Tag: in-the-news

The Big Labor President


topicspolitics

Scores of millions of Americans have zero memory of living under a White House of, by, and for Big Labor. So we are going to have to make new memories to accurately assess President Joe Biden.

After repeatedly promising on the campaign trail to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen,” Biden has broken with all recent Democratic predecessors by actually governing like he means it.

On his first day in office, the 46th president fired National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) General Counsel Peter Robb, replacing him with former Communications Workers of America attorney Jennifer Abruzzo. On the same day, he rescinded some of Donald Trump’s federal civil service reforms, declaring, “It is also the policy of the United States to encourage union organizing and collective bargaining.”

Three days later, Biden announced the creation of a new Made in America Office inside the White House. The day after that, he signed an order saying federal agencies “shall…apply and enforce the [1931] Davis-Bacon Act and prevailing wage and benefit requirements,” thus making government workers and contractors richer at the expense of taxpayers. He appointed Laborers’ International Union of North America member Marty Walsh, the former mayor of Boston, as secretary of labor and created a Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, headed by Vice President Kamala Harris.

In February 2021, Biden took the step—”basically unprecedented in American history,” University of Rhode Island historian Erik Loomis later told Vox—of endorsing a specific workplace unionization effort, at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. (The final tally in Bessemer was 1,798 votes against unionization, 738 in favor.)

The March 2021 American Rescue Plan sloshed $1.9 trillion into mostly governmental areas, where unionization rates are high. It included an $86 billion unconditional bailout for multi-employer pension funds, a Big Labor wish-list item that had zero to do with the bill’s stated purpose of COVID-19 relief.

“Biden talks like the most pro-union president since the New Deal,” The Washington Post concluded in April 2021 after an in-depth comparison of presidential labor rhetoric. Yet he was just getting started.

The November 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act gushed out another $1.2 trillion in federal spending, including a “Buy American” provision mandating that building materials for the law’s road, bridge, and rail projects come primarily from the United States. In addition, Biden has kept in place many of Trump’s labor-pleasing protectionist restrictions on trade and immigration.

On the first anniversary of Biden’s inauguration, a host of union heavies came together under the umbrella of the AFL-CIO to lob laurels in his direction. “On the campaign trail and throughout his presidency,” gushed International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers President Lonnie R. Stephenson, “Joe Biden has promised to be the most pro-union, pro-worker president in history. As President Biden celebrates his first year in office, I can say with confidence his actions are matching his words.”

Seafarers International Union President Michael Sacco praised Biden for supporting the 1920 Jones Act, a classic of concentrated-benefits, dispersed-costs protectionism that requires ships sailing between U.S. ports to be American-owned. American Federation of School Administrators President Ernest A. Logan pronounced Biden, who likes to brag in speeches that he “sleeps with” a teachers union member, the “Best Education President.” Operative Plasterers’ and Cement Masons’ International Association General President Daniel E. Stepano summed up the prevailing labor assessment: “Biden has been the most pro-union, pro-worker president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

Is that what Americans, let alone the comparatively conservative wing of the Democratic Party that elevated Biden over his more progressive competitors in the 2020 primaries, had in mind when they voted for the old Washington hand? Probably not. Labor issues generally did not rise above the considerable din kicked up by any conversation involving Trump.

Yet it’s not like Biden made any secret of his sympathies. Despite his half-century in government office, he has always maintained a regular-guy, blue-collar persona, complete with tall tales about family members from Irish coal mining stock. “My great-grandfather Blewitt…was a mining engineer, back in the days of the Molly Maguires,” the president said in his 2021 Labor Day remarks, referring to a controversial 19th century mining-union group in the Northeast. “Molly Maguires…they were a little tougher. You gave them a hard time, and you ended up on the doorstep, in a bag.”

There is a big gap, however, between rhetorical nostalgia for the working-man struggles of yesteryear and the largely white-collar realities of 21st century Democratic Party unionism. Just 6 percent of the private-sector work force is unionized, down from 17 percent in 1983 and 36 percent in 1953, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) annual report in February 2022. The rate for the public sector, by contrast, was 34 percent in 2021, about the same as it has been for the last several decades. “The highest unionization rates,” BLS noted, “were among workers in education, training, and library occupations.” Coal mining this decidedly is not.

