The Other Afghan Women - In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them. - link
The Manifold Threats of the Texas Abortion Law - It not only violates abortion precedents but also attempts to shield illegal statutes from the courts. - link
In the Northeast, Hurricanes Now Look Very Different - That I could have ever found such a visitation of chaos invigorating is amazing to me. - link
Is El Salvador’s President Trying to Shut Down a Hearing on the Infamous El Mozote Massacre? - To understand why there’s a crisis in Central America, an expert said, you have to start with El Mozote. - link
Waiting to Testify at R. Kelly’s Trial - Lizzette Martinez was allegedly abused by the R. & B. star when she was a minor. Now she may be asked to testify against him. - link
From Vox
In defense of the “gentrification building” -
A single-family home sandwiched between two multifamily developments in Denver in 2015. | RJ Sangosti/Getty Images
The new multifamily buildings in your neighborhood actually slow displacement.
“It’s hard to describe, but you know it when you see it. Gentrification building!”
The audio blares at the end of a TikTok video depicting a gray, white, and green modern-style building in Camden, New Jersey. The video, captioned “honestly so ugly,” has racked up a million views. The comments rail against gentrification: “It displaces the natives of the community,” the creator writes, while another commenter says that “the corner store run by a family will be overtaken by Starbucks in no time.”
The video is emblematic of a larger trend, one that looks at boxy, modern, often multifamily homes as the culprits of gentrification, displacement, and potentially violent cultural shifts in a neighborhood. The gentrification hashtag on TikTok is full of posts criticizing modern homes for mostly aesthetic reasons. In cities from New York to Philadelphia to Toronto to San Francisco, TikTok users record these properties and then overlay the videos — which have collectively earned millions of views — with audio such as the JoJo song “Leave (Get Out).” The message is the same warning: If these buildings go up in your neighborhood, displacement is just around the corner.
That discussionof gentrification is instead frequently diverted to what the buildings look like is a massive coup on behalf of existing property owners. Those current owners often want to maintain aesthetic control, sometimes as a means ofblocking new homes from being built (experts have found that historic preservation is often weaponized to prevent new, more affordable housing options).
It is fine to dislike the way a home looks; not all art is for everyone. But the convergence of aesthetic preferences and physical displacement under the same “gentrification” banner only serves to maintain the current system of housing development, one that has made housing prohibitively expensive for many Americans anddisplaced people under countless different architectural styles.
The problem with this conflation became clear when I looked into the building depicted in the Camden TikTok video above. Branch Village isn’t a “gentrification building.” It’s actually an affordable housing project funded in part by low-income housing tax credits. According to the Courier-Post, the project’s second phase included the construction of 75 townhomes, all of which “will be considered affordable, accessible to those making less than 80 percent of the area’s median income.” Per an affordable housing database, the development now has 245 units.
Despite the primary concern of gentrification usually being the displacement of low-income residents, the top two comments on the video, which collectively received 76,000 “likes,” are stylistic complaints: “why is it ALWAYS h&r block green, and “they really had to pick the worst colors didn’t they?”
This is common in gentrification discourse. People want to use a word that evokes visuals of marginalized communities being displaced, either through evictions, rising prices, or even violent displacement. But, after prodding, the actual concern is artistic. The rhetorical sleight of hand is not always intentional. For many, the concepts of “new, modern buildings” and “displacement” have simply become inextricable. But the confusion around how the word gentrification is being used has real policy consequences: If people believe that new buildings work against housing affordability, they will oppose the very policies necessary to solve the nation’s housing affordability crisis.
In defense of new buildings
Disdain for modern architecture isn’t new. In his book The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York, Suleiman Osman traces the recent history of neighborhood change in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. The iconic brownstones and neighborhood design people have fought so hard to preserve, under the philosophy that such older buildings represented something more authentic and removed from the modern and capitalist architecture of Manhattan, were once new and “inauthentic” themselves.
The Brooklyn brownstones (which now sell for millions), “were in original design and intention no more or less authentic than a Levittown Cape Cod,” Osman writes. “Brownstones were an architectural trompe l’oeil designed to give a faux sense of historic grandeur. … While they would later be viewed as authentic, contemporaries dismissed brownstones as modern and artificial.”
