Monthly Archives: April 2022

(Briana Scroggins | Special to The Tribune) Utah independent Evan McMullin walks with supporters to the auditorium during the Utah Democratic Convention at Cottonwood High School in Murray, Utah on Saturday, April 23, 2022.

By James Hansen | Special to The Tribune

| April 29, 2022, 2:30 p.m.

This past weekend, independent Evan McMullin successfully pulled the wool over the eyes of the Utah Democratic Party. Masquerading as a healthy alternative to U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, a slight majority of Utah Democratic Convention delegates opted not to advance their candidate, Kael Weston, to shoehorn Democrats across the state into supporting McMullins Not Mike Lee campaign.

In an opinion piece to The Salt Lake Tribune, Weston writes a clear and scathing criticism of McMullins key message, Campaigning against someone is not enough. This election year we should insist that candidates address the issues that matter to Utah families. Voters deserve to hear what candidates are for and how they intend to help improve our lives and futures.

Evan McMullin is a D.C. man through and through. Statements from his 2016 campaign are indicative of a candidate who would support expanding the defense budget, more conflicts and interventions abroad, tougher civilian-killing sanctions on uncooperative nations, anti-LGBTQ and marriage equality, expansion of federal powers to surveil and apprehend U.S. citizens and follow GOP party leadership in partisan voting.

With a resume that includes CIA operative, Wall Street banker and GOP analyst and consultant, we can easily predict McMullins political career style and focus. Federal power and special interests. Evan McMullin is the poster child of Wall Street and the Pentagon, precisely the kind of person Utahns should not elect.

I am offering a stark contrast to Evan McMullins and Mike Lees campaigns for Utahns to choose from this Fall. As a father of four, working as a high school physics teacher and coach, I have an authentic and grounded connection to the issues facing our students, families and communities. I am striving to bring a focus to tax burdens on lower and middle-class families of our state, the ballooning defense budget and the fallout of decades of warfare, removing barriers to quality primary care to improve health outcomes, protecting our environment and managing our precious water resources, defending the rights of LGBTQ Utahns to have fair and equal treatment under the law, eliminating subsidies/bailouts for oil and gas and all special interests, criminal justice reform and greater accountability in our law enforcement agencies and connecting federal education dollars to the student and their outcomes, not institutions.

Pressing issues need fixing in our great nation, and there is no time to squander on partisan politics and fearmongering. I promise to go to Washington with a deep focus on these issues and work with like-minded members of Congress to accomplish them, party affiliation be damned!

I invite you to visit my campaign website at JimmyForUtah.com and read more about the key issues facing Utahns and how I propose to solve them.

James Hansen is the Utah Libertarian Party nominee for U.S Senate. He resides in Heber City and teaches physics and geology at Wasatch High.

Here is the original post:
McMullins is a DC man through and through and won't do what Utah voters need. - Salt Lake Tribune

Dear Capitolisters,

As Ive mentioned here before, I hail from the right side of the libertarian spectrum and have long worked with conservatives, center-right media, and Republican politicians on various policy issues.Back then, wed surely disagree on specific line itemsIraq or the drug war, for examplebut we always shared a core belief in certain fundamental principles about government, public policy, and life.These principles, not necessarily shared by the left (for better or worse), ensured that wed remain close allies in the political arena, regardless of our disagreements on discrete issues. (I even recall one time scoffing at a former colleagues liberaltarian project in the early 2000s, because the left and libertarians had far more fundamental disagreements about natural rights, limited government, the rule of law, and related issues.)

As readers of The Dispatch are surely aware, this fusionist alliance has, in recent years, frayed, with many self-identified conservatives today accusing us libertarians of not only being turtleneck-wearing, election-losing chart jockeys but actually causing many of the rights (and Americas) problems.But I think the Florida-Disney sagaparticularly many mainstream conservatives reactions theretomay take the schism to a whole new (and bad) level and reveal in the process that, if this is the new conservatism its not very conservative at all.

Follow this link:
What's Conservative About the New Conservatism? - The Dispatch

Switzerland's tech-neutral approach to regulation has created a fertile ground for bitcoin adoption

Ask the average person in the street what they think about bitcoin, and youre likely to hear one of two responses: either its an earth-shattering invention thatll transform global finance; or its a dodgy game for fraudsters and speculators thatll end in tears.