Biden would surely like to reverse that long private-sector slide. He has been pushing for the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would abolish “right to work” laws that  prohibit unions from forcing nonmembers to pay dues in 27 states. But that bill, which also would classify millions of independent contractors as employees, is already dead on arrival in the 50–50 Senate during a midterm year when Democrats are likely to see steep losses.

The awkward truth of contemporary unionism is that it’s largely an effort to remove taxpayers from negotiations between white-collar union reps and the lawyer/politicians they help elect. Teachers, cops, and civil-service bureaucrats treat the tax base like a guaranteed revenue stream, which they try to maximally divert for their own self-interest at the expense of the people paying their salaries and guaranteeing their pensions. In the zero-sum game of government budgeting, blue-collar workers in the hinterlands will continue to foot the tab for paper pushers in the capital. At most, Biden will extend some of those benefits to the building trades, jacking up costs while claiming to save money.

“As president of the United States,” he said in February while signing yet another pro-labor executive order, “I award contracts. [And] unless the product that I’m purchasing for the American people was made in America, and all of its component parts are made in America, we ain’t buying it. We’re just simply not buying it. Every single project that we’re talking about that’s paid for with federal dollars and is a federal project, it’s going to be union jobs—every single one of them. And guess what? The American public is going to be safer, and it’s going to be cheaper—cheaper paying the right wage and the right trained people to begin with and get the job done right and on time.”

Such magical thinking will continue to expand in the absence of criticism. Although it may seem as antiquated as coal-mining strikes and Molly Maguires, it’s time for the rest of us to again start noticing the anti-economic excesses of Big Labor.

The post The Big Labor President appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/7dAp6jI
via IFTTT

Brickbat: Just Eat It


eatingchips_1161x653

Pennsylvania’s Aliquippa School District has announced that it is going to begin searching students’ bags and will confiscate and throw away “excessive amounts” of snacks. In a Facebook post, the school district said each student will be limited to one 4-ounce bag of chips and one beverage of no more than 20 ounces. That Facebook post was removed after receiving hundreds of negative comments, but the policy remains in place. Superintendent Phillip Woods said students were bringing snacks to school to sell or to trade, and the policy is aimed at reducing that activity.

The post Brickbat: Just Eat It appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/3MRcLlA
via IFTTT

ATF’s New ‘Ghost Gun’ Rules Are as Clear as Mud


zumaamericasthirty655994

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF) finalized “ghost gun” rule surprised Cody Wilson, the head of Ghost Gunner. His company manufactures CNC mills that turn unfinished firearm receivers into products that can be included in completed firearms that have no serial numbers and are, hence, called “ghosts.” He’d anticipated a more-or-less explicit ban on so-called “80 percent receivers” which would leave his Ghost Gunner 3 that can turn a raw block of metal into an AR-15 receiver as the simplest remaining solution. Instead, by his reading, the new rules consumed a lot of pages to go after the most basic end of the DIY market.

Well, maybe. Other industry experts aren’t sure what the rules mean. That uncertainty poses huge challenges for manufacturers, vendors, and anybody trying to establish what is and isn’t legal.

“It looks like there is room still to sell 80 percent receivers, especially ones that have had determination letters,” Wilson told me over the phone. “But they aren’t saying they’re grandfathering those determinations [about the legality of existing products]; they’re saying everybody has to resubmit.”

Wilson’s impression is that “they’re trying to prevent the evolution of something like the Polymer80 kit from happening again. And that’s very clear. It’s more about the Polymer80 in this reemphasis.”

The White House itself implied such a focus in its April 11 “fact sheet” preceding publication of the rule: “This final rule bans the business of manufacturing the most accessible ghost guns, such as unserialized ‘buy build shoot’ kits that individuals can buy online or at a store without a background check and can readily assemble into a working firearm in as little as 30 minutes with equipment they have at home.”

