(By Brett Rowland, The Center Square) The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Binance, the largest cryptocurrency asset trading platform in the world, for allegedly misusing customer money and operating an illegal exchange.
The lawsuit filed Monday named Binance Holdings Ltd., Binance.com; U.S.-based affiliate, BAM Trading Services Inc., which, together with Binance, operates the crypto asset trading platform, Binance.US; and founder Changpeng Zhao.
The suit accuses Zhao and Binance of lying when they claimed that Binance.US was created as a separate, independent trading platform for U.S. investors when in reality Zhao and Binance secretly controlled the platform’s operations.
“We allege that Zhao and Binance entities engaged in an extensive web of deception, conflicts of interest, lack of disclosure, and calculated evasion of the law,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in a statement. “As alleged, Zhao and Binance misled investors about their risk controls and corrupted trading volumes while actively concealing who was operating the platform, the manipulative trading of its affiliated market maker, and even where and with whom investor funds and crypto assets were custodied.”
Gensler also said they “attempted to evade U.S. securities laws by announcing sham controls that they disregarded behind the scenes so that they could keep high-value U.S. customers on their platforms.”
Binance said it was caught in the middle of “a U.S. regulatory tug-of-war.”
“We are disappointed that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chose to file a complaint today against Binance seeking, among other remedies, purported emergency relief,” according to a statementfrom the company. “From the start, we have actively cooperated with the SEC’s investigations and have worked hard to answer their questions and address their concerns.”
The company said it had been working with the SEC “to reach a negotiated settlement to resolve their investigations.”
Zhao said, “Our team is all standing by, ensuring systems are stable, including withdrawals, and deposits,” in a tweet Monday.
In later tweets and retweets throughout the day, Zhao was critical of Gensler and the SEC.
The company also said customer assets were safe.
“Any allegations that user assets on the Binance.US platform have ever been at risk are simply wrong,” the statement said. “All user assets on Binance and Binance affiliate platforms, including Binance.US, are safe and secure, and we will vigorously defend against any allegations to the contrary.”
The form of the “dislike” takes many forms. Some intellectuals want to regulate and control market processes, others want to “abolish” (whatever that even means) markets and private property all together. (Note: Earlier, I tried to distinguish “markets” and “capitalism,” but for present purposes I’m going to use them interchangeably.)
Since I live among the tribes of the intellectuals, and often attend their primitive ceremonies and celebrations, I have had many occasions to observe their customs and folkways. A few years ago, I argued that the alternative that many intellectuals prefer to capitalism actually does exist, but like the image conjured by the word “unicorn,” it exists only in their minds. The problem is that “I can imagine it” is enough, since intellectuals are all about the power of imagination and mentally envisioning things.
A number of scholars have taken up the question of why intellectuals favor complex top-down designed systems to the emergent (apparent) chaos of market processes. In 1949, Friedrich Hayek wrote (in the University of Chicago Law Review) that:
In every country that has moved toward socialism the phase of the development in which socialism becomes a determining influence on politics has been preceded for many years by a period during which socialist ideals governed the thinking of the more active intellectuals. In Germany this stage had been reached toward the end of the last century; in England and France, about the time of the first World War. To the casual observer it would seem as if the United States had reached this phase after World War II and that the attraction of a planned and directed economic system is now as strong among the American intellectuals as it ever was among their German or English fellows. Experience suggests that once this phase has been reached it is merely a question of time until the views now held by the intellectuals become the governing force of politics.
By “intellectuals,” Hayek did not mean smart people, or even educated people. What he meant was “secondhand dealers in ideas,” people whose job, vocation, or obsessive hobby was to discuss and evaluate the ideas of others, and advocate for one or another of these great systems to be implemented. Their reasons always have to do the positive results that they imagine will follow; while some autocrats may seek power and use ideas as a pretext, intellectuals are true believers. It is for that reason that intellectuals are effective.
What qualifies a person as an “intellectual?” In Hayek’s sense, it is their role as a broker or intermediary, occupying a position or role in society which confers a large comparative advantage in the dissemination of what appear to be authoritative ideas. He notes that he means:
journalists, teachers, ministers, lecturers, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, cartoonists, and artists,” but also professionals, “such as scientists and doctors, who through their habitual intercourse with the printed word become carriers of new ideas outside their own fields and who, because of their expert knowledge on their own subjects, are listened to with respect on most others. (emphasis added)
Nearly 50 years later, Robert Nozick wrote his famous piece, “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” It’s worth reading the whole thing, but the insight can really be distilled to a name: Al Czervik, the low-class, but rich, real estate developer from Caddyshack. (If you don’t get the reference, here’s a short video refresher). Nozick notes that intellectuals were always the sort of kids who were nerdy and got good grades. The Al Czerviks of the world sat in the back of the class and played cards. But now they have started businesses and sell real estate or automobiles. Any system that rewards entrepreneurship instead of good grades and helping the teacher clean the erasers after class is obviously unfair.
