Tag Archives: ethics

Go Ahead On

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IBM was interested in buying the Israeli chip maker, Tower Semiconductor, and the acquisition might have raised antitrust concerns in Israel, the US, the EU, and elsewhere around the world. Each of those antitrust concerns, if acted on, would have had effect only inside the nation raising the concern, however, making the matter purely a business decision whether to go through with the merger and simply not do business in the objection nation. Nobody objected, though, except the People’s Republic of China.

The PRC’s State Administration for Market Regulation balked and withheld approval, so IBM meekly quit the deal altogether, apparently in order to appease the PRC and preserve—IBM hoped—its other business concerns there.

Slow walking or outright blocking tech and other mergers with, or acquisitions by, American companies is part of the PRC’s economic aggression against us as that nation objects to our objecting to the PRC’s economic aggressions and to its tech and intellectual property extortion and theft. IBM is working, it seems, at cross-purposes with our struggle against the PRC.

Other moves by the PRC have included blocking

  • Qualcomm‘s acquisition of Netherland’s chip maker NXP Semiconductors
  • DuPont‘s acquisition of electronics-materials specialist Rogers Corp, an Arizona-headquartered company
  • certain PRC domiciled companies from buying memory chips from US chip giant Micron

It would have been better for IBM—and those other companies, too; IBM‘s managers don’t have a lock on timidity—to proceed with the acquisition and to eliminate the PRC’s antitrust concerns by not doing business associated with the acquisition’s chips inside the PRC or with businesses domiciled inside the PRC. Or for IBM, et al., to stop doing business with the PRC altogether.

It would have been a beneficial twofer had IBM gone ahead on with the acquisition: IBM and Tower merge, Israel, the US, the EU, and most of the rest of the world would reap the benefits of the merging, and IBM and Tower would be out from under the PRC’s regulatory thumb.

It would be beneficial for our nation, too, if the managers of our businesses had the courage to stand up to our enemies and walk away from them.

Chip Manufacturing

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The Biden administration is bent on bringing computer chip manufacturing back into the United States. On its face, that would seem beneficial. However, the administration team he’s formed to oversee the matter and its $39 billion of taxpayer dollars allocated to the program is populated with

investment bankers, private-equity investors, and management consultants.

And apparently no chip engineers or anyone familiar with supplying chip factories.

Uh, huh.

The Manhattan Project and the crash program to develop treatments for the Wuhan Virus were populated, strongly preferentially, with experts in the field, and they just as strongly deemphasized the moneybags experts.

That’s not the case with Biden’s nightmare dream team of money allocators. This isn’t a true crash program, certainly, but it’s still an effort to rapidly guts something up. It needs experts in the field to do the gutsing, it does not need politically connected money handlers.

Collusion

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Or worse. The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are on the right track to criticize the sham nature of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint David Weiss as Special Counsel (an illegal appointment, as illustrated nearby) in the Hunter Biden (and possibly et al.) investigation.

Those editors, though, are surprisingly naïve in one regard. On the matter of DoJ’s (Garland’s and Weiss’) move to formally withdraw the plea deal that Federal District Judge Maryellen Noreika had rejected the day it was presented to her, the editors suggested,

He may now end up facing some felony tax charges, as two investigating IRS whistleblowers told Congress they had recommended, or perhaps other charges.

The Editors can’t possibly be this naive. There are only two likely outcomes to this. One is that Weiss drops the charges altogether and walks away. The other is that Weiss proceeds with the present case, and charges Hunter Biden with precisely the charges to which Hunter had agreed to plead guilty.

As to Weiss’ sweetheart “Special” Counsel role, that in no way blocks either of the above moves; his new title is just a mechanism to drag out his new sham investigation for another five years, following which he’ll write a report that shakes his finger very firmly at Biden.

The fix has been made manifest, and Garland has shown that he’s far more deeply embedded than Eric Holder was in his wingman role; Garland is Joe Biden’s made man.

The Problems with David Weiss’ Appointment

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Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed Delaware Federal Prosecutor David Weiss as Special Counsel overseeing the Huner Biden collection of investigations. You all know this already. There are problems with Garland’s appointment and with Weiss’ being in that position.

