The Inevitable Corruption Of "Affordable" Housing

Government handout and redistribution programs promise that they can achieve perfect justice and fairness in human affairs, but somehow we always seem to be coming up short.  The latest example arises once again in the arena of the "worst possible public policy," affordable housing in Manhattan.  

You always knew that the handing out of the affordable housing had to be corrupt.  But the secrets are well kept among the clique of insiders who do the handing to their friends and cronies.  In the last couple of weeks, elections in New York caused a small piece of the cover to be blown off.

September 12 was the date for primary elections for local offices in New York City -- Mayor, Comptroller, Public Advocate and City Council.  Those who know our city will recognize that the result of the Democratic Party primary generally determines the ultimate winner of most of these offices.  Since the City Council has term limits, many seats are open and attract multiple candidates.  That was the case in City Council District 2, which covers a swath of the Lower East Side of Manhattan -- an area that was formerly impoverished but is now rapidly gentrifying.

In District 2, the odds-on favorite candidate was one Carlina Rivera.  Rivera followed the time-tested road to a City Council seat, namely serving as a top staff person of the term-limited predecessor, who then made Rivera the designated successor.  Rivera's husband of several years is one Jamie Rogers, who has recently been serving as the Chairperson of the Community Board that covers the same area.  Rivera ended up winning her ballot line (and therefore almost certainly her seat) with 61% of the vote.  (However, note that turnout in this primary was only about 20%, and Democrats are far from all of the eligible voters.  Likely, Ms. Rivera got the votes of well less than 10% of eligible voters.)

Things started to get interesting about a week before the election when the New York Post on its famous Page 6 reported that Rogers and Rivera were living in a subsidized apartment under HUD's so-called "Section 8" voucher program -- a program whose benefits are supposedly reserved for "the poor."  From the Post:

Carlina Rivera — the leading candidate to replace her former boss, term-limited City Councilwoman Rosie Mendez — lives in federally subsidized Section 8 housing reserved for the poor.  Rivera is married to James Rogers, a Cornell Law School graduate who once worked at the white shoe firm of Sullivan & Cromwell.

Readers not familiar with the ins and outs of the New York big law firm community may not recognize Sullivan & Cromwell as not just any old law firm.  It is the principal outside law firm for Goldman Sachs and for a big chunk of corporate America.  A recent piece at Above the Law puts the starting associate salary there at $180,000, rising to more than $300,000 over several years.  

And over the next several days it only got more interesting.  Turns out that Rogers's dad is a recently-retired partner of Cravath, Swain & Moore -- again one of the very top firms in prestige and profitability.  Partners at such firms earn another order of magnitude above the associates.  The American Lawyer keeps its most recent law firm profitability figures behind a pay wall, but here is a list at Wikipedia from 2012.  Annual profits per partner at Cravath were $3.435 million.  Rogers Sr. was a partner there for about 30 years, which means that he likely has a net worth in the range of $25 - 50 million, and potentially even more.  Then there were the pictures of the younger Rogers competing in sailing regattas with his dad.  This picture from the Post has Jamie on the left out sailing, and Carlina on the right:

Yes, your tax dollars are subsidizing the rent of these people -- because they have declared themselves to be "poor."  According to this article, their current Section 8-subsidized rent is about $1600 per month, as against a market rent for the apartment of $2775.  You pay the difference.  

You might think that at this point Rogers and Rivera would have been overcome with shame and gone off and crawled in a hole somewhere.  Of course not!  Instead, they immediately doubled down.  They went out and did interviews with the local newspaper, The Villager, which appeared immediately after the election on September 14.    The headline summarizes their defiant attitude:  "We Qualify". 

In separate interviews with The Villager, Rivera and Rogers both said that it’s perfectly legal for them to live in the apartment and that their incomes were fully vetted under the requirements of the Section 8 program.