Intellectuals imagine that in a socialist system, experts and technocrats such as themselves (or as they think of themselves) will clearly be in charge. In fact, of course, the intellectuals are wrong twice: First, people who create value deserve to be paid more than people who can quote “great thinkers” verbatim, especially since we have Google™. But more importantly, there is not a single case in the history of socialist governments, the actual kind of governments that govern nations, to make us think that anyone but aggressive thugs and autocrats will be in control. As Hayek noted, “the worst get on top” in socialism. The intellectuals are rounded up and shot.
To be fair, though, intellectuals are smart. Why do they repeatedly fall for this seductive unicorn? I was listening to Bob Dylan the other day, and was suddenly struck by part of his lyrics that I had heard a thousand times, but never really understood. In his 1963 song, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Dylan asks: “Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly | Before they are forever banned?” How are you going to enforce a ban on cannonballs, if no one has cannon balls?
The answer appears to be that the good people, the smart people, the intellectuals, they will have the cannonballs, and they will enforce the ban on the rest of us. Libertarians tend to think that the right of self-defense belongs to individuals; intellectuals think that if the ability to defend oneself is taken away from everyone, so that power is concentrated among intellectuals, then the problem will be solved. And since capitalism diffuses power, among the many people who acquire wealth, capitalism must be replaced by a system that concentrates power.
What it comes down to is this: In capitalism, wealth is power over goods and services that I want. That kind of power is not “zero sum,” because I can have it, you can have it, and Al Czervik can have it. Al Czervik may have more than you and I have, but we can all be prosperous.
Intellectuals, however, favor socialism, which reverses the causal arrow. Whereas in capitalism wealth makes you powerful and able to buy what you want, under socialism it is power that makes you wealthy. Party apparatchiks and technocratic functionaries have enormous power to make production and distribution decisions.
But power, by which I mean political power, is always zero-sum: If the intellectual elite has it, you and I don’t have it. And Al Czervik is driving a garbage truck, because he insulted an intellectual in 4th grade, and the intellectual told his daddy the party boss. Under socialism and state ownership and control of enterprises, the comparative assessment of status becomes important. If I’m powerful, you are not. Socialism is a way of building envy into the system, on the assumption that elites— “people who are educated, like me”—will come out on top.
(Corine Gatti, Headline USA) After agreeing to take a second DNA test to clear up any further doubts, former World Wrestling Entertainment star Stan Lane said he had confirmed he was not the father of Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo.
The New York Post reported that both Lane, 69, and Boebert, 36, agreed in May to take a new DNA test, which showed that the congresswoman is not his daughter—despite claims to the contrary made by her mother, Shawn Roberts Bentz.
“It was kind of like, ‘Ya, this is it, OK!’” Boebert told the Daily Beast about the results. “He has been wrongfully attacked, and he doesn’t deserve that.”
The drama started after Bentz allegedly had an affair with Lane during the mid-1980s while he was working for Championship Wrestling at the time in Florida. She said Boebert was the result of that relationship.
Bentz sought child support from Lane, but he denied that he was the father. They danced through the legal system, and Lane submitted to a court-ordered paternity testthat showed he was not the dad.
For Bentz, however, doubts persisted after a lab worker who took Lane’s blood sample was later convicted in a separate case of taking a bribe to switch vials.
“It’s been a nightmare,” Lane said. “My reputation was always something that I was proud of. But this whole thing has tarnished it considerably.”
Lane said he hoped he was giving his final statement on the matter to the Daily Beast.
“I ask that I be taken out of this equation since a conclusive result has been given to both sides,” he said.
“I wish Boebert all the best in her future endeavors, and I hope she finds the answers she has been looking for,” he added.
Both Lane and Lauren agreed that the matter was settled, he noted, and he accepted “Lauren’s apology on behalf of herself and her mother.”
Boebert has lately faced her own family drama following an acrimonious separation from her husband of 17 years, Jayson.
The two married out of wedlock when the second-term GOP lawmaker was only 19 years old and have four sons together.
Tensions seem to have come to a head in December when one of the boys called police on his father but later recanted allegations that he had been assaulted.