Here is what 28 CFR § 600.3 – Qualifications of the Special Counsel says about who’s allowed to be appointed to the position and who’s allowed to occupy the position.

  • 600.3 Qualifications of the Special Counsel.
    (a) An individual named as Special Counsel shall be a lawyer with a reputation for integrity and impartial decisionmaking, and with appropriate experience to ensure both that the investigation will be conducted ably, expeditiously and thoroughly, and that investigative and prosecutorial decisions will be supported by an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies. The Special Counsel shall be selected from outside the United States Government. Special Counsels shall agree that their responsibilities as Special Counsel shall take first precedence in their professional lives, and that it may be necessary to devote their full time to the investigation, depending on its complexity and the stage of the investigation.
    (b) The Attorney General shall consult with the Assistant Attorney General for Administration to ensure an appropriate method of appointment, and to ensure that a Special Counsel undergoes an appropriate background investigation and a detailed review of ethics and conflicts of interest issues. A Special Counsel shall be appointed as a “confidential employee” as defined in 5 U.S.C. 7511(b)(2)(C).

The problems begin with Special Counsel shall be a lawyer with a reputation for integrity and impartial decisionmaking. Both of these criteria are open questions as they apply to Weiss. Weiss, recall, is the Delaware Federal Prosecutor who agreed to a plea deal regarding Hunter Biden’s tax and gun possession misbehaviors that was so dishonest—he even tried to slide a permanent immunity clause into a rehab program requirement and didn’t present that clause to the presiding judge until the day he, in collusion with Biden’s lawyers, hoped she would bless the deal—that the presiding judge rejected the deal the day it was laid in front of her. The lack of impartiality of Weiss’ decision making is exemplified by that same dishonest plea deal: his judgment was such that he thought he could railroad, or con, the judge with his stampede effort.

Next is the part about the investigation will be conducted ably, expeditiously and thoroughly. Weiss took five years to investigate what he considered to be misdemeanors and a minor drug habit—the charges and rehab need to which he agreed in the above plea deal. He may have been uncommonly thorough (emphasis on may) in those misdemeanor investigations, but they most assuredly were neither ably done nor expeditiously so.

Then there’s the bit about The Special Counsel shall be selected from outside the United States Government. This, by itself, should have been a deal breaker, and it demonstrates AG Merrick Garland’s own utter dishonesty and shameless participation in what can only be a coverup of Hunter Biden’s, President Joe Biden’s (D), and the Biden Family Syndicate’s criminal behaviors. Weiss, as I’ve mentioned a couple of times above, is deep inside the United States Government; he’s deep inside the United States Department of Justice; he was, until his current appointment, the United States Attorney for the District of Delaware.

That former Attorney General Bill Barr appointed United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut John Durham as Special Counsel regarding the Russia Collusion Hoax sets no precedent that clears Garland or Weiss of this deal breaker. That’s merely a prior grievous error by an Attorney General.

Biden’s Attack on American Free Markets

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The Biden administration’s OMB is moving to eliminate consideration of opportunity costs from the administration’s estimates of the costs of proposed regulations, a move that would make those regulations seem cheaper than they are.

Opportunity costs are at the core of free market economics, and The Wall Street Journal‘s editors offer a succinct definition [emphasis added].

Consider a business that spends $1 million obeying a regulation by making an upgrade, installing new equipment, hiring lawyers, and whatever else compliance entails.
[O]pportunity cost is what the $1 million would have been used for absent the regulation. It might have been spent on research and development, hiring, increasing output, or paying bonuses to employees, who in turn would spend it on something else.
An accountant would say the cost of this regulation is $1 million, and this is basically how President Biden’s OMB wants regulators and the public to think as well. A good economist knows better and would account not only for the dollars spent but also the forgone rate of return on activities never taken up due to regulatory compliance.

Thus, opportunity cost estimating is a critical way in which businessmen—not just economists—estimate the value of a variety of potential moves in an effort to identify the one (or two in concert with each other) that make the most business sense/provide highest and most likely return(s) on the actual dollars that would actually be committed.

Biden’s move is not just an attempt to…mislead…us ordinary Americans regarding the costs of the Biden regulatory state, it’s an outright attack on our free market economy and an attempt to replace it with his regulatory state, economic decisions from the center, economy.