Many of the comments around the architectural style of new multifamily buildings castigate them for looking like ugly Lego-brick structures, mass produced and phony. These are the very same things people said about what we consider today to be timeless, individualistic, and sturdy infrastructure. In fact, brownstones were “products of the mechanical age,” Osman recounts in his book. “The stone exteriors were poorly built and subject to quick decay … critics in the nineteenth century decried the mechanical, dehumanizing monotony of brownstone rows. ‘When one has seen one house he has seen them all’ wrote one writer.”
Today, we have the“5 over 1” building — which you will recognize as the quintessential “gentrification building.” In 2018, Curbed detailed how the seemingly ubiquitous design is itself “a symbol of today’s housing problems: a lack of developable land; rising land, material, and labor costs; and an acute need to find more affordable places for people to live.”
The buildings themselves are an effort to fit within the small niches made available by local building and zoning codes. According to [Richard Mohler, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Washington], due to height limits and safety/fire requirements, most of these structures are what’s known as “5 over 1” or “one-plus-five”: wood-framed construction, which contain apartments and is known as Type 5 in the International Building Code, over a concrete base, which usually contains retail or commercial space, or parking structures, known as Type 1. Some codes also mandate a modulated facade, or varying exteriors across adjacent buildings to avoid repetition.
It’s also just “the cheapest way to build an apartment”:
In this case, that’s light-frame wood construction, which often uses flat windows that are easy to install; a process called rainscreen cladding to create the skin of the building; as well as Hardie panels, a facade covering made from fiber cement. …
“Since we’re facing a housing affordability crisis, it makes a certain amount of sense to build a building as affordably as we can,” says Mohler.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with America’s housing: There simply aren’t enough homes where people want or need to live. The only way to get more affordable housing is to build more, of all kinds.
It is easy to defend a 100 percent affordable housing development like Branch Village in Camden, New Jersey. But even new buildings that service higher-income peopleare an anti-displacement tool. When higher-income residents look for housing, they have two options: Either new housing will be built for them or they’ll bid up the price of existing housing, pricing out current residents.
It can feel counterintuitive: People begin to see new entrants and fearing the neighborhood will become too expensive for them to afford, they oppose new buildings, hoping that will stop the changes, but it doesn’t work.
Economist Evan Mast identified “52,000 residents of new multifamily buildings in large cities, their previous address, the current residents of those addresses, and so on for six rounds” in an effort to show “how new market-rate construction loosens the market for lower-quality housing.” He found that such construction projects free up homes in below-median-income neighborhoods, providing for more affordable housing and reducing competition for lower-income residents. The implication is also that many higher-income residents are pricing out lower-income residents because there is an undersupply of market-rate housing.
If you don’t build enough of something, the only people who will get anything are rich people. Reflexively opposing new buildings doesn’t protect neighborhoods from gentrification but actually increases a neighborhood’s exclusivity.
Moreover, that discourse can be co-opted by people who actually oppose more affordable housing. While many who conflate modern buildings with gentrification operate in good faith, the fusion of the progressive desire to stop displacement and new buildings allows regressive anti-housing activists to use the same message to fight important pro- housing legislation. One clear example of this is Livable California, a group that has repeatedlyused the language of anti-gentrification to fight sensible and modest housing-production bills in the state.
“It’s very hard to distinguish in any given situation what is a legitimate opposition to urban development on gentrification grounds,” Jake Anbinder, a PhD candidate in American history at Harvard, told Vox.
Artists, architects, and regular people alike should feel free to continue having aesthetic debates, but couching these concerns in the language of gentrification and displacement is misguided and harmful to the low-income tenants who need protection.
America is still stuck in the world 9/11 built -
Standing with retired New York City firefighter Bob Beckwith, President George W Bush rallies emergency responders during a speech at the site of the collapsed World Trade Center on September 14, 2001. | Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Spencer Ackerman on Trump, Obama, and the self-fulfilling logic of the war on terror.
Did 9/11 pave the way for Donald Trump?
That’s a big question, and until I read Spencer Ackerman’s new book, Reign of Terror: How 9/11 Destabilized America and Produced Trump, I hadn’t really thought about it. Ackerman is a longtime national security journalist who’s covered the “war on terror” since its inception roughly two decades ago.
Ackerman’s answer to the above question is yes, but his thesis is even more pointed: The war on terror — and the panoply of excesses it unleashed — eroded the institutional armor of American democracy and left the country defenseless against its own pathologies. And those pathologies, which Ackerman lays out with meticulous attention, prepared the ground for a figure like Trump.
Reading Ackerman’s book was a bit of a whirlwind. I was 19 years old when the Twin Towers fell. I’ll never forget watching the planes hit the wall. I’ll never forget how confused and angry I was. And I’ll never forget the thoughts running through my mind as I realized I was heading to boot camp in just four months.
