haven’t even counted the more than one thousand Trump loyalists who have been arrested and charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol that Trump fomented on Jan. 6.  Several hundred of the insurrectionists have been convicted and are serving time in jail. 

Trump has promised to pardon the Jan. 6 “hostages,” as he calls them, but that can only happen if he is elected in November.  It’s up to us to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Leave a comment

Share

Give a gift subscription