position:chairwoman

Bad loans were killing the taxi industry long before Uber and Lyft: report
▻https://nypost.com/2019/05/19/bad-loans-were-killing-the-taxi-industry-long-before-uber-and-lyft-report
▻https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/taxi-medallions-loans.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200

The financial woes of the city taxi market may not be entirely the fault of ride-hailing companies — the industry was a house of cards waiting to collapse, a report says.

An investigation by the New York Times Sunday put the blame on industry leaders who artificially inflated taxi medallions costs fivefold over 12 years and created a massively profitable loan market built on questionable lending practices similar to those at the center of the housing crash.

In 2013, a taxi medallion fetched $1.3 million, but by last year, the market had plunged and medallions were selling for less than $250,000.

While much of the decline in value can be attributed to the flood of Uber and Lyft drivers, the report says exploitative loans, hundreds of which were interest-only, strapped drivers, often immigrants and unclear on the terms, with hefty monthly costs.

The report says some loan costs became so steep, there weren’t enough hours in a week to drive to make a profit and eventually, all of their monthly fares went to pay the loans.

When the market bottomed out in 2014, the head of the Progressive Credit Union, Robert Familan, made nearly $35 million from his medallion loan non-profit company.

Employees were encouraged to give out shaky loans with bonuses and trips, the report says.

The lenders denied any wrongdoing and the former chairwoman of the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission said it wasn’t the commission’s job to regulate the lending, the report says.

But Meera Joshi did tell the paper “lots of people just watched it happen.”

#USA #New_York #Taxi #Betrug #Ausbeutung

As Thousands of Taxi Drivers Were Trapped in Loans, Top Officials Counted the Money - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/nyregion/taxi-medallions.html

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[Read Part 1 of The Times’s investigation: How Reckless Loans Devastated a Generation of Taxi Drivers]

At a cramped desk on the 22nd floor of a downtown Manhattan office building, Gary Roth spotted a looming disaster.

An urban planner with two master’s degrees, Mr. Roth had a new job in 2010 analyzing taxi policy for the New York City government. But almost immediately, he noticed something disturbing: The price of a taxi medallion — the permit that lets a driver own a cab — had soared to nearly $700,000 from $200,000. In order to buy medallions, drivers were taking out loans they could not afford.

Mr. Roth compiled his concerns in a report, and he and several colleagues warned that if the city did not take action, the loans would become unsustainable and the market could collapse.

They were not the only ones worried about taxi medallions. In Albany, state inspectors gave a presentation to top officials showing that medallion owners were not making enough money to support their loans. And in Washington, D.C., federal examiners repeatedly noted that banks were increasing profits by steering cabbies into risky loans.

They were all ignored.

Medallion prices rose above $1 million before crashing in late 2014, wiping out the futures of thousands of immigrant drivers and creating a crisis that has continued to ravage the industry today. Despite years of warning signs, at least seven government agencies did little to stop the collapse, The New York Times found.

Instead, eager to profit off medallions or blinded by the taxi industry’s political connections, the agencies that were supposed to police the industry helped a small group of bankers and brokers to reshape it into their own moneymaking machine, according to internal records and interviews with more than 50 former government employees.

For more than a decade, the agencies reduced oversight of the taxi trade, exempted it from regulations, subsidized its operations and promoted its practices, records and interviews showed.

Their actions turned one of the best-known symbols of New York — its signature yellow cabs — into a financial trap for thousands of immigrant drivers. More than 950 have filed for bankruptcy, according to a Times analysis of court records, and many more struggle to stay afloat.

Remember the ‘10,000 Hours’ Rule for Success? Forget About It
“Nobody wanted to upset the industry,” said David Klahr, who from 2007 to 2016 held several management posts at the Taxi and Limousine Commission, the city agency that oversees cabs. “Nobody wanted to kill the golden goose.”

New York City in particular failed the taxi industry, The Times found. Two former mayors, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Michael R. Bloomberg, placed political allies inside the Taxi and Limousine Commission and directed it to sell medallions to help them balance budgets and fund priorities. Mayor Bill de Blasio continued the policies.

Under Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. de Blasio, the city made more than $855 million by selling taxi medallions and collecting taxes on private sales, according to the city.

But during that period, much like in the mortgage lending crisis, a group of industry leaders enriched themselves by artificially inflating medallion prices. They encouraged medallion buyers to borrow as much as possible and ensnared them in interest-only loans and other one-sided deals that often required them to pay hefty fees, forfeit their legal rights and give up most of their monthly incomes.

When the medallion market collapsed, the government largely abandoned the drivers who bore the brunt of the crisis. Officials did not bail out borrowers or persuade banks to soften loan terms.

“They sell us medallions, and they knew it wasn’t worth price. They knew,” said Wael Ghobrayal, 42, an Egyptian immigrant who bought a medallion at a city auction for $890,000 and now cannot make his loan payments and support his three children.

“They lost nothing. I lost everything,” he said.

The Times conducted hundreds of interviews, reviewed thousands of records and built several databases to unravel the story of the downfall of the taxi industry in New York and across the United States. The investigation unearthed a collapse that was years in the making, aided almost as much by regulators as by taxi tycoons.

Publicly, government officials have blamed the crisis on competition from ride-hailing firms such as Uber and Lyft.

In interviews with The Times, they blamed each other.

The officials who ran the city Taxi and Limousine Commission in the run-up to the crash said it was the job of bank examiners, not the commission, to control lending practices.

The New York Department of Financial Services said that while it supervised some of the banks involved in the taxi industry, it deferred to federal inspectors in many cases.

The federal agency that oversaw many of the largest lenders in the industry, the National Credit Union Administration, said those lenders were meeting the needs of borrowers.

The N.C.U.A. released a March 2019 internal audit that scolded its regulators for not aggressively enforcing rules in medallion lending. But even that audit partially absolved the government. The lenders, it said, all had boards of directors that were supposed to prevent reckless practices.

And several officials criticized Congress, which two decades ago excepted credit unions in the taxi industry from some rules that applied to other credit unions. After that, the officials said, government agencies had to treat those lenders differently.

Ultimately, former employees said, the regulatory system was set up to ensure that lenders were financially stable, and medallions were sold. But almost nothing protected the drivers.

Matthew W. Daus, far right, at a hearing of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission in 2004. CreditMarilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Matthew W. Daus was an unconventional choice to regulate New York’s taxi industry. He was a lawyer from Brooklyn and a leader of a political club that backed Mr. Giuliani for mayor.

The Giuliani administration hired him as a lawyer for the Taxi and Limousine Commission before appointing him chairman in 2001, a leadership post he kept after Mr. Bloomberg became mayor in 2002.

The commission oversaw the drivers and fleets that owned the medallions for the city’s 12,000 cabs. It licensed all participants and decided what cabs could charge, where they could go and which type of vehicle they could use.

And under Mr. Bloomberg, it also began selling 1,000 new medallions.

At the time, the mayor said the growing city needed more yellow cabs. But he also was eager for revenue. He had a $3.8 billion hole in his budget.

The sales put the taxi commission in an unusual position.

It had a long history of being entangled with the industry. Its first chairman, appointed in 1971, was convicted of a bribery scheme involving an industry lobbyist. Four other leaders since then had worked in the business.

It often sent staffers to conferences where companies involved in the taxi business paid for liquor, meals and tickets to shows, and at least one past member of its board had run for office in a campaign financed by the industry.

Still, the agency had never been asked to generate so much money from the business it was supposed to be regulating.

Former staffers said officials chose to sell medallions with the method they thought would bring in the most revenue: a series of limited auctions that required participants to submit sealed bids above ever-increasing minimums.

Ahead of the sales, the city placed ads on television and radio, and in newspapers and newsletters, and held seminars promoting the “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

“Medallions have a long history as a solid investment with steady growth,” Mr. Daus wrote in one newsletter. In addition to guaranteed employment, he wrote, “a medallion is collateral that can assist in home financing, college tuition or even ‘worry-free’ retirement.”

At the first auctions under Mr. Bloomberg in 2004, bids topped $300,000, surprising experts.

Some former staffers said in interviews they believed the ad campaign inappropriately inflated prices by implying medallions would make buyers rich, no matter the cost. Seven said they complained.

The city eventually added a disclaimer to ads, saying past performance did not guarantee future results. But it kept advertising.

During the same period, the city also posted information on its website that said that medallion prices were, on average, 13 percent higher than they really were, according to a Times data analysis.

In several interviews, Mr. Daus defended the ad campaigns, saying they reached people who had been unable to break into the tight market. The ads were true at the time, he said. He added he had never heard internal complaints about the ads.

In all, the city held 16 auctions between 2004 and 2014.

“People don’t realize how organized it is,” Andrew Murstein, president of Medallion Financial, a lender to medallion buyers, said in a 2011 interview with Tearsheet Podcast. “The City of New York, more or less, is our partner because they want to see prices go as high as possible.”

Help from a federal agency

New York City made more than $855 million from taxi medallion sales under Mayor Bill de Blasio and his predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg.

For decades, a niche banking system had grown up around the taxi industry, and at its center were about half a dozen nonprofit credit unions that specialized in medallion loans. But as the auctions continued, the families that ran the credit unions began to grow frustrated.

Around them, they saw other lenders making money by issuing loans that they could not because of the rules governing credit unions. They recognized a business opportunity, and they wanted in.

They found a receptive audience at the National Credit Union Administration.

The N.C.U.A. was the small federal agency that regulated the nation’s credit unions. It set the rules, examined their books and insured their accounts.

Like the city taxi commission, the N.C.U.A. had long had ties to the industry that it regulated. One judge had called it a “rogue federal agency” focused on promoting the industry.

In 2004, its chairman was Dennis Dollar, a former Mississippi state representative who had previously worked as the chief executive of a credit union. He had just been inducted into the Mississippi Credit Union Hall of Fame, and he had said one of his top priorities was streamlining regulation.

Dennis Dollar, the former chairman of the National Credit Union Administration, is now a consultant in the industry. 

Under Mr. Dollar and others, the N.C.U.A. issued waivers that exempted medallion loans from longstanding rules, including a regulation requiring each loan to have a down payment of at least 20 percent. The waivers allowed the lenders to keep up with competitors and to write more profitable loans.

Mr. Dollar, who left government to become a consultant for credit unions, said the agency was following the lead of Congress, which passed a law in 1998 exempting credit unions specializing in medallion loans from some regulations. The law signaled that those lenders needed leeway, such as the waivers, he said.

“If we did not do so, the average cabdriver couldn’t get a medallion loan,” Mr. Dollar said.

The federal law and the N.C.U.A. waivers were not the only benefits the industry received. The federal government also provided many medallion lenders with financial assistance and guaranteed a portion of their taxi loans, assuring that if those loans failed, they would still be partially paid, according to records and interviews.

As lenders wrote increasingly risky loans, medallion prices neared $500,000 in 2006.

‘Snoozing and napping’

Under Mr. Bloomberg, the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission began selling 1,000 new medallions.

Another agency was also supposed to be keeping an eye on lending practices. New York State banking regulators are required to inspect all financial institutions chartered in the state. But after 2008, they were forced to focus their attention on the banks most affected by the global economic meltdown, according to former employees.