Read the full article and you find out how this works.  It basically goes back to the central deception of the poverty scam, which is the delusional presumption that a family's arbitrarily-defined "income" in any one given year inexorably reveals its permanent status in an immutably fixed social class structure.  In this case Rogers managed to engineer his "income" for one year down close to zero, and used that snapshot to qualify for a Section 8 handout for life.  Essentially, he had opened a mini-chain of coffee shops, a couple of which were not performing.  So he closed those two and took the write-off in a single year in order to offset the income from the others.  Then he and Carlina had their "income" for that year "vetted" by the friendly cronies in the housing bureaucracy.  Voila!  A housing subsidy for life for a couple that by any realistic measure is well into the top 0.1%!

(But wait, you ask -- Didn't the Manhattan Contrarian also artificially engineer his income for one year down to about zero?  Yes!  However, I did not have the gall to use that result to claim subsidized housing for life.)

Well, once Rivera claims her Council seat on January 1, Rogers and Rivera will have a much higher income that will make the Section 8 voucher far less valuable, and indeed they claim they will relinquish it.  But thanks to them for shedding a little light in on how the political insiders game the housing giveaway system.  And they are far from alone among the political class in corruptly claiming for themselves the benefits of housing giveaways intended for the disadvantaged.  Other examples:

• Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito is a crazed hard leftist who comes out of a privileged upbringing (her dad was a hospital executive) in Puerto Rico.  She lives in a townhouse in East Harlem that was built with city subsidies in the 90s.  According to this Wikipedia article, she acquired the property with a "taxpayer subsidized loan."  The zillow.com website contains no valuation or transaction history for her property at 211 East 111th Street (I wonder why -- politician's privilege?), but does have information for the comparable property next door (209 East 111th Street).  The latter property was initially bought in 1999 for $349,500, and has a current estimated value of $2.72 million.
• Then there's my long-time State Senator (recently retired), Tom Duane.  While he was a State Senator he managed to get himself a spot in the Penn South complex in the West 20s.  This is something we call here in New York a "limited equity co-op."  I won't go into the details, but again, these things are deeply subsidized by the taxpayers.  At the time Duane was admitted to Penn South, two bedroom apartments went for completely artificial prices in the range of about $18,000.  Today the market value of such an apartment would be in the range of at least $1 million to $2 million or more. 

Hey, they're politicians.  Of course they know how to work the system to their own advantage!  I have no way of knowing how many of our other politicians have managed to do something similar.

So, do you still think that "affordable housing" initiatives are going to be getting us any closer to the world of perfect justice and fairness any time soon?

Trump Administration Takes First Baby Steps Pushing Back Against The Dependency State

Every time you start thinking that Trump leaves something to be desired as President, just keep in mind that the alternative was Hillary.

Consider one of the little-mentioned areas of distinction:  the dependency state.  The left in general, and Obama in particular, think that every dollar handed out by the government is a big positive in the world.  We're "helping struggling families," or something like that.  It seemingly never has occurred to them that increasing dependency on government handouts has any down side.  Without doubt Hillary as President would have brought more and yet more of same.

Consider the trajectory of food stamp recipients during Obama's tenure.  Here is a chart of recipients by year (source):

Obama's first term was supposedly a time of recovery from a deep recession, but in sharp contrast to previous recoveries, the number of food stamp recipients went up instead of down, and by dramatic amounts.  The number of recipients shot up from about 28 million in 2008 to some 47.6 million in 2013, and then despite continuing economic improvement declined only marginally thereafter, ending when Trump took office at about 44.2 million, some 16 million higher than the pre-Obama record level.  What was going on?  If you remember my post from back on April 25, 2013, it turned out that the government had hired an army of "food stamp recruiters" to get every possible person onto the handouts, and in addition (with Congressional support) had waived work requirements and asset restrictions on eligibility.  (My post was in part based on a series in the Washington Post by Eli Saslow, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize.)

And food stamps were far from the only example of the Obama administration actively seeking to increase and maximize dependency.  The other obvious big example was Obamacare, where the program launch brought a truly enormous federal marketing effort to attract more and yet more people onto subsidized "healthcare."  Back in 2013 the AP identified at least $684 million budgeted by governments at all levels, mostly federal, to advertise and promote enrollment in Obamacare.  Yet another area of dependency is social security disability, which went from 9.2 million beneficiaries just prior to Obama taking office in 2008 to 10.6 million in 2016.  Once on social security disability, almost nobody ever gets off.

