US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8365

A California court has ordered a Silicon Valley billionaire to restore access to a beloved beach that he closed off for his private use, a major victory for public lands advocates who have been fighting the venture capitalist for years.

An appeals court ruled Thursday that Vinod Khosla, who runs the venture capital firm Khosla Ventures and co-founded the tech company Sun Microsystems, must unlock the gates to Martins Beach in northern California by his property.

The decision is a major blow to Khosla and other wealthy landowners who have increasingly tried to buy up the internationally celebrated beaches along the California coast and turn public lands into private property.

The beach was a popular destination for fishing, surfing and other recreational activities for nearly a century, and the previous owners provided a general store and public restroom. But Khosla eventually bought the property and in 2010 closed public access, putting up signs warning against trespassing.

Khosla, who has a net worth of $1.55bn and does not live on the property, has faced multiple lawsuits and legislative efforts to get him to open up the gate to the beach near Half Moon Bay, about 30 miles south of San Francisco. The law in California states that all beaches should be open to the public up to the “mean high tide line”.

The decision this week, affirming a lower court ruling, stems from a lawsuit filed by the Surfrider Foundation, a not-for-profit group that says the case could have broader implications for beach access across the US.

“Vinod Khosla, with his billions of dollars, bought this piece of property and said, ‘No, no, the public isn’t going to use this anymore. End of story,’” the Surfrider attorney Joe Cotchett said by phone on Thursday. “He got away with it for many years … This is probably one of the most important public right-of-access cases in the country.”

Khosla’s refusal to restore access has made him something of a symbol of the immense wealth in the tech industry and rising income inequality in the region.

Last year, his attorneys claimed that he would open the gate to the beach only if the government paid him $30m, an amount that state officials said was unreasonably high. In October, Khosla also sued two state agencies, accusing the government of using “coercion and harassment” to infringe on his private property rights.

The California coastal commission, established by voters in 1972 to protect public use of the coast, has reported that beachgoers have increasingly complained about private security guards telling them they are trespassing on private property and forcing them to leave the public beaches.

“The issue here is, can wealthy private individuals buy up our beautiful beaches for their own use?” said Cotchett, adding that he expects Khosla to appeal the decision and attempt to bring the case to the US Supreme Court.

Khosla’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Khosla recently made headlines when he downplayed the problem of sexual harassment in the venture capital industry, which has recently been exposed as a major concern among female founders. “I did not know that there was any discrimination,” Khosla said at a recent event, adding that it was “rarer than in most other businesses”.

On August 11 2017 11:13 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
A ray of good news in this end shit times this country and possibly the world is living in right now.



Source

On August 11 2017 11:36 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote:



this has been going on for years.

pretty sure law previously ruled he needed to provide a path to the beach for the public.

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is changing his attorneys as a federal investigation heats up into his financial transactions, according to people familiar with the matter.

Manafort's case will now be handled by Miller and Chevalier, a boutique firm in Washington that specializes in complicated financial crimes among other issues, these people said.

A spokesman confirmed the change. “Mr. Manafort is in the process of retaining his former counsel, Miller & Chevalier, to represent him in the office of special counsel investigation. As of today, WilmerHale no longer represents Mr. Manafort," Jason Maloni said in a statement.

Kevin Downing, a former senior Department of Justice official known for his work representing clients and firms facing complex financial investigations, will be working on the case, one of these people familiar with the matter said. Downing will have help from other lawyers also working on the case.

Manafort is cutting ties with WilmerHale, the firm that has represented him in the matter so far. His former lawyer there, Reg Brown, led the congressional investigations practice.

The move could signify a realization that the case has heated up, one of these people said, and that Manafort needs specialized criminal counsel. The switch comes after the FBI raided his home last month and a number of financial institutions were subpoenaed, these people said. The Washington Post first reported the home search, and Bloomberg first reported the bank subpoenas.

While Manafort has emerged as a key figure in the various probes into whether Trump's campaign colluded with Russian officials to influence the 2016 election, special counsel Robert Mueller has also been examining Manafort's personal finances and consulting work.

