Letter: A sad sign of the times – Huron Daily Tribune

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Letter:A sad sign of the times

To the Editor:

Recently, there has been a widespread movement in several counties in the Thumb where political candidate yard signs affiliated with the Democratic Party have been taken from private properties. According to many residents, the Port Austin area has been targeted. And to be fair, I have heard from Republicans that their signs are being stolen too in the Elkton area. This is unacceptable behavior by anyone involved in this taking of personal property.

These antics have been going on for years from all parties. That does not make it right. In todays political climate, where we are in serious need for more civility and courtesy, our patience and tolerance is waning.

Political signage, and in a broader sense our First Amendment right, affords all of us, right and left, freedom of speech and expression. I ask that you please be vigilant and watch out for the theft of political signs. Some property owners have gone to extreme measures to protect their signs: trail-cams, locks on flagpoles, and bringing signs in at night.

There is an all too common perception that removing a political sign from someone's private property is a matter of no legal concern. On the contrary, it is a theft. Its stealing, plain and simple. Our local peace officers have better things to do than chasing down sign thieves.

The right to endorse and promote our candidates is a large part of election campaigns. A hallmark of our rural communities is yard signs. So stop the nonsense, Huron County.

Respect your neighbors and their right to free speech. Speak up when violated and by any means necessary, vote.

Charles Henry

Caseville

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Letter: A sad sign of the times - Huron Daily Tribune

Press Release: New social media regulation will further stifle free speech in Turkey – Stockholm Center for Freedom

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The Turkish Parliament passed a social media regulation on July 29 that will, if signed by President Recep Tayyip Erdoan, further stifle free speech through social media, the only remaining refuge for critical journalists, human rights defenders and activists.

The 11-article regulation obligates foreign social network providers with more than 1 million daily users in Turkey to maintain a representative in the country. If they fail to appoint a local representative, they will face progressive sanctions in the form of exorbitant administrative fines up to 4 million euros, three-month advertising bans and bandwidth reduction that can go up to 90 percent.

The new regulation with its draconian provisions will further stifle freedom of expression under the guise of regulating social media. It will be a new scourge in the hands of the authorities to crack down on critics and dissidents expressing their thoughts through social media platforms, the last refuge left to them after the mainstream media of the country yielded almost in its entirety to the will of the ruling party, said Abdullah Bozkurt, president of the Stockholm Center for Freedom.

The bill also prescribes huge administrative fines for social network providers that fail to abide by the provisions of the bill in terms of content removal stemming from individuals as well as government authorities.

According to the new regulation, social network providers are required to keep users data locally, prompting the fear that they will be compelled to transmit these data to the authorities for prosecution and sanctions, a circumstance that will boost the self-censorship already widespread among Turkish social media users.

The right to freedom of speech is enshrined in all human rights conventions as a constituent element of a democratic and open society. The Turkish government must respect its obligations emanating from international human rights law, and President Erdoan needs to return this bill to the parliament for reconsideration.

About the Stockholm Center for Freedom

A Swedish-based, non-profit advocacy organization, SCF promotes the rule of law, democracy and fundamental rights and freedoms with a special focus on Turkey.

SCF is committed to serving as a reference source by providing a broad perspective on rights violations in Turkey, monitoring daily developments through the lens of fact-based investigative journalism and documenting individual cases of infringement of fundamental rights and liberties.

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Press Release: New social media regulation will further stifle free speech in Turkey - Stockholm Center for Freedom

As threats to the company mount, TikTok pushes back – TechCrunch

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As TikToks existential roller coaster ride continues to rattle on, the company is trying to sway regulators and the public with a flood of dollars and arguments wrapped in free enterprise and free speech to ensure that its parent company ByteDance can retain control of its operations.

The push to validate its business comes as reports swirl around a potential presidential ban and bid from Microsoft to take over the companys business in the U.S.

As it confronts domestic competitors and political attacks, TikTok and its parent company ByteDance have picked up some defenders from the American civil rights movement.

Late last night, the American Civil Liberties Union tweeted its objections to the proposed ban by President Trump.

With any Internet platform, we should be concerned about the risk that sensitive private data will be funneled to abusive governments, including our own, the ACLU wrote in a subsequent statement. But shutting one platform down, even if it were legally possible to do so, harms freedom of speech online and does nothing to resolve the broader problem of unjustified government surveillance.

Even as ownership of the service remains an open question, the company moved quickly to reassure its users that TikTok would continue to operate in the U.S.

The company is also redoubling its efforts to appeal to creators even as it faces defections over its potential mishandling of user data.

On Tuesday, a clutch of the companys largest celebrities, with a collective audience of some 47 million viewers, abandoned the platform for its much smaller competitor, Triller.

Founded in 2015, two years before TikTok began its explosive rise to prominence, Triller is backed by some of the biggest names in American music and entertainment, including Snoop Dogg, The Weeknd, Marshmello,Lil Wayne, Juice WRLD, Young Thug,Kendrick Lamar,Baron Davis, Tyga, TI,Jake PaulandTroy Carter.

Now, TikTok stars Josh Richards, Griffin Johnson, Noah Beck and Anthony Reeves are joining their ranks as investors and advisors. Richards, Johnson, Beck and Reeves are also being compensated by Triller, but the reason they cited for leaving the service are the security concerns from governments.

Triller is compensating Richards, Johnson, Beck and Reeves, though the details of the deals are undisclosed. Despite that, the creators say theyre leaving TikTok because theyve grown wary of the Chinese-owned companys security practices.

After seeing the U.S. and other countries governments concerns over TikTokand given my responsibility to protect and lead my followers and other influencersI followed my instincts as an entrepreneur and made it my mission to find a solution, Richards, whos assuming the title of chief strategy officer, told theLA Times.

TikTok has responded by announcing a dramatic increase in the companys creator fund. Initially set at $200 million, in a blog post earlier this week, TikTok chief executive Kevin Mayer announced that the fund would reach $1 billion over the next three years.

TikToks charm offensive may stave off the assaults, but the company will need to address concerns around user data. Its the most pressing threat to the company and the one its least equipped to deal with.

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As threats to the company mount, TikTok pushes back - TechCrunch

Is There a Moral Panic Over Campus Speech? – Slate

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Demonstrators participate in the March for Change protest led by Clemson University football players on June 13 in Clemson, South Carolina.Maddie Meyer/Getty Images This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.

As part of the ongoing Free Speech Project, Future Tense editorial director Andrs Martinez invited Robby Soave, senior editor at Reason; Pardis Mahdavi, dean of social sciences at Arizona State University; and Sabine Galvis, a 2020 graduate of ASU who served as the executive editor of the student newspaper the State Press, to talk on Slack about rising concerns (and rising pushback to those concerns) about eroding tolerance for free speech on college campuses across America, and throughout society.*

The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Andrs: Pardis, shortly after President Donald Trumps bizarre Fourth of July rant at Mount Rushmore against a new far-left fascism, you told me this was the latest sign of a moral panic around the question of a supposed erosion of free speech in this country. Soon after, a letter published in Harpers, signed by an eclectic, mostly liberal mix of public intellectuals (including Slates Dahlia Lithwick), also expressed concern over what they considered a restriction of debate on the left (while making it clear that Donald Trump is a bigger threat). How do you see things in this fraught year of 2020? Is this the golden age of free speech in the U.S., or do you worry about where were headed?

Pardis: I vacillate between worry and hope.

Across the country, debates about the campus culture wars have been mired in anxieties about free speech, academic freedom, and the perceived lack of resiliency of millennials characterized as the proliferation of snowflake culture. Indeed, institutions of higher education have been seen as the battleground for a determination of American values and Americanness. Students, like those Trump addressed at the Dream City Church in Phoenix recently, are seen as the foot soldiers.

These discursive trends reveal a modern-day moral panic about youth gone astray and are contributing to an identity crisis in higher education, rather than helping to alleviate it. Like other moral panics, the narrative around higher education in 2020 is based largely on assumptions. This is not unlike other moral panics that have preceded this onereefer madness in the 1930s, moral panics about sexuality during the sexual revolution. But rather than seeing protesting and engaged students on campuses today as morally astray, it is more useful to understand their actions in the context of a desire to reform higher education, address the identity crisis, and bringmoredialogue about values into the classroom and higher ed writ large.

Andrs: I know you have studied in great depth questions of inclusion and academic freedom on campuses across the country, but before we get into that, do you think there is a distinction between how free speech debates play out on campus versus the rest of society?

Pardis: I think that the debates are playing out on campus but they mirror what is happening in society today.

I do think that we need to be worried about free speech, but we need to be clearer about what our worries are. Students want more freedomtospeak and to experiment. Simply put, they want the freedom to be wrong sometimes, too. But they want more speech, rather than less. And the moral panic seems to be casting students as snowflakes who want to be freefromspeech.

Andrs: I do wonder if there isnt a generational shift, though, in how we think of disagreeable speech that makes us uncomfortable. In one of my journalism classes a couple of years back, most of my students said it would be reasonable to ban what they considered controversial speakers (such as Trump administration officials) from campus. The one student in class who felt strongly that any invited speaker should be heard was a Russian journalist here on a State Department exchange. It was pretty funny, as he was like, But this is America. So I wonder what you mean when you say students want the freedom to be wrong sometimes toobecause that seems to be what the folks in the moral panic school are saying too.

Pardis: So, I think that students want the space (which some derisively chide as safe spaces) to wrestle with these difficult issues. They want to be able to try out new words, frameworks, phrasing. But they want to feel safetodo that. They dont want to be called out for saying the wrong thing. So our job in higher ed is to create networks of belonging where students can feel like they belong and are being heard but where they can dig into the challenging issues.

Andrs: Robby, for much of our history, it was the left that worried about the right restricting debate and speech, and now there is this concern about political correctness on the left leading to an erosion of speech. Sitting at the libertarian citadel of Reason, do you feel there has been a shift in terms of where the threat lies, or do the threats to speech continue to come from all sides? What worries you most these days?

Robby: I think one of the difficulties in discussing these issues is scale. Certainly, there has been plenty of catastrophizing coming from people on the political right. We are told that the campus free speech problem is a crisis, political correctness is the worst its ever been, young people hate free speech, that sort of thing. There are enough examplesmany of them quite egregious!that, if youre looking to demonstrate that this is the case, there are things you can point to. Some promote this narrative while ignoring the very real threats to free speech posed by the government and specifically the Trump administration.