On display at the presidential press conference announcing the new rule was what appeared to be a Polymer80 kit of the sort that Reason‘s Mark McDaniel used to construct a pistol in 2018. But such all-you-need-minus-a-few-parts kits aren’t the only way to go. I separately purchased an unfinished aluminum AR-15 receiver, jig, and parts to complete a rifle through drilling, milling, and assembly for a project featured in a separate Reason article in 2021. Or you could use one of Wilson’s Ghost Gunner machines. Or you could use widely available designs to craft a firearm with 3D printers. And then there are the many people who use standard home-workshop tools to make what they want. According to the plainest reading of the ATF’s language, those approaches remain legal at the federal level.

“ATF has maintained and continues to maintain that a partially complete frame or receiver alone is not a frame or receiver if it still requires performance of certain machining operations (e.g., milling out the fire control cavity of an AR-15 billet or blank, or indexing for that operation) because it may not readily be completed to house or hold the applicable fire control components,” the document says. 

ATF adds that new restrictions would apply if the partial frame or receiver is indexed or dimpled to indicate where to drill, or through “the aggregation of a template or jig with a partially complete frame or receiver.” Minus such clear markings or accessories, though, unfinished receivers would appear to retain a viable market without having to go to the raw blocks of aluminum and polymer necessarily exempted in the rules (unless you want to subject hardware stores to gun regulations) and with which Ghost Gunner has a distinct advantage. Wilson still sees an opening, though, in states that have tighter rules than those imposed by the ATF.

“I would say if they maintain an 80 percent space and don’t allow people to buy a simple kit, then Ghost Gunner market share goes way up and then the zero-percent conversation becomes a conversation about the state level on 80s” in places like Connecticut and New Jersey that have banned unfinished receivers, Wilson told me. “I was just assuming that the feds would also be shutting that door and I’m just surprised to see that they’re not.”

But not everybody is convinced that the ATF rules leave an opening for the existing 80 percent receiver market to continue to operate. That’s because the agency dumps its old guidance with regard to the unfinished components, creates untested new terminology, and leaves an awful lot to the interpretation of federal bureaucrats.

“You gotta remember that that’s in their Q&A section,” Matthew Larosiere, policy counsel attorney with Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), cautioned me by phone about the language that seems to leave space for partially complete frames and receivers. “The rule itself refers to those partially completed receivers that are ‘readily’ manufactured or convertible into a complete firearm.”

Larosiere pointed out that “‘readily’ has its own definition here which is meaningless because all we have to go on is the wildly vague notion that incomplete receivers which are ‘fairly or reasonably efficient, quick, and easy’ to complete into firearms are firearms. So, we don’t actually know what their position is now. What we do know for sure is that they’ve rescinded all previous guidance on all incomplete frames or receivers.” Included in the ATF’s holistic definition of “readily” convertible frames and receivers is the availability of tools, parts, and instructions from the same vendors, Larosiere emphasized.

“The point of these rule-makings is supposed to be to clarify the law,” he told me. “And I don’t see any clarification here at all.”

There is something that everybody does agree on: The new gun rules will end up in court. “Based on the comments received in opposition to this rule, there is a reasonable possibility that this rule will be subject to litigation challenges,” acknowledges the ATF. Wilson agrees that “a lot of people” are going to sue, as does Larosiere. The fact that individuals with deep knowledge of firearms and applicable laws have widely different interpretations of the government’s language probably necessitates courtroom drama so that somebody can hammer out what those words actually mean.

The finalized ATF rule, which takes effect 120 days after publication in the federal register, also requires permanent records-retention by licensed gun dealers instead of allowing for disposal after 20 years as in the past, changes marking requirements for adding serial numbers to guns, and anticipates a growing market for privately made firearms which, of course, the government intends to regulate. But the greatest legacy of this rules update is to issue hundreds of pages of firearms regulations that are as clear as mud and leave experts in the field disagreeing over the interpretation.

The post ATF's New 'Ghost Gun' Rules Are as Clear as Mud appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/QZ2lwSp
via IFTTT

A Murdochized internet?

The theme of this episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast is, “Be careful what you wish for.”  The wish for techlash regulation is still growing around the world.  Mark MacCarthy  takes us through a week’s worth of regulatory enthusiasm.  Canada is planning to force Google and Facebook to pay Canadian news media for links. It sounds simple, but arriving at the right price – and the right recipients — will require a hefty dose of discretionary government intervention. Meanwhile, South Korea’s effort to regulate Google’s Android app store policies, which also sounds like a simple undertaking, is quickly devolving into an elaborate effort at price regulation. The movement continues, Mark notes, even in China, which once seemed to be moderating its hostility to tech platforms; yet the Chinese government just announced algorithm compliance audits for TenCent and ByteDance.