On August 11 2017 11:45 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote:
pretty sure he's lost every single legal battle on this. He should really just give up

The 6 a.m. raid on Manafort’s Virginia home last month seemingly caught his legal team by surprise. It came the day after he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, and after he had provided his notes to the committee.

Trump was asked about the raid on Thursday. “I was surprised to see it,” he said. “I’ve always found Paul Manafort to be a very decent man.”

Russian Meeting

In fact, Manafort had alerted authorities to a controversial meeting on June 9, 2016, involving Trump’s son Donald Jr., other campaign representatives and a Russian lawyer promising damaging information on Hillary Clinton, according to people familiar with the matter. The president and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, were dragged into the matter in July as details repeatedly emerged that contradicted the initial accounts of that meeting.

Manafort disclosed the meeting to lawmakers about three months ago in response to a congressional request for any information related to Russia during his time on the campaign. He also provided more than 300 relevant documents to Congress, though he no longer had access to emails from the campaign.

On August 11 2017 11:53 Nevuk wrote:

Btw, Bloomberg is reporting that Manafort was the source for the authorities investigating the Don Jr meeting :


www.bloomberg.com

On August 11 2017 11:54 OuchyDathurts wrote:


I also saw an article speculating that Manafort's son in law (who is being divorced by his daughter) might have thrown Manafort under the bus. Delicious.

Russian Meeting

In fact, Manafort had alerted authorities to a controversial meeting on June 9, 2016, involving Trump’s son Donald Jr., other campaign representatives and a Russian lawyer promising damaging information on Hillary Clinton, according to people familiar with the matter. The president and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, were dragged into the matter in July as details repeatedly emerged that contradicted the initial accounts of that meeting.

“Mr. Manafort is in the process of retaining his former counsel, Miller & Chevalier, to represent him in the office of special counsel investigation,” Manafort’s spokesman Jason Maloni said in a statement to Politico. “As of today, WilmerHale no longer represents Mr. Manafort.”

According to Politico, Miller & Chevalier is known for its work specializing in complicated financial crimes.

On August 11 2017 11:48 Plansix wrote:

That is now what rich people with money to burn do. They make sure the public has to fork over every penny to be able to use public spaces. You and I don't get to do that. The super rich do.

On August 11 2017 12:00 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote:

In stead of more legal battles they should just make him do a surf off with Kelly slater.

President Donald Trump’s $1 trillion plan to rebuild America’s infrastructure may be unprecedented in its size and ambition, but it promotes a controversial model championed by Vice President Mike Pence in his home state of Indiana. The Hoosier flavor is hardly surprising: After his gubernatorial experience with road privatization, Pence has been a public face of the White House initiative, and executives from financial firms that helped privatize Indiana’s roads are now the Trump administration officials sculpting the details of the national plan.

As that federal proposal now moves forward, Indiana’s experience with infrastructure privatization has become a political Rorschach test. Pence and his allies are extolling Indiana’s record selling control of major roads to private firms as an ideal model, arguing that such public-private partnerships prompted corporations to invest money in Indiana infrastructure that taxpayers would otherwise have had to sponsor.

“Indiana has been a national leader in this area where you use private capital to build infrastructure,” Pence told one conservative radio host just after the 2016 election, signaling his eagerness to get started.

But opponents of privatization have depicted Indiana as a heartland cautionary tale of get-rich-quick scheming and secrecy that led the state to sell off valuable public assets, which were then wildly mismanaged. To them, the Indiana story reveals the ideological zealotry of a politician who is now a driving force behind an infrastructure program that could radically reshape local economies and commerce in communities across the country, and for generations to come.

Pence believes in “this religion — the magic and mystery of markets is solving all the problems,” said Shaw Friedman, who represented Northwest Indiana counties’ unsuccessful efforts to press the Pence administration to let public entities reclaim the Indiana Toll Road when its private operator went bankrupt. “They allowed a philosophical aversion to the public sector bid."