All that said, it does appear to me to be the case that culturally speaking, a climate of self-censorship has taken shape in many elite progressive social circles, college campuses being the first and most obvious.

It is not universal. There is still plenty of interesting dialogue happening. But some students, and indeed some professorsmany who are themselves on the political leftdo seem to run into trouble when they discuss certain topics, often relating to race or sex. And that trouble is usually caused by a small number of ideologically motivated students whose view of free speech is that they essentially have a right not to be offended.

Pardis: I dont disagree that people are self-censoringbut I think that folks on the right and left are frustrated with self-censorship.

Robby: That I would heartily agree with. I hear all the time from professors who represent the old left, ACLU types, and are increasingly frustrated by their studentsnot all of them, but the small number of unreasonable ones who demand a lot of attention and appeasement.

Andrs:Sabine, you just graduated from ASU, where you were the executive editor of the State Press newspaper. Congrats (and how you managed all that in a time of a pandemic is a separate question for another day). Whats your take on us older folks speculating on your generations views on free speech and your slowflakeiness?

Sabine: If anything, I think political correctness is generally asking for more thoughtful speech. While there are some egregious examples, as Robby said, of people who may take it to an extreme, I think that does not represent youth and students at large.

But what is being called snowflakeiness is really a push for public figures to be accountable for speech that members of the public (largely, but not exclusively, made up of Gen Z and millennials) see as being bigoted, harmful, or simply incorrect. There is a demand for accountability that can gain traction very quickly and organically.

In general, I think this kind of criticism can be seen as adding to the discourse, as a counterpoint to whatever offensive statements are made, which really affirms free speech. After all, free speech never called for freedom from criticism and consequences.

Pardis: I would agree with that, Sabine. I think that the phrase political correctness, though, has also been taken out of context and triggers moral panic.

Sabine: Its a catchphrase, like the term snowflake, thats made it easier at times to malign the intentions of youth and students.

Andrs: Were there speakers who came to campus in your years at ASU that you felt shouldnt have had the right/opportunity to speak?

Sabine: I think the most controversial speaker I can remember is Carl Goldberg, who was brought to campus by College Republicans United, a far-right political club at ASU. A number of groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, have criticized Goldberg for misrepresenting Islam and being Islamophobic, while the Southern Poverty Law Center described him as an anti-Islam lecturer. CRU set up the event as a discussion between Goldberg and the Muslim Students Association, who invited a local imam to provide a counterperspective. I dont think theres any need to give space to bigoted speech on campus, and the event created a false equivalency between the two speakers, given that Goldberg is heavily prejudiced against Islam and promotes Islamophobia. The interesting thing is that CRU said in an email at the time that Press is NOT welcome to attend the event, which is a hypocritical stance from a group that claims to love freedom.

Robby: I mean, its very difficult coming up with a precise term to describe the range of examples were usually talking aboutfrom, say, Ben Shapiro getting shouted down at a college campus to data guy David Shor being fired from his job. Cancel culture seems to be the term that is currently winning.

Andrs: Robby, youve done some great reporting on some of the more disconcerting episodes on campus, but as you also say, there is a question of scale and how prevalent these episodes really are. Columbia president and First Amendment scholar Lee Bollinger had a powerful essay in the Atlantic last year saying this is far less of an epidemic than is sometimes suggested.

To shift gears a bit: You are working on a book about content moderation on social media. Do you feel that what we see online is analogous to the campus debates, and are you worried about a decline of free speech online? (Seems like many people fret about the opposite.)

Robby: I think that social media has greatly expanded our capacity to engage in speech. It would be hard to argue otherwise. I mean, right now, we are using an online platform to hold a debate! Remarkable. We forget how much harder this would have been just 15 years ago. But more speech isnt always pleasant, and in fact, social media has permitted a lot of irritating people to make themselves known and to identify one another and group together. On the far right, this manifests itself in the form of some really awful racist and sexist peoplethe alt-right, for instanceengaged in campaigns of harassment that make the internet a much more miserable place. But you also have this problem where now everything people say is public record forever, and its trivially easy to go digging, find an unwise remark or joke from perhaps years ago, and get someone fired or dragged through the mud. And this happens to people on the right and the left.

Pardis: Totally agree.

Robby: Social media spaces act as public spaces, but they are privately owned and administered, so the rules here can be more flexible than what the First Amendment requires of, say, a public university. So there are a lot of interesting debates to be had about how much moderation there should be, and if it can be done in a nonbiased way.

Like, in a truly public space. I mean, the Westboro Baptist Church can shriek obscenities at peoples funerals. Thats literally what the Supreme Court has ruled! On Twitter and Facebook, they dont have to permit that. But they could.

But what results is people being censored on social media, and then they complain about it. And sometimes if you look, it does seem like the call was wrong, or unfair, or heres 80 examples where someone said the same thing and didnt get in trouble.

Andrs: I dont envy Mark Zuckerberg.The right accuses him of too much content moderation, the left of not doing enough.And yes, these are not First Amendment questions.He can set whatever rules he wants on his platform.

Robby: The platforms do get attacked either way, yes. Too much moderation, and Sen. Josh Hawley comes for you. Not enough, and its Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Andrs: How do each of you feel about political ads on Twitter and Facebook? The former said it wouldnt accept them anymore, FB still does. How do you all feel about tolerating a certain amount of what Colbert used to call truthiness from candidates on these platforms?

Pardis: I guess I think we need to be wary of censorship of any kind. Our job as educators is to help teach readers how to sift through information. Teaching critical thinking skills and looking for Truth (capital T intentional) is a key component of higher ed. So that is the role we play.

Robby: I prefer Facebooks approach. I think expecting Mark Zuckerberg to be the arbiter of whats true online would be foolish, and Zuckerberg was correct to realize this. Im intrigued by Facebooks new council that will adjudicate difficult speech questions; this could be a model for other platforms.

Andrs: Its also true that we can no longer pretend to be in some sealed-off Fortress America. As you noted in a recent article, Robby, two-thirds of Facebooks new Oversight Board are foreign experts, as befits a global platform. Increasingly, too, institutions like the NBA and even Hollywood studios have to be mindful of Chinese censors when exercising their own speech. Should we worry that our speech freedoms might be devalued by globalization (paradoxically?) regardless of our internal spats on the issue?

Pardis: The global angle is really important, and Im glad you brought that up. For me, being censored, arrested, and kicked out of Iran for my writings really informs my views on the topic. And it makes me appreciate the importance of academic freedom and free speech here in the U.S.

Andrs: I wondered about that, Pardis. You courageously gave a speech at the University of Tehran in 2007 on sexual politics, and within 14 minutes of getting started, you were hauled offstage by four soldiers whod barged in to put a stop to your talk. Subsequently you were detained and expelled from the country.How does that inform your views on speech?

Pardis: I think it makes me really attuned to the importance of freedomtospeak.

It makes it so that I dont take for granted the fact that I can write a book that may be critical of the government and then not be arrested.

But it also makes me committed even more to higher education, specifically that which a liberal arts education offers. Teaching students to question, to think, and to uphold the freedom to hold that space.

Andrs: Does your experience in Tehran make you empathize with controversial far-right speakers who get disinvited or shouted down on campuses?

Pardis: Thats an interesting question. Because I do want to go back to Sabines point about the call forthoughtfulspeech. My experiences in Tehran were so haunting because I was trying to be very thoughtful about how I presented my work, and it was data-driventhe result of a decade of research.

Andres: But whos to decide whats thoughtful?

Pardis: I wasnt speaking up to offend people, I was speaking up because peoples rights were being violated.

Sabine: Its also important to remember that censorship abroad centers around criticism of government and powerful officials. Here in the United States, I see people like those who signed the Harpers letter, claim that theyre being censored because there is public outcry against their speech and actions.

And so in assessing these cases, I think its important to take into consideration the power differential.

Andrs: The power differential between ?

Pardis: Between who is regulating and who is being regulated. A lot of this is also getting mixed up with the social pandemic of racism that rages in our country.

BIPOC individuals have been silenced for a long time. And they want to feel safe to speak up and speak back.

A big problem as I see it is that free speech is posited as the counterweight to efforts around diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And the two are not diametrically opposed forces. Not at all. But that is how its being framed.

Sabine: Public figures have larger platforms than the average individual who may criticize them online. I think criticism from youth, students, and BIPOC when they punch up can be considered as adding to freedom of speech, rather than censorship. Certainly, social media can amplify their power in a way that is unprecedented.

Robby: My issue with the power differential argument is that it often seems to assume that there are two groups, the marginalized and the powerful. But people can be marginalized in some situations and powerful in others. Obviously, if you belong to certain historically oppressed groups, that has an impact on you in many ways. At the same time, its been fairly easy for the supposedly powerless to drum up social media canceling campaigns (for lack of better terminology) against the supposedly powerful.

Andrs: I always think of poor Trotsky when I hear about cancel campaigns. He was canceled in so many ways!

Robby: I think the next phase of this conversation will move to the workplace. I recently wrote about a San Francisco museum curator who was forced to resign because he said, after noting the museums diversity efforts, that well, of course, there would still be paintings from white artists too. Was it clumsy phrasing? Sure. But it created a petition that branded him a white supremacist and demanded his immediate ouster. This is the kind of thing that worries me and probably worries a lot of other people. Was it properly a free speech issue? I guess not. Still seems bad and wrong.

Pardis: But this is why we need freedom to be wrong, and freedom to be clumsy, and freedom to talk about things, about pain points, about racism in safe ways.

Andrs: Slate alum Michelle Goldberg wrote in her New York Times column that she does worry about the left having a speech problem in a climate of punitive heretic-hunting (speaking of Trotsky), and she alluded to NYU professor Jonathan Haidts criticism of safetyism in these debates, when disagreements are quick to lead to calls for HR to get involved. She wrote that even sympathetic people will come to resent a left that refuses to make a distinction between deliberate slurs, awkward mistakes and legitimate disagreements.

Pardis: Thats why it keeps coming back to campuses. We need to be having the conversations that get us to better frameworks and phrasing so that those who want to push political correctness dont veer into extreme waters of moral panic, either.

