Daily Archives: 7 March 2022

Either There’s a Deadline, or There Isn’t

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Amazon is pushing the FTC to fish or cut bait (because this is a family blog) regarding Amazon’s proposal to acquire MGM:

Amazon recently certified to the FTC that it had provided all the information requested by antitrust investigators, according to people familiar with the matter. That certification triggered a ticking clock for the FTC that expires in mid-March, the people said. If the commission doesn’t file a legal challenge before the deadline, Amazon could be free to consummate the deal.

However.

The FTC currently has also the authority to unwind mergers and acquisitions after the fact, and to continue investigations pursuant to such post hoc disassemblies even after their nominal clock regarding the merger/acquisition has expired.

That authority means there’s no real deadline, and the government can continue to interfere with private enterprise whenever they take the notion to.

The deadline is a good one, and it should be transformed into a real one: if the FTC does not rule on the matter (itself a questionable government authority, but that’s for another discussion) by a time certain, then the merger/acquisition should go forward unfettered, and the FTC should be required to sit down and shut up. If there’s a real problem with the merger/acquisition, well, we have already on the books perfectly serviceable anti-trust tools.

There’s just no reason for Government to dither and stall on any merger/acquisition or to continue to harass after the fact.

Dangerously Hypocritical

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And dangerous in its own right. President Joe Biden (D), even as he pays lip service to supporting Ukraine against Russia’s invasion of that nation, is conspiring with Russia to let Iran obtain nuclear weapons. Here’s Fred Fleitz, former CIA analyst and ex-senior staffer on the House Intelligence Committee and the National Security Council:

The US has partnered with Russia to get a new nuclear deal with Iran. This includes secret talks with the Russians over the last year and agreements where Russia would hold uranium enriched by Iran and give it back to Iran if a future Republican president backed out of a new nuclear deal.

This is dangerously hypocritical in that Biden is conspiring with one enemy nation to free up another enemy nation in the latter’s effort to get nuclear weapons. The agreement that Biden is so desperate to get back into (with its trivial tweaks) expires, ends sanctions against Iran, and with that expiry leaves Iran with an unrestricted path to nuclear weapons.

Biden’s dealings with Russia in this are dangerous in their own right because Russia is going to give that enriched uranium back to Iran under any circumstance—that uranium is a threat to us and to Israel, and that’s what Russia wants. This is how desperate Biden is to prevent a subsequent President—especially a hated Republican President—from canceling his precious deal: he knows Russia will give the uranium back.

In the end, any agreement Biden might enter into here becomes hard for future Presidents to undo only if Biden submits the deal to Congress for majority votes in each house, which would make the deal a statute, or he submits it to the Senate for ratification as a treaty. Absent those, all Biden’s agreement becomes is an Executive Agreement, which can be undone with the stroke of a pen—just as former President Donald Trump (R) did with the prior failure of an Obama Executive Agreement.

And a future President should cancel such an EA without hesitation, given that Russian return of uranium.