Bitcoins tendency to divide opinions isnt surprising. The blockchain technology its built on is a complex invention, only deeply understood by programmers and mathematicians. Its also relatively new the first bitcoin block was mined just 13 years ago so there hasnt been much time for governments, academics and the media to wrap their heads around the subject.

What everyone seems to agree on and what fuels much of the skepticism about bitcoin is the fact that its early history was entwined with criminality and an ultra-libertarian worldview that bordered on anarchism.

It was the cypherpunk movement of the 1990s that laid the foundations for bitcoin, coalescing a community of geeks around the shared belief that cryptography a form of digital encryption could protect global citizens from intrusion by all-seeing governments, intelligence agencies and corporations.

Whether Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoins creator, saw himself as part of the cypherpunk movement isnt clear. His invention used cryptography in a more nuanced way: sidelining central banks by creating a decentralized form of digital money. Nonetheless, most of bitcoins early use cases were illicit extorting hacking ransoms, for example, or selling drugs on the dark web so the link with anarchism became entrenched.

Fast forward to today, and bitcoin is a very different animal. The worlds oldest and largest cryptocurrency now has a market cap of $735 billion; its spawned thousands of rivals and a new industry of Decentralized Finance (DeFi); two countries El Salvador and the Central African Republic treat it as legal tender; financial institutions hoard it as digital gold; and the endless applications of blockchain have fueled innovation in every business sector on the planet.

One country, in particular, seems determined to help bitcoin and blockchain grow out of their roots in the cypherpunk movement and spread their wings as avowedly mainstream technologies.

The financially innovative, politically libertarian nation of Switzerland has already made strides in legitimizing bitcoin. In the town of Zug, SEBA Bank, one of two Swiss crypto banks, is reporting a surge in institutional demand for cryptocurrencies thanks to its myriad regulatory licenses. In Zurich, Sygnum, the other crypto bank, is using blockchain-specific laws to create a new form of tokenized art investments. And in Lugano, the municipal government backed by stablecoin issuer Tether is exploring how to make its local economy run almost entirely on cryptocurrency.

Developments like these are probably not what the cypherpunks had in mind when they first heard of bitcoin. But Swiss officials make no apologies for their pragmatic approach.

To the contrary, an administrative unit of the federal government thats tasked with regulating and promoting international finance is pulling out all the stops to put a friendly face on the new, crypto-centric digital economy.

Much of the ecosystem you see flourishing not just in Switzerland, but also abroad is probably going against the initial idea of the crypto anarchists, explains Nino Landerer, head of capital markets & infrastructure at the State Secretariat for International Finance (SIF), which is based in Switzerlands capital Bern and comes under the responsibility of the finance ministry.

[The original vision for bitcoin was] having a fully decentralized system where everyone manages his or her own keys, and no one trusts anyone, but they can all verify everything. That was the ultimate basic idea in Nakamotos white paper. And some tech people believe in that fundamental philosophy. But that's not the ecosystem we see. We see a rather centralized ecosystem. We see service providers like banks who are providing services to clients. And their clients trust the banks not the DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology that helps make bitcoin secure).

So it's really kind of building up a similar system to what we already have just based on cryptoassets.

Many of the industry experts who are trying to make bitcoin a part of everyday life seem to agree. Paolo Ardoino, chief technology officer at Tether, is one of the architects of Luganos Plan B initiative, which envisages the city becoming the European capital of bitcoin. He describes himself as super libertarian but is quick to add: You also have to be realistic.

We need regulation and we need laws, Ardoino says. You can be an anarchist when you are with a few of your friends. But if youre actually living in a country and you want to build infrastructure, you cannot be an anarchist.

Switzerlands attempt to find a middle ground involves falling back on the governments longstanding claim of tech neutrality. Rather than developing regulation for certain technologies and, in doing so, showing an indirect preference for them the country favors a catch-all approach of regulating activities. Thus when crypto banks like SEBA and Sygnum offer custody for bitcoin deposits, their services are held to the same standards and obligations that apply when traditional banks custody fiat deposits.

The advantage of this approach, officials say, is that it allows the rules to be applied universally in fast-moving situations. When sanctions were imposed on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, for example, cryptoassets were explicitly included without any need for additional, sector-specific regulation.

