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Friday, January 31, 2014

Ex-Port Authority Official Says ‘Evidence Exists’ Christie Knew About Lane Closings


The New York Times



N.Y. / Region

Ex-Port Authority Official Says ‘Evidence Exists’ Christie Knew About Lane Closings

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Christie’s other traffic jam


msnbc


Christie’s other traffic jam

Updated
 
 
The greatest threat to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s political future may be “Bridgegate,” the unfolding scandal centered on evidence that his staff engineered a massive traffic jam as an act of political retribution. But Christie’s constituents could face longer term consequences from another transit-centered controversy from the governor’s first term.

In 2010, Christie decided to kill a project called Access to the Region’s Core, a years-in-the-making effort to build a new rail tunnel from New Jersey to New York City. Proponents of the project say it could have created as many as 44,000 jobs in and around the state and hiked local property values by up to $18 billion. A recent report [PDF] from the office of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo even suggests that an additional tunnel under the Hudson River connecting New Jersey and New York could make regional infrastructure more resilient in the face of disasters like Hurricane Sandy.

Up With Steve Kornacki, 1/26/14, 10:34 AM ET

Why this very popular project was stopped

“Going back to when I first started in 1996, people always talked about the need to have a trans-Hudson tunnel for rail service built, but it was spoken of in almost mythic proportions,” Assemblyman John Wisniewski, a Democrat and fervent critic of the Christie administration, told msnbc. State officials spent years trying to get the project up and running.
 “Then it actually got legs, got moving, and ground was broken, which was incredible,” said Wisniewski. “And even better, there was a huge allocation of federal money.”

Yet Gov. Christie abruptly scrapped the project during his first year in office. In doing so, he willingly gave up $3 billion in promised federal assistance, infuriated a local senator, and provoked the federal Department of Transportation to demand some of its money back. More importantly, critics say Christie may have stunted his state’s economic development in such a way that it could take decades to recover.

“I have a lot of bitterness about this. I think that the future of our state has been very, very seriously compromised,” said Martin Robins, director emeritus of Rutgers University’s Alan M. Vorhees Transportation Center and original director of the ARC project.

So why did Christie kill the new tunnel? Ostensibly, he was worried about cost overruns; but an independent inquiry by Congress’ investigative arm found no evidence of the massive price inflation which Christie predicted. To many many of the governor’s critics, the death of the ARC tunnel looks more like a political ploy, crafted to boost his reputation and pocket billions of dollars in construction funds at the expense of New Jersey’s transit system and economic well-being.
The two men who allegedly led this effort at the Port Authority are David Wildstein and Bill Baroni—both of whom have subsequently been caught up in the Bridgegate scandal.

On September 10, 2010—less than nine months into his first term—Christie ordered a month-long pause in new ARC expenditures, during which time the ARC Executive Steering Committee would compile a report on the projected cost of construction, originally pegged at $8.7 billion. On October 7, the committee issued a memorandum projecting that the total cost of the project “is likely to top $11 billion and could exceed $14 billion.”

Christie promptly announced the cancellation of the project, citing the state’s strained finances in the wake of the recession.

“I have made a pledge to the people of New Jersey that on my watch I will not allow taxpayers to fund projects that run over budget with no clear way of how these costs will be paid for,” he said in a statement. “Considering the unprecedented fiscal and economic climate our State is facing, it is completely unthinkable to borrow more money and leave taxpayers responsible for billions in cost overruns. The ARC project costs far more than New Jersey taxpayers can afford and the only prudent move is to end this project.”

Officials in the federal Department of Transportation (DOT) were reportedly appalled. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood had committed $3 billion to the project, hundreds of millions of which had already been spent. Now, after a decade and a half of work and planning, Christie had decided to shut down the project in the space of a month.

Up With Steve Kornacki, 1/26/14, 10:33 AM ET

The politics of the Port Authority

LaHood rushed to Trenton, where he persuaded Gov. Christie to delay cancellation of the project for two weeks. In the meantime, members of DOT and NJ Transit would work together to try and keep it afloat. 
 
Over the course of those two weeks, DOT offered concession after concession, according to local press: “a federal loan, the use of private financing and an offer to split the cost of $1.1 billion in overruns with the state and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.” But none of those options satified Christie, who again killed the project on October 27. Robins said he believes that Christie was always going to cancel the ARC project, regardless of the outcome of the review and DOT negotiations.

“I know that the staff at NJ Transit was beside themselves,” he told msnbc. “They were not listened to.”

A spokesperson for NJ Transit declined to comment for this article. A former NJ Transit employee who was present at the time of the review said that he had signed a non-disclosure agreement, but added that he had “a lot of feelings” about the process.

Evidently, the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., also had a lot of feelings. In a blistering statement to the press, he accused Christie of making “the biggest policy blunder in New Jersey’s history.

“The Governor has put politics before performance, and it is the people of New Jersey who will pay the high price,” he said.

Christie stood firm, insisting that the “long-term fiscal health” of New Jersey was at stake. While critics were more than a little skeptical, it wasn’t until 2012 that independent investigators released a comprehensive fact-check of that claim. In April of that year, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) released the findings of a thirteen month investigation into the ARC tunnel cancellation. Their conclusion: As of October 2010, estimates for how much the ARC project would cost ranged from $9.78 to, at most, $12.43 billion. And whereas Christie had said that the state of New Jersey would be on the hook for 70% of the total cost, the GAO found that the real number was closer to 14%.

