German States Outlaw Letter “Z” Displays As Ukraine Asks World To Criminalize
Public displays of the letter “Z” have been outlawed in two German states, after authorities in Bavaria and Lower Saxony announced over the weekend that anyone who displays the letter – which has become synonymous with support for Russia’s war in Ukraine – will be subject to a fine or three years in jail, according to The Local.
“The Russian war of aggression on the Ukraine is a criminal act, and whoever publicly approves of this war of aggression can also make himself liable to prosecution,” said an Interior Ministry spokesperson in a Monday press statement.
The letter became a hot-button issue after tanks amassed at the Ukrainian border displayed it – possibly to distinguish them from Ukraine’s tanks.
Chapter 140 of Germany’s criminal code recognizes “incitement to crime of aggression” as an offense, according to Ukrainian state news agency Ukrinform. The Local reports that there have been displays of “Z” in both Lower Saxony and Bavaria. -NPR
Russia’s war of aggression against #Ukraine is a criminal offense. Anyone publicly approving the war may be liable to prosecution in Germany. This applies to using the “Z” symbol, too. German security authorities are keeping an eye on the use of the symbol. – Ministry of Interior https://t.co/diQEgGwR7a
Meanwhile, Ukraine is asking the entire world to criminalize the usage of “Z” – with Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeting on Tuesday: “I call on all states to criminalize the use of the ‘Z’ symbol as a way to publicly support Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.”
“‘Z’ means Russian war crimes, bombed out cities, thousands of murdered Ukrainians. Public support of this barbarism must be forbidden.”
I call on all states to criminalize the use of the ‘Z’ symbol as a way to publicly support Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. ’Z’ means Russian war crimes, bombed out cities, thousands of murdered Ukrainians. Public support of this barbarism must be forbidden.
The actual meaning of the letter has never been confirmed, however Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a series of tweets earlier this month that the “Z” stands for “Victory,” “for the truth,” “for peace,” as well as “denazification” and demilitarization.”
Weaker Yen Becoming A Double-Edged Sword For Japanese Stocks
By Hideyuki Sano, Bloomberg Taking Stock markets commentator and analyst
The yen’s weakness has helped fuel a world-beating rally in Japanese stocks. But its impact appears less pronounced this time and may even risk backfiring in an era of rising oil prices and U.S. interest rates.
The broad Topix index has gained 5.6% this month, outperforming most of its major global peers. While the yen’s slide to a more than six-year low has aided some exporters, the main drivers behind the market’s gains were banks and energy trading firms, which have benefited from higher borrowing costs and oil prices, respectively.
The diminishing correlation between a cheaper yen and higher stocks not only costs Japanese shares a historically reliable catalyst but also reflects an economy increasingly dependent on offshore manufacturing. That has made Japanese businesses benefit less from a competitive currency and more vulnerable to imported inflation.
“In recent years, Japanese corporate earnings have become less responsive to the yen’s moves,” said Hiroshi Watanabe, senior economist at Sony Financial Group Inc. That’s because a strong currency more than a decade ago prompted many firms to shift a large part of their production outside Japan.
12-month forward earnings per share of firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s main board closely tracked the dollar-yen exchange rate until 2016, when the link started becoming much more tenuous.
In a sign that a weaker yen is now more of a damper than boost to foreign investors, the latter were net sellers of local shares in the first three weeks of March, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. To these overseas investors, who account for more than two-thirds of brokerage trading in Japan, the yen’s rapid depreciation may lead to huge currency losses.
“Prices of imported food and resources are rising, which will surely slow the Japanese economy because wages remain stagnant,” said Tetsuro Ii, chief executive at Commons Asset Management in Tokyo. “If the yen keeps falling, that may become a net negative.”
Mayor Lightfoot Assigned 70 Chicago Cops To Personal Security Detail Created In 2020
The Democratic rulers of ultra-liberal cities love to pay lip service to their voters’ calls to ‘defund the police’ – except, of course, when it comes to their own protection.
In the latest example of this disturbing trend, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has, for the past two years, enjoyed a security detail consisting of some 71 Chicago PD officers, despite proposing to cut the department’s budget by $80 million back in 2020 as a sop to the “defund” movement (while the city’s murder rate continues to spiral out of control).
The detail, known as Unit 544, started with a handful of officers, but has since grown into a group that includes 65 officers, five sergeants, and a lieutenant, according to a Chicago Sun Times report.
As if this weren’t already excessive enough, Lightfoot has an additional personal bodyguard detail made up of approximately 20 officers. The department sent a memo to its officers in the summer of 2020 (at the height of the defund movement) inviting them to apply to join the mayor’s detail.
“The unit’s mission will be to provide physical security for City Hall, the mayor’s residence and the mayor’s detail command post,” the memo read. “Through the coordination of intelligence and resources, officers will respond to all threats related to the mayor’s physical properties to ensure its protection.”