Lauren Boebert, who had been living in a separate house on the family property, filed for divorce in May.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
(Abdul–Rahman Oladimeji Bello, Headline USA) Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., recently blasted the Biden administration during a Fox News Sunday interview for pining after communist China like “lovestruck teenagers.”
“Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is over in Singapore. Chinese counterparts don’t want to meet with him there, they refuse that,” Fox host Shannon Bream noted. “We’ve had these incursions with a jet, a Chinese jet, and now with warships and the Taiwan Strait, some aggressive behavior there.”
Bream added, “But there’s talk that this administration is looking at potentially lifting some tariffs and saying, ‘We have to do better with communication between these two countries.’ How are we doing managing that relationship?”
Cotton responded, “Well, Biden administration officials should stop chasing after their Chinese communist counterparts like lovestruck teenagers.”
The senator added, “It’s embarrassing, and it’s pathetic. In fact, it projects weakness to China. It encourages them to do things like buzz our aircraft, or come within a few hundred yards of our ships, encourages them to send spy balloons floating all across America. Reducing those tariffs would send the same message.”
A report from ABC Chicago noted that the U.S. military released a video showing China’s guided-missile destroyer overtaking the American destroyer USS Chung-Hoon in an “unsafe” maneuver.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin defended this maneuver as they claimed it was in accordance with the law, adding, “It is the U.S. that should deeply reflect upon itself and correct the wrongdoings.” However, the Indo-Pacific Command noted that such a maneuver violates maritime rules of safe passage in international waters.
Cotton further stated that the best way to unnerve nations like Russia, Iran and communist China is to “have a military capable of deterring them.”
(Headline USA) Target has financially donated to a leftist activist organization that wants to “demilitarize” the “violent” U.S. military and tear down Mount Rushmore, according to a new report.
As part of its diversity, equity and inclusion initiative, Target Corporation, via its nonprofit foundation, awarded a grant to the NDN Collective in 2022, a South Dakota-based nonprofit that says it is “dedicated to building Indigenous power through organizing, activism, philanthropy, grantmaking … and narrative change.”
One of NDN’s campaigns is called “LANDBACK,” and is aimed at forcing the U.S. government to give up all its public land, including Mount Rushmore, which the group called an “international symbol of white supremacy and colonization.”
“The closure of Mount Rushmore, return of that land and all public lands in the Black Hills, South Dakota is our cornerstone battle,” NDN said. “Not only does Mount Rushmore sit in the heart of the sacred Black Hills, but it is an international symbol of White supremacy and colonization. To truly dismantle white supremacy and systems of oppression, we have to go back to the roots. Which, for us, is putting Indigenous Lands back in Indigenous hands.”
NDN has also demanded that the U.S. military be “demilitarized.”
“[T]he U.S. military is in the explicit business of taking land away from communities all around the world and using their presence on their land to carry out their own agenda for the inhabitants of that area,” the group claimed.
“Violence is fundamental for the U.S. to maintain its presence, and the military is how they establish dominance domestically and internationally, wherever they may be,” the group claimed.
Target also awarded a grant to YWCA Minneapolis, another leftist organization that claims to advance “racial equity.” YWCA Minneapolis has said it opposes capitalism, saying, “To understand its structure and function is to know its relationship to racism, genocide and systemic inequities.”
(Headline USA) Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey once again claimed that Russia “wants” former President Donald Trump to be in the White House, pushing long debunked allegations of Russian collusion.
Asked by MSNBC’s Jen Psaki whether we should “expect Russia to interfere on [Trump’s] behalf in 2024,” Comey said: “Yes, of course. Vladmir Putin does not want Joe Biden to be president of the United States for reasons that I hope the American people see because he acts in our national interests. He would very much like Donald Trump to be president again because Donald Trump – for reasons I still can’t explain – very, very fond of Vladmir Putin. And so they will find ways to interfere.”
Comey then suggested that intelligence agencies might have to take action to prevent such collusion.
“I hope our intelligence community is equipped to respond maybe better than we did in 2016. But they’ll come for this election,” he claimed.
When asked who Americans should support in 2024, Comey said: “It has to be Joe Biden. And I’m glad he’s willing to serve. It has to be somebody committed to the rule of law, committed to the values of this country.”
Even if Americans disagree with Biden on policy, Comey said, they should be willing to put aside those “disagreements.”
“The president must be someone who abides the law and our Constitution. And there’s no one else but Joe Biden,” he claimed.
