Monthly Archives: October 2022

Women’s Rights

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The Iranian women are campaigning, with great courage, for their freedom (proximately to dress as they wish, but it’s much broader than that) against the tyrannical, murderous, and terrorism-supporting regime reigning over Iran. Many Iranian men are campaigning with them, and together, they’re struggling for broad freedoms for everyone: the freedom for Iranian citizens of both sexes to make their own, individual, decisions regarding their any of their actions.

The Progressive-Democratic Biden administration is shamefully quiet on the matter, even as it continues to beg on bended knee—from the kiddie table, yet—to be allowed to rejoin the JCPOA, the Obama-era agreement to allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons after expiry of some restrictions.

This is how the Progressive-Democratic Party has chosen to interact with the terrorism-supporting regime, though. An earlier Iranian people’s attempt to fight for individual rights, joined by Iranian women that time (compared to the women’s campaign being joined by men this time), was just as shamefully ignored by an earlier Progressive-Democratic administration.

The last time the Iranian people risked their lives for freedom from the benighted theocracy that subjugates them—the 2009 protests against a stolen election—Washington chose shame. The White House turned its back on the protesters for a week until they gathered near the former US embassy building in Tehran chanting, “Obama, you’re either with them or with us.” This finally evoked a statement of support, but it was too little, too late.

Emphasis on too little. Obama’s words were—by design—empty; he followed up on those words with…nothing at all for the Iranian people, not a minim of actual, concrete support.

Joshua Muravchik is being generous in his op-ed at the first link, though, regarding Biden.

The Biden administration has been more forthcoming in its pronouncements during the current protests, but it can and should do more.

He appears to take Biden seriously in its being more forthcoming. Biden’s pronouncements are just empty words, and not even as articulately snowing as Obama’s prior chit-chat. The Biden administration can and should do more, but it won’t. It’s too desperate to get back into that nuclear weapons authorization agreement.

Those Iranian women—they’re on their own.

It’s not only the Progressive-Democratic Party administrations who are silent, though. Just as shamefully, what passes for the current American feminist movement is just as meekly quiet. And they don’t even have a sham realpolitik motive for it.

Another DoJ Failure

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DoJ has fined a business in Maryland $300,000 because it asked its employees for particular items of documentation as proof of citizenship or legal resident alien status instead of accepting the generic sets of documents that “Federal law” allows. Per DoJ,

Federal law allows workers to choose which valid, legally acceptable documentation to present to demonstrate their identity and permission to work, regardless of citizenship, immigration status, or national origin.

Regardless of…immigration status. So a company wants to be careful that it’s hiring legal workers by applying tighter standards to its own workforce, and DoJ objects. ‘Course if the company is caught with illegal aliens in its employ—that regardless of immigration status part—it could lose its license to operate.

But never mind.

Biden’s Union Push

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Or maybe it’s Biden’s union putsch.

The Labor Department on Tuesday proposed a rule that aims to reclassify millions of independent contractors as employees. About 20 million Americans work as independent contractors, which have more autonomy than employees and can set their own hours and work for multiple companies at the same time.

But that autonomy is anathema to the Left: it’s much harder to unionize all those independent contractors, much harder to bring them under control until they’re created formal employees and so can be forced into unions in closed shop States. And make no mistake: the Progressive-Democratic Party is bent on eliminating all right-to-work laws so that every State becomes a unionized closed shop State.

This move by the Biden administration is just an early one on its path to making it easier to convert these free market jobs to mandatory union jobs. And to increase government control over average Americans and so to increase Party power.

Continued Inflation Pressure

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The Producer Price Index rose 0.4% in September (against analysts’ expected rise of 0.2%), and it’s up 8.5% year-on-year.

This matters because the PPI reflects the prices—and price increases—that suppliers face for the components of goods that they must acquire in order to produce those goods. Those supplier prices are then passed up the supply chain to subsequent suppliers and on through to the final product that consumers buy.

That means that consumers can expect commensurate price increases—continued inflation—in the weeks and a few months into the future, a lag whose delay depends on the specific product being produced and sold/bought, but a lag whose outcome is unavoidable.

That’s not just a prediction with a high degree of confidence behind it, either. Much of that future consumer inflation is concrete because it’s built in.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that trillions of dollars in long-term contracts are pegged to versions of the PPI.

Bank of England Fails

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The Bank of England, in its panic over the British bond market repricing, is extending its intervention into that market. The purpose of the BOE’s intervention, though, is exposed by the beneficiaries of the move [emphasis added].

The central bank on Tuesday said it would add inflation-linked government bonds to its program of bond purchases after a fresh attempt on Monday to help pension funds failed to calm markets.

And [emphasis added]

The central bank first launched its bond purchases on September 28 in an effort to help pension funds that held large positions in derivative-based investments that were upended by the surge in UK government bond yields.

Clearly, the BOE is not in the business of maintaining a stable pound; it’s in the business of protecting special interests from the results of their foolishness—like “investing” pensioners’ and future pensioners’ money in risky vehicles like those derivatives.

The proper move would be for the BOE to stand aside and let the market do what it will—which is to say let the market investors, all of them buyers and sellers according to their own imperatives, do what they will according to their own, independently arrived at, imperatives. That will be painful during the (re)adjustment period, but the outcome will be what investors, with their pounds, say they want.

After all, a properly free and open market is self correcting; a government intervened-in market never can be. Aside from the fact that a centrally directed market cannot respond quickly enough, those interventions color those investors’ imperatives, driving them necessarily away from independent development. Such politically-created market distortions permanently block corrections from running to completion.