In May, Reasonwrote about Steven Hedrick, a resident of Holiday Island, Arkansas, who rents out roll-away dumpsters. Renters get a dumpster delivered, which they fill, and Hedrick hauls it away. Business was good—until April 2022, when the Holiday Island City Council passed Ordinance 2022-004, mandating that residents and businesses use Carroll County Solid Waste (CCSW) for all trash pickup and disposal services.
Last week, Hedrick filed a lawsuit against the city in the Carroll County Circuit Court on behalf of himself and his business, X-Dumpsters, claiming that the provision violates the state constitution.
The lawsuit says that Hedrick offers “different and supplementary” services and does not compete with CCSW’s weekly trash pickup service. Hedrick initially believed that as a county-licensed solid waste hauler who doesn’t provide weekly trash pickup, the ordinance did not apply to his business. But the city said otherwise, and he received multiple notices threatening him with citations if he provided any further services within Holiday Island. Letters from the mayor and the city’s code enforcement officer “asserted that the presence of his dumpsters on property not his own was sufficient to violate the Ordinance.”
Since receiving the letters, Hedrick has ceased operating in Holiday Island, renting only to county residents outside the city. In May, Hedrick told Reason that he was turning down “two or three jobs a week” due to the ordinance. Worse still, he felt a “moral obligation” to refer them to his competitor even though CCSW “is not prompt with their deliveries.”
In a video produced by the Goldwater Institute, the free market public policy and litigation organization that is representing him, Hedrick said this was “the most frustrating part,” that “I’ve got to send my business to my competitor that’s actually got their boot on my neck.”
In his lawsuit, Hedrick contends that the ordinance constitutes a monopoly, which “violates the anti-monopoly clause and the due process clause of the Arkansas Constitution.” Article II, Section 19 of the Arkansas Constitution states that monopolies “are contrary to the genius of a republic, and shall not be allowed.” Goldwater Institute staff attorney Adam Shelton told Reason in May that while the state can require people to use a particular trash pickup service, “what the government can’t do is say that that person has the exclusive right to collect all solid waste, and no other individual or no other business entity can collect solid waste in the city.”
After the ordinance passed, Mayor Dan Kees wrote in a blog post that it was necessary “to mitigate the growing problem of illegal dumping in Holiday Island” since “the City does not have the resources to supervise the operations of several other haulers.” But Hedrick’s lawsuit says that he is licensed by the county and “is in good standing.” It further contends that Holiday Island has not provided “any rational connection to the public health, safety, welfare, or general prosperity” to justify the monopoly.
An email to Kees requesting comment received an out-of-office reply that referred senders to another city official, who had not responded by press time.
Hedrick is seeking a declaratory judgment finding the ordinance unconstitutional and an injunction against its enforcement. Past that, he only seeks nominal damages, attorney’s fees, and the freedom to continue his work. According to the lawsuit, he “simply wants to provide Holiday Island residents reliable and affordable ad-hoc solid waste removal service.”
“If it’s not something that is causing damage or harm to others,” Hedrick says, “you shouldn’t have to ask permission to put food on your table.”
Kayden Kross, an adult film entrepreneur and a former business partner of mine, sent me a text message a few months ago. She was excited—she was seeing a community of straight dudes gather on Deeper, the power exchange and BDSM-themed website she owns, to discuss their sexual preferences, turn-ons, and other various tastes. And she was seeing this across other platforms too. This felt rare to her, and groundbreaking to me.
When I asked Lucie Fielding, a mental health counselor in Washington state, how many spaces she was aware of for straight men to have these conversations, she said “Oh, not many—unless we’re talking incels—there’s got to be stuff on Reddit, but apart from that, these are such important forums. Because there’s such a societal pressure for men not to be talking with one another about these things.” But on platforms like Deeper, PornHub, and other online providers of adult videos, the comments section is just that sort of conversation.
Kross described the communities as having creeds of acceptance, giving examples such as “The ‘don’t yuck my yum’ thing. It’s agreed upon that so long as you are not saying something that is a political minefield, it is not OK to dog on someone else’s expression of what they’re there for. And when people do, even if it’s something where you can’t imagine anyone would be into that, you’ll see people rush to that person’s defense. There’s very much this understanding that in order for this to work, everyone has to agree not to add shame to the pile.”
And it isn’t just sexuality being shared. Someone might say, according to Kross, “‘My dog died today.’ And then someone else will chime in with, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ And then the person will say, ‘I had no one,’ and ‘I’m alone.’ And then someone else would be like, ‘Well, I would have given you a hug if I was there.’ We all know, there’s this kind of idea of traditional masculinity, and the expectations are that men don’t really talk about their feelings. And the fact is, in the comment section, when you’re anonymous, you’re not subject any longer to expectations, right? That’s why we have trolls. But it’s also why you end up with these kinds of conversations that, you know—otherwise, who would you have them with?”