It seems that the Trump administration is actually taking an intentionally different course on the issue of dependency.  First, Trump's budget outline that came out back in May proposed that the food stamp budget would be cut by some 29% over 10 years.  OK, but that was only a projection, and based more on assumptions of an improving economy than on specific changes in policy.  Then, in August, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that they would reduce the Obamacare advertising budget from about $100 million in the current year to only $10 million in the coming year.  This time it's a real one-year change in policy by the administration itself.  This is starting to sound like something.

And here's another item that you may have missed.  On August 1, according to the National Law Journal, Trump nominated a wounded Iraq vet named Daniel Gade to the EEOC.  One of EEOC's missions is assisting military veterans who have claims for discrimination or disability.  But Gade, according to the NLJ,  is actually a guy who has been a leader in criticizing disability pay for wounded vets:

Gade has been an outspoken critic of disability pay for wounded veterans, traveling the country in recent years making speeches and giving interviews about his views that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs should move away giving disability checks to wounded soldiers. He was twice wounded during service in Iraq, which led to the loss of his right leg. He spent six months in hospital and six months as an outpatient when he had 40 surgeries.

He has warned about misguided efforts to help veterans with government assistance. . . .  “People who stay home because they are getting paid enough to get by on disability are worse off,” Gade told The New York Times in 2015. “They are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. They are more likely to live alone. You’ve seen these guys. And the system is driving you to become one of them, if you are not careful.”

Well, that's about a 180 degree change from how the Obamanites approached this subject.  But an administration that actually works on this issue could probably reduce overall dependency by as much as 25% in one four-year term.  And the effect on the "poverty" rate could be dramatic, since nearly everyone who gets removed from dependency and gets work thereby exits from "poverty."             

How To Deal With Equifax

This is not a financial advice website.  However, with the big Equifax data breach, there are all kinds of bad advice out there on what to do.  In my case, I sent them a letter today.  By snail mail, return receipt requested.  I thought that some readers might find the letter useful, so I have copied the text into this post below.

The situation in the U.S. with the so-called "credit bureaus" (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion) is really quite bizarre.  They obtain information that you provide in strict confidence to your bank or credit card company, supposedly for purposes of credit reporting, which is a valuable function.  But the actual credit reporting function is mostly done by barter or something close to it (bank reports customer payment history and in turn gets access to full credit reports), so how to turn yourself into a multi-billion dollar infotech powerhouse?  (Equifax and Experian both have reported market caps in the range of $14 billion; TransUnion is a private company, but clearly it made recent ex-Commerce Secretary and Obama Campaign Finance Chair Penny Pritzker very wealthy.)  It's easy!  Take the personal data obtained from consumers in strict confidence and re-sell it to thousands of customers without the consumers' permission.  And since the credit bureaus have no direct relationship with the consumer, they don't have nearly the incentive of your bank or credit card company to safeguard the information they hold and then sell.  What are you going to do, fire them?  Thus, one big hack after another.  (Experian last had a big breach in 2015.  ChoicePoint -- a major customer of the credit bureaus -- had big breaches in 2004 and 2008.  And so forth.)  How our genius so-called "regulators" have allowed this situation to develop is a story that is too long for this post.  But here we are.    

You are welcome to use all of my letter for yourself, or as much as suits your circumstances.  Clearly, it is not likely that you froze your credit with Equifax as I did back in 2009.  But go ahead and demand the credit freeze for yourself today!  (And while you're at it, do the same with Experian and TransUnion.)    

