Clarifying the significance of a resolution that absurdly condemned the National Rifle Association (NRA) as a “domestic terrorist organization,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed argues that the measure will have no practical effect. Although she does not mention the First Amendment lawsuit provoked by the resolution, her reasoning seems to be the city’s best defense against the argument that threatening to cut off contractors with ties to the NRA violates the right to freedom of speech.
The resolution, which the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved on September 3, urges city officials to “assess the financial and contractual relationships our vendors and contractors have” with the NRA and “limit those entities who do business with the City and County of San Francisco from doing business with this domestic terrorist organization.” Insofar as it affects contractors who are sympathetic to the NRA’s Second Amendment advocacy, that policy seems like a clear violation of the principle established by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1996 case Board of County Commissioners v. Umbehr. “The First Amendment protects independent contractors from the termination of at-will government contracts in retaliation for their exercise of the freedom of speech,” the Court said in that decision.
But don’t worry, Breed and City Attorney Dennis Herrera say in a memo dated September 23, two weeks after the NRA challenged the resolution in federal court. “The Resolution does not impose any obligations on City departments or members of the public,” Breed and Herrera write. “Because the Resolution did not change City law, the City’s contracting processes and policies have not changed and will not change as a result of the Resolution.” No harm, no foul.
“In a Face-off With the N.R.A.,” says the headline over a New York Timesstory about the memo, “San Francisco Blinks.” John Coté, a spokesman for Herrera, rejected that characterization. The memo “just explains what has always been true —the resolution does not change the law,” he told the Times. “If the N.R.A. thinks this is a win, it’s only because their lawsuit completely distorts what the resolution actually does.”
The NRA, for its part, is not dropping its lawsuit, which argues that even the threat of penalizing contractors for their ties to the organization has a chilling effect on constitutionally protected speech. The NRA also claims the policy described in the resolution would unconstitutionally punish the organization itself for exercising its freedom of speech.
City officials “wisely have attempted to pull back from what we alleged…was a clear violation of the association’s First Amendment rights,” NRA lawyer William A. Brewer III told the Times. “What we hope is that the Board of Supervisors will further mitigate the damage they’ve done” by rescinding the resolution or “walk[ing] away from it in some binding way.”
Supervisor Catherine Stefani, who sponsored the resolution, also has emphasized its practical insignificance. “It’s a resolution,” she told the Times after the NRA filed its lawsuit. “It’s not an ordinance. It’s nonbinding.” Her measure, in other words, was nothing more than meaningless bluster, and it should be viewed as such by the courts.
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Among the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment is the right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” In other words, you have a right to communicate with the government, to complain about its current policies, and to advocate for new and different ones without fear of punishment or censor. You might call this a right to gripe about the government, to the government. Alternatively, you might call it a right to lobby.
The unlimited right to petition the government—to lobby the lawmakers who make decisions that affect your life, your family, your fortune, and your business—is a right that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) thinks American businesses should not have.
Warren, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, has proposed taxing corporate lobbying. Expenditures between $500,000 and $1 million would be taxed at 35 percent. Spending over $1 million would face a 60 percent tax rate, which would jump to 75 percent above $5 million. Some non-profits would be exempt, but the tax would hit trade organizations as well as corporate influence efforts.
Warren’s campaign estimates that if the rule had been in place over the last decade, and businesses had made no changes to their lobbying activities, it would have raised about $10 billion. But as with her wealth tax proposal, which is designed more to degrade large fortunes than to raise revenue for the government, the point isn’t really to generate new funds from taxation. It is to eliminate much of the lobbying that happens in Washington.
“We can end excessive lobbying,” Warren wrote in a tweet this morning. Excessive lobbying. Excessive petitioning of the government. The point of Warren’s tax on lobbying is to eliminate, or at least severely degrade, a fundamental constitutional right. It is probably unconstitutional, in the sense that it wouldn’t stand up to a court challenge. It is certainly anti-constitutional, in the sense that it is contrary to the spirit of the First Amendment.
That’s not terribly surprising coming from Warren, whose respect for the Constitution knows many bounds. As National Review‘s David French has written, many of Warren’s vaunted plans—from her wealth tax to her proposed executive order banning fracking—appear likely to cross legal and constitutional lines. As a candidate, she has repeatedly demonstrated her willingness to ignore the irritating limitations imposed by the Constitution to pursue her political and policy objectives.
