Category Archives: rights

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party

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Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wants Elon Musk arrested for…allowing free speech on his platform and for speaking freely himself. Reich actually said, with a straight face,

Musk’s free-speech rights under the first amendment don’t take precedence over the public interest.

That’s a Party leader saying that our American free speech rights, enshrined in our Constitution, are separate from the public interest.

Party is breathtakingly wrong on that. Free-speech rights are the public interest. Without freedom of speech, there is no public, only dependents of Government.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party. Free speech is what Party says it is. Nothing else.

A Couple of Suitable Civil Sanctions

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General Motors is being sued by Texas’ Attorney General Ken Paxton for allegedly

unlawfully collecting driving data from users and selling it to other companies.

GMC allegedly

used technology that was installed in the majority of 2015 or newer General Motors vehicles that would “collect, record, analyze, and transmit highly detailed driving data about each time a driver used their vehicle[.]”

That’s a long time to be collecting and peddling personal information without the permission of the vehicle’s owner.

After all,

Unbeknownst to customers, however, by enrolling in GM’s products, they were “agreeing” to General Motors’ collection and sale of their data. Despite lengthy and convoluted disclosures, General Motors never informed its customers of its actual conduct—the systematic collection and sale of their highly detailed driving data.

I see two suitable civil sanctions here, assuming conviction. One is to force GMC to disclose the amount of money it received over those two years from its sale of those data. It must then be required to pay that money to each person who bought a GMC vehicle from those two model years, whether the vehicle was bought new or used. Yes, yes, identifying all the used vehicle buyers will be difficult. Cry me a river. GMC should have thought about that beforehand.

The other isn’t really a sanction, per se. GMC should be required to disclose each of the buyers of those data, and then each of those buyers should be required to certify that it has purged all of the data of this type that GMC sold to it.

It would be suitable, also, to go after criminal sanctions against the GMC executives who authorized the illegal collection of the data, who authorized the sale of those illegally collected data, and who carried out the collections, and who carried out the sales.

It’s time to get draconian in sanctioning these data thefts. Bad enough we have to deal with hackers; we shouldn’t have to be subject to such thefts from allegedly mainstream companies.

Kamala Harris and a Smattering of History

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is proud of her record as California’s Attorney General. Here’s an example from that proud record of hers, against the backdrop of the Progressive-Democrat Biden-Harris administration’s lawfare campaign against their political opponent, former President and Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

As AG, Harris demanded nonprofits in her jurisdiction hand over their federal IRS Forms 990 Schedule B so she could pretend to be investigating self-dealing and improper loans involving those organizations and their donors. Her office then promptly “leaked” 2,000 Conservative cause-supporting organizations’ Schedules B to the public via Harris’ Attorney General Web site. Those organizations and their donors then began receiving threats of retaliation and death threats.

It won’t matter that the Supreme Court blew up her California AG case in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v Bonta. She’s already shown her disdain of the Court and complete disregard for its rulings; her demand for those Schedules B (much less her release of so many submittals) was in complete disregard of a much earlier, already long-standing Supreme Court NAACP v Alabama ruling which had held that similar demands violated the 1st Amendment’s right freely to associate as a critical aspect of the Amendment’s explicit Free Speech Clause.

Harris will continue Party’s lawfare campaigns against those of whom Party elite personally disapprove. This is the empirical practice and view of “law” that the highly experienced, and proud of that experience, Harris will bring to her administration, including the Department of Justice that she will build during her term.

That’s if we average Americans are foolish enough to elect her.

Dictating the Terms of Business

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The Progressive-Democratic Party is at it again, trying to dictate how private businesses in our, so far, substantially free market economy will be permitted to operate. Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden intends to dictate to landlords:

Today, I’m sending a clear message to corporate landlords: if you raise rents more than 5%, you should lose valuable tax breaks.

This isn’t just the big landlords, either, bad as that would be by itself. Biden’s proposed cap would apply to half the rental market in the country.

We’ve known this for a while. Here’s then-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden tweeting:

Joe Biden @JoeBiden · 14h
We’re going to beat Donald Trump. And when we do, we won’t just rebuild this nation—we’ll transform it.

He’s talked about fundamentally transforming our economy in his State of the Union addresses, also.

Presidential Immunity

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Justice Sonia Sotomayor waxed hysterical in her dissent to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Presidential immunity from prosecution for alleged crimes committed while in office.

Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

Maybe some broader context is in order.

Consider, for instance, our individual right to commit piracy on the high seas, so long as that, too, is done with the express permission of our Federal government (the immunity parallel is that the sovereign, We the People, have granted a considerable measure of permission to a President by electing him to that office).

The Federal government’s authority to authorize piracy by us private citizens exists in so many words in Article I, Section 8, of our Constitution:

To…grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal….

It’s instructive that that clause comes immediately on the heels of this clause:

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas….

It’s hard to get any clearer than that: our Constitution authorizes our Congress to define what piracy is and then to authorize us private citizens to commit what otherwise would be that piracy by sailing as privateers under Congress-issued Letters of Marque.

Immune, immune, immune, indeed.

 

H/t AJ Jacobs, writing in The Free Press