Here are a few of the principles that inform this letter:

• Give them the absolute minimum amount of information that they will need to identify you as a unique individual.  (In my case my name is very close to unique, so this is not difficult.)  Every piece of information you give them about yourself is very valuable to them, because their main business is to package information about you and others and sell it without your permission.  Just like your contacts list in Outlook, their database is full of inaccuracies and anomalies.  Everything you give them, whether it be a current telephone number, a date of birth, an employer, or whatever, will be added to their database and sold and/or hacked to the world.
• Under no circumstances give them your social security number.  Their data base has literally millions of social security number "anomalies," and they would dearly love you to help them clean it up so they can sell your information for a higher price to their customers without your permission.  And if you should ever give it to them, and then try to object to their use of it for their own profit, their response will be, "he gave it to us without imposing restrictions and knowing that we re-sell it."  Meanwhile, if you try to have any dealings with them by website, you will not be allowed to proceed without inputting your social security number.  That's why you need to send a letter.  I can state that I have obtained both credit reports and credit freezes from all three credit bureaus without ever providing my SSN.  In some cases it took considerable persistence, but right now Equifax is not in a very good position to argue about this, so go for it.
• Their claimed basis for demanding social security number is to "identify" you.  I have never understood how exactly name plus SSN constitutes good "identification" when they sell that information to thousands of customers.  But that's why I offer to show up in person with my passport.  What's their answer to that?  (Fortunately, Equifax has an office in Manhattan.)
• Everybody should demand a license for use of their data for any purpose other than credit reporting with your explicit consent.  The license would include a provision for a fee, a limitation on permitted uses, and a liquidated damages provision in case of use for non-permitted purposes and/or a hack.  Of course they won't agree to this, but really, people should start being aware of what's going on and demanding decent treatment.
• They also won't agree to deleting the bulk of your "credit header."  That's not a reason not to demand it.

With that, here's the text of the letter:

Francis J. Menton

[Address]

www.manhattancontrarian.com

 U.S. mail return receipt requested

September 12, 2017

Equifax Credit Information Services, Inc.

P.O. Box 740241

Atlanta, GA 30374

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am writing you at this time because of the recent data breach experienced by your company.   I am corresponding by letter because your online resources for dealing with this matter all require that I input my social security number or some portion of it.  I have never provided you with my social security number and I will not do so now.  Obviously, you cannot be trusted with it.

Here are my requests/demands:

·      Kindly inform me if I have been a subject/victim of the data breach, and if so what pieces of my information have been disclosed and to whom.

·      I would like to sign up for the free year of credit monitoring that you are offering to all who are subject/victims of the breach.  This service must be made available to me in a manner that does not require me to provide any information about myself other than as contained in my letterhead above.  For any other information about me, you will have to pay a fee and sign a license agreement as to use of the information, which will contain a provision for liquidated damages.  Kindly advise if you would like to pursue this option, and I will provide a fee schedule and license agreement.

·      As you know, I have had a credit freeze in place with Equifax since January 2009.  Kindly advise if my PIN number for this credit freeze has been compromised by the recent data breach.  If you are anything less than 100% confident that the PIN number has not been breached, I will obviously need a new PIN number.  Therefore, either advise that you are absolutely 100% confident that the PIN number has not been breached, or provide me with a new PIN number.

·      Kindly delete from your databases all so-called “credit header” information about me other than the information in the letterhead of this letter.  This includes, but is not limited to, my social security number or taxpayer ID number (if you have such), any and all prior addresses, current or prior telephone numbers, my date of birth, and any employment information.

If you feel that you need to do more in order to verify my identity, I would be glad to meet in person with one of your representatives.  I could bring my passport and/or driver’s license, and/or New York State attorney identification card to such a meeting.  Although I will be glad to show these documents to your representative to verify my identity, I will not permit you to make copies of same, nor to make a record of any information or numbers on such documents, without payment of a license fee and signing of a license agreement with a liquidated damages provision, as indicated above.

The best way to communicate with me is by hard copy mail to the address above.  Alternatively, you may respond by email via my website address above.

Very truly yours,

Francis J. Menton

Does Anyone Actually Believe That "Climate Change" Has A Role In Hurricanes?

