Tag Archives: political economy

Here’s a Thought

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Take a breath. I have those once in a while.

Anyway.

The Biden administration has just sent $530 million to two (count ’em, two) companies in deep Progressive-Democratic (I won’t say “blue;” that sullies the term used to describe our State and local police forces) Massachusetts so they can make batteries for battery-powered vehicles.

Ascend Elements and 6K Inc were recipients Wednesday [19 October] of more than $530 million in federal funding through a program designed to support battery manufacturing, recycling, and material processing for the electric vehicle market.

Massachusetts Progressive-Democrat Senators Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren and Congressmen Jim McGovern and Seth Moulton all think the taxpayer money transfer is just peachy-keen.

Which brings me to my thought. The money has flowed. When the new Congressional session begins, Ascend and 6K will have had 2½ months by which to have committed at least some of that money. Of course, as serious companies, they already have had a year, or two, or more in which to plan their use of all that taxpayer money as they lobbied for it with their Massachusetts Congressional delegation.

If the Republican Party wins a majority in the House, and especially if it wins a majority in the Senate also, then by the end of January 2023, they should hale Mike O’Kronley and Andrew Aberdale, Ascend’s CEO and CFO respectively, before the relevant committees to testify, under oath, concerning the disposition of those moneys so far, and the concrete results obtained with those expenditures. The two should appear on the same day, but in separate committees, cycling through all of them separately so as to be unable to coordinate their responses in real time.

The same should be done with Aaron Bent and Gary Hall, 6K’s CEO and CFO, respectively.

Following that, House auditors to visit the two companies to audit their performance under the contracts. Such testimony and auditing subsequently should be done annually.

It’s a new concept—Congress exercising its oversight responsibility by actually monitoring private contractor performance rather than just paying lip service to the obligation—but it’s one that needs to be put into effect.

Progressive-Democratic Party Payback?

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Or is it Big Tech payback? Or both?

Recall Elon Musk’s renewed commitment to buy Twitter, and recall also his commitment to free speech and to ending Twitter’s bias and censorship.

Now the Biden administration is “reviewing” the proposal for its national security implications.

US officials have grown uncomfortable over Musk’s recent threat to stop supplying the Starlink satellite service to Ukraine—he said it had cost him $80 million so far—and what they see as his increasingly Russia-friendly stance following a series of tweets that outlined peace proposals favorable to President Vladimir Putin. They are also concerned by his plans to buy Twitter with a group of foreign investors.

Of course there was no threat to stop the Ukraine-Starlink facility; Musk only said he wasn’t sure he could continue to cover the cost alone. The Biden administration objected to the idea of no longer having that freebie.

How dare Musk propose peace talks between Ukraine and Russia. That’s President Joe Biden’s (D) and SecState Antony Blinken’s (D) job. Private citizens should just sit down and shut up.

How dare Musk put together an international consortium to buy a company with global reach? Neither Progressive-Democrats nor the Precious Ones of Twitter approve.

Need to do that “security” evaluation.

Indentured Servitude

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The Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West wants to force unionization on companies and their employees whether those employees want it or not. The SEIU-UHW’s proximate target is California’s dialysis industry. California’s Proposition 29 is the union’s latest (after two prior ballot failures in the two prior election cycles) effort targeting dialysis.

The measure, which would require dialysis clinics to have a physician, nurse practitioner or physician assistant “on-site during all patient treatment hours, would cost dialysis clinics $376,000 to $731,000 per year—per clinic. That would drive many into bankruptcy closure because they can’t afford those costs.

That’s bad enough. Here, though, is the enforcement mechanism the union has included in its ballot measure.

[T]he language of Prop 29 says it would prohibit “clinics from closing or substantially reducing services without state approval.”

That’s naked indentured servitude. That’s what unions want. Recall unions’ prior and long-standing drive to force non-union workers in any company to pay union dues under the guise that the union is working for them as well as their actual members.

Now unions want to reduce businesses and their employees to the status of serfs, permanently tied to the land/permanently tied to operation.

Who’s in Charge?

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British Prime Minister Liz Truss and her then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng proposed a serious personal and corporate tax reduction for British subjects. The Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey demurred—loudly—and sent the British securities and debt markets into a tailspin.

As a result of the turmoil, Truss folded, fired Kwarteng, and removed the corporate tax reduction.

That wasn’t enough for Bailey and now the TINAs—Tories in Name Alone—and now Truss has virtually quit the game altogether: she’s now withdrawn all of the tax reductions, even those income tax reductions that would have benefitted the ordinary British subject.

Never mind, either, that the tax reductions would have spurred British economic growth and gone a long way toward getting its high inflation back under control and back down.

Elected Truss doesn’t seem to be in charge. Bureaucrat Bailey does. On the other hand, between the two of them, only Bailey seems to have the courage to stay the course he’s set.

One of those TINAs, a carefully unnamed Conservative lawmaker who won his district in 2019 with a 65% majority had this:

One says that he lies awake at night worrying about being kicked out when the country next goes to the polls.
“I’ve got private school fees to pay and my mortgage is going through the roof[.]”

More worried about his elite status and personal welfare than he is about the job his constituents hired him to do.

And isn’t all of that a sad state of affairs for the British people.

Unions for Socialism

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It doesn’t get any clearer than this.

Workers at an Apple Inc store in Oklahoma City’s Penn Square Mall have voted to organize, styling themselves the Penn Square Labor Alliance.

Here’s the deal, though, as laid out by Charity Lassiter, a member of the new organization’s organizing committee:

Now that we’ve won the election, it is our hope that management will come to the table so that we may collectively work towards building a company that prioritizes workers over profit and encourages employees to thrive[.]

To hell with profit, to hell with business success—which is how jobs get created, how wages increase—companies exist as non-governmental social welfare organs.

That’s the stuff of socialism.