And in this case, it’s both. Or, more precisely, it’s a political objective masquerading as a policy goal: Warren, who is vying for frontrunner status in the Democratic primary race, wants to look tough on lobbyists and lobbying, and this is a way to do it. It’s pseudo-policy, a veneer of wonky seriousness draped over anti-constitutional populist dogma.
Like many of Warren’s bad ideas, it may be politically savvy: Lobbyists are not exactly popular in America these days, and lobbying is widely viewed as grubby and unseemly, if not actively corrupt.
This view is not always correct; asking (lobbying) the government to pursue different laws and different policies can be a noble task and a path to better governance. But the view of lobbying as ignoble does have some merit; individuals and corporations often lobby for bad ideas. Indeed, as Bradley Smith and Luke Wachob of the Institute for Free Speech recently noted, Warren herself has a long history of directly encouraging federal lawmakers to adopt policies she prefers, particularly on issues like bankruptcy, about which she has produced misleadingresearch for decades. Over and over again, she petitioned the government to adopt her misguided views—as was her right.
At other times, lobbyists advocate for narrow self-interest. Following the passage of Obamacare, for example, medical device makers, who have a heavy economic footprint in Massachusetts, the state Warren represents, pushed hard for a repeal of a tax directed at their industry. Starting with her 2011 campaign for Senate, Warren supported their position and backed much of the rest of their agenda in a 2012 op-ed for a trade publication. Industry lobbyists later praised her as a helpful working partner. “We’ve enjoyed the opportunity to work with Sen. Warren during her tenure in Congress,” a representative from a major medical device industry group toldTime in 2015. No doubt they did.
Lobbying—or petitioning—the government to change a law, or advance an agenda, or redress a grievance, like, say, a tax on your industry, might not be held in high esteem. But it is a form of protected speech. And that protection is designed to shield those who are not in government from those who are, to level the playing field between those who wield direct political power, and those who do not. It is more than a little revealing that Warren, a powerful senator who wants to be an even more powerful president, is proposing to weaken that protection in hopes of advancing her own political interests. Warren, you might say, is lobbying for herself.
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Here Is The Megabank Behind September’s Repo Shock
Over the weekend, when trying to isolate the bank(s) behind the recent repocalypse, we looked at the aggregate cash levels of commercial banks in the US (which including foreign banks) as published each week by the Fed, and found that cash at foreign banks operating in the US rose by a respectable $13.6BN in the week ended Sept 18, to $537,8BN, in line with levels where foreign bank cash had been for much of the past two months.
“In other words”, we wrote “to find the culprit for the latest repo shock, don’t look to Europe (those banks have enough pain on their plate with the ECB recently launching QEternity, to also have to worry about overnight funding in the US) but look for clues among domestic US banks. “
Three days later, Reuters did just that, and in a report which surprisingly flew deep under the radar, appears to have found the one bank that may have been the inadvertent reason for the repo market to lock up on the 11th anniversary of Lehman when the repo rate exploded as high as 10%.
According to Reuters, “JPMorgan Chase has become so big that some rival banks and analysts say changes to its $2.7 trillion balance sheet were a factor in a spike last month in the U.S. “repo” market, which is crucial to many borrowers.“
As a reminder, just days after the record repo rate surge, a clearly clueless NY Fed president John Williams told the FT in an interview that the Fed was examining “why banks with excess cash failed to lend to the overnight money market, following a week that revealed cracks in the US’s financial plumbing.“
The answer: big changes JPMorgan made in its balance sheet “played a role in the spike in the repo market.”
Specifically, using public data, and conducting an analysis similar to the one we did last weekend tracking commercial bank cash levels, Reuters found that JPMorgan reduced the cash it has on deposit at the Federal Reserve, from which it might have lent, by $158 billion in the year through June, a 57% decline.