Meanwhile, the project cancellation did not exactly come free. An incensed LaHood, who declined to comment for this article, demanded that New Jersey return the $271 million which the federal government had already poured into the project. Christie refused, and hired the law firm Patton Boggs to negotiate a settlement with DOT. Ultimately, New Jersey only had to return $95 million—plus over $1 million in legal fees for Patton Boggs. The law firm—which now represents Christie’s reelection campaign and the New Jersey Republican State Committee in the Department of Justice’s Bridgegate investigation—did not return a request for comment, and Christie spokespeople did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Despite all the fallout from the ARC project cancellation, New Jersey voters did not punish Christie. In fact, support for his decision to kill the project grew in hindsight, from 51% in October 2010 to 56% two months later.

“My guess is, he was appealing to people’s basic instinct that government is too big, inefficient, bloated, and just wastes their money,” said msnbc’s Steve Kornacki, a close observer of New Jersey politics. “I think any time you dangle a price tag around these big public works projects, you can get people going in that direction.”

The cancellation may have also been an attempt to establish Christie’s fiscally conservative bona fides with the national Republican base.

“If you look at the time of it, Christie was having that big year with [cutting] pensions, going after teachers’ unions, making a series of plays that were translating really well on the Republican national stage,” said Kornacki.

That’s where Wildstein and Baroni, Christie’s men at the Port Authority, come in. Killing the tunnel had freed up some $1.8 billion which the Port Authority had pledged towards the project. And while that agency was established to serve both New York and New Jersey, the ARC funds all wound up going to infrastructure upgrades inside the latter state. In January 2011, Christie announced that the $1.8 billion would go towards upgrading crumbling New Jersey roads, including the historic Pulaski Skyway.

Such projects are supposed to be paid for out of the New Jersey Transportation Trust Fund, but the trust fund had been hovering near bankruptcy for years. Even now, all of the fund’s income goes towards financing debt, said the Tri-State Transportation Campaign’s Veronica Vanterpol.

“The Transportation Trust Fund was meant to be a sustainable vehicle for funding these projects, and that was created in 1984,” she said. “The problem is that one of the main revenue sources, which is the state’s gas tax, has not kept up with inflation even though the transportation needs of the state have grown.”
Christie had pledged during his first gubernatorial campaign that would not raise New Jersey’s gas tax under any circumstances. That meant the only way he could pay for upgrading infrastructure was by issuing more debt and raiding the Port Authority’s ARC tunnel funds. According to a recent report from investigative journalist Andrea Bernstein, that may have been the plan all along.
“According to documents and interviews with more than a dozen top-level sources, the governor made clear from the get-go that the agency would be the source of cash for New Jersey’s hard-up infrastructure budget,” writes Bernstein. “And he and his team proceeded to wrangle billions from the bi-state authority to further his political goals—much of that for projects that had never been under the Port Authority’s jurisdiction before.”

Wildstein and Baroni allegedly worked within the Port Authority to kill the tunnel project so they could redirect the money toward New Jersey road projects.
Although the ARC project may be dead and buried, New Jersey may still eventually get its second rail tunnel to New York. Last May, the Department of Transportation offered New York $185 million for a project known as Gateway, which would serve the same needs as ARC. But the project is still not fully funded, and it could be years before construction begins.

Meanwhile, the Port Authority’s $1.8 billion is set to run out in 2016, leaving the New Jersey Transportation Trust Fund in much the same shape it was before.
“From a transportation perspective, it’s been a total and complete disaster, and I think we’re going to suffer probably for the rest of my life,” said Robins. “People my age will have to live with Christie’s decisions.”

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Meet the Rockefeller Group: The Real Estate Company At the Eye of NJ's Political Storm

  News & Politics  


 
 

The Christie administration allegedly pressured Hoboken's mayor over a development project Rockefeller was pushing.




Photo Credit: AFP
 
 
 
The company at the center of a growing controversy in Hoboken, New Jersey that is fueling Governor Chris Christie’s woes is a major political player that spreads around campaign cash.   Talking Points Memo’s Hunter Walker details how the Rockefeller Group spends money on both parties, though most of the cash goes to Republicans. 

The politically connected real estate group has spent more than $70,000 on both parties, including $2,500 to Christie. Of their 21 donations, 16 went to Republicans for a total of $40,500. $37,000 went to Democrats.  Rockefeller employees also dole out cash, with Christie receiving money from two executives. 

While the money has gone to both parties, the real estate company now finds itself in the middle of a partisan controversy over the Christie administration punishing political opponents.  In this case, the issue is the alleged pressure on the Hoboken mayor over a real estate development project Rockefeller was pushing.

Over the weekend, MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki broke a story by interviewing the mayor of Hoboken, Dawn Zimmer, who said that she was pressured by Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno and Community Affairs Commissioner Richard Constable.  The Rockefeller Group’s eyes have been set on a multi-million dollar development project.  Guadagno and Constable allegedly withheld Hurricane Sandy relief money from Zimmer because she did not approve the development.
“The bottom line is, it’s not fair for the governor to hold Sandy funds hostage for the City of Hoboken because he wants me to give back to one private developer,” Zimmer told Kornacki on his MSNBC show. 