Around the time the unit was established, city residents who lived near the mayor’s house were complaining that the precinct’s limited resources were too often being dedicated to the mayor’s residence, where protesters repeatedly gathered.
Lightfoot told the Sun-Times that the unit was created to ensure proper coordination between officers who provided security at her residence, and those who provided security at city hall.
“…[Y]ou know, if there was some kind of emergency at City Hall, for example, the right hand wouldn’t necessarily know what the left hand was doing because they all reported to different chains of command.”
[…]
“…[I]n 2020 in particular, there were a significant amount of protests all over the city, and some of them targeted at my house. All the more reason why having a unified command to understand and share intelligence and be ready to respond if there was any kind of threat was very important.”
Lightfoot also tried to play down the proposed PD budget cut as the result of a ‘pandemic-related budget shortfall’, not an example of her bowing to the “defund” movement.
She also blamed President Trump for threatening her security: “When the president of the United States uses the world’s largest megaphone and platform to target you personally, terrible things happen…And he not only blew a dog whistle, he pointed really evil and dangerous people right at my doorstep.”
Of course, the political winds have shifted dramatically since 2020 – so much so that President Biden recently included additional funding for federal and local law enforcement in his 2023 budget proposal, which he unveiled yesterday.
President Joe Biden’s proposed fiscal year 2023 budget would involve billions of dollars in climate-related spending, including $11 billion for international climate finance, as well as multibillion-dollar investments said to “advance equity and equality globally.”
Submitted on March 28—more than a month after it was legally due on the first Monday of February—the budget would total $5.8 trillion.
With energy prices up from 2021 and an economically disruptive war raging in Eastern Europe, the president didn’t highlight climate or environmental concerns in a brief, pre-prepared statement on the budget request. However, he did claim that his budget would “continue our equitable growth.”
Yet, according to a fact sheet from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), as well as a 156-page summary from that same agency, a significant proportion of prospective spending would be in the name of climate and what the fact sheet describes as “environmental justice.”
The Ecological Society of America, a large organization of ecological scientists, states that “environmental justice is understood in many ways” on its webpage defining the term.
It first lists the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) definition, which appeared as early as 1998 in a Clinton administration report, where it was attributed to the EPA Office of Environmental Justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws and regulations.”
The webpage then notes that “a broader definition views [environmental justice] ‘both as a field of study and a social movement that seeks to address the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and harms, and asks whether procedures and impacts of environmental decision-making are fair to the people they affect,’” referencing a definition from University of Michigan professor Bunyan Bryant.
Bryant, professor emeritus for Environmental Justice, has elsewhere written that “the destructive power of market forces” has led humans “to wreak destruction upon the Earth and upon each other.”
A search of Federal Election Commission filings from Jan. 1, 2018, through Dec. 31, 2020, shows that all donations from people who listed “Ecological Society of America” or “The Ecological Society of America” as their employer went to Democratic candidates and causes, such as the Biden Victory Fund, Biden for President, and the online fundraising platform ActBlue.
Climate and Equity
Environmental spending in Biden’s proposed budget would include $3.3 billion on new energy programs, with $500,000 for weatherizing and retrofitting low-income homes.
In addition, Biden would allocate $80 million to a Grid Deployment Office, which would aim to modernize the U.S. electrical grid.
The EPA’s discretionary funding would be boosted to $11.9 billion, a rise of 29 percent from the enacted level for 2021. Biden seeks to enlarge EPA’s staff by 1,900 full-time equivalents, reversing a trend of staffing reductions under the Trump administration.
More than $18 billion would go to climate resilience and adaptation, a major winner in the recently passed omnibus legislation.
“These critical investments will reduce the risk of damages from floods and storms, restore the Nation’s aquatic ecosystems, and make HUD-assisted multifamily homes more climate-resilient,” the OMB fact sheet reads.
An additional $1.45 billion goes to what are described as the EPA’s “environmental justice efforts,” which the fact sheet claims will “advance racial equity.”
The budget would also provide $47 million in environmental justice-related funding to the Department of Energy and $1.4 million to establish a new Office of Environmental Justice within the Department of Justice.
Biden’s budget would also devote $11 billion to international climate finance, including $1.6 billion for a Green Climate Fund, a program said to fund climate adaptation and mitigation in the developing world.
Equity is a dominant theme both in the climate-related funding and elsewhere in the spending proposal. The OMB’s full, 156-page proposal uses the word “equity,” or close variations thereof, at least 75 times. “Equitable,” or close variations thereof, shows up 38 times.
Months after the Taliban took control in Afghanistan and halted U.S. gender-related programs in that nation, Biden’s FY 2023 budget aims for “equity” not just in the United States, but around the world.
The Biden administration had previously published the first National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality in 2021.
The OMB’s budget fact sheet highlights $2.6 billion in spending said to “advance gender equity and equality across a broad range of sectors.”
As part of that effort, Biden’s FY 2023 budget would allocate $200 million to the Gender Equity and Equality Action Fund, which already received $200 million in the FY 2022 funding that was finalized through the recent omnibus.