As a result, some industry veterans said, the state stopped examining medallion loans closely.

“The state banking department would come in, and they’d be doing the exam in one room, and the N.C.U.A. would be in another room,” said Larry Fisher, who was then the medallion lending supervisor at Melrose Credit Union, one of the biggest lenders. “And you could catch the state banking department snoozing and napping and going on the internet and not doing much at all.”

The state banking department, which is now called the New York Department of Financial Services, disputed that characterization and said it had acted consistently and appropriately.

Former federal regulators described a similar trend at their agencies after the recession.

Some former employees of the N.C.U.A., the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said that as medallion prices climbed, they tried to raise issues with loans and were told not to worry. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve Board also oversaw some lenders and did not intervene.

A spokesman for the Federal Reserve said the agency was not a primary regulator of the taxi lending industry. The rest of the agencies declined to comment.

“It was obvious that the loans were unusual and risky,” said Patrick Collins, a former N.C.U.A. examiner. But, he said, there was a belief inside his agency that the loans would be fine because the industry had been stable for decades.

Meanwhile, in New York City, the taxi commission reduced oversight.

For years, it had made medallion purchasers file forms describing how they came up with the money, including details on all loans. It also had required industry participants to submit annual disclosures on their finances, loans and conflicts of interest.

But officials never analyzed the forms filed by buyers, and in the 2000s, they stopped requiring the annual disclosures altogether.

“Reviewing these disclosures was an onerous lift for us,” the commission’s communications office said in a recent email.

By 2008, the price of a medallion rose to $600,000.

At around the same time, the commission began focusing on new priorities. It started developing the “Taxi of Tomorrow,” a model for future cabs.

The agency’s main enforcement activities targeted drivers who cheated passengers or discriminated against people of color. “Nobody really scrutinized medallion transfers,” said Charles Tortorici, a former commission lawyer.

A spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg said in a statement that during the mayor’s tenure, the city improved the industry by installing credit card machines and GPS devices, making fleets more environmentally efficient and creating green taxis for boroughs outside Manhattan.

“The industry was always its own worst enemy, fighting every reform tooth and nail,” said the spokesman, Marc La Vorgna. “We put our energy and political capital into the reforms that most directly and immediately impacted the riding public.”

Records show that since 2008, the taxi commission has not taken a single enforcement action against brokers, the powerful players who arrange medallion sales and loans.

Alex Korenkov, a broker, suggested in an interview that he and other brokers took notice of the city’s hands-off approach.

“Let’s put it this way,” he said. “If governing body does not care, then free-for-all.”

By the time that Mr. Roth wrote his report at the Taxi and Limousine Commission in 2010, it was clear that something strange was happening in the medallion market.

Mr. Daus gave a speech that year that mentioned the unusual lending practices. During the speech, he said banks were letting medallion buyers obtain loans without any down payment. Experts have since said that should have raised red flags. But at the time, Mr. Daus seemed pleased.

“Some of these folks were offering zero percent down,” he said. “You tell me what bank walks around asking for zero percent down on a loan? It’s just really amazing.”

In interviews, Mr. Daus acknowledged that the practice was unusual but said the taxi commission had no authority over lending.

Inside the commission, at least four employees raised concerns about the medallion prices and lending practices, according to the employees, who described their own unease as well as Mr. Roth’s report.

David S. Yassky, a former city councilman who succeeded Mr. Daus as commission chairman in 2010, said in an interview that he never saw Mr. Roth’s report.

Mr. Yassky said the medallion prices puzzled him, but he could not determine if they were inflated, in part because people were still eager to buy. Medallions may have been undervalued for decades, and the price spike could have been the market recognizing the true value, he suggested.

Meera Joshi, who became chairwoman in 2014, said in an interview that she was worried about medallion costs and lending practices but was pushed to prioritize other responsibilities. Dominic Williams, Mr. de Blasio’s chief policy adviser, said the city focused on initiatives such as improving accessibility because no one was complaining about loans.

Worries about the taxi industry also emerged at the National Credit Union Administration. In late 2011, as the price of some medallions reached $800,000, a group of agency examiners wrote a paper on the risks in the industry, according to a recent report by the agency’s inspector general.

In 2012, 2013 and 2014, inspectors routinely documented instances of credit unions violating lending rules, the inspector general’s report said.

David S. Yassky, the former chairman of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission.

The N.C.U.A. chose not to penalize medallion lenders or impose extra oversight. It did not take any wide industry action until April 2014, when it sent a letter reminding the credit unions in the taxi market to act responsibly.

Former staffers said the agency was still focused on the fallout from the recession.

A spokesman for the N.C.U.A. disputed that characterization and said the agency conducted appropriate enforcement.

He added the agency took actions to ensure the credit unions remained solvent, which was its mission. He said Congress allowed the lenders to concentrate heavily on medallion loans, which left them vulnerable when Uber and Lyft arrived.

At the New York Department of Financial Services, bank examiners noticed risky practices and interest-only loans and repeatedly wrote warnings starting in 2010, according to the state. At least one report expressed concern of a potential market bubble, the state said.

Eventually, examiners became so concerned that they made a PowerPoint presentation and called a meeting in 2014 to show it to a dozen top officials.

“Since 2001, individual medallion has risen 455%,” the presentation warned, according to a copy obtained by The Times. The presentation suggested state action, such as sending a letter to the industry or revoking charters from some lenders.

The state did neither. The department had recently merged with the insurance department, and former employees said it was finding its footing.

The department superintendent at the time, Benjamin M. Lawsky, a former aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, said he did not, as a rule, discuss his tenure at the department.

In an emailed statement, the department denied it struggled after the merger and said it took action to stop the collapse of the medallion market. A department spokesman provided a long list of warnings, suggestions and guidelines that it said examiners had issued to lenders. He said that starting in 2012, the department downgraded some of its own internal ratings of the lenders.

The list did not include any instances of the department formally penalizing a medallion lender, or making any public statement about the industry before it collapsed.

Between 2010 and 2014, as officials at every level of government failed to rein in the risky lending practices, records show that roughly 1,500 people bought taxi medallions. Over all, including refinancings of old loans and extensions required by banks, medallion owners signed at least 10,000 loans in that time.

Several regulators who tried to raise alarms said they believed the government stood aside because of the industry’s connections.

Many pointed to one company — Medallion Financial, run by the Murstein family. Former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, the current governor’s father, was a paid member of its board from 1996 until he died in 2015.

Others noted that Mr. de Blasio has long been close to the industry. When he ran for mayor in 2013, an industry lobbyist, Michael Woloz, was a top fund-raiser, records show. And Evgeny Freidman, a major fleet owner who has admitted to artificially inflating medallion prices, has said he is close to the mayor.

Some people, including Mr. Dollar, the former N.C.U.A. chairman, said Congress excepted the taxi trade from rules because the industry was supported by former United States Senator Alfonse D’Amato of New York, who was then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

“The taxi industry is one of the most politically connected industries in the city,” said Fidel Del Valle, who was the chairman of the taxi commission from 1991 to 1994. He later worked as a lawyer for drivers and a consultant to an owner association run by Mr. Freidman. “It’s been that way for decades, and they’ve used that influence to push back on regulation, with a lot of success.”

A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo said Medallion Financial was not regulated by the state, so the elder Mr. Cuomo’s position on the board was irrelevant. A spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio said the industry’s connections did not influence the city.

Mr. Murstein, Mr. Woloz, Mr. Freidman and Mr. D’Amato all declined to comment.

The aftermath
“I think city will help me,” Mohammad Hossain, who is in deep debt from a taxi medallion loan, said at his family’s home in the Bronx.

New York held its final independent medallion auction in February 2014. By then, concerns about medallion prices were common in the news media and government offices, and Uber had established itself. Still, the city sold medallions to more than 150 bidders. (“It’s better than the stock market,” one ad said.)

Forty percent of the people who bought medallions at that auction have filed for bankruptcy, according to a Times analysis of court records.

Mohammad Hossain, 47, from Bangladesh, who purchased a medallion for $853,000 at the auction, said he could barely make his monthly payments and was getting squeezed by his lender. “I bought medallion from the city,” he said through tears. “I think city will help me, you know. I assume that.”

The de Blasio administration’s only major response to the crisis has been to push for a cap on ride-hail cars. The City Council at first rejected a cap in 2015 before approving it last year.

Taxi industry veterans said the cap did not address the cause of the crisis: the lending practices.

Richard Weinberg, a taxi commission hearing officer from 1988 to 2002 and a lawyer for drivers since then, said that when the medallion bubble began to burst, the city should have frozen prices, adjusted fares and fees and convinced banks to be flexible with drivers. That could have allowed prices to fall slowly. “That could’ve saved a lot of people,” he said.

In an interview, Dean Fuleihan, the first deputy mayor, said the city did help taxi owners, including by reducing some fees, taxes and inspection mandates, and by talking to banks about loans. He said that if the City Council had passed the cap in 2015, it would have helped.

“We do care about those drivers, we care about those families. We attempted throughout this period to take actions,” he said.

Federal regulators also have not significantly helped medallion owners.

In 2017 and 2018, the N.C.U.A. closed or merged several credit unions for “unsafe business practices” in medallion lending. It took over many of the loans, but did not soften terms, according to borrowers. Instead, it tried to get money out as quickly as possible.

The failure of the credit unions has cost the national credit union insurance fund more than $750 million, which will hurt all credit union members.

In August 2018, the N.C.U.A. closed Melrose in what it said was the biggest credit union liquidation in United States history. The agency barred Melrose’s general counsel from working for credit unions and brought civil charges against its former C.E.O., Alan Kaufman, saying he used company funds to help industry partners in exchange for gifts.

The general counsel, Mitchell Reiver, declined to answer questions but said he did nothing wrong. Mr. Kaufman said in an interview that the N.C.U.A. made up the charges to distract from its role in the crisis.

“I’m definitely a scapegoat,” Mr. Kaufman said. “There’s no doubt about it.”

Glamour, then poverty
After he struggled to repay his taxi medallion loan, Abel Vela left his family in New York and moved back to Peru, where living costs were cheaper. 

During the medallion bubble, the city produced a television commercial to promote the permits. In the ad, which aired in 2004, four cabbies stood around a taxi discussing the perks of the job. One said buying a medallion was the best decision he had ever made. They all smiled. Then Mr. Daus appeared on screen to announce an auction.

Fifteen years later, the cabbies remember the ad with scorn. Three of the four were eventually enticed to refinance their original loans under far riskier terms that left them in heavy debt.

One of the cabbies, Abel Vela, had to leave his wife and children and return to his home country, Peru, because living costs were lower there. He is now 74 and still working to survive.

The city aired a commercial in 2004 to promote an upcoming auction of taxi medallions. The ad featured real cab drivers, but three of them eventually took on risky loans and suffered financial blows.
The only woman in the ad, Marie Applyrs, a Haitian immigrant, fell behind on her loan payments and filed for bankruptcy in November 2017. She lost her cab, and her home. She now lives with her children, switching from home to home every few months.

