The NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has introduced the first of four vending machines destined for drug-infested areas of the city. These machines provide free items like crack pipes, Narcan, and condoms, among other essentials. 

The first public health vending machine operates at 1676 Broadway in Brooklyn. It’s a big blue box stocked with naloxone — a drug that can reverse overdoses, fentanyl test strips, hygiene kits, and safe sex kits. And it’s considered by health officials to be the first line of defense to combat the city’s out-of-control drug overdose crisis. 

Anyone can use the vending machine. All someone has to do is enter their NYC zip code and pick if they want crack pipes, Narcan, and condoms (maybe this vending machine should be kept a secret from Hunter). 

The city’s health commissioner said the machines would help fight the overdose crisis:

“We are in the midst of an overdose crisis in our city, which is taking a fellow New Yorker from us every three hours and is a major cause of falling life expectancy in NYC.

“But we will continue to fight to keep our neighbors and loved ones alive with care, compassion and action. Public health vending machines are an innovative way to meet people where they are and to put life-saving tools like naloxone in their hands. We’ll leave no stone unturned until we reverse the trends in opioid-related deaths in our city.”

Overdose deaths across the metro area have hit record highs. In 2021, there were 2,668 overdose deaths in NYC, compared with 2,103 in 2020. In 2021, 84% of overdose deaths involved an opioid. Fentanyl, a highly potent opioid, was involved in 80% of all overdose deaths. There were 1,370 confirmed overdose death in the first half of 2022. Officials estimate 2022 could be the deadliest year for overdoses if that trend persists. 

So what’s the strategy by Democrats to curb the drug and crime crisis? It revolves around vending machines full of crack pipes, Narcan, and condoms. Their approach to crime and drugs has been horrendous as NYC spirals into a crime-ridden hellhole. It’s not just NYC. Many other metro areas controlled by progressives are spiraling out of control. 

Authored by Steven Kovac via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A small but vocal group of demonstrators gathered on June 3 outside the Detroit office of the FBI to demand the firing of Christopher Wray, the bureau’s director.

“Wray must be fired, and the FBI must be decentralized and moved out of Washington, D.C.,” protest organizer and Trump supporter Brian Pannebecker said. “As long as the FBI and DOJ [Department of Justice] continue to illegally withhold subpoenaed evidence from Congress, we will continue to fight.”

Wray was nominated by then-President Donald Trump to succeed FBI Director James Comey, whom he fired in the summer of 2017.

When asked about that by The Epoch Times, Pannebecker said: “Yeah, Trump made some really bad appointments. He’ll know better in his next term.”

Suppressing Potential Evidence

Pannebecker, a U.S. Army veteran with a son currently serving in the Army National Guard in the Middle East, said he’s outraged by what he sees as the FBI’s protecting President Joe Biden by suppressing potentially incriminating evidence that allegedly links Biden to an international influence peddling scheme.

“We are here today in the hope of awakening the people of Detroit, who are the victims of so much crime and violence, to the need to be rid of Wray and replace him with someone who will work for them,” he said.

“I’m here because our government is completely corrupted,” Dana Coyne told The Epoch Times. “We are not a government of the people anymore.

“We are a country run by globalists who do not love America and who disrespect the sovereignty of the United States.”

John Zupanc of Macomb County said he came to downtown Detroit on a Saturday because he believes the government “is crooked and corrupt and must be held accountable.”

Wray’s Offer

Facing a contempt of Congress citation, Wray announced on June 2 that he would permit a piece of evidence subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee to be viewed only by Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Democratic Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).

Wray’s move on the eve of the protest did nothing to appease the demonstrators.

“At this point, does anybody trust Wray to follow through? He has a history of stonewalling and then finally producing documents requested by Congress that are near totally redacted,” Pannebecker said.

“I feel there is a two-tiered system of justice in this country. There should not be one set of rules for the favored few and different rules for the rest of us. Government should do the right thing,” said demonstrator Angelic Johnson, of the group Faith, Education, and Commerce United of Michigan (FEC).

Protester Elisa Wagner said: “Today, our government is doing exactly what our Founding Fathers warned us about. We are living in a tyrannical time.