OMB Director Shalanda Young will testify about Biden’s proposed budget to the House Committee on the Budget on March 29.
Cathay Pacific Airways Secures World’s Longest Flight As It Now Avoids Russian Airspace
The international community is increasingly isolating Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. The latest example is Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. rerouting its New York-Hong Kong flight away from Russian airspace, making it the world’s longest commercial passenger flight by distance.
According to a Cathay memo sent to flight staff and seen by Bloomberg, the New York-Hong Kong flight, using Airbus SE’s A350-1000, will be rerouted to avoid Russian airspace altogether. The new distance will total 10,326 miles for a 16-17 hour flight versus the old route across Russia that totaled 8,071 miles and take about 15 hours.
Cathay’s new flight will supersede Singapore Airlines Ltd.’s Singapore-New York JFK flight, which was once considered the longest flight in terms of distance.
“Such flight changes are likely to only be temporary given the costs carriers face from high oil prices and uncertainty over the accessibility of Russian airspace,” Bloomberg said, adding that other airlines are also rerouting flights away from Russian airspace.
In yesterday’s National Press Photographers Ass’n v. McCraw(W.D. Tex.), Judge Robert Pitman held that Texas statutes limiting drone photography were unconstitutional. A brief summary of the statutes:
Section 423.003 imposes criminal and civil penalties by declaring it unlawful to use “an unmanned aircraft to capture an image of an individual or privately owned real property … with the intent to conduct surveillance on the individual or property captured in the image.” Section 423.002 exempts certain uses of UAVs from liability under the Surveillance Provisions but does not exempt newsgathering. Exemptions include “professional or scholarly research and development or … on behalf of an institution of higher education.” …
Texas Government Code Sections 423.0045 and 423.0046 (together “No-Fly Provisions”) impose criminal penalties by making it unlawful to fly UAVs over a “Correctional Facility, Detention Facility, or Critical Infrastructure Facility” or “Sports Venue” at less than 400 feet. Critical infrastructure facilities are defined to include oil and gas pipelines, petroleum and alumina refineries, water treatment facilities, and natural gas fractionation and chemical manufacturing plants. In 2017, critical infrastructure was expanded though legislative amendments to include animal feeding operations, oil and gas drilling sites, and chemical production facilities, among others. The 2017 amendments also defined a “sports venue” to include any arena, stadium, automobile racetrack, coliseum, or any other facility that has seating capacity of more than 30,000 people and is “primarily used” for one or more professional or amateur sport or athletics events. Plaintiffs contend that when combined with Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”) regulations, which require UAVs to fly below 400 feet, the No-Fly Provisions effectively ban UAVs at the listed locations. The No-Fly Provisions exempt certain UAV users, including those with a “commercial purpose.”
The court concluded that drone photography was covered by the First Amendment:
In the analogous context of filmmaking, the Fifth Circuit has noted that “the First Amendment protects the act of making film, as ‘there is no fixed First Amendment line between the act of creating speech and the speech itself.'” Furthermore, courts have never recognized a “distinction between the process of creating a form of pure speech (such as writing or painting) and the product of these processes (the essay or the artwork) in terms of the First Amendment protection afforded.
Here, Plaintiffs have established that Chapter 423 restricts their use of drones to record the news, necessarily constraining their ability to disseminate the news. It is uncontested that budgetary and other constraints may make drones the only option for recording certain events. Defendants assert that other options—namely expensive helicopters—can fill the same role in facilitating news production. Yet they cannot dispute the extreme price and safety differences between these technologies. Furthermore, Pappalardo and the organizational plaintiffs’ members have stated that drones are central to their journalistic pursuits, claims which Defendants do not refute.
The court concluded that the restrictions were content-based and thus subject to strict scrutiny:
The Surveillance and No-Fly Provisions are both content-based restrictions that regulate based on the subject of the expression. The Surveillance Provisions require the enforcing official to inquire into the contents of the image to determine whether it is prohibited. Specifically, the provisions apply to images of individuals and private real property only. Drone photography is permitted when the subject is public property, but when the subject is an individual or private property, the possession, disclosure, display, or distribution of the image is prohibited. In effect, the statute “identifies various categories” of images based on their content, “then subjects each category to different restrictions.” An official must first ascertain the subject matter of the drone image to determine whether it is permissible under the statute. Therefore, it is the content of the image that determines its permissibility—the definition of a content-based restriction.
The No-Fly Provisions are also subject to strict scrutiny by conditioning the legality of images based on their purpose. “Whether laws define regulated speech by particular subject matter or by its function or purpose, they are subject to strict scrutiny.” Under the No-Fly Provisions, expression that would otherwise be prohibited is permissible if “used for a commercial purpose.” Indeed, Calzada and Wade both note that, as journalists, they cannot take drone images of Nelson Wolff Stadium and Globe Life Park, respectively. But Wade was hired by the Rangers to take the very same images of Globe Life Park “for their own public relations purposes”—that he was “not permitted to share … with members of the news media.” Here too, then, the purpose determines the legality of the speech. For both the Surveillance and No-Fly Provisions, the subject or purpose of the drone-captured image is the key to its applicability. Thus, both constitute content-based restrictions and trigger strict scrutiny under the First Amendment.