Why does freedom of speech and freedom from shame matter in this context? According to Fielding, “Shame tells us that we are bad. That our desires are bad, that our pleasure isn’t valid. And the relationship between shame and isolation is that when we feel that we are bad or that there’s something to be ashamed of, we withdraw because we don’t want to share that.… That leads to social withdrawal.… It means that folks are trying things in very risky ways, because they don’t have the community around them.” One example is choking—without proper safety and risk-informed consent, this risky activity can turn deadly with alarming ease.
Ali Joone, my former boss at Digital Playground and the originator of thevirtual sex video game genre in 1999, recalled consumers using the CD-ROM version of Virtual Sex with Jenna to share the ways they’d used the technology to live out fantasies of directing Jenna Jameson in a point-of-view porn film. Joone was pleased by this usage, “To me, it’s all about how do you make connections? How do you make people create connections even through [something] like commentary? We’re wired to connect, to communicate with each other and people.” Sexuality is a big part of human life, yet conversations about it are often silenced.
No matter what regulations are passed, sexuality will continue to be expressed, and pornography will continue to exist. But the more these communities are stamped out, the harder people will have to work to find each other and the wealth of information about how to explore their fantasies more safely and with higher risk awareness. The federal and state governments, as typical of the past few decades, continue to pass laws that hurt freedoms while failing to achieve their stated aim of protecting children.
Porn can fester, driven offshore and underground, contextless and removed from both communities and educational resources, fostering shame and isolation. Or it can thrive—along with consumers of such media—in relative sunlight, embedded in a web of discourse, information, and empathy.
Starting September 5, many nurses moving to Pennsylvania will be able to bypass the state’s time-intensive licensing process, a change with enormous benefits not just for those nurses but for patients.
Created by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, the Nurse Licensure Compact (NLC) is a standardized system through which a nurse licensed in any active member state is cleared to work in any of the other member states. Pennsylvania is turning to it as the state faces a severe nursing shortage—by some measures the worst in the nation.
More than 20,000 registered nurse positions are unfilled in the state, a vacancy rate of over 30 percent. A recent report from the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania suggested that, absent a change in policy, the number of registered nurse vacancies in the state would exceed 26,000 by 2026.
“Our hospitals and health care systems need nurses now,” said state Sen. Lisa Boscola (D–18th District) in an August 22 press release. “Allowing nurses who have a compact license from another state to start work without unnecessary bureaucratic hoops to jump through is a great first step.”
Under Pennsylvania’s old licensure system, a prospective out-of-state nurse would often wait several months, and sometimes closer to a year, before being allowed to work. The NLC helps streamline the process, allowing Pennsylvania’s health care facilities to draw on a wider pool of qualified applicants.
Gov. Josh Shapiro’s move, announced last week, stops short of full participation in the NLC: Nurses from other member states will be cleared to work in Pennsylvania, but Pennsylvania nurses will not yet be cleared to work in other member states. A spokesman for the Democratic governor’s administration explains that the State Board of Nurses currently lacks access to the FBI database needed to run background checks, a prerequisite for the multistate licenses.
In theory, Pennsylvania joined the NLC back in 2021, after its nursing shortfall was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. But it is only now becoming an active member. It is unclear why it took the state two years to proceed with this partial implementation, nor how long it will take to clear the hurdles to fully join the NLC.
The Nurse Licensure Compact includes 40 other states, Guam, and the Virgin Islands. The remaining holdouts include California and New York, both of whom are among the five states where nursing shortages are expected to be most severe by 2030. If they want to ensure that both patients and nurses are treated well, they should follow Pennsylvania in climbing aboard.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Waylon Bailey, a resident of Rapides Parish, Louisiana, made a joke on Facebook that alluded to the 2013 Brad Pitt zombie movie World War Z. “RAPIDES PARISH SHERIFFS OFFICE HAVE ISSUED THE ORDER,” he wrote, that “IF DEPUTIES COME INTO CONTACT WITH ‘THE INFECTED,'” they should “SHOOT ON SIGHT.” He added: “Lord have mercy on us all. #Covid9teen #weneedyoubradpitt.”
That post went up on March 20, 2020. The Rapides Parish Sheriff’s Office (RPSO) was not amused. Detective Randell Iles was immediately assigned to investigate the matter. That same day, about a dozen deputies wearing bulletproof vests descended upon Bailey’s home with their guns drawn. They ordered him to “put your hands on your fucking head” and get on his knees, handcuffed him, and arrested him for violating a state law against “terrorizing,” a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. While Bailey was being handcuffed, one of the deputies elicited laughter from his colleagues by advising the perpetrator that his next Facebook post “should be not to fuck with the police.” The RPSO announced the arrest on Facebook, and local news outlets reported that Bailey had been charged with terrorism.
For very good legal reasons, the Rapides Parish District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute Bailey. But when Bailey sued Iles and Sheriff Mark Wood for violating his constitutional rights and making a false arrest, U.S. District Judge David C. Joseph dismissed his claims with prejudice, concluding that his joke was not covered by the First Amendment, that the arrest was based on probable cause, and that Iles was protected by qualified immunity. On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that Joseph was wrong on all three counts.