While JPMorgan’s moves were seen as logical responses to interest rate trends and post-crisis banking regulations, which have limited it more than other banks, “the data shows its switch accounted for about a third of the drop in all banking reserves at the Fed during the period”, Reuters adds. As a reminder, the recent slide in bank cash levels took the Fed’s reserves to the lowest level since 2012:
“It was a very big move,” said a Reuters source who watches bank positions at the Fed but did not want to be named. An executive at a competing bank called the shift “massive.”
And while other banks also brought down their cash, it was by only half the percentage, on average, according to Reuters calculations. One of them, Bank of America, the second-biggest U.S. bank by assets, with a $2.4 trillion balance sheet, took down 30% of its deposits, a $29 billion reduction, less than a fifth of JPM’s cash decline.
JPMorgan or not, as we showed for the past two weeks, total deposits at the Fed from banks have come down sharply over the past year as a consequence of the central bank’s decision to gradually reduce the vast holdings of bonds it had acquired to bolster the economy after the financial crisis: the reason is simple – as the Fed tapered its bond portfolio as part of QT, its deposits from banks have also declined.
“All of the banks were doing this to a degree,” said one Wall Street banking analyst, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record, adding: “JPMorgan does look like an outlier here.”
Ok, so we now know we can blame JPMorgan for not stepping up when the bank with the largest cash balances at the Fed clearly should have. But why?
Well, whereas in the past JPMorgan would have “gladly seized the opportunity to lend cash in the repo market, where loans are backed by the best collateral, often U.S. Treasury securities”, on on Sept. 17 even as the majority of repo loans were being made at 5% and above, twice the usual rates, “JPMorgan was limited in how much of its remaining cash it could provide because of regulatory and other constraints.”
The spike in rates reflected extra demand for cash, which was widely anticipated due to corporations requiring cash to make scheduled tax payments and banks and other firms needing it to buy newly-issued U.S. Treasury securities.
In other words, without the regulatory requirements and official constraints – most of which are created by the Fed itself – on JPMorgan, the rate wouldn’t have spiked to 10%, the person said.
Ironically, it was JPMorgan that made the biggest draws from the Fed late last year and bought securities, winning praise from analysts for locking in fixed interest rates before Federal Reserve cuts. Buying the securities also offset pressure on JPMorgan’s mortgage loan portfolio from falling rates. JPMorgan also needs cash for sudden demands by corporate depositors and to meet government requirements for reserves on checking account deposits.
It is this cash level that regulators now oversee to make sure there is no repeat of the cash crunch that took place during the 2008 financial crisis; as a result JPM must comply with rules which require banks to keep additional cash in case they fail and the government needs to transfer their operations in viable condition to other firms. Banks do not disclose how much of this so-called resolution cash they must hold, but the amount is clearly significant if $1.4 trillion in “excess” reserves turned out to be woefully insufficient.
Another post-crisis regulation imposes a capital surcharge on banks that are most important to the global financial system and it gives JPMorgan particular reason not to make repo loans going into the last three months of the year.
That is especially true for repos with firms from abroad, which include U.S. branches of foreign banks and Cayman Islands-registered hedge funds. Such loans could push JPMorgan’s surcharge higher, requiring it to carry an additional $8 billion of capital, a Goldman Sachs report said.
According to Goldman, JPMorgan’s capital surcharge is already the highest of any U.S. bank, which means its must make more profit from its business to produce the same return on shareholder equity.
Separately, as we reported before, Goldman analysts see the repo market pressures continuing under the regulatory constraints and what they believe is a shortage of extra cash on deposit at the Fed. Their solution: resuming Treasury purchases by the Fed, which they believe should conduct roughly $15bn/month rate of permanent OMOs, enough to support trend growth of the balance sheet plus some additional padding over the first two years to increase the size of the balance sheet by $150bn, restoring the reserve buffer and eliminating the current need for temporary OMOs. Altogether, this would boost the Fed’s balance sheet by a total of $180bn/year and result in net UST purchases by the Fed (the sum of the red and grey bars) of roughly $375bn/year over the next couple of years. When netting the purchases to rollover maturing debt, the monthly total rises to about $20BN/month on average.
For those asking, the $20BN in soon to be announced monetizations is virtually the same as the total debt purchased under the fully-upsized QE1 which was launched in response to the financial crisis, as the following JPMorgan chart shows:
Researchers have been in a race to find ways to improve lithium-ion batteries. They are also looking to develop alternatives to the lithium-ion battery that would be lower cost and more sustainable to manufacture. And they may just have found one.
