Tag Archives: rights

The Fed and Social Engineering

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President Joe Biden (D) wants our Federal Reserve System to engage in economic social engineering, so he’s nominating as the Fed’s banking supervisor the climate activist Sarah Bloom Raskin. Among her lately remarks concerning credit allocation and climate change was her last-spring op-ed in The New York Times. She led off that piece with this:

Climate change poses the next big threat. Ignoring it, particularly to the benefit of fossil fuel interests, is a risk we can’t afford.

She had this, too, in the same piece:

The Fed is singularly poised to seed strategic investments in future economic stability.

And this:

The decision to bring oil and gas into the Fed’s investment portfolio not only misdirects limited recovery resources but also sends a false price signal to investors about where capital needs to be allocated[.]

Raskin had this in her September 2020 Project Syndicate op-ed, reprinted by Duke Law:

US regulators need to be encouraged to think more imaginatively about how they can engage with local transition efforts. For example, how might financial policies from diverse agencies be stitched together to produce outcomes that enable firms to hit their net-zero targets? How can financial policy be used to help accelerate a transition that redeploys workers for new jobs, or to assist households that are being asked to change their spending habits? And how can regulatory changes relating to disclosure, access to credit, and pricing of risk support a rapid and just green transition?
…
In short…[f]inancial regulators must reimagine their own role so that they can play their part in the broader reimagining of the economy.

That’s not the Federal Reserve’s role, though. The Fed’s statutorily required goals are to maximize employment, stabilize prices, and moderate long-term interest rates. There’s nothing in there about climate change, or “guiding” lending to this or that government-favored group of Americans and away from that or this government-disfavored group of Americans, or any other sort of social engineering.

One more thing. Aside from Raskin’s own altered-state understanding of the Fed, a larger problem regards the present administration’s overall attitude. That Biden-Harris actually nominated Raskin says volumes about his own view of law and his own willingness to disregard it in order to increase his administration’s power.

Congressman Jordan Demurs

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Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) has declined Congressman and Chairman of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol Bennie Thompson’s (D, MS) “request” to appear before that J6 committee. His letter carrying his decision to Thompson laid the matter out in no uncertain terms.

Leaving aside Jordan’s notice that the J6 committee’s summons of Jordan (and of Congressman Scott Perry (R, PA), I add) is an assault (Jordan used “pry”) on a sitting Congressman’s deliberative process informing a Member about legislative matters before the House is an outrageous abuse of the Select Committee’s authority, he laid out a number of other reasons for his decision.

As you well know, I have no relevant information that would assist the Select Committee in advancing any legitimate legislative purpose. I cannot speak to Speaker Pelosi’s failure to ensure the appropriate security posture at the Capitol complex in advance of well-publicized protests on January 6, 2021. I cannot elaborate on former US Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund’s statement that a concern about “optics”—following widespread calls from Democrats in 2020 to defund the police—contributed to the limited security response. I have nothing to add to the bipartisan, comprehensive findings of the Senate investigative committees or to those issued by federal inspectors general. I cannot testify about the Justice Department’s ongoing law-enforcement efforts, although I am aware of reports that the FBI has determined the violence was not coordinated or part of any “organized plot to overturn the presidential election result.”

Jordan, in his letter, also took notice that the J6 committee seems superfluous (my term), since House Democrats have already determined the committee’s outcome:

House Democrats have already prejudged the results of the Select Committee’s work, declaring in their February 2021 impeachment brief that President Trump is “unmistakabl[y]” responsible for the events of January 6. Democrats have accused their Republican colleagues of “sedition” and called them “traitors” for objecting to Electoral College results in certain states—an official action taken pursuant to federal law, and the same objections that you and other senior House Democrats made following the 2000, 2004, and 2016 presidential elections.

He also laid out individual Progressive-Democrat committee members’ dishonesty:

  • In a widely distributed letter, you falsely accused former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik of attending a meeting in Washington on January 5, 2021, when Kerik was actually in New York City.
  • During a business meeting to consider holding our former colleague Mark Meadows in criminal contempt of Congress, Representative Adam Schiff, a member of the Select Committee, doctored a text message I had forwarded to Mr. Meadows.
  • During the floor debate on the Meadows criminal contempt resolution, Representative Jamie Raskin, another member of the Select Committee, falsely attributed a second text message to a “lawmaker” when in fact it was not sent by any Member of Congress.