Zimmer only received about $342,000, instead of the $127 million she wanted in the aftermath of Sandy, which devastated Hoboken.   

The Rockefeller Group owns the land where the project is set to be built, and is represented by a law firm founded by a close ally of Christie.  In addition, as the New York Times notes, a study of the redevelopment project “had been paid for with $75,000 from the Port Authority, whose deputy executive director at the time was a Christie appointee, Bill Baroni.” The study concluded that three blocks out of 19 in question should be developed--and all the lots in those groups were owned by Rockefeller.  Ron Hine, the director of Fund for a Better Waterfront, a Hoboken advocacy group, told the Times that it looked like the company was getting “special treatment.” 

The allegations from Zimmer lead to a meeting between the mayor and a federal prosecutor.  The federal government is already looking into the allegations that the Christie administration punished the mayor of Fort Lee over his refusal to endorse the governor’s re-election.
 
Alex Kane is AlterNet's New York-based World editor, and an assistant editor for Mondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.

Bitcoin — boom or bubble? Everything you need to know.


 
 The Washington Post
 
 
 
The baffling Bitcoin boom is either an exercise in self-delusion — a high-tech Ponzi scheme that will come crashing down — or an imaginative new Internet technology that could change how millions of people around the world conduct everyday business. There is little middle ground.

Called a “digital currency,” Bitcoin originated in early 2009 with a software program written by Satoshi Nakamoto. Who is Nakamoto? Good question. It’s a pseudonym, and we don’t know who’s behind it — whether man or woman; individual or group; American, Japanese, Russian or some other nationality. But what seems clear is that Nakamoto owns bitcoins worth “hundreds of millions of dollars,” says Jerry Brito, an analyst at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University and a Bitcoin enthusiast.


You can do two things with bitcoins: buy stuff, just as with traditional money; and hold them as an investment or speculation, hoping their price will rise.

Some shopping does occur with bitcoins. The first retail transaction is usually attributed to Laszlo Hanyecz, a computer programmer in Florida, who in May 2010 persuaded someone to order two pizzas for him in exchange for 10,000 bitcoins. Recently, Overstock.com — an online retailer — agreed to accept bitcoins; the Sacramento Kings basketball team will do likewise. According to coinmap.org, about 2,600 stores and businesses worldwide accept bitcoins, with concentrations in Western Europe, California and New York.

Still, bitcoins today are mainly a financial gamble. They’re traded on electronic exchanges, where price swings have been mind-blowing. When Hanyecz bought his pizzas, bitcoins were perhaps worth less than a penny each. In late 2013, prices exceeded $1,000. Short-term variations are enormous. Here’s one stretch in 2013: On April 6, the price was $142.63; on April 16, $68.36; on April 30, $139.23, according to data from coindesk.com. Prices now bounce between $800 and $900. At $800, Hanyecz’s pizzas would cost $8 million.
Basic economics teaches that money serves three roles:

● a medium of exchange, buying and selling;

● a store of value, something whose stability protects wealth;

● a unit of account, a way to price goods and services.

Bitcoin’s wild price fluctuations seem disqualifying on all counts. A business that accepts bitcoins takes an immediate risk that the funds will lose 5 percent or 10 percent of their worth before they can be converted into traditional money (dollars, euros, yen). By this logic, retail uses will remain limited. For similar reasons, bitcoins flunk as a store of value and unit of account.

What has boosted bitcoins’ price is speculative mania and specific events that increased demand. Cyprus’s financial crisis in 2013 reportedly caused European investors to convert euros into bitcoins as a way of evading controls on moving money abroad. Prices rose when Baidu — China’s Google — said it would accept bitcoins in some situations. Because it’s hard to identify owners, bitcoins may also lubricate crime, money-laundering and tax evasion. Bitcoins were used on “Silk Road,” a Web site that peddled illegal drugs.

To skeptics (including this writer), Bitcoin seems a collapse waiting to happen. There’s nothing behind it except clever programming. It’s extremely vulnerable to hostile government actions. Baidu reversed its decision after China’s central bank criticized Bitcoin; Germany’s Bundesbank has done likewise. The FBI pierced Silk Road’s anonymity and shut it down. Could bitcoins be worth $80 or 80 cents instead of $800?

Hold it, retort Bitcoin’s defenders. The standard “bubble” analogy distorts Bitcoin’s technology and potential.

It won’t replace the dollar or the euro, says Brito of the Mercatus Center. Instead, Bitcoin represents a payments technology that competes with Visa and PayPal. Against these, he says, Bitcoin has some huge theoretical advantages. Except for cash, most payment systems require a middleman (usually a bank) to move funds from the buyer’s account to the seller’s account. By contrast, buyers and sellers of bitcoins deal directly with each other. Bitcoins are deposited automatically in the seller’s electronic “wallet.” Savings could be sizable, Brito says.