Aluminum-based batteries would be cheaper to make, because aluminum is the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust after oxygen and silicon. Aluminum is also light-weight and could be ideal for use in batteries.
Yet, for years scientists have stumbled in the research about aluminum batteries because they have yet to crack the code of what materials to use for the anode and cathode of the battery so that it could enable efficient energy storage with enough energy content.
Now scientists from Sweden and Slovenia say they have found a way to have efficient aluminum batteries with lower environmental impact and lower production costs.
Researchers from Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology and the National Institute of Chemistry in Slovenia came up with a new concept for an aluminum battery design that promises twice the energy density compared to previous aluminum battery versions.
Compared to the lithium-ion batteries today, the new concept could lead to “markedly lower production costs” of aluminum batteries, the scientists say.
Another advantage is that there already exists an established industry for aluminum manufacturing and recycling. With lithium-ion batteries, recycling is one major issue as few economically feasible technologies for battery recycling currently exist.
The Swedish and Slovenian researchers have come up with a new concept to design aluminum batteries that theoretically overcomes previous challenges with low energy density in today’s aluminum batteries.
The new concept, described in an article in the journal Energy Storage Materials, upends the previous designs of the aluminum battery. So far, designs have used the aluminum as the negative electrode—the anode, while the positive electrode—the cathode—was made of graphite. But graphite doesn’t have enough energy content to be useful in a battery cell.
In the new concept, however, the researchers replaced graphite with an organic, nano-structured cathode made of the carbon-based molecule anthraquinone. This organic material in the cathode enables storage of positive charge-carriers from the electrolyte—the solution in which ions move between the electrodes—which enables higher energy density in the battery.
“Because the new cathode material makes it possible to use a more appropriate charge-carrier, the batteries can make better usage of aluminum’s potential,” Chalmers researcher Niklas Lindahl said in a statement.
“The material costs and environmental impacts that we envisage from our new concept are much lower than what we see today, making them feasible for large scale usage, such as solar cell parks, or storage of wind energy, for example,” Patrik Johansson, Professor at the Department of Physics at Chalmers, notes.
There are currently no commercially available aluminum batteries, but now the question scientists are asking is whether they can one day replace lithium-ion batteries.
“Of course, we hope that they can. But above all, they can be complementary, ensuring that lithium-ion batteries are only used where strictly necessary,” Johansson says.
According to the scientist, the team still has much work to do with the electrolyte and charging mechanisms, but they believe that aluminum is generally “a significantly better charge carrier than lithium, since it is multivalent – which means every ion ‘compensates’ for several electrons.”
“Furthermore, the batteries have the potential to be significantly less environmentally harmful,” Johansson added.
The Swedish-Slovenian team of scientists is not the only one working on aluminum battery breakthroughs. A team at UNSW Sydney said last December that they had found a new way to design rechargeable aluminum batteries by using a large organic chemical compound as the part of the battery that stores energy, which was a fundamental challenge before that.
“Developing batteries using aluminum has received a lot of expectation for delivering high energy to price ratios,” Dr Dong Jun Kim of UNSW’s School of Chemistry said.
Among the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment is the right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” In other words, you have a right to communicate with the government, to complain about its current policies, and to advocate for new and different ones without fear of punishment or censor. You might call this a right to gripe about the government, to the government. Alternatively, you might call it a right to lobby.
The unlimited right to petition the government—to lobby the lawmakers who make decisions that affect your life, your family, your fortune, and your business—is a right that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) thinks American businesses should not have.
Warren, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, has proposed taxing corporate lobbying. Expenditures between $500,000 and $1 million would be taxed at 35 percent. Spending over $1 million would face a 60 percent tax rate, which would jump to 75 percent above $5 million. Some non-profits would be exempt, but the tax would hit trade organizations as well as corporate influence efforts.
Warren’s campaign estimates that if the rule had been in place over the last decade, and businesses had made no changes to their lobbying activities, it would have raised about $10 billion. But as with her wealth tax proposal, which is designed more to degrade large fortunes than to raise revenue for the government, the point isn’t really to generate new funds from taxation. It is to eliminate much of the lobbying that happens in Washington.