The Surveillance Provisions are separately subject to strict scrutiny as they discriminate based on the identity of the speaker. A regulation may also constitute a content-based restriction if it discriminates between speakers in a way that “disfavors” certain speakers in exercising their First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court has admonished that “[s]peech restrictions based on the identity of the speaker are all too often simply a means to control content.” Section 423.003 provides an extensive list of individuals whose use of drones is not proscribed. Professors, students, employees of insurance companies, and real estate brokers all appear on this list; journalists do not. As Plaintiffs note, the same drone image taken legally by a professor would constitute a misdemeanor if captured by a journalist….
And the court concluded that the law failed strict scrutiny:
Here, Defendants cannot carry their burden to establish that Chapter 423 is “actually necessary” to protect any identified interests. In enacting the law, state legislators claimed the law would protect private property, individual privacy, and the safety of critical infrastructure facilities.
However, Defendants have failed to establish that alternative means are insufficient to sufficiently protect these interests. Plaintiffs note that “Defendants have a variety of tools to protect the privacy and private property of Texans from overly intrusive or dangerous drone use without Chapter 423.” The Texas criminal trespass statute, recording and voyeurism statutes, and tort claims including intrusion upon seclusion all have been or could be used to protect the privacy of individuals from UAV recordings. As to safety of critical facilities, it is already a felony under Texas law to knowingly damage, impair, or interrupt a critical infrastructure facilities. Having failed to identify any interest that is unprotected absent Chapter 423, Defendants cannot establish that this provision is “actually necessary.” Indeed, “[m]ere speculation of harm does not constitute a compelling state interest.” …
The Surveillance and No-Fly Provisions are [also] overinclusive and thus overbroad because they “unnecessarily circumscribe[s] protected expression.” Plaintiffs have established that Chapter 423 effectively outlaws the use of UAVs for newsgathering on private property—constituting 95 percent of the state. As Plaintiffs note, the Surveillance Provisions “prevent[] journalists from using drones to record many scenes that could be recorded from a helicopter, or that anyone standing on public property could easily see and record.” Wade explains that “even if I am physically over public property, I am violating the law by documenting private real property or a person on that property.” Similarly, the No- Fly Provisions proscribe use of drones even when they “indisputably do[] not pose the risks that the State claims.” In particular, restrictions on recording empty stadiums seem to belie explanation, and Defendants have done nothing to alter this impression….
The Surveillance and No-Fly Provisions are also underinclusive based on their carve-outs for uses of UAVs that pose the same risks as would drone journalism. If the interests in privacy and safety were indeed sufficient to uphold the law, the exceptions included in Chapter 423 would “leav[e] appreciable damage to [the government’s] interest unprohibited.” The Surveillance Provisions exclude 21 uses of drones, none of which obviate the purported privacy concerns of newsgathering. As such, the exceptions “raise[] serious doubts about whether the government is in fact pursuing the interest it invokes, rather than disfavoring a particular speaker or viewpoint.” As to the No-Fly Provisions, the exemption of drone photography for “commercial purposes” appears divorced from any asserted interest in safety or privacy….
The Court also held that the terms “surveillance” and “commercial purposes” were unconstitutionally vague:
Chapter 423 does not provide a definition of “surveillance,” nor do Defendants put forth a single definition. (“Surveillance can involve ‘close observation or listening of a person or place in the hope of gathering evidence.’ Or it might be as broad as the ‘act of observing or the condition of being observed.’ Either might include journalism.”).
Defendants further provide that surveillance may mean “the careful watching of a person or place, especially by the police or army, because of a crime that has happened or is expected”; “a watch kept over a person, group, etc., especially over a suspect, prisoner, or the like[;] … continuous observation of a place, person, group, or ongoing activity in order to gather information”; or “the process of carefully watching a person or place that may be involved in a criminal activity.” None of these definitions conclusively includes or excludes journalism, and none is found within the statute.
Defendants themselves double down on their refusal to define the term and its applicability to journalism, stating that “‘journalism’ … may or may not constitute ‘surveillance,’ … depend[ing] on factual determinations by a jury.” Defendants claim that “surveillance” is distinct from “observation,” because it “involves prolonged time periods and/or some degree of surreptitiousness or invasion of one’s expectation that they are not being watched. But this contention only highlights the vagueness in the word’s meaning, for it in no way clarifies whether journalism is covered….
The statute [also] does not define the term “commercial,” and dictionary definitions do not provide conclusive guidance as to whether photojournalism is included in the definition. [Details omitted. -EV]
Avocado Prices Rocket To Decade High As Mexican Production Set To Plunge
Even before the war in Ukraine, a majority of American households were under pressure from record-high food inflation and consumer prices at a four-decade high. The conflict and following sanction inflation have made everything worse. One food unrelated to Ukraine and found mainly in Mexico is avocados. Prices of the fruit are now at a decade high as supplies tighten (in terms of USD).
