U.S. consumer protection official puts Equifax probe on ice
reuters.com
reuters.com
Chances are, if you're an adult American you are impacted. Even if you did not authorize Equifax's "services", a third party most likely did it for you, and you are impacted.
Note that your credit score or lack thereof is often used to deny housing and (for generally unsubstantiated reasons,) employment.
The fact that Equifax is not held accountable is one of the biggest data-related atrocities of the modern era.
Not defending Equifax, but this is misleading. Credit checks are what enable lending of this sort in the first place.
There are still places in the world today which have functioning credit markets despite prohibitions on charging interest.
It isn't that lending doesn't exist without credit history, it's everyone gets the same shitty terms and shitty interest rate and banks are much more conservative in lending.
The parent comment I was replying to seemed not to understand how a functioning credit/lending market could exist without Equifax-like centralized reporting agencies. The sarcastic point was that credit and lending existed and worked for millennia previously.
1. there is less reliance on credit for day to day spending.
2. banks are liable, so they're more careful. I don't get offers by mail for credit cards,
and the card I do have has stricter limits.
3. a national ID system
4. specifically for real estate, separate regulation exists.
You cant buy or sell real estate nor take out a mortgage without going through a notary
(heavily protected profession), who ensure that the real estate and the loan to pay for it remain linked.https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/2164680...
So the bank looks at your income, possibly your expenses, and whether you've been defaulting in the past. If it's your bank, which it usually is, then they can probably mine your transaction history in more detail to decide how trustworthy you are.
I'm surprised that works at all. I wonder if it's quantitatively less 'effective'. (A quick Google didn't turn up much on that question.)
Aside from that, if you want a business process for vetting credit to work across geographies, you can't be dependent on a particular agency or report being available for a specific locale. You _can_ however, almost always depend on a business keeping books and paying taxes.
I know people borrow money like they're crazy over here in Sweden. For consumption, for housing etc. (So much for the liberal-a-land it's portraited as in US media)
In Germany, also pay slips and work contracts. Additionally, there is a semi-private government-mandated company (I never understood why Germans don't complain about this) that maintains a database of existing debtors. You basically start with a perfect score and it decreases only when you don't repay on time.
Completely private and manual underwriting exists and always existed in the United States. The reason that it is not popular is that the vast majority of Americans would not qualify under any private underwriting guidelines for most of the loans Americans get ( and successfully pay for ).
So the bank of France is a centralized credit bureau. So going by that, it's actually much more similar than different from the US system. The US system adds proprietary algorithms designed by actuaries to that rather than, or in addition to, manually underwriting. But it's not all that different other than being for profit.
We have many private companies act as data brokers here in the US, as opposed to a single central bank or government agency, because Americans hate government and love private businesses. The US is like "the government can't do anything, let private companies handle it and make money off it and the free market solves everything." We seem to be just learning that the free market can have problems too...
Designing a centralized government run system is a non-starter in the US. Even now.
Only by what data they gather, and this stems from what the data is needed for. There is vast difference in purpose, though: the Bank of France is (a) a public institution that (b) does not earn money solely by selling every personal data they could put hands on to just about anybody. The incentives are totally different from Equifax'.
Note also that the data collected is not even remotely about everybody, as with Equifax.
1) banks need this information for underwriting
2) the US doesn't have and won't ever have a centralized government/public database that contains this information
So
3) the private market takes over and compiles that information for profit
Doing so wouldn't guarantee either good security or general system effectiveness.
Edit: Apparently some people are too lazy to educate themselves beyond anything in the comment section. Here, perhaps clicking a link is within your grasp.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/072915/how-petro...
(I actually just got a mortgage and it was pretty painless: 1 week from 1st contact to contract)
I believe, again I don't speak Dutch, the longest loan term on that page is 10 years. If that's the case, then you'd have to compare it to a 10 year mortgage in the US, not a 30 year like you did.
Edit: I was holding my phone in a way I couldn't see the whole table. It appears to me that a 30 year mortgage with less than a 15% down payment is 4.40%.