“When the ad happened, the taxi was in vogue. I think I still have the tape somewhere. It was glamorous,” she said. “Now, I’m in the poorhouse.”

Today, the only person from the television commercial still active in the industry is Mr. Daus. He works as a lawyer for lenders.

[Read Part 1 of The Times’s investigation: How Reckless Loans Devastated a Generation of Taxi Drivers]

Madeline Rosenberg contributed reporting. Doris Burke contributed research. Produced by Jeffrey Furticella and Meghan Louttit.

#USA #New_York #Taxi #Betrug #Ausbeutung

‘They Were Conned’: How Reckless Loans Devastated a Generation of Taxi Drivers - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/nyregion/nyc-taxis-medallions-suicides.html

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May 19, 2019 - The phone call that ruined Mohammed Hoque’s life came in April 2014 as he began another long day driving a New York City taxi, a job he had held since emigrating from Bangladesh nine years earlier.

The call came from a prominent businessman who was selling a medallion, the coveted city permit that allows a driver to own a yellow cab instead of working for someone else. If Mr. Hoque gave him $50,000 that day, he promised to arrange a loan for the purchase.

After years chafing under bosses he hated, Mr. Hoque thought his dreams of wealth and independence were coming true. He emptied his bank account, borrowed from friends and hurried to the man’s office in Astoria, Queens. Mr. Hoque handed over a check and received a stack of papers. He signed his name and left, eager to tell his wife.

Mr. Hoque made about $30,000 that year. He had no idea, he said later, that he had just signed a contract that required him to pay $1.7 million.

Over the past year, a spate of suicides by taxi drivers in New York City has highlighted in brutal terms the overwhelming debt and financial plight of medallion owners. All along, officials have blamed the crisis on competition from ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft.

But a New York Times investigation found much of the devastation can be traced to a handful of powerful industry leaders who steadily and artificially drove up the price of taxi medallions, creating a bubble that eventually burst. Over more than a decade, they channeled thousands of drivers into reckless loans and extracted hundreds of millions of dollars before the market collapsed.

These business practices generated huge profits for bankers, brokers, lawyers, investors, fleet owners and debt collectors. The leaders of nonprofit credit unions became multimillionaires. Medallion brokers grew rich enough to buy yachts and waterfront properties. One of the most successful bankers hired the rap star Nicki Minaj to perform at a family party.

But the methods stripped immigrant families of their life savings, crushed drivers under debt they could not repay and engulfed an industry that has long defined New York. More than 950 medallion owners have filed for bankruptcy, according to a Times analysis of court records. Thousands more are barely hanging on.

The practices were strikingly similar to those behind the housing market crash that led to the 2008 global economic meltdown: Banks and loosely regulated private lenders wrote risky loans and encouraged frequent refinancing; drivers took on debt they could not afford, under terms they often did not understand.

Some big banks even entered the taxi industry in the aftermath of the housing crash, seeking a new market, with new borrowers.

The combination of easy money, eager borrowers and the lure of a rare asset helped prices soar far above what medallions were really worth. Some industry leaders fed the frenzy by purposefully overpaying for medallions in order to inflate prices, The Times found.

Between 2002 and 2014, the price of a medallion rose to more than $1 million from $200,000, even though city records showed that driver incomes barely changed.

About 4,000 drivers bought medallions in that period, records show. They were excited to buy, but they were enticed by a dubious premise.

What Actually Happened to New York’s Taxi DriversMay 28, 2019

After the medallion market collapsed, Mayor Bill de Blasio opted not to fund a bailout, and earlier this year, the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, shut down the committee overseeing the taxi industry, saying it had completed most of its work.

Over 10 months, The Times interviewed 450 people, built a database of every medallion sale since 1995 and reviewed thousands of individual loans and other documents, including internal bank records and confidential profit-sharing agreements.

The investigation found example after example of drivers trapped in exploitative loans, including hundreds who signed interest-only loans that required them to pay exorbitant fees, forfeit their legal rights and give up almost all their monthly income, indefinitely.

A Pakistani immigrant who thought he was just buying a car ended up with a $780,000 medallion loan that left him unable to pay rent. A Bangladeshi immigrant said he was told to lie about his income on his loan application; he eventually lost his medallion. A Haitian immigrant who worked to exhaustion to make his monthly payments discovered he had been paying only interest and went bankrupt.

Abdur Rahim, who is from Bangladesh, is one of several cab drivers who allege they were duped into signing exploitative loans. 
It is unclear if the practices violated any laws. But after reviewing The Times’s findings, experts said the methods were among the worst that have been used since the housing crash.

“I don’t think I could concoct a more predatory scheme if I tried,” said Roger Bertling, the senior instructor at Harvard Law School’s clinic on predatory lending and consumer protection. “This was modern-day indentured servitude.”

Lenders developed their techniques in New York but spread them to Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and elsewhere, transforming taxi industries across the United States.

In interviews, lenders denied wrongdoing. They noted that regulators approved their practices, and said some borrowers made poor decisions and assumed too much debt. They said some drivers were happy to use climbing medallion values as collateral to take out cash, and that those who sold their medallions at the height of the market made money.

The lenders said they believed medallion values would keep increasing, as they almost always had. No one, they said, could have predicted Uber and Lyft would emerge to undercut the business.

“People love to blame banks for things that happen because they’re big bad banks,” said Robert Familant, the former head of Progressive Credit Union, a small nonprofit that specialized in medallion loans. “We didn’t do anything, in my opinion, other than try to help small businesspeople become successful.”

Mr. Familant made about $30 million in salary and deferred payouts during the bubble, including $4.8 million in bonuses and incentives in 2014, the year it burst, according to disclosure forms.

Meera Joshi, who joined the Taxi and Limousine Commission in 2011 and became chairwoman in 2014, said it was not the city’s job to regulate lending. But she acknowledged that officials saw red flags and could have done something.

“There were lots of players, and lots of people just watched it happen. So the T.L.C. watched it happen. The lenders watched it happen. The borrowers watched it happen as their investment went up, and it wasn’t until it started falling apart that people started taking action and pointing fingers,” said Ms. Joshi, who left the commission in March. “It was a party. Why stop it?”

Every day, about 250,000 people hail a New York City yellow taxi. Most probably do not know they are participating in an unconventional economic system about as old as the Empire State Building.

The city created taxi medallions in 1937. Unlicensed cabs crowded city streets, so officials designed about 12,000 specialized tin plates and made it illegal to operate a taxi without one bolted to the hood of the car. The city sold each medallion for $10.

People who bought medallions could sell them, just like any other asset. The only restriction: Officials designated roughly half as “independent medallions” and eventually required that those always be owned by whoever was driving that cab.

Over time, as yellow taxis became symbols of New York, a cutthroat industry grew around them. A few entrepreneurs obtained most of the nonindependent medallions and built fleets that controlled the market. They were family operations largely based in the industrial neighborhoods of Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan and Long Island City in Queens.

Allegations of corruption, racism and exploitation dogged the industry. Some fleet bosses were accused of cheating drivers. Some drivers refused to go outside Manhattan or pick up black and Latino passengers. Fleet drivers typically worked 60 hours a week, made less than minimum wage and received no benefits, according to city studies.

Still, driving could serve as a path to the middle class. Drivers could save to buy an independent medallion, which would increase their earnings and give them an asset they could someday sell for a retirement nest egg.

Those who borrowed money to buy a medallion typically had to submit a large down payment and repay within five to 10 years.

The conservative lending strategy produced modest returns. The city did not release new medallions for almost 60 years, and values slowly climbed, hitting $100,000 in 1985 and $200,000 in 1997.

“It was a safe and stable asset, and it provided a good life for those of us who were lucky enough to buy them,” said Guy Roberts, who began driving in 1979 and eventually bought medallions and formed a fleet. “Not an easy life, but a good life.”

“And then,” he said, “everything changed.”

– Before coming to America, Mohammed Hoque lived comfortably in Chittagong, a city on Bangladesh’s southern coast. He was a serious student and a gifted runner, despite a small and stocky frame. His father and grandfather were teachers; he said he surpassed them, becoming an education official with a master’s degree in management. He supervised dozens of schools and traveled on a government-issued motorcycle. In 2004, when he was 33, he married Fouzia Mahabub. -

That same year, several of his friends signed up for the green card lottery, and their thirst for opportunity was contagious. He applied, and won.

His wife had an uncle in Jamaica, Queens, so they went there. They found a studio apartment. Mr. Hoque wanted to work in education, but he did not speak enough English. A friend recommended the taxi industry.

It was an increasingly common move for South Asian immigrants. In 2005, about 40 percent of New York cabbies were born in Bangladesh, India or Pakistan, according to the United States Census Bureau. Over all, just 9 percent were born in the United States.

Mr. Hoque and his wife emigrated from Bangladesh, and have rented the same apartment in Queens since 2005.

Mr. Hoque joined Taxifleet Management, a large fleet run by the Weingartens, a Russian immigrant family whose patriarchs called themselves the “Three Wise Men.”

He worked 5 a.m. to 5 p.m., six days a week. On a good day, he said, he brought home $100. He often felt lonely on the road, and he developed back pain from sitting all day and diabetes, medical records show.

He could have worked fewer shifts. He also could have moved out of the studio. But he drove as much as feasible and spent as little as possible. He had heard the city would soon be auctioning off new medallions. He was saving to buy one.

Andrew Murstein, left, with his father, Alvin.CreditChester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
In the early 2000s, a new generation took power in New York’s cab industry. They were the sons of longtime industry leaders, and they had new ideas for making money.

Few people represented the shift better than Andrew Murstein.

Mr. Murstein was the grandson of a Polish immigrant who bought one of the first medallions, built one of the city’s biggest fleets and began informally lending to other buyers in the 1970s. Mr. Murstein attended business school and started his career at Bear Stearns and Salomon Brothers, the investment banks.

When he joined the taxi business, he has said, he pushed his family to sell off many medallions and to establish a bank to focus on lending. Medallion Financial went public in 1996. Its motto was, “In niches, there are riches.”

Dozens of industry veterans said Mr. Murstein and his father, Alvin, were among those who helped to move the industry to less conservative lending practices. The industry veterans said the Mursteins, as well as others, started saying medallion values would always rise and used that idea to focus on lending to lower-income drivers, which was riskier but more profitable.

The strategy began to be used by the industry’s other major lenders — Progressive Credit Union, Melrose Credit Union and Lomto Credit Union, all family-run nonprofits that made essentially all their money from medallion loans, according to financial disclosures.

“We didn’t want to be the one left behind,” said Monte Silberger, Lomto’s controller and then chief financial officer from 1999 to 2017.

The lenders began accepting smaller down payments. By 2013, many medallion buyers were not handing over any down payment at all, according to an analysis of buyer applications submitted to the city.

“It got to a point where we didn’t even check their income or credit score,” Mr. Silberger said. “It didn’t matter.”

Lenders also encouraged existing borrowers to refinance and take out more money when medallion prices rose, according to interviews with dozens of borrowers and loan officers. There is no comprehensive data, but bank disclosures suggest that thousands of owners refinanced.