Andrs: Robby, I wonder what advice youd give to universities after all youve reported on to not curb freedom of inquiry that we seek to preserve?

Robby: Fire a bunch of administrators!

Andrs: Whoa, careful! I think I technically may be one.

Robby: University administrations do too much policing of speech, often in the form of investigations. Lots and lots of investigations. I dont think professors should have to fear that a classroom discussion occasionally veering off topic is going to trigger a Title IX trial. We need to restore a presumption of good faith.

Andrs: Sabine, you get the last word. How do you think you will look back at this time, when you were in college during the Trump administration? Will you look back at this time of incivility and polarization as a precursor of better days, or are you wary that this will be the environment you will be working in for coming years?

Sabine: I hope that future generations feel empowered to help shape the society that they want to see. I do see these turbulent times as a path toward better days, but I dont think incivility is as much of a problem as it is being made out to be. Civility is a comfort for those whose identities are not at stake in the discourse. It shouldnt be prioritized over standing up for marginalized peoples, and sometimes its necessary to shake the table in order to make way for change.Saying something bigoted in a polite tone isnt respectful; its only a false veneer that protects those espousing harm. Tolerance doesnt need to extend to proponents of bigotry, because bigotry is inherently violent, and I dont think civility is always required in turn. More than anything, I think the current environment pushes us all to be better. Rather than looking at cancel culture as something to fear, I think we can look to it as a moment for growth and learning, which makes me optimistic.

Correction, July 31, 2020: This article originally misidentified Robby Soaves role at Reason. He is a senior editor, not an associate editor.

This piece has been updated to clarify the role of the signatories of the Harpers open letter on free speech.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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Is There a Moral Panic Over Campus Speech? - Slate

Governor violated both federal and state Constitutions – Fallbrook / Bonsall Villlage News

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Californias governor suspended the rights of property owners to receive rents for the use of their property, a violation of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution and a violation of the state of California Constitution property rights.

This action took place in February. Many tenants discontinued paying their rent even if they could afford it given that it was announced by the governor that they didnt have to pay.

The governor also took it upon himself to suspend unlawful detainers and foreclosures until 90 days after the lockdown was ended. This date was supposed to be July 29, 2020. It of course did not happen, and California is in lockdown again compounding the damage to the small property owner who worked and saved to provide for their families and for retirement.

For a property owner to have absolutely no use, benefit or control of their property in my mind constitutes an eminent domain action and is not tenable under the law.

Citing the Fifth Amendment, the owners entitlement to the value of the property is, accordingly, a property right protected by the Takings clause of the Constitution and perhaps also by the federal Takings clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Owners were not given fair notice nor was just compensation provided to the owners of the property that has essentially been taken by the state of California

It would appear that all owners that have been deprived of these rights have just cause to proceed against the governor and the state of California.

Much damage has been caused by this across the board mandate and much will never be recovered. There is rampant abuse by tenants, and there is no recourse under the state mandate.

This mandate has now been extended again, and now it appears that there is no way forward until next year. It creates a strong movement to sell any rental properties especially those owned by small landlords in California. Thus, there will be a dramatic decrease in rental properties available and an increase in rents for those units that do become available.

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Governor violated both federal and state Constitutions - Fallbrook / Bonsall Villlage News

Voting Isnt Everything – The New York Times

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Yes, George Floyds brutal murder, a flagrantly racist president and the pent-up emotions of a pandemic motivated people to take to the streets to demand racial justice. But social movements never emerge just because conditions are bad.

Bill Moyer, a movement strategist, wrote about this dynamic in his Movement Action Plan. He noted that the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in 1979 became a rallying point for people concerned about the dangers of nuclear power. Yet Michigans Enrico Fermi plant had been closer to a full meltdown in 1966 and didnt lead to soul-searching or a social crisis. The difference was that in the intervening years, organizers had worked to seed local groups, build national networks, hone responses to the pronuclear lobby and develop alternative policy platforms.

The current movement has done all those things, spurred largely by the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Mo., over the killing of Michael Brown. It grew into a network of dozens of local Black Lives Matter chapters across the United States and Canada. Groups like Black Youth Project 100 and Movement for Black Lives built comprehensive policy platforms, leading to radical, ground-shaking demands like defund the police. As Jessica Byrd, a leader in Movement for Black Lives, said in a recent interview with Time, Movement made this moment different.

If one isnt aware of this work, its easy to assume that after this phase of street protests ends, the movement will be gone and it will be time to turn to the real work of voting to fulfill our civic duty.

But people who understand movements know that voting is not the end its one part of the process. Movements amplify complex questions that otherwise get simplified to sound bites in elections. Questions like: Does society really need armed police answering mental health crises? Can the police be reformed while still armed with military-grade weapons? What are practical alternatives to police systems? By changing peoples views, movements apply pressure to decision makers.

Contrary to popular belief, movements shouldnt be measured by whether the preferred candidates get into office, nor are they undermined by short-term failures to cobble together national legislation.

A better yardstick for a movement is the publics perception of the problem, a growing certainty that current policies dont work and ultimately peoples commitment to embracing alternatives.

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Voting Isnt Everything - The New York Times

Beyond Big Meat – The New Republic

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Big operations are extremely cost efficient, wrote Temple Grandin, a longtime proponent of humane animal handling, in a recent op-ed for Forbes. The downside is the fragility of the supply chains, as Covid-19 proves. This pandemic is going to be a wakeup call. As farmers across the country see herd-thinning expand into cattle feedlots, and as the losses for rural communities mount, many are asking whether the entire system needs dramatic reform. In late June, Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Cory Booker of New Jersey announced an investigation into the large meat-packers, questioning their commitment to providing a safe, affordable, and abundant food supply to the nation. A tight network of smaller producers, they argue, could help ensure that our food economy is more equitable for farmers, safer for packinghouse workers, and, for consumers, more resilient and reliable in the face of crisis. The current pandemic underscores that broader argument for a new system of meat production and distribution. Droving nearly six billion animals, some two-thirds of the total number of livestock slaughtered in the United States each year, onto the kill floors of barely 100 meatpacking plants owned by just six companies not only creates an impassable bottleneck; it has also produced a potential national security threat should our food supply chain experience a sustained disruption.

The current system, however, didnt evolve by accidentand it is important to recognize that it was never intended to protect the American consumer, much less the American farmer or the American worker. To change, it will require nothing short of breaking up the Big Six and enforcing antitrust laws to their fullest extent. More than that, though, it will take a cultural change, in which we, as eaters, no longer see issues of labor, on the farm or the factory floor, as separate from questions of what is on our forks, and how it got there.

Hogs on Bernie Herickhoffs Minnesota farm lost value as they gained weight during Covid-related delivery delays.

From the very dawn of the industrial meat era, going all the way back to when Upton Sinclair started serializing his novel The Jungle in 1905, the American public has appeared unmoved by labor abuses in the meat industry. Basing his book on two months in the Packingtown district of Chicago near the old Union Stock Yards, Sinclair graphically portrayed the killing floors at Armour and Swift, where supervisors moved through each room with a watch, pressing cutters to work faster while they increased the pace of the production chain. The speeding-up seemed to be growing more savage all the time, Sinclair wrote, but his readers were less concerned by the dehumanizing treatment of workers or the inhumane handling of livestock than the possible contamination of their meat. When President Theodore Roosevelt took up the cause of reform, Sinclair wrote, it was not because the public cared anything about the sufferings of these workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef.

As a consequence, after the Supreme Court ruled in Swift & Co. v. United States that the federal government had antitrust jurisdiction over the interstate activities of big packers, Congress used that power to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906measures aimed at consumer protectionbut did nothing to reform labor practices in the packinghouses. Sinclair complained that the new laws were written by the packers and paid for by the people of the United States for the benefit of the packers. Nothing would be truly reformed, least of all for workers. Theodore Roosevelt, among other influential critics, dismissed Sinclairs complaints as hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful because they failed, as Roosevelt derisively put it, to consider the marvelous business efficiency of the big packers. The Jungle caused the whitewashing of some packing-house walls, Sinclair wrote in 1920, but it left the wage-slaves in those huge brick packing-boxes exactly where they were before.

By then, the Federal Trade Commission had concluded a new investigation of the big packersa two-year inquiry ordered by President Woodrow Wilson to ascertain the facts bearing on the alleged violations of the anti-trust acts, and particularly upon the question whether there are manipulations, controls, trusts, combinations, or restraints out of harmony with the law or the public interest. In damning detail, the commission concluded that the big packers not only had a monopolistic control over the American meat industry but also were moving fast into eggs, cheese, fish, and vegetable oil. And they were trying to take over not only nearly every kind of foodstuff but also control of supporting industriesstockyards, shipping and refrigeration cars, cold storage, and warehouses. Elaborate steps have been taken to disguise their real relations by maintaining a show of intense competition, the report concludedbut by maintaining two-thirds to three-quarters control of all markets, the big packers were able to effectively restrain free trade by colluding against farmers and price-fixing to defraud consumers.

Rather than indicting the presidents of the five corporations named in the FTC report, however, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer entered into a landmark consent decree, compelling the meat companies to divest from other food sectors as well as from supporting industries along the supply chain. Congress subsequently passed the Packers and Stockyards Act, legally enshrining that agreement. The arrangement held for 50 years. From 1920 to the present date, concluded a study of deconcentration in the meatpacking industry in 1971, limited ability to use anti-competitive forms of conduct caused the largest companies to lose market shares continually to regional firms in a process that can and should be called market competition. Over that same period, conditions and wages improved considerably for meatpacking workers, livestock farmers and ranchers received increased prices, and the cost of food for consumers actually went down relative to hourly wages. But at precisely the moment that the study appeared, the systematic effort to unravel antitrust measures was beginning.

That transformation was rooted in a philosophy of intentional agricultural overproduction advocated by Earl L. Butz, President Richard Nixons secretary of agriculture. Butz embraced deregulation and market concentration as a way to prop up industrial-scale agriculture, in order to artificially depress food prices worldwidea strategy aimed at increasing American soft power on the world stage. In short order, the federal government went from policing food trusts at home to running an international food ring, intended to undercut our Communist competitors. Ronald Reagans Justice Department fortified this system in the 1980s, when it loosened standards for approving mergers under the 1920 consent decree. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Cargill, Inc. v. Monfort of Colorado, Inc. that demonstrating a price-cost squeeze for farmers or even collusion between packers did not constitute an antitrust monopoly unless their market share were large enough to succeed in a sustained campaign of predatory pricing such that, per the established antitrust standard, competitors actually are driven from the market and competition is thereby lessened.