Still, 9/11 seems so distant and trying to follow the thread over the past 20 years is daunting. But there is a thread and if you track it closely enough you can see how profoundly that event changed our politics and culture.
So I reached out to Ackerman for a forthcoming episode ofVox Conversations to talk about how the war on terror upended American politics and set us on a glide path to nativism and lawlessness. We also discuss the failures of Democrats like Barack Obama to course-correct, and why the end of the conflict of Afghanistan does not mean the end of the war on terror as we know it.
A transcript, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Sean Illing
I want to start by flashing back to 9/11, which seems like a lifetime ago. You said, “I have to admit that after 9/11, I swallowed that red pill myself. Even after I thought I spat it out over the carnage of Iraq, it took me years to recognize its lingering effects.”
That resonates with me, because I departed for boot camp four months almost to the day after 9/11. And I remember watching those towers fall from my apartment, and I remember the rage and the confusion I felt. I remember how eager I was to go “over there” and do … something.
I’ve come to see things very differently since, for all kinds of reasons we’ll get into here, but I did want to start by just asking how that moment changed you, or at least temporarily scrambled your worldview.
Spencer Ackerman
I’m a native New Yorker. I live in the same Brooklyn neighborhood where I was born and raised. I was not in New York when the towers got struck. I was in New Jersey, at Rutgers University, where through a weird series of events, I went to college. And I remember that that morning I was supposed to cover some minor campaign stop by Jim McGreevey, who was running for governor that summer, that was in New Brunswick. And I was living in a group house and I went downstairs and my roommates were just looking at a TV and sobbing. And the panic that went through me, the feeling of not being able to get back home was really overwhelming, to be real about it.
I certainly was not thinking in terms of historical context, or in terms of any material grievance. I had yet to really understand it, but everyone in a position of authority was articulating a response that was just simple rage, and turning trauma into something that could be exploited for violence. And I was not questioning that at all.
I also felt something that could have been the seeds of a much better response to 9/11 was something that didn’t come from the political leadership, but just came from Americans who got in their cars from wherever around the country and drove to Manhattan to try and help. People lining up to give blood. There was a lot of solidarity that people wanted to express to make sense of the trauma that they felt.
And instead, the leadership of this country harnessed it, harnessed the very real pain of New Yorkers who just watched nearly 3,000 of their neighbors die a horrible death, and used it to turn it into something that would deny our other neighbors of their freedom, exclude them from the so-called national unity, and insisted upon exploiting all of this pain to turn it into something useful from the perspective of American hegemonic interests globally.
I wrote it in the book, to both make it clear that I am no exception here and that I don’t write this out of some kind of self-righteous anger. I write it out of shame, and identification that this kind of barbarism resonated with me as well. And it took me, I think way too long to recognize for years and years and years after, that every last service member in Iraq needed to be withdrawn and withdrawn quickly.
But I still didn’t always recognize or understand the ways in which that feeling, and the way in which the political, journalistic, intellectual explanations on offer had inclined me in subtle ways to interpret the world the way they did. Sometimes I didn’t recognize that was there, working as an assumption, but it was definitely there. It was there in all of the pieces of journalism that I didn’t produce, that looked not at the policies, but at the human beings whose lives were destroyed by those policies.
Sean Illing
It’s much easier to reflect soberly from our perch today on all the misadventures and the tragedies of the last 20 years. But that moment was intense and traumatic and chaotic. And I think a lot of us were overcome by some of those unhelpful emotions. And I just at least wanted to acknowledge that before we dig into what happened since.
It’s obviously very hard to summarize our collective response to that national trauma, which involved a wave of legislation and the construction of various agencies and bureaucracies. But was there a unifying thread to all these things that captured the country’s reaction to that event?
Spencer Ackerman
Yes. It’s called American exceptionalism. It was, and is, a way of ordering the world that says America constructs what it calls the rules-based international order, which is to say an international architecture through which first it operates in a leading role. And second of all, the outcomes of it, while not always and not guaranteed, are throttled in such a way that it benefits the extent of American political and economic order.
It also says that the United States does not have to feel itself bound by the architecture it creates. And perhaps most fundamentally, it says that America acts, America is not acted upon. That was the violation that policymakers felt, as they interpreted the trauma of 9/11.