Industry veterans said it became common for owners to refinance to buy a house or to put children through college. “You’d walk into the bank and walk out 30 minutes later with an extra $200,000,” said Lou Bakalar, a broker who arranged loans.

Yvon Augustin has been living with help from his children ever since he declared bankruptcy and lost his taxi medallion.

Some pointed to the refinancing to argue that irresponsible borrowers fueled the crisis. “Medallion owners were misusing it,” said Aleksey Medvedovskiy, a fleet owner who also worked as a broker. “They used it as an A.T.M.”

As lenders loosened standards, they increased returns. Rather than raising interest rates, they made borrowers pay a mix of costs — origination fees, legal fees, financing fees, refinancing fees, filing fees, fees for paying too late and fees for paying too early, according to a Times review of more than 500 loans included in legal cases. Many lenders also made borrowers split their loan and pay a much higher rate on the second loan, documents show.

Lenders also extended loan lengths. Instead of requiring repayment in five or 10 years, they developed deals that lasted as long as 50 years, locking in decades of interest payments. And some wrote interest-only loans that could continue forever.

“We couldn’t figure out why the company was doing so many interest-only loans,” said Michelle Pirritano, a Medallion Financial loan analyst from 2007 to 2011. “It was a good revenue stream, but it didn’t really make sense as a loan. I mean, it wasn’t really a loan, because it wasn’t being repaid.”

Almost every loan reviewed by The Times included a clause that spiked the interest rate to as high as 24 percent if it was not repaid in three years. Lenders included the clause — called a “balloon” — so that borrowers almost always had to extend the loan, possibly at a higher rate than in the original terms, and with additional fees.

Yvon Augustin was caught in one of those loans. He bought a medallion in 2006, a decade after emigrating from Haiti. He said he paid $2,275 every month — more than half his income, he said — and thought he was paying off the loan. But last year, his bank used the balloon to demand that he repay everything. That is when he learned he had been paying only the interest, he said.

Mr. Augustin, 69, declared bankruptcy and lost his medallion. He lives off assistance from his children.

During the global financial crisis, Eugene Haber, a lawyer for the taxi industry, started getting calls from bankers he had never met.

Mr. Haber had written a template for medallion loans in the 1970s. By 2008, his thick mustache had turned white, and he thought he knew everybody in the industry. Suddenly, new bankers began calling his suite in a Long Island office park. Capital One, Signature Bank, New York Commercial Bank and others wanted to issue medallion loans, he said.

Some of the banks were looking for new borrowers after the housing market collapsed, Mr. Haber said. “They needed somewhere else to invest,” he said. He said he represented some banks at loan signings but eventually became embittered because he believed banks were knowingly lending to people who could not repay.

Instead of lending directly, the big banks worked through powerful industry players. They enlisted large fleet owners and brokers — especially Neil Greenbaum, Richard Chipman, Savas Konstantinides, Roman Sapino and Basil Messados — to use the banks’ money to lend to medallion buyers. In return, the owners and brokers received a cut of the monthly payments and sometimes an additional fee.

The fleet owners and brokers, who technically issued the loans, did not face the same scrutiny as banks.

“They did loans that were frankly insane,” said Larry Fisher, who from 2003 to 2016 oversaw medallion lending at Melrose Credit Union, one of the biggest lenders originally in the industry. “It contributed to the price increases and put a lot of pressure on the rest of us to keep up.”

Evgeny Freidman, a fleet owner, has said he purposely overbid for taxi medallions in order to drive up their value.CreditSasha Maslov
Still, Mr. Fisher said, Melrose followed lending rules. “A lot of people tend to blame others for their own misfortune,” he said. “If they want to blame the lender for the medallion going down the tubes the way it has, I think they’re misplaced.”

Mr. Konstantinides, a fleet owner and the broker and lender who arranged Mr. Hoque’s loans, said every loan issued by his company abided by federal and state banking guidelines. “I am very sympathetic to the plight of immigrant families who are seeking a better life in this country and in this city,” said Mr. Konstantinides, who added that he was also an immigrant.

Walter Rabin, who led Capital One’s medallion lending division between 2007 and 2012 and has led Signature Bank’s medallion lending division since, said he was one of the industry’s most conservative lenders. He said he could not speak for the brokers and fleet owners with whom he worked.

Mr. Rabin and other Signature executives denied fault for the market collapse and blamed the city for allowing ride-hail companies to enter with little regulation. “It’s the City of New York that took the biggest advantage of the drivers,” said Joseph J. DePaolo, the president and chief executive of Signature. “It’s not the banks.”

New York Commercial Bank said in a statement that it began issuing medallion loans before the housing crisis and that they were a very small part of its business. The bank did not engage in risky lending practices, a spokesman said.

Mr. Messados said in an interview that he disagreed with interest-only loans and other one-sided terms. But he said he was caught between banks developing the loans and drivers clamoring for them. “They were insisting on this,” he said. “What are you supposed to do? Say, ‘I’m not doing the sale?’”

Several lenders challenged the idea that borrowers were unsophisticated. They said that some got better deals by negotiating with multiple lenders at once.

Mr. Greenbaum, Mr. Chipman and Mr. Sapino declined to comment, as did Capital One.

Some fleet owners worked to manipulate prices. In the most prominent example, Evgeny Freidman, a brash Russian immigrant who owned so many medallions that some called him “The Taxi King,” said he purposefully overpaid for medallions sold at city auctions. He reasoned that the higher prices would become the industry standard, making the medallions he already owned worth more. Mr. Freidman, who was partners with Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, disclosed the plan in a 2012 speech at Yeshiva University. He recently pleaded guilty to felony tax fraud. He declined to comment.

As medallion prices kept increasing, the industry became strained. Drivers had to work longer hours to make monthly payments. Eventually, loan records show, many drivers had to use almost all their income on payments.

“The prices got to be ridiculous,” said Vincent Sapone, the retired manager of the League of Mutual Taxi Owners, an owner association. “When it got close to $1 million, nobody was going to pay that amount of money, unless they came from another country. Nobody from Brooklyn was going to pay that.”

Some drivers have alleged in court that lenders tricked them into signing loans.

Muhammad Ashraf, who is not fluent in English, said he thought he was getting a loan to purchase a car but ended up in debt to buy a taxi medallion instead.

Muhammad Ashraf, a Pakistani immigrant, alleged that a broker, Heath Candero, duped him into a $780,000 interest-only loan. He said in an interview in Urdu that he could not speak English fluently and thought he was just signing a loan to buy a car. He said he found out about the loan when his bank sued him for not fully repaying. The bank eventually decided not to pursue a case against Mr. Ashraf. He also filed a lawsuit against Mr. Candero. That case was dismissed. A lawyer for Mr. Candero declined to comment.

Abdur Rahim, a Bangladeshi immigrant, alleged that his lender, Bay Ridge Credit Union, inserted hidden fees. In an interview, he added he was told to lie on his loan application. The application, reviewed by The Times, said he made $128,389, but he said his tax return showed he made about $25,000. In court, Bay Ridge has denied there were hidden fees and said Mr. Rahim was “confusing the predatory-lending statute with a mere bad investment.” The credit union declined to comment.

Several employees of lenders said they were pushed to write loans, encouraged by bonuses and perks such as tickets to sporting events and free trips to the Bahamas.

They also said drivers almost never had lawyers at loan closings. Borrowers instead trusted their broker to represent them, even though, unbeknown to them, the broker was often getting paid by the bank.

Stan Zurbin, who between 2009 and 2012 did consulting work for a lender that issued medallion loans, said that as prices rose, lenders in the industry increasingly lent to immigrants.

“They didn’t have 750 credit scores, let’s just say,” he said. “A lot of them had just come into the country. A lot of them just had no idea what they were signing.”

The $1 million medallion
Video
Mrs. Hoque did not want her husband to buy a medallion. She wanted to use their savings to buy a house. They had their first child in 2008, and they planned to have more. They needed to leave the studio apartment, and she thought a home would be a safer investment.

But Mr. Hoque could not shake the idea, especially after several friends bought medallions at the city’s February 2014 auction.

One friend introduced him to a man called “Big Savas.” It was Mr. Konstantinides, a fleet owner who also had a brokerage and a lending company, Mega Funding.

The call came a few weeks later. A medallion owner had died, and the family was selling for $1 million.

Mr. Hoque said he later learned the $50,000 he paid up front was just for taxes. Mega eventually requested twice that amount for fees and a down payment, records show. Mr. Hoque said he maxed out credit cards and borrowed from a dozen friends and relatives.

Fees and interest would bring the total repayment to more than $1.7 million, documents show. It was split into two loans, both issued by Mega with New York Commercial Bank. The loans made him pay $5,000 a month — most of the $6,400 he could earn as a medallion owner.

Mohammed Hoque’s Medallion Loans Consumed Most of His Taxi Revenue
After paying his two medallion loans and business costs, Mr. Hoque had about $1,400 left over each month to pay the rent on his studio apartment in Queens and cover his living expenses.

Estimated monthly revenue $11,845

Gas $1,500

Income after expenses $1,400

Vehicle maintenance $1,300

Medallion loan 1 $4,114

Insurance $1,200

Car loan $650

Credit card fees $400

Medallion loan 2 $881

Other work-related expenses $400

By the time the deal closed in July 2014, Mr. Hoque had heard of a new company called Uber. He wondered if it would hurt the business, but nobody seemed to be worried.

As Mr. Hoque drove to the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s downtown office for final approval of the purchase, he fantasized about becoming rich, buying a big house and bringing his siblings to America. After a commission official reviewed his application and loan records, he said he was ushered into the elegant “Taxi of Tomorrow” room. An official pointed a camera. Mr. Hoque smiled.

“These are little cash cows running around the city spitting out money,” Mr. Murstein said, beaming in a navy suit and pink tie.

He did not mention he was quietly leaving the business, a move that would benefit him when the market collapsed.

By the time of the appearance, Medallion Financial had been cutting the number of medallion loans on its books for years, according to disclosures it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Murstein later said the company started exiting the business and focusing on other ventures before 2010.

Mr. Murstein declined numerous interview requests. He also declined to answer some written questions, including why he promoted medallions while exiting the business. In emails and through a spokesman, he acknowledged that Medallion Financial reduced down payments but said it rarely issued interest-only loans or charged borrowers for repaying loans too early.

“Many times, we did not match what our competitors were willing to do and in retrospect, thankfully, we lost the business,” he wrote to The Times.

Interviews with three former staffers, and a Times review of loan documents that were filed as part of lawsuits brought by Medallion Financial against borrowers, indicate the company issued many interest-only loans and routinely included a provision allowing it to charge borrowers for repaying loans too early.

Other lenders also left the taxi industry or took precautions long before the market collapsed.

The credit unions specializing in the industry kept making new loans. But between 2010 and 2014, they sold the loans to other financial institutions more often than in the previous five years, disclosure forms show. Progressive Credit Union, run by Mr. Familant, sold loans off almost twice as often, the forms show. By 2012, that credit union was selling the majority of the loans it issued.

In a statement, Mr. Familant said the selling of loans was a standard banking practice that did not indicate a lack of confidence in the market.