“I’m relieved that the court recognized that the deputies were wrong to arrest me for making a joke on Facebook,” Bailey said in a press release issued by the Institute for Justice, which represented him when he appealed Joseph’s decision. “I’m glad that I will be able to hold the detective and sheriff accountable, and hopefully my case will stand as a strong statement to officers about what the First Amendment protects.”
Joseph thought Bailey’s joke was not constitutionally protected because it posed a “clear and present danger.” The judge said “Bailey’s post publishing misinformation during the very early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and [a] time of national crisis” was “remarkably similar in nature to falsely shouting fire in a crowded theatre.” That was a reference to the much-abused analogy that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes drew in the 1919 case Schenck v. United States, in which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Espionage Act convictions of two anti-draft activists.
Writing for a unanimous 5th Circuit panel, Judge Dana M. Douglas says Joseph “applied the wrong legal standard,” overlooking the well-known fact that the Supreme Court modified the “clear and present danger” test in the 1969 case Brandenburg v. Ohio. Under Brandenburg, even advocacy of criminal conduct is constitutionally protected unless it is “directed” at inciting “imminent lawless action” and “likely” to do so. Bailey’s joke plainly did not satisfy either of those prongs.
“At most, Bailey ‘advocated’ that people share his post by writing ‘SHARE SHARE SHARE,'” Douglas writes. “But his post did not advocate ‘lawless’ and ‘imminent’ action, nor was it ‘likely’ to produce such action. The post did not direct any person or group to take any unlawful action immediately or in the near future, nobody took any such actions because of the post, and no such actions were likely to result because the post was clearly intended to be a joke. Nor did Bailey have the requisite intent to incite; at worst, his post was a joke in poor taste, but it cannot be read as intentionally directed to incitement.”
Another possibly relevant exception to the First Amendment is the one for “true threats,” defined as “statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.” In a deposition, Iles claimed to view Bailey’s post as threatening because it was “meant to get police officers hurt.” The joke was especially dangerous, he said, because there were “a lot of protests at the time in reference to law enforcement.”
As Douglas notes, that claim was patently implausible “because Bailey was arrested in March 2020, while widespread protests concerning law enforcement did not begin until after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020.” In any case, Bailey’s joke clearly did not amount to a true threat.
“On its face, Bailey’s post is not a threat,” Douglas writes. “But to the extent it could possibly be considered a ‘threat’ directed to either the public—that RPSO deputies would shoot them if they were ‘infected’—or to RPSO deputies—that the ‘infected’ would shoot back—it was not a ‘true threat’ based on context because it lacked believability and was not serious, as evidenced clearly by calls for rescue by Brad Pitt. For the same reason, Bailey did not have the requisite intent to make a ‘true threat.'”
Furthermore, the 5th Circuit held, Iles should have known that Bailey’s post was protected speech. “Based on decades of Supreme Court precedent,” Douglas says, “it was clearly established that Bailey’s Facebook post did not fit within one of the narrow categories of unprotected speech, like incitement or true threats.” Iles therefore could not find refuge in qualified immunity, which shields police officers from civil liability only when their alleged misconduct does not violate “clearly established” law.
Joseph interpreted Bailey’s First Amendment claim as a complaint that Iles had retaliated against him for his constitutionally protected speech. Such a claim requires plaintiffs to show that “they were engaged in constitutionally protected activity,” that “the defendants’ actions caused them to suffer an injury that would chill a person of ordinary firmness from continuing to engage in that activity,” and that “the defendants’ adverse actions were substantially motivated against the plaintiffs’ exercise of constitutionally protected conduct.”
According to the 5th Circuit, Joseph erroneously concluded that Bailey did not meet the first element of that test. Even if Bailey’s post was constitutionally protected, Joseph said, he had not adequately alleged a “retaliatory motive.” But as Douglas notes, “Iles admitted that he arrested Bailey at least in part because of the content of his Facebook post, rather than for some other conduct.” And it was clear that Bailey’s speech was chilled, since he agreed to delete the post after Iles told him the RPSO otherwise “would contact Facebook to remove it.”
What about Iles’ claim that he had probable cause to arrest Bailey? Louisiana defines “terrorizing” as “the intentional communication of information that the commission of a crime of violence is imminent or in progress or that a circumstance dangerous to human life exists or is about to exist, with the intent of causing members of the general public to be in sustained fear for their safety; or causing evacuation of a building, a public structure, or a facility of transportation; or causing other serious disruption to the general public.”
State courts have made it clear that the crime requires both “false information intentionally communicated” and “an immediacy element concerning the false information or threat that causes sustained fear or serious public disruption.” It also requires “specific intent” to “cause members of the general public to be in sustained fear for their safety, or to cause evacuation of a public building, a public structure, or a facility of transportation, or to cause other serious disruption to the general public.”
When he decided to arrest Bailey, Douglas notes, Iles had read the Facebook post along with the comments below it, which confirmed that it was meant in jest. According to Iles, Bailey, when confronted by the sheriff’s deputies, apologized, saying he had “no ill will towards the Sheriff’s Office” and “only meant it as a joke.” Iles also knew that “nobody reported the post to law enforcement.” The only basis for the arrest was the content of the post, combined with the fact that the detective’s supervisors had asked him to investigate it and “the general social conditions” at the beginning of the pandemic.
