2-15-17 Great Guests for Your Show

1. Pranav Jandhyala: Beaten at the UC Berkeley Milo Event

2. Michelle Seiler-Tucker: Mining M&A Poised for a Busy 2017

3. Crista Huff: Dodd-Frank - Another Rule Bites the Dust

4. Lowell Ponte: Trump Should Reform the Forfeiture Laws

5. Daniel Greenfield: Slavery and Rape Aren’t Wrong when Muslims Do It

Beaten at the UC Berkeley Milo Event

By Pranav Jandhyala

I am a UC Berkeley student who's been involved with everything that's been going on this past week with the Milo protests. Professor Bill Shireman is sponsoring me because he thinks it’s an important story. I was a journalist on the night of the protests and was beaten by ANTIFA protesters for filming the violence, and when I wrote an editorial condemning the violence and calling for a new free speech movement at Berkeley, the Daily Cal rejected it twice. Our school newspaper only published op-eds that supported the violence. My editorial has since been published on The Huffington Post: [more...]

Pranav is a student at UC Berkeley studying business and political science. He is the founder and president of BridgeCal, a nonpartisan political organization that seeks to bridge the political divide on campus and in the nation through a platform of free and open discourse between people who disagree with each other.

Mining M&A Poised for a Busy 2017

By Michelle Seiler-Tucker

No need to dig deep to find activity in the mining sector. Coming off a positive end to 2016, Ernst and Young expects mergers and acquisitions in the mining sector to pick up right where they left off. The positive environment in the equity markets and strengthening investor confidence are leading drivers of the high 2017 expectations. There are several industry-specific factors and general patters behind the M&A activity. [more...]

Dodd-Frank - Another Rule Bites the Dust

By Crista Huff

A costly Dodd-Frank-related rule affecting the energy industry - the Securities and Exchange Commission’s resource extraction rule - is heading toward repeal. The final version of the rule, which was approved in June 2016 for enforcement beginning in 2018, required “resource extraction issuers to disclose payments made to governments for the commercial development of oil, natural gas or minerals.” This rule affected public companies - companies that trade on the stock exchange - but did not affect their private company competitors, nor many foreign competitors, creating an unbalanced playing field. [more...]

Trump Should Reform the Forfeiture Laws

By Lowell Ponte

In 2015, American law enforcement used civil asset forfeiture laws to seize more than $5 billion from people. This is more money than was stolen in all burglaries, combined that year, as Craig R. Smith and I document in our latest book, Money, Morality & The Machine: Smith’s Law in an Unethical, Over-Governed Age. When Ronald Reagan supported the wide use of civil asset forfeiture, his aim was to stop letting crime pay by confiscating what its dirty money – especially illegal drug money – buys. President Trump and his Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as defenders of capitalism and private property, ought to oppose the way civil asset forfeiture laws are now sometimes misused against innocent citizens by money-hungry governments. [more...]

Slavery and Rape Aren’t Wrong when Muslims Do It

By Daniel Greenfield

"I don’t think it’s morally evil to own somebody."

"A male owner of a female slave has the right to sexual access to her.”

These views don’t come from an ISIS underground bunker, but out of the brilliantly lit halls of Georgetown University where rape and slavery are defended by an Islamic studies professor. Georgetown had changed the names of Mulledy Hall and McSherry Hall because Mulledy and McSherry had once been involved in selling some slaves back in the early 19th century. When Christina Hoff Sommers spoke at Georgetown, feminists demanded trigger warnings and a university official threatened College Republicans. But defending actual slavery and rape is still okay at Georgetown... so long as it’s committed by Muslims under the license of the Koran. [more...]