Nobody is weeping for Big Tech, but anybody who thinks this kind of thing will really hurt the tech giants has never studied the history of AT&T – or of Rupert Murdoch for that matter. Incumbent tech companies have the resources to protect themselves from undue regulatory burdens – and to make sure competitors will be crushed by them. The one missing chapter in a story of gradual mutual accommodation between Big Tech and Big Government, I argue, is a Rupert Murdoch figure – someone who will use his platform unabashedly to curry favor not from the left but from the right. It’s an unfilled niche, and a profitable one: even a moderately conservative Big Tech company is likely to find all the close regulatory calls being made in its favor as soon as the GOP takes power. If you think that’s unlikely, you missed the last week of tech news. Elon Musk, whose entire business empire is built on government spending, is already toying with occupying a Silicon Valley version of the Rupert Murdoch niche. His acquisition of nearly 10% of Twitter is an opening gambit that is likely to make him a conservative(ish) antidote to Silicon Valley’s political monoculture. Recent complaints that the internet is becoming politically splintered are wildly off the mark today, but they may yet come true.

Nick Weaver brings us back to earth with a review of the FBI’s successful (for now) takedown of the Cyclops Blink botnet – a Russian cyber weapon that was disabled before it could be fired. Nick reminds us that the operation was only made possible by a change in search and seizure procedures that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and friends condemned as outrageous just a decade ago. In addition, he reports, Western law enforcement last week broke the Hydra dark market. In more good news, Nick takes us through the ways in which bitcoin’s traceability has enabled authorities to bust child sex rings around the globe.

Nick also brings us This Week in Bad News for Surveillance Software: FinFisher is bankrupt. The EU is investigating Israeli surveillance software on its ministers’ phones; and Google has banned apps that use particularly intrusive data collection tools, the latter having been outed by Nick’s colleagues at the International Computer Science Institute.

Finally, Europe is building a vast network to do face recognition across the continent. I celebrate the likely defeat of ideologues who’ve been trying to toxify face recognition for years. And I note that one of my last campaigns at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was a series of international agreements that lock European law enforcement into sharing of such data with the United States. Defending those agreements, of course, should be a high priority for the State Department’s on-again off-again (and now on again) cyber bureau.

Download the 402nd Episode (mp3

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

The post A Murdochized internet? appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/Jvpqmth
via IFTTT

Anti-Israel Advocacy at University Doesn’t Create Illegal “Hostile Environment” for Israeli Citizens or Jews

From Judge Mark Hornak’s decision two weeks ago in Newman v. Point Park Univ. (W.D. Pa.), which I think reaches the correct result:

Plaintiff Channa Newman is a Jewish, Israeli, and Czech woman born in 1942 who is employed as a professor by Defendant, Point Park University, a post-secondary education institution located in downtown Pittsburgh. Plaintiff has worked at Point Park as a professor and at times as a Department Chair since 1964. Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint consists of 19 counts encompassing 628 paragraphs over 75 pages and asserts an array of statutory discrimination, retaliation, and hostile work environment claims against Defendant, alleging that Defendant discriminated, retaliated, and harassed Plaintiff on the basis of her religion, race/national origin, sex, and age.

The overall dispute between Plaintiff and Defendant originated in what appears to have been at times a heated set of academic and philosophical contentions between Plaintiff and other faculty members at the University—and Plaintiff broadly alleges that this dispute has infiltrated Defendant’s administration, the administration’s decision making, and the student body….

The court allowed plaintiff to proceed with her discrimination and retaliation claims, but rejected her hostile environment claim:

[Plaintiff alleges] a hostile work environment due to Dr. Ross’s and Dr. Hines’s viewpoints or disagreements with Plaintiff on contentious geopolitical issues in the course of their academic roles at the University, leading to what Plaintiff describes as “shunning” or “evasion,” as these allegations are a focus of Defendant’s Motion…. [But plaintiff does not show] that Drs. Ross or Hines or the student body held their viewpoints on these contentious issues to cause hostility directed toward Plaintiff or had and advocated discriminatory views to harm Plaintiff specifically….