“All Americans must do their due diligence to protect our constitutional rights. That’s why I’m here.”

Differing Opinions

Trump flags and “Fire Wray” picket signs in the Federal Building Plaza provoked responses from passing cars, with some honking and shouting, “Go Trump!” while others yelled obscenities and “Lock him up!”

The demonstration also caught the attention of passing pedestrians.

Read more here…

Authored by Michael Shellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse via Public Substack,

Yesterday, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. appeared on a Twitter Spaces panel co-hosted by Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, and venture capitalist David Sacks. He spoke for over two hours on a range of issues, including the war in Ukraine, energy policy, gun control, and the origin of SARS-CoV-2. And Kennedy deplored the corporate takeover of the Democratic Party, excoriated President Biden’s pro-war instincts, decried the domination of US foreign policy by neo-cons and promoted renewable energy.

And yet, according to the New York Times and CNN, it was an orgy of right-wing conspiracy theorizing. “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a scion of one of the country’s most famous Democratic families,” wrote three New York Times reporters, “dived into the full embrace of a host of conservative figures who eagerly promoted his long-shot primary challenge to President Biden….On Monday, he sounded like a candidate far more at ease in the mushrooming Republican presidential contest.”

In pre-Trump America, Kennedy, an anti-war, pro-free speech environmentalist and fierce critic of corporate power, would have been universally regarded as a far-left candidate in the mold of Ralph Nader or his current campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich. He once called for the Koch Brothers to be criminally prosecuted. Kennedy believes that the war in Ukraine is being fueled by “the neo-cons in the White House” who want “regime change with the Russians.” In his campaign announcement speech, he described his mission as ending “the corrupt merger of state and corporate power” that is threatening “to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country.”

But a dizzying political realignment has scrambled all of the traditional categories and left in its wake just two sides: not left and right, but insider and outsider. And no matter the substance of one’s beliefs, to the media, “outsider” means, by default, “right-wing conspiracy theorist.”

On yesterday’s Twitter spaces conversation, the shift was lost on nobody, including Kennedy. “The Democrats slowly became pro-corporate, pro-war, and pro-censorship,” said Kennedy, and “Republicans became anti-censorship, pro-civil liberties, and anti-war. There’s been this tremendous realignment.”

Kennedy’s rising profile ignited a media backlash yesterday that felt almost orchestrated. Kennedy’s “crackpot claims” and “outlandish views” have won him “favor on the right,” Vanity Fair moaned. “Mr. Kennedy has found another benefactor who seems to enjoy deluging the press with excrement: Elon Musk,” snarled The Independent. “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Spends an Hour Sucking Up to Elon Musk in Twitter Space,” blared a New Republic headline.

Business Insider called the conversation on Twitter “a bizarre Twitter Spaces conversation littered with falsehoods and conspiracy theories” and dismissed Kennedy’s “odd and occasionally incoherent policy positions.” Rolling Stone sneered at his “outlandish and pseudoscientific ideas” and labeled Kennedy a “fringe candidate” with “crank beliefs.” Esquire called him a “raving anti-vaxxer” and lambasted the very idea of having a contested Democratic primary.

But none put it as plainly as The Washington Post. “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tests the conspiratorial appetite of Democrats,” wrote the Post’s Michael Scherer. Kennedy, Scherer alleged, “campaigns on the idea that powerful people have been working in secret to deceive you.”

The Washington Post may believe that the public’s distrust of the elite is nothing more than a conspiracy theory. But if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that powerful people have, indeed, been working in secret to deceive us.

Consider how many suspicions that were dismissed as conspiracy theories turned out to be true: 

1. Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden showed that the U.S. government was indeed spying on millions of Americans without a warrant and without their knowledge and that such claims of widespread surveillance were neither paranoid nor conspiracy theories. Obama’s Director of National Intelligence had lied to Congress about NSA surveillance before Snowden revealed the truth.

2. Jeffrey Epstein may have been running a honeypot blackmail operation with the knowledge of the CIA, whose director visited him frequently, according to his private emails.

3. The evidence is today overwhelming that President Joe Biden’s son and brother sold access to Joe Biden, when he was Vice President, to foreign investors, including Chinese with close relationships to military intelligence.