In my long-time business of commercial litigation, engaging in obvious exaggeration and hyperbole, not to mention disprovable falsity, was the surest way to discredit yourself in the eyes of the judge and jury.  Even one instance of such, and your credibility would decline noticeably.  Keep it up and it would only get worse and worse.  

Meanwhile, over in the field of "climate communication," the conventional wisdom seems to be completely the opposite:  Our job is to scare the bejeezus out of people, and we will say whatever it takes, no matter how obviously exaggerated or even false.  Well OK guys, if you think this works, go ahead and keep trying it.

I won't bore you with too big a round-up of alarmists trying to blame the destruction from Harvey and Irma on "climate change."  You well know that there are hundreds of examples to choose from.  But here is a small sample:

Los Angeles Times, August 30 editorial, "Harvey should be a warning to Trump that climate change is a global threat":

[W]arming . . . certainly makes such storms [as Harvey] stronger, more unpredictable and  quicker to intensify. Experts . . . say that warmer air temperatures mean more evaporation of moisture from the seas to the skies, and thus more rainfall from storms. Warmer seas — including the Gulf of Mexico — intensify storms, from their size to their wind speeds, and amplify storm surges.

Or try this one from the same LA Times on September 10, "Fires, droughts and hurricanes: What's the link between climate change and natural disasters?":

GET READY FOR RAIN. Climate change can influence hurricanes in a number of ways — for example, in the amount of rainfall they drop. As the planet warms, the atmosphere can hold more moisture. So when it rains, it really pours.

And then from the exact same article:

RAIN-BLOCKING: On top of that, climate change might mean that subtropical high pressure systems are likely to get stronger and larger. Those systems keep moist air from traveling upward in the atmosphere, where it can condense and eventually fall to the earth as rain or snow. By gaining in size and strength, those systems may become even more effective at blocking precipitation.

So "climate change" both causes more rainfall and also blocks rainfall!  Scary!  

From New York Magazine (David Wallace-Wells), August 28, "The Specter of Climate Change Hangs Over Hurricane Harvey":

Was Hurricane Harvey the result of climate change?  . . .  As journalist Robinson Meyer, at The Atlantic, and climate scientist Michael Mann, on Facebook, have explained very clearly and very helpfully, global warming has meant more moisture in the air, which intensifies rainfall and flooding, and significant sea-level rise, which leads to bigger and more invasive storm surges — these elements, along with lesser anthropogenic factors, account for as much as 30 percent of the deluge, according to one scientist Meyer spoke with.

And for today's award winner in the category of Say-Absolutely-Anything-To-Advance-The-Cause, we have Emily Atkin from September 7 in The New Republic, "This Weather Is Not Normal. And It Will Only Get Worse."

How many more lives must be destroyed by historic hurricanes, floods, and wildfires before the government admits that climate change is a problem?

[T]here was no avoiding the mass devastation [from Harvey]. Homes were destroyed. At least 60 people died. The flooding has not even fully receded, and now forecasters are tracking another frightening storm that they don’t quite have the language for. . . .  Irma is threatening carnage worse than Harvey, having alreadywreaked havoc in the Caribbean as it barrels toward the mainland U.S., where both Florida and South Carolina have declared states of emergency. . . .  Climate scientists have been warning us for years about this very scenario. “We have extensive scientific evidence that extreme events are increasing around the world, and will continue to increase as climate change gets worse,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of earth system science at Stanford University. “We see global-scale temperature increases. Global sea level is rising. The amount of heat and atmosphere and ocean is increasing. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is increasing. What we’re seeing as a result of those changes is an increase in not only the mean, but the tails of destructive weather events.”

Are you scared yet?

So then, which of these articles (or of the dozens of others parroting similar talking points that you have undoubtedly read in the last few days) acknowledges or deals with the extraordinary 12 year hiatus of major (cat 3, 4 or 5) hurricanes making landfall in the U.S. immediately prior to Harvey and Irma?  None of them.  Which of them acknowledges or deals with the ongoing long-term decline in the number of landfalling hurricanes in the U.S.?  None of them.  