The effect of these initiatives to tighten top-down market control of the U.S. food supply is hard to overstate. In 1972, there were nearly 3,000 packinghouses operating in the United States. Twenty years later, that number had plummeted to fewer than 200. At the start of the Reagan administration, there were roughly 600,000 hog operations nationwide. Twenty years later, there were only about 80,000 left. And those who managed to hold on were often in desperate shape. By 2001, an estimated 71 percent of chicken farmers were at or below the poverty line. Eventually, those farmers started filing antitrust suits under the Packers and Stockyards Act, and the 2008 Farm Bill required federal regulators to revisit the standards for antitrust enforcement in the food economy. The DOJ and the USDA held joint hearings and proposed rule changes to make it easier for farmers to sue over anti-competitive practices and antitrust market advantages. But the meat and poultry industry successfully lobbied to remove language from the rule about price-fixing, and Congress defunded implementation of the change through an appropriations riderand has repeatedly done so ever since. Only when the Organization for Competitive Markets, a livestock farmer advocacy group, filed suit against the Trump USDA did the DOJ finally agree to investigate unfair practices and undue influences in the meat industry before the end of 2020.

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Beyond Big Meat - The New Republic

Fanon and the ‘rationality of revolt’ – newframe.com

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We inhabit extraordinary times, times in which we are acutely aware of the intensity of what political thinker Frantz Fanon called the glare of historys floodlights. Around the world, the pandemic has thrown new light on old inequalities. From the United States to Brazil and South Africa, it is those who had already been rendered acutely vulnerable who are on the front lines of caring for those with private healthcare.

And then there was the rebellion. The velocity and scale at which the rebellion against police violence that began in Minnesota moved through the US, and then other parts of the world, was astonishing. Many were reminded of Lenins observation that there are weeks where decades happen.

Thinking about this moment with Fanon, we need to be aware of continuities and discontinuities or as he puts it, an opacity between the ages. Fanon is always speaking to us, but often in ways we cannot hear. We have to work to listen to him, and understand the new contexts and meanings in relative opacity. It is this constant dialogue that helps illuminate the present and enable ongoing fidelity to Fanons call in the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth to work out new concepts.

One of the concepts central to Fanons thought is the idea of the rationality of revolt. In the chapter titled Medicine and Colonialism in A Dying Colonialism, he connects his work to hearing symptoms speak in the hospital to hearing quotidian resistances in daily life: It is necessary to analyse, patiently and lucidly, each one of the reactions of the colonised, and every time we do not understand, we must tell ourselves that we are at the heart of the drama, that of the impossibility of finding a meeting ground in any colonial situation. In other words, understanding requires both careful and critical listening aware of meaning and context.

The important first step is to recognise that we dont understand. In other words, rather than fitting these reactions into a readymade scenario, we begin with an absolute, the impossibility of finding a meeting ground, but this itself also could become an abstraction that effectively limits any further work. The hospital itself is such a space.

In the eyes of the psychiatrist, the patients are deemed as mad and therefore irrational and thereby in need of control (and medication). In the colonial hospital, ethnopsychiatry generalises the pathologisation. Politically, then, Fanon insists on self-critical reflection to enable listening as a first step towards understanding. It is on this basis of working with those who are considered external to history and rationality that new concepts are allowed room for their own development.

Understanding thus requires both critical listening and the development of new concepts through which to hear, with each dependent on the other. In The Wretched of the Earth, this is connected with the idea of the rationality of revolt, which becomes a new beginning that opens up both action and thought. And Fanon immediately adds a critique of the old leadership and old politics, which wants to close down thinking into a series of reformist demands constructed by old concepts.

In defiance of those inside the movement who tend to think that [nuance and] shades of meaning constitute dangers and drive wedges into the solid block of popular opinion, thinking becomes alive and principles are actually worked out in the struggles for freedom. This is a new form of political activity based on real action living inside history where people, he adds, take the lead with their brains and their muscles in the fight for freedom.

This thinking challenges revolutionary intellectuals to help work out the movements own self-clarification, to help develop what the movement itself is revealing. As Fanon puts it, these unexpected facets bring out new meanings and pinpoints the contradictions camouflaged by these facts.

It is in the working out of these unexpected facets that Fanons discussion takes on an important class dynamic. The nationalist elites unpreparedness, the lack of practical ties, their colonial mentality and their cowardice derives, he says, from their incapacity to rationalise popular praxis, their incapacity to attribute it any reason. It betrays an elitist attitude toward mass action, which it tries to control or suppress. It means the continuation, by other means, of the regime of necropolitics.

Hemmed in, crushed, denied space, food and clean water, Fanons description of colonial space in The Wretched of the Earth and the colonial world as a motionless and Manichean world of statues has rightly been considered one of his most important contributions. While space is absolutely essential to his analysis, so too is time. As he says in Black Skin White Masks, the problem considered here is one of time.

He refuses to consider the present as definitive and searches for notions of the future in the present, or as he wonderfully phrases it, the Algerian revolution being no longer in future heaven but in the radical actions and consciousness of the people. The idea of the future time in the present is similar toKarl Marxs description of time as the space for human development.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon also asks about the timing of revolt. In this atmosphere of violence which is just under the skin What makes the lid blow off? It is impossible to predict but then, in retrospect, it is an event. As we look back over the past few months and their concatenation of events, it seems so obvious.

In A Dying Colonialism, Fanon explains the event as an opening into historical time, a time in which the oppressed become historical actors, and the future suddenly becomes a matter of contestation:

Before the rebellion there was the life, the movement, the existence of the settler, and on the other side the continued agony of the colonised. Since 1954 in Algerian society, it seems, things no longer repeat themselves as they did before.

Fanon dates the rebellion to 1 November 1954, the day that the National Liberation Front launched a number of attacks in Algeria against French colonial forces. For Fanon, it was an extraordinary declaration of intent against the odds that led to a radical change in consciousness among the colonised.

What is also obvious is that the spontaneity of popular actions is not simply spontaneous but the result of ongoing thinking and organising. When demonstrators in Bristol, England, pulled down the statue of slave trader Edward Colston and dumped it in the same harbour where his slave ships used to dock, there is thinking, a rationality of revolt intimating a different world. When demonstrators deface the statues of national heroes such as George Washington in the US and Winston Churchill in the UK, they express a moment of decolonialisation reminiscent of Fanons opening pages in The Wretched of the Earth.

There, Fanon talks about another notion of time and dignity, one that is fully integrated with a conception of human life and one that humanises and socialises the individual. Critical of the betrayal by the nationalist elites, he says the yardstick of time must no longer be that of the moment or up till the next harvest, but must become that of the rest of the world. Fanon immediately links that to humanising work. Today, his idea of the rest of the world takes on a significance that is universal and urgent in this moment of climate extinction and global pandemic.

It is a notion of time, liberated from the colonial foreclosure of possibility and capitalist time dominated by dead labour. Time, instead, is connected with life and self-determination, the development of a historical subjectivity that emerges through struggle. Nothing, however, is automatic. Fanons notion of time is also extremely sensitive to the psychological situation that people find themselves in, including the weight of collective trauma and prospects for future health that only time will fully reveal. He is aware that the process of creating actional people liberated from internalised inferiority is going to take time, insisting there is no magical process, no leader, no other who will do it for us.

In a certain way, you could say this way of taking measure of time echoes Marxs idea of time and his critique of capitalisms commodification and disposal of human time. What is time for capitalism but opportunity for profit? In Grundrisse, Marx contrasts a struggle over time and labour (forced and free), understanding a wholly different and more freely associated notion of labour time.

Marx writes, with glee, about an article in TheTimesof London about the cry of outrage of a West Indian plantation owner at the free blacks of Jamaica, who produce only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption, and how they do not care a damn for the sugar and the fixed capital invested in the plantations, but rather observe the planters impending bankruptcy with an ironic grin of malicious pleasure They have ceased to be slaves, says Marx, but not in order to become wage labourers As far as they are concerned, capital does not exist as capital, because autonomous wealth as such can exist only either on the basis ofdirectforced labour, slavery, orindirectforce labour, wagelabour.

Fanon sustains a fundamental sense of movement and opening to the future, in the form of a critical, questioning mode of praxis. He concludes his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, with a prayer. O my body, make of me always a man who questions!

In his final text, The Wretched of the Earth, there is a radical questioning from within the revolutionary movement. Perhaps we need to rethink everything, he says, connecting his notion of the future as a limitless humanity to new ways of life. Perhaps its necessary to begin everything all over again: to change the nature of the countrys exports to re-examine the soil and mineral resources, the rivers and why not? the suns productivity. Theres an ecological dimension here essential to human life and dignity.

What is the struggle really about? It is a reaching toward a new humanism based on self-determination, uprooting the alienated social relations of a racist and colonised society. If conditions of work are not modified, he adds, centuries will be needed to humanise this world which has been forced down to animal level by imperial powers. Hes talking about the forms of forced labour called freedom in neoliberal and neocolonial capitalism that consume life and environments. We know very well, we no longer have centuries. The time is now.

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Socialism removes incentives – Washington Times

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ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Communist redistribution theory was extremely popular in American and European academic circles during much of the 20th century. Professors, (bomb-building) students and Hollywood wannabes all stumbled over one another in enthusiasm about it. Yet the Soviet model collapsed with food lines and empty store shelves, killing and starving over 100 million people in the process. Indeed, the history of godless Marxism is synonymous with death, war and misery.

Of course Communism failed; it was and is a dumb idea embraced by people with high IQs but low amounts of common sense. The philosophy is riddled with economic error and blind contradictions of human nature. People work, innovate and establish businesses for the reward of wage or profit. If those incentives are controlled, greatly diminished or removed by governmental force, the incentive for production and the enthusiasm for work is largely removed. The individual subjected to such conditions is incentivized to exert minimum effort for the government stipend provided. Few, if any, inventions or advances in science have emerged from Marxist cultures. When workers are assigned employment in Siberia (current China) for example its far more like slavery.