“These facts and circumstances are not sufficient for a reasonable person to believe that Bailey had violated the Louisiana terrorizing statute,” Douglas writes. “The statute’s requirement that the communication have ‘an immediacy element concerning the false information’ is lacking. Moreover, ‘causation of “sustained fear”‘ is clearly an essential element of this part of the statute. Here, however, there were no facts that would lead a reasonable person to believe that Bailey’s post caused sustained fear. No members of the public expressed any type of concern. Even if the post were taken seriously, it is too general and contingent to be a specific threat that harm is ‘imminent or in progress.’ Nor would a reasonable person believe, based on these facts, that Bailey acted with the requisite ‘specific intent’ to cause sustained fear or serious public disruption.”
As with the question of whether Bailey’s post was constitutionally protected, the 5th Circuit held that Iles should have recognized that he did not have probable cause to arrest Bailey. “Iles is not entitled to qualified immunity,” Douglas writes, “because no reasonable officer could have found probable cause to arrest Bailey for violating the Louisiana terrorizing statute in light of the facts, the text of the statute, and the state case law interpreting it.”
In addition to resuscitating Bailey’s claims under the First Amendment’s speech protections and under the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures,” the 5th Circuit said he also could pursue a state claim based on false arrest. “The parties agree that Bailey’s state law false arrest claim turns on whether there was probable cause for his arrest and that the Fourth Amendment probable cause analysis is thus determinative of this claim,” Douglas writes. “Further, the parties agree that if Iles is liable for false arrest, then Wood is vicariously liable under Louisiana law for the tort of his employee.”
The 5th Circuit’s decision in Bailey v. Iles “makes clear that the First Amendment applies with full force to online speech,” said Institute for Justice attorney Ben Field. “Government officials can’t get away with stretching criminal laws to go after people who make jokes at their expense. This is a victory for free speech and common sense and against the pernicious doctrine of qualified immunity.”
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,'” declared the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., 60 years ago today.
In 1963, the United States was surely far from living out that creed. Addressing 250,000 people from the steps of a monument to the man who had issued the Emancipation Proclamation a century earlier, King pointed out that
the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land.
In 1963, I was a 9-year-old about enter my recently desegregated fourth grade in Washington County, Virginia. That was nine years after the Supreme Court’s unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision had ruled that America’s public schools had to be racially integregated. Despite the ruling, Virginia’s legislature adopted a program of “massive resistance” to racial desegregation, at one point closing down schools rather than admitting black students to the same classrooms as whites.
My fourth-grade history book, written and approved by the Virginia History and Textbook Commission, was published in 1957 and was taught in the state’s public schools through the early 1970s. That text declared that 1619 was, owing to three important events, a “red letter” year for the Virginia colony. One was that the colonists were permitted to make their own laws. Another was that young English women immigrated to become wives of the colonists. And the the third was that “the first Negroes were brought from Africa.”
The textbook went on: “There were about twenty of these Negroes. They were sold as servants to some of the planters. Soon other Negroes were brought to Virginia. They helped the planters do the work on their plantations.” Later, my seventh grade history textbook asserted that the “regard that master and slaves had for each other made plantation life happy and prosperous” and that the “Negroes went about in a cheerful manner making a living for themselves and for those for whom they worked.”
The book reported that it was regrettably necessary sometimes to “punish disobedient Negroes” by whipping them. But that was fine, it added, since “in those days whipping was also the usual method for correcting children.” It further elaborated that most slaves did not long for freedom and thus “were not worried by the furious arguments going on between Northerners and Southerners over what should be done with them. In fact, they paid little attention to these arguments.”
(Virginia History Geography Politics)
My 11th grade textbook infamously maintained that an enslaved person “did not work as hard as the average free laborer, since he did not have to worry about losing his job. In fact, the slave enjoyed what we might call comprehensive social security.” In other words, Virginia’s schoolchildren were taught that slavery was a safety net.
One of the authors of that 11th grade textbook, Marvin Schlegel, explained at a 1957 conference why he chose to portray the history of slavery in Virginia the way he did. “When it is necessary to discuss the Negro, he should be praised for those qualities which are approved by the whites, his loyalty to his master for example,” he said. But “the realistic version” of history, he noted, would “put our ancestors in too severe a light.”
After the end, in 1865, of what my public school history texts were pleased to call the War Between the States, civil equality for America’s black citizens were embodied in the 13th,14th,and 15th amendments to the Constitution. But these promises were betrayed as Virginia and other Southern states erected a new version of their old racial caste system. Under the so-called Jim Crow laws, every white citizen was legally superior to every black citizen. The erosion of civil rights sped up after the Supreme Court’s vile 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which ratified a Louisiana law requiring that white and black railroad passengers ride in separate cars. The majority opinion, written by Associate Justice Henry Brown, rejected “the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority.”