Or consider this chart from actual hurricane expert Philip Klotzbach of the most powerful hurricane landfalls in the U.S. since the late 1800s:

If Harvey and Irma are supposedly evidence that "climate change" makes for more intense and dangerous storms, how is it that here, deep into the human-produced CO2 era, Irma still ranks only 7th in intensity and Harvey 18th?  How is it that the very most intense storm, both by windspeed and pressure, was back in 1935 -- before any significant amount of human CO2 emissions?  If your hypothesis were right, shouldn't we be smashing these records by large margins every year?

And how is it that 12 of these most powerful storms are found in the 60 pre-human CO2 years of 1898 to 1957, but only 9 in the 60 post-human CO2 years of 1958-2017?

Again, which of these articles actually acknowledges or deals with any of this obvious adverse evidence?  None of them.

Too bad that we never get a chance to cross-examine any of these people.  Meanwhile, does anybody really believe that "climate change" has anything to do with hurricane frequency or intensity?  On what basis?

All The Federal "Privacy" Regulations Are Worse Than Useless

By now you've probably heard of the big data breach at credit reporting agency Equifax.  It apparently occurred back in July, but the details are only now coming out.  Numbers in the range of 143 million have been mentioned for how many consumers have been subjected to compromise of their personal data, including their name, addresses, date of birth, and social security number (aka your "personal information").  The combination of these things in association with each other is what enables the opening of a credit account in your name.

When comparably large data breaches occurred a couple of years ago at Yahoo and Target, you knew you were at risk if you did business with those companies; and if you did, you could rightfully blame yourself.  But, you say, you've never had any dealings of any kind with Equifax.  Therefore, your information cannot possibly be at risk.  Wrong.  Pretty much every bank, credit card company, mortgage lender, car finance company, or credit provider of any type shares your personal information with Equifax.  Without your permission.  Indeed, even over your specific objection.

The New York Times today has no fewer than three big articles on the Equifax breach, one on page A1, and two more on the front page of the Business Section.  The article on page A1 is headlined (in the online version) "Equifax Hack Exposes Regulatory Gaps, Leaving Consumers Vulnerable."  The theme, you will not be surprised to learn, is that the problem was caused by insufficient government regulation:

Despite the wealth of sensitive information in its databases, Equifax, in essence, falls through the regulatory cracks.  The dangers of such lax oversight became apparent on Thursday when Equifax disclosed that hackers had compromised the personal and confidential information, including Social Security numbers, of nearly half of the American population.

"Falls through the regulatory cracks"?  "Lax oversight?"  Funny, but as far as I've been able to observe over the past multiple decades, the credit reporting business has been the subject of one big federal statutory and/or regulatory initiative after another.  First there was the Consumer Credit Protection Act of 1968, followed quickly by the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970, which has subsequently been amended several times.  The FCRA gave regulatory jurisdiction to the Federal Trade Commission, which has issued multiple rounds of regulations.  Then there was a big statutory addition made by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, followed by additional rounds of regulations from the FTC.  The Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 added yet more statutory provisions, and brought in another regulator, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with its own rounds of regulations.  Are you now telling us that all these layers and layers of statutes and regulations have given us nothing but a bunch of "cracks" for our information to slip through right into the hands of the bad guys?

The problem, of course, is that all the rounds of statutes and regulations have been completely incompetent.  The chance that the next round will be any less incompetent is approximately zero.  With so many regulations the details have become mind-numbingly complex, but the bottom line is that you have no ability whatsoever to limit access to your information only to the people and companies of your choice.  Nor can you find out any comprehensive list of who has access to your personal information or what they are doing with it.

The statute most specifically focused on the privacy of your personal information was Gramm-Leach-Bliley (GLBA).  Here is a summary of the GLBA privacy provisions from the Electronic Privacy Information Center.  GLBA is the source of the requirement for all those "privacy notices" that you get regularly from your banks and credit card companies and insurers.  Have you ever read one of them?  I'll bet the answer is no.  And you are right not to.  They all start out saying that "you have options," but then seem to exempt from the opt outs anything of any significance.  Somewhere in every one of them it will say either that we use your information to "manage our business" or "as permitted by law" or some other empty phrase that lets them do whatever they please without giving any specifics.  As an example (and not meaning to pick on them specifically) here is the relevant part of the Citibank privacy statement currently available at their website:

Citi uses the information we collect about and from you to provide services, to manage our business and to offer an enhanced, personalized online experience on our site and third-party websites.

