What Happened: June 30, 2021

The Big Story

You may remember Robinhood Financial LLC as the company behind the free stock-trading app that became notorious in January of this year for its role in the GameStop and r/wallstreetbets trading scandal—perhaps the first populist protest in history fought over stock purchases. Now Robinhood is being forced to pay roughly $70 million as part of a settlement with government regulators who charged the company with unfairly preventing millions of users from trading on its platform, and misleading its customers, among other violations. The payout ordered by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority in a settlement announced Wednesday includes $57 million in fines and close to $13 million in restitution to customers. Launched in 2014, Robinhood’s public reputation tanked earlier this year after it appeared to bow to hedge fund pressure and lock users out of the platform to prevent them from trading in popular stocks. But the episode did not appear to hurt Robinhood’s standing within the larger financial industry, and the company is expected to have a large public offering later this year. On Tuesday, Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner Charlie Munger called Robinhood “a gambling parlor masquerading as a respectable business.”
Read it here:https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/30/robinhood-to-pay-70-million-for-misleading-customers-and-outages-the-largest-finra-penalty-ever.html
And get the backstory here:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/david-samuels-new-americans-gamestop-wallstreetbets

In today’s Back Pages: The Democrats and the Black Vote


The Rest

Bill Cosby was released from prison Wednesday after Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court vacated his sexual assault conviction. The 83-year-old former comedian and star of The Cosby Show had served more than two years out of a 3- to 10-year sentence after being convicted on three counts of aggravated indecent assault. Cosby, who was accused of sexual assault by mutiple women before the trial that led to his conviction and admitted to drugging women he was trying to have sex with, has maintained his innocence. But the Pennsylvania high court ruled that prosecutors had violated Cosby’s right to due process by charging him despite Cosby having reached a “non-prosecution agreement” with a previous prosecutor.

New York City’s Board of Elections succeeded in making the new “ranked-choice voting” system—already bewildering to many voters—even more confusing Tuesday night, when it tweeted results in the mayor’s race and then retracted them shortly after. The initial tweet appeared to show the Democratic primary race dramatically tightening, with front-runner Eric Adams only two points ahead of rival Kathryn Garcia—prompting a statement from Adams “raising serious questions” about the results. But those tweets were deleted within hours by the elections board, which later explained the error as the result of mistakenly counting 135,000 test ballots alongside real votes. Though it was corrected within a few hours, that left enough time for a number of New York journalists to compare the Black, liberal Democrat Adams to Donald Trump for Adams’—accurate, as it turned out—questioning of the election results. Final results of the race may not be known for several weeks.

here we go...Eric Adams in a statement here is baffled that when the vote counting process plays out, the vote totals change from what they were on election night...this is the argument Trump used to declare election fraud https://t.co/Ex3QVzkLVV

— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) June 29, 2021

Joining a growing market for privacy-focused alternatives to the dominant tech platforms, a former Google ad executive is launching a new subscription-based search engine called Neeva that promises (we’ll see about that) to never mine or sell user’s personal data. Using search rankings powered by Microsoft’s Bing, Neeva will charge subscribers $4.95 a month instead of relying on an ad model. When it debuts in July, Neeva will be competing with other search engines like DuckDuckGo and Brave that are already challenging Google’s supremacy by promising not to spy on users.

Speaking of data security, 700 million LinkedIn users have had their personal information stolen and posted for sale in a popular hacker forum online. The data, including users’ emails, personal addresses, and phone numbers, was obtained in a June 22 hack of the social-networking and job-search site’s servers.
Read it here: https://restoreprivacy.com/linkedin-data-leak-700-million-users/

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has died at 88. Rumsfeld first served as a secretary of defense under President Gerald Ford and then again more than two decades later under George W. Bush, when he became known for his leading role as an architect of the “War on Terror” and the U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Rumsfeld died at his home in Taos, New Mexico, from multiple myeloma, according to a spokesman for the family.

As we’ve reported here before, the United States is witnessing a dramatic increase in residential home prices. New data from the S&P Case-Shiller national home price index shows housing prices rising at the fastest rate in 30 years. In April, prices jumped by 14.6% compared to the same period last year—that followed a 13.3% annual increase in March.

In related economic news, U.S. economists surveyed by the Financial Times predict that in an effort to combat inflation, the Federal Reserve will raise U.S. interest rates at least twice by the end of 2023.
Read it here: https://www.ft.com/content/de778e1b-3876-4999-942e-186c2a692a1a

The House of Representatives voted 285-120 Tuesday to remove Confederate statues from the Capitol building. The bill, authored by House Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, received bipartisan support, with 67 Republicans, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, voting for the legislation. But 120 Republicans voted against the bill.

Here’s a useful resource for anyone looking for insights into the debate over critical race theory (CRT) that goes beyond culture war shouting points. The legal and constitutional primer is provided by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a group that has upheld the civil liberties mantle, while organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union have transitioned from their traditional missions to embracing activist causes. Bottom line: Most of the state bills looking to ban CRT are troublingly vague, and thus rife for abuse, but probably constitutional.
Read it here: https://www.thefire.org/13-important-points-in-the-campus-k-12-critical-race-theory-debate/

California’s Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta has barred state employees from state-funded travel to 17 states that have laws Bonta alleges discriminate against the gay community. “Make no mistake: We’re in the midst of an unprecedented wave of bigotry and discrimination in this country—and the State of California is not going to support it,” Bonta said.

The Back Pages

In a smart column today from The New York Times’ Thomas Edsall, looks at the New York City mayoral race as an indicator of larger trends in the Democratic Party and national politics. Namely, “the continuing power of Black voters to act as a moderating force in a Democratic Party that has seen growing numbers of white voters shift decisively to the left.”

A recent article in Gothamist breaks down how the votes split in New York City’s Democratic primary between current front-runner Eric Adams, a former cop who ran on a law-and-order platform, and the other leading candidates such as Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley, who both ran on more progressive platforms compared to Adams. (In New York City, whoever wins the Democratic ticket is often a shoo-in to win the general election.)

Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president who ran on a platform of public safety, swept central Brooklyn, southeastern Queens, and the Bronx, areas dominated by working and middle-class Black and Latino voters. Maya Wiley, the former civil rights attorney who emphasized police reform, assembled pockets of progressive support in parts of gentrified Brooklyn, Manhattan’s East Village and central Harlem, and northeastern Queens. Meanwhile, Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner who touted her credentials as a crisis manager, swallowed up large swaths of Manhattan, including the Upper West and Upper East sides, as well as parts of brownstone Brooklyn, considered home to the city’s largely white and affluent managerial class.

This goes to Edsall’s point, which is that Adams’ more moderate and safety-focused campaign was key to his success with a broad cross section of the working class.

“From a national vantage point,” Edsall writes, “the most significant element of Adams’s campaign so far lies in his across-the-board success with working class voters of all races and ethnicities.”

Edsall, clearly, is thinking about the 2020 presidential election, in which Donald Trump defied the predictions and certainties of nearly the entire U.S. media and pundit class by gaining Black and Latino votes while losing critical support from white men. Edsall writes:

The results in the mayoral primary so far are evidence of the continuing power of Black voters to act as a moderating force in a Democratic Party that has seen growing numbers of white voters shift decisively to the left. The results also suggest that Adams’s strategy of taking a strong stand on public safety in support of the police, combined with a call to end abusive police practices, is an effective way for the party to counter the small but significant Black and Hispanic defections to the Republican Party that began to emerge in the 2020 presidential election.

Read the rest here:https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/opinion/eric-adams-kathryn-garcia-maya-wiley.html

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