As well as influencing the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) particularly in relation to Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) compliance the philosophy of tech neutrality affected how lawmakers drafted last years DLT Act.

Instead of writing brand new legislation for bitcoin and other blockchains, the government made ten separate amendments to pre-existing laws some more than a century old bringing them up-to-date while harmonizing the rules for traditional financial entities and newer fintech players. The need to get a handle on the market had become particularly apparent during the boom in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) a few years earlier, Landerer says, referring to the cryptocurrency equivalent of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), in which tech firms raise funds by issuing digital tokens.

These legislative changes didnt come out of the blue, he insists. It was around 2017 that they became more salient, and the government decided it needed to do something.

Doing something doesn't mean kill it, but embrace it to the extent that it can be useful, while also making clear that it shouldn't be the Wild West ... [You want to] create a framework to enable innovative business models and financial services, but also account for the risks in terms of money laundering, in terms of financial stability, in terms of reputation.

Nino Landerer, head of capital markets & infrastructure at the State Secretariat for International ... [+] Finance (SIF), an administrative unit of the Swiss finance ministry

Asked about specific provisions in the DLT Act that have helped the crypto sector move forward, Landerer cites three areas.

First, the legal recognition of ledger-based securities that enable peer-to-peer transfers without a central intermediary; Sygnum has already exploited this change of contractual law by pioneering Art Security Tokens (ASTs). Second, the integration of DLT trading and settlement layers into one single step an upgrade that significantly boosts the efficiency of digital trading platforms, and thats only possible thanks to the immutable nature of blockchains. Third, the separation of cryptoassets during insolvencies.

There are many other areas that still require legal and regulatory clarity, of course chief among them DeFi protocols. But theres also no shortage of private-sector entities looking to work with SIF and FINMA as they navigate these uncharted waters.

You can be assured there's hundreds of pages going back and forth between the regulators and us, says Mathias Imbach, Sygnums co-founder and group chief executive. We see ourselves as a player who can help to address these challenges.

I'll give you some examples ... What is it on a bank's balance sheet if you have exposure to a decentralized liquidity pool? How do you manage that from an Excel accounting standpoint? What does it mean for your liquidity ratio? Is it that you need to have a financial audit on the smart contract every year? That's not possible because it's not a centralized entity. There's questions around who is the counterparty and what does that mean for the bank's risk management operation. There's questions around taxes.

Landerer admits that the cypherpunks would probably find it kind of absurd that regulated banks are now getting involved in DeFi markets a space that exists, by definition, to provide an alternative to banking.

But their involvement means that a field which might otherwise be deemed unscrupulous or disreputable is enjoying a mainstream makeover potentially mirroring bitcoins own evolution from a currency for drug dealers into a store of value for financial institutions. In DeFi many things are not as decentralized as they appear to be, or they would like to be, Landerer argues. Ultimately, when you look under the hood, its actually quite centralized.

For all the talk of tech neutrality, its hard not to wonder: if bitcoin gained popular support as the dominant medium of exchange in Switzerland, would the government seriously embrace its monetary function over, say, the Swiss franc or a future Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)?

Thats a decision for politicians and central banks to make. But, in Landerers mind at least, the question isnt as controversial as it might seem elsewhere in the world.

We have always had private money in Switzerland. Even today, much of the money we use as a medium of exchange is private money its credit from [commercial] banks. As citizens, we don't have access to central bank money in electronic form as of yet. So why would that change?

A more pertinent question, he suggests, is whether a decentralized, proof-of-work cryptocurrency like bitcoin is really capable of being a better medium of exchange than the public and private alternatives. Decentralization in itself is inherently inefficient from a technological standpoint, he points out, referring to the burden of distributing and validating blocks across a DLT network. Attempts are being made to address bitcoins scalability problem with second-layer, off-chain solutions like Lightning, but the jurys still out on their long-term viability.

Overall, thats not the question we need to answer as a regulator whether blockchain technology is really the gamechanging thing that the market thinks, Landerer says. [Our role] is to enable innovation, to allow it to flourish without creating too many tears.

And I think that's the fundamental attitude we have in Switzerland towards any technological innovation. We dont prejudge things.

See original here:
How The Swiss Government Is Helping Bitcoin & Blockchain Technology Grow Up - Forbes

Independent voters will have a lot of power during the midterm election. They outnumber Republicans and Democrats.

