Bear Witness
Abortion
When we talked about abortion in May, I wrote this about the anti-choice movement:
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.
Two weeks ago some of their most influential voices gathered to discuss how to do just that:
A week before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the nationwide right to abortion, conservative groups were already mapping out their next moves: how to prevent pregnant people from seeking abortion care wherever it would still be legal.
Their focus was on charging and criminally prosecuting people who cross state lines to receive an abortion, anyone who aids them, and companies who sell abortion medication. Many states have already drafted legislation to criminalize thinking about getting an abortion elsewhere:
The versions in states like Arkansas, South Dakota, and Missouri would seek to use the same mechanism in Texas, where private individuals can report people who illegally access abortion services or even consider traveling outside state lines for an abortion.
Multiple states have either passed laws banning their citizens from obtaining mail-order abortion medication, though the groups are hoping they can pass a federal ban when Republicans regain control of Congress and the White House. In the mean time, states can criminally prosecute doctors or sue out-of-state companies who provide the pills:
Another approach would be to prosecute anyone who aids in distributing abortion medication. That could include doctors, pharmacists, or clinics that advertise that they provide abortion pills to out-of-state residents.
Under Roe, many women have been put in prison for using recreational drugs while pregnant, a blueprint for anti-choice zealots:
“Well, what about a child in the womb who is solicited out of state by someone who is promoting drugs, either illegally administered and prescribed or just that are illegal in that particular state?” [Denise Harle] also said, referencing the idea of prosecuting kidnapping once again. “Would the state have an action there?”
Expect to hear more comparisons to kidnapping, as right wing groups concoct legal precedent for depriving women of basic rights:
“One idea states have had is that it's almost analogous to kidnapping, where if someone took your child out of state, that state would have an interest in that and that would be a federal crime,” Harle said.
The next time you read a puff piece about a company offering travel credits or paid sick leave to its female employees seeking reproductive care, remember those same employers could be creating legal liability for those same employees by creating a paper trail.
Out-of-state abortions aside, the end of Roe will make life difficult - and even deadly - for women trying to carry a baby to term:
One in 50 pregnancies in the United States is ectopic, for example, in which a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus. The embryo must be removed, and delaying that treatment can result in sepsis, internal bleeding and death. Placental abruptions must be addressed immediately to avoid extensive bleeding, renal failure and even, in some instances, death.
Even in states with legal exceptions to protect the life of the mother, such decisions will now be in the hands of a hospital’s legal team. Even clinics in states where abortion remains legal have to weigh the risks:
Planned Parenthood’s Montana branch has reportedly decided that it will no longer provide medication abortions for patients from certain states where bans are in effect or in the works, citing the “rapidly changing” legal landscape.
Imagine if every treatment that involved terminating an embryo or fetus had to go through the same legal risk analysis of an elective surgery? If every doctor faced with an ectopic pregnancy or other medical emergency had to seriously consider whether they’d be arrested for their actions? In much of the country, this is the new reality.
Then there’s the consequences of forcing the women who can’t risk imprisonment to have (or attempt to have) unwanted children:
Forced birth will take women out of the work force in an already tight labor market. Women could be treated like criminals for having miscarriages, which are incredibly common. And women who are pregnant when their partners don’t want them to be will be more at risk for domestic violence and homicide.
The anti-choice movement has been able to ignore all the potential consequences for women because it’s never been about helping women, or the children they birth. Their goal has been to impose their beliefs on the rest of us, and now they have. Now all the money they’ve poured into state legislatures, judgeships, and attorney generals can do the dirty work of surveilling, arresting, and jailing women for the crime of seeking reproductive care.
Informants
We talk a lot about how police are solving fewer crimes despite receiving record funding from the taxpayers they don’t protect or serve. Some of the cases they do ‘clear’ do not result in legitimate convictions - because police use on illegal tactics to put criminals behind bars.
Juries put a lot of weight on eyewitness testimony, despite growing evidence witnesses can fabricate memories. The human brain is not a recording device, and can provide imperfect recollections of events. Police take advantage of the perceived veracity of witness testimony to fabricate evidence:
In fact, Williams was a serial informant who had implicated at least six defendants in the killings of eight people. Williams alleged that each of the six men had confessed to a homicide or brazenly committed the act in front of him, or later showed him the murder weapon.
When Williams signed those statements, he would later testify, he was barely out of his teens, being treated for mental health issues, and either incarcerated or under threat of significant prison time. Later, in some of the cases, he recanted. Then, in some, he recanted the recantations.
We may joke about ‘snitching’ as an abstract concept, but it’s a perverse incentive we’ve baked into our criminal justice system:
“The heart of the informant problem is that we permit our criminal system to pay for cooperation,” said Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice. Those incentives include leniency, reward money or even the ability to evade charges in serious criminal cases. “We are running a market, a deregulated market in which the exchange of benefits such as leniency for cooperation is almost entirely unregulated and permitted.”
In fact, all these tropes are regularly dramatized in the police procedurals and crime shows. Far from brave patriots risking their lives to infiltrate cells, the FBI has a history of using paid informants to entrap ‘terrorists’. Jailhouse snitches tend to be nothing like what we see on TV:
But Natapoff noted that the market also tends to exploit vulnerable people — minors, undocumented immigrants, people in addiction or with mental health disorders. As a result, she said, it produces highly unreliable testimony. It almost inevitably generates serial cooperators.