“We can end excessive lobbying,” Warren wrote in a tweet this morning. Excessive lobbying. Excessive petitioning of the government. The point of Warren’s tax on lobbying is to eliminate, or at least severely degrade, a fundamental constitutional right. It is probably unconstitutional, in the sense that it wouldn’t stand up to a court challenge. It is certainly anti-constitutional, in the sense that it is contrary to the spirit of the First Amendment.
That’s not terribly surprising coming from Warren, whose respect for the Constitution knows many bounds. As National Review‘s David French has written, many of Warren’s vaunted plans—from her wealth tax to her proposed executive order banning fracking—appear likely to cross legal and constitutional lines. As a candidate, she has repeatedly demonstrated her willingness to ignore the irritating limitations imposed by the Constitution to pursue her political and policy objectives.
And in this case, it’s both. Or, more precisely, it’s a political objective masquerading as a policy goal: Warren, who is vying for frontrunner status in the Democratic primary race, wants to look tough on lobbyists and lobbying, and this is a way to do it. It’s pseudo-policy, a veneer of wonky seriousness draped over anti-constitutional populist dogma.
Like many of Warren’s bad ideas, it may be politically savvy: Lobbyists are not exactly popular in America these days, and lobbying is widely viewed as grubby and unseemly, if not actively corrupt.
This view is not always correct; asking (lobbying) the government to pursue different laws and different policies can be a noble task and a path to better governance. But the view of lobbying as ignoble does have some merit; individuals and corporations often lobby for bad ideas. Indeed, as Bradley Smith and Luke Wachob of the Institute for Free Speech recently noted, Warren herself has a long history of directly encouraging federal lawmakers to adopt policies she prefers, particularly on issues like bankruptcy, about which she has produced misleadingresearch for decades. Over and over again, she petitioned the government to adopt her misguided views—as was her right.
At other times, lobbyists advocate for narrow self-interest. Following the passage of Obamacare, for example, medical device makers, who have a heavy economic footprint in Massachusetts, the state Warren represents, pushed hard for a repeal of a tax directed at their industry. Starting with her 2011 campaign for Senate, Warren supported their position and backed much of the rest of their agenda in a 2012 op-ed for a trade publication. Industry lobbyists later praised her as a helpful working partner. “We’ve enjoyed the opportunity to work with Sen. Warren during her tenure in Congress,” a representative from a major medical device industry group toldTime in 2015. No doubt they did.
Lobbying—or petitioning—the government to change a law, or advance an agenda, or redress a grievance, like, say, a tax on your industry, might not be held in high esteem. But it is a form of protected speech. And that protection is designed to shield those who are not in government from those who are, to level the playing field between those who wield direct political power, and those who do not. It is more than a little revealing that Warren, a powerful senator who wants to be an even more powerful president, is proposing to weaken that protection in hopes of advancing her own political interests. Warren, you might say, is lobbying for herself.
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It’s a rare week when a major politician doesn’t threaten social media with censorship or other legal action. President Donald Trump regularly inveighs against Facebook and Twitter, claiming that such platforms minimize the reach and influence of posting by him and conservatives. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has promised to break up tech giants using antitrust law if elected president. Meanwhile, talking heads and experts routinely blame social media for mass shootings, rising suicides, and all sorts of social maladies.
Is any of this true? If it is, what should we do about it? And if it isn’t, why are we so freaked out? On today’s podcast, Nick Gillespie interviews Mike Godwin, whose new book, The Splinters of our Discontent: How to Fix Social Media and Democracy Without Breaking Them, is a richly researched and remarkably panic-free discussion of how Facebook, Twitter, and other social media actually operate and influence public discourse, including elections. Currently a “distinguished senior fellow” at the think tank R Street, Godwin has a long and legendary history when it comes to cyberspace. Back in the 1990s, he was the first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and helped craft the legal arguments that ultimately struck down government control of online speech in The Communications Decency Act of 1996. He also codified what’s become known as “Godwin’s law,” which holds that the longer an online discussion continues, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis, Adolph Hitler, or the Holocaust approaches 100 percent. Godwin has served as general counsel for Wikimedia Foundation, is the author of Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the DigitalAge, and longtime Reason contributing editor (read his Reason archive here).