I love the Midwest, my money goes WAY further here working remote for a California company, not to mention all of the other benefits.
Not bashing LA/NY or those who choose to live there, but stop bashing us.
Temecula is a shit/middle of nowhere area if your closest employment options are in LA.
Nobody said anything about the Midwest being shitty.
Pretty much anywhere outside a few areas is affordable.
You can argue credit scores have value, but the parent’s observation is not misleading.
What about a Federal program?
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-joint-res... [2]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/24/congress-votes-to-disallow...
Upon quick searching, it looks like scholars have debated the civil/criminal point:
https://www.quora.com/Does-ex-post-facto-apply-to-civil-and-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_State...
However, it's not symmetric - lifting prohibitions can be done retroactively, to not prosecute people for things they did back when it was still prohibited.
Unfair, arbitrary prosecution may violate someones rights, but unfair, arbitrary immunity can not - there's no right to get someone else punished.
It's also not clear what actions the consumer protection agency may still pursue. This article only mentions that they held off on doing an on the ground investigation of how they do data storage. Still plenty of options available to them without that...
Like they are forced to sell their assets, ok I'm sure those assets end up with basically the same shareholders they have now and basically the same people working on it under a new branding. Probably some leadership changes but the same offices with a new banner on the wall next to the same people in the same cubicles. Great.
Or maybe they move offices a few buildings over. Its all the same garbage.
Serious monetary punishment could possibly force reform, but just destroying equifax will do nothing and honestly the name "equifax" is just a word you would be replacing with another meaningless word that is basically the same thing.
Now, if they were stopping because of a criminal investigation has started, great. Otherwise, what message is the federal government sending to its people? "hahaha, shouldn't have trusted them. Of course you had the choice, you could have gone without those services that use Equifax. It's your own fault and we aren't helping"?
And to me, that is the bigger issue.
Is there any precedent for committing "mutiny" in a governmental organization?
Most mutinies are from a crew against their captains, yes, but I think that a captain of a ship can commit mutiny by saying "I don't care what my countries' objectives are, this is my objective and I'm taking the ship."
It's wildly undemocratic to push for government employees to usurp the will of the people's representatives.
Like other's have said, the best a government employee can do to protest the direction that the President and Congress set is to resign vocally (as lots of people have done).
Consider the opposite side! People rightly criticize government employees who resist implementing gay rights. But, somehow EPA employees resisting loosening regulations is righteous.
Everyone thinks their political beliefs are righteous.
The point is: rogue government employees should not be exerting their concept of what it morally right in direct conflict with leaders elected by the people.
It is inherently undemocratic. If you want an unelected oligarchy of technocrats, that's something to debate the merits of. But, anyone who values democracy should be appalled by an unelected bureaucrat setting policy against the will of the people.
If you hire / appoint / confirm someone with the motivation of doing something unusual or illegal, you’re hardly going to turn around and fire them for it.
This repeated claim that “things must be fine, otherwise the adults in the room would take action” assumes that there are adults in the room willing or able to take action. At some point it’s nonsensical, and clearly just an attempt to avoid acknowledging the obvious.
They're political appointees. Injecting their political opinions is their job. Even if their goal is reducing the influence of the organization they've been appointed to.
(This may jog your memory if you watch stuff like The Daily Show: in the debates, he fairly embarrassingly forgot which three agencies he wanted to get rid of...)
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/19/rick...
However, I asked what Rick Perry did, not what he said.
Will you accept subsidizing unneeded coal plants? https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/10/4/1640727...
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/budget-strategy/fun...
These requirements on the President are just a shell game from Congress to blame the President, avoid passing a budget, and pretend to be the "white-knights" each time there is a continuing resolution battle.
It is interesting to note that the CFPB passed in July 2010. Yet, 2015 was the first budget passed since 2009. I think it's safe to say that Congress has purposely engineered this situation to get the self-serving results they want.
There's been a bit of it lately: 8 of the 28-person National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC), all 17 members of the Presidential Committee on the Arts and Humanities, co-chairs of the Sustainable and Healthy Communities Subcommittee of the EPA, 5 members of Trump's business advisory council, 6 members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, the State Department science envoy...
