Category Archives: regulation

Dismissive Disingenuousness

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Recall that some Alaskan-harvested fish, 26 million pounds of them, had been stranded in eastern Canada, just a few hundred yards from American fish-processing plants, because President Joe Biden’s (D) Customs and Border Protection managers threatened $41 million in penalties on fish handlers if those fish moved down a 100 yard railroad line into Maine, as the Jones Act explicitly allows.

Biden’s CBP managers decided that those 100 yards didn’t satisfy the Act (or Biden’s and those managers’ whims) after decades of the ride having been entirely satisfactory.

Federal Judge Sharon Gleason issued a temporary injunction against those and any further CBP penalties, allowing the fish to move.

What’s telling about this incident, though, is this statement that the Biden-Harris administration argued in court [emphasis added]:

…an injunction wasn’t needed, because food supply chains had already begun to adjust. “Within days of CBP issuing notices of penalties in this matter the movement of Russian-origin frozen seafood from the Bayside facility began.”

Maybe this isn’t dismissiveness or disingenuousness. Maybe it’s more of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s collusion with Russia.

Anti-Business Anti-Freedom Left Strikes Again

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Their latest assault comes from left-of-the-west-coast Los Angeles.

The city of Los Angeles will begin requiring most people to provide proof of full COVID-19 vaccination before entering a wide variety of indoor businesses including salons, restaurants, gyms, museums, and theaters.

Alternatively, those with medical conditions that do not allow them to be vaccinated, or those with sincerely held religious beliefs that prevent them from being vaccinated, will be allowed to enter on presentment of a negative Wuhan Virus test done within the prior 72 hours (whose definition of “sincerely held?”). Never mind that the cost of such a test starts at $20 and that the median cost is $127. And you thought the costs at the theater concession counter were high. How’s that blowout or updo at the salon sound now? The testing requirement looks like it’s going to swamp that dinner out you thought you were going to enjoy with the family.

Notice, too, that many—most?—of the businesses in these categories are small businesses, mom-and-pop businesses, low margin businesses.

This isn’t only an assault on American businesses and American business owners, though: it’s also an assault on Americans qua Americans.

It’s a demand that we citizens give up our medical privacy and proclaim to the world what our medical status is, using only the Wuhan Virus situation—which is on the wane—as an initial step to expose all of our medical privacy.

It’s more than that, even. This vaccine mandate, and others like it, are a demand that we citizens give up an essential liberty—a liberty over which we’ve already fought one civil war—our control over our own bodies. It’s an essential liberty that the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party are trying to take away from all of us this time, not just a minority which they held and hold in contempt.

Bank Experts Need Risk Management Advice from Government Bureaucrats

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Federal Reserve System Governor Lael Brainard actually said that with a straight face [Wall Street Journal‘s paraphrase]:

…financial regulators should direct the nation’s biggest banks to take new steps to manage climate-related risks as part of a broader effort to monitor potential hazards posed to the financial system.

She said this (quoted by WSJ) at last week’s conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston:

Ultimately, I anticipate it will be helpful to provide supervisory guidance for large banking institutions in their efforts to appropriately measure, monitor, and manage material climate-related risks.

Yeah. Because finance businessmen, bankers, whose businesses live or die on their abilities, are incapable of understanding the financial risks to their businesses without the…guidance…of government bureaucrat/regulators.

Essential Services

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A Florida bill is starting to make inroads on defining what services are essential in an emergency.

State Senator Jason Brodeur (R, Sanford) filed Senate Bill 254 on September 17. It stipulates that “emergency orders may not expressly prohibit religious institutions from regular religious services or activities.”
On Thursday, state Representative Nick DiCeglie (R, Indian Rocks Beach) filed a House companion, House Bill 215, which reiterates that an emergency lockdown or shutdown order must apply equally across businesses and religious institutions.

The bill, a shockingly concise one-pager, says

An emergency order…may not expressly prohibit a religious institution from conducting regular religious services or activities. However, a general provision in an emergency order which applies uniformly to all entities in the affected jurisdiction may be applied to a religious institution if the provision is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest and is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.

I’ll go them one further. Keeping our economy open and running is an essential service. Unless bombs are falling, there is no emergency that justifies shutting down, damaging our economy, destroying businesses, destroying livelihoods, even lives.

On the contrary, an open and operating economy is the best means of dealing with the emergency because that keeps operational the ability to generate the weal and mechanisms necessary to bring the emergency quickly and efficiently to a favorable conclusion.

 

The bill can be read here (the bill actually spills onto a second page by one line).

It’s a Start

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A coalition of 10 States, led by Texas, has filed an amicus brief in the 11th Circuit Appellate Court supporting Florida’s law requiring Big Tech to

consistently apply content-moderation practices and disclosures to affected users.

The Texas law, in particular and on which Florida’s law was modeled, specifies that

…social media sites in question must…disclose their content management and moderation policies and create a complaint and appeals process. The new law also prohibits email service providers from impeding the transmission of email messages based on content.

So far, so good for the two laws, but not far enough for either.

These platforms’ moderation teams also must be required to advise the poster/communicator, in advance of any adverse action, that the team is contemplating such action. In that advance notice, the moderation teams must advise the poster/communicator which platform criterion or set of criteria that the moderation team believes is being violated, and how—in concrete, measurable terms—the team believes that violation(s) is occurring.

For instance, in the case of “might offend some,” that notice must specify the group or groups the team believes might be offended and how that offense might occur—vis., if the potential offense is along the lines non-inclusiveness, the team must specify precisely how the non-inclusion is believed to be occurring.

The team also must suggest alternative phrasings (yes, plural) and for each alternative explain how the team’s suggestion conveys the same message as the original.

This advance notice also must provide the name and business contact data of the moderation team lead and the name and business contact data of the platform Director or Senior Vice President overseeing the platform’s moderation function.

The appeal itself must go to an independent arbitration board agreeable to both the poster/communicator and the platform and at the platform’s sole expense.