Aborted Rights
Abortion
It is both upsetting and unsurprising that the US Supreme Court is poised to overturn abortion rights in the country, leaving it up to individual states. This wildly unpopular ruling has long been the stated goal of the GOP despite their protestations. It is hard to overstate how bad this ruling is going to make life for women in this country, but the reality is, things are already bad, and even the political party that claims to be pro-choice has done little to defend the rights of vulnerable women.
On its face, the Roe overturn will look like this:
An immediate ban on abortion somewhere between 23 and 28 states, according to various estimates, and restrictions in many others. But, this dire map isn’t that much worse than what women in these states are dealing with today.
Here is a good piece in the Atlantic detailing the history of the abortion fight in America. It describes the brutal efficiency of the anti-choice movement and the stubborn bravery of the (mostly female) pro-choice activists who created informal networks over decades to provide access to safe abortions to women across the country.
First, let’s dispel a couple myths. Many people assume abortions are medical procedures done at clinics or hospitals. In reality, more than half of abortions in the US are done with a simple combination of pills:
Abortion pills—mifepristone and misoprostol, colloquially called “mife” (pronounced “miffy”) and “miso”—are remarkably effective and medically safer than acetaminophen and Viagra. They’re FDA-approved for ending pregnancies up to 10 weeks’ gestation. The WHO has protocols for using them to end pregnancies up to 12 weeks’ gestation, and even later.
Safer than Tylenol! And yet, only a fifth of the Americans surveyed knew about this option. The second myth is that non-pill abortion procedures are difficult and dangerous. Also not true:
In circumstances where pharmaceuticals may not be appropriate, [Paul Blumenthal] believes that laypeople can be instructed to wield manual vacuum-aspiration devices, including the Del-Em, with little risk of infection. Technicians without medical degrees, he added, have been using such tools safely for decades in South and Southeast Asia. “This is not a complicated procedure,” Blumenthal said. Vacuum aspiration outside a clinical setting is not “self-managed” the way pills can be—it requires assistance. Although specific studies are few, they suggest that outcomes involving trained nonphysicians are comparable to those involving physicians (and in either case, the risks are very low).
Even a more invasive vacuum procedure can be done without a medical professional, if women are given the proper tutorials and have someone to assist. The devices can be assembled with parts from any hardware store.
This is promising information, in the face of potential crackdowns by more than half the states in the country. However! Anti-choice zealots in those states have already been investigating and charging women with crimes - often using unrelated laws - for having abortions, and that’s going to get much worse when they can do so with the full force of the state:
Some were charged with felonies under laws that were not actually intended to target abortion, including murder in Georgia and abuse of a corpse in Arkansas. In Indiana, a woman named Purvi Patel was convicted of feticide and given a 20-year sentence.
So while abortion pills are legal and available in states without bans on abortion, there’s no way to guarantee protection for women who are residents of anti-choice states, who could be prosecuted for their actions. Mother Jones details how bad things could get in states that aggressively pursue women for abortion:
But you may also live in Texas, Georgia, or Mississippi, states with draconian abortion laws—and just three of the 19 where telemedicine for abortion is outlawed. The nearest clinic might be at capacity, or out of state altogether, and you can’t afford the costs of travel.
[…]
As you search, your phone and computer log your every move: the search history stored on your Google Chrome browser, your internet service provider’s record of incoming and outgoing requests, the financial details tracked by your payment processor, the emails you send, and more.
Sound like a grim, Handmaid’s Tale-style future? For women in the South, it’s been reality for years:
In 2017, Latice Fisher, a Black woman, arrived at a Mississippi hospital after losing a pregnancy at home. Because she had admitted during an earlier gynecological exam that she was pregnant, but never returned for an ultrasound, suspicious medical officials handed her medical records to police, who launched an investigation. Since Fisher had voluntarily surrendered her phone, prosecutors were able to scrape her search history, which included searches for misoprostol, and used it as evidence that she had intentionally “killed” her fetus. She was charged with second-degree murder.
