With the newly installed Biden administration, the People’s Republic of China are enthusiastically touting the status quo ante. Here’s the PRC’s Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Hua Chunying:
I hope they can meet the Chinese side halfway, uphold the spirit of mutual respect….
Meet us halfway: agree that the South China Sea with its islands and resources are our sovereign territory, and we’ll stop going after the East China Sea. For now.
Oh, and yes, we’ll respect you in the morning.
A short piece about billionaire real estate developer Jeff Greene‘s view of the current state of our economy had this:
A progressive Democrat, Greene explained that former President Donald Trump failed to support the working class by increasing wages and establishing income equality….
This is a typical Progressive-Democrat distortion of the facts. With unemployment rates falling to historic lows and Americans reentering the labor force (reversing a years-long trend), income equality actually increased markedly during the Trump administration. The lowest income earners got more hours and some pay increases, and those without jobs got jobs, increasing their income sharply from zero. In the meantime, the highest paid saw very little increase in their income. The rich stayed rich, and the poor got much less so.
If the real estate developer didn’t see this, it’s only because, in his own bubble, he continued to not pay his employees adequately or to push his contractors to pay their tradesmen adequately or to hire more.
Nasdaq—the tech-oriented stock exchange (no irony there)—is demanding companies listed with it
appoint within the next four years no fewer than two “diverse” directors: at least one woman, and one person from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group or someone who identifies as LGBTQ. Any company failing this requirement would be obligated to explain why.
The SEC must approve the demand before it has legal effect, but look for the Biden SEC to grant that.
Nasdaq, and the rest of the social justice warrior-ettes and virtue-signalers, miss the point of diversity, though. Or they don’t miss the point; they just don’t care.
Diversity of thought, diversity of approaches to problem solutions, most assuredly is something desperately needed in the boardroom. And in the C-suites, in middle management, on the production floor. And in schools, legislatures, and other political entities. (Voucher and charter schools already have this kind of diversity, in the main.) And in the mainstay of our private economy, mom-and-pop and other small businesses. Diversity of irrelevant characteristics like race, gender, or anything other will fall out of hiring for diversity of thought.
That’s even the logical outcome of those who push for diversity based on those irrelevant characteristics: all men are fundamentally equal in capability, these worthies say, regardless of color, gender, or….
Diversity done for the sake of diversity of race, gender, any other form, however, is just bigotry for the sake of bigotry, regardless of claimed purpose for the bigotry.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has taken his State hostage and, reminiscent of a scene in Blazing Saddles, involving his Cleavon Little character counterpart, is threatening that if he doesn’t get billions in Federal dollars, “the…hostage…gets it.” (“Isn’t anybody gonna help that poor State?”)
During a speech detailing the state’s annual budget, Cuomo requested at least $15 billion in federal funding—or the state will likely have to implement a number of undesirable measures, including tax increases.
And
Cuomo said the state has proposed temporarily increasing the top rate by two percentage points to 10.86%, from 8.82%. A wealthy resident in New York City would pay a top rate of 14.7% in combined taxes….
“Temporarily.” Sure.
But the very threat is Cuomo’s admission that his State already plenty of money; it just needs reallocation. Cuomo’s State has no need of Federal—which is to say, the money of us non-New York citizens.
Open MIC is a Left-wing activist organization that buys stocks in companies and then uses that shareholder status to push policies having nothing to do with the companies’ business and everything to do with “social justice,” sham diversity goals, and other attempts to alter the nature of commerce in our American economy.
Now the group has joined the censorship campaign against free speech.
New shareholder resolutions call upon advertiser Home Depot Inc and agency group Omnicom Group Inc to investigate whether their advertising policies inadvertently contribute to “violations of civil or human rights” by funding platforms that spread inappropriate content, according to copies of the proposals filed in late 2020.
The effort was organized by Open MIC, an organization that uses shareholder engagement to promote causes such as diversity and privacy.
Advertisers have come under pressure to withhold their spending from controversial TV programming or social-media platforms such as Facebook Inc. and to use their weight to push for more content moderation.
“Inappropriate” is as defined by Open MIC. No disputes of that definition are allowed.
Such attempts to censor do not constitute an open microphone; they move to prevent disfavored groups of Americans from having access to the microphone.
They’re claims that ordinary Americans are too grindingly stupid to be trusted with our own decisions regarding what to listen to and how to evaluate what we hear.
They’re borne of the terror the Left has of views and of speech that contradicts the Left’s Received Wisdom.