Jeremy Allaire is chief executive of Circle Internet Financial, a start-up company striving to commercialize Bitcoin. With time, he thinks Bitcoin’s price volatility will subside or be hedged. He says that Bitcoin’s frantic trading is not just mindless speculation. “People are making a bet,” he says. The bet is that Bitcoin will emerge as a global payment platform operating through smartphones, tablets and other devices. If Bitcoin captures even a small share of the multitrillion-dollar global payment market, its current price will be dramatically undervalued, he says. There are now about 12 million bitcoins; the underlying software is supposed to stop production at 21 million.

Ours is an era when technologists are leading us in directions that neither they nor we fully understand. That’s why it’s so hard to know whether Bitcoin represents constructive innovation — or just another old-fashioned swindle.

Read more from Robert Samuelson’s archive.

 
Continue to next article in this post. ~Bear

 

12 questions about Bitcoin you were too embarrassed to ask 

This has been a big week for Bitcoin. On Monday, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held the first-ever Congressional hearing on Bitcoin. Later in the day, the currency's value reached an all-time high of more than $800.

That has left a lot of people scratching their heads. What's Bitcoin? How do you use it? And why would anyone want to? Read on for answers. (Inspired by Max Fisher's classic explainer on Syria)

1. What's Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is an online financial network that people use to send payments from one person to another. In many ways, Bitcoin is similar to conventional payment networks like Visa credit cards or Paypal. But Bitcoin is different from those and other payment networks in two important ways.

First, Bitcoin is decentralized. For-profit companies own the Visa and Paypal networks and manage them for the benefit of their respective shareholders. No one owns or controls the Bitcoin network. It has a peer-to-peer structure, with hundreds of computers all over the Internet working together to process Bitcoin transactions.

Bitcoin's decentralized architecture means that it is the world's first completely open financial network. To create a new financial service in the conventional U.S. banking system, you need to partner with an existing bank and comply with a variety of complex rules. The Bitcoin network has no such restrictions. People don't need anyone's permission or assistance to create new Bitcoin-based financial services.

The second thing that makes the Bitcoin unique is that it comes with its own currency. Paypal and Visa conduct transactions in conventional currencies such as the U.S. dollars. The Bitcoin network, however, conducts transactions in a new monetary unit, also called Bitcoin.

2. That seems really weird! Why would anyone use a payment network based on an imaginary currency?

It is weird. Almost everyone who encounters the idea for the first time (including me) has the same reaction: That can't possibly work. But so far the market has proved the skeptics wrong:


This graph shows the price of one Bitcoin since the start of 2011, when the currency began to adopt mainstream attention. The price has been extraordinarily volatile -- it lost more than 90 percent of its value between June and October 2011, for example. But there's also been an unmistakable upward trend. Notice that the chart is on a logarithmic scale. It shows the currency's value rising from around $0.30 at the start of 2011 to around $600 today. There are almost 12 million bitcoins in existence, so the Bitcoin "money supply" is now worth around $7 billion.

Bitcoin has captured the imagination of venture capitalists. A startup called Bitpay, which processes Bitcoin payments on behalf of vendors, raised more than $2 million earlier this year. Coinbase, a startup that helps consumers buy and sell bitcoins, has raised $5 million. And last month, a Bitcoin startup called Circle raised $9 million.

Why are people so excited? Bitcoin enthusiasts believe that Bitcoin's peer-to-peer architecture and low barriers to entry will allow the creation of a new generation of innovative financial services, in much the same way that the Internet's open architecture led to innovative new online services. There are also many Bitcoin fans who see the currency as an antidote to the inflationary tendencies of central banks, though, as we'll see later, this argument for Bitcoin is misguided.

3. This just sounds like a bubble. Do people use the currency for anything besides speculation?

I just mentioned Bitpay. It provides a good sign of Bitcoin's growing popularity for "real" transactions. In September 2012, the company announced that it had signed up 1,000 merchants to use its service for accepting Bitcoin payments. Just a year later, the company said, it passed 10,000 merchants.

Bitpay works with a wide variety of merchants. Some sell online services like Web hosting or virtual private networks. Others sell jewelry and electronics. There are even restaurants and cupcake shops that sell their wares for bitcoins.
And yes, Bitcoin has significant illicit uses. Programs like Satoshi Dice allow people to gamble online. Until recently, a Web site called Silk Road helped dealers sell millions of dollars of illicit drugs.

It's hardly unusual for new payment technologies to attract illicit use. Pornography was a big draw for both the first VCRs and the early consumer Internet. New payment technologies often attract criminals looking for new ways to move their funds without government scrutiny.

Another application for bitcoins that is expected to become more important in the future is international payments. Right now, wiring money internationally involves slow, expensive and inconvenient services like Western Union. Bitcoin is international, and its fees can be much lower than conventional wire transfer services. There's still work to be done to make such a system affordable and user-friendly. But it has the potential to disrupt the international payment industry.

4. Who created Bitcoin?

No one knows for sure. The currency was created by a person who indentified himself as "Satoshi Nakamoto." While the name sounds Japanese, Bitcoin's creator never provided any personal details. He collaborated with other early Bitcoin fans through online forums but never met with other members of the Bitcoin community face to face. Then, starting in 2010 he gradually reduced his involvement in the currency's development. His last known communication came in 2011.