(I haven't been keeping track, this was just a quick google search; probably there are more I missed. Not to mention the wave of early retirements, lateral moves to private sector, sudden new desires to spend more time with family, etc)
How does that help anything? They'll get replaced with cheerleaders.
The only reason we know this was because of a change in plans but we never hear about the thousands of other times where it never gets even close to that for other serious abuses by politically connected organizations and individuals.
The article also mentions the FTC and 50 states are still investigating Equifax so its not like they have been given a pass yet. Nor has the consumer protection agency given them a pass yet either, this article only said they chose not to pursue one particular investigation option planned by a previous admin, not that they have abandoned the whole investigation.
There is tons of waste in government and oversight is needed in many facets but destroying our agencies is not the way forward. I wish voters where more aware of how many services government agencies provide, it seems like most of America is for smaller government until something like a shutdown slaps them awake for a brief period of time.
e.g. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I'm here to help.’”
“One way to make sure crime doesn't pay would be to let the government run it.”
“Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
etc., and unfortunately this rhetoric was very effective as advertising/propaganda, noticeably shifting public attitudes.
His platform was largely about cutting taxes, deregulation, privatizing public institutions and infrastructure, reducing or eliminating government services, ...
... so let's starve it to death, because that's what you normally do with babies. I always knew that Reagan was a dementia victim, but not that he was so bad at metaphors.
Norquist was a Reaganite though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reagan,_Abramoff,_Norquis...
p.s., As far as I can tell he actually wrote this, which is somewhat unusual for such things.
This is hilarious. A rehash of Friedmans' if the state had monopoly of the sahara, it would run out of sand in 5 years.
On the case in hand, equifax is a not a poster case for advocating for more regulation.
Not following. Why not?
Equifax receives government protection, not scrutiny, so more regulation means more protection..
Regulation tends to decrease the number of players and increase the size of the incumbents, particularly because it puts requirements that can only be done with big bucks.
Meanwhile, regular non-bank Americans get screwed in ways that could have been mitigated by regulation. In economic terms, that's called an externality, a concept which is covered in any reasonable Econ 101 book. The foolish solution to a market failure is more market.
Unless you're independently wealthy, taking Equifax on by yourself in court is a non-starter. This, of course, was the point of adding these clauses in the first place.
1) Sophisticated corporations have developed legal loopholes to eliminate their vulnerability to class actions. Wells Fargo used this tactic to have the lawsuits about the fraudulent accounts it created dismissed [1]. Equifax may or may not be able to benefit from similar provisions (they had one on their website terms of use, which their twitter said didn't apply to the breach as they were getting PR flak for it).
In a move you doubtless approve of, the regulation that would have restored consumer access to the legal system was repealed [2].
2) Money damages in a class action lawsuits aren't going to really make the victims of the Equifax breach whole. Valuing your leaked personal data is very difficult, as is proving that an identity theft was performed with information leaked from a particular source, and both of these will work in Equifax's favor in court. The data has been leaked, and a lawsuit isn't going to put it back into a bottle, nor is it likely to financially chastise Equifax adequately.
[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wells-fargo-arbitratio...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/24/senate-kills-cfpb-rule-on-ar...
What do you expect after giving the CIA decades of experience to kneecap other countries democracies and economies - they'll put that valuable knowhow to use internally eventually for their own profit.
There's tons of waste in all human endeavor but I haven't seen any evidence that government is particularly good or bad.
I believe the argument stems from the difference between wasting your own money vs. wasting tax payer money.
>but I haven't seen any evidence that government is particularly good or bad
There's plenty of examples out there of the latter (you'll often see more criticism than praise on govt spending). For example, [1].
[1] https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/50-examp...
This is the two-pronged attack, a maniacally evil strategy from the brains of the John Birch Society, the Koch brothers and their minion ‘think’ tanks, and Grover Norquist. They wish to institute their libertarian paradise, but what gets in their way is that most Americans don’t actually share their desires. Most Americans tend to favor the kind of smart policies that balance the needs of enterprise with the needs of society - laws that harness the engine of capitalism to work broadly in service of everyone.