Plaintiff claims that Dr. Ross, in particular, held and advanced in the classroom and beyond strongly differing viewpoints from those of Plaintiff on the Israel-Palestine conflict and the responses to it, that Drs. Ross and Hines support different political movements in those regards than Plaintiff does (specifically, Plaintiff alleges that they support the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” or “BDS” movement and criticize Israeli policy regarding Palestinian settlements), and that Plaintiff considers those viewpoints on those topics as anti-Semitic and therefore by definition to be targeted at her. To the extent that Plaintiff alleges that Dr. Ross “used his position” to espouse a BDS-based or related agenda in the classroom where he taught and created a hostile work environment for Plaintiff in doing so, the Court would observe that there are competing assessments of the basis for such views…..

Plaintiff has not shown that Defendant has subjected her to an objectively hostile work environment by its not suppressing, or otherwise protecting Plaintiff from, the personal views and academic interests of some of Defendant’s professors and students related to these geopolitical topics. The record does not plausibly make a “showing” that Defendant created an objectively hostile work environment for Plaintiff or for a reasonable employee in Plaintiff’s shoes by allowing controversial theories and ideas that directly compete with Plaintiff’s own views to be discussed among professors and/or students in a classroom or academic setting or engaged with outside of the classroom. Rather, Plaintiff’s allegations amount to her strong and fundamental disagreement with the viewpoints and public actions that she attributes to either or both of Drs. Ross and Hines, largely manifesting in actions outside of the classroom including participating in protests and posting content on social media, and her disagreement with allegedly related views of and the speech and actions by Point Park students on those same matters.

Plaintiff posits that such advancement of these ideas and concepts by Drs. Ross and Hines and by students inherently makes her an outcast given her vigorously opposing viewpoints coupled with her race and religion. But in the Court’s judgment, accepting that argument would prove too much, as it would invalidate as a facial matter and on Title VII grounds an entire academic and public debate and give Plaintiff a veto over others engaging in that same debate. It would effectively compel, under the pain of Title VII liability, that any speech and viewpoints held and espoused by others as part of that debate and that are contrary to Plaintiff’s point of view be reformulated to be consistent with Plaintiff’s views on such topics.

{In essence, Plaintiff contends that the way in which she was treated in the workplace was part of an overarching movement by supporters of the BDS movement to discriminate against her due to her Israeli citizenship, Jewish race and religion, and her support of Israel in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Plaintiff alleges that Dr. Ross supports the BDS movement and that some students may also support the movement (given, for example, their participation in protests relative to it). As the Court has noted, these allegations taken as they are stated reflect a core disagreement between private individuals expressing differing positions on a topic of vigorous ongoing political debate.

Such disagreements on a contentious geopolitical conflict do not in and of themselves form the basis of a hostile work environment claim ….. If such were the case, then as a practical consequence, the fair employment practice laws invoked by Plaintiff would serve as parking brake on those academic and public debates about those highly contentious topics and would put the thumb of those fair employment practice laws on the First Amendment scale, tipping it irrevocably in favor of Plaintiff’s point of view on those same topics.

In short, the natural and probable consequence of Plaintiff’s position is that advocacy of the BDS movement (or any other criticism of the actions of the Israeli government by other faculty members or students) in an academic employment setting is per se unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, and/or religion, and that such, as a matter of law, generates an objectively hostile work environment. The Court is not aware of case law that would support that position.

The Court of course recognizes the contentious nature of the debate surrounding the BDS movement, including the stance of some, including Plaintiff, that BDS activities are by definition a form of anti-Semitism simply by their existence and articulation, and her contention that their very existence in her workplace necessarily constitutes unlawful “hostile environment” discrimination against her. For example, Plaintiff broadly contends that “Israeli and Jewish students and scholars have been subjected to prejudice, shunning, exclusion, and discrimination on campuses by BDS proponents in this country and abroad,” and she cites scholarship in her Response to Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss that contends that BDS, specifically any academic boycott of Israel and Zionist voices from higher education, is necessarily anti-Semitic conduct, and that it is therefore and more specifically necessarily conduct directed at her by its very existence, thereby generating Title VII liability for the Defendant.