We don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, but we do know that if he ever surfaces, he will be an extremely wealthy man. Millions of bitcoins were created in the currency's first two years, and Satoshi likely owns hundreds of thousands of them. At today's prices, he would be a millionaire many times over.

Before leaving the scene, Nakamoto passed his torch to a mild-mannered developer named Gavin Andressen, who is currently the project's lead developer. Andressen now works under the auspices of the Bitcoin Foundation, the closest thing the anarchic Bitcoin community has to an official public face.

5. Where do bitcoins come from?

In a conventional financial system, new money is created by a central bank, such as the Federal Reserve. But the Bitcoin network doesn't have a central bank. So the system needed an alternative mechanism for introducing currency into circulation.

Bitcoin's designer solved this problem in a clever way. As I said above, hundreds of computers scattered around the Internet work together to process Bitcoin transactions. These computers are called "miners," and Bitcoin's transaction-clearing process is called "mining." It's called that because every 10 minutes, on average, a Bitcoin miner wins a computational race and gets a prize. Currently, that reward is 25 bitcoins, worth around $12,500. These prizes provide a strong incentive for more people to join in Bitcoin's transaction-clearing process, helping the currency to remain decentralized.

This reward declines on a fixed schedule: Every four years the reward falls by half. So, from 2009 to 2012, it was 50 BTC, now it's 25 BTC, and starting in late 2016 it will fall to 12.5 BTC, and so forth. If you do the math, you'll find that there will never be more than 21 million bitcoins in circulation. Right now, there are almost 12 million bitcoins in ciruclation, so the Bitcoin money supply will never be more than twice its current size.

6. Isn't that a huge problem? I learned in economics class that deflation can cause economic problems.

It's true that deflation has traditionally been associated with economic problems, but there's little reason to think this will be a problem for Bitcoin. That's because deflation is only a problem if it is what economists call a "unit of account" for a nation's economic system.

Right now in the United States, salaries, mortgage payments, rents and other long-term financial commitments are priced in U.S. dollars. As a result, if the value of the dollar rises unexpectedly, these "sticky prices" can cause severe economic distortions. Unable to cut wages, employers have trouble making payrolls. Unable to renegotiate their debts, homeowners have trouble making their mortgage payments. Tenants get stuck with rents they can't afford. The result is a recession.

Hardly anyone uses Bitcoin as a unit of account. You'd be insane to sign a contract promising to repay a loan of 100 BTC in 10 years or to take a job where your salary was priced in bitcoins. Even the Bitcoin Foundation, which pays its employees in bitcoins, still sets its employees' salaries in dollars, converting employees' dollar-based salaries into the corresponding number of bitcoins on each payday. As a result, fluctuations in the value of bitcoins don't cause the kinds of economic disruptions that fluctuations in the value of traditional currencies do.

7. How do I get bitcoins?

One option is to mine them yourself, but that's not a good choice for beginners. For everyone else, your best bet is to purchase them with a conventional currency. Web sites known as exchanges will let you trade bitcoins for conventional currencies with other users. Even more convenient are companies like Coinbase, which will withdraw cash from your bank account and convert it to bitcoins at the current exchange rate. A few Bitcoin ATMs are popping up, which will directly trade paper money for Bitcoins. Here's a video of someone using a Bitcoin ATM in Vancouver:
 




8. Okay, I bought some Bitcoins. Now what?

Next you'll need a place to store them. Bitcoins are stored in "wallets," which in this case are just files that contain encryption keys, or secret codes that allow you to transfer your bitcoins to other people. There are several options. One is to store them yourself using one of the Bitcoin programs available for Mac, PC and Android.

Another option is to entrust them to a third-party Web site known as a "online wallet."

A third option is what's known as a "paper wallet," where you print out your encryption keys and store them in a safe place, such as a safe deposit box.
Each has risks. If you choose to store your bitcoins yourself, then you could lose them to a hacker, a hard drive crash or a lost mobile device. But if you choose to use a third party, you need to worry about that third party swindling you or becoming bankrupt. The Bitcoin market is largely unregulated, so there are few legal protections if you happen to choose the wrong online wallet service. Paper wallets avoid the pitfalls of other methods, but they're tricky to set up correctly, and of course you're out of luck if you lose the piece of paper.

9. Okay, I have some bitcoins and found a secure way to keep them. What do I do with them now?

There are thousands of Bitcoin merchants online who will sell you everything from jewelry to electronics to illegal drugs. You can also spend bitcoins in "real life." To spend them in person, you need a Bitcoin mobile app. Generally, the store you're buying from will show you a QR code representing the Bitcoin transaction. You then scan that QR code with your phone, and the mobile app will send the required number of bitcoins to the store. Then you walk out the door with your purchases.


Of course, right now the options for face-to-face Bitcoin transactions are rather limited. Earlier this year, Kashmir Hill of Forbes lived on Bitcoin for a week. Because she lived in tech-savvy San Francisco, she was able to find enough Bitcoin-accepting merchants to get by, but just barely. So Bitcoin is far from being a practical currency for day-to-day use.

10. Should I buy bitcoins?

Probably not. There are two reasons you might want to buy bitcoins: to purchase goods and services or for speculation.

