Tag Archives: regulation

This Is Why Unions Need to be Busted

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Iowa State Senator Adrian Dickey (R, Packwood) has introduced SF 2374, which is a bill that would

require each public employer to “submit to the [Public Employee Relations Board, or PERB] a list of employees in the bargaining unit” within 10 days of a union recertification election.

Never mind that Iowa’s taxpaying citizens have every right to know what their tax dollars are being used for and who’s being paid with them. Never mind, either, that the bill requires public employers, not unions, to submit lists of eligible employees. Never mind, either either, that unions insist on precisely this information when it’s useful for them; unions just call it card checking.

Jesse Case, Teamsters Local 238 Secretary-Treasurer, says that everything—including strikes—are on the table if that’s what it takes to stop the bill. He’s even proposing some wildly inappropriate, deliberately dangerous, union actions if his union doesn’t get its way:

Let’s say you’re a water treatment person and you get a call at three in the morning that says, “The water supply’s going down,” you’re not obligated to answer that call and that’s not a strike.
It’s not a work stoppage because you’re not getting paid at three o’clock in the morning to answer your phone. In fact, it’s against the law to make somebody answer their phone if they’re not receiving pay.
…
It’s [sic] there’s a blizzard moving in at three in the morning, you can go into work at seven or six or your regular scheduled time—call Senator Dickey to come plow your streets.

The union doesn’t care about the risks to businesses or lives; they want their way. The union doesn’t care that those hours already count as serious overtime, emergency or not, with serious extra pay associated.

These strike threats, these union flu work slowdowns, this you can’t have anything unless we get everything ideology, this legalized extortion—nice business/state/whatever you got there, be too bad if something was to happen to it—is exactly why today’s unions need to be busted.

The Iowa legislature and Governor need to stand tall and pass the bill and apply the consequences to these unions.

Not All It Can Do

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Progressive-Democrat Mayor Eric Adams’ New York City government has a new way to spy on American citizens resident in that city, or even just visiting.

New York City drivers buckle up because Big Brother (aka the MTA) is keeping a watchful eye on you by installing cameras along New York City streets to track you. But why? Well, it all boils down to money, of course. The MTA is rolling out a controversial $15 per day congestion fee for all drivers venturing south of 60th Street. They’ve even given this area of Manhattan a snazzy name: the toll congestion zone.

That’s its publicly stated—look, a squirrel—purpose.

Another purpose, one Adams and his city government don’t want to mention, is to track those drivers to see where they go; where they park and shut down, presumably getting out of their cars; what shops they go to, at least identifying the shops within walking distance; and how long they’re there.

Because inquiring Government minds want to know.

More Reasons to Disband

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Now the Biden administration is actively seeking to undermine our friends and allies on top of destroying our energy industry.

The White House on Friday announced a temporary pause on pending decisions of exports of liquefied natural gas to non-free trade countries, until the Energy Department can factor climate change into its reviews of the projects.

Two changes (for starters) are badly needed, and these changes badly need significant majorities in the House and Senate and a Republican in the White House (which puts a premium on the elections this fall).

One of those changes is enactment of a statute giving the relevant approval authority(s) 10 calendar days in which to approve an export application or to provide a detailed explanation for denial, which explanation must have only concrete, measurable reasons, be devoid of generalities, and be publicly available NLT the 11th day. Absent such a decision, the application must be deemed approved.

The other change is the disbandment of the Department of Energy with all Department personnel returned to the private sector, not reassigned elsewhere in the Federal government. The only functions remotely worth retaining are ARPA-Energy and Science and Innovation, which should be folded into ARPA with circumscribed funding authorities.

Another change, in furtherance of the concept of the second change, is the disbandment of the Environmental Protection Agency, with its personnel also returned to the private sector, rather than reassigned within the Federal government. This agency—the managers in charge of it, along with its employees, have for too long conflated environmental protection with climate “protection,” with its cockamamy decisions exemplified by its ruling that plant food in our atmosphere—CO2—is a pollutant.

Valid Arguments

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Several States’ Attorneys General have filed an amicus brief in a Supreme Court case centered on whether Texas and Florida statutes that limit Big Tech’s ability to censor speech done on their platforms are legitimate. The analogy they draw is one valid argument.

[Summarized by Fox News]: [G]iving Big Tech the ability to moderate or censor users’ content would be like giving cable or telephone companies permission to cut phone lines on speech at their discretion. The AGs note that under federal “must-carry requirements,” those companies are banned from subjugating any speech on their lines.

And:

The Eleventh Circuit concluded social media companies could censor content because they have “historically exercised” power to refuse transmission of disfavored ideas.
But telegraph companies have a much longer history of censorship. Social media is less than two decades old. Congress did not impose must-carry requirements on telegraphs until 1888, 50 years after their invention[.]
Yet it is well recognized today that those must-carry regulations were constitutional—even though this Court declared that telegraph companies are “not common carriers.” History thus provides no basis for dismissing the striking similarities between social media companies and telegraph and telephones by dubbing social-media censorship “editorial judgment[.]”
While the earlier laws applied to telegraphs and telephones, it is no different when the companies carrying other people’s speech are digital rather than analog[.]
The States thus have a paramount interest in urging this Court to affirm that longstanding, historic authority of States to protect freedom of speech and enable representative government by prohibiting dominant communication networks from censoring[.]

There is one more argument that is, IMNSHO opinion, dispositively on point. This is the status of those Big Tech platforms—X (nee Twitter), Meta’s Facebook, and Alphabet’s YouTube, for instance—as public forums. Indeed, some of these platforms have explicitly stated that they intend to be public squares for public discourse, even as they also provide mechanisms for exchanging private correspondence.

The public square is precisely where speech may not be censored except within a very few very narrowly defined boundaries—incitement to riot, explicit threats of violence against particular persons. Whether any Big Tech platform has explicitly styled itself a public square, each of these platforms have grown so large—become so dominant—that each one of them is, de facto, a public square. Their censorship practices must be barred.

Bank Capital Requirements

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The Federal Reserve is looking hard at increasing the amount of capital that banks must hold in the Fed’s effort to boost bank liquidity, or their ability to handle sharply increased withdrawal rates.

There is pushback against this proposal, including objections that it might make it harder for banks to lend to folks on the lower economic tiers, even that it might make American banks less competitive than foreign competitors. That last often (not always) is just political Newspeak for “be more like Europe.”

However, the problem can be preempted—or at least pushed a considerable way down the road, allowing for more thought—by doing something different that IMNSHO is a better move, anyway.

Rather than increasing capital requirements, require all banks to mark to market (semiannually? quarterly?) all of the debt instruments the banks hold in satisfaction of existing capital requirements.

Then leave that requirement in place for some period of time (5 years, say) in order to get a serious look at how well, or poorly, that requirement supports bank liquidity during economic downturns.