Only by driving a wedge in between the American populace and government, and between the non-union worker and the union worker, and between the middle class and the poor, and between the poor and the immigrant - to the point that everyone is now against everyone else - could they succeed in creating such visceral hatred so wide and so deep in the populace that we would have no sense of society left. When we cease to feel like we’re all in this together, we cease to feel a responsibility for the common good, when we show no concern for the pillaging of the commons, we laugh haughtily at the misfortune of others, we joke about the failure of our institutions and collectively we stick our heads in the sand and turn to salve our sorrows with the solace of drugs or numb ourselves with our mindless entertainment, we step closer to the now-inevitable collapse of our great experiment in democracy, our once powerful leadership fallen to depths of ridicule and our empire crumbled.
Those rich men who directed our demise might initially celebrate the arrival of their libertarian paradise, but with a limping husk of a state left, even a minimal order won’t last for long, and their wealth - in money that has little lingering value won’t shield them from the pains of society collapsed. Their land is only theirs if recognized by a government, and if property rights are respected. I suspect that it won’t be long until all are consumed in anarchy, followed by formation of groups of violent masses, led by ideologues who commandeer what bits of military hardware they can grab.
Their land is only theirs if they can secure it from foreign aggression through a functional nuclear deterrent. However, operating a nuclear deterrent is a significant Big Government endeavor that is unlikely attainable by those chasing the so-called libertarian paradise.
That is the consequence of tearing down the government, if you tear down enough of it, you're not a patriot, you're literally handing it over to those you would call our enemies.
So the issue here is a legislature that has coordinated against the interests of the country and its people for the betterment of themselves and the few who fund them. Keep that in mind, and direct anger and action there.
I'm going to assume you weren't aware of that... and not--as Trump likes to do--pointing fingers at others for Trump's failures.
In... what way exactly?
The Equifax breach is a pretty great example of exactly why the CFPB is needed, Trump's appointee is trying to line-item-veto it out of existence, and you're calling for directed anger against the "legislature"?
But that doesn't have anything to do with the comment I was responding to.
What we're discussing here is an action by a Trump appointee, who was not confirmed by the senate (Mulvaney is an "acting" head). The blame for that action lies with Trump and with Mulvaney. It does not lie with the congress that failed to prevent it.
The grandparent argument appears to boil down to "Trump & team did evil. Congress failed to prevent them from getting away with it. Therefore direct your anger toward congress." That's just an inch or two from complete nonsense.
That, and given the upcoming midterm elections, I feel I have more influence on Congress (or at least my Congressional delegation) than I do on Trump & Friends.
Are they objectively not or are you basing it on what you consider the interest of the country?
There will probably be dozens of books solely about the topic of what has been said by the executive branch on Twitter. (How clever will all those snappy quips and one liners seem 15 years from now on the pages of the next David McCollough?)
It's usually the case that those who aren't passionate about history will primarily be familiar with the big picture marquee events without fully getting the nuance of the experience, but there are troves of evidence here for extraordinarily rich future histories.
I've noticed a disturbing trend recently where this is becoming less true than we'd like to believe.
Try searching for news articles about GWB's 2nd term. Try to find opinion pieces about it. Try to name (and cite) a dozen different important events directly related to his administration.
It's doable, but it's not easy. Google's got a really short-term memory these days (unless, of course, you're trying to debug a problem in Linux, in which case these forum posts from 2010 are sure to help...).
It's a big part of why I take the time to maintain the bookmark database I've got: I don't trust that I'll be able to find articles like this one in the future.
I go further than that - and I assume many do: For stuff I think I'll want to reference in the future, that I find important - I'll take a copy of it; ctrl+s or ctrl+p for basic stuff, other things I'll take the time and space to mirror (using wget or something similar).
Given that we've seen major portions of the internet literally shut down or "destroyed" over the decades, this isn't something one should find odd or overkill.