Social media, argues Godwin, isn’t broken at all, although both tech companies and users need to clarify their terms of engagement. On the other hand, he says, democracy is in deep disarray, for reasons that go back to the very founding of the United States.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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California cannot keep President Donald Trump, or any other presidential candidate, off the 2020 ballot for refusing to release his tax returns, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.
The ruling concerns Senate Bill 27 (SB27), the Presidential Tax and Transparency Act, which California’s legislature passed in July and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law. SB27 requires all candidates for president, in order to appear on the state’s primary ballots, make the last five years of their income tax returns publicly available.
Trump’s attorneys, representatives for the Republican National Committee, the state’s Republican Party, and a small group of individual voters all sued, arguing that the act violates the First and 14th Amendments of the Constitution and is pre-empted by federal law regulating financial disclosures by presidential candidates.
On Tuesday, Morrison C. England Jr., U.S. District Judge of the Eastern District of California, agreed with Trump and the other plaintiffs and enjoined California from enforcing the part of the law that requires the disclosure of candidate tax records. England ordered a temporary injunction when he first heard the challenge back in September. Today’s written ruling formally orders California to cease making these demands.
England agreed with every single argument the plaintiffs presented against California. He agreed that the plaintiffs were likely to win on the merits, as the U.S. Supreme Court has determined that the Constitution forbids states from making new eligibility requirements by “dressing eligibility to stand for [public office] in ballot access clothing.” He also agreed that SB27 was preempted by the federal Ethics in Government Act, which outlines what candidates for president must publicly disclose.
He further explains that the Act thwarts the will of California voters, violating their First Amendment rights:
“Here, the Act creates what amounts to a functional bar against the ability to cast an effective vote for a candidate who elects not to disclose his or her tax returns. It further interferes with the ability of both individuals and political parties to select the individual presidential candidate of their choice to act as the ‘standard bearer who best represents [their] ideologies and preferences. … These are severe restrictions, since limitations on ballot access can violate multiple constitutionally-protected interests, including the right to associate for political purposes, the right to vote, and the right to express political preferences.'”
Essentially, England is saying that if the voters support a candidate who does not want to release his or her tax returns, that’s their right and California can’t stop them.
Lawmakers tried to pass the bill under previous Gov. Jerry Brown, who vetoed it as likely unconstitutional and worried that it would result in a slippery slope. England even quotes Brown’s veto message in the ruling:
Today we require tax returns, but what would be next? Five years of health records? A certified birth certificate? High school report cards? And will these requirements vary depending on which political party is in power?
England adds his own concerns:
The list of allegedly “relevant” information required to obtain ballot access could therefore snowball out of control with no practical limitation as legislatures throughout the nation could impose their own qualifications on presidential candidates, perhaps for nakedly political purposes. That result cannot possibly comport with the Framers’ goal for a fixed and nationwide standard for such federal offices.
The short-sighted stupidity of this law should be readily apparent to even the most casual observer, even if we were to set aside the severe constitutional issues with it. For instance, why wouldn’t a state with a Republican legislature retaliate in a way that made it harder for Democratic presidential candidates to qualify for ballot access?
CNN notes that Democratic California Attorney General Xavier Becerra is likely to appeal the ruling. He really should read the whole thing, accept this law is doomed, and not waste any more taxpayer money. England does not give one single inch to any of California’s arguments in the ruling and even points out that it’s actually not true that every presidential candidate has historically released his taxes. Brown himself did not disclose his tax returns when he ran for president in 1992. Nor did Ross Perot. Nor did Ralph Nader in 2000.
It is a dumb, unconstitutional law, and to continue to defend it weakens the argument that Trump is a unique threat to Democratic and constitutional governance. There’s nothing Democratic nor constitutional about trying to gin up reasons to keep a candidate from an opposing political party off the ballot.
It’s a rare week when a major politician doesn’t threaten social media with censorship or other legal action. President Donald Trump regularly inveighs against Facebook and Twitter, claiming that such platforms minimize the reach and influence of posting by him and conservatives. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has promised to break up tech giants using antitrust law if elected president. Meanwhile, talking heads and experts routinely blame social media for mass shootings, rising suicides, and all sorts of social maladies.
