Monthly Archives: March 2023

Negative Inference

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Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg likes to jet around the country and to overseas locations. He claims to do this while flying coach on commercial airlines, but he’s also taken 23 jet rides at taxpayer expense on private Government-owned jets. Now he’s refusing to supply relevant oversight data for these rides.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) has turned down repeated requests for information related to the taxpayer costs of 23 flights Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his advisers took on government private jets since taking office.
The DOT and the agency’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office both declined to detail how much each flight cost taxpayers over the course of multiple months and in recent weeks.

It’s illegal for Government agencies to refuse to respond substantively to FOIA requests (clearly saying “No” with a clear explanation of the legality for that “No” would constitute such a substantive response).

It’s a common practice in cases before a court for a judge to advise a jury that when a prosecutor’s witness obfuscates during his testimony, or refuses to answer clearly or at all, the jury is free to attach the most negative interpretation to those witness failures during the jury’s subsequent deliberations.

So it is with the man who sits in the Transportation Secretary’s chair. Pete Buttigieg cannot be taken as anything other than both in over his head and dishonest. His words are useless, and the only conclusion possible concerning those flights is that they were done illegally, and that illegality—repeated 23 times—should be a fireable offense.

Perhaps it’s time for Government officials who stonewall to lose access to their office facilities through those facilities’ loss of funding. And this step, also, although it won’t have immediate effect, even were it to get through the Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated Senate and White House:

House Republicans plan to vote to defund non-complying witnesses in the government when the new fiscal budget takes effect on October 1.

In the present case, that would mean Buttigieg and the head of his FOIA Office would lose their salaries.

Streamlining

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Recall the People’s Republic of China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law that requires all PRC-domiciled businesses, and by extension, the companies which those businesses control that are domiciled in non-PRC nations, to provide, even to actively seek out, any and all information that the PRC’s intelligence community wants those businesses to produce.

Now the PRC is moving to streamline that process.

China is set to create a new government agency to centralize the management of the country’s vast stores of data, as Beijing seeks to address data-security practices by businesses and streamline its regulatory structure.
The new national data bureau is set to become the top Chinese regulator on various data-related issues, people familiar with the matter said, in a shift from the current structure in which multiple ministries share oversight.

And this:

If established, the agency…[would] set and enforce data-collection and sharing rules for businesses, or vet the data that domestic companies plan to share with foreign business partners to check for potential national-security breaches….

Carefully omitted is that tie-back to the intelligence collection law. In addition to streamlining control of domestic data collection and dissemination, this centralized agency would streamline the intelligence community’s use of PRC businesses for espionage.

Rules for Investing in the People’s Republic of China

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The Biden administration is starting to pay lip service to setting rules for American businesses’ investing in the People’s Republic of China. It’s

preparing a new program that could prohibit US investment in certain sectors in China, a new step to guard US technology advantages during a growing competition between the world’s two largest economies.

And, of course, the effort will need new taxpayer money.

Treasury and Commerce departments said they expected to finalize their policy on the issue in the near future. Both agencies said they expected to seek additional resources for the investment program in the White House budget, which will be released next week.

Naturally, the administration isn’t prepared to specify which sectors would be included, or how these departments propose to enforce their rules. Just give them money.

Since the Federal government is in the business of regulating American business’ investing in enemy nations, I have my own proposal for a rule for investing in the PRC: No. No investments in the PRC, and those businesses with investments there have two years in which to wind down those investments and withdraw from the PRC.

That won’t cost nearly as much. Just require public companies to report their investments in their quarterly SEC filings, and private companies to report same in their Federal tax filings—which would easily fall within the requirement, with only the smallest adjustment, to report on accounts held in foreign nations. Require those particular reporting subjects to be available to the public via FOIA requests. These requirements would come close to paying for themselves in the early years by assessing fines equal to the size of the investments not reported or inaccurately reported.

I have an alternative rule proposal: for every dollar an American business wishes to invest in the PRC, it must invest three dollars in the Republic of China. If the RoC can’t absorb all of the investment, then the business cannot invest at all in the PRC. This alternative would carry the same reporting requirements and penalties as my first proposal.