Public-private partnerships (P3s) involve private companies investing in, constructing and/or maintaining public assets such as roads, bridges and airports — in exchange for those companies pocketing tolls, fees or other public revenues generated by the assets. The model, sometimes called “asset recycling,” has been more prevalent in Australia, Asia and Europe. In the U.S., use of such partnerships has been “limited,” according to a 2014 Congressional Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure report. But since the turn of the 21st century, more cities and states have begun to embrace such deals. The number of P3s underway in the decade after 2000 more than tripled in comparison to the previous 10-year period, according to a newsletter from Public Works Financing, which compiles a database on P3 projects.

Few states have been as aggressive as Indiana in embracing public-private partnerships. In a state whose official motto, “Crossroads of America,” explicitly touts its highways, recent complications with road privatization projects illustrate how the approach is not always as simple or successful as its boosters would have it.

Only weeks after Pence visited Australia to promote Trump's infrastructure plan to foreign investors, the I-69 privatization deal that he championed — which involved a Pence-connected corporate law firm — collapsed after months-long construction delays, allegations of financial mismanagement and a surge in traffic accidents. At the same time, a foreign firm Pence approved to run the 155-mile Indiana Toll Road announced it would be hammering economically battered Northwest Indiana with toll increases. The move came just a few years after Pence’s administration approved that corporation’s bid to keep the road under private control — and after Pence's administration rejected local Indiana governments’ efforts to reclaim the road for the public.

Pence’s decision to re-privatize the toll road came even as state audits reviewed by International Business Times warned of a spike in infrastructure deficiencies on the road after it was originally leased to private companies. Other documents obtained by IBT show that as local governments made their pitch to take back the road, Pence’s administration blocked the release of a state-sponsored, independent cost-benefit analysis of continued privatization — all as the lobbying firm for the road’s private operator delivered more than $100,000 to Pence’s gubernatorial campaign.

The two road deals are precisely the kind that Trump’s infrastructure plan aims to expand under the direction of a team with ties to Indiana privatization. Along with Pence, White House officials Gary Cohn and D.J. Gribbin are spearheading the national proposal to let private firms invest in, operate and/or purchase public assets. Cohn and Gribbin worked for two companies — Goldman Sachs and Macquarie — that originally helped privatize the Indiana Toll Road. Gribbin also worked for Koch Industries, the multinational conglomerate run by billionaire conservative donors Charles and David Koch. The Koch brothers have ties to Pence as well.

Friedman said that with Vice President Pence spearheading the Trump administration's federal infrastructure plan, “It’ll be the same thing. He’ll want to turn over public roads, public bridges to the private sector.”

As the debate over infrastructure policy intensifies, there is no dispute that the Trump administration’s initiative could open up a huge new market for financial firms on Wall Street. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that there are $4.6 trillion worth of needed investments to maintain and upgrade infrastructure throughout the U.S. In light of that, recent reports from Moody’s and AIG project a financial jackpot for private investors, with the latter predicting that America “is poised to become the largest public-private partnership market in the world for infrastructure projects.”

That market appears to be a ripe profit opportunity for politically connected firms. On top of Pence’s overtures to investors in Australia, a country that has aggressively embraced privatization, Trump recently secured a pledge from Saudi Arabia’s government to invest billions in American infrastructure.

The Saudi money is slated to flow through the private equity firm Blackstone Group LP, which has been eyeing opportunities to profit from American infrastructure privatization since its CEO, Stephen Schwarzman, was named by Trump to run a White House economic advisory panel shaping federal infrastructure policy. At the same time, Cohn’s former employer, Goldman Sachs, has said in its financial filings that it too has plans to expand investment in privatized infrastructure. (Neither Schwarzman or Cohn have recused themselves from working on White House infrastructure policy that could benefit the firms, even though both own stakes in the companies.)

On August 11 2017 11:18 Plansix wrote:
The worst sort of rich people.

On August 11 2017 10:30 TheTenthDoc wrote:
I mean, the problem isn't that he said "there are potential biological causes of gender differences" it's that he said they should nuke diversity programs of several stripes in the memo, remove multiple programs oriented at removing non-biological biases (which he even admits exist!), and "de-emphasize empathy" (lmao). At least that's what I got out of skimming his text and list of suggestions.