I too keep a huge bookmark stack, but sometimes I don't properly sort things, and just put them in a "general" location. Recently I started going back thru these bookmarks, just to organize some of them - and many of them were no longer valid; 404s were the norm. That said, in many cases having the bookmark name or description (and even the old URL) was useful to find a copy of the information, where it moved (if it did) or maybe somebody archived it. But in some cases, it simply vanished.
I do agree with your assessment, though - Google and the internet has this "short term memory" problem; a big part of that is the (now) dynamic nature of websites, which doesn't allow for easy crawling by some systems (like the wayback machine), as well as allowing the data to move or vanish at a whim.
I suspect it will go the other way. A generation raised on the total malfunction of the US government.
https://twitter.com/aScaramucciAgo has got you covered.
Terrible URL, great archive of Trump administration events
[1]https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_tru... [2]http://news.gallup.com/poll/116479/barack-obama-presidential...
I had the pins for all the thaws and they went relatively smoothly, except for Equifax, who required me to call and answer ridiculous questions about banking I did over a decade ago (and suggested I would always have to do this regardless of the fact that I had my pin and an account).
I shudder to think what would happen if I lost my pin numbers. Especially if I didn't realize until right before I needed a credit check.
Either way, gonna be ugly.
One of his early moves was to change their mission statement to add "regularly identifying and addressing outdated, unnecessary, or unduly burdensome regulations".
https://thinkprogress.org/cfpb-protect-consumers-8d50e60ba5d...
Odd addition to the agency that was created because existing regulation was demonstrably insufficient.
Run on a platform saying that government doesn't work, and once in office govern in a way that proves the premise!
Brilliant.
If a Democratic president gets elected in 2020, it'll be interesting to watch whether this standard gets upheld. (Most likely the Republicans will complain about how the Democrats are attacking loyal Americans working hard for their government, and the Democrats will do their usual thing of feeling bad and giving in.)
Democrats are unlikely to give in again. Giving in is what drive away their base cost them the election in 2016. If they do it again in 2020, the party is dead.
If executive behavior should be constrained by previous administration's decisions, then Congress or if necessary a Constitutional convention should make a law to establish that.
If our country is so divided that we can't maintain basic consistency across changing administrations, then we don't deserve to be a country anymore, and we should split into 2.
An unenforced, unmaintained agreement is the same as pulling us out, and it erodes trust in the United States on the international stage. Yes, the OP was talking about domestic policies; I was saying that historically some of those things would still be maintained, rather than introduce complete instability with every administration, and that this administration has broken that precedent both on the domestic and the international front.
Consumer financial protection is now in charge of making sure corporations can harm consumers without obstacle.
Yes, I too routinely shut down entire departments when I'm put in charge of them. Just long enough so I can get a handle on things, you know. Perfectly reasonable behavior.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/18/mulvaney-funding-c...
https://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson-court-f...
> To understand some of the distrust of police that has fueled protests in Ferguson, Mo., consider this: In 2013, the municipal court in Ferguson — a city of 21,135 people — issued 32,975 arrest warrants for nonviolent offenses, mostly driving violations.
> A new report released the week after 18-year old Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson helps explain why. ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis-area public defender group, says in its report that more than half the courts in St. Louis County engage in the "illegal and harmful practices" of charging high court fines and fees on nonviolent offenses like traffic violations — and then arresting people when they don't pay. The report singles out courts in three communities, including Ferguson.
The self-funded USPTO has a bias toward approving bad patents to generate revenue and consequently enables the predatory behavior of NPEs. It becomes a net detriment to society.
Fewer patent clerks would be needed, so their operating costs would also decrease. But presumably not below 1/1000.
Unlike taxes, fines and fees in the US are not adjusted for income, so they hurt poorer people much more than wealthier people (ex. http://time.com/3182726/if-you-want-to-see-inequality-in-the...).
If you're already struggling financially, being forced to pony up 30% of this month's net revenue just to keep some public agency afloat so it can fine and fee more people later is the kind of bad break that kills people (https://www.thecut.com/2016/12/america-is-failing-the-bad-br...).
It's cruel and unjust and it has no place in America.
Imagine if the cop that writes your speeding ticket gets paid on commission...