A final alternative: spread those three dollars among any number, greater than one, of the nations rimming the South China Sea in addition to the RoC. Again, with the same reporting requirements and penalties.

Illinois and the 2nd Amendment

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In a Just the News article concerning an Illinois district judge’s impending order declaring unconstitutional that State’s Progressive-Democratic Party-run government ban on a broad range of firearms and the requirement for citizens to register with that government those firearms they already possess, there’s this closing paragraph.

In federal court, four cases consolidated in the Southern District of Illinois have a hearing set for April 12. The state filed its response to a motion for a preliminary injunction Thursday arguing the ban addresses dangerous and unusual weapons the Founders of the US Constitution couldnt imagine in the 18th Century. Plaintiffs argue the law violates the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

Which leads me to ask: what would be more dangerous than privately owned artillery and sea-going combat ships? Yet those weapons were privately owned and contributed heavily to the war effort in our Revolution against another government that was, among other things, seeking to disarm us.

For the benefit of those Illinois Progressive-Democrats, here is the 2nd Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Those personages should note carefully that there are no caveats in that short sentence. In particular, there is no caveat for “Arms of which Government disapproves from time to time.”

Germany Welches Again

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I wrote yesterday, in part, about Germany’s disreputable performance in supporting Ukraine in the latter’s war for existence against the Russian barbaric invasion.

Now, Germany has made the apparent decision to walk away altogether in any practical form from Ukraine in that nation’s hour of need, paying only lip service to aiding that nation.

In a landmark speech days after the invasion, [Chancellor Olaf] Scholz promised a Zeitenwende—a turning point—pledging to rebuild Germany’s military, secure alternative energy supplies, and help Ukraine fight off Russia.

Since then, according to Bojan Pancevski, in his Thursday Wall Street Journal article (at the link just above), Germany has

delivered on the latter two pledges, but a year on, Germany’s armed forces are in an even worse condition than when the war started, according to military commanders….

Pancevski is being generous, though. See yesterday’s table (at the first link); Germany’s—which is to say Scholz and his fellows in his government—have been niggardly in their…efforts…with five nations other than Poland, the US, and Great Britain contributing at least 50% more to Ukraine’s war effort on a GDP-normalized basis. Germany is doing next to nothing to help Ukraine. Only Italy and France are more miserly, throwing mere euro pennies, insultingly, at the feet of the Ukrainians.

More of Pancevski’s generosity:

On Ukraine, Mr Scholz discarded the longstanding pacifism underpinning German foreign policy to become the third-largest supplier of weapons to Kyiv after the US and the UK, according to the Kiel Institute for World the Economy. Two days after the invasion Mr Scholz lifted a ban on exporting weapons to war zones.

As yesterday’s table demonstrates, that “third-largest” sum is only in absolute terms. When the totals are normalized to each nation’s GDP—i.e., when the sums are matched to what the nations can afford to commit–Germany’s “generosity” fades to a distant 10th. And the nation further demonstrates its version of generosity by slow-walking on, and excuse-making for, its decision to delay delivery of the Leopard tanks it recently promised Ukraine.

German betrayal extends further.

By disdaining to rebuild Germany’s military establishment, Scholz has only perpetuated (not merely extended) his predecessor Angela Merkel’s perfidy in welching on the German promise to commit 2% of its GDP to military support for NATO.

Here is an outcome of that:

The country has 180,000 active soldiers and just over 300 tanks, half of them not roadworthy, down from 500,000 troops and 5,000 tanks at the height of the Cold War.

Germany had said earlier that it would create a €100 billion ($106 billion) fund with which it would rebuild and rearm its defense establishment. That, though, would need an amendment to its Basic Law, and no one in the German government has made a move toward generating that amendment so it could be put up for debate and passage.

Germany is not only betraying its fellow NATO members with those reneges, that nation is betraying its own citizens in those eastern States that were under Russian Soviet occupation via the fictitious (if narrowly, strictly legal) German Democratic Republic.