This also helps you understand that American exceptionalism is basically the geopolitical version of white innocence. America has never been immune from history. It tries to escape from history, and say that it’s not culpable for history, not culpable for things that it does to millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people.
Sean Illing
We’re fast-forwarding a little bit to the present, but I think we should. How did that reaction, how did that posture, this idea that we’re locked in a civilizational drama … how does that lead to Trump?
Spencer Ackerman
So in that response, in the pathologizing of Muslims, of Islam, of the Arab world in particular, to spread culpability and deflect any discussion of how America’s extant, hegemonic, violent, and exploitative policies in the Muslim world contribute to a demand for the kind of psychotic political violence that Bin Laden is offering. As that takes hold, so do very old, historically rooted nativist currents in American history, expressed openly by pundits who are openly calling for the American military to invade their lands, convert them to Christianity.
Really, the name is a social compromise, to not say “the war on radical Islamic terror.” But it’s not a war on terror, because we see very quickly that not everyone’s terror is the subject of the war on terror. White people’s terrorism, the oldest, most violent, most resilient terrorism in American history, is expressly not part of this, and becomes — as one FBI veteran told me much, much later — it becomes the lowest priority for FBI counter-terrorism.
Evangelical leaders, people with tremendous followings, tremendous political influence as well as spiritual influence, settle on this very explicitly in 2002 as their explanation, and preach from the Southern Baptist Convention and other fora that this was Islam’s “mask off” moment, that now it’s not just coming for Israel, it’s coming for America, which is also a deep misunderstanding, and a deliberate one, of the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict.”
This starts expanding dramatically particularly when the first Black president gets elected. Among the things that this constituency is stoked to believe is that he is an enemy of the United States, by virtue not just of being Black, but through the meme of birtherism. The war on terror is right there, because it’s calling Obama a secret foreign Muslim.
Obviously, we should just pause to say that this is a lie. But nevertheless, this found purchase, because it was so aggressively cultivated by people like Donald Trump, who as every New Yorker, particularly of my age knows, has played this casually violent nativism for his entire public career, and makes sure as well that he’s present at these moments of eruption.
Sean Illing
That speaks to another crucial theme in the book, which is that Trump understood something about the war on terror that many liberals and Democrats did not. You write that “he recognized that the 9/11 era is grotesque subtext to the perception of non-whites as marauders, even as conquerors from hostile foreign civilizations was its engine.” And by understanding that, he was able to appear hostile to the war on terror, by virtue of the contempt that he expressed for it on the campaign trail.
But what he objected to wasn’t the war itself, it was our unwillingness to be even more brutal. Beyond his grotesque rhetoric, how did Trump actually escalate the brutality of the war on terror, or did he?
Spencer Ackerman
He did, in a variety of specific and concrete ways. To itemize just a few: In 2018, I discovered that the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency were a high-water mark of US drone strikes around the world. In 2010, they a very narrow area of Pakistan, basically the size of the New York greater tri-state area, one every three days. Just imagine that. Imagine if there was an airstrike in the greater New York area for an entire year, an average of once every three days. We don’t journalistically usually talk about it in those terms, but it’s important, I think, that we do, because it reveals the reality of what this campaign was.
Trump escalated that. Even before 2018 was finished, Trump had launched more drone strikes than Obama at the height of the drone war. Before suing for peace with the Taliban, he escalated the war in Afghanistan. He acquiesces to H.R. McMaster and Jim Mattis, who were in the Trump administration to try at the very least make sure that he keeps the war on terror going, and doesn’t stop it in any real way.
He repeatedly lies and says that he’s pulling US troops out of Syria, when in fact he doesn’t. What he does is pull them away from the Kurdish forces that the US and Syria relied upon, at extreme cost, to destroy the ISIS caliphate in Syria and let their Turkish enemies run riot against them. Trump didn’t even withdraw those forces from Syria. He just simply pulled them back away from their battlefield allies.
No one in the United States, from a policymaker perspective, a congressional perspective, a media perspective, really pays any attention at all to the US and US-backed war in Somalia. Many times we’ve called Iraq or Afghanistan, varyingly, “the forgotten war.” But Somalia is a war that’s old enough to have a bat mitzvah. Trump escalates that war like no one else has. In the way that Obama is synonymous with drone strikes in, particularly, Pakistan and Yemen, Trump ought to be synonymous with drone strikes in Somalia. His presidency wages the war in Somalia like never before, and then withdraws forces to great fanfare.