Comey said that if Trump won the GOP nomination and then the White House again, there would be “four years of a retribution presidency.”
“He could order the prosecution of individuals who he sees as enemies. I’m sure I’m on the enemies list,” Comey alleged. “Because the president constitutionally does oversee the executive branch entirely, which includes the Department of Justice, prosecutors and investigators. And so he could commission, direct that individuals be pursued.”
(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) The state of California has been sent into a panic regarding the arrival of 16 illegal immigrants in the city of Sacramento, allegedly flown in by the state of Florida, the Los Angeles Timesreported.
Paperwork that was transported with the migrants indicated that they were sent from the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which runs the state’s relocation program, moving illegal immigrants to more welcoming, sanctuaries like California and New York.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a 2024 presidential hopeful, has not commented on whether or not he is behind the act, though it calls to mind his previous Martha’s Vineyard mockery.
Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, had harsh words for DeSantis upon the discovery of the immigrants’ initial location.
“This is Gov. DeSantis, this is his baby, this is his project, his fingerprints are all over it,” Bonta said.
“The governor signed it, the Legislature approved to fund it in the budget, and they hired Vertol Systems Co., a vendor, to carry out the work,” he added, referring to the company that contracted with the state of Florida to send immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard last year.
According to the leftist AG, the Florida governor is too mean to people and should stop making leftists deal with the consequences of their own policies.
“It’s DeSantis being exactly who he is and advertising to the world that he is petty, little … and full of political stunts that hurt, harm and abuse and exploit people to try and get cheap political points. It’s wrong.”
For Bonta, the entire thing is “potentially illegal.”
Though he did not mention how, he argued that “it could violate criminal law, it could violate civil laws, so we’re going to continue the investigation. We’re going to get to the bottom of that.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom added his own spin, suggesting that the immigrants were “dumped on the doorstep of a local church without any advance warning.”
(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) A Kellogg, Idaho, high school barred a senior from participating in his graduation ceremony after declaring in front of his classmates that there are only two genders, the Idaho Tribunereported.
Kellogg High School school decided that, instead of including senior quotes in the yearbook, they would allow each graduate to deliver a brief message to younger students at the commencement ceremony.
During the commencement rehearsal, 18-year-old Travis Lohr told his classmates and younger students that there are only two genders.
“Guys are guys and girls are girls,” he said. “There is no in-between.”
His remarks received massive applause.
Later on, he added that “a lot of people thought that my statement was against people or against groups, and it wasn’t targeted at any groups.”
In response, however the school’s administration opted to punish Lohr for his disruption.
According to Lohr, administrators, including one named Dan Davidian, took him aside after the rehearsal and told him that his message “seems political.”
The school reportedly has approximately 30 “transgenders” among its 300 students.
Lohr’s mother argued that the school administration was “pushing their biases” on her son.
Lohr’s classmates planned a walkout on Friday to protest his suspension, prompting school officials initially to discuss the postponment of its Saturday graduation ceremony out of safety concerns.
However, the school proceeded with the ceremony anyway, absent Lohr, KHQ reported.
Kellogg High School’s response to their student’s basic scientific observation was, unfortunately, not an isolated incident.
A Massachusetts family may be taking its First Amendment case to the Supreme Court after their seventh-grade son was kicked out of class for wearing a T-shirt that said “There are only two genders.”
A 12-year-old in @MiddleboroughPS was allegedly sent home from school and told he’s making people feel unsafe for wearing a shirt that said “there are only 2 genders.”
And administrators in President Joe Biden‘s Department of Education recently weighed in on a Georgia school district’s dispute concerning sexually explicit books that the superintendent opted to remove from the school’s libraries.
The president’s administrators ordered that the district must now offer “supportive measures to students who may have been impacted by the book removal process.”
(Robert Jonathan, Headline USA) A Biden administration appointee appears to be proposing that the United Nations establish a “visionary” framework for delivering reparations to African Americans.
“Reparations is what justice looks like in the 21st century,” Justin Hansford told a U.N. committee, in part.
The U.S. State Department under Biden named Hansford to the U.N.’s Permanent Forum on People of African Descent.
A critical race theory activist, Hansford is a law professor at the Washington, D.C.-based Howard University and executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center there.
During a recent session of the PFPAD, Prof. Hansford, who received his law degree from Georgetown in D.C., also seemed to be advocating for exclusion rather than inclusion as part of the purported reparations-focused tribunal.
“But far we have left it to the scholars of the past, the lawyers of the past, the white scholars, the white lawyers, to determine the bounds of our legal imagination, to determine the narrow structures that we will use to determine what justice looks like for our own people,” he asserted.