Ahead of Super Bowl 56, on Feb. 13, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) suspended U.S. imports of Mexican avocados due to one of its inspectors being threatened by drug cartel members. At the time, we pointed out avocados prices had never been higher for the big football game.
Even though U.S. imports of avocados have been restored, prices have continued to rocket higher since Super Bowl 56. For a 20-pound box of avocados from the state of Michoacan, Mexico (the central hub of Mexican avocado production), prices soared 40% to around $38, a new decade high.
Two decades of data show prices for avocados have never been higher for this time of year.
The cause of the price surge is not as much related to trade disruption but instead tightening supplies.
“Lower availability and supply-side inflationary pressures are the main suspects,” David Magana, an analyst at Rabobank International, wrote in a note.
Keep in mind that 80% of all U.S. avocados originate from Mexico, and the rest are from the U.S.
USDA expects Mexican avocado output to plunge 8% in the 2021-22 crop year from a record high harvest in the prior growing season.
Bloomberg notes, “American importers of the fruit are still catching up from a temporary ban on shipments from Michoacan last month stemming from threats against U.S. inspectors.”
Mission Produce Inc, the largest U.S. avocado wholesaler, has marked up prices by more than 50%.
“Partially offsetting price gains was an 18% decrease in avocado volume sold, which was primarily driven by lower supply, but exacerbated by price sensitivity in select international markets that competed for lower-cost sources of fruit,” CEO Steve Barnard told Bloomberg in a statement.
Factor in soaring costs of fertilizer, diesel, and freight, avocado prices are likely to remain elevated and or keep rising until millennials can no longer afford the yummy fruit, otherwise known as demand destruction.
In yesterday’s National Press Photographers Ass’n v. McCraw(W.D. Tex.), Judge Robert Pitman held that Texas statutes limiting drone photography were unconstitutional. A brief summary of the statutes:
Section 423.003 imposes criminal and civil penalties by declaring it unlawful to use “an unmanned aircraft to capture an image of an individual or privately owned real property … with the intent to conduct surveillance on the individual or property captured in the image.” Section 423.002 exempts certain uses of UAVs from liability under the Surveillance Provisions but does not exempt newsgathering. Exemptions include “professional or scholarly research and development or … on behalf of an institution of higher education.” …
Texas Government Code Sections 423.0045 and 423.0046 (together “No-Fly Provisions”) impose criminal penalties by making it unlawful to fly UAVs over a “Correctional Facility, Detention Facility, or Critical Infrastructure Facility” or “Sports Venue” at less than 400 feet. Critical infrastructure facilities are defined to include oil and gas pipelines, petroleum and alumina refineries, water treatment facilities, and natural gas fractionation and chemical manufacturing plants. In 2017, critical infrastructure was expanded though legislative amendments to include animal feeding operations, oil and gas drilling sites, and chemical production facilities, among others. The 2017 amendments also defined a “sports venue” to include any arena, stadium, automobile racetrack, coliseum, or any other facility that has seating capacity of more than 30,000 people and is “primarily used” for one or more professional or amateur sport or athletics events. Plaintiffs contend that when combined with Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”) regulations, which require UAVs to fly below 400 feet, the No-Fly Provisions effectively ban UAVs at the listed locations. The No-Fly Provisions exempt certain UAV users, including those with a “commercial purpose.”
The court concluded that drone photography was covered by the First Amendment:
In the analogous context of filmmaking, the Fifth Circuit has noted that “the First Amendment protects the act of making film, as ‘there is no fixed First Amendment line between the act of creating speech and the speech itself.'” Furthermore, courts have never recognized a “distinction between the process of creating a form of pure speech (such as writing or painting) and the product of these processes (the essay or the artwork) in terms of the First Amendment protection afforded.
Here, Plaintiffs have established that Chapter 423 restricts their use of drones to record the news, necessarily constraining their ability to disseminate the news. It is uncontested that budgetary and other constraints may make drones the only option for recording certain events. Defendants assert that other options—namely expensive helicopters—can fill the same role in facilitating news production. Yet they cannot dispute the extreme price and safety differences between these technologies. Furthermore, Pappalardo and the organizational plaintiffs’ members have stated that drones are central to their journalistic pursuits, claims which Defendants do not refute.
The court concluded that the restrictions were content-based and thus subject to strict scrutiny:
The Surveillance and No-Fly Provisions are both content-based restrictions that regulate based on the subject of the expression. The Surveillance Provisions require the enforcing official to inquire into the contents of the image to determine whether it is prohibited. Specifically, the provisions apply to images of individuals and private real property only. Drone photography is permitted when the subject is public property, but when the subject is an individual or private property, the possession, disclosure, display, or distribution of the image is prohibited. In effect, the statute “identifies various categories” of images based on their content, “then subjects each category to different restrictions.” An official must first ascertain the subject matter of the drone image to determine whether it is permissible under the statute. Therefore, it is the content of the image that determines its permissibility—the definition of a content-based restriction.