A third problem is presented when incompetent politicians attempt to direct the wheels of production absent any expertise. Should we return to caves and immediately remove cars, trucks and airplanes from the economy over a one-degree rise in temperature over a period of 100 years? Until truly efficient green technology exists, the proposed solution is more dangerous than a slight temperature rise.

As for European socialism, should we move to Denmark where a Big Mac costs $12 and a new Honda up to $90,000, and citizens pay a 56% tax rate? Americas discontents including leftist professors are not waiting at the Danish border, seeking entry.

In contrast, millions maass at our borders, attempting escape from quasi-sociaist states. Socialist policies cannot produce free-market results.

FRANK GARDINER

Provo, Utah

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Socialism removes incentives - Washington Times

Striking a Balance Between History and Diversity at VMI – Bacon’s Rebellion

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J.H. Binford Peay III

by James A. Bacon

The Virginia Military institute will not purge monuments to Stonewall Jackson and VMI cadets who fought at the Battle of New Market, Superintendent J.H. Binford Peay III announced last week in a letter to the VMI community.

But the retired four-star general said the military college will intensify efforts to achieve diversity among staff and cadets, and it will alter its Cadet oath ceremony, which involves a reenactment on the New Market battlefield where VMI cadets helped win one of the last Confederate victories of the Civil War. In the future, he added, the college, which was founded in 1839, will emphasize recognition of leaders from its second century.

Peay justified retaining memorials to Jackson and the cadets who fought at New Market:

Unlike many communities who are grappling with icons of the past, VMI has direct ties to many of the historical figures that are the subject of the current unrest. Stonewall Jackson was a professor at VMI, a West Point graduate who served in combat in the Mexican War, a military genius, a staunch Christian, and yes, a Confederate General. Throughout the years, the primary focus on honoring VMIs history has been to celebrate principles of honor, integrity, character, courage, service, and selflessness of those associated with the Institute. It is not to in anyway condone racism, much less slavery.

Peay said he wants to erase any hint of racism at VMI, and acknowledged that some African-American cadets and alumni have contacted him to say that parts of the VMI experience did not live up to the standards that it should have. He is committed, he said, to fixing any areas of racial inequality at our school.

In the letter, Peay elaborated upon the changes in VMI symbolism that will take place:

Meanwhile, VMI continues to develop its curriculum emphasizing American history and civics within the context historically of national and world events, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and slavery. Every cadet will take the American Civic Experience course. Also, wrote Peay, two courses on Virginia history will be reviewed to ensure that they are taught with the proper context and from multiple perspectives.

Bacons bottom line: As recently as a year ago, there was broad sentiment in Virginia to maintain traditions and monuments that celebrated enduring virtues honor, integrity, character, courage, service, and selflessness while placing the memorials in their historical context. Outside of VMI, there appears to be little appetite today for the view that one can honor the personal virtues of extraordinary men without honoring indeed, while disapproving of the slave-holding society in which they lived. Sadly, such nuanced thinking appears to be beyond the capacity of our intelligentsia, which views the world in increasingly Manichean terms. Some will see Binford Peay and the VMI board as hopeless anachronisms. If our society ever rejects identitarian politics and re-embraces the cultivation of personal virtue, history will treat them more kindly

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Striking a Balance Between History and Diversity at VMI - Bacon's Rebellion

Just 10.9% Of Snap Employees Are Black Or Latinx, Company Discloses Amid Allegations Of Discrimination – Forbes

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TOPLINE

Facing allegations of discriminatory behavior from employees, Snap published its first annual diversity report Wednesday looking at team demographics from 2019, becoming the latest company to reckon with diversity and inclusion following a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement this summer.

In this screengrab CEO Evan Spiegel, speaks at the virtual Snap Partner Summit2020.

In 2019, Snaps team was 4.1% Black and 6.8% Latinx and 32.9% of staff identifed as female; at the director-level and above, the leadership team was 2.6% Black, 2.6% Latinx, 16.5% Asian, 7% multiracial, 70.4% white and 24.3% identified as female.

The diversity report outlines steps Snap has taken to improve, including hiring Google exec Oona King as its first vice president of diversity and inclusion in 2019, creating hiring goals for underrepresented groups and instituting a living wage pledge which set a minimum employee salary of $70,000 for all employees at headquarters and equity grants for employees worldwide.

CEO and founder Evan Spiegel addressed concerns of racism at an all-hands meeting last month and said he was concerned with releasing diversity reports because they effectively normalize the current makeup of the tech industry, of which Snapchat's in line, but said the team would work on a report that would include Snaps diversity and inclusion strategy, according to a Business Insider report.

The meeting came days after former employees shared their experiences as people of color at the company on Twitter, including discriminatory behavior from leadership team members.

Five former employees who worked on the content team from 2014 and 2018 told Mashable that editorial practices were racially biased and they had to advocate for Black representation; Snap said it would investigate the allegations.

This month, Snap hired a law firm and launched an internal investigation into allegations of racism and sexism, according to a Business Insider report.

When many prominent Silicon Valley tech companies started publishing diversity reports in 2014, there was hope that transparency would be a catalyst for change. Looking at 2019 data, Google said 51.7% of all employees were white, 41.9% were Asian and 32% of employees were female; Facebook said 41% were white, 44.4% were Asian and and 37% were female; and Twitter said 40.9% were white, 27.7% were Asian and 42% were female.

91%. That is the percentage of Snaps tech employees who were white or Asian in 2019. Just 16.1% of all tech employees identified as female.

Snap Inc. Diversity Annual Report (Snap)

Snap CEO says in internal meeting he doesn't release diversity numbers because it would reinforce the perception that Silicon Valley isn't diverse (Business Insider)

Snapchat ex-employees say past editorial practices were racially biased (Mashable)

Snap is investigating allegations of racism and sexism within the company after some employees complained of a 'whitewashed' culture (Business Insider)

Five Years of Tech Diversity Reportsand Little Progress (Wired)

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Just 10.9% Of Snap Employees Are Black Or Latinx, Company Discloses Amid Allegations Of Discrimination - Forbes

BCC works with director of LME to fight worker exploitation – Cleaning & Maintenance

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The British Cleaning Council (BCC) has held a virtual meeting with the director of Labour Market Enforcement (LME), as part of its drive to ensure the voice of the cleaning and hygiene sector is heard at the highest levels.

The BCC wants to work with Matthew Taylor to ensure any remote or remaining concerns on modern slavery, pay below the minimum wage and worker exploitation continues to be prevented within the industry. As a result of the meeting, Taylor has agreed to organise a workshop for the sector later in the year, to advise as to how the LME intend to look into worker exploitation in the sector and non-compliance with the law and how these issues can be addressed.

BCC deputy chairman, Jim Melvin (pictured with BCC chairman, Paul Thrupp), said: It was a very useful discussion with Mr Taylor, which helped raise the profile of the cleaning and hygiene sector within Government and ensure it is better understood. Our membership of reputable and responsible businesses has always been concerned about any risk of worker exploitation and the payment of illegally low wages within our industry. We continue to promote the undoubted professionalism and high standards within the industry whilst also wanting to prevent workers in the cleaning and hygiene sector being exploited. We are pleased to have had the opportunity to discuss the industry to Mr Taylor and his team and we look forward to working with him in the future to assist in the removal of any of these practices. In the meantime, the BCC would strongly encourage anyone with concerns about worker exploitation in our sector to report it.

For details of how to complain about not being paid the National Minimum Wage, employment agencies, gangmasters or working hours, visit https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pay-and-work-rights-complaints

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BCC works with director of LME to fight worker exploitation - Cleaning & Maintenance

In an age of masks, the mask is off – People’s World

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Phelan M. Ebenhack via AP

In this day and age, with escalating mask requirements by either state, local, or private entities like Wal-Mart, the mask has become a symbol of our broken time.

Yet, in a day and age where masks are becoming more and more a requirement for everyday living due to the COVID-19 crisis, the mask of humanity, justice, rationality, and peace is being torn off the collective face of the American government and politics and replaced with the sneer of the reality television host and the dead eyes of federal troops from unknown agencies.

Take for example billionaire capitalist Elon Musk boldly stating that the political and economic system of the U.S. capitalists can overthrow any government they want. Take for example Trump touting an absolute quack who mentions demon sperm. Take for example the use of mercenaries to suppress the protests in Portland, Oregon. The list goes on and on, but there can be no doubt the simple image of a peaceful, loving republic that would base its decisions on shrewdness and compassion has gone out the proverbial window.

Never before has so much been showcased in American history that could not be considered anything but absolute political decline, though of course, the crimes of the United States should not be news to anyone with a barely working understanding of history, a history that goes deeper and uglier than most Americans may realize or wish to realize.

The United States is in danger of hitting a moment of terminal decline much like a cancer patient, stage four, on their last round of chemo that the patient takes not because of a feeling that things will turn around, but because the show must grimly go on.

The United States potential decline is on a historical scale. The nation is already experiencing a round of deaths that rival a World War.

In the aviation industry, a common phrase shared amongst pilots is the first step to surviving a plane crash is to understand your plane is crashing. The danger is real, the clock is ticking. The margin of error is tiny.

What is to be done, to quote a famous Russian revolutionary? What can we do during such a time when the proverbial national plane is crashing?

The thing we can do is to recognize first that the danger can no longer be disguised. Yes, this country does not care for the poor, otherwise, it would not be haggling over hundreds of dollars per person as opposed to the billions paid out in bailout money that cant be properly traced.

Yes, a national strategy to combat the pandemic was abandoned because Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Trump, said that only blue states run by Democratic Governors were being hit by the virus and thus not worthy of support and easy targets of political blame.

Yes, we do have billionaires like Musk who are openly congratulating themselves on coups supported by our so-called democratic government in order to steal the resources of another country and to murder those who stand its way.

Yes, we do have secret police in the streets of Portland.

Yes, the commander in chief is supporting insanity and his son-in-law is a brutal crook who thought more of how to hurt political opponents than to save lives.

The idea of the United States as we were told about as children does not match up with what we see today.

The mask has come off. We see the face of the beast. What is to be done?