4. The Biden administration and media elites have aggressively pushed for bans and restrictions on natural gas stoves while claiming that those who claimed they were pushing for such bans and restrictions were spreading conspiracy theories.

5. The U.S. really did manage bio-labs in Ukraine, despite propaganda from NPR and others dismissing this reality as a conspiracy theory.

6. The Pentagon had indeed been covering up evidence of UFOs for decades.

7. Emails show former NAID director Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins conspired to spread the lie that the Covid lab leak hypothesis had been debunked. In truth, there is a long history of lab leaks in the US and around the world, and scientists had hotly debated whether coronavirus research should occur given the high risk of a leak.

The New York Times wrote that “American intelligence agencies do not believe there is any evidence indicating that” COVID-19 was created as part of a bioweapons program. But Fauci’s NIH funding for gain-of-function research may indeed have originated as a biodefense effort.

…

Calling someone a “conspiracy theorist” is powerful and insidious. It does more than imply that a person is gullible or stupid. It suggests that they suffer from some kind of mental illness, and their opinions are not worth listening to.

Calling someone a conspiracy theorist is an act of delegitimation, just as calling them a racist or climate denier is. The goal is to ostracize and stigmatize, to un-person one’s political adversaries, and to banish their arguments from public discourse instead of refuting them. This is what the media is doing to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

…

Kennedy’s zealous support for free speech runs counter to the media’s goal of “combating disinformation” by monitoring and censoring ordinary people online and thereby establishing themselves, once again, as the arbiters of truth and falsehood.

This is another reason the media is so determined to destroy his candidacy.

…

That’s an existential threat to the mainstream media, so outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN are doing everything they can to discredit both the platform and Kennedy’s candidacy. That alone makes both worth fighting to defend.

Subscribers to Public substack can read the full article here…

Amid attempts to reset normal relations, given the two sides have been engaged in tit-for-tat accusations going back to at least February, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to China in the coming weeks, Bloomberg was the first to report Tuesday.

CNN is also reporting that the trip is expected, though a precise date hasn’t been specified, citing unnamed US officials. The trip was supposed to happen in February, but that was abruptly canceled (or perhaps just “postponed”), following the Chinese “spy balloon” shootdown incident early that month and ensuing war of words and Chinese denials of wrongdoing.

The State Department is keeping mum on the reports, however, with a spokesperson saying Tuesday, “We have no travel for the Secretary to announce; as we’ve said previously the visit to the People’s Republic of China will be rescheduled when conditions allow.”

But Biden admin officials have been busy trying to rescue spiraling relations with Beijing. The State Department earlier described “candid” and “productive” meetings between US officials and their Chinese counterparts in Beijing Monday:

Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink and NSC Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs Sarah Beran, accompanied by US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, met with Ministry of Foreign Affairs Executive Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu and Director General of the North American and Oceanian Affairs Department Yang Tao.

“The two sides exchanged views on the bilateral relationship, cross-Strait issues, channels of communication, and other matters. U.S. officials made clear that the United States would compete vigorously and stand up for U.S. interests and values,” an official readout said.

In a statement ahead of the 34th anniversary of the #TiananmenSquareMassacre, US Secretary of State Blinken issues a statement recalling that the government of #China sent tanks “to brutally repress peaceful Chinese pro-democracy protesters and bystander… https://t.co/CJPi3Hw9hx

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) June 3, 2023

Over the weekend Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu told the Shangri-La Dialogue security summit that any potential future conflict between the United States and China would bring “unbearable disaster for the world”.

But he said both rival powerful countries should be able to grow together and to avoid confrontation. His words came as the US condemned what it called unsafe and aggressive maneuvers by a Chinese PLA Navy warship in the Taiwan Strait as the American destroyer USS Chung-Hoon conducted a ‘freedom of navigation’ transit on Saturday.

Authored by Rudy Blalock via The Epoch Times,

Some residents in Santa Monica, an idyllic beach town in Southern California, are pushing for an outdoor county-operated program that distributes clean syringes weekly to homeless drug users near the city’s parks to be moved indoors to a county-owned facility.