Right now Bitcoin isn't a very practical payment technology for ordinary users. The software is too complicated, and the risk of loss due to hackers, forgotten passwords, hard drive failures and so forth are too large. Also, Bitcoin is extremely volatile right now, so your wallet could go from having $100 worth of Bitcoins one day to $50 the next. And right now, as Hill discovered, the technology just isn't used widely enough to make it a useful option to have in your pocket or purse. For most people, conventional payment technologies like credit cards are going to be more convenient.

What about speculating on Bitcoin? Once again, the currency probably isn't a good choice for ordinary users. The security and reliability risks of Bitcoin loom much larger if you invest thousands of dollars in the currency. You don't want to run the risk of losing thousands of dollars because you forgot a password or had an unexpected password failure. And the currency is extremely volatile. It might keep going up, but it could also lose 90 percent of its value next week. In other words, you should only jump on the bandwagon if you have a strong stomach.

11. If people shouldn't buy bitcoins, then what is all the fuss about?

Once again, the analogy to the Internet is instructive. Until the 1990s, the Internet wasn't a practical technology for ordinary folks to use, either. It used complicated text-based programs, and you had to be a computer expert to use it effectively.

But it would have been foolish for an observer in 1990 to dismiss the Internet as too nerdy for mainstream use. Over time, entrepreneurs took the basic infrastructure of the Internet and built innovative and user-friendly online services such as Google, Facebook and YouTube.

Bitcoin boosters are betting that the same will happen with Bitcoin. The "raw" bitcoin network isn't very accessible, but startups like Coinbase and Bitpay are slowly fixing that. Some day soon, someone may develop Bitcoin's "killer app," a program that provides a financial service that has clear advantages over conventional banking. That might be an international money-transfer network with lower fees, a practical system for online micropayments, or something else that no one has thought of before.

12. Could bitcoins ever replace conventional money?

It's possible, but it doesn't seem very likely. People want to use the currency that most other people use, and in the United States that's going to be US dollars for the foreseeable future. And that's a good thing: if Bitcoin became the standard currency of the US economy, then its fixed money supply would create a serious risk of the next economic downturn snowballing into a depression.

However, there could be a lot of room for Bitcoin to complement conventional financial networks. After all, Paypal gained traction because the conventional financial networks of the day weren't meeting all of users' needs. Bitcoin's open architecture could allow it to be even more disruptive. People are unlikely to ever eschew conventional financial networks altogether, but there could be a substantial market for Bitcoin-based services that perform certain services more effectively or affordable than conventional alternatives.

Related content:

Bitcoins needs a central banker

WATCH: Bitcoins: Coming soon to a campaign near you?


Sunday, January 5, 2014

The right’s Benghazi insanity reaches new depths



SALON



The right’s Benghazi insanity reaches new depths

No amount of facts can convince the right of reality. Here's how politics, racism and sexism guide their lunacy



 
The right’s Benghazi insanity reaches new depthsLou Dobbs, Hillary Clinton (Credit: AP/Kathy Willens/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
 
 
Hands down the biggest news story of the 2013 holiday season was the New York Times opus on the 2012 Benghazi attack. The Dec. 28 story debunked every single right-wing conspiracy peddled by Fox News (and also promulgated briefly by CBS News’ “60 Minutes”): the attack was, in fact, heavily motivated by an anti-Islam movie, as the Obama administration claimed; its militia ringleaders were independent of al-Qaida, and there was nothing the administration or Hillary Clinton’s State Department could do to protect the four men who died at the underdefended Benghazi compound.

Given the holiday, you may have missed the story. The folks at Fox may as well have. They continue to push their old lies: that the tragedy was the result of Obama and Clinton ignoring the growing al-Qaida threat in Libya and the danger to Ambassador Chris Stevens and his staff. When Fox bothered to acknowledge the Times’ work, it has been only to accuse the paper of carrying water for the administration, and specifically, for Hillary Clinton.

Charles Krauthammer insisted the Times piece was all about protecting Clinton’s 2016 presidential chances. “The reason that Times invested all the effort and time in this and put it on the front page is precisely a way to protect the Democrats, to deflect the issue, to protect Hillary, who was exposed on this issue with almost no issue in her tenure in the administration,” he said Monday. “It is obviously a political move.”

To be fair, the Times story had critics beyond Fox: the Daily Beast’s Eli Lake continued to peddle the story that al-Qaida played a key role in the Benghazi bloodshed.

But Fox Business hit a new low Thursday, when Lou Dobbs hosted former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer to attack the Times’ work. Scheuer became famous critiquing the Bush administration’s war on terror in his book “Imperial Hubris,” which he first published anonymously. But he’s reached new depths attacking Obama.

In a Dec. 23 column on Obama’s tyranny, he effectively advocated the president’s assassination, quoting Algernon Sidney on what should happen to tyrants: “by an established law among the most virtuous nations, every man might kill a tyrant, and no names are recorded in history with more honor, than of those who did it.”

Scheuer also managed to work in racism, sexism and xenophobia, insisting Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are protected because “the impeachment provisions of the Constitution are a dead letter; that they apply only to individuals named Nixon; or that they do not apply to black Americans supported by such towering giants of fatuousness as Oprah, Chris Matthews, Fareed Zakaria, Piers Morgan, and Hillary Clinton and her motley band of Viragos.”