For all of my criticisms of Barack Obama’s presidency as it drew the United States into the Syrian civil war, it’s not Obama who ultimately takes cruise missile strikes against Bashar al-Assad’s forces, it’s Donald Trump. And of course, the constant encouragement and nudging of white supremacist terrorism here in the United States.
And then finally, on the streets of various American cities last summer, Trump uses the mechanisms of the war on terror against anti-fascist protesters, putting surveillance over 15 cities via aerial drone against protestors who are calling for black liberation, having the Department of Homeland Security stuff protesters in Portland into unmarked vans for detention and so on. This is Trump waging the war on terror. I call it in the book, “allowing the war on terror to be its most authentic self.”
Sean Illing
Maybe we just answered this, but why couldn’t Democrats, why couldn’t Obama escape the gravity of the war on terror? Why did they get sucked into the same self-fulfilling vortex?
Spencer Ackerman
They buy into American exceptionalism. I argue in the book that this is a downstream consequence of the Democratic Party’s divorce from its former base in the labor movement. As the Democratic Party becomes less of a working-class party, becomes less receptive to democratic interests and far more receptive to upper middle class and wealthy interests. It goes searching for a post-Cold War justification for it that it finds largely in conceptions of humanitarianism, that it basically puts in fatigues and calls the responsibility to protect.
And that ideology doesn’t cohere. But in the context of the war on terror, it kind of doesn’t need to. It just needs to be interpreted within the war on terror. And that’s where a lot of liberal journalists and intellectuals go. The policymakers themselves are in far more of a reactive position, facing just a deep, deep fear that they’ll never enjoy power again if they oppose any aspect of the war on terror. And this is ultimately the glide path for the Democratic Party’s elites to march into Iraq.
But from the intellectual perspective amongst liberal elites, the ideas that carried the day were that the war on terror could be a valorous struggle, that saved people from the nightmares of these despotic rules by the Taliban, or Saddam Hussein, through the righteous application of American violence on their behalf. Which is what imperialism always justifies itself as accomplishing, delivering security and justice when in fact it delivers only extraction, death, and injustice.
Sean Illing
Let me hold on that for a second, because what you’re saying now really highlights this tragic contradiction that Democrats marched right into. They couldn’t let go of the war on terror for all these political reasons, or they could have, but they —
Spencer Ackerman
They chose not to. This is always a choice.
Sean Illing
So they tried to manage and bureaucratize it, but the longer it persisted, the more it failed, and the more it fostered the undercurrents that propped it up in the first place. And here we are.
Spencer Ackerman
And what I think doesn’t always get as appreciated, but is critical context for understanding someone like Trump and how he was so able, without incurring any consequence within the Republican Party that had been so devoted to the war on terror for saying “These wars have been stupid,” because throughout the Obama administration, no one wants to say yet that they are lost wars, but it’s obvious that they haven’t delivered what they promised. And they’ve only delivered agony and suffering and increased terrorism, increased the ambition and scope and opportunities of what becomes the Islamic state, which would never have existed had the US not invaded Iraq.
But through the Obama administration’s maintenance of the war on terror, it becomes, not particularly conspicuous to the political class, but very conspicuous to Trump’s coalition, that these disastrous wars now look a whole lot like wars waged by the Democratic Party.
Sean Illing
The way you put it in the book is to say that Obama tried to put the forever war on a sustained footing. What does that actually mean in practice?
Spencer Ackerman
What it meant was compiling internal committees of lawyers, intelligence officials, senior military officers, and high-ranking political appointees who would come together in a bureaucratic process that meted out the war on terror, through most often drone strikes and counter-terrorism raids. This was seen as a way of making the war on terror respect the law.
But the thing is that the law wasn’t respected. What happened was lawyers in the Obama administration and in the intelligence community and in the military found justifications for what Obama already wanted to do, to the point where two attorneys, David Barron and Marty Lederman in the Justice Department (Barron was rewarded for this with a federal judgeship), told Barack Obama that despite the Constitution’s prohibitions on depriving someone of life without due process of law, that it could simply execute an American citizen named Anwar al-Awlaki, who was an important and even operational figure in Al-Qaeda in Yemen. Someone who the war on terror radicalized into becoming a radicalizer of other people, including the Detroit underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
Probably not the last time that we will see [that], as long as the war on terror persists.
We might perhaps better appreciate it when remembering that in the summer of 2020, the Trump administration maneuvered a lot of the mechanisms of the war on terror against its domestic opponents. There’s going to be another right-wing administration. It will probably look more like Trump’s than not. It may be more competent and it may be bolder, and it will have a precedent blessed by Obama’s Justice Department that says if it’s too hard to kill people, you declare to be dangerous terrorists, just … sorry.