Is any of this true? If it is, what should we do about it? And if it isn’t, why are we so freaked out? On today’s podcast, Nick Gillespie interviews Mike Godwin, whose new book, The Splinters of our Discontent: How to Fix Social Media and Democracy Without Breaking Them, is a richly researched and remarkably panic-free discussion of how Facebook, Twitter, and other social media actually operate and influence public discourse, including elections. Currently a “distinguished senior fellow” at the think tank R Street, Godwin has a long and legendary history when it comes to cyberspace. Back in the 1990s, he was the first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and helped craft the legal arguments that ultimately struck down government control of online speech in The Communications Decency Act of 1996. He also codified what’s become known as “Godwin’s law,” which holds that the longer an online discussion continues, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis, Adolph Hitler, or the Holocaust approaches 100 percent. Godwin has served as general counsel for Wikimedia Foundation, is the author of Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the DigitalAge, and longtime Reason contributing editor (read his Reason archive here).
Social media, argues Godwin, isn’t broken at all, although both tech companies and users need to clarify their terms of engagement. On the other hand, he says, democracy is in deep disarray, for reasons that go back to the very founding of the United States.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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At Least 7 Dead, Embassies Sealed Off As Iraq Protests Rage; Police Open Fire On Crowds
Protests in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad which began relatively peacefully on Tuesday have spiraled out of control Wednesday, and into other cities, after witnessing a heavy handed police response resulting in up to seven reported deaths, according to data from Iraq’s High Commission for Human Rights (IHCHR), cited also by the AFP.
Though the initial protest origins remain obscure, the larger wave on Wednesday has been generally seen as fueled by anger over corruption, unemployment, and the lack of basic services.
Federal police have sought to clamp down on the increasingly violent demonstrations through rubber bullets, tear gas, and even the use of live ammunition. This prompted a statementfrom the US Embassy in the country, condemning the violence on both sides. At least 200 people were reported injured on Tuesday alone.
Protests raged in downtown Baghdad on Tuesday, and quickly turned violent, according to The New York Times. Image source: AFP/Getty.
“US embassy in Baghdad continues to monitor recent protests closely,” the statement read. “The right to demonstrate peacefully is a fundamental right in all democracies, but there is no place for violence in demonstrations from any side.”
The embassy confirmed that multiple protesters had been killed as it urged all sides to “reject violence while exercising restraint”. The Iraqi government has vowed to investigate the “heavy-handed response” of security forces in a statement.
Social media image showed throngs of angry protesters in Baghdad on Tuesday.
The AFP reported Wednesday that“Iraqi security forces fired live rounds on Wednesday to disperse new protests in the capital.”
Protests in Baghdad streets on Wednesday, via the AFP.
Repeat bursts of live fire can be heard in a number of social media videos showing Baghdad’s restive streets on Wednesday.
While wounded by the riot police ,this young Iraqi civil protester continued praying while live bullets were flying in the air near by. #Iraq#baghdadpic.twitter.com/Gs5c8Vn5ze
As evening fell, large groups of young men were filmed making their way toward the ‘Green Zone’ – the high security zone of the capital that hosts embassies, diplomatic compounds, and the headquarters for various international organizations.
Protesters are on Al-Jmhuria bridge in #Baghdad aiming to reach the green zone, while massive gun fires are heard being shot by the security forces toward the sky. #العراقpic.twitter.com/Ggr2kAx8rZ
Expressing solidarity with some of the issues demonstrators have complained about, Iraq’s President Barham Salih issued a public statement late Tuesday, telling security forces that “peaceful protest is a constitutional right”.
#Iraq 🇮🇶 BREAKING: several people have been shot by security forces as anti-government protests spread across the capital #Baghdadpic.twitter.com/Ewn0NGJzPq
Watch Live: Will Trump Explode During Joint Presser With Finnish President?
After a difficult couple of days that has seen President Trump lash out at Congressional Democrats and their impeachment probe, politicos will be watching his press conference with the Prime Minister of Finland Wednesday afternoon to see if Trump loses his cool when the inevitable impeachment-related question is asked.