The “overdose prevention program”—which is overseen by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s Division of Substance Abuse Prevention and Control—currently distributes syringes, first aid kits, opioid overdose reversal medication, and hygiene kits every Friday at three city parks, according to a spokesperson for the department.

Members of the Santa Monica Coalition, a group of retail and commercial tenants, residents, and property owners, are looking to put an end to the syringe distribution, which they say has been operating without public knowledge since 2019.

According to John Alle, who owns property on the Third Street Promenade, some city officials weren’t even aware of the county-funded program until he brought it to their attention a year ago.

“We raised it. We went to the local papers, and we wrote letters directly with photos to the city council and to downtown Santa Monica business owners and residents, so they had to address it,” said Alle, who also helped found the coalition.

The recently closed Wetzel’s Pretzels of Santa Monica, Calif., on June 2, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

City Councilman Oscar de la Torre confirmed that he only learned of the program after Alle first raised the issue.

“There was never any discussion. We never really talked about it in city council meetings. It’s never been agendized, so it was kind of a shocker for me to just hear that that was going on,” he told The Epoch Times.

The county’s health department works with the Venice Family Clinic, a community health center with several locations in the Los Angeles area to carry out the distribution of medical supplies, including needles. According to the coalition, Santa Monica is the only city in the country that currently has a publicly funded outdoor needle distribution program.

“The City of Santa Monica and the County along with Venice Family Clinic have been operating the only open-air, publicly funded needle, condom, and synthetic distribution program in the country,” reads a petition created by the coalition in March that has since received 8,000 signatures.

Petitioners are asking the city of Santa Monica to “force the County to move their distribution program indoors under medical supervision with supportive services.”

Some residents say they’re concerned that outdoor giveaways could lead to an increase in homelessness, drug use, and crime.

A Venice Family Clinic van is seen in a park in Santa Monica, Calif. (Courtesy of John Alle)

City officials sent a letter to the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors in September 2022 asking for the program to be halted in and near parks, noting that a large majority of residents are renters and rely on parks for open space.

“Because roughly 70 percent of Santa Monicans are renters, our community relies on the City’s parks and open spaces as they do not have access to private open space,” reads the letter, signed by then-Mayor Sue Himmelrich.

The city asked for the program to be moved to a “service-rich environment,” instead, that was “preferably” indoors inside a county-owned facility, with services for substance abuse and mental health.

De la Torre told The Epoch Times that county officials did respond, saying the distribution would instead be done from a van, parked near the parks.

But Alle said that’s not the case.

Recently, he posed as a homeless person at one of the parks and was almost given a syringe—until it became clear that he was testing the program—by one of the nonprofit’s social workers, when he told them he was unable to walk to the van to retrieve it for himself, he said.

“They’re not only operating from inside the van. They were giving out supplies to people in the park,” Alle said.

John Alle is seen in a recent photo disguised as a homeless person in Santa Monica, Calif. (Courtesy of John Alle)

Alle said he and two colleagues observed three workers of the clinic passing out Narcan—an opioid reversal medication—condoms, and syringes to several homeless people in the parks that day.

Officials from the Department of Public Health didn’t return a request for comment on the allegations.

According to Alle, such programs have exacerbated the city’s homeless and crime crisis.

He recounted how he leased one of his properties on the promenade to the NFL for a pop-up store this year in advance of the February Super Bowl. But the football league asked for its money back after less than a week, he said.

“After six days [they] said ‘John, we’ve had three break-ins, two of our employees have been hit over the head going to their cars, and we have people pissing against our windows during the day,’” Alle said.

According to Alle, the promenade is roughly 50 percent vacant now.

The clinic began passing out items in the area in 2019 at six locations in the city, including along Third Street Promenade.

The locations have now been reduced to three parks.

Bryan Paarlberg, who receives free meth pipes from the Venice Family Clinic, sits near his collection of items in Santa Monica, Calif., on June 2, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

“Los Angeles County is currently experiencing the worst overdose crisis in its history, and overdose prevention services are critical to save lives and protect public health and safety,” a public health department spokesperson said.

Restricting access to such services will only lead to more overdoses and “exacerbate” the homelessness crisis, according to the spokesperson.