In a brilliant dissent, Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan pointed out that the court’s majority opinion had now ratified “a power in the States, by sinister legislation, to interfere with the full enjoyment of the blessings of freedom to regulate civil rights, common to all citizens, upon the basis of race, and to place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens.” Harlan proved all too prescient: Virginia and other states quickly established an oppressive system of legal apartheid that, in the main, persisted even as the Martin Luther King was speaking in Washington. “Whites Only” signs were still pervasive throughout the South, limiting access to all sorts of public facilities and accommodations.
A 1947 report by the Civil Rights Commission recounted in gory detail how federal, state, and local governments regularly violated the civil rights of several minority groups, but chiefly those of African Americans. The report described lynching, widespread police brutality, and bureaucratic discrimination. It also highlighted how black citizens (and many poor white ones) were systematically denied the vote by means of poll taxes and unequally applied “understanding clauses” that required would-be voters to explain a state’s constitution to the satisfaction of a registrar. As a result of this discrimination, the report estimated that only about 10 percent of potential voters in the seven poll-tax states participated in the presidential elections of 1944, as against 49 percent in the free-vote states. Even more egregious was the creation of “whites only” Democratic Party primaries in seven states.
The report concluded that “the separate but equal doctrine has failed,” declaring that “it is inconsistent with the fundamental equalitarianism of the American way of life in that it marks groups with the brand of inferior status.” Consequently, the commission recommended “the elimination of segregation, based on race, color, creed, or national origin, from American life.” Shortly afterward, on July 26, 1948, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981, mandating the desegregation of the U.S. military.
The Civil Rights Commission’s report and Truman’s desegregation of the military alarmed segregationists. They were among the reasons Virginia’s white leaders created the state’s textbook commission in 1950.
Just two months before King spoke, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission issued its 1963 report. “In seven States,” it noted, “the right to vote—the abridgment of which is clearly forbidden by the 15th amendment to the Constitution of the United States—is still denied to many citizens solely because of their race.”
“There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied?” King said in his famous speech. His answer:
We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.
We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: for whites only.
By the time I entered the fourth grade, the percentage of white Americans who agreed that black and white children should go to the same schools had essentially doubled from 32 percent in 1942 to 64 percent. (96 percent now do.) In a 1963 poll, more 60 percent of whites said that whites had the right to bar blacks from their neighborhoods. That fell to 15 percent by 1995, when the question was last asked.
In 1948, 30 states still had laws making it crime for black and white citizens to marry; today, thanks to the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, it is legal everywhere. In 1958, only 4 percent of American adults approved of black-white marriages; now 94 percent do.
A year after King declared his dream that our country would soon “live out the true meaning of its creed,” Congress finally enacted federal legislation aimed at dismantling the South’s system of legally imposed and enforced racial apartheid. Such state and local laws made it illegal for businesses to accommodate both black and white customers even if they wanted to do so.
First, Congress passed the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination at places of public accommodation on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin. This overturned such regulations as a South Carolina ordinance that had mandated racially segregated eating areas in “any hotel, restaurant, cafe, eating house, boarding-house or similar establishment.” That South Carolina law decreed that there must be a seating distance of at least 35 feet between white and black customers and that meals be served using clearly marked “separate eating utensils and separate dishes.”
Congress then passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which eliminated “tests and devices,” such as literacy tests and poll taxes, that had been used to prevent black citizens from successfully registering to vote. After its adoption, the percentage of blacks registered to vote in Virginia rose from 19 percent in 1956 to 46.9 percent in 1966. By 2020, 72.7 percent of Virginia’s black residents were registered to vote.
Sixty years later, overt and legally enforced racial discrimination has receded. But even now, various state legislatures are attempting to enact racial gerrymandering to hem in the votes of their black citizens.
How history should be taught remains contentious in Virginia. Witness Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s first executive order, which instructed K–12 public schools “to end the use of inherently divisive concepts.” But the state’s current history and social science standards of learning for the fourth grade explicitly include describing “the laws that established race-based enslavement in the colony” and “how the institution of slavery was the cause of the Civil War.” Later in the year, fourth grade history classes will explain “the social and political events connected to disenfranchisement of African American voters in Virginia in the early 20th century, desegregation, court decisions, and Massive Resistance, with emphasis on the role of Virginians in the Supreme Court cases, including, but not limited to Brown v. Board of Education.” In addition, students will learn about the political, social, and economic contributions of prominent black Virginians such as Maggie Walker, Oliver Hill, Sr., and Douglas Wilder.
Instead of teaching that slavery amounted to a kind of “comprehensive social security,” 11th grade history will now discuss “the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the 1963 March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” Those 11th graders will also “evaluate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., including “A Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” civil disobedience, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, and his assassination.” This is all far better than the lessons inflicted on my peers and me.
Any glance at the state of America’s prisons and public schools will reveal how much more must be done before all Americans enjoy fully equal rights. But 60 years after King’s famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial, we can celebrate how much closer we are to his dream of rising from “the dark and desolate valley of segregation” and into “the sunlit path of racial justice.”
U.S. sanctions have crippled Venezuela’s crude oil production and exports.