History rarely has been kind to the indecisive and the hesitant. The locomotive of history has started up and will result in either one of two things. As Friedrich Engels once said: Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.

While those words were spoken many years ago, it seems as apt today as it did during the 19th century. Though we are not nearly at the level of barbarism as it was during Engelss day when chattel slavery and crushing poverty were the rule for the so-called industrialized world, it cannot be seen that we are marching forward to a better day and age with massive increases in wealth inequality and declines in life expectancy.

It can be seen that we are approaching a historical moment of reckoning. Fascism is capitalism in decay and with a record 33 percent drop in GDP, capitalism is very much in decay.

It is time to rise up. The plane is crashing. Something needs to be done. And the only solution is a movement of the people to take back control of our lives.

A massive turnout of voters on Nov. 3 to defeat Donald Trump and all his enablers in Congress, the Senate and the state legislative bodies across the country is an essential first step. If we can do that we will better be able to wage the fight that we will have to continue.

As with all op-eds published by Peoples World, this article represents the opinions of its author.

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In an age of masks, the mask is off - People's World

‘Caste’ Explodes The Myth Of American Exceptionalism – HuffPost

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In her new book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, recalls once seeing a small, barely noticeable welt in the corner of a room in her home and deciding it was nothing. But over the years, the welt became a wave that widened and bulged, until the ceiling was bowed. The tiny flaw in the homes structure could only be ignored for so long before it threatened the integrity of the whole.

America is like that old house, Wilkerson observes, and the owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away.

For many Americans, the country now seems to be in that catastrophic phase. The rot cannot be ignored. Tens of thousands have died from the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19; the economy has been devastated by the pandemic, and millions have lost work and face eviction due to the lack of government aid. Protesters have filled the streets of American cities, decrying police brutality against Black people, while police and federal agents respond with rubber bullets, tear gas, and beatings.

The interlocking systems that structure American life no longer seem stable but why?

Some may say its the advent of President Donald Trump, a destructive aberration from our usual political leaders. Others believe the roots lie far deeper. Wilkerson, for example, argues that a caste system as central to [our nations] operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home has both structured American society and led inexorably to its decay.

Wilkerson, the author of the acclaimed The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of Americas Great Migration, traces this caste system back to the colonization of America and the creation of the American slave trade, which arose out of the demand for cheap, virtually limitless labor. Unlike white indentured servants, she writes, African slaves lacked ongoing ties to family or organized labor movements back in England, which could provide aid in eventually seeking wages and freedom. Over time, colonial law began to privilege white indentured servants, at first exempting Christians (at the time roughly synonymous with Europeans) from lifetime enslavement.

As enslaved Africans began to convert to Christianity, however, the rationale evolved and hardened into one of racial difference. Americas rigid caste system, Wilkerson argues, was developed to justify and perpetuate a brutal form of chattel slavery. It made lords of everyone in the dominant caste, she writes. Slavery so perverted the balance of power that it made the degradation of the subordinate caste seem normal and righteous.

After the abolition of slavery, the caste distinction remained vital to the white population who feared losing the psychological wage of a superior rank a fear that has remained powerful in American politics and daily life. Jim Crow enshrined caste into law, but caste, as Wilkerson describes it, is not strictly legal; it also plays out in unequal application of criminal law, or widespread perceptions of Black people as poor or uneducated that shape how they are treated by medical workers, teachers, banks, employers, and police.

This is not exactly new, of course; what Caste proposes is a framework for understanding it not as Americas odd preoccupation with race, but as just one example of a caste system much like others we are familiar with.

Wilkerson turns again and again to metaphors to pin down what caste means exactly, arguing that its not exactly race (though in the U.S. it is inextricable from it), nor is it class. It is, she says, the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. Or it is the play itself, in which the actors wear the costumes of their predecessors and inhabit the roles assigned to them. The people in these roles are not the characters they play, but they have played the roles long enough to incorporate the roles into their very being. Caste is like a corporation that seeks to sustain itself at all costs.

Wilkerson focuses most of her attention, rightly, on the tremendous suffering inflicted by caste on the lowest subordinate group in a system, and on Black Americans in particular. Using studies, historical research, and anecdotes from daily life, she argues that it is caste expectations that frequently exclude Black people from high-status jobs and that scapegoat them for crime and other social ills. These expectations inflict stress especially, she argues, on Black people who defy caste by climbing into higher social classes, which has profound health implications.

Socioeconomic status and the presumed privilege that comes with it do not protect the health of well-to-do African-Americans, she points out. In fact, many suffer a health penalty for their ambitions The stigma and stereotypes they labor under expose them to higher levels of stress-inducing discrimination in spite of, or perhaps because of, their perceived educational or material advantages.

In the current moment, with rioters protesting police killings of Black people, and the coronavirus tearing through Black and brown communities, Wilkersons caste opus is often clarifying. She traces how caste relegates most lower-status people to the type of essential work that forces them to leave home, endangering their health, even as many predominantly white office workers remain safely isolated while working remotely. She examines how it undergirds every interaction between people of different castes, especially as the election of Barack Obama, and then Donald Trump, drove a resurgence of caste policing.

After the 2016 election, she writes, the surveillance of black citizens by white strangers became so common a feature of American life that these episodes have inspired memes of their own. White people calling the cops on Black people entering their own homes or waiting at a Starbucks, she argues, is a distant echo of an earlier time when anyone in the dominant caste was deputized, obligated even, to apprehend any black person during the era of slavery.

In an era of increasingly widespread anti-capitalism, it can be surprising how matter-of-fact Wilkerson is about class hierarchy. Class mostly appears in the book as either a function of caste or a foil to it: Black people are mostly confined to low-wage labor and lower social classes, while some rise to the upper classes but face frequent assumptions that they are unfit to be in upper-class spaces. To limn the precise reach of race-based caste, Wilkerson focuses on those who defy caste-assigned class, especially wealthy Black people. In several anecdotes, including some drawn from her own life, Wilkerson remarks on a Black person being treated rudely despite being expensively dressed, owning a house, or participating in a white-collar professional gathering. The episodes are revealing; they speak to the reality that class does not account for all racial disparities, and that caste functions with and through class rather than being identical to it.

This makes sense, as the project of the book is to tease out what caste is. But the question of class hierarchy lingers tantalizingly. Wilkerson often suggests that hierarchies are natural, provided that the sorting happens through personality, grit, and intelligence rather than caste. She devotes one rather eccentric chapter to the concept of alphas, digging into the science of wolf pack hierarchies to argue that one harm of caste is to force people from dominant castes to behave as alphas and to suppress natural alphas from lower castes into subordinate roles. In her disproportionate interest in the individual experience of upper-class people from lower castes, like herself, and her apparent acceptance of class as a reasonable hierarchy, Wilkerson neglects to explore the full implications of how the intersection of caste and class disadvantage poor Black people. As long as class hierarchies are embraced, one is left wondering how injustices like those inflicted by caste might ever be fully eradicated.

If a future utopia fails to materialize in Wilkersons dissection of caste, her macro-level analysis of the caste system itself is more fruitful. Her exploration of why caste provides a rickety framework for society as a whole is particularly illuminating, exposing how Americas vulnerability to the pandemic arose is rooted in the neglect and vilification of the lower castes. Both the ebola and the coronavirus pandemics, she argues, exemplify the dangers of creating scapegoat lower classes on whom to offload societal anxieties. By treating these illnesses as exotic diseases faced by poor, underdeveloped nations populated by lower-caste people, white Americans failed to realize that they could easily fall victim to the same virus. This was a problem for Africa, seen as a place of misfortune filled with people of the lowest caste, not the primary concern of the Western powers, she writes of the anemic involvement of the U.S. in finding treatments for ebola during the epidemic in West Africa. This dynamic continues to play out today, as white Americans defy masking and social distancing guidance perhaps partly because COVID-19 originated in China and has disproportionately sickened Black and brown people, allowing white people to dismiss it as a disease of the lower castes very likely fueling outbreaks that leave Americans of all races dead.

The myth of American exceptionalism is enduring though frequently debunked. The nations centuries-old pattern of imperialism and violent racial subjugation has always been presented to the world as natural and inescapable, where other countries systematic oppression and genocide of certain groups are framed as human rights violations, a function of the United Statess wealth and influence rather than its morality.

Wilkerson matter-of-factly punctures this inflated image not just by examining the unique cruelties of American caste, but by refusing to present it as utterly exceptional. She compares the American racial caste to the lingering, millennia-long Indian caste system and the accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system implemented in Nazi Germany. The similarities between the systems are clearly laid out and convincing; Nazis, as she notes, even researched Jim Crow law as a model for instituting legal restrictions on Jews.

Yet the comparison has already drawn outrage. Bari Weiss referenced the argument, which Wilkerson advanced last month in a New York Times feature adapted from the book, in her public resignation letter as an example of the hostile working environment she claimed she faced at the Times. The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people, she wrote. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its diversity; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.

For immigrants separated from their children and held in detention centers, or Black people funneled into the prison industrial system at hugely disproportionate rates, this characterization of American caste may not seem distant from their own lives at all. But it is distant from the American self-mythology, honed over centuries, which positions the United States as a country uniquely devoted to freedom, tolerance and justice.

People bridle instinctively at stigmatizing comparisons. Wilkerson points out that [t]he dominant caste resists comparison to lower-caste people, even the suggestion that they have anything in common or share basic human experiences, as this diminishes the dominant-caste person and forces the contemplation of equality with someone deemed lower. Many may balk, as Weiss did, at the idea that Americas racial caste system can be put in the same category as that of Nazi Germany. But Wilkersons brutal accounting of the unimaginable cruelty inflicted under slavery, Jim Crow and the following decades makes a powerful case that white Americans resist being shocked and a bit peeved and acknowledge the truth revealed by her comparisons.

American exceptionalism is a lie. To fix our broken country, we have to learn not just from our own crimes, but from how much like other evil-doers we actually are.

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Tech Billionaires Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk Have Made $115 Billion This Year – NDTV

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Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos has seen his net worth soar by $63.6 billion this year.

The message from Jeff Bezos: Big Tech's not so powerful.

The message from his personal fortune: Oh yes it is.