Law enforcement has access to pretty much all of our online data, because courts refuse to rein them in, and because digital forensic tools are cheap and easy to use:
In fact, more than 2,000 government agencies—from police departments and prisons to public schools and housing authorities—use them to extract and share data in investigations of all kinds. In an analysis of public records, UpTurn found that just 44 law enforcement agencies extracted data from 50,000 phones between 2015 and 2019, using their findings in prosecutions for sex work, public drinking, shoplifting, cannabis possession, and more.
But abortion providers and advocates have other groups to worry about as well - the anti-choice movement is well-funded and tech savvy:
People anxiously waiting at a clinic, scrolling on their phones, have been served ads from “crisis pregnancy centers,” religious anti-choice operations that often target low-income women with misleading information on “abortion reversal,” an unsafe, unscientific method of stopping medication abortions by flooding the body with the hormone progesterone.
[…]
And anti-choice groups, many flush with cash, can easily pay to fill the first few pages of Google search results with crisis pregnancy centers. That’s “just how Google ads work,” says the digital security expert who spoke to me. “It means that anybody with enough money can willfully distort access to a free and open internet.” Meta (formerly Facebook) has netted over $140,000 from ads pushing “abortion reversal,” which have been viewed more than 18 million times, predominantly by minors.
So, a woman who happens to live in, say, Detroit, could be targeted, tracked, and turned in to the authorities by anti-choice groups, her neighbors, relatives, or really anyone, and she could go to jail.
Culture wars aside, states need tax dollars from companies to keep the lights on. What is the ‘free market’ doing about this? Well, they’re offering to pay expenses for their employees to travel to other states to have legal abortions:
Amazon became the latest corporation to cover employees' travel costs to seek abortion care.
[…]
The company's announcement echoes similar moves by Citigroup, Yelp, Uber and Lyft to help employees bypass Republican-led efforts in several states to effectively ban abortion.
I cannot think of a more quintessentially American solution to an unelected panel of right wing judges stripping half the country’s women of basic human rights than offering to pay their travel costs to go elsewhere. The problem with this ‘solution’ is it does not offer legal protection for the women, who can and will be charged with crimes in their home states. Texas has a bounty law allowing private citizens to sue anyone who facilitates an abortion (Uber and Lyft have said they’ll cover legal fees if their drivers get sued taking women to abortion clinics) but do we really think anti-choice groups won’t immediately bombard these companies with lawsuits for enabling their employees to fly to California for an abortion? Do we think governors and attorneys general in anti-choice states won’t sue to shut down websites offering pills by mail? Or charge them with drug trafficking? If you need to imagine how seriously a Republican president would take the states’ rights argument for abortion access, here is a Senator from North Dakota saying they’d use the federal government to prevent it:
Women in anti-choice states have no good options. They could order pills online and hope they don’t get caught, because if they take them and the abortion occurs in their home state, they’re criminally liable. They could take a few days off work (Amazon isn’t offering PTO for the abortions, because of course not) and get on a fucking plane to fly a thousand miles to a state where abortion is legal, take the pills there, and hope they don’t get charged with a crime when they return home. Anti-choice prosecutors and judges are already putting women in jail for these things while Roe is law. Meanwhile, anti-choice groups will spend millions to muck up their web searches, mine their data to hand over to authorities, and create more honeypot websites and clinics to trick women exploring health options. Showing up to one of those fake crisis pregnancy centers will become extremely fraught, because they can now be threatened with jail time if they have the abortion elsewhere.
The bottom line is - Roe has provided only scant protection for women up to this point, because our government’s failure to codify abortion rights into law has allowed states and local governments and anti-choice groups to systematically chip away at women’s rights for decades. A lack of reproductive education - opposed by those same groups - keeps women in the dark about the range of easy, safe options to terminate a pregnancy. Losing Roe will mostly impact the poor and people of color, who make up the majority of people who seek abortion via Google search or by showing up to a clinic in-person. Democrats could still pass a law protecting abortion rights and gutting the evil laws many states have on the books, but I’m not holding my breath. The response from many Dem leaders has been to tell us to vote harder.