David Frum argued that “Scheuer’s meltdown” would once and for all discredit him and keep him off the airwaves – Frum charges liberals with looking away from Scheuer’s extremism and anti-Semitism back when he was a Bush critic, and he has a point.

But Frum was wrong: Dobbs invited Scheuer to weigh in on the Times’ Benghazi scoop, and he came through for the Fox Business host, insisting Clinton “has blood on her arms up to her elbows for not being willing to protect the people who are representing us in Libya” and thus “killed those Americans and [the Times editors] have to kill that story or it is going to become mainstream for 2016.” (h/t Media Matters.)

Clearly the right’s Benghazi fever will not be cured by facts. Obama and Clinton’s critics are so adept at projection that they imagine the New York Times is motivated by the same sort of political agenda that drives Fox’s news coverage, only for the other team. I enjoyed managing editor Jill Abramson dismissing Fox’s charges as “ridiculous,” without elaboration.

The truth is, the Times piece was not without criticism of the administration’s efforts in Benghazi. It found that the attack’s leaders had benefited from American weaponry and support while fighting Moammar Gadhafi, and suggests that while the strike on the compound “does not appear to have been meticulously planned, neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.”

The Benghazi tragedy, David Kirkpatrick wrote, “shows the risks of expecting American aid in a time of desperation to buy durable loyalty, and the difficulty of discerning friends from allies of convenience in a culture shaped by decades of anti-Western sentiment.”

That raises thorny questions of national security that demand serious bipartisan debate. But the usual suspects on Fox and within the GOP leadership continue to believe they have a way to disqualify Hillary Clinton from becoming president, and it will take much more than facts to convince them otherwise. 
Joan Walsh Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large and the author of "What's the Matter With White People: Finding Our Way in the Next America."

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Top 10 Proofs People Can Be Completely Manipulated without Hypnosis


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Top 10 Proofs People Can Be Completely Manipulated without Hypnosis

1. Any article listing the top 10 of anything will be widely read.

2. A poll of people in 65 countries, including the United States, finds that the United States is overwhelmingly considered the greatest threat to peace in the world. The consensus would have been even stronger had the United States itself not been polled, because the 5 percent of humanity living here is largely convinced that the other 95% of humanity — that group with experience being threatened or attacked by the United States — is wrong. After all, our government in the U.S. tells us it’s in favor of peace. Even when it bombs cities, it does it for peace. It’s hard for people under the bombs to see that. We in the U.S. have a better perspective.

3. Polls in the United States through the 2003-2011 war on Iraq found that a majority in the U.S. believed Iraqis were better off as the result of a war that severely damaged — even destroyed — Iraq.1 A majority of Iraqis, in contrast, believed they were worse off.2 A majority in the United States believed Iraqis were grateful.3 This is a disagreement over facts, not ideology. But people often choose which facts to become aware of or to accept. Tenacious believers in tales of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” tended to believe more, not less, firmly when shown the facts. The facts about Iraq are not pleasant, but they are important. To believe that the people who live where your nation’s government has waged a war are better off for it, despite those people’s contention that they are worse off, suggests an extreme sort of arrogance — and a misplaced arrogance because you’ve just proven that a few slick politicians can make you believe up is down.

4. According to U.S.ians the greatest threat to peace on earth is a nation that hasn’t threatened any other, and hasn’t attacked any other in centuries, a nation that suffered horrible chemical weapons attacks and refused to use chemical weapons in response, a nation that has refused to develop nuclear weapons but been falsely accused of doing so by the U.S. government for decades. That’s right: a bit of laughably bad propaganda, regurgitated in variations for 30 years, and the smart critical thinkers of the Land of the Free declare a nation with a military budget below 1% of their own — Iran — the Greatest Threat to Peace.4 Edward Bernays is cackling wickedly in his grave.

5. Because no cartoon character has ever been named after Edward Bernays, nobody’s ever heard of him.

6. In poll after poll after poll, 75% to 85% in the United States say their system of government is broken. Yet, what remains the top piece of advice to agitators for change? That’s right: “Work within the system.” And what remains the fallback ultimate reliable justification for launching or escalating or continuing a war: That’s right: “We need to bring our system of government to others.”

7. When U.S. military spending begins to inch below $1 trillion a year, military-friendly journalists declare the weapons lobby dead.  When it begins to inch back slightly above $1 trillion a year, slightly less military-friendly journalists declare the weapons profiteers alive but struggling. In both scenarios the level of spending remains roughly $1 trillion and the difference between the high end and the low end, while greater than most other public programs will ever see, is less than the Pentagon “misplaces” in an average 12-month period.

8. On Tuesdays, President Barack Obama goes through a list of men, women, and children, picks which ones to have murdered, and has them murdered. Knowing this would conflict with hating exclusively a particular sub-group of our public sociopaths, so most people simply choose not to know it.

9. If Iraq had really had those weapons, and if Syria had demonstrably really killed a small number of its victims with the wrong type of weapons, and if Iran were really building nuclear weapons, . . . then launching wars on those countries would still be illegal, immoral, and disastrous. We all have opinions about the question the warmakers want asked, but not about the insanity that lies behind the question.