The No-Fly Provisions are also subject to strict scrutiny by conditioning the legality of images based on their purpose. “Whether laws define regulated speech by particular subject matter or by its function or purpose, they are subject to strict scrutiny.” Under the No-Fly Provisions, expression that would otherwise be prohibited is permissible if “used for a commercial purpose.” Indeed, Calzada and Wade both note that, as journalists, they cannot take drone images of Nelson Wolff Stadium and Globe Life Park, respectively. But Wade was hired by the Rangers to take the very same images of Globe Life Park “for their own public relations purposes”—that he was “not permitted to share … with members of the news media.” Here too, then, the purpose determines the legality of the speech. For both the Surveillance and No-Fly Provisions, the subject or purpose of the drone-captured image is the key to its applicability. Thus, both constitute content-based restrictions and trigger strict scrutiny under the First Amendment.
The Surveillance Provisions are separately subject to strict scrutiny as they discriminate based on the identity of the speaker. A regulation may also constitute a content-based restriction if it discriminates between speakers in a way that “disfavors” certain speakers in exercising their First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court has admonished that “[s]peech restrictions based on the identity of the speaker are all too often simply a means to control content.” Section 423.003 provides an extensive list of individuals whose use of drones is not proscribed. Professors, students, employees of insurance companies, and real estate brokers all appear on this list; journalists do not. As Plaintiffs note, the same drone image taken legally by a professor would constitute a misdemeanor if captured by a journalist….
And the court concluded that the law failed strict scrutiny:
Here, Defendants cannot carry their burden to establish that Chapter 423 is “actually necessary” to protect any identified interests. In enacting the law, state legislators claimed the law would protect private property, individual privacy, and the safety of critical infrastructure facilities.
However, Defendants have failed to establish that alternative means are insufficient to sufficiently protect these interests. Plaintiffs note that “Defendants have a variety of tools to protect the privacy and private property of Texans from overly intrusive or dangerous drone use without Chapter 423.” The Texas criminal trespass statute, recording and voyeurism statutes, and tort claims including intrusion upon seclusion all have been or could be used to protect the privacy of individuals from UAV recordings. As to safety of critical facilities, it is already a felony under Texas law to knowingly damage, impair, or interrupt a critical infrastructure facilities. Having failed to identify any interest that is unprotected absent Chapter 423, Defendants cannot establish that this provision is “actually necessary.” Indeed, “[m]ere speculation of harm does not constitute a compelling state interest.” …
The Surveillance and No-Fly Provisions are [also] overinclusive and thus overbroad because they “unnecessarily circumscribe[s] protected expression.” Plaintiffs have established that Chapter 423 effectively outlaws the use of UAVs for newsgathering on private property—constituting 95 percent of the state. As Plaintiffs note, the Surveillance Provisions “prevent[] journalists from using drones to record many scenes that could be recorded from a helicopter, or that anyone standing on public property could easily see and record.” Wade explains that “even if I am physically over public property, I am violating the law by documenting private real property or a person on that property.” Similarly, the No- Fly Provisions proscribe use of drones even when they “indisputably do[] not pose the risks that the State claims.” In particular, restrictions on recording empty stadiums seem to belie explanation, and Defendants have done nothing to alter this impression….
The Surveillance and No-Fly Provisions are also underinclusive based on their carve-outs for uses of UAVs that pose the same risks as would drone journalism. If the interests in privacy and safety were indeed sufficient to uphold the law, the exceptions included in Chapter 423 would “leav[e] appreciable damage to [the government’s] interest unprohibited.” The Surveillance Provisions exclude 21 uses of drones, none of which obviate the purported privacy concerns of newsgathering. As such, the exceptions “raise[] serious doubts about whether the government is in fact pursuing the interest it invokes, rather than disfavoring a particular speaker or viewpoint.” As to the No-Fly Provisions, the exemption of drone photography for “commercial purposes” appears divorced from any asserted interest in safety or privacy….
The Court also held that the terms “surveillance” and “commercial purposes” were unconstitutionally vague:
Chapter 423 does not provide a definition of “surveillance,” nor do Defendants put forth a single definition. (“Surveillance can involve ‘close observation or listening of a person or place in the hope of gathering evidence.’ Or it might be as broad as the ‘act of observing or the condition of being observed.’ Either might include journalism.”).
Defendants further provide that surveillance may mean “the careful watching of a person or place, especially by the police or army, because of a crime that has happened or is expected”; “a watch kept over a person, group, etc., especially over a suspect, prisoner, or the like[;] … continuous observation of a place, person, group, or ongoing activity in order to gather information”; or “the process of carefully watching a person or place that may be involved in a criminal activity.” None of these definitions conclusively includes or excludes journalism, and none is found within the statute.