So, for now, the abortion underground that existed pre-Roe thanks to the incredible bravery of a small number of activists, educators, and health providers, is going to be a key resource for lots of women. Unfortunately, the anti-choice forces have more money, more resources, and soon the law on their side. They’ve won this battle, and since they know their ideas are wildly unpopular, expect them to crack down hard to attempt to maintain what they hope will become the new status quo.
Elon
Last week I wrote:
Maybe it will be different this time, and maybe Musk can just meme his way to infinite wealth, but he’s tied up a huge chunk of his assets buying a company that could potentially cost him billions a year just to keep the lights on.
Because it made no sense to me why Musk would tie up a large percentage of his paper wealth to buy an unprofitable company and take it private, robbing him of a thing he’s very good at - getting rich(er) by pumping public companies to obscene valuations. Musk and former CEO Jack Dorsey seemed to agree that Twitter as a public company was a bad idea, because then it’s beholden to markets or shareholders rather than ‘the people’ or whatever. Well, guess what:
Mr. Musk said he plans to stage an initial public offering of Twitter in as little as three years of buying it, according to people familiar with the matter.
If true - Elon says many things that are not true, or that he later changes his mind about - it appears his strategy is to flip Twitter after a few years for a wildly inflated stock price. It’s sort of his specialty!
So, as it currently stands, the world’s richest guy is buying one of the world’s most influential social platforms. He wants to fire a bunch of its staff, make it a ‘free speech paradise’ whatever that means, and then flip it after a couple years and presumably make himself much richer in the process. I had wondered what his pitch could possibly be to the investors he’s courting to help defray his purchase costs, and this appears to be it.
In crypto crossover news Binance is putting in half a billion dollars to make Twitter web3, or something.
Rivian
Late last year, we talked briefly about Rivian. I wrote:
A car company that hasn’t delivered any cars is worth as much as GM in its first day of trading. They’ve got 55,000 outstanding orders which the company says will take nearly two years to fill. They’re building an upscale pickup truck and an SUV - two vehicles the US definitely needs more of - and currently have no dealerships or obvious plan for how to deliver charging stations to service customers. Also, they’re burning a few billion dollars a year in development costs. Anyhow, financial markets are rational and I’m sure all of this makes sense to someone.
We don’t do much in the way of financial prognostication around here, but it seems at least a few people did the napkin math and said hey, wait a minute, should a company that is only making twenty thousand cars a year be worth more than one that makes millions?
Amusingly, Rivian’s market implosion has blown a hole in the balance sheets of Amazon and…Ford:
In its earnings report on Thursday, Amazon took a $7.6 billion loss on its stake in Rivian. Shares of the EV manufacturer plummeted by more than 50% in the first three months of 2022
[…]
On Wednesday, Ford took a $5.4 billion loss on its 12% stake in Rivian.
You would expect Ford, a company that pioneered vehicle production to be a little more circumspect with its investments in other car companies, but I guess they got caught up in the EV mania. Ford taking a massive paper loss on a luxury EV truck startup while its own EVs are wildly popular is surely an indictment of financialization, or markets, or something. Like I said, we’re not a finance newsletter.
Credit Cards
I don’t often include personal anecdotes in this newsletter, but as a recent fraud victim, I thought it might be fun to revisit the last couple weeks in my household.
Some time in mid-April I noticed a handful of charges on one of my credit cards that I definitely did not make. Someone had ordered delivery five times in a single day, from three different merchants, none of whom I had accounts with. They racked up around $500 worth of charges in a brief spending spree. I called my bank to dispute it and a customer service rep unenthusiastically told me I could cancel my card ‘if I wanted to’ which was a little less urgency than I felt the situation deserved. Also, they couldn’t dispute my charges until they settled, so I’d have to call back in a few days to start the chargeback process.
I may have mentioned this in a past newsletter I can’t find, but I used to work in payment processing - I was a co-founder of a credit card gateway in a past life. I am familiar with the dispute process, and I know how banks do (or do not) try to manage fraud on behalf of their cardholders.