However, Plaintiff’s effort to characterize support for these topics (or at least advocacy contrary to the position of the Israeli government) by Dr. Ross, Dr. Hines, and certain students at Point Park University, as well as the fact of academic discussion of BDS at the University, as inherently severe unlawful discrimination such that those allegations in and of themselves make out a hostile work environment claim of discrimination against her lacks legal support. The Court is aware of no cases that draw that conclusion, and the parties have advanced none. And the actions of other academics and students on other campuses is not germane to the issues presented by this asserted claim in this specific case.

Thus, no matter the divisiveness of the debate surrounding the BDS movement (or other philosophical viewpoints parallel to the BDS movement’s opposition to the actions of the Israeli government) nor the validation of Plaintiff’s point of view by some but not all engaged in the academic debate outside of the Defendant’s campus and workplace, the Court cannot conclude that association with BDS statements and principles that is not directly and specifically targeted at Plaintiff by and among Defendant’s professors and students objectively could create a hostile work environment claim against Defendant.}

The post Anti-Israel Advocacy at University Doesn't Create Illegal "Hostile Environment" for Israeli Citizens or Jews appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/K8uHLzx
via IFTTT

Shanghai’s Lockdowns Result in Starvation and Quarantine Enforcers Being Attacked


featurechinapix136913

In Shanghai, 25 million people remain locked down as 26,087 new COVID cases were reported on Sunday.

The situation has grown increasingly dire: Two people who tried to leave their apartment to walk their dog were confronted by a COVID prevention worker who they ended up attacking. At least one man allegedly tried to get the cops to apprehend him so he could at least have food to eat. Meanwhile, people who end up in central quarantine—state-administered facilities where COVID-positive people are sometimes sent so others in their apartment buildings don’t get sick—complain about the fact that it’s so unhygienic, it may well be facilitating greater spread of the virus (or even reinfection). Shared rooms, no running water, broken toilets (or disgusting ones shared by hundreds of people), and people crammed into overflow beds in hospital hallways have grown to be expected by the city’s increasingly angry residents.

This is all after reports emerged that parents were being separated from their COVID-positive children (a policy officials claim has been altered, with parents now allowed to apply to remain with their sick, minor children). Meanwhile, last week, a graphic video went viral on Chinese social media of a COVID prevention worker killing a family’s corgi dog in the streets.

Given the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) aggressive track record of censorship and tight media control, it’s noteworthy that so much information has leaked through what is termed the “Great Firewall”—China’s internet censorship apparatus—and made its way to the Western press. But this may be a somewhat deliberate tradeoff on the part of the CCP, recognizing that while they can’t fully suppress the horror scenes, they can scapegoat lower-level officials as a form of damage control instead.

“Chinese censorship is more complicated than just trying to stop negative information,” Jeremy Daum, senior fellow at Yale Law’s Paul Tsai China Center, tells Reason. The CCP has “made announcements about cracking down on ‘rumors,’ but to put a city as cosmopolitan and populous as Shanghai under total information quarantine would probably be impractical and counterproductive,” he says. If the city’s residents were to feel “silenced,” that “would probably be more disruptive of social order and a bigger threat to stable government than letting people vent.”

“Censorship isn’t always a blunt tool,” says Daum, “especially when directed by higher-level authorities. They try to be cognizant of public opinion, because the goal is stability, and there has to be a cost-benefit analysis.”

Meanwhile, Guangzhou, a manufacturing hub home to more than 18 million people, looks disturbingly primed to follow in Shanghai’s footsteps, as COVID cases spread and travel to the city is sealed off.

The post Shanghai's Lockdowns Result in Starvation and Quarantine Enforcers Being Attacked appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/69g2ZFe
via IFTTT

Two Cops Will Not Face Discipline For Pushing a 75-Year-Old to the Ground. You Can Thank the Police Union.


thumbnail (7)

The last two years brought a public reckoning around public sector unions, the collective-bargaining groups that represent workers in government positions. A recent story reminds us why.