Several banks used something called a confession of judgment. It was an obscure document in which the borrower admitted defaulting on the loan — even before taking out any money at all — and authorized the bank to do whatever it wanted to collect.

Larry Fisher was the medallion lending supervisor at Melrose Credit Union, one of the biggest lenders originally in the industry, from 2003 to 2016.
Congress has banned that practice in consumer loans, but not in business loans, which is how lenders classified medallion deals. Many states have barred it in business loans, too, but New York is not among them.

Even as some lenders quietly braced for the market to fall, prices kept rising, and profits kept growing.

By 2014, many of the people who helped create the bubble had made millions of dollars and invested it elsewhere.

Medallion Financial started focusing on lending to R.V. buyers and bought a professional lacrosse team and a Nascar team, painting the car to look like a taxi. Mr. Murstein and his father made more than $42 million between 2002 and 2014, disclosures show. In 2015, Ms. Minaj, the rap star, performed at his son’s bar mitzvah.

The Melrose C.E.O., Alan Kaufman, had the highest base salary of any large state-chartered credit union leader in America in 2013 and 2015, records show. His medallion lending supervisor, Mr. Fisher, also made millions.

It is harder to tell how much fleet owners and brokers made, but in recent years news articles have featured some of them with new boats and houses.

Mr. Messados’s bank records, filed in a legal case, show that by 2013, he had more than $50 million in non-taxi assets, including three homes and a yacht.

The bubble bursts

At least eight drivers have committed suicide, including three medallion owners with overwhelming loans.
The medallion bubble burst in late 2014. Uber and Lyft may have hastened the crisis, but virtually all of the hundreds of industry veterans interviewed for this article, including many lenders, said inflated prices and risky lending practices would have caused a collapse even if ride-hailing had never been invented.

At the market’s height, medallion buyers were typically earning about $5,000 a month and paying about $4,500 to their loans, according to an analysis by The Times of city data and loan documents. Many owners could make their payments only by refinancing when medallion values increased, which was unsustainable, some loan officers said.

City data shows that since Uber entered New York in 2011, yellow cab revenue has decreased by about 10 percent per cab, a significant bite for low-earning drivers but a small drop compared with medallion values, which initially rose and then fell by 90 percent.

As values fell, borrowers asked for breaks. But many lenders went the opposite direction. They decided to leave the business and called in their loans.

They used the confessions to get hundreds of judgments that would allow them to take money from bank accounts, court records show. Some tried to get borrowers to give up homes or a relative’s assets. Others seized medallions and quickly resold them for profit, while still charging the original borrowers fees and extra interest. Several drivers have alleged in court that their lenders ordered them to buy life insurance.

Many lenders hired a debt collector, Anthony Medina, to seize medallions from borrowers who missed payments.

The scars left on cabs after medallions were removed.

Mr. Medina left notes telling borrowers they had to give the lender “relief” to get their medallions back. The notes, which were reviewed by The Times, said the seizure was “authorized by vehicle apprehension unit.” Some drivers said Mr. Medina suggested he was a police officer and made them meet him at a park at night and pay $550 extra in cash.

One man, Jean Demosthenes, a 64-year-old Haitian immigrant who could not speak English, said in an interview in Haitian Creole that Mr. Medina cornered him in Midtown, displayed a gun and took his car.

In an interview, Mr. Medina denied threatening anyone with a gun. He said he requested cash because drivers who had defaulted could not be trusted to write good checks. He said he met drivers at parks and referred to himself as the vehicle apprehension unit because he wanted to hide his identity out of fear he could be targeted by borrowers.

“You’re taking words from people that are deadbeats and delinquent people. Of course, they don’t want to see me,” he said. “I’m not the bad guy. I’m just the messenger from the bank.”

Some lenders, especially Signature Bank, have let borrowers out of their loans for one-time payments of about $250,000. But to get that money, drivers have had to find new loans. Mr. Greenbaum, a fleet owner, has provided many of those loans, sometimes at interest rates of up to 15 percent, loan documents and interviews showed.

New York Commercial Bank said in its statement it also had modified some loans.

Other drivers lost everything. Most of the more than 950 owners who declared bankruptcy had to forfeit their medallions. Records indicate many were bought by hedge funds hoping for prices to rise. For now, cabs sit unused.

Jean Demosthenes said his medallion was repossessed by a man with a gun. The man denied that he was armed.

Bhairavi Desai, founder of the Taxi Workers Alliance, which represents drivers and independent owners, has asked the city to bail out owners or refund auction purchasers. Others have urged the city to pressure banks to forgive loans or soften terms.

After reviewing The Times’s findings, Deepak Gupta, a former top official at the United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said the New York Attorney General’s Office should investigate lenders.

Mr. Gupta also said the state should close the loophole that let lenders classify medallion deals as business loans, even though borrowers had to guarantee them with everything they owned. Consumer loans have far more disclosure rules and protections.

“These practices were indisputably predatory and would be illegal if they were considered consumer loans, rather than business loans,” he said.

Last year, amid eight known suicides of drivers, including three medallion owners with overwhelming loans, the city passed a temporary cap on ride-hailing cars, created a task force to study the industry and directed the city taxi commission to do its own analysis of the debt crisis.

Earlier this year, the Council eliminated the committee overseeing the industry after its chairman, Councilman Rubén Díaz Sr. of the Bronx, said the Council was “controlled by the homosexual community.” The speaker, Mr. Johnson, said, “The vast majority of the legislative work that we have been looking at has already been completed.”

In a statement, a council spokesman said the committee’s duties had been transferred to the Committee on Transportation. “The Council is working to do as much as it can legislatively to help all drivers,” the spokesman said.

As of last week, no one had been appointed to the task force.

On the last day of 2018, Mr. and Mrs. Hoque brought their third child home from the hospital.

Mr. Hoque cleared space for the boy’s crib, pushing aside his plastic bags of T-shirts and the fan that cooled the studio. He looked around. He could not believe he was still living in the same room.

His loan had quickly faltered. He could not make the payments and afford rent, and his medallion was seized. Records show he paid more than $12,000 to Mega, and he said he paid another $550 to Mr. Medina to get it back. He borrowed from friends, promising it would not happen again. Then it happened four more times, he said.

Mr. Konstantinides, the broker, said in his statement that he met with Mr. Hoque many times and twice modified one of his loans in order to lower his monthly payments. He also said he gave Mr. Hoque extra time to make some payments.

In all, between the initial fees, monthly payments and penalties after the seizures, Mr. Hoque had paid about $400,000 into the medallion by the beginning of this year.

But he still owed $915,000 more, plus interest, and he did not know what to do. Bankruptcy would cost money, ruin his credit and remove his only income source. And it would mean a shameful end to years of hard work. He believed his only choice was to keep working and to keep paying.

His cab was supposed to be his ticket to money and freedom, but instead it seemed like a prison cell. Every day, he got in before the sun rose and stayed until the sky began to darken. Mr. Hoque, now 48, tried not to think about home, about what he had given up and what he had dreamed about.

“It’s an unhuman life,” he said. “I drive and drive and drive. But I don’t know what my destination is.”

[Read Part 2 of The Times’s investigation: As Thousands of Taxi Drivers Were Trapped in Loans, Top Officials Counted the Money]

Reporting was contributed by Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Suzanne Hillinger, Derek M. Norman, Elisha Brown, Lindsey Rogers Cook, Pierre-Antoine Louis and Sameen Amin. Doris Burke and Susan Beachy contributed research. Produced by Jeffrey Furticella and Meghan Louttit.

Follow Brian M. Rosenthal on Twitter at @brianmrosenthal

#USA #New_York #Taxi #Betrug #Ausbeutung

Israeli right up in arms over news anchor who said occupation turns soldiers into ’animals’ - Haaretz.com

Oshrat Kotler was responding to a report on the five Israeli soldiers who were recently indicted for beating Palestinian detainees in revenge for the death of their comrades
Itay Stern
Feb 17, 2019

▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israeli-right-blasts-anchor-who-said-occupation-turns-soldiers-int

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.6939971.1550439503!/image/2064558393.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/2064558393.jpg

Israeli right-wing politicians harshly criticized Channel 13 TV anchorwoman Oshrat Kotler for saying soldiers become “human animals” during their army service in the West Bank during a broadcast on Saturday night.

Kotler was responding to a report on five Israeli soldiers who were recently indicted for beating Palestinian detainees in revenge for the death of two soldiers from their battalion.

“They send children to the army, to the territories, and get them back human animals. That’s the result of the occupation,” she said.

>> Israeli army officer indicted for allowing soldiers to beat detained Palestinians ■ Palestinian father and son abused by Israeli soldiers: ’They beat us up, then started dancing’

The statement sparked the ire of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who tweeted: “Proud of IDF soldiers and love them very much. Oshrat Kotler’s words should be roundly condemned.”

Netanyahu addressed the remarks again at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting, saying “Yesterday I thought I did not hear correctly when I turned on the television. I heard an infuriating statement against IDF soldiers by a senior journalist, a news anchor. I would like to say that this statement is inappropriate and must be condemned - in a firm and comprehensive manner.”

“I am proud of IDF soldiers. They are protecting us and we are carrying out the supreme humanitarian and moral mission of defending our people and protecting our country against those who want to slaughter us. The journalist’s words deserve all condemnation,” he said.
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Education Minister Naftali Bennett wrote: “Oshrat, you’re confused. IDF soldiers give their lives so you can sleep peacefully. Human animals are the terrorists who murder children in their beds, a young girl on a walk or a whole family driving on the road. IDF soldiers are our strength. Our children. Apologize.”

Bennett’s new party, Hayamin Hehadash, tweeted it would file an official request to the attorney general that he prosecute Kotler for defamation, “following her affronting comments which slander IDF soldiers.”

Kotler, who realized during the broadcast that her statement sparked a storm, said later in the show: “I would like to stress: my children, and their friends, they’re all combat soldiers in the territories. My criticism was directed only at those soldiers led by our control over the Palestinians to hurt innocent people. Those who really listened and didn’t run to rail against me on the web understood that I’m in fact in favor of leniency toward the indicted soldiers, because we sent them into this impossible situation.”

Meretz chairwoman MK Tamar Zandberg came to Kotler’s defense, writing: “How miserable and predictable is the attack on Kotler’s just statements. We don’t want a reality of occupation and violence? It must be changed. Closing our eyes and then scolding the messenger, that’s no solution.”

Peace Now also voiced its support for Kotler, tweeting: “It’s permissible and desirable to look in the mirror sometimes and honestly admit the mistakes of the occupation. So when the right wing falsifies and incites and when MKs rush to join the crowd, Oshrat Kotler’s courageous words should be given a platform.”

Channel 13 news issued a response saying “Oshrat Kotler is a journalist with strong opinions and she expresses them from time to time, like other journalists on our staff who hold other opinions. Oshrat expressed her personal opinion only.”

The parents of the indicted soldiers called the statement “unfortunate and ugly," saying there is “no place in Israeli discourse and certainly not by a new anchorwoman who is meant to represent the facts and not her distorted worldview. Our boys went into the army with a feeling of mission and Zionism. They chose a hard road, they wanted to be combat soldiers in the IDF, they wanted no special conditions; they carry out a complex mission in one of the most difficult sectors. These are the best of the sons of the State of Israel, who although only a month ago they lost two comrades in arms, held their heads high, walked tall and carried out any mission they were assigned, without fault.”

