The Manchin Alternative

Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) claims he never liked HR1, even though he voted for cloture on the Senate Progressive-Democrats’ effort bring that Federal election deform law to the Senate floor for party-line passage.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors rightly called out his sham of a compromise, to be substituted for that HR1…nonsense.

I’ve picked out just a couple of the items in Manchin’s offering to illustrate the sham. The first is a repeat example of Manchin’s personal fundamental dishonesty.

The [compromise’s] preamble insists that any voting bill “must be the result of both Democrats and Republicans coming together.”

We’ve already seen how worthless Manchin’s word is. On that “coming together” bit, in particular, Manchin late last fall piously intoned, often, that he would support no bill that didn’t have input from “his friends across the aisle.” Then he voted, twice, for a unilaterally done reconciliation bill that spent nearly $2 trillion of our taxpayer money.

“ban partisan gerrymandering and use computer models.”

Here is an example of Party’s intrinsic dishonesty, and that of the DC politicians in general, for generations and across parties.

The only legitimate way to get rid of gerrymandering, and computers would be helpful here, but they’re far from critical, is to subdivide each State into rectangular districts of substantially equal numbers of citizens, and with no regard to geography other than State borders.

After all, in the eyes of our Constitution, there are no black voters or brown voters or Asian voters or white voters. There are no male voters or female voters. There are only American voters.

You Didn’t Build That

The Progressive-Democrats are continuing their attack on American citizens being successful. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) has populated her Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth.

The past several decades have shown with devastating clarity the marked imbalance between the financial fortunes of CEOs and workers….

Never mind that the last four years before the present Progressive-Democrat-run administration and Congress has seen a marked decrease in the disparity in the financial fortunes of CEOs and workers, as workers got bigger pay raises, in per centage terms, than have the CEOs, significantly closing the gap. Never mind, either, that that decrease in the financial fortunes gap also has been markedly potentiated by the historic lows in minority and women unemployment as those especially on the bottom rungs of our economic—financial fortune—ladder saw marked increases in their wages: they got actual jobs, they became workers.

Pelosi went on:

The devaluing of work has had a negative impact on consumer confidence, job creation and economic growth….

Never mind that the only ones devaluing work, and through that negatively impacting consumer confidence, are Progressive-Democrats with their government (not economic) policy of paying people not to work. Never mind, either, that Job creation has been so anemic under this Progressive-Democrat government that there are millions more jobs available than there are workers willing to take them—especially in the low-skill milieus—because Progressive-Democrats insist on paying those least fortunate to not work, to continue being the least fortunate.

Pelosi’s wonderful select committee? It’s chaired by Congressman Jim Himes (D, CT) and populated with Progressive-Democrats like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY), Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D, WA), Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (D, OH), Congresswoman Gwen Moore (D, WI), Congressman Vicente González (D,TX), Congresswoman Angie Craig (D, MN), and Congresswoman Sara Jacobs (D, CA).

It’s hard to find farther left members, even for the Progressive-Democratic Party.

Pelosi to Americans: you didn’t build that. You’re not going to, either, without Government.

An Example

…of socialism’s control of private enterprise. California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom has issued this diktat for how California-domiciled businesses must operate vis-à-vis the waning Wuhan Virus situation in that State.

Businesses were told by the state that they will have three options related to vaccines and mask mandates. Business owners can provide information to customers and not require anything at all. They can implement “vaccine verification” to determine which people must wear a mask, or they can require everyone to wear a mask.

Those three, and no other, options. Never mind that a business might wish, instead, to provide separate (not necessarily masked) seating for those not vaccinated. That’s not allowed.

No business decision to not ask at all a customer’s medical status regarding the virus. That’s not allowed.

No business decision to discriminate between not vaccinated by individual choice and not vaccinated by already having had the virus and recovered from it, and so not needing vaccination (another individual choice). That’s not allowed.

No business decision to do nothing at all, including not spending money on a State-mandated information campaign aimed at business’ customers. That’s not allowed.

No business decision to…. Don’t even think about it. That’s not allowed.

No, this is the socialist government dictating to private enterprise how it must operate. This is the socialist government dictating to private enterprise the government-allowed performance options.

Socialism: government control of the means of production. Government control of private enterprise.

Socialism: private enterprise isn’t private—it’s government enterprise.

The Biden Oil Price Spike

President Joe Biden (D) has killed the Keystone XL Pipeline, is blocking oil production from Federal lands, killed oil production in northern Alaska, is working to kill fracking altogether, is working to kill American oil (and natural gas) production, and has given the go ahead to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline. In sum, he’s actively working to kill American energy independence.

All of that is driving up American citizens’ energy costs, and that is reflected in the market’s anticipation of spiking oil costs. Here are a couple of graphs illustrating that. They illustrate the expectation that oil will soon cost $100/barrel, after several years of $50-$65/barrel. The first presents the spike since the start of the year in the number of West Texas Intermediate $100/barrel futures contracts against a current $70 price.

This graph reflects the price of a $100/barrel call option on WTI for delivery in December this year and next.

The expectation of actual market pricing of $100 is rising, also, sharply enough to drive up the price of the option.

This is what expert traders (some of whom are trading on the trends themselves and not on underlying oil prices, to be sure) are seeing as the future price of oil for our citizens. Even if oil settles out at its current price of $70 or just a little higher (and the anticipations turn out to be overstated), this current price represents a sharp increase over the last several years, when Government wasn’t moving so zealously to restrict our nation’s oil supply.

This is what Biden has wrought for our nation’s energy supply and cost of energy.

Maybes and Could Bes

Illumina is a company that makes platforms that do genetic sequencing for the likes of Covid variants and fetal abnormalities. Grail is a company that has blood tests that can detect DNA from cancer cells before people show symptoms. At the outset, Illumina created Grail for that purpose then spun the company off so each could focus on what it does best.

Grail succeeded, strongly.

Now Illumina wants to (re)acquire Grail, and Grail wants to be (re)acquired. Illumina says its regulatory satisfaction expertise can greatly facilitate bringing Grail’s tests to market and to the benefit of countless folks at risk of any of the 50 cancers Grail’s tests can detect quickly and reliably, along with the 12 most deadly cancers with 60% accuracy. All with a simple blood draw.

Potential competitors petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to block the merger, and the FTC agreed and has sued to block the merger.

That’s a problem. The FTC’s case centers on two premises and a false underlying assumption. The merger would, according to the FTC,

lessen competition in the US multi-cancer early detection (MCED) test market by diminishing innovation and potentially increasing prices.

“Diminishing innovation”—not at all. Aside from the lack of actual evidence of such a diminution—this is just tacit speculation—this sort of development only spurs competition (my own, no more or less valid speculation).

“Potentially increasing prices”—again, not at all. That first word says it all: the plaint is just overt speculation. There are no increasing prices here, and there’s no evidence that increasing prices are per se anticompetitive (as opposed, for instance, due to too high demand for too little product. Never mind that neither demand nor product yet exist.)

The false underlying assumption is that a market for this sort of thing even exists. It does not, and that lack renders both of those speculations, individually and severally, wholly irrelevant.

Maybes and could bes in a nonexistent market—what a way to regulate.