The information we collect allows us to:

• Recognize you when you return to our site so we can personalize your experience
• Process applications and transactions
• Respond to your requests
• Recognize and provide you account related benefits and information on our sites.
• Provide you more relevant product and service offers on our sites and in other advertising

We may also use personal information we have about you such as your email or postal address to deliver advertising to you directly or on third party websites.

Try reading that a few times and see if you can figure out where they tell you that they give your personal information to Equifax (and for that matter Experian and TransUnion).  Or where they tell you that Equifax, Experian and TransUnion in turn sell your personal information to data aggregators and brokers who then sell it to all kinds of other people and entities for all kinds of other unspecified purposes, like:

• Governments at all levels for whatever they feel like doing with it, including snooping on you behind your back without a warrant.
• Private investigators for whatever they do with it.
• Law firms (my old law firm subscribed to one of these services).
• Others?  I've demanded a complete list from my bank, from each of the three credit bureaus, from some of the data aggregators (like ChoicePoint) and others.  None will respond.

Here's another page from EPIC, this time about ChoicePoint.  Haven't heard of them?  Here's an example of what they sell:

ChoicePoint sells a wide array of information to the government, including:  Credit headers, a list of identifying information that appears at the top of a credit report. This information includes name, spouse's name, address, previous address, phone number, Social Security number, and employer.

Wait, where did they get that information to sell?  You guessed it.  If you think that a big piece of the holes in the GLBA are to enable the government to circumvent the pesky Fourth Amendment requirements for court-approved warrants if they want to investigate you, you are now starting to catch on.  Enabling you to protect yourself against fraud is not one of their priorities.

By the way, ChoicePoint had a big data breach in 2004, and then another one in 2008.  

So is there anything you can actually do to protect yourself against misuse of your personal information?  Yes:  put a "freeze" on your credit.  If you haven't done it yet, you should do it promptly, with each of the three credit bureaus.  But don't do it online.  Try to do it online, and they will of course demand your social security number in order to proceed.  Don't give it to them.  They will promptly re-sell it.  Write them a letter.  It's some work, but it can be done. 

The New York Mayoral Election

It's hard to believe that it has been almost four years since hard leftist Bill de Blasio was elected Mayor of New York City; so the next election is rapidly approaching.  (We hold our elections for City offices in these bizarre odd off-years.)  Indeed, there are Democratic and Republican primary elections next week, September 12.  Of course, Mayor de Blasio is running for re-election.

You will be shocked to learn that yesterday the New York Times endorsed de Blasio in the primary.  They used the occasion to take a swipe at those who had predicted disaster from having a socialist ideologue in Gracie Mansion:

When Bill de Blasio took office in 2014 as the most left-wing mayor in New York’s modern history, skeptics forecast disaster. In the post-Giuliani and post-Bloomberg era, they predicted, the city would roll back to the chaotic 1970s, when crime rates soared, garbage piled high in the streets, corporations fled to leafier environs and municipal bankruptcy loomed. 

And then they proceeded to gloat with a round of "I told you so":

None of those dire warnings became reality. New York remains, on the whole, well run. Crime has continued its remarkable decline. Garbage is collected as efficiently as ever. The local economy is humming, and municipal finances are sound, with steady budget surpluses. Most unions representing city workers are content.

Well, I can't speak for all of the "skeptics" they are referring to, but here at the Manhattan Contrarian we certainly did not predict immediate disaster.  That's not how socialist death spirals work.  From my post on November 4, 2013, the day before the last election:

The good news is that even the worst left-wing policies do not lead to immediate economic collapse, but rather to slow gradual decline.  It took decades of Rockefeller/Wagner/Lindsay overtaxing and overspending before New York City lost 10% of its population in the 1970s, and that one proved possible to correct.  Still, you would think we had learned those lessons.