“As part of our commitment to save lives and protect public health, we are in constant communication with Santa Monica officials to address community concerns and needs,” the spokesperson said.

A family uses a playground near a homeless man in Santa Monica, Calif., on June 2, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

According to the health department, the clinic distributes 200 syringes at the three Santa Monica locations every month to 100 people and disposes of the dirty needles.

It also refers those interested in substance use treatment services and refers individuals for free HIV or hepatitis C testing.

Eleven House Republicans – most of them in the Freedom Caucus – joined Democrats on Tuesday in voting against a rule to advance four bills attempting to overturn Biden administration regulations to control gas stoves, in order to send a big ‘f-you’ to Speaker Kevin McCarthy for breaking his promises to the Caucus and negotiating a debt deal that largely favors the Democrats.

The move was enough to tank the rule and block the legislation from advancing to the floor.

Just before the vote closed, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) changed his vote to oppose the rule as well so he could bring the rule back up later. The final vote was 206-220.

The revolt made for a dramatic scene on the House floor, where Scalise huddled with more than a dozen conservatives in the back of the chamber in a tense effort to flip votes and allow the bills to advance to the floor. -The Hill

“We’re frustrated at the way this place is operating,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL).

“We took a stand in January to end the era of the imperial Speakership, and we’re concerned that the fundamental commitments that allowed Kevin McCarthy to assume the Speakership have been violated as a consequence of the debt limit deal. And, you know, the answer for us is to reassert House conservatives as the appropriate coalition partner for our leadership instead of them making common cause with Democrats.”

The Epoch Times explains what’s in two of the GOP bills;

One bill, the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act, would prevent the CPSC from banning or substantially raising the price of gas stoves. That agency made a formal request for information related to gas stoves in March.

The other bill, dubbed the Save Our Stoves Act, would keep the Department of Energy from implementing a proposed energy efficiency rule for gas stoves.

Concerns about a ban were ignited in part by comments from CPSC Commissioner Richard Trumka, Jr., to Bloomberg News in January.

“This is a hidden hazard. Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned,” he said.

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

After Donald Trump proclaimed at the weekend that he doesn’t like the term ‘woke’ because nobody knows what it really means, his GOP challenger Ron DeSantis charged that those who do not treat it as an “existential threat” are missing the point.

Commenting to reporters on Trump’s comments, DeSantis noted “Woke is an existential threat to our society,” adding that “to say it’s not a big deal, that just shows you don’t understand what a lot of these issues are right now.”

DeSantis described woke as a “form of Cultural Marxism,” and “basically a war on the truth,” adding “it’s about putting merit and achievement behind identity politics.”

“As that has infected institutions, and it has corrupted institutions. So, you’ve got to be willing to fight the woke, we’ve done that in Florida, and we proudly consider ourselves the state where woke goes to die,” DeSantis urged.

Watch:

DeSantis on Trump’s recent comment that he doesn’t like the term “woke” —

“Woke is an existential threat to our society … To say it’s not a big deal, that just shows you don’t understand what a lot of these issues are right now.” (Answering a @PhilipWegmann question) pic.twitter.com/kr1Jj8rgqj

— Shelby Talcott (@ShelbyTalcott) June 3, 2023

Trump said Friday at a Q&A in Iowa “We have school systems that don’t even want to talk to the parents about their children. You talk about changing gender and things where the child can make a choice and the child can be unbelievably young — the country has gone sick. It’s gone sick. And I don’t like the term ‘woke,’ because I hear the term “woke, woke, woke,” … it’s like just a term they use, and half the people can’t define what it is. 

Trump continued, “you look at these things like women getting competing with men that were men and are men. And out there swimming and setting records. Do you see the records being broken?”

He added “It is so crazy. And that is all woke. I guess they define that as woke. But that’s all woke. We have to bring common sense back to the country. People say, “You are conservative.” Yeah, I am conservative, but more importantly, I’m a person with common sense.