That, stripped of euphemism, stripped of self-conception, was Obama’s war on terror.
I asked Ben Rhodes, who was one of his, probably his most left-wing policy aide, why they didn’t dismantle the war on terror, particularly after they had the opportunity once they killed Bin Laden. And his answer was, “Imagine if he does what you wanted him to do and there’s another terrorist attack and the world ends.”
And what he really means is not the world ending, but that’s the end of Obama’s presidency, if he follows what my advice would have been. But that is not something that had to happen, first of all, if Obama made a thoroughgoing case for why the war on terror is a generator or of its own security threats to Americans, as he kind of edges toward on a couple occasions in his presidency.
Also that the maintenance of the war on terror had demonstrably made Americans less safe, not alleviated their security concerns. And so while, of course, Obama would have been demagogued for having done that, the only way you can stand up to the demagoguery is by actually standing up to it, and making an affirmative case for why the war on terror is a failure of profound consequence.
Sean Illing
It does speak to the political logic that makes the forever war forever. But there is a bridge here between Obama and Biden. And obviously, we’re talking a week after the official end of the Afghanistan war. What do you make of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan? And what do you make of the reaction to it?
Spencer Ackerman
So from a top-line perspective, withdrawing from Afghanistan is absolutely the right thing to do. Every year that we were in Afghanistan, Afghanistan grew more chaotic. The Taliban grew stronger. So there’s never a better time to withdraw from Afghanistan than yesterday. And the second-best time is always going to be today. The worst time is always going to be tomorrow.
These stories, if you were reading Afghanistan coverage or performing Afghanistan coverage, since 2020 and before, were constantly there. The anxieties of a return to Taliban rule were not obscure things. They’re foreseen and foreseeable things. They were foreseen things. And the Biden administration, particularly once it became clear that there wasn’t going to be a peace process, that the Taliban was just winning, including in the areas of Northern Afghanistan that they had never held when they were first in power, the situation becomes quite dire.
I think I’ve described it as a moral floor that operated as a moral ceiling. The United States created millions of refugees in Afghanistan. And if you didn’t serve the war effort, if you merely sought to endure and survive it, you weren’t going to be on those planes. You were not going to be the people whose lives America was interested in saving.
For all of the reaction that has occurred, with journalists, in particular, rending their garments about the very real human disaster that America is responsible for, what I see is people expressing their anger that 20 years of war seemingly ended suddenly and yielded nothing. When in fact, these were the consequences of 20 years of war.
Sean Illing
You closed the book by saying that it’s difficult to see America as anything more than its war on terror. And I don’t know if I’d put it that way, but I would say that Americans have so internalized the war on terror — its ethics, its excesses, its failures — that we can’t even see beyond it. It’s just in the ether now. And the whole thing feels like a metaphor for the slow-motion death of the American empire.
Spencer Ackerman
I think an appropriate point to end on is to underscore what the war on terror is, and why it has to be abolished, why it can’t be reformed, and what it ultimately means.
We’re recording this on a day when Brown University’s Costs of War Project has put out its latest estimate of the consequences of the war on terror. This is a very conservative tally. It finds well over 900,000 people killed by the war on terror, and $8 trillion in money that I think is best described as looted.
The Afghanistan war didn’t rebuild Afghanistan. The Afghanistan war rebuilt Northern Virginia. The Afghanistan war, like the war on terror beyond it, enriched a very small and exceedingly politically powerful private interest, which is the defense industry. The defense industry functions as what I think you could say is the American variant of state capitalism.
This is an enterprise that operates as a tremendous force, not just for inertia in the American empire, but its growth. Obviously, we paid for the war on credit. … What would you rather have spent that on?
Biden’s SEC is ready to regulate cryptocurrency -
More people are investing in crypto like bitcoin — and the government is stepping up to regulate it. | Michael Short/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Coinbase has gotten the government’s attention.
Cryptocurrency has an SEC problem — and it just got bigger.