On June 4, 2020, 75-year-old Martin Gugino captured much of the nation’s attention after a clip showed the man walking up to police officers at a protest in Buffalo, New York, and talking with them briefly before two officers shoved him to the ground.

An arbitrator—hired by the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, the police union—announced last week that Officers Aaron Torgalski and Robert McCabe acted judiciously when they pushed Gugino to the pavement, after which point blood is seen gushing from his head as he lay on the sidewalk. Whether one officer applied more force than the other is impossible to tell, but the video shows the two pushing Gugino in tandem before he trips backward and falls.

“Gugino, after the force was applied to him, appears to have not been able to keep his balance for reasons that might well have had as much to do with the fact that he was holding objects in each hand or his advanced age,” wrote Jeffrey M. Selchick, who also notes that the officers were worried about Gugino getting close to their “bare skin” in the case that they might catch COVID-19.

“It was an acrobatic exercise to avoid what the world saw,” Melissa D. Wischerath, an attorney for Gugino, tells Reason.

The video is here, and you can decide for yourself. But the main issue isn’t the decision per se. It’s the inevitability of it.

A core function of police unions—and of any union, really—is to defend their workers, even when that means sticking up for distasteful behavior. That becomes a bit more complex when the union is tasked with defending the worst actions taken by those who hold the monopoly on force and power.

As a part of that function, many unions have sought to make it as difficult as possible to discipline those within their ranks when they may be out of line. That’s no different in Buffalo, which quite literally “bargained away the ability for the city to discipline,” notes Wischerath. Instead, when their employees are accused of potentially violating policy, the municipality can pursue a private arbitration process where each entity finds an arbitrator to make an unappealable decision. In this case, the city and the union jointly selected and financed Selchick’s participation, who, according to Wischerath, is a known quantity. “Even if you know it’s coming, it’s still shocking to read,” she says.

This sort of thing isn’t new. Up the road in Rochester, New York, a group of cops last year pepper-sprayed and handcuffed a nine-year-old girl, who, for the record, was not suspected of committing any crime. The police union responded that such force was necessary to detain a child. There are many such stories.

Criticism of police unions over the last couple of years has primarily come from the left, it seems. But they aren’t the only collective-bargaining groups taking heat. Teachers unions have been thrust under the spotlight as well, accused by the right of overplaying their hand in prolonging measures like remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both entities have much in common: monopoly control over a public good and a penchant for prioritizing themselves at the direct expense of the people they are charged with serving. Yet, in our tribal political landscape, that close Venn diagram is unfortunately lost on many.

The post Two Cops Will Not Face Discipline For Pushing a 75-Year-Old to the Ground. You Can Thank the Police Union. appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/jcVUODm
via IFTTT

Criminal Defense Lawyers, This Is For You: A Model Motion to Suppress on Internet Content Preservation

I recently wrote a law review article, The Fourth Amendment Limits of Internet Content Preservation, 65 St. Louis University Law Journal 753 (2021), on the widespread practice of governments directing Internet providers to copy and store contents of Internet accounts without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion just in case they later develop probable cause to get access to the contents with a warrant.  This practice, known as “preservation,” happens to hundreds of thousands of Internet accounts every year.  In the article, I explain why I think current preservation practices are mostly unconstitutional. Preservation is a Fourth Amendment seizure, and it should ordinarily require probable cause.

My article naturally points to a Fourth Amendment claim that I think criminal defense lawyers should be making.  And it’s an argument I have been suggesting to criminal defense lawyers for years.  But defense lawyers haven’t taken me up on the suggestion; the issue has generally remained unlitigated.

To help make the argument easier for defense lawyers to make, I decided to write a model motion to suppress.  It’s my own take on what criminal defense counsel should be arguing to best litigate the Fourth Amendment limits on preservation.  You can read the model motion in .pdf format here: Preservation Draft Motion April 2022.pdf.   Alternatively, if you are a lawyer who is interested in filing the motion, you can download the draft motion in Microsoft Word format (so you can edit it, format it, and the like) here: Preservation Draft Motion April 2022.docx.

I expect to tinker with the model motion over time in response to suggestions or future court rulings.  But my hope is that the existence of the draft motion will make it easier for defense lawyers to raise this issue.  The arguments in the motion are primarily legal, not factual, so defense lawyers should only have to make minor changes to the motion to use it in their cases.