Watch:

Trump: “I don’t like the term woke because I hear ‘woke, woke, woke’ — it’s just a term they use; half the people can’t define it, they don’t know what it is.” pic.twitter.com/k2jrdb32hi

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) June 3, 2023

Trump has somewhat flip flopped on this, likely because DeSantis has made it such a central part of his campaign. Trump was more than happy to define woke in 2020 before the election:

“Everything woke turns to shit” – Trump
August 2021pic.twitter.com/WwwZr4jGd2

— MAGS (@TAftermath2020) June 4, 2023

Still, Trump is leading DeSantis by 28 points according to PredictIt…

*  *  *

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A few weeks ago, Goldman revealed the “most accurate” reading of the current commercial real estate market, pointing to a 25% plunge in office property values. Adding more to this nightmarish outlook is a new Knight Frank poll showing that major corporations expect to reduce global office space footprints over the next several years.  

Bloomberg said the poll of 350 real estate leaders at international firms found half of the largest companies with total workforces of over 50,000 employees are expected to cut their office space footprints by 10% to 20% within three years. 

“Now that we are in a truly post-pandemic world, corporate decision-makers are ‘removing the blinkers’ and making clear decisions around their future corporate real estate strategy based on a broader array of business issues than just the pandemic,” Knight Frank global head of occupier research Lee Elliott said

The poll signifies continued downward pressure on office spaces and high vacancies at a time refinancing for the CRE space is more challenging, which could lead to a significant downdraft in property prices.

We have already laid out to readers major liberal cities have an office space vacancy crisis:

•  A Record 30% Of San Francisco Office Space Is Vacant

• Office Buildings Are Emptying In Major U.S. Cities Like Houston, Dallas, New York, And San Francisco

• Manhattan Office Vacancy Hits Record As Marquee LA Office Tower Sells At 50% Loss

… and then there’s this:

• Park Hotels Makes “Difficult” Decision To Stop Paying San Fran CMBS Loan, Citing “Concerns Over Street Conditions”

Already, CRE prices have tumbled into a downturn as property values are sliding for the first time since 2011. 

As for Goldman’s “most accurate portrayal of current market conditions,” their analysts are looking at Green Street data that foretells the coming price plunge in office and apartment property values. 

And remember, as regional banks began imploding in March, we noted, “CRE Nuke Goes Off With Small Banks Accounting For 70% Of Commercial Real Estate Loans.”

Owners of office buildings need to quickly consider transitioning their buildings to multi-family units as post-Covid work trends shake up the CRE market. 

Update (1300ET): Copinbase CEO Brian Armstrong took to Twitter to respond to the SEC lawsuit: 

Regarding the SEC complaint against us today, we’re proud to represent the industry in court to finally get some clarity around crypto rules.

Remember:

1. The SEC reviewed our business and allowed us to become a public company in 2021.

2. There is no path to “come in and register” – we tried, repeatedly – so we don’t list securities. We reject the vast majority of assets we review.

3. The SEC and CFTC have made conflicting statements, and don’t even agree on what is a security and what is a commodity.

4. This is why the US congress is introducing new legislation to fix the situation, and the rest of the world is moving to put clear rules in place to support this technology.

Instead of publishing a clear rule book, the SEC has taken a regulation by enforcement approach that is harming America. So if we need to avail ourselves of the courts to get clarity, so be it.

Btw, in case it’s not obvious, the Coinbase suit is very different from others out there – the complaint filed against us is exclusively focused on what is or is not a security.  And we are confident in our facts and the law.

We’ll get the job done. In the meantime, let’s all keep moving forward and building as an industry. America will get this right in the end.

*  *  *

A day after the SEC sued Binance – the world’s largest crypto exchange – Bloomberg reports that Gensler and his anti-crypto goons have now sued Coinbase in federal court in New York on Tuesday, alleging the crypto firm broke US securities rules, claiming the exchange is acting as an unregistered broker.

“We allege that Coinbase, despite being subject to the securities laws, commingled and unlawfully offered exchange, broker-dealer, and clearinghouse functions,” Gensler said in a statement.

“Coinbase’s alleged failures deprive investors of critical protections, including rulebooks that prevent fraud and manipulation, proper disclosure, safeguards against conflicts of interest, and routine inspection by the SEC,” he added.

The regulator alleged that the Coinbase, the largest US crypto platform, evaded regulations by letting users trade numerous crypto tokens that were actually unregistered securities.