Last year, Venezuelan crude oil production hit a 50-year low of around 700,000 barrels per day.
Analysts: If the Biden Administration further eases the sanctions and allows other Western oil companies to operate in Venezuela, the South American country could ramp up its production by around 200,000 bpd and reach about 1 million bpd in crude output by 2025.
A potential temporary relief to the U.S. sanctions against Venezuela could jumpstart the oil industry in the South American country where output has slumped to a five-decade low.
The sanctions, imposed by the Trump Administration, have crippled Venezuela’s crude oil production and exports. But the industry in the nation sitting on the world’s largest crude oil reserves – even bigger than Saudi Arabia’s – had been in a decline for years due to mismanagement, corruption, and a lack of investment in field operations and refinery maintenance by state oil firm PDVSA.
Last year, Venezuelan crude oil production hit a 50-year low of around 700,000 barrels per day (bpd).
The first opening of the Biden Administration to Venezuela occurred at the end of last year when it eased sanctions on Venezuela to allow Chevron to resume its work in Venezuela and export the crude when access to Russian heavy crude was shut off by the sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
In November, the U.S. government granted Chevron a license to operate in Venezuela under its joint ventures with PDVSA there. Profits from the sale of Chevron’s Venezuelan-derived crude oil go towards paying down PDVSA’s debt to Chevron and will not bolster state-run PDVSA’s profits.Related: UK Households To Pay Lower Energy Bills In Q4 2023
Venezuela’s heavy crude oil is prized by U.S. Gulf Coast refiners, who, until recently, looked to Russia’s heavy grades to replace it. Last December, it was reported that several refiners were attempting to get their hands on the rare Venezuelan crude oil.
If the Biden Administration further eases the sanctions and allows other Western oil companies to operate in Venezuela, the South American country could ramp up its production by around 200,000 bpd and reach about 1 million bpd in crude output by 2025, analysts say.
Yet, for this to happen, several conditions need to be met. First, Nicolas Maduro has to agree to hold free presidential elections. Next, the Western oil companies have to be sure that the possible temporary relief in the sanctions regime would open enough of an investment window for them to invest in reviving production at Venezuelan oilfields, many of which have been sitting idled and neglected due to PDVSA’s lack of resources to operate them and the sanctions on Venezuela’s oil exports.
There could be an opening in the U.S. Administration to allow more companies – other than Chevron – to export crude oil from Venezuela.
Federal government officials in Washington are reportedly working on a draft proposal for sanctions relief to be offered to Venezuela if it organizes “free and fair” presidential elections.
The pitch focuses on letting more companies buy Venezuelan crude, Reuters reported, citing unnamed sources.
“Should Venezuela take concrete actions toward restoring democracy, leading to free and fair elections, we are prepared to provide corresponding sanctions relief,” a spokesperson for the National Security Council said, as quoted by Reuters.
If Maduro shows willingness to hold fair and free elections – something he hasn’t been keen on doing for years – Venezuela could be able to increase its oil production. Companies including Eni and Repsol, which are still owed payments by PDVSA, could also receive relief to sell Venezuelan crude.
“Venezuela could add 200,000 barrels a day by 2025 and reach 1 million barrels per day as a result of successful negotiations and new issuing of licenses,” Francisco Monaldi, a fellow in Latin American energy policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told Bloomberg.
Chevron, the only Western firm currently allowed to do business with Venezuela, has already doubled its production in the country, to 135,000 bpd as of May this year compared to October 2022, just before the U.S. sanctions relief.
Chevron could begin drilling new wells in Venezuela next year and could further ramp up its output to 200,000 bpd by the end of 2024, a source with knowledge of the U.S. supermajor’s plans told Bloomberg.
Venezuela could see higher output in the near term – and the global oil market, more supply – but only if Maduro is open to holding a free and fair election.
Bankrupt Evergrande Crashes As Much As 87% After Resuming Trading Following 17 Month Halt
Shares of bankrupt (former) Chinese property giant, Evergrande Group, crashed 79% on Monday, their first trading day following a suspension of more than 17 months. The stock of the embattled real estate developer – which trade in Hong Kong under what was supposed to be the “lucky” ticker 3333 – opened 87% lower and ended the day at 0.35 Hong Kong dollars. Trading had been halted since March 21, 2022, when shares were priced at HK$1.65. Evergrande was the most traded stock in Hong Kong on Monday, with about 1.85 billion shares changing hands.
Evergrande said that a meeting with creditors to discuss offshore debt restructuring has been pushed back from Monday to Sept. 26 citing various reasons for the delay, including “numerous media reports which have wholly mischaracterized the restructuring recognition under Chapter 15” of the U.S. bankruptcy code.
As reported previously, the company filed for bankruptcy protection in a New York court on Aug. 17, a technicality since the company had defaulted on its debt almost two years earlier. The company’s bonds remain frozen and do not trade in the secondary market.
Evergrande was once China’s largest real estate developer but defaulted on a number of debt obligations, leaving homeowners with unfinished homes and suppliers with unpaid bills. As Nikkei reports, the company applied for the trading suspension to be lifted on Friday evening after it said it had cleared various conditions set by the Hong Kong Exchange, including the release of financial reports.