They further criticized Kotler for not enquiring into the identity of the soldiers, “what they went through when they enlisted, what huge difficulties they experienced.”

How Vilification of George Soros Moved From the Fringes to the Mainstream - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/31/us/politics/george-soros-bombs-trump.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/31/us/politics/31dc-soros1/31dc-soros1-facebookJumbo.jpg

On both sides of the Atlantic, a loose network of activists and political figures on the right have spent years seeking to cast Mr. Soros not just as a well-heeled political opponent but also as the personification of all they detest. Employing barely coded anti-Semitism, they have built a warped portrayal of him as the mastermind of a “globalist” movement, a left-wing radical who would undermine the established order and a proponent of diluting the white, Christian nature of their societies through immigration.

In the process, they have pushed their version of Mr. Soros, 88, from the dark corners of the internet and talk radio to the very center of the political debate.

“He’s a banker, he’s Jewish, he gives to Democrats — he’s sort of a perfect storm for vilification by the right, here and in Europe,” said Michael H. Posner, a human rights lawyer and former State Department official in the Obama administration.

Mr. Soros has given his main group, the Open Society Foundations, $32 billion for what it calls democracy-building efforts in the United States and around the world. In addition, in the United States, Mr. Soros has personally contributed more than $75 million over the years to federal candidates and committees, according to Federal Election Commission and Internal Revenue Service records.

That qualifies him as one of the top disclosed donors to American political campaigns in the modern campaign finance era, and it does not include the many millions more he has donated to political nonprofit groups that do not disclose their donors.

By contrast, the network of conservative donors led by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, who have been similarly attacked by some on the American left, has spent about $2 billion over the past decade on political and public policy advocacy.❞

The closing advertisement for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign featured Mr. Soros — as well as Janet L. Yellen, the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve at the time, and Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, both of whom are Jewish — as examples of “global special interests” who enriched themselves on the backs of working Americans.

If anything, Mr. Soros has been elevated by Mr. Trump and his allies to even greater prominence in the narrative they have constructed for the closing weeks of the 2018 midterm elections. They have projected on to him key roles in both the threat they say is posed by the Central Americans making their way toward the United States border and what they characterized as Democratic “mobs” protesting the nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

The National Republican Congressional Committee ran an ad in October in Minnesota suggesting that Mr. Soros, who is depicted sitting behind a pile of cash, “bankrolls” everything from “prima donna athletes protesting our anthem” to “left-wing mobs paid to riot in the streets.” The ad links Mr. Soros to a local congressional candidate who worked at a think tank that has received funding from the Open Society Foundations.

Even after the authorities arrested a fervent Trump supporter and accused him of sending the pipe bombs to Mr. Soros and other critics, Republicans did not back away. The president grinned on Friday when supporters at the White House responded to his attacks on Democrats and “globalists” by chanting, “Lock ’em up,” and yelling, “George Soros.”

#Antisémitisme #Georges_Soros #Néo_fascisme #USA

Supreme Court rejects industry’s plea to hear Grand Canyon #uranium mining case

The Supreme Court declined Monday to hear a case challenging the government’s ban on uranium mining in the Grand Canyon, a major blow to industry groups hoping to mine for the nuclear material.

The court said it would not hear the case brought by the National Mining Association and the American Exploration and Mining Association, which challenged the Interior Department’s ban as being based on an unconstitutional provision of the law.

The rejection leaves in place a December appeals court decision that upheld the ban.

In 2012, Obama administration Interior Secretary Ken Salazar instituted the ban, partly because the neighboring Havasupai Tribe relies on groundwater from the area to survive.

“The lands in and around the Grand Canyon have always been the homeland of the Havasupai People,” Muriel Coochwytewa, the tribe’s chairwoman, said in a statement Monday.

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“Our ancestors lived and died amongst the sacred sites that cover this land. The mineral withdrawal is a necessary way to protect the land and the water that our people and our village depend upon, and we are grateful that the Supreme Court has agreed with the 9th Circuit’s conclusion ― that our lands and our people must be preserved.”

In March, the industry groups asked the court to review the ban, which prohibited uranium mining on public lands next to the national monument for 20 years.

While the Supreme Court’s decision to not take the case leaves uranium mining companies no more avenues to challenge the ban in court, they are reportedly lobbying the Trump administration to support renewed mining in the U.S. for both economy and national security reasons.

▻https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/409328-supreme-court-rejects-industrys-plea-to-hear-grand-canyon-uranium
#Grand_Canyon #USA #Etats-Unis #mines #extractivisme
cc @daphne @albertocampiphoto

The real Oslo criminals
▻https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-the-real-oslo-criminals-1.6338505

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.6338508.1533160775!/image/3231892592.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/3231892592.jpg

We should adopt the conceit of the right: the Oslo criminals. The pejorative should be attached, of course, to Benjamin Netanyahu and the savage incitement that he and the settlers perpetrate; but the heroes of the peace, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, are also worthy of the title. Their missed opportunity, rooted chiefly in their cowardice, is unforgivable.

A new documentary shows this quite well. “The Oslo Diaries,” directed by Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, which was screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival, is a moving and important film that many Israelis will see.

When it was over, a woman sitting in front of me got up and tried in vain to hold back her tears. It was the chairwoman of Meretz, MK Tamar Zandberg. It was touching to see a politician crying over a missed opportunity, but a similar discomfort, to heavy to bear, filled the entire hall. The film proves how, despite all the wariness toward the Oslo Accords, they still represented an opportunity — and this is what Rabin and Peres missed. This missed opportunity was not only fateful, it was also irreparable.

“The Oslo Diaries” reflects the spirit of the times. Netanyahu, still with his unkempt hair, looks like a crazy man at the right-wing rallies, his eyes spinning round, different from his relatively level-headed image of today, and the fascist and violent atmosphere of the street as never seen before in Israel. But the film deals with the peacemakers, and the picture that arises from them too is worrying. They are the explanation for the failure, most of which can be placed on their shoulders.

Faltering from the beginning: Yair Hirschfeld preaches morality with characteristic haughtiness and threatens Ahmed Qureia for daring to mention the Nazi occupation of Norway and to compare it to the Israeli occupation, which has lasted 10 times longer and exacted many more victims. A few of the other members of the Israeli delegation are tainted by the same arrogance toward the Palestinians — particularly legal adviser Joel Singer, who is exposed in the film as an especially repulsive and arrogant individual.

Standing out from them is the innocent and benevolent figure of Ron Pundak, and above all of them shines Yossi Beilin, one of a rare breed of diplomats who can set his ego aside, always behind the scenes and focused on the goal rather than on getting credit. Beilin has never received his due honor: Oslo is Beilin, Beilin is Oslo. The missed opportunity belongs to those above him, Rabin and Peres. They are the heroes of Oslo, and its criminals.

They began the negotiations with the intention of manipulating the Palestinians as far as possible. There is not a moment of equality or fairness in the negotiations. When agreement is reached on an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank in the second stage, they insisted on only 2 percent. Only they had “misgivings” about sitting with the PLO. They, who never shed a drop of blood, found it so difficult to speak with the bloodthirsty terrorists from Tunis. They, who did not exile hundreds of thousands in 1948 and did not establish the occupation enterprise in 1967, suffered so much from speaking with terrorists.

The theatrical feeling of disgust they showed, and Rabin in particular, from shaking hands with Yasser Arafat demonstrated their true attitude toward the Palestinians. Rabin of the expulsion of Ramle and the massacre in Lod, Rabin of “break their bones,” recoiled so much from defiling his pure hands with Arafat’s bloody hands. And he took the trouble to show it, too. This is not how you make peace. If anyone should have recoiled it was Arafat, who was forced to shake the hand of someone who occupied and disinherited him. Arafat wanted to start a new chapter more than Rabin did.

But the main guilt is in the missed opportunity. There were at least two, one for Rabin and one for Peres. Rabin, who gave Beilin the impression that he was about to remove the Jewish community of Hebron after the Baruch Goldstein massacre, became frightened and did not keep his word, and in doing so determined the future of the relations, possibly forever.

At the end of the 40 days of mourning, the suicide bombing attacks began. It is not difficult to imagine what would have happened had Rabin removed the obstacle of the settlement in Hebron. Peres, who in the movie is seen giving one of his peace speeches, one of the most courageous and hair-raising ever heard here, rejected as prime minister the draft of the permanent agreement reached by Beilin and Mahmoud Abbas, out of fear of the coming elections. This was the second moment of missed opportunity. Everyone knows what happened next, and it makes one despair.

.:Middle East Online:: :.
▻http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=86948

Moins médiatique que le droit de conduire une voiture mais autrment plus important si ça passe...

Women in Tunisia may be able to pass their family name on to their children and have equal inheritance with men if proposals, due to be finalised in February, are adopted in a country regarded as a leader for women’s rights in the Arab world.

The Committee on Individual Freedoms and Equality, set up in August, will present its recommendations on Feb. 20 to the president.

“Tunisia is once again pioneering and irreversibly moving towards advancement,” the committee’s chairwoman Bochra Bel Haj Hmida told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in emailed comments.

#tunisie

Wladek Flakin : Some revolutionary Jews - EXBERLINER.com
▻http://www.exberliner.com/features/opinion/some-revolutionary-jews
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmSKBFM-WWk

As Chanukah is drawing near (Dec 12-20), I decided to take a walk through Berlin’s old Jewish quarter just after sunset and tried to imagine the same place in the 1920s. I saw myself descending a staircase into a random building’s half-basement, where I’d bump into people arguing in conspirative tones, using a mixture of Berlinerisch and Yiddish. They would go silent and and the mood would turn hostile – until I could prove my revolutionary bonafides.

This was my imagining of the home base of the KPD (Germany’s Communist Party), illegal for long stretches of the 1920s. Their secret Zentrale was just a few blocks away at Hackesche Höfe, where Kino Central is today. Jewish life in Berlin was intertwined with the revolutionary underground. The KPD was founded by Rosa Luxemburg, and after her murder taken over by her lawyer Paul Levi. In 1924, a younger generation took over, with 29-year-old firebrand Ruth Fischer as chairwoman and Werner Scholem (less well-known than his brother Gershom, a scholar of Jewish mysticism) at the helm.

There is lots of ideological tension in these streets. My heroes from the past were planning for revolution. But now we’re just demoralised hipsters trying to sell this memory to tourists.

This is exactly the tension expressed in the music of Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird, who I saw in concert just last month – I had to at least partly realise my own fantasies. Kahn, a fellow Neu-Neuköllner originally from the US, has been making music in Berlin for more than 10 years. His band just published its fifth album, The Butcher’s Share.

Kahn strikes me as the kind of character one would encounter in the 1920s: a rootless and multicultural Revoluzzer with a black fedora, leather jacket and full beard. He performs the classic hymns of the Jewish workers’ movement of Eastern Europe – Klezmer music in the original Yiddish. Traditional songs like “Arbetslozer Marsch” or “Arbeter Froyen” are filled with the pathos of millions of struggling proletarians condemning capitalism and conjuring up the socialist utopia.