Defendants themselves double down on their refusal to define the term and its applicability to journalism, stating that “‘journalism’ … may or may not constitute ‘surveillance,’ … depend[ing] on factual determinations by a jury.” Defendants claim that “surveillance” is distinct from “observation,” because it “involves prolonged time periods and/or some degree of surreptitiousness or invasion of one’s expectation that they are not being watched. But this contention only highlights the vagueness in the word’s meaning, for it in no way clarifies whether journalism is covered….
The statute [also] does not define the term “commercial,” and dictionary definitions do not provide conclusive guidance as to whether photojournalism is included in the definition. [Details omitted. -EV]
This past weekend, celebrated journalist and author Chris Hedges woke up to find six years of episodes of his Russia Today show On Contact vanished from the show’s account on YouTube. Though almost none of the shows referenced Russia or Vladimir Putin directly, and the few that did tended to be unflattering, his association with Russian state media was enough to erase hundreds of interviews about topics ranging from Julian Assange’s imprisonment to censorship to police brutality to American war crimes in the Middle East.
Now on Substack, Hedges has a long and uncomfortably colorful history of being muffled. The former New York Times correspondent covered wars from the Balkans to the Middle East to the Falkland Islands, and authored books like War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, American Fascists, and The Death of the Liberal Class, and through 2002, when he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team for Exploratory Reporting, he defined mainstream respectability and excellence in journalism. He might have had it easy, spending the latter part of his career on the Thomas Friedman/David Brooks Memorial Gravy Train of overpaid lectures, University trusteeships, and fellowships at obscure think-tanks, if he’d just kept his mouth shut.
He didn’t. One of the few frontline American reporters who spoke Arabic, Hedges knew instantly the Iraq war would be a disaster and said so at every opportunity. He was booed offstage at a commencement address at Rockford College in 2003 by a crowd chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!,” and hustled off campus so fast that the school wouldn’t let him grab his jacket on the way out. For those who haven’t seen it, the video of that scene is a remarkable museum piece of Bush-era war mania:
Episodes like this accelerated his departure from the New York Times and into the wilds of independent media, where paying options for dissident voices had been shrinking. As he points out below, someone like him in the past would have parachuted out of a big commercial enterprise like the Times into a life at NPR — broadcasting shows “at like one in the morning, or something,” he chuckles — but NPR, too, had by then been begun its purging of unorthodox and especially antiwar voices.
By the 2010s, one of the last places where media figures pushed off the traditional career track could pick up a paycheck was Russia Today. In an arrangement Hedges plainly describes as a cynical marriage of convenience, the Russian state was happy to give voice to figures covering structural problems in American society, and those quasi-banned voices were glad for the opportunity to broadcast what they felt is the truth, even understanding the editorial motivation. Hedges ended up working at RT for six years hosting On Contact, where he interviewed authors and thinkers resting outside the cultural mainstream, from Nathaniel Philbrick to Cornel West to Nils Melzer to Noam Chomsky to many others (disclosure: I’ve also been a guest).
As Hedges points out in the wide-ranging, unnerving interview below, the speech-control one-two he’s just experienced — first herded out of the mainstream for ideological offenses into a shrinking space of “allowable” dissent, then forced to watch as that space is demonized out of existence — is part of an effective pattern. “It’s how this works,” he sighs. He points to the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 6th, 2017, ostensibly intended to make a case for Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which actually spent much of its time complaining about RT, especially itscoverage of real but unflattering domestic issues.
“They showed their hand,” he says, referring to the intelligence community’s complaints over reporting on everything from the pursuit of Assange to Occupy Wall Street to corporate overreach. From the Assessment:
RT’s reports often characterize the United States as a “surveillance state” and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and drone use…
Hedges denounced Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a “criminal act of aggression” after it began, and believes that if RT had been allowed to stay on YouTube, he — along with similarly critical former RT contributors like Jesse Ventura — wouldn’t have been permitted by the Kremlin to stay on air. On the other hand, seeing an American company vaporize six years of interviews having nothing to do with Russia shows space for voices like his continues to shrink in the West. In this sense he represents a kind of person we’ll be seeing more of in the future, caught between a censorship rock and a hard place, an outcast in domestic and foreign media systems.
You can find Chris’s work on Substack now at the Chris Hedges Report, and some of the On Contact shows that were re-posted by independent accounts remain up. The launch of the new site has gone very well, but he warns that no place in media is safe now. “They’ll shut down Substack, I absolutely know. Either that, or they’ll create a way that sites like yours and mine won’t be on it,” he says.
More from Chris on censorship, RT, Ukraine, and other issues:
MT: What happened with YouTube?
Chris Hedges: My entire archive of shows from On Contact was taken down. I was in London last week for Julian Assange — I was supposed to be a guest at the wedding, but then, the prison didn’t let me in of course. When I came back, I got a text from a friend of mine, with whom I’d done a half hour show, about a girlfriend who’d overdosed on fentanyl. And because I knew him, my interview with him is quite a powerful segment. And he said, the show doesn’t exist anymore. Then I checked, and nothing exists.