The Biden administration is taking a more hands-on approach to the highly volatile, little understood, and barely regulated cryptocurrency industry. Cryptocurrencies are decentralized digital currencies secured by blockchain technology. Bitcoin, ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies have become almost as accessible as government-issued currency in recent years, but the government offers few consumer protections for them.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) — led by Gary Gensler, who taught a class on cryptocurrency at MIT — is trying to make the case that it can and will regulate whatever cryptocurrency investment schemes it decides fall under its purview. The relative newness and rapid expansion of the cryptocurrency industry have put it in a regulatory gray area. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) classifies crypto as property. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) considers crypto to be a commodity. And the SEC has said that digital assets “may be securities, depending on the facts and circumstances.” A security is a financial asset that can be traded, like stocks and bonds, and which is governed by several laws designed to prevent fraud and protect investors.
The SEC appears to have decided that an upcoming offering from Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, meets its definition of a security. And it’s showing that it will step in and regulate it accordingly — and, by extension, regulate the rest of the crypto finance industry more assertively.
Cryptocurrency exchanges allow people to buy and sell crypto. Coinbase is one of the biggest in the world and recently went public. It was planning to launch a program called Lend, which would allow investors to let others borrow from them a form of crypto called USDC, a “stablecoin” whose value is tied to the value of the US dollar (one USDC is always supposed to equal and be traded for the value of one US dollar). In exchange, lenders would receive 4 percent interest on the loan — a far higher rate than traditional banks currently offer on their savings accounts. This could have made the Coinbase Lend offering very attractive to consumers who wouldn’t have otherwise risked investing in crypto.
That’s where the SEC stepped in, according to Coinbase. The company announced on Wednesday (or late Tuesday, if you count a Twitter thread from CEO Brian Armstrong) that the SEC threatened to sue the company if it launched Lend, but that the agency wouldn’t tell Coinbase why it considered Lend to be a security, except that it was doing so “through the prism of decades-old Supreme Court cases.” These cases, informally known as Howey and Reves, are the prism through which every potential security is considered, including crypto services. Coinbase said it wanted formal guidance from the SEC on how it was using those cases to determine if Lend was a security, but the SEC wouldn’t provide it.
The SEC has not officially commented yet, though some people think this tweet qualifies as a response.
The people behind Coinbase might be (or at least claim to be) clueless, but the SEC almost certainly knows what it’s doing here: asserting its regulatory control over the world of cryptocurrency banking and finance. And it’s doing so with a pugnaciousness not typical of the agency, according to anonymous former SEC officials who spoke to Bloomberg.
“The announcement that the SEC is investigating Coinbase’s Lend program is consistent with regulators’ ongoing aggression regarding crypto,” George Monaghan, an analyst with market intelligence firm GlobalData, told Recode.
As the New York Times recently explained, cryptocurrency is moving into the banking sector, offering services that are usually reserved for traditional banks, whose services are backed by government-issued currency (the dollar, for example) and have operated under consumer protection laws and regulations that go back decades. For example, some crypto companies now offer interest-bearing crypto accounts, debit cards, and credit cards with cryptocurrency rewards
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has called these “shadow banks,” noting they aren’t federally insured and could be more susceptible to hacks and fraud than traditional banks. She’s written to Gensler about her concerns, and, in his August 5 response, the SEC chair agreed that “investors using these platforms are not adequately protected.” He also said there were certain activities that the SEC can regulate, and that he believed lawmakers should prioritize legislation that addressed crypto trading and lending.
The SEC has previously shown an interest in cracking down on crypto. It launched a crypto regulation initiative in 2018, which became a standalone office within the agency last December. And it recently charged another crypto lending platform, BitConnect, with $2 billion in fraud for operating what the Department of Justice called a “textbook Ponzi scheme.” Another crypto company, BlockFi, which offers loans and high-interest deposit accounts backed by crypto and a credit card with a crypto rewards program, has been the subject of investigations from several state-level security regulators.
But Coinbase is bigger and more high-profile than those companies. GlobalData’s Monaghan didn’t expect the fallout to be significant for Coinbase itself, as the Lend program wasn’t yet active. But the SEC’s interest in Coinbase is a sign to every crypto finance company that there are still rules they have to follow, and they should expect consequences if they don’t.
Those rules might be bulked up in the near future as the Biden administration and lawmakers work to address the regulatory gaps cryptocurrency falls into. Biden’s proposed 2022 budget included crypto reporting requirements, the IRS is cracking down, and crypto regulations even became a temporary sticking point in the passage of the infrastructure bill. Adding to this — or perhaps exacerbating it — is concern over how cryptocurrency can be used to facilitate criminal activities; ransomware attacks often demand payment in bitcoin due to the difficulty in tracing those payments.