As the cover page of the motion explains, the motion is potentially useful whenever the government is seeking to use contents obtained from a client’s Internet account.  When that is the case, defense counsel should ask the government if the warrant used to obtain the contents was preceded by preservation under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(f)— and if so, on what date the preservation request was made.  The brief can be filed if preservation occurred, with the date preservation occurred and the date the warrant was served filled in where noted in the brief.

Finally, if criminal defense lawyers out there have ideas on how I can spread the word about this model motion, please let me know (email is orin at berkeley dot edu). My hope is that the model motion can lead to real motions being filed, and that can lead to rulings on this question that develops Fourth Amendment law accordingly.

The post Criminal Defense Lawyers, This Is For You: A Model Motion to Suppress on Internet Content Preservation appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/0XzgaZp
via IFTTT

The Real War in Ukraine and the Culture War in Florida


4700646650_16e7bea549_o

On this Monday’s Reason Roundtable, with Katherine Mangu-Ward out, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Fiona Harrigan discuss the latest on the war in Ukraine and the ongoing Disney “groomer” panic.

1:37: Ukraine update: What the U.S. should and shouldn’t do in Ukraine

19:27: The great “groomer” debate.

38:01: Weekly Listener Question: “Can a tent be too big? I understand the definition of libertarianism is fluid, but there has to be limits to that. Any time someone tries to nail down a few ideas, it’s always countered with them saying “no true Scotsman fallacy” or “libertarianism is the goal, but we need to be pragmatic in the short term”. All of this, however, is a convoluted way for me to say the LP of NH, the Mises Caucus, and last week’s Roundtable emailer are not libertarian and should stop using the word. DeSantinistas, Trumpers, pro-Putin trad cons, and all right-wing reactionaries need to be disavowed and loudly.”

This week’s links: 

“The Case for Pursuing the Issue of Russian War Crimes in Ukraine – Even Though Putin is Highly Unlikely to Ever be Tried and Punished” by Ilya Somin

“From Iraq to Ukraine, the American Press Loves a War” by Fiona Harrigan

“Ukraine Crisis: U.S. Must Use Restraint” by Nick Gillespie

“‘Equity,’ ‘Multiculturalism,’ and ‘Racial Prejudice,’ Among Concepts That Could Be Banned in Schools by Wisconsin Bill” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“40 Years of Free Minds and Free Markets” by Brian Doherty

“Goodnight, Moonshot” by Matt Welch

Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

Today’s sponsor:

Tired of feeling like someone’s always watching you on the internet? Maybe advertisers know a bit too much about you, or you’re concerned about the privacy of your identity. Using incognito mode won’t solve the problem either.  IPVanish VPN is here to protect your right to privacy and help you stay anonymous online.

IPVanish helps you safely browse the internet without exposing your private details to third parties, such as hackers, your ISP, or advertisers.

You can use IPVanish on unlimited devices without sacrificing on speed: your computers, tablets, phones…even devices like your Firestick when you’re streaming media. When you use IPVanish, all of your data is encrypted. This means that your private details, passwords, communications, browsing history, and more will be completely shielded from falling into the wrong hands. Even your physical location will be hidden. IPVanish makes you virtually invisible online. It’s that simple.

Whether I’m at home or in public, I don’t go online anymore without using IPVanish. IPVanish is offering an incredible 70 percent off their yearly plan for our listeners with a 30-day money-back guarantee. That’s just like getting 9 months for free.

IPVanish is super easy to use. All you have to do is tap one button, and you’re instantly protected. You won’t even know it’s on. Stop sharing with the world everything you watch, everything you search for, and everything you buy.  Take your privacy back today with the brand rated 4.6 out of 5 on Trustpilot. 

Go to IPVANISH.com/roundtable and use promotional code ROUNDTABLE to claim your 70 percent savings. That’s I-P-V-A-N-I-S-H.com/roundtable.

 

Audio production by Ian Keyser

Assistant production by Hunt Beaty and Adam Czarnecki

Music: “Angeline,” by The Brothers Steve

The post The Real War in Ukraine and the Culture War in Florida appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/C0goGLZ
via IFTTT