But if that then becomes an incentive for self-dealing, it is very problematic. Instead that money should go directly to citizens in the form of remediation and barring that, deficit paydown or underfunded government services (the VA comes to mind...)
And I'm all in favor of the CFPB getting pretty heavy handed. I wanna see some Enron style prosecutions start.
That sounds like misinformation, considering their website says they're explicitly forbidden from doing that.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/payments-harmed-con...
> When the Bureau collects a civil penalty through an enforcement action, that penalty is deposited into the Civil Penalty Fund. The money in the Fund is pooled and can be used to compensate victims who haven’t received full compensation for their harm through redress paid by the defendant in their case.
> In accordance with the Dodd-Frank Act and the Bureau's Civil Penalty Fund rule, the Fund can only be used for two purposes: to compensate eligible harmed consumers and, to the extent that victim payments are not practicable, to provide funding for consumer education and financial literacy programs. If victims cannot be located or it is otherwise not practicable to pay victims, the Bureau may keep the money in the Fund for victims in future cases, or the Bureau may use money in the Fund for consumer education and financial literacy programs.
People blame Trump but this has been a conservative agenda item for decades.
Being in charge of something doesn't mean you have to be a proponent of expanding it or even maintaining it in its current form. Being in charge for a dismantling is common place as well.
> Three sources say, though, Mulvaney, the new CFPB chief, has not ordered subpoenas against Equifax or sought sworn testimony from executives, routine steps when launching a full-scale probe. Meanwhile the CFPB has shelved plans for on-the-ground tests of how Equifax protects data, an idea backed by Cordray.
So, beyond not issuing subpoenas (yet), and shelving plans for a security test, that's hardly putting the probe "on ice". It's possible the the statement from TransUnion was correct:
> We believe that it is clear that the CFPB was not given legal authority to supervise any financial institutions with respect to cybersecurity
In which case it's no surprise that the inspections were deferred or cancelled.
But I still feel helpless, voting for incompetent elitist cronies on both sides who are relentlessly abusing the system for their own benefit, or voting for the rare ethical person who is hamstrung by their honest desire to do the right thing and therefore simply can't possibly win this rigged game.
First-time progressive candidates that are running in districts the Democratic party hasn't bothered contesting, and outraising the incumbents with just grassroots support.
There is a wave. We'll see how big it gets. https://theintercept.com/2017/07/13/democrat-beto-orourke-ta...
Give money; take heart!
Also, consider your talents, pick a problem, and try to solve it.
For instance, is there anything that the credit bureaus provide that we can't beat with a little game theory and some cryptography? Let's build an open source decentralized alternative and use it to replace the whole cancerous sector.
It's still a long way from a solution, though.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-17/republica...
Gerrymandering and the Electoral College means your vote is absolutely worthless!!!
There's cases being presented to the supreme court right now on gerrymandering but do you think the majority conservative supreme court is going to rule against conservative majority thru gerrymandering?
They've won.
Don't make blanket claims like this, some people will think it's 100% true for everyone. Sure, there are some people whose vote doesn't count but some of us live in areas where our vote will make a difference.
http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/372352-supreme-court...
would that work for some time?
That's why they're desperate to 'solve' aging.
JME is not even close to very rich, yet he's done pretty well at escaping the system. http://adventurebuilders.club/
I'd have no problem with "political litter" in the state I currently reside because it's a corrupt, mismanaged dump.
If I moved back to where I used to live I'd care.
How do you think it got to be such a dump?
Mentoring underserved children.
I mean no disrespect, but it's not like there's a simple solution at hand.
I’m not saying everyone should do it, but it’s something I can do that feels helpful.
On the contrary, door to door canvassing can be extremely effective. It is one of the primary reasons why Democrats made huge gains in Virginia state government races, as well as the Alabama special election.
Indeed, a solid ground game is the only way to counter the vast amounts of money Republican donors are pouring into the political system.
Wherever you live, there's probably an Indivisible group, and a group of Democrats. Those are decent starting points; both are big groups with room for policy differences within them.