As Bezos and three other technology magnates prepare to defend their businesses at a Congressional hearing on antitrust worries Wednesday, their fast-growing wealth provides a breathtaking measure of their companies' economic might. The Amazon.com Inc. founder has seen his net worth soar by $63.6 billion this year. On one day this month, it leaped an unprecedented $13 billion. The world's richest man is now on the cusp of another record: a fortune exceeding $200 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Another chief executive officer set to testify, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook Inc., has grown $9.1 billion richer this year, placing his fortune within reach of the centibillionaire status already held by Bezos and Bill Gates.

The mind-boggling accumulation of money underway in technology is unrivaled in speed and scale. No other group of executives has prospered to such a degree. Indeed, the world's richest people are growing even richer, even faster, as the coronavirus pandemic upends the global economy and drives ever more activity online.

Online Economy

"We moved the brick-and-mortar economy to an online economy dramatically," said Luigi Zingales, a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. "Probably the same thing would have happened in a longer period of time. Now it's happening in weeks instead of years."

The hearing will be held by video conference and also features Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, the CEOs of Apple Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc. It's poised to be a combative affair as lawmakers express heightened frustration with how the industry wields its clout.

Bezos's stance will be that his company is an American success story that achieved its position through risk-taking and a relentless focus on customers, according to his prepared testimony. He will tell his personal story and that of his parents, who invested in what would become the world's largest online retailer.

The collective wealth of tech billionaires in Bloomberg's index, a ranking of the world's 500 richest people, has nearly doubled since 2016, from $751 billion to $1.4 trillion today. That's faster than in every other sector.

Seven of the world's 10 richest people derive the bulk of their fortune from technology holdings, with a combined net worth of $666 billion, up $147 billion this year.

Big winners so far in 2020 include Elon Musk, whose net worth has more than doubled to $69.7 billion on the back of surging Tesla Inc shares.

Microsoft Corp. co-founder Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer have also soared, long after they left the company. Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, whose fortune is tied up in the world's largest oil refinery -- has also profited from the shift online. Shares of Reliance Industries Ltd., the conglomerate he controls, have risen 45% this year as the company has expanded into digital and retail businesses, making him the fifth richest person in the world.

Among the top 10, only two have seen their wealth decline in 2020: luxury mogul Bernard Arnault and Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s Warren Buffett. While tech has surged, more than 200 of the 500 billionaires tracked by Bloomberg have lost money this year.

Giant tech companies control the infrastructure of the digital economy in a similar vein to how Gilded Age trusts monopolized America's industrial economy at the turn of the 20th century. Yet in 1900, the five largest U.S. companies had combined market values that equaled less than 6% of the nation's economy, according to estimates by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Daron Acemoglu.

Currently, five of the largest American tech companies -- Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, and Microsoft -- have market valuations equivalent to about 30% of U.S. gross domestic product. That's almost double what they were at the end of 2018.

The economic power of the Robber Barons created a fiery counter-reaction, in violent labor unrest and the adoption of reforms that once seemed radical, like the Sherman Antitrust Act and a federal income tax. Compared to the political difficulties faced by John D. Rockefeller and other early 20th-century industrial magnates, government moves against Big Tech have been relatively mild. At least so far.

On the left, politicians including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have delivered blistering attacks on widening inequality and the growing wealth of billionaires. Protesters have gathered outside Bezos's Manhattan penthouse, demanding a wealth tax. Facebook employees have spoken out about their employer's role in spreading disinformation and hate speech..

New Gilded Age

Monopolists like Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie helped repair their public images with large-scale philanthropy, a move echoed in this new Gilded Age.

The Giving Pledge, a commitment to give away the majority of your wealth in your lifetime, was founded by Gates and Buffett. Zuckerberg also has stepped into the realm of philanthropy, establishing the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or CZI, in 2015 with a goal to "advance human potential and promote equality."

But even these acts have sparked criticism.

"The modern ultra-billionaire is someone who feels a right, in many cases, to privately govern the people of the United States," said Anand Giridharadas, author of "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World," an influential critique of billionaire philanthropy.

Gates's generosity and activism during the pandemic has earned him widespread praise, but it's also attracted conspiracy theorists suspicious of his motives. A YouGov and Yahoo News poll found that 44% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats believed Gates wanted to use vaccinations to give people tracking implants.

The criticism of Bezos also hasn't let up, even as his giving increased recently with a $10 billion commitment in February to fight climate change and a $100 million donation in April to the nonprofit Feeding America. When he made the announcements, his wealth had already grown by significantly more than those amounts this year. He hasn't signed the Giving Pledge.

Signed Pledge

MacKenzie Scott, Bezos's ex-wife, signed the pledge not long after the two announced their split. Scott said Tuesday that she has since donated $1.7 billion to several causes including racial equity, climate change and public health.

"There's no question in my mind that anyone's personal wealth is the product of a collective effort, and of social structures which present opportunities to some people, and obstacles to countless others," she said.

Big Tech companies have earned some grudging respect, even from critics, during the pandemic.

"We have been fortunate to have these digital technologies," said MIT's Acemoglu. "Without them, the fallout from the lockdowns and social distancing would have been worse."

That may come with a cost: "This is going to make the domination of tech companies over the economy and our social lives much worse, and it's going to significantly accelerate the trend toward greater automation," Acemoglu said. He warns that tech's rapid ascent may deepen inequality, shrink the number of good jobs, and weaken democracy.

Such concerns could help shift Big Tech and its billionaires into the crosshairs of governments whose finances have been devastated by the pandemic. Heading into this year's U.S. presidential race, Elizabeth Warren and Sanders proposed wealth taxes on billionaires, an idea that polled well with voters.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, hasn't embraced the wealth tax, but he's campaigning on higher rates on the rich and corporations, as well as the closing of estate-tax loopholes.

Absent a wealth tax or some other innovative new kind of levies, it will be difficult to tax the fortunes of Zuckerberg, Bezos and other tech billionaires. Much of their fortune is in the form of rising stock, which isn't taxed until it's sold.

"Billionaires are accumulating a huge amount of unrealized capital gains, on which they're not paying much -- if any -- tax," said University of California at Berkeley economics professor Gabriel Zucman, who helped Sanders and Warren develop their wealth-tax proposals.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

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Tech Billionaires Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk Have Made $115 Billion This Year - NDTV

Federally Chartered Banks Approved to Provide Custody of Cryptocurrency – Lexology

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On July 22, 2020, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued an interpretive letter confirming that national banks and savings associations may provide cryptocurrency custody and related services. National banks have long provided safekeeping and custody services for a wide variety of customer assets, including both physical objects and electronic assets, and the extension of these services to cryptocurrency is a modern form of these traditional activities.

In the letter, the OCC acknowledged that the provision of custody services could involve a range of services, from safekeeping to non-fiduciary and fiduciary custody. Depending on the type of custody service, banks will be able to provide a range of ancillary services, including facilitating cryptocurrency and fiat currency exchange transactions, transaction settlement, trade execution, record keeping, valuation, tax services, reporting and other appropriate services.

The OCC stresses that banks will need to apply effective risk management practices, as required under law, to any potential cryptocurrency custody services, and have adequate systems in place to identify, measure, monitor, and control the risks of its custody services. In particular, the OCC states that banks should include the following systems:

The OCC suggests that banks should also consider special controls for settlement of transactions, physical access controls, and security servicing. These controls would need to be tailored in the context of digital custody.

Finally, the OCC states the banks will need to address the risks associated with an individual account prior to acceptance through a sound know-your-customer and due diligence process. In summary, the OCCs letter is an overdue measure and tacitly recognizes that cryptocurrency is not an irregular and unusual asset. This development effectively expands the number of types of entities that provide cryptocurrency custody, allowing national banks to compete with state-chartered entities.

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How to unearth the different scams in Cryptocurrency Exchanges? – YourStory

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With a rise in the tendency to make a quick buck, Cryptocurrency Exchanges have emerged in different parts of the globe courtesy friendly regulations and crashes in financial markets. As the number of users and volume of trades reaches new heights, it is important to take precautionary measures from scams. Scams rob not only funds but also the reputation of cryptocurrencies.

Investors can avoid the above scams and stay safe by installing top-notch security features in their respective accounts. Taking steps such as two-factor authentication, reserving funds in cold wallets, double-checking cryptocurrency addresses before finalizing deals, and keeping their private keys safely with themselves will go a long way in preventing the occurrence of such dangerous scams.

Want to make your startup journey smooth? YS Education brings a comprehensive Funding Course, where you also get a chance to pitch your business plan to top investors. Click here to know more.

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Making money on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency futures – htxt.africa

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Written by Noah Abbe, analyst and trader at BTCC UK

Traders all around the world are always looking for opportunities to make money. With progression of time and technological advancements, the traders life and opportunities have evolved along as well. Introduction of virtual financial assets, along with the popularity of the futures of virtual currency has brought interest from traders globally.

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency launched in 2009 and remained relatively low in terms of value the first few years until reaching a massive high in 2017 and staying close to a $10K mark now.

Looking at the chart above, having traded below a $2 000 mark until 2017, there was an upsurge in price where the return went as high as to 10 times in a single year.

That makes it a 10x or 1 000 percent in a single year of holding. Not just that, Bitcoin has provided immense such gains each year, with volatility so great that a trader could have made more than a 10x/1 000 percent each year in the previous three years just by trading.

In December of 2017, the two largest global exchanges the CBOE and CME launched the derivatives for Bitcoin which allowed the traders to take benefit of leverage Bitcoin trading.

The futures then allowed the traders to take a long as well as a short position on the Bitcoin letting the traders take benefit of each and every available opportunity that grew out as a result of rising volatility.

Looking at the graph above, it can be easily seen that BTC futures was close to $7 000 at the start of the year, where they rose to $10 000 mark, fell down to $5 000 during the ongoing pandemic, beginning in March 2020.

Soon thereafter, recovery of Bitcoin started and the futures rose as well. The retracement is now close to a 100 percent from the beginning of 2020 in February and currently trades close to $9 270 for a contract.

Let us consider if there are any opportunities available.

Just looking at the above available graph, there is another possibility of Bitcoin Futures.

The moment the futures break above the $9 500 mark, the futures would be moving up towards the $10 400 mark in a matter of a few days. Since the futures work on the underlying commodity which in this case is Bitcoin itself, this means that Bitcoin is ready to provide a move as well.