The SEC also accused Coinbase on Tuesday of breaking the agency’s rules with its “staking” service.

Coinbase itself said as such in the past, and analysts have been worried for months over the prospect, because the broker relies heavily on altcoin trading and staking as sources of revenue and future growth.

Meanwhile SEC approving listing of Coinbase on stock exchange pic.twitter.com/3dmyMBp2pC

— Rancune (@Rancune_eth) June 6, 2023

So what changed at the SEC since COIN’s IPO was approved by the SEC?

Political pressure? Surely not?

The exchange revealed in March that the regulator had sent it a so-called Wells notice, a warning the agency may sue the exchange.

“We observe that several of the details of the lawsuit that the commission filed against Binance echo those it previously filed against crypto exchanges Bittrex and Kraken, and we believe these cases in aggregate represent a preview of the action that is likely to be filed against Coinbase,” Berenberg analyst Mark Palmer wrote in a Monday note.

Earlier in the day – before the SEC headlines – Barrons reported that Coinbase risks a revenue hit of more than 30% if it suffers a similar fate to crypto exchange Binance, analysts warn.

“The recent developments and content of the SEC complaint vs. Binance make us believe that over 30% of Coinbase business may be at risk,” Dan Dolev, an analyst at Mizuho Securities said.

COIN shares are plunging in the pre-market on the news, extending losses from Binance headlines yesterday…

And Bitcoin (and the rest of the crypto-verse) are also lower (but notably not very much for now)…

Bitcoin is holding in for now…

It appears the war on crypto just turned ‘hot’.

The lesson is clear: Binance and Coinbase should have spent at least as much on politician bribes as FTX

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 6, 2023

*  *  *

Read the full complaint below: 

Authored by ‘BTCCasey’ via BitcoinMagazine.com,

The country of El Salvador is harnessing its energy resources and constructing a renewable power generation park to fuel the growth of Bitcoin mining…

The country of El Salvador is tapping into its abundant natural resources to create “Volcano Energy.” According to a press release sent to Bitcoin Magazine, the aim is to position the country as a major global player in the Bitcoin mining industry while promoting energy competitiveness, diversification and geographic expansion for the Bitcoin network. Adopting a debt-free approach, El Salvador plans to construct a 241 megawatt (MW) renewable power generation park in the Metapán region, combining solar and wind projects.

“This project is a transformative journey that will establish one of the world’s largest Bitcoin mining farms,” the release said.

“Located in the El Shiste hamlet, within the municipality of Metapán, Santa Ana, this chosen site boasts exceptional solar and wind energy yields in the country.”

The park will have a capacity of 169MW of photovoltaic solar energy and 72MW of wind energy. The initial computational power is expected to surpass 1.3 EH/s, marking a significant milestone for the country and industry.

The release stated that “The total commitment for the project is $1 billion, beginning with a first investment of $250 million, bootstrapped by key Bitcoin industry leaders, with collaboration from top developers and manufacturers of renewable energy technology, as well as Bitcoin mining experts on a global scale.”

The government of El Salvador will play a crucial role in the planning and execution of the initiative, securing a preferred participation equivalent to 23% of the revenue. The remaining ownership will be divided among investors and reinvested in expanding energy production capacity and advancing Bitcoin mining.

Robert Warren of Distributed Hash explained on Twitter that the reasoning behind leveraging wind and solar is likely to monetize quicker to build upon a base set of geothermal expansion.

If you’re confused by the use of wind/solar, here is the translation.

El Salvador is building large intermittent wind/solar generation to monetize base geothermal expansion with BTC mining.

In the grand scheme 241MW isn’t huge, but if properly run, very good for ES. https://t.co/JJpFjhZOnS

— Rob W. (@BikesandBitcoin) June 5, 2023

By leveraging Volcano Energy, El Salvador aims to create a prosperous future driven by sustainable energy and Bitcoin. As the country’s investment progresses volcanoes could serve as the backbone of this transformation, fostering economic growth and prosperity for future generations. The establishment of the renewable power generation park signifies a large step towards achieving these goals while cementing El Salvador’s position in the global Bitcoin mining industry.