"Even though a Republican can say and promise A, B, C, a Democrat can promise D, E, and F, but I might like A and a little bit of E so its not just red and blue anymore," said Esmeralda Villeda, one of the millions of independent voters in the U.S.

Villeda is like many Americans who are frustrated with politics.

I dont watch the news because, at this point, all it is, is 'this candidate said this, this candidate that, let me find something else to talk bad about this person,'" she said. "That's not what politics is about."

Villeda, a Las Vegas native and first-generation Mexican-American, was the first in her family to graduate from high school.

She used to be politically active, even helping national and local political campaigns

Its a little heartbreaking," Villeda said, "because right out of high school, I was full-on Democrat and voting Democrat all the way.

After the 2020 election, Villeda said she was fed up with party politics.

It got very messy. It got very, 'Youre with me or against me,'" Villeda said

According to Gallup, as of March, 40% of voters say they are independent, more than the 28% who say they are Republican and 30% say they are Democrat.

In 2004, 27% of voters identified as independent, while Republicans made up 38% of voters and Democrats made up 35%.

I think thats one of the things you see nationally is this sort of swinging from Democrat to Republican control, youre seeing voters say no to both parties not saying yes to either one here," said University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) political science professor David Damore.

Damore has taught politics at UNLV for 22 years. Non-partisan and minor party voters, like Libertarians, now make up the largest group of voters in Nevada, which has one of the fastest-growing populations in the country.

Damore said Nevada has seen a non-partisan voter boost because of the state's automatic voter registration. New residents are registered to vote when they get a driver's license and non-partisan is the default option.

Damore contends non-partisan voters have a lot of power.

You look back in '16, Trump carried them narrowly here, they shifted to Biden two years ago, so its a real uncertainty here," Damore said.

This November, U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, could be voted out. Independents could be the group tips the scales in favor of a Republican challenger.

A lot of them are new to the state, so the question is how much are they going to spend learning about these candidates or are they just going to go with the national flow," Damore contemplated.

Independents might have even more power if people like Jeremy Gruber get their way.

His nonpartisan, nonprofit group, Open Primaries Education Fund, is pushing for all states to open their primary elections to independent voters.

This year, 12 states are not allowing independents to vote in primaries. They will only be allowed to participate in general elections.

Theyre taxpayer-funded. We pay millions of dollars every year to fund primaries," Gruber said. "They are for all intents and purposes public elections, but we let the parties decide which members of the public can participate."

This fall, Villeda will vote in her first election as a non-partisan and she is OK with it. She will be voting for the person, not the party.

"This what America is," she said. "We have a right to our own voice."

Read this article:
The power of the independent voter - Denver 7 Colorado News

Andrew Adams| State Journal-Register

Fifty-one years ago, the Occupational Safety and Health Act went into effect. Since 1989, the day has been commemorated byAmerican labor unions as Workers Memorial Day.

On Thursday morning,the AFL-CIO hosted its annual memorial service to honor the day, the first time its been held in-person since the start of the pandemic.

This year's service was dedicated to Deidre Silas, a Springfield resident and Department of Children and Family Services worker who was killed on the job earlier this year.

Silas' family attended the ceremony. Herfather,Roy Graham, placed a rose on a replica of the Illinois Workers Memorial statue in Silas' memory as part of the ceremony.

Past coverage: Family, friends, co-workers remember Silas during services at Union Baptist Church

Graham was joined by other relatives of workers who died on the job as well as their "union brothers and sisters," who placed 75 roses to honor the dead.

The 75 workers all died since the Workers Memorial Day tradition began in the 10-county area covered by the local AFL-CIO's Springfield and Central Illinois Trades and Labor Council. About half of Illinois' 22 AFL-CIO councils held similar events around the state.

Silas' death motivated several lawmakers to push for new standards for DCFS this spring, resulting in the legislature passing several new laws, including one granting DCFS workers the option to carry pepper spray or mace if they've been trained and one granting the family of those killed on the job ancillary benefits, such as health insurance.

"It's not a political issue, it's a workplace safety issue," said state Sen. Doris Turner, D-Springfield, who co-sponsored both of those bills.