The results for the first six months of the year were announced Sunday night, with the company reporting a net loss of 33.01 billion yuan ($4.53 billion), better than the 66.35 billion yuan loss a year ago, but still catastrophic. Then again since Evergrande is bankrupt and insolvent, it hardly matters.
The distressed developer posted long-overdue annual earnings reports for the last two years on Aug. 16, revealing a combined net loss of a record 581.94 billion yuan, a reversal from 8.07 billion yuan in net profit in 2020 prior to a crackdown by Beijing on the industry.
The company said in its Sunday night filing that its financial status is still precarious. Its total cash and cash equivalents, including restricted cash, was 13.38 billion yuan as of the end of June, while net current liabilities were 713.10 billion yuan. The company also said that “it is involved in various litigation and arbitration cases for various reasons.”
Its electric vehicle unit China Evergrande New Energy Vehicle Group on Friday night separately announced a net loss of 6.86 billion yuan for the first six months of the year, compared to a net loss of 13.36 billion yuan a year ago. Similar to its parent, the EV subsidiary’s financial position remains strained, as its cash and cash equivalents including restricted cash came to 117 million yuan as of the end of June, while its net current liabilities stood at 36.61 billion yuan.
The company also revealed that it has 9.34 billion yuan of unpaid debt and 3.59 billion yuan of overdue commercial bills, and has 48 pending litigation cases involving 10.88 billion yuan.
As part of the financial restructuring, China Evergrande Group has proposed selling part of the EV unit to NWTN (Zhejiang) Automobile, a Nasdaq-listed, Dubai-headquartered mobility product company founded by Chinese entrepreneur Alan Nan Wu.
NWTN is willing to acquire 27.5% of the enlarged share capital of Evergrande’s EV unit for HK$3.88 billion to “support [the] business recovery and growth” of Evergrande Group. The new shares will be issued at HK$0.6297 apiece, representing a 63% discount to the stock price when the agreement was signed on Aug. 14.
Evergrande Group and its major shareholders, including founder Xu Jiayin, also known as Hui Ka-yan, have also agreed to convert their loans into a total of 5.44 billion new shares, at a price of HK$3.84 a piece. The Hong Kong-listed shares of the EV unit closed at HK$1.22 on Monday.
Trump Trial Set For March 2024 As Activist Judge Refuses Request For Election Delay
Obama-appointed activist Judge Tanya Chutkan – who’s behind some of the most “extreme sentencing of January 6th defendants” while “openly supporting the violent Black Lives Matter riots of 2020” – has denied a request to move Donald Trump’s federal election-interference trial until after the 2024 US election.
Instead, the trial will start March 4, 2024 in what the WSJ framed as ‘seeking a balance’ between prosecutors’ request for a Jan. 2 start date, and Trump’s request to push the trial to April 2026, citing the large volume of evidence they will have to examine, as well as the historic nature of the case.
Trump is the first president in US history accused of blocking the peaceful transfer of power to his successor, which his lawyers characterized as “terra incognita.”
“Never in the history of the United States have we seen a case of this magnitude go to trial in four months, and this man’s liberty and life is at stake,” said Trump attorney John Lauro on Monday. “He deserves an adequate representation. He’s no different than any American.”
Chutkan, a US District Court judge in the District of Columbia, previously worked at a law firm that represented Fusion GPS, the company that helped orchestrate the Russia collusion hoax targeting former President Donald Trump. During her stint with Boies Schiller Flexner, the Democrat-friendly law firm also reportedly represented Clinton Cabal foot soldier Huma Abedin, the former wife of disgraced Democrat Anthony Weiner.
Special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with four crimes on August 1st, including conspiring to defraud the U.S., obstructing an official proceeding and conspiring against the rights of voters, per the Journal.
The indictment points to actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters. Trump has denied wrongdoing and accused prosecutors of pursuing him to undermine his bid to return to the White House.
One of Smith’s prosecutors, Molly Gaston, acknowledged that the discovery evidence so far amounts to 12.8 million pages, but said most of it had already been turned over to or previously reviewed by the defense. At least 25% of those pages are associated with Trump’s campaign and political-action committee, more than three million came from the U.S. Secret Service, and hundreds of thousands came from publicly available litigation, Gaston said. -WSJ
According to Gaston, grand jury transcripts, notes, exhibits and reports from interviews amount to roughly 58,000 pages, while prosecutors have assembled roughly 47,000 pages of “key documents” for Trump’s defense team, including evidence they thought Trump’s lawyers would find helpful.
“It’s essentially a road map to our case,” she said.
“Judge Tanya Chutkan’s extreme sentencing of January 6th defendants, while openly supporting the violent Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, showcases a complete disregard for her duty of impartiality and the rule of law,” Mr. Gaetz said.
He appeared to be referring to remarks the judge made in one Jan. 6-related sentencing.