Or, from my post of June 16, 2016:

[I]ncreased government spending and tightening government control of an economy in the "socialist" model reverses the positive incentives of the private ownership/free exchange model (aka "capitalism"), undermines the dynamic of economic growth, and causes a gradual but then accelerating decline of the real economy.

At Pravda, of course, they have never made the effort to observe the real world and see that this is how it works.  Anyway, as mere Mayor of New York City, de Blasio has not been in a position to put in place the true socialist agenda that he would like.  New York Magazine has a remarkable interview with de Blasio on September 4 that reveals a small piece of where de Blasio would like to take us if only he could:

[Q]  In 2013, you ran on reducing income inequality. Where has it been hardest to make progress? Wages, housing, schools?
[A]  What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development. . . .  Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents. That’s a world I’d love to see. . . .  It’s not reachable right now. And it leaves this friction, and this anger, which is visceral.

So, lacking the legal ability to impose the Venezuelan model upon us, what have we gotten from de Blasio?  A few of the highlights:

• He has repeatedly proposed increasing city income tax rates on top earners.  But that requires approval from the state legislature, where the Senate is controlled by the Republicans.  So these proposals have gone nowhere.
• Three issues have been repeatedly identified by the Manhattan Contrarian as the most important issues for a New York City mayor to address:  (1) overspending on K-12 education (roughly double the national norm per pupil); (2) overspending on Medicaid (again, close to double the national norm per beneficiary); (3) and wildly overgenerous and under-funded defined benefit pension promises for the workforce.  De Blasio has done nothing whatsoever to address or make progress on any of these issues.
• As you might expect, the City budget and employee headcount have exploded on some kind of auto-pilot during de Blasio's mayoralty.  Nicole Gelinas reports in the New York Post on August 27 that the budget has increased some 14.6% in inflation adjusted dollars (from $76.2 billion to $87.3 billion) since de Blasio took office.  And, from the New York Times, October 16, 2016: "New York City is undergoing a rare explosion in city government: More people now work for the city — 287,002 full-time employees as of July — than at any other point in its modern history, with thousands more scheduled to join them."  Nobody knows what these people do, or can notice any difference in increased or improved services from the hiring binge.
• We got universal pre-K!  Great!  Of course, before de Blasio, the City already provided free pre-K for poor people.  So this was for the non-poor.  Oh, and also for the teachers union -- the largest contributor to de Blasio's campaigns -- which got a few thousand new dues-paying members.  The budget impact was about 1% of the City budget, mostly funded by the State.
• "Income inequality" was de Blasio's signature issue.  Has it gotten worse or better during his tenure?  Worse of course, according to a Manhattan Institute study in December 2016.   ("Income inequality has actually gone up in New York City since Mayor de Blasio took office vowing to tackle the problem, according to a new report by the Manhattan Institute.")  Was there ever a chance that pre-K education -- or any other de Blasio initiative -- would have a noticeable positive effect on income inequality in less than about 25 years (if ever)?
• Spending on the homeless has about doubled (still only about 2% of the budget).  The number of homeless has of course gone up.  Has any government program ever improved (let alone cured) the problem that it supposedly was set up to address?

To de Blasio's credit, he has not significantly restrained policing, and crime has continued to fall.

Look around, and things definitely appear to be doing remarkably well.  If you want my opinion, that comes from a combination of (1) de Blasio not being able to implement the most destructive policies that he would like to implement, such as much higher taxes and abolition of private property, and (2) the destructive effect of higher spending and more wasteful programs being relatively minor and slow moving so far.  Some day, probably when the stock market inevitably takes a big hit, the pension expense will suddenly soar and the extra employees will become unaffordable.  Most likely, that will not occur until long after de Blasio has left office.

Meanwhile, de Blasio has an energetic if long-shot Republican opponent named Nicole Malliotakis.  If you would like to contribute to her campaign, you can go to this site.