by Christian Britschgi, RodeOctober 15, 2024
Extract:
In September, the city council of Kalispell, Montana, took the unusual and likely unprecedented step of revoking a permit it had given to a local shelter that had allowed it to provide warm beds to the rural community’s homeless during the winter months.
City council members blame the privately funded Flathead Warming Center for attracting homeless people from out of town to the community, which they say has caused an increase in crime and disorder in the surrounding neighborhood.
The Flathead Warming Center says these allegations are unfounded and that the permit revocation was done through an ad hoc, illegal process.
DRH comment: Without the government, who would ensure that private shelters no longer exist?
by Clark Nelly, Cato at FreedomOctober 15, 2024.
In reality, the American criminal justice system often is rotten to the core. Unlike the scenario in Rebel BackPolice and other system actors do not have to stare down the barrel of a budget crisis to deploy civil forfeiture in a manner that is barely distinguishable from outright theft. Instead, the combination of perverse incentives, lax proceduresAnd almost zero responsibility practically creates abuse. Those who object will find that the so-called “blue wall of silence‘is very real and far more effective at protecting perpetrators of serial police misconduct than the ragtag conspiracy of country bumpkins portrayed in Rebel Back.
And in our system, there is no need to sandbag defendants by outright denying access to counsel, when you can achieve the same functional result by being persistent underfunding and overburdening public defenders to the point where it becomes impossible for them to provide a truly diligent defense to all of their clients, or even most of their clients.
by Marc Joffe, Cato at FreedomOctober 17, 2024.
Rivian has struggled to make cars and turn a profit, but has proven adept at securing subsidies and tax breaks from governments across the country. If the company cannot turn around its financial fortunes, it could go under before taking advantage of all the incentives on offer.
According to Grant tracker from Good Jobs FirstSince 2016, Rivian has received stimulus packages from four states totaling more than $2.3 billion. company started small and received $1.72 million from the Michigan Business Development Program to establish its headquarters in Livonia, Michigan and hire up to 170 employees. It later moved to the nearby city of Plymouth, Michigan, before moving its headquarters out of state to Irvine, California.
DRH Comment: These two paragraphs, as well as the entire article, are interesting in themselves. The other interesting thing is that there is actually a ‘subsidy tracker’. There should be too.
by Rupa Subramanya, The free pressOctober 17, 2024.
Extract:
Not being able to process payments would make running his crowdfunding platform impossible. So Blauvelt, now 40, left a family vacation in Florida to fly to Stripe’s headquarters in San Francisco to set things right.
A dozen people, mostly from Stripe’s compliance department, were waiting in a conference room. Blauvelt explained that LaunchGood, which crowdsources donations for Islamic charities around the world, was all about things like providing food aid in Syria, clean drinking water in Gaza, Flood relief in Bangladeshand so forth.
Born in Malaysia to a Protestant family, Blauvelt converted to Islam as a teenager. He knew the unspoken concern of those present. As he told me, he explained to Stripe, “We are not terrorists. We are trying to bring humanity together.”
Stripe’s Arboleda told Blauvelt it was out of their hands: Stripe’s banking partner, Wells Fargo, had called to cut ties. She said it was all she knew, and in fact it was all she was allowed to know. Banking laws prevented banks from disclosing the reasons for cutting ties with customers.
Reminder: the banking sector is one of the sectors that does thinks Joe Stiglitz was deregulated.