Monthly Archives: July 2019

Foolishness

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Kate Cronin-Furman, Assistant Professor of Human Rights at University College London—that’s London, Great Britain, mind you, not London, KY—thinks our Border Patrol agents should be doxed and then shamed for doing their jobs in trying to keep our borders secure and detaining illegal aliens.

Of course, she denies that her demand is doxing.

The identities of the individual Customs and Border Protection agents who are physically separating children from their families and staffing the detention centers are not undiscoverable. Immigration lawyers have agent names; journalists reporting at the border have names, photos and even videos.

Yet here she is, demanding they be doxed. With her doxing demand, too, she’s demanding that immigration lawyers violate client-lawyer privilege.

She went on to insist that the agents and others associated with detaining illegal aliens should not be allowed to have lawyers to defend them.

…the American Bar Association should signal that anyone who defends the border patrol’s mistreatment of children will not be considered a member in good standing of the legal profession.

Her definition of mistreatment, mind you, not a jury’s.  Never mind the causes of the border situation.  Never mind that all defendants, no matter how despicable-seeming, are entitled to legal representation, are presumed innocent until proven otherwise in a jury trial—even in Great Britain.  Or, maybe it’s that she Knows Better than us ignorant colonials; our juries are not to be trusted.

Atrocity-doers, she calls them, saying the conditions in the detention centers amount to torture chambers.

Deplorable those conditions certainly are, but that’s not the agents’ fault.  What Cronin-Furman carefully elides (deliberately, I say; she is a professor at a prestigious British school, so she knows better) are the reasons for those conditions.

Reasons like the wholly unprecedented flood of illegal aliens across our border.

Reasons like their claiming asylum falsely, having already rejected the asylum—and work opportunities—that Mexico offered them on their way up from the Caravan Triangle.

Reasons like Congress’ Progressive-Democrats blocking all efforts to reform our immigration laws to make it harder to enter illegally and much easier to enter legally while at the same time refusing to correct our asylum laws so that the combination of immigration and asylum law could remove incentives to try to enter our nation illegally.

Reasons like Congress’ Progressive-Democrats blocking all efforts actually to secure our southern border with increased and improved security measures, including walls in key sections of our border.  Indeed, many of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s current Presidential candidates have openly called for open borders, decriminalizing illegal entry.

Immediately proximate reasons like Progressive-Democrats in the House of Representatives refusing—for far too long; it took an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote in the Senate to force the question to the House floor—to fund DHS so that Department could expand the detention facilities to meet the “demand” created by that flood of illegal aliens.

Immediately proximate reasons like Progressive-Democrats in the House of Representatives refusing—until that Senate vote—even to allow money to be appropriated for beds and hygiene supplies for those children unless they also could get existing detention facilities disbanded.  “Let those children suffer,” the Progressive-Democrats demanded, “until we get our way.”

If there are atrocities going on on our southern border, they’re in those House Progressive-Democrats’ cynical, despicable dehumanizing of those children, using them as machinations for imposing Progressive-Democrat policies regarding our borders and immigration.  Those children are not human beings in the eyes of those Progressive-Democrats; those children are seen merely as tools to be used for a purpose.

The august personage of Cronin-Furman hasn’t been to our border; she just phoned her piece in (emailed it?) from the safety and comfort of her London school’s office.

Her behavior would be shameful were it not so foolish, or had this professor the grace to know shame.

Trade and the Rule of Law

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Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has asked for President Donald Trump’s help, at the G-20 meeting in Japan, to get the People’s Republic of China to release the Canadian hostages that the PRC kidnapped in retaliation for Canada’s detaining a PRC company executive for criminal investigation.  Trump has agreed.

Gerard Gayou suggested in his piece at the link,

Mr Trump may worry that challenging Mr Xi on political prisoners would jeopardize a trade deal, but pressing China on the rule of law should be a priority.

Indeed. Rule of law—as opposed to the PRC’s rule by law—is critical to many of the sorts of things Trump is looking for in a trade deal with the PRC: things like intellectual property protection, an end to the extortion the PRC applies to obtain proprietary technologies from foreign companies wishing to do business in the PRC, an end to the PRC’s demands for back doors into companies’ software, etc.

Absent rule of law, as the PRC demonstrated as recently as some few weeks ago when it walked away from commitments it had made during the then-trade negotiations, the PRC’s word on any trade deal will be largely worthless.

Is Renault a Useful Business Partner?

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When Fiat-Chrysler offered a merger deal with Renault, Renault’s subordinated partner, Nissan, expressed reluctance unless its subordination to Renault could be revised upward at least somewhat so that it could have a greater voice in the resultant combined company.

Note, though, that the French government is a major shareholder of Renault, and the government has a virtually controlling number of seats on the Renault board: Nissan was—and is, given subsequent events—subordinate to the French government as much as it is to its nominal business…senior partner.

The French government interfered with the offer, and it dithered and stalled, and finally Fiat-Chrysler lost patience and withdrew its offer.

Any possibility of the offer being revived (Nissan’s reluctance was not a block) has been dashed, though, by the French government’s effective refusal to discuss Nissan’s future role.

President Emmanuel Macron urged the French car maker to focus on generating cost savings with its partner Nissan Motor Co, rather than reshaping their 20-year alliance.

As he arrived in Japan for the G-20 discussions—conveniently local to Nissan—Macron flat refused to discuss the matter.

Mr Macron told reporters in Tokyo, where he is on an official state visit ahead of the G-20 summit, that discussing the shareholdings was “off topic.”
“We need to focus less on politics, less on finance, and more on industry,” he said.

That’s the flimsiest of excuses.  Its implication that Macron is unable to do two things in the same time frame is an insult to our intelligence.

Is Renault a useful business partner?  It may well be from a business perspective.  The heads of Fiat-Chrysler certainly thought it could be, and the heads of Nissan plainly were willing to consider the matter seriously.

However, from a political perspective, as long as the French government is involved with Renault in any way other than as a customer, Renault has no possibility of being anyone’s useful business partner.  The government-run company just isn’t worth the trouble.