But times have gotten less revolutionary. When Kahn sings a harmonica-laced ballad about a Vilna partisan waiting, gun-in-hand, in the dark woods for a German patrol, sure, it will make any lefty go teary-eyed. But then again, shooting Nazis is not currently part of our life experience. So Kahn also gives us new songs about the contradictions of revolutionary-minded hipsters living under capitalism – rejecting it, and yet still profiting in unintended ways from the awful exploitation. “Every pair of pants contains a horror story”, he sings, because “there’s blood and guts encoded in the value of the ware.” This rather depressing observation about the ignored realities of globalisation is also the title of the album: You have to give the butcher his share.

We really want to believe in the socialist utopia with the same passion of our forebearers from the KPD, but in a time with few mass struggles it’s easy to lose hope – this tension is the core of this modern Klezmer punk. Kahn would certainly be happier playing at a large revolutionary demonstration with a megaphone and an accordion, or at a secret assembly with a ukulele. But these aren’t the times we’re living in – at least not yet. Until the winds change, we’ll be stuck living with our contradictions, enjoying socialist battle songs in a stuffy theatre where there isn’t even space to dance.

But the memories still live on. And if it’s too cold for you to take a walk down Linienstraße through the old Jewish quarter this Chanukah, there’s always another chance to catch the ol’ Kahn instead.

#musique #Berlin #histoire

13 PLC members held by Israel after Khalida Jarrar detained in overnight raidsJuly 2, 2017 10:49 A.M. (Updated: July 2, 2017 5:07 P.M.)
▻http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=777878

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BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Israeli forces detained Palestinian parliamentarian Khalida Jarrar during predawn military raids carried out across the occupied West Bank on Sunday — just over a year after she was released from Israeli prison — bringing the number of Palestinian lawmakers imprisoned by Israel to 13.

At least 11 other Palestinians were detained in the raids, included the chairwoman of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees.

Israeli forces detained Jarrar, a deputy at the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) for the leftist faction the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), after raiding her home in Ramallah in the central occupied West Bank.

She was released from Israeli prison on June 3, 2016 on a suspended sentence of 12 months within a five-year period.

Following her detention 14 months prior, she was initially sentenced to six months of administrative detention — internment without trial or charge — though international pressure forced Israeli authorities to bring charges against her, all 12 of which focused on her political activism.

Jarrar was charged with security-related offenses related to her membership and activities with the PFLP — a Palestinian political party Israel considers a “terrorist” organization, along with the majority of other Palestinian political factions — and accused of inciting violence.

At the time, Jarrar accused the Israeli military prosecution of working to keep her in jail as long as possible, adding that she “did not expect anything from military courts. They are a joke, it’s like a big theater, I do not trust them and my detention has been political since the beginning.”

Jarrar also said that she refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the court, stating that all charges pressed against her were “ridiculous” and related to completely legal activities, including social and political work as a member of parliament.

A statement released by the Israeli army Sunday morning claimed that Jarrar was detained for activities within PFLP and that her detention was not related to her post as member of the PLC.

Jarrar is also the head of the Prisoners’ Commission in the PLC, and vice-chairperson of the board of directors of Palestinian prisoners’ rights group Addameer.

Addameer said in a statement Sunday morning that “the arrest of Khalida Jarrar constitutes an attack against Palestinian political leaders and Palestinian civil society as a whole. It also constitutes one arrest in the context of continuous arrest campaigns against Palestinians.”

#Khalida_Jarrar

WATCH: Verbal Clashes in Knesset After Lawmaker Calls Israeli Soldiers Murderers

Israeli Arab MK Zoabi causes storm during debate on reconciliation with Turkey, prompting calls to have her barred from legislature.
Jonathan Lis Jun 29, 2016 5:46 PM
▻http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.727913

A clash broke out at the Knesset plenum on Wednesday after MK Haneen Zoabi (Joint List) called Israeli soldiers who participated in the takeover of the 2010 Gaza flotilla “murderers.” Her comments took place during a legislature session on the reconciliation agreement with Turkey, formally announced on Tuesday.

Lawmakers Mickey Levy (Yesh Atid), Oren Hazan (Likud) and Hilik Bar (Zionist Union) gathered around the podium and demanded that Zoabi be removed. Levy even ran from his seat and tried to forcefully remove her from the podium. The meeting’s chairman, Deputy Knesset Speaker Hamad Amar (Yisrael Beiteinu) removed Zoabi from the platform and the plenum. Other lawmakers, including Hazan, Levy, Meretz chairwoman Zehava Galon and Joint List MK Jamal Zahalka, were also removed.

Turkey and Israel have reconciled after a six-year rift. The agreement renormalizes diplomatic relations between the two countries and ends the crisis that erupted following the death of nine Turkish civilians during a raid by Israeli commandos on the Mavi Marmara flotilla to Gaza Strip in May 2010 – on which Zoabi was also present.

“I stood here six years ago, some of you remember the hatred and hostility toward me, and look where we got to,” Zoabi said in her speech. “Apologies to the families of those who were called terrorists. The nine that were killed, it turns out that their families need to be compensated. I demand an apology to all the political activists who were on the Marmara and an apology to MK Haneen Zoabi, who you’ve incited against for six years. I demand compensation and I will donate it to the next flotilla. As long as there’s a siege, more flotillas need to be organized.”
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QVW2fOMVjQ

#Haneen_Zoabi

Racist incidents feared to be linked to Brexit result

Suspected racist graffiti at Polish cultural centre in London among incidents thought to be fuelled by vote to leave the EU

▻http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/26/racist-incidents-feared-to-be-linked-to-brexit-result-reported-in-engla
#racisme #xénophobie #graffitis #UK #Angleterre #graffitis #migrants_polonais

#Europe Prepares to Pick Who Can Run Greece’s Banks - WSJ
▻http://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-prepares-to-pick-who-can-run-greeces-banks-1465378203

ATHENS—European authorities are seeking to replace a third of the board members at Greece’s major banks, among the toughest actions by regulators since the financial crisis. And Louka Katseli is a major target.

The former socialist parliamentarian was named chairwoman of National Bank of Greece SA last year, one of several politicized appointments that European regulators say saps investors’ confidence in Greek banks and makes it harder to clean up a mountain of bad loans.

#colonisation #Grèce

Survey: One-third of Americans Support Boycotting Israel
But 62 percent of Americans and 50 percent of Brits think BDS is a modern form of anti-Semitism, Ipsos poll shows.

Haaretz May 30, 2016 6:50 PM
read more: ►http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.722327
►http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.722327

One-third of Americans support the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, as do 40 percent of Britons, states a survey conducted by the Ipsos global market research and public opinion firm, Channel 2 News reported on Monday.
At the same time, a larger number of people - 62 percent of Americans and half of Britons - consider the BDS movement to be a modern form of anti-Semitism.
The poll sampled 1,100 people in the United States on their views about Israel, and a similar poll was conducted in Britain.
The poll implies that the BDS movement, on campuses in particular and elsewhere, is having a real effect on public opinion.
The Democratic Party may now be on the verge of a major fight on the issue too. Last week, U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders appointed three critics of Israel to help draft the party’s platform ahead of the convention in Philadelphia. Hillary Clinton and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz appointed supporters of Israel to the committee drafting the Democratic platform.

Daily chart: Revenge of the nerds | The Economist

▻http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/03/daily-chart-2?fsrc=scn/tw/te/dc/revengeofthenerds

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THE economies of the rich world increasingly depend upon skilled workers, and college degrees are in high demand. In 1972 a university-educated man aged 25-34 could expect to earn 22% more than a peer without a degree, according to the Urban Institute, a think-tank. Today that premium has risen to 70%. But if university pays, its benefits are not spread evenly across all graduates. A new report from PayScale, a research firm, calculates the returns to higher education in American universities. Its authors compare the career earnings of college graduates with the present-day cost of a degree at their alma maters, after taking account of financial aid.

US Congress blocks $159 million in aid to PA
March 20, 2016 6:17 P.M. (Updated : March 20, 2016 6:22 P.M.)
▻http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=770770

BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Members of the United States Congress are delaying a payment of $159 million in aid allocated for the Palestinian Authority in effort to pressure the PA to relaunch negotiations with Israel, the PLO ambassador to Washington said Saturday.

Maen Erekat confirmed earlier reports that US Congress was blocking the payment, which came at the request of House Republican Kay Granger, the Chairwoman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State-Foreign Operations, under the pretext that the PA supports “terrorism.”

The Obama administration allocated $440 million in aid to Palestinians for 2015, including $131 million for economic and development projects by USAID and $70 million for PA agencies and security agencies, while $80 million in aid was deducted following Israeli criticism of “incitement” by the PA last October.

Erekat added that some “pro-Israel” congress members are continuing to pressure the PA to relaunch diplomatic negotiations with Israel, and prevent Palestinians from joining international organizations and conventions.

““““““““““““““““““““““““““
L’aide américaine aux Palestiniens bloquée
Par Marc Henry Mis à jour le 03/10/2011
▻http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2011/10/02/01003-20111002ARTFIG00229-l-aide-americaine-aux-palestiniens-bloquee.php

Une partie du Congrès américain semble décidée à faire payer cher aux Palestiniens leur campagne pour l’adhésion de leur État à l’ONU. À titre d’avertissement, les élus américains ont bloqué le versement d’une tranche de 200 millions de dollars d’aide destinée à l’Autorité palestinienne. Le pactole correspond à un tiers de l’aide annuelle versée par les États-Unis. Cette sanction a été prise contre l’avis de Barack Obama par des membres du Congrès surtout républicains à l’approche de l’élection présidentielle de l’an prochain.

Child brides in Mozambique: ‘an affront to human rights on a massive scale’ | Simon Allison | Global development | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/nov/26/mozambique-child-marriage-african-girls-summit-lusaka-zambia

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/cf78b5a7cb7e0b31c8a5cbb9c9e7031bcccba589/0_339_5100_3061/master/5100.jpg?w=1200&q=85&auto=format&sharp=10&s=cfeb3237822e675f66d03eb48f58bc0a

The African Girls’ Summit on ending child marriage, convened by the African Union (AU), is seeking to improve the lives of girls like Cidalia. The summit, being held in Lusaka, Zambia, this week, is the first of its kind in Africa, and is designed to put a stop to a practice that limits the prospects of girls across the continent. It is hoped the summit will secure concrete pledges from governments to tackle the problem.

“We must do away with child marriage. Girls who end up as brides at a tender age are coerced into having children while they are children themselves,” said the AU chairwoman, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.