“People gathered all over the country last year to protest the violent murder by the police of an unarmed man,” she said, referencing violent riots that erupted after the death of George Floyd. “To compare the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights, to those of a violent mob seeking to overthrow the lawfully elected government is a false equivalency and ignores a very real danger that the January 6 riot posed to the foundation of our democracy.”
Mr. Gaetz’s resolution points to a few other cases of “open partisanship,” including the fact that the Obama-appointed district judge had donated thousands of dollars to his presidential campaign, and that during another Jan. 6-related sentencing she “lamented” that President Trump “remains free to this day.”
“Such partisan commentary by Judge Chutkan has been ongoing and calls into question her fitness as a judge and … Chutkan’s comments and activities on and off the bench violate all 5 canons of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges,” the resolution reads (pdf).
The canons are that a judge should uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary; avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities; perform the duties of the office fairly, impartially, and diligently; engage in extrajudicial activities that are consistent with the obligations of judicial office, and refrain from political activity.
“It is deeply concerning that a United States District Court judge would exhibit such blatant political bias from the bench,” he said in a press release. “Justice may be blind, but the American people are not—we see Judge Chutkan for her actions, and we rebuke them in the greatest possible sense.”
“We will not be having our jobs taken away and given to robots,” declaredBreaking Bad star Bryan Cranston at a recent rally for Hollywood’s two ongoing strikes. It was a blunt statement of one of the fears animating the labor actions: Many of the issues in the Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild walkouts center around the impact artificial intelligence (A.I.) could have on their livelihoods. Another relatively recent technology, online streaming, features prominently in these battles too.
While A.I. has raised unique concerns related to intellectual property and the use of actors’ images, fears around tech-driven job losses in the entertainment industry are not novel. After all, a few decades ago the studios were decrying the VCR as something that could kill movies. Instead it furthered their opportunities to reach audiences.
Art requires a unique spark that A.I. can often mimic but can never fully replace. It can be a powerful tool, but it often lands in an uncanny valley that makes many viewers uneasy. The use (or even just the accusation of using) purely A.I.-generated extras in crowd scenes has already prompted ridicule when the industry has tried it.
At the same time, A.I. can dramatically reduce the cost of certain visual effects and other expensive elements of film production and post-production. This may make it easier for smaller studios to make more movies at a lower cost. In the long term, this could bring more competition to the industry and more opportunities for filmmakers who the big studios might have ignored. So we shouldn’t view artificial intelligence as an exclusively harmful force. It is important to consider the tradeoffs involved.
A.I. is not the only technology the strikers are concerned about. Streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+ have been disrupting the industry’s residuals. But the internet shouldn’t be presumed to be the enemy of creative artists, as it has also given rise to new forms of entertainment that can benefit both creators and consumers alike.
A growing amount of consumer time is being spent on user-generated content sites such as TikTok and YouTube. In fact, the average user now spends between 45 minutes and an hour consuming content on each app. These times are edging closer and closer to the time spent on the traditional streaming giant Netflix.
That might threaten the big studios’ bottom lines, but it also offers a way for small and micro-budget projects to directly reach audiences and allow artists to refine their skills. Several actors and singers—including Justin Bieber and The Little Mermaid star Halle Bailey—got their start as YouTubers.
Hollywood’s last writers strike occurred in 2007–2008, when many social media and online services were still new. While many movies and TV shows were delayed, creators with new and inexpensive ideas were able to both capitalize on the internet’s low barriers to entry and circumvent the strike’s logjam to reach an audience directly. (One notable example: Joss Whedon’s immensely popular Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.)
These platforms provide the tools to learn skills and build a following without a costly studio investment. Social media can create word-of-mouth buzz around low-cost independent productions. And it can highlight under-the-radar talent, allowing artists to circumvent the studios or prove their value to industry insiders.
Given the number of dystopian films and television from classics like 2001:A Space Odyssey and Terminator to more recent films like M3GAN and Black Mirror involving artificial intelligence, it is not surprising that Hollywood is focused on tech’s potential harms. But these technologies needn’t mean apocalypse for the entertainment industry. New technologies mean new opportunities too.
2Y Auction Stops Through, Prices Above 5% For The First Time In 17 Years
Moments ago the Treasury completed the first of Monday’s two coupon auctions (the scheduled is truncated due to this week’s economic data barrage), and it was a solid sale of 2Y paper.
The sale of $45 billion in 2Y paper stopped at a high yield of 5.024%, the first auction pricing north of 5% since July 2006. The yield, which was just over 20bps compared to last month’s 4.823%, stopped through the 5.028% When Issued, the 3rd stop through in the past 4 auctions.
The bid to cover was an impressive 2.943, the highest since April 2020 excluding January’s 2.944, and well above the recent average 2.71.
The internals were also solid, with Indirects taking down 65.01%, down from 65.45%, but also above the six-auction average of 63.03%. And with Directs awarded 20.0%, Dealers took down 14.98%, the highest since May.
Overall, this was a strong, if hardly stellar 2Y auction, and one which boosted bond market sentiment helping 10Y yields slide below 4.21% and approaching session lows of 4.20%.