Crypto regulations are coming. The question now is whether the slow process of creating rules and passing laws will be able to keep up with the rapidly evolving world of cryptocurrency.
From The Hindu: Sports
Mohammad Nabi named captain of Afghan team for T20 WC after Rashid steps down - The Afghanistan Cricket Board is yet to officially announce Nabi’s appointment as captain but the all-rounder tweeted that he has been chosen to lead the team
Looks impossible for Afghanistan to play in T20 World Cup, says Tim Paine - The Australia Test captain believes that other countries might refuse to play against Afghanistan following Taliban’s ban on women’s cricket.
Rampaul back in West Indies T20 squad; Brathwaite not named - The 36-year-old Rampaul is back in a West Indies T20 squad for the first time in six years
U.S. Open | Teens Raducanu, Fernandez advance to women’s final - Raducanu is the youngest Slam finalist since Maria Sharapova won Wimbledon at age 17 in 2004
Lionel Messi surpasses Pele as Argentina cruises to victory in World Cup qualifiers - With a hat-trick against Bolivia, Lionel Messi surpassed Pele to become the highest goal scorer in South American football history.
From The Hindu: National News
I-T Department conducts searches on three Punjab-based commission agent groups - The agency found books of accounts, in Laddo script, which showed unaccounted transactions running into crores.
Rajnath holds talks with Australian defence minister - New DelhiDefence Minister Rajnath Singh on Friday held wide-ranging talks with his Australian counterpart Peter Dutton to boost overall bilateral stra
Uttar Pradesh government reclaims land of Azam Khan’s Jauhar University in Rampur - A team of the Local Revenue Department employees went to the university to complete the formalities of reclaiming 170 acres of land, officials said.
Kerala initiates steps to reopen higher education institutions - Higher Education Minister R. Bindu said special vaccination drives will be held at campuses to fast-track inoculation among college students prior to the resumption of physical classes
Co-WIN launches new API to show vaccination status - The Health Ministry has launched a new Application Programming Interface (API), through its web portal Co-WIN, called ‘Know Your Customer’s/Client’s V
From BBC: Europe
North Macedonia: Deadly fire guts Covid hospital - Fourteen people are killed at a makeshift hospital treating Covid-19 patients in Tetovo.
Austria man kept dead mother in cellar for pension, police say - The suspect is said to have “mummified” the corpse in order to continue receiving her pension.
Emma Raducanu reaches US Open final in New York - British teenager Emma Raducanu reaches the US Open final as her meteoric rise continues with a stunning straight-set win over Greece’s Maria Sakkari.
Jerome Boateng trial: German football star found guilty of assaulting ex - Jerome Boateng is fined 1.8m euros after being convicted of injuring an ex-girlfriend on holiday in 2018.
Channel crossings: France and UK clash over Border Force tactic plans - France says turning boats away would break maritime law, but No 10 says all its actions are legal.
From Ars Technica
Amazon fights high warehouse turnover with offer of free college tuition - Benefit comes as Amazon warehouses face increasing turnover and scrutiny. - link
Rocket Report: Next Falcon Heavy launch date set, Soyuz 5 engines clear tests - “I think that that’s exactly the wrong message to send.” - link
Gran Turismo 7, Spider-Man 2, KOTOR remake lead PlayStation 5 showcase - Big reveals: Insomniac’s Wolverine, Uncharted remasters, God of War Ragnarok gameplay. - link
Sex can relieve nasal congestion, and other work honored by 2021 Ig Nobels. - The awards ceremony took place virtually for a second year due to the ongoing pandemic - link
Infosec researchers say Apple’s bug-bounty program needs work - Apple allegedly pays less for bugs than its competitors do—and pays more slowly. - link
An old man lived alone in Idaho. He wanted to spade his potato garden, but it was very hard work. His only son, Bubba, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament. -
Dear Bubba,
I am feeling pretty bad because it looks like I won’t be able to plant my potato garden this year. I’m just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. If you were here, all my troubles would be over. I know you would dig the lot for me.
Love Dad. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A few days later he received a letter from his son.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dear Dad,
For heaven’s sake, dad, don’t dig up that garden, that’s where I buried the BODIES!
Love Bubba,
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
At 4 the next morning, F. B. I. agents and local police showed up and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized to the old man and left. That same day the old man received another letter from his son.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dear Dad,
Go ahead and plant the potatoes now. That’s the best I could do under the circumstances.
/cdn.vox-
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22835112/Cover.Reign_of_Terror.jpg)