According to statistics from the UN children’s agency, Unicef, published on Thursday, the number of child brides in Africa is predicted to increase from 125 million to 310 million by 2050.

merci @reka #mariages_forcés #filles #femmes #patriacat #pédosexualité

What We Know About the Computer Formulas Making Decisions in Your Life - ProPublica
▻https://www.propublica.org/article/what-we-know-about-the-computer-formulas-making-decisions-in-your-life

http://www.propublica.org/images/ngen/gypsy_og_image/20151030-algorithms-reading-guide-1200x630.jpg

We reported yesterday on a study of Uber’s dynamic pricing scheme that investigated Uber’s surge pricing patterns in Manhattan and San Francisco and showed riders how they could potentially avoid higher prices. The study’s authors finally shed some light on Uber’s “black box,” the algorithm that automatically sets prices but that is inaccessible to both drivers and riders.

That’s just one of a nearly endless number of algorithms we use every day. The formulas influence far more than your Google search results or Facebook newsfeed. Sophisticated algorithms are now being used to make decisions in everything from criminal justice to education.

But when big data uses bad data, discrimination can result. Federal Trade Commission chairwoman Edith Ramirez recently called for “algorithmic transparency,” since algorithms can contain “embedded assumptions that lead to adverse impacts that reinforce inequality.”

Here are a few good stories that have contributed to our understanding of this relatively new field.

South African Jews Vow Not Be ’Bullied’ by Calls to Cut Dual Israeli Citizenship - Jewish World News - Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/.premium-1.675013

An attack on the Jewish community – that is how South African Jewish community organizations are describing proposed changes to the country’s dual-citizenship laws.
A deputy cabinet minister and senior official in the ruling African National Congress (ANC) made headlines at the weekend when he was quoted as saying that the government should look at changing current laws so as to prevent South African citizens from fighting for the Israel Defense Forces.
The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) and South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) condemned the comments made by Obed Bapela, who is also head of the ANC’s national executive committee’s panel on international relations. 
“He has undermined the very core value of South Africa’s democracy by proposing a change to our law purely to prevent one sector of our society, in this case, South African Jews, from having a relationship with Israel,” the SAJBD and SAZF said.
“The South African Jewish community will not be bullied or intimidated by his threats and have sought a meeting with President Jacob Zuma and will request further meetings to clarify Bapela’s statement.”
SAJBD chairwoman Mary Kluk told Haaretz that she didn’t know how many South Africans have served with the IDF in recent years.
Asked if she believed that Bapela’s views reflected those of the senior ANC leadership, she said: “No. I strongly believe that these are Bapela’s personal views and that he uses every opportunity provided to him to put them out there.”
Bapela rejected the notion that the proposed policy changes were aimed only at Israel.
In a radio interview, he said that Israel was used as simply an example, but that the government was also concerned about South Africans serving with other nations’ armies.
Several citizens had served with the American and British militaries during the invasion of Iraq, he said, and that others take part in mercenary wars and escape prosecution by adopting another country’s citizenship.
Responding to the assertion that the South African Jewish community was being singled out, Bapela said: "Not at all. We are not anti-Jewish. We are not anti-Semitic. That is why even the policy says ’the Israeli state co-existing with that of Palestine.’

Pro-Gaza, anti-Israel demonstrators in Cape Town, August 9, 2014.Reuters
“That’s recognition of Israel as an independent state and the Jewish community as citizens of the world. It’s the policies of the government of Israel we oppose and are against.”
He added, however, that if a “specific group” is sending boys to a country every year to receive military training, it was something that goes against ANC policies and would have to be looked at.
Speaking to Haaretz, SAZF President Avrom Krengel said that although the organization doesn’t keep track of how many South Africans have served in the IDF in recent years, it was definitely far less than the number who serve in the British armed forces.
“A year or two ago, the U.K. High Commissioner said that there were over 1,000 South Africans serving as British Marines,” Krengel said.
He added that while the children of South Africans who make aliyah would eventually end up in the IDF when they reached conscription age, it could not be interpreted as a case of South African Jews sending their children to Israel to be part of the army.
The fewer than 200 families who make aliyah every year come from a big cross-section of the community and are motivated to immigrate to Israel for various reasons, Krengel said.
“They are not going there to join the IDF,” he said.
He described Bapela as being part of a very vociferous anti-Israel camp in the ANC, but said his views weren’t shared by the country’s president, deputy president or senior cabinet ministers.
The mooted change to the law also drew sharp criticism from Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who for 10 years served as Minister of Home Affairs and is head of the opposition Inkatha Freedom Party.
Buthelezi said he felt frustrated by the ANC’s intention to “instruct” government to change its citizenship laws “purely on the basis that a few South Africans are also citizens of Israel, and a few among them may be receiving military training in Israel.”
Buthelezi pointed out that under current laws a citizen can only lose his or her citizenship for serving in the armed forces of a country with which South Africa is at war.
“We are not at war with Israel,” he noted.
“One can reach no other conclusion than that the ANC has moved from being ’pro-Palestine’ to being ’anti-Israeli’.”
Bapela was in the news less than two months ago for comments related to Israel.
He had harsh words for South African students who visited Israel under the auspices of the South Africa-Israel Forum, saying that they had brought the ANC into disrepute and promising to launch a probe.
At the time he accused Israel of “offering free trips and holidays to embarrass the ANC."
Bapela was also a featured speaker at a protest in March of this year against the South Africa-Israel Expo in Johannesburg.
During the BDS event, participants were heard shouting “You think this is Israel, we are going to kill you!” and “You Jews do not belong here in South Africa!”

South African Jews Vow Not Be ’Bullied’ by Calls to Cut Dual Israeli Citizenship
Official in the ruling ANC party said that the government should look at changing the laws to prevent South Africans from fighting for IDF.

Michael Campbell Sep 07, 2015

An attack on the Jewish community – that is how South African Jewish community organizations are describing proposed changes to the country’s dual-citizenship laws.
A deputy cabinet minister and senior official in the ruling African National Congress (ANC) made headlines at the weekend when he was quoted as saying that the government should look at changing current laws so as to prevent South African citizens from fighting for the Israel Defense Forces.
The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) and South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) condemned the comments made by Obed Bapela, who is also head of the ANC’s national executive committee’s panel on international relations. 
“He has undermined the very core value of South Africa’s democracy by proposing a change to our law purely to prevent one sector of our society, in this case, South African Jews, from having a relationship with Israel,” the SAJBD and SAZF said.
“The South African Jewish community will not be bullied or intimidated by his threats and have sought a meeting with President Jacob Zuma and will request further meetings to clarify Bapela’s statement.”
SAJBD chairwoman Mary Kluk told Haaretz that she didn’t know how many South Africans have served with the IDF in recent years.
Asked if she believed that Bapela’s views reflected those of the senior ANC leadership, she said: “No. I strongly believe that these are Bapela’s personal views and that he uses every opportunity provided to him to put them out there.”
Bapela rejected the notion that the proposed policy changes were aimed only at Israel.
In a radio interview, he said that Israel was used as simply an example, but that the government was also concerned about South Africans serving with other nations’ armies.
Several citizens had served with the American and British militaries during the invasion of Iraq, he said, and that others take part in mercenary wars and escape prosecution by adopting another country’s citizenship.
Responding to the assertion that the South African Jewish community was being singled out, Bapela said: "Not at all. We are not anti-Jewish. We are not anti-Semitic. That is why even the policy says ’the Israeli state co-existing with that of Palestine.’

Pro-Gaza, anti-Israel demonstrators in Cape Town, August 9, 2014.Reuters
“That’s recognition of Israel as an independent state and the Jewish community as citizens of the world. It’s the policies of the government of Israel we oppose and are against.”
He added, however, that if a “specific group” is sending boys to a country every year to receive military training, it was something that goes against ANC policies and would have to be looked at.
Speaking to Haaretz, SAZF President Avrom Krengel said that although the organization doesn’t keep track of how many South Africans have served in the IDF in recent years, it was definitely far less than the number who serve in the British armed forces.
“A year or two ago, the U.K. High Commissioner said that there were over 1,000 South Africans serving as British Marines,” Krengel said.
He added that while the children of South Africans who make aliyah would eventually end up in the IDF when they reached conscription age, it could not be interpreted as a case of South African Jews sending their children to Israel to be part of the army.
The fewer than 200 families who make aliyah every year come from a big cross-section of the community and are motivated to immigrate to Israel for various reasons, Krengel said.
“They are not going there to join the IDF,” he said.
He described Bapela as being part of a very vociferous anti-Israel camp in the ANC, but said his views weren’t shared by the country’s president, deputy president or senior cabinet ministers.
The mooted change to the law also drew sharp criticism from Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who for 10 years served as Minister of Home Affairs and is head of the opposition Inkatha Freedom Party.
Buthelezi said he felt frustrated by the ANC’s intention to “instruct” government to change its citizenship laws “purely on the basis that a few South Africans are also citizens of Israel, and a few among them may be receiving military training in Israel.”
Buthelezi pointed out that under current laws a citizen can only lose his or her citizenship for serving in the armed forces of a country with which South Africa is at war.
“We are not at war with Israel,” he noted.
“One can reach no other conclusion than that the ANC has moved from being ’pro-Palestine’ to being ’anti-Israeli’.”
Bapela was in the news less than two months ago for comments related to Israel.
He had harsh words for South African students who visited Israel under the auspices of the South Africa-Israel Forum, saying that they had brought the ANC into disrepute and promising to launch a probe.
At the time he accused Israel of “offering free trips and holidays to embarrass the ANC."
Bapela was also a featured speaker at a protest in March of this year against the South Africa-Israel Expo in Johannesburg.
During the BDS event, participants were heard shouting “You think this is Israel, we are going to kill you!” and “You Jews do not belong here in South Africa!”

Comme les Américains l’ont fait avec les Indiens…
▻http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/MKs-learn-Beduin-were-in-the-dark-over-resettlement-plan-threatening-bills-Kn

“You want to transfer an entire population,” MK Hanna Swaid (Hadash) said.

Committee chairwoman MK Miri Regev (Likud) responded, “Yes, as the Americans did to the Indians.”

Israël, comme en Egypte ou en Russie

Knesset revives attempt to restrict foreign funding of left-wing NGOs -
By Jonathan Lis
Haaretz Daily Newspaper

▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/knesset-revives-attempt-to-restrict-foreign-funding-of-left-wing-ngos.premi

The Knesset is once again attempting to restrict foreign donations to certain nongovernmental organizations: MK Ayelet Shaked, chairwoman of the Habayit Hayehudi Knesset faction, submitted a new bill on this subject on Tuesday.

According to the bill, groups that call for boycotting Israel or for indicting Israel Defense Force soldiers in international tribunals are among those that would be restricted in raising funds from foreign sources, as would individuals identified with such groups.

It would be enough for a single paid employee of an organization, or someone who sits on its board, to call for a boycott of Israel to apply the restrictions, the bill states.

#ONG #NGO

“South African groups seek arrest warrant for Livni” - Haaretz
►http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/south-african-groups-seek-arrest-warrant-for-livni-1.337175

The Media Review Network and the Palestine Solidarity Alliance are seeking to secure an arrest warrant in South Africa for Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni, who is due to visit that country next week, Channel 10 reported citing South African media outlets.

The South African groups allege that Livni is guilty of war crimes due to her role in Israel’s three-week offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in the winter of 2008-09, when Livni was foreign minister in the government of Ehud Olmert.

#Tzipi_Livni #Israël #Afrique_du_Sud