Jordan is being polite. Speaker Pelosi’s (D, CA) J6 committee is not just the cudgel for smearing Republicans that he terms it; it’s a kangaroo court being used to assault an opposition party and attempt to delegitimize it through innuendo, ad hominem, and outright lie.

Jordan’s letter can be read here via Fox News.

Trespassing and Protesting

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Michael Taube is on the right track with his opprobrium of trespass on the private property of protest targets in the pursuit of those protests, and he’s correct in his opprobrium of those who do the trespassing.

But as is typical of Leftists (Taube was a speechwriter for former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who for all his Canadian-level conservatism was quite a bit to the Left), he insists that control from the center is the answer.

Unfortunately, neither Canada nor most US states have a clear legal distinction when it comes to protesting outside a person’s home or dwelling. Both countries need laws protecting the right to live and raise a family in a peaceful environment.

No, the “countries” should not have such laws. At least in the US, police powers reside in the States. Our Federal government already has too many police power-based laws, and we see the outcomes in the FBI’s misbehaviors, and in DoJ’s gun-running efforts (in the name of the greater good, no less).

American States, at least, already have trespass laws; although they may well need to strengthen sanctions on conviction. In any event, the Federal government needs to butt out.

The Senate and the Republic

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Senator Jeff Merkley (D, OR) has said the quiet part aloud (to coin a phrase). His immediate venue is the coming Progressive-Democrat effort to Federalize our nation’s elections, which by our Constitution are set by each State’s own legislatures and only modifiable under narrow circumstances by the Federal Congress.

You can think of January as a moment when two different forces are converging. One is the functionality of the Senate and the other is the functionality of our republic.

No, these are not different “forces” at all. The functionality of our republic depends on our Federal Senate remaining the bipartisan body that it was designed to be. In the present case, that requires the Senate’s filibuster function to remain as it is, which enforces the Senate’s bipartisan nature.

It gets worse, though:

[Progressive-]Democrats have called passing new elections legislation their priority, arguing that minority voters need protections from new state rules.

This is Party being openly, loudly and proudly racist. There are no minority voters or “other” voters or non-minority voters. There are only American voters. As a man said not so long ago,

There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.

Even if that man turned out actually to not believe his words, the concept he pretended to espouse is true, nonetheless.

But, then, this is just another aspect of the Progressive-Democrats’ drive to fundamentally change America. The next year, and the two years after that, are going to be very dangerous times for our Republic.

Child Abuse

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Now the New Orleans government is requiring children as young as five years old to get vaccinated, whether they need it or not, whether their parents want it for their children or not.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell said she is implementing the policy “to keep the omicron variant at bay,” amid surging cases in Orleans Parish.

And

“The vaccine mandate will expand to include children ages 5-11,” she said. “We will require proof of vaccination or negative tests at bars and restaurants and other locations for everyone ages 5 and older.”

(I’m not aware that patrons as young as five years are allowed in New Orleans bars, but that’s another story.)

And, she orders:

Starting in January, you MUST ensure that your children are getting vaccinated!

This too closely approaches child abuse. There is virtually no risk to children—or from them to others—from the Wuhan Virus, especially from the mildest of all the variants, Omicron. It’s also true that the risk of dangerous side effects from the vaccines against the virus seems very small.

However.

We have more than two years of empirical data from a sample size that is the population of children on Earth with which to assess the level of risk to children from a Wuhan Virus infection. We have a much smaller set of data, collected over a much shorter period of time, with which to assess any risk to children of serious side effect from any of the virus vaccines.

Stipulate, though, that the vaccines’ serious side effect risk really is quite small. The comparison of interest is not whether the vaccines have an absolute level of risk in isolation of other factors or risks. The proper comparison is the level of risk to a child from being unvaccinated compared with the risk to the child of serious side effect from the vaccine.

If the two levels of risk are comparable—and they seem to be, even with the so-far assessed optimistic side effect risk—then the risk from the vaccine is not worth the risk to a child from going unvaccinated.

Forcing that second risk onto the child is too risky, to the point of abuse.