Daily Archives: 14 August 2015

Gotta Regulate

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Senator Elizabeth Warren has discovered a bit of financial activity that she can’t regulate, and she wants to regulate it.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) on Monday sent letters to six financial regulators saying she is troubled that the big banks and other financial firms backing Symphony Communications Services LLC may use the new tool to skirt regulatory and legal requirements, as well as escape enforcement action by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other regulators.

Symphony’s sin? Their words on their publicly accessible Web page.

Symphony is designed to meet the cyber-security and compliance needs of financial firms.

They also tout their ability to guard against government spying.

Never mind that Symphony also says,

The use of Symphony does not change regulators’ ability to obtain messages from our clients. Symphony delivers messages to its clients to download, decrypt, and archive, and they are able to provide those messages to regulators just as they would with other compliant messaging systems.

Symphony is plainly acknowledging that message handling is the sole responsibility of the correspondents, and not at all that of the pipeline.

Senator Warren (and FBI Director James Comey) are prime examples of the need of private citizens and our enterprises for protection from government spying—even domestic spying. They’re already having some success, too, in browbeating Symphony:

Symphony’s current website doesn’t appear to contain the language Ms Warren raises in her letter.

What’s in that message? Inquiring Progressive minds want to know.

Democrat Disingenuosity

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An example is provided by a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

President Obama says that critics of his plan to decarbonize the economy are “the special interests and their allies in Congress” repeating “the same stale arguments” about “killing jobs and businesses and freedom.” He adds that “even more cynical, we’ve got critics of this plan who are actually claiming that this will harm minority and low-income communities.”

His EPA, though, has let the cat out of the bag in its Clean Power Plot Plan:

The EPA authors are careful to reiterate that “its benefits will greatly exceed its costs.” (Sure.) But then they ever so gingerly observe that “it is also important to ensure that to the extent there are increases in electricity costs, that those do not fall disproportionately on those least able to afford them.”

The actual cynicism is in the Democratic Party’s assumption that Americans are so stupid we won’t see, or won’t care about, this naked redistribution plan. On the other hand, Obama’s EPA did very carefully bury the plan 1,500 pages in to its 1,560-page Plan.