The cost paid by the wrongfully convicted, and society at large, is huge:
Informant testimony is a leading cause of wrongful convictions. It factored in about one in five wrongful convictions, researchers have found, and 46% of death row exonerations. Settlements in those cases have cost U.S. taxpayers nationwide close to $300 million in restitution.
Police can barely clear half their murder cases, with rates nearing the single digits for less severe crimes. Meanwhile, they pressure vulnerable detainees to sign false confessions and witness statements, ruining innocent lives.
BNPL
We talked a few weeks ago about buy now, pay later companies and investor attempts to call consumer subprime lending fintech. Optimistic business journalists may point out that for some - who, uh, eschew ‘permanent debt’ - a zero-interest payment plan is a good deal. And, sure, but many companies already offer zero percent financing for larger purchases? If you buy a product financed by the company selling it to you, you can avoid these sorts of problems:
Making purchases with buy now, pay later companies is easy. Getting money back after a return or recall can take months—if it happens at all. Refund-seekers say confused customer-service representatives often blame the merchants for the delay. Merchants, customers say, blame the buy now, pay later companies. Refunds are on the way, customers say they are told, but they sometimes don’t materialize.
Shocking! If you insert a middleman into the process, and that middleman has different contracts with each vendor, it can be a real pain to get your money back if something goes wrong with the product - or if you simply don’t want it! Credit card companies and retailers have spent decades making the return and refund process as frictionless as possible, and now BNPL companies have inexplicably inserted themselves into it, tried to reinvent the wheel, and made it much worse.
Speaking of reinventing the wheel, check this shit out:
Companies like Mondu, Hokodo and Billie have raked in heaps of cash from investors with a simple pitch: businesses — not consumers — are a more lucrative clientele for the buy now, pay later trend.
Right. Deep breaths. Okay. BNPL, but for business. What?
A visit to Billie’s site tells me I can get paid ‘immediately’ on all my open invoices. But…how? A BNPL firm cannot instantly materialize legally binding contracts with my vendors, and even if they did - I assume this is part of the process, because it would be insane if not - what’s stopping the vendor from stiffing the BNPL company? Or what if I fabricate invoices and bounce with the cash? What’s Billie’s recourse? They could sue my company for the money, sure, but how is any of this efficient? They’re making a short (?) term loan, pocketing some of it in fees, and assuming vendors will pay their invoices. But, unlike a consumer buying a Peloton, the cost of default and debt recovery are much higher in the B2B world, since businesses do not have static assets like a home, a car, or a credit score. Have the BNPL firms written these expected costs into their models? If so, why is anyone investing in them?
Also…why? If the problem we’re trying to solve is giving businesses extra cash flow or working capital, that’s called a business line of credit or operating loan. If we’re trying to allow businesses to borrow against future revenues, that’s factoring. These are both solved problems! What is the point of BNPL? CNBC handwaves the question away:
It’s different to some other existing forms of short-term finance like working capital loans, which cover firms’ everyday operational costs, and invoice factoring, where a company sells all or part of a bill for faster access to cash they’re owed.
It’s…not, though? If I can get paid on my open invoices is that not…selling the debt to a lender? Is the word ‘buy’ confusing business journalists? Am I having a stroke?
One of two things is true - either the BNPL firms’ marketing is lying to me and I can’t get all my invoices paid because they do so conditionally based on vendor default risk, or they’re simply taking the VC cash they’ve raised and fronting it to me without knowing whether they’ll be repaid. Judging by the last ten years’ worth of VC-funded hypergrowth fintech startups, I’m betting on the latter. I’m betting some analysts at Billie have created very large spreadsheets predicting that only a small percentage of vendors will default on payments, so they can tell investors their maximum liability will be small, because every vendor has a 100% payment rate, until they don’t.
It feels like the best use of business BNPL is to extract investor capital. It feels like some fintech entrepreneurs literally made the ‘UberBNPL, but for X’ slide deck, and received billions of dollars. Anyhow, if any German or Italian entrepreneurs want to create a web of fake B2B vendors with me, I’m not busy this summer.
TMTG
It’s been awhile since we checked in with Donald Trump’s (giant air quotes) media company. How’s it going?
The public listing of former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company took a fresh blow on Monday when the cash-rich shell company merging with Mr. Trump’s company disclosed in a regulatory filing that a federal grand jury in New York recently issued subpoenas to the company and its directors.
Oops! It is truly impressive that Trump’s first business fresh out of the Oval Office appears to be under investigation by literally every applicable government agency and regulator before it’s even had a chance to go public.
Last fall I wrote:
There is something very funny about Trump spending his whole adult life pretending he was a billionaire when he wasn’t, spending four years trying to steal as much money as he could from the US government and mostly losing money, and now finally joining the three comma club by founding a phony media company.
Now it seems like he might be denied entry to the three comma club. The only consistent moneymaking ventures Trump has run this decade are his campaign defense funds.
Short Cons
Rolling Stone - “In other words: Sitting Supreme Court justices have prayed together with evangelical leaders whose bosses were bringing cases and arguments before the high court.”
Gizmodo - “A sweeping Interpol operation led to the seizure of $50 million in illicit funds and the arrests of 2,000 alleged scammers from a number of different countries earlier this week.”
ARS Technica - “The Federal Communications Commission today said it closed a robocall loophole by requiring small phone companies to implement the caller ID authentication technology known as STIR and SHAKEN.”
FT - “Visa and Mastercard set down rules for the payments community on porn, essentially core principles and goals.”
Tips, thoughts, or all my open invoices paid immediately to scammerdarkly@gmail.com