10. People have been dying since before recorded history, and yet only those who pretend to believe nobody dies can be considered serious, honest, upstanding folk. That there’s another longer life helps us not worry so much about getting screwed during this one. Perhaps it also helps us in allowing our “representatives” to routinely end the lives of so many foreign, and thus ignorant, people.
  1. The last such poll may have been Gallup in August 2010. []
  2. Zogby, Dec. 20, 2011. []
  3. The last such poll may have been CBS News in August 2010. []
  4. Check out Gareth Porter’s forthcoming book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. []
David Swanson is an anti-war activist and blogger at War Is a Crime. Read other articles by David.

Friday, January 3, 2014

CIA Blocks More Inquiries




 

CIA Blocks More Inquiries

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In a recent New York Times article about efforts by the Senate Intelligence Committee to get its hands on (and perhaps release?) an internal report on torture that the CIA doesn’t want to turn over, the author mentions in passing the pending nomination of Caroline D. Krass to be the top lawyer at the Agency.

He then notes that:

Ms. Krass is a ca­reer gov­ern­ment law­yer who works at the Jus­tice De­part­ment’s Of­fice of Le­gal Coun­sel, the arm of the de­part­ment that ad­vis­es the White House on the le­gal­ity of do­mes­tic and for­eign poli­cies.

The of­fice was par­tic­u­lar­ly con­tro­ver­sial dur­ing the Bush ad­min­is­tra­tion, when lawyers there wrote lengthy mem­os ap­prov­ing C.I.A. in­ter­ro­ga­tion meth­ods like wa­ter­board­ing and sleep dep­ri­va­tion, as well as sign­ing off on the ex­pan­sion of sur­veil­lance by the Na­tion­al Se­cu­rity Agency.

That is very useful information, worthy of its own article.

Because the move of Krass from OLC to CIA is highly suspicious. After all, they’re taking someone from the very heart of the cover-up over torture at the Agency and putting her in charge of… legal blocking of inquiries into CIA actions.

This would not be the first time in recent memory that an organization that is all about subterfuge has moved to prevent the truth from getting out by shuffling key personnel between it and other parts of the Executive Branch. In another instance, the CIA last year sent Sheryl Shenberger, who had served as a branch chief in the CIA counterterrorism center between 2001 and 2003, to be in charge of declassification of documents at the National Archives. Bet that she hasn’t rushed to make available documents pertaining to the September 11 attacks.

The Times article, published under the dull headline, “Senate Asks C.I.A. to Share Its Report on Interrogations,” unsurprisingly does not seem to have made any waves. And we have not noticed anyone else drawing attention to the buried sub-narrative about Krass’s new appointment.
If these kinds of congressional committees are serious about actually representing the interests of the American people, after years of failures on that front, they might start by taking a closer look at dodgy- looking personnel moves.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Mitt Romney Being Sued For Racketeering In Federal Court






Liberals Unite



Mitt Romney Being Sued For Racketeering In Federal Court


Screen Shot 2013-12-30 at 10.18.37 AM




One of the most ignored stories in the mainstream media will surely be coming to a television screen near you once the court proceedings commence. That lawsuit is none other than racketeering charges leveled against one Willard “Mitt” Romney and his co-defendants in Haas v. Romney.


Filed on October 18 in Los Angeles, CA, in an ironic twist of fate it was decided on November 6, the one-year anniversary of Romney’s loss to Barack Obama, that the lawsuit could go forward.

eToys executive Steven “Laser” Haas and his company, Collateral Logistics, Inc., was the court appointed fiduciary charged with overseeing the liquidation of eToys. Haas filed the suit after discovering multiple frauds while in the process of liquidating the company. In his affidavit to the Securities and Exchange Commission dated August 3, 2012, Haas charges, among other things, that he was offered $850,00 by Bain Capital to keep quiet about irregularities he uncovered.

He is suing the defendants for $100 million in an effort to recoup the losses incurred by him and the other victims of the alleged fraud.
Several steps are necessary as the lawsuit goes forward. In a lengthy and sorely in need of an edit article written by Haas for the Daily Kos, he lists the procedural necessities:
Haas notes that the Court denied his request for the U.S. Marshal’s Office to serve the summons on legal grounds, but that notwithstanding, the case will go forward. It is up to Haas to find the means to have the summons served to the parties involved by February 16. He is gleeful at the prospect.

There are allegations of murder and mayhem in addition to the breaking of federal racketeering laws.

The case number is 2:13-cv-07738 and will be tried in the Los Angeles Division of the Federal District Court, located on Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles.

Stay tuned.

Additional references:

http://theobamacrat.com/2013/12/07/willard-mitt-romney-bain-capital-sued-for-rico-in-federal-court/comment-page-1/#comment-94214
http://stellionata.com/in-the-news/8598-racketeering-lawsuit-haas-v-mitt-romney-going-forward
Update from Haas:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/23/1264888/-Haas-v-RICO-Romney-Huge-Case-But-Haters-Are-Nixing-Merits-Debates

Ann-SM
Ann Werner is a blogger and the author of CRAZY and Dreams and Nightmares. You can view her work at ARK Stories.
Visit her on Twitter @MsWerner and Facebook