The RT On Contact website is still up, but everything on YouTube is gone, and people watched it on YouTube. Some of that stuff had hundreds of thousands of views.
MT: This two-step process feels like a backdoor way of getting rid of unorthodox voices. In other words, weren’t you on RT in the first place because you’d been bounced out for opposing the war in Iraq? Now, because of your association with RT, you’re off YouTube. Is this a way to get at, not just people connected with Russians, but people with unpopular views generally?
Chris Hedges: Yeah. That’s how it works. They push you to the margins and then, they demonize those spaces on the margins. This has long been the habit of the dominant ruling elites. So for instance, Robert Scheer, whose website I write for, Scheerpost — and of course, we were all fired from Truthdig, this is just a never ending saga — but he ran Ramparts. I think it was Spiro Agnew said, “It’s a magazine with a bomb in every issue.” We could never get advertisers.
So they push you into a space that they then demonize, and then use it as an excuse to shut you down. But they’ve already in essence created the space in which you exist.
I have a couple strikes against me. One, I was pushed out of the New York Times, because I spent so many years in the Middle East, and many years in Gaza. And of course, I was the Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times. I’m very outspoken about Israel, and I’m a very strong supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Which alone is enough — I just saw my friend, Cornel West, denied tenure at Harvard over this. And I’m also a fierce critic, as you are, of the Democratic party. Those are all flags that will get you locked out of even the quote- unquote “liberal media” like MSNBC.
MT: This freeze-out led to your tenure at RT?
Chris Hedges: I’d been marginalized for a long time because of those issues. RT gave me space, and I took it. But it wasn’t a show about Russia. We never did a show on Russia. The irony is that, in fact, the very few times Putin was mentioned, he was not described in flattering terms — it was as an autocrat. There was one show where Syria came up, and Russian war crimes. So there was nothing on the show, ever, that was in any way flattering to the Putin regime.
But the point of the show was, of course, critiquing and looking at our own society, and that was the problem.
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Shanghai Lockdowns Force Bankers And Traders To Sleep In The Office
As it turns out, China’s factory laborers aren’t the only ones who are being forced to quarantine at work (with many sleeping on factory floors with only a piece of cardboard as a mattress) during the latest round of “targeted” CCP lockdowns.
Bankers, traders and other white-collar workers on China’s Wall Street are also finding they have no choice but to ride out the lockdown at the office, as management demands that workers bed down for a long stretch without going home.
According to Reuters, “more than 20,000 bankers, traders and other workers are bedding down in office towers in Shanghai’s Lujiazui district as they bid to keep China’s giant financial hub ticking” during the first round of the city’s two-part staggered lockdown.
As the section of Shanghai east of the Huangpu River closes for a total of five days, finance workers are scrambling to make sure they can continue to work throughout the nine-day shutdown (which could be extended if case numbers fail to decrease). Teams have reportedly adopted 12-hour split-shift rotations in a financial hub that handled more than 2,500 trillion yuan ($292 trillion) of financial transactions last year.
A handful of local firms have confirmed the strategy, according to Reuters:
Amundi BOC Wealth Management said its senior executives, as well as key investment, trading and risk-management staff are all working and sleeping in their offices. And they’re far from the only ones.
Haitong Securities said Chairman Zhou Jie arranged emergency on-site duty shifts at its subsidiaries in Pudong on Sunday night before leading more than 150 key staff to work in offices starting Monday. The brokerage has also resorted to two-team rotation shifts between its two office areas, it announced.
HFT Investment Management, BNP Paribas’ Chinese fund joint venture, has placed 52 workers in offices to work around the clock during the lockdown period.
Sinolink Securities issued a notice on Sunday night calling on staff to rush back to its headquarters in Pudong before midnight, so as to “ensure continuity of system operation and trading”.
The number of new confirmed community transmitted cases in the major financial hub of Shanghai reached 4,477 on Tuesday. Although this number was a record high, only 2.1% of cases showed symptoms.
Restive Shanghai residents have at times pushed back aggressively against the government’s heavy handed measures, even before the broad-based lockdowns were announced (previously, the local authorities had implemented “targeted” lockdowns on housing complexes and other areas where outbreaks had been discovered). Some residents lashed out as they were unable to receive vital services like kidney dialysis or other urgent treatment. In one high-profile case highlighted by the NYT, a nurse who suffered an asthma attack died after she was denied care by a hospital, which cited COVID prevention protocols in its decision to turn her away.
As frustration builds, the CCP is once again resorting to baseless conspiracy theories – including telling its citizens that the US is to blame for the rise of COVID – to try and deflect public anger away from the government.
Chinese media is telling their citizens America made COVID-19, again—this time using #Moderna as the scapegoat. #China’s COVID-19 cases are rising, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is blaming the United States for it.