The lower black line should be the stopping point for any long move, where the upper pink line noting 2020 Febs previous top as the likely target.

Having earned a technical view, I decided to go long on a 10x leverage where I enter when Bitcoin has provided me a breakout above $9 500.

I keep my target as $10 400 with a stop of $9 320. In that case, my stop-loss is $180 for the move while my target is $900 on the long move, making my Risk to Reward Ratio (RR Ratio) 1:5.

On every $1 that I have put at stake to lose on the basis of the wrong view, I can earn $5 A view that is prepared on technical basis led by experience, a defined stop-loss and moves is not gambling.

Instead, its an opportunity to trade. And the stop-loss, if taken, are the costs of doing business.

So, lets explain the above example in detail.

Lets say, I went long at $9 500 with a 20x leverage buying 1BTC contract each. So, I have now effectively exposure of 20BTC.

The money at risk that I have is 20 times the $180, making it $3 600 as the amount that I can lose. On the other hand, given that my technical view is right, on my exposure of position, I can in against make 20 x $900 = $18 000.

So, given that my RR ratio is good enough and I am making the right moves, assuming I took five trades and only one of them went right, I would still not be in a loss, if my three out of five or four out of five trades go right.

With a preview given on how to trade the contracts of Bitcoin futures, let us now speak about which platform to choose for your trading.

You need a platform which is safe, offers you a good leverage option and enough liquidity with low costs of position. For this purpose, I suggest BTCC.com.

It has options of letting you trade at a 100x leverage, with signup free bonus of $1 000 and allows you to trade nine pairs of major cryptocurrencies which include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, EOS, Bitcoin Cash, XRP, ADA, XLM and Dash.

The signup option takes 30 seconds and the charting option that the platform provides is extremely lucrative. It also offers a customer service option and financial security, making it one of the best available options globally.

Find out how to make your first Bitcoin or crypto futures trade on BTCC here.

Disclaimer: There are risks attached to investing, trading and speculating. With hefty gains, there is always a risk of losing your money given that you are not adequately taking care of it. It is advised that you follow safety measures which could include using technical entries, stop loss(es) and targeted exits. Understanding leverage is significant. Consulting your independent financial advisor before entering into any commercial trade is highly advisable.

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Compliant Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchanges Accounted for Only 1% of the Trading Volume of the Sector During Q2 2020 with $21.62 Billion in…

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The overall performance of the nascent cryptocurrency market during Q2 2020 was not as good as it was when compared to the previous quarter.

According to Token Insight, the main reason for the relatively poor performance this past quarter may be attributed to very little fluctuation in the price of Bitcoin (BTC) and other major digital assets.

The Token Insight team pointed out in its report that the BTC and larger crypto market trading during the month of June 2020 remained sideways.

The report states that the positive market sentiment due to the Bitcoin (BTC) halving in May 2020 has now been exhausted. The report also mentions that when the money-making effect is low, the entire market is relatively quiet.

According to research conducted by Token Insight, industry participants believed that the cryptocurrency derivatives market, particularly the competition in contract-based transactions, will become more intensified in the near future.

The researchers claim that this will be due to incomplete product forms of different cryptocurrency exchanges at this particular stage. They argue that if and when similar products (for example, forward perpetual, reverse perpetual, delivery, and options) are complete, the competitive landscape will change or be broken again.

The research teams findings indicate that Tether (USDT) contracts will continue to occupy the mainstream crypto market. Because of this, crypto exchanges with leading positions in forward contracts should have more of an advantage, the researchers claim.

They noted:

The reverse contract market will continue to exist. At this stage, large positions still account for a relatively high proportion of reverse contracts, especially at the BitMEX exchange.

The transaction volume of deliverable contracts in the cryptocurrency market rose quickly during Q1 2020, the report confirmed. Huobi appears to have offered the most attractive options in this particular market segment, the Token Insight team claims.

The report also pointed out that Binance recently introduced deliverable contracts.

The report predicted:

We [believe] that more exchanges will also launch deliverable contracts in the near future. [However,] the market share of Huobi and OKExs deliverable contracts is likely to fall; Binances deliverable contracts will also occupy part of the market, while Bybit will also gain a certain market share if it launches deliverable contracts.

They added:

The leverage ratio of the overall contract market should be between 20-50 times. The use of high leverage ratio will shorten the life cycle of ordinary users. At this stage, the life cycle of contract users is about two months.

The report revealed that many crypto trading platforms have adopted a customer loss model.

It also mentioned:

After users lose money in the industry, the funds earned by exchanges, and a large part of it is actually transferred out of the industry. Therefore, high-risk, high-leverage and other irregular behaviors in the derivatives field are actually consuming the vitality of the industry and users. Exchanges have to face the problems of high customer acquisition costs and high retention costs.

The report notes that specialization is most likely the future of cryptocurrency-based derivatives trading. It claims that contract fund transactions will account for more trading volume; but at this stage, the imperfect cryptocurrency custody infrastructure will limit the development of GP and LP; and the Counterparty Risk that LPs face is also an important factor.

Crypto exchanges will be competing with each other, more than ever, when it comes to offering the best or most affordable prices, the report states.

According to TokenInsight, transaction fees remain relatively high when compared to traditional market rates. Theres a significant gap among different digital currency exchanges in API, document specification and quality, and the poor infrastructure is also a reason why many professional investors have not yet entered the crypto market, the report revealed.

During Q2 2020, TokenInsight determined that the crypto derivatives market was valued at $2.159 trillion. The estimate is reportedly based on the activity of 42 digital asset exchanges. There was a modest increase of 2.57% in the size of the emerging derivatives market during Q2 2020 when compared to the previous quarter. There was a more impressive year-on-year growth of 165.56%.

Other key findings from the report regarding the digital asset derivatives market are as follows:

(Note: The full report may be accessed here.)

As covered recently, crypto markets are plagued with manipulation, endless wash trading, but industry executives are confident about H2 2020, according to a new report.

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Compliant Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchanges Accounted for Only 1% of the Trading Volume of the Sector During Q2 2020 with $21.62 Billion in...

Regulation of Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in Europe – Euro Weekly News

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Hello everyone! All of you are well aware of the term cryptocurrencies, which are the most common and useful terms nowadays. It is an essential and well-known term which are needed to be understood. Cryptocurrency meaning goes to the assets. It is a term related to the asset and where you can exchange your currency at the digital market place. It is instrumental nowadays in the era of technology and artificial intelligence. Here you can learn about the data controller to transfer your currency and to exchange your money.

The primary purpose is to describe the facts for cryptocurrency and the regulation of cryptocurrency like bitcoin in Europe, which is such the most prominent place to live. Europe is making a lot of progress in every walk of life, and the same is the case with cryptocurrencies. It is trying for more useful ways to regulate the cryptocurrency. In the next section, you will learn about the regulation of the cryptocurrency in Europe using the efficient and the tops ideas. You need to read the full article to know more.

Lets discuss the top and essential regulators of the cryptocurrencies in Europe. All of these are the best and efficient ways that are mentioned by the Financial Stability Board of Europe. These are the following:

European Commission is the first and the most important regulator of the cryptocurrency in Europe. The primary function of the European Commission is to plan, prepare, design, and propose the legislations involving in the cryptocurrency. The commission not only gives you the essential guidelines and the information, but the primary purpose is to stabilize the risks as well.

European Banking Authority also called as EBA is another well important and versatile regulator for the cryptocurrency. The EBAs primary functions include regulating the horizon-scan for innovative products and services in all over Europe. It monitors the aspects of the financial system and how these systems are stable by the countrys laws and regulations.

The main functions of the European Insurance and Occupational Pension Authority are to regulate and develop the methods for the coins currencies to control. It produces all of the important and the needed currencies in the country, including the bitcoin and many others.

European Securities and Markets Authority is another essential and efficient regulators which are called as ESMA. The main functions are to provide all of the necessary and fundamental rules for the cryptocurrency regulation. Not only has this, but it also provided the financial improvements providing the cryptocurrencies ideas.

Europe is making a ton of progress in these fields and is making the advancements, but it is still doing the best to improve the cryptocurrency so that you can learn more about bitcoin trader. It has made a lot of improvements and is looking for more. In recent days in 2020, it has made the new policies and new rules for the regulation of the cryptocurrency. The people working for the cryptocurrency are those who are making a lot of struggle for the improvements and all experts. The trends and the new advancements are given in the next sections.

Fifth-Anti Money Laundering Directive (5AMLD) is the agency that works with legislations and make advancements. It brings the rules for the cryptocurrency exchange according to the new and upcoming ideas. Recently it has made the exchange rules in January 2020 and is getting a lot of achievements according to the planning. It has made several procedures as well for the regulation of the cryptocurrency.

5AMLD is just a nutshell in Europe that is making several advancements. The primary purpose is to look for how much the regulations are accepted and applied by all countries. The rules must be followed by the customers and the newcomers in the cryptocurrency states. It has created a phrase which to Know Your Customers called the KYC.

KYC is doing a lot of efficiency in this field, and the main of these is to look that how many people are doing the best in the cryptocurrency regulation just like bitcoin and how many people have been identified for this job. Million of the people are doing the succession by making the regulations in cryptocurrency and doing the best job in this field.

Several personalities are doing a great job and creating the new advancements because they are a member of the 5AMLD. The EU is making more progress day by day and is getting success in the regulation of the cryptocurrency. The exciting aspect is the KYC strategy, which is working at the tops level in the EU.

There is no doubt that Europe is making a lot of progress and success in cryptocurrency regulation like bitcoin. It is still keen and curious for the future advancements and is more furious for the next prospective. A lot of strategies are working, and a lot of plans are upcoming on the way.

The article is about the cryptocurrency regulation in Europe, as the bitcoin currencies. All of the critical regulators and the relevant agencies which are serving the entire EU are mentioned above. You are advised to follow the above regulators in the EU if you are living in Europe, and you can even use these all using your online sources. No matter where you are. Europe has made a lot of progress in this field but is looking for more advancement. The main reasons for the success in the cryptocurrency regulation include the 5AMLD and KYC. KYC is the basic need to be successful, according to the European people. These are all about the essential aspects, and the EU is still making new ideas. If you have more questions regarding the cryptocurrency regulation in Europe, you are welcome and feel free to ask any time you want.

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