This book isn't bad, either: http://amzn.to/2E4mQze
Abuse flourishes in an environment of learned helplessness.
You think things are bad now, wait til you see what they'll try to get away with when everyone starts feeling like a battered wife.
I really wonder about the necessary cost involved to prevent those future scams.
Wait til they start contacting representatives with stolen data to make it look like real constituents, en masse in your name like the FCC faked comments supporting net neutrality repeals.
How are we gonna stop people contacting your representatives, under your name, throwing support behind what you are opposed to?
We eventually need some sort of validated 'contact your representative' system that tracks responses, shows numbers of people in support against how representatives vote and more to make sure people are real people and that it isn't stolen data used to support something you don't want in your name. Contacting your representative is one of the most broken systems in the US with so few representatives, if they flood them with real user data but fake concerns, representatives will be flooded with the wrong perception of what people want.
This is besides all the fraud that can come about with stolen data from hack after hack. How long until they have access to all the NSA collected data through hacks and backdoors. We are seriously in the thick of it.
Update: Am I really being down-voted for suggesting what everyone already knows? Seriously?
LPs typically don't have such a direct influence on the operations of the investments, although certain actual LP arrangements have in recent years.
Of course, the nature of political contributions and influence seems to be vastly more complicated compared to VC.
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
From the report:
"We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.
Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or 'trolls.'"
It doesn't say anything on if they actually succeeded.
Find a quote that says they actually succeeded in having influence over Trump, and maybe that would be a valid argument.
The special counsel is presumably constructing a more fleshed out case looking at proving a direct quid pro quo, using witness testimony, financial records, etc. All of that investigation is currently secret however.
And not that long ago he put more sanctions on them than was requested by Obama. So you can not read anything into that.
I skimmed your timeline. It's pretty much junk. You can make a timeline like for basically anyone. If you have enough public activity some of it is going to line up.
> All of that investigation is currently secret however.
That's not an excuse for you to declare case over. So far every time people claim to have some evidence or other, it's all been nothing.
Trump says a lot of stupid things, but I've never found anything that makes him beholden to the Russians. And in fact, even if they did help him, Trump, of all people, would feel perfectly free to completely not care.
He's already well known for ignoring political norms. Ignoring the norm of helping people who help you would be completely typical for him.
Who said the “case was over”? It’s clearly an ongoing investigation, which will hopefully be allowed to proceed to its conclusion despite the president’s ham-handed efforts to obstruct it.
Why do you think Trump’s campaign was so filled with people traveling back and forth to Russia, having secret meetings with Russian intelligence assets, trying to set up secure communications channels directly to the Russian government, and so on? Why do you think they have spent so much effort on publicly lying about those meetings and communications, and so much effort on shutting down the investigation about it?
Are you referring to this? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-sanctions/trum...
Taking my own advice, regardless of what you or anybody may think of the connection between Russian money, Russian politics, and Mr. Trump, surely we can find a number of wealthy Americans who are interested in winding down Federal oversight.
I'd start with the high-fructose corn syrup people, the private university rip-off people, and the fossil fuel people. If there are also Russian interests, surely they are not "acting alone."
Or non-wealthy Americans interested in winding down Federal over-reach. Really, in a federal republic aren't there quite a lot of things which can safely be left to the several states? Is it necessary to make everything an item for federal concern?
Well, you hope so, otherwise a federal republic is a good idea. OTOH, simply because you have a federal government (or even that it was a good idea a century or two ago) doesn't mean that a federal republic is a good idea, and even if a federal republic is a good idea and there are quite a lot of things that make most sense at the state level, well, that doesn't mean that every particular thing belongs there.
I completely agree! Most of them are already explicitly listed as federal concerns, in the Constitution; we should amend it to include environmental concerns for the exact reason you note.
But I see no reason why e.g. education should be a federal concern. Let the states do as they will.
How is "over-marketing" even a thing? Like what is the definition of that term? Seems very odd that would be a regulation at all which they could be fined for. I'm no fan of credit companies, but it seems strange that a company could get fined for aggressively advertising their product.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-order...