“So I come to you today with a novel proposal, that we begin to think our own thoughts, propose our own vision of justice, and implement that justice, as part of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent.”
He went to propose the creation of a new community of legal thinkers, including non-lawyers with a passion for racial justice “to discuss what it means to be prepared in 2023 for crimes that have been done to us and are continuing to be done to us for over 500 years.”
Without naming the U.S. in particular, the Biden appointee reasoned that this was an initial step for demanding that U.N.-member countries “start the process of apology and reparation, but not on their terms, but on our terms.”
“It is not clear what Professor Hansford meant when he suggested that a United Nations program for reparations should not only be crafted but ‘implemented’ by people of color,'” influential constitutional legal scholar Jonathan Turley, who teaches at George Washington University, also in D.C., wrote.
Turley added that the U.N. group “did not offer an opposing view on this [reparations] question, which is often the case on our campuses.”
A self-described liberal, Turley implied that Hansford’s call to action might be yet another form of hypocrisy within the international body.
“Now Professor Hansford is calling on the United Nations to order such payments by the United States. It is an interesting pitch to countries that were directly involved in the slave trade or enslaved other people in their own histories,” Turley wrote. “Reparations would appear to apply to many of the same countries and might be looked at with some skepticism and concern in their own capitals.”
At the outset of his remarks, Prof. Hansford asserted that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an explicit believer in reparations.
He also seemed to be lamenting that the U.N. itself provided insufficient administrative support for the PFPAD session.
Some U.S. blue states, such as California, and various individual Democrat-controlled localities across the country, have established individual reparations study panels.
Prof. Hansford’s remarks offered some international legal precedents, including a 2005 U.N. General Assembly resolution addressing gross human rights violations, as to how the U.N. might presumably have the authority to order a national government to disburse taxpayer-funded reparations payouts or implement related programs.
Since much of what that U.N. concerns itself with is not legally binding, “it remains unclear whether a tribunal could do anything other than add some external pressure to buoy racial justice activists in the US,” the Daily Mailnoted.
(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) The family of an NRA executive died tragically Sunday afternoon after their private jet spiraled out of control over Washington, D.C., eventually crashing in the Virginia mountains, the Daily Mailreported.
Barbara Rumpel, a businesswoman and member of the NRA Women’s Leadership Forum from Florida, said that her 49-year-old daughter and 2-year-old granddaughter were killed, alongside the girl’s nanny and the pilot after the plane apparently depressurized for reasons that remain unclear.
The crash left no survivors.
“My family is gone, my daughter and granddaughter,” Rumpel lamented in a Facebook post.
Tragically, the Rumpels lost another daughter, Victoria, in a 1994 scuba-diving accident at the age of 19, the New York Post reported.
After losing all contact with the jet, which was in restricted airspace over the nation’s capital city, the Pentagon sent an interceptor fighter jet after it, which caused a supersonic boom over the city.
According to Rumpel, her daughter, Adina Azarian, was returning home to New York after a visit to North Carolina.
Flight data trackers indicated that the plan spiraled out of control during a rapid descent into the wilderness of the Shenandoah Valley.
John Rumpel, the father, told reporters that he knew nothing about the crash yet, and that an investigation would ensue.
“We know nothing about the crash,” noted the Florida businessman and Trump campaign donor. “We are talking to the FAA now.”
The Virginia State Police said that they were alerted of a possible crash Sunday afternoon, prompting a search of the wilderness area.
“At 3:50 p.m. Sunday (June 4, 2023), the Virginia State Police was notified of a possible aircraft crash in the Staunton/Blue Ridge Parkway region,” a spokesperson said, adding that first responders reached the crash site “shortly before 8 p.m.” on foot.
The spokesperson also said that the police soon thereafter gave up the search for survivors.
Though the cause of the crash is not clear, incidents involving unresponsive pilots are not infrequent, particularly when plane cabins lose pressure, leaving passengers and pilots alike unconscious.
Some preliminary speculation focused on hypoxia, or a lack of oxygen in the cabin.
“The pressure should keep enough air in the cabin to stay alert and stay awake,” aviation expert Steve Ganyard told ABC News. “In this case, it can happen insidiously where you lose consciousness, you begin to feel tingling, you get a sense of euphoria and it very slowly overcomes the people in the cabin.”
Some reports indicated that the plane may have made it as far as Long Island before doing a U-turn and returning southward, where it remained on autopilot before running out of fuel.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