One thing to remember - which we have definitely talked about before - is that the various players in the credit card payment system are subject to Card Association agreements. Everyone - card banks, payment processors, merchants - agrees to the same set of rules, or in the cases of Discover and AmEx it all exists in a closed loop. When I call my bank to dispute a charge, they start a process that usually ends in my funds being returned and the merchant (DoorDash, or whoever) paying a fee for processing the erroneous charge. My bank sends a request to DoorDash’s bank, DoorDash’s bank contacts DoorDash, DoorDash says oh, I guess we don’t have proof that this charge was definitely made by Colin, sorry about that, here’s his money back, our bad. DoorDash pays a fee - anywhere from a few dollars to $35 - for being naughty, the banks pocket said fee (and keep the transaction fees they charged DoorDash) and DoorDash is out the fees plus whatever they paid out on the order (it is unclear to me whether they charge the restaurant for fraud.)
So, the banks don’t typically lose any money in this scenario - unless DoorDash suddenly folds and has large outstanding fee balances with the banks, which seems unlikely. This may explain why the person I spoke to on the phone did not feel a particular sense of urgency about my situation - I could cancel my card, or I could just let the fraudster continue to order DoorDash. It mattered little to them, or their employer.
I cancelled my card, disputed the charges, and moved on with my life. Unfortunately, the story does not end here. My girlfriend had received a call from her bank (not the same one I use) about a legitimate charge from a European airline we were trying to use to book a trip and they mentioned someone had been calling the bank trying to access her account. They suggested she get a new card, and she agreed, and had a new one issued. What they neglected to mention was they’d already sent a couple thousand dollars out via check, on the instructions of someone who wasn’t her.
The scam appears to have been - acquire enough personal information about her (identity theft) to call the bank and have them reverse her last card payment to be refunded to the fraudster. But! The bank sent the refund check to our house instead. At no point in this process did her bank contact her, and she received no email confirmation of the refund. They even allowed her to dispute the refund, because they couldn’t see where the check had gone, for some reason. The whole thing is deeply weird and reminiscent of the time a scammer got Amazon to send me a free phone after stealing mine.
If this sounds completely absurd to you, you’re not alone. How on earth is bank security this lax in 2022? The answer is: banks have done the math, and the losses from fraud are nothing compared to the money they make charging merchants for disputes or their customers for NSF fees and overdrafts. My girlfriend and I are fortunate enough to not need those few hundred (or thousand) dollars’ worth of spending power for the time (up to 90 days) it takes for our disputes to wind through the banking system. But what if I needed that $500 dollars? More than half the country doesn’t have $1,000 dollars in the bank for an emergency. Meanwhile, banks are letting anyone with a penchant for light fraud order food delivery every couple hours until they get caught.
Also, while DoorDash is a big company with cash to burn, most merchants hit by chargebacks are simply out the money - if my fraudster had used my card at a small convenience store or a local restaurant, they’d be out the cost of the order plus all the fees, through little fault of their own. The banks punish the merchant at no financial risk to themselves. As my experience shows, their fraud detection is wholly inadequate to prevent the sort of theft that can put a real dent in a small business’s bottom line.
Believe it or not, the story doesn’t even end there. A week after I’d cancelled my card, my bank allowed four more charges from a hotel in Puerto Rico I’d stayed at back in January, on my old card number. When I called to dispute it they told me the charges showed as ‘in-person’ despite the fact that the card was cancelled and I’d bought stuff in Philadelphia the same day. Cool system!
Short Cons
Defector - “What happens when we are faced with a complete erosion of our right to be whole in the eyes of the law, and the same politicians who have failed us again and again ask for our votes? When do we stop begging the people in power to listen to us, and force them to?”
Axios - “Activision CEO Bobby Kotick rushed to secure a takeover bid from Microsoft in order to escape liability for misconduct at the company, a new lawsuit from New York City officials alleges.”
Bloomberg - “TurboTax owner Intuit Inc. agreed to pay all 50 U.S. states a total of $141 million to resolve claims that the online tax preparer duped low-income Americans into paying for services that should have been free.”
NYTimes - “Within a few weeks of announcing the I.R.S. deal, the company fired Mr. Hannum. I had asked ZenLedger about things I could not verify about Mr. Hannum after I talked to him for an article about crypto trading and taxes. Much of what he had said to others did not check out, either.”
Tips, thoughts, or activist uprisings to scammerdarkly@gmail.com