Despite multiple attempts, Turner was unsuccessful at passing the Knight-Silas Legacy Act, a proposal first introduced by Rep. Tony McCombie, R-Savanna, after the death of Pamela Knight, another DCFS worker who died on the job. Turner said she is looking to bring that bill back up for consideration in this fall's legislative veto session.

"The only way way we can continue to put workplace safety on the front burner is to have days like thisto honor our brothers and sisters for the sacrifice they made and at the same time, advocate for laws that will protect workers, so we can eliminate workplace death and injuries,"said Tim Drea, president of the Illinois AFL-CIO.

In Illinois, 135 people died on the job in 2020,according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's just over one workplace fatality every three days.

Nationwide, there were 4,764 fatal work injuries, meaning somewhere in the country, a worker died every 111 minutes.

2020 saw the fewest workplace fatalities of any year since 2013 nationwide and the fewest workplace fatalities in Illinois since 1996, the first year for which statistics are available.

Though the numbers have been decreasing, labor advocates and officials within workplace safety agencies around the country believe that more must be done to reduce the number of workplace deaths.

"We have to keep fighting until every worker is able to go home to their familyat the end of the day, safe and healthy," said Natalicia Tracy, senior policy adviser at OSHA during the Department of Labor's Workers Memorial Day service.

Illinoisans are preparing to make a decision about the future of organized labor later this year, when a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the rights of workers to "organize and to bargain collectively" will be put to voters on the ballot at the Nov. 8 election.

"Workplace safety is why we're advocating for the passage of the Illinois Workers Rights Amendment," said Drea in a speech at the memorial.

The amendment was approved by the General Assembly in 2021, with the language that will appear on the ballot approved this year on April 9.

Read the language of the amendment.

"They normally vote for Democrats, Republicans, independents or Libertarians," said Drea. "This time, the first question on the ballot, they can vote for themselves."

Drea added that the amendment will help workers ensure their workplaces are safe in addition to protecting collective bargaining in Illinois.

The amendment gained bipartisan support in both chambers of the Illinois legislature, passing on a 49-7 vote in the Senate and 80-30-3 vote in the House. All of those who voted against the amendment are Republicans.

But others have already started to fight the measure in the courts.

Last week, lawyers from the conservative Liberty Justice Center and the Illinois Policy Institute, a conservative think tank,filed a lawsuit against the state board of elections arguing that the language of the amendment is too broad.

"If Illinois were seeking solely to make right-to-work unconstitutional in Illinois, the phrasing would have reflected that, as it did in a previous version of this amendment filed in 2019," said Mailee Smith,director of labor policy and staff attorney at the Illinois Policy Institute in a statement."Instead, the current phrasing creates a litany of problems, could lead to unparalleled power by a special interest group and most importantly, is unconstitutional.

Smith and lawyers from the Liberty Justice Center argue in the lawsuitthat because the amendment regulates private sector unions, it conflicts with the federal National Labor Relations Act. They say because the federal constitution says federal law takes precedence over state laws,the amendment is unconstitutional.

This is the first time the two conservative organizations have partnered since they argued the U.S. Supreme Court caseJanus v. AFSCME, in which the Supreme Court found that government employees cannot be required to pay union fees as part of their employment.

Here is the original post:
As Illinois gears up to vote on workers' rights, unions remember those killed on the job - The State Journal-Register

Age: 68

Occupation: Nebraska Lieutenant Governor since 2013

Political party: Republican

Mike Foley was the state auditor for two terms then ran for governor in 2014, lost to Pete Ricketts, and was appointed by Ricketts as his running mate to become the current lieutenant governor. Foley couldve run for governor again, but he said he decided to run for auditor because of his skills and interests.

"I enjoyed my work as state auditor when I previously held that position. I was a very aggressive state auditor, worked very hard to expose waste, fraud inefficiency in government operations and root that out of the system," he said.

Foley intends to focus on the largest agency in state government, the Department of Health and Human Services, if elected. He said hes in the best position to be state auditor because he understands the complexities of state government and has worked there for 22 years, including six years in the Legislature.

"I look forward to returning to that [auditor's] office where I can do some more good work for the people of Nebraska, to protect their hard earned tax dollars from being wasted," he said.

Optometrist Katrina Tomsen of Upland is also running for the seat unopposed with the libertarian party.

Link:
Meet the Republican Candidates for State Auditor and Treasurer - Nebraska Public Media | News