Category Archives: ethics

Americans

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Silverton, CO, mayor, Shane Fuhrman tried to do away with the practice of saying the Pledge of Allegiance at town Trustee meetings. His excuse was his claimed need to duck away from unspecified “direct and indirect threats” and supposedly inappropriate comments he heard “in and out of public meetings” and because of his vague and undefined “general divisiveness and issues created in our community.”

A Trustee demurred, and so did town attendees at the meeting. They stood and recited the Pledge.

These are some of the average Americans for whom the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party have such contempt.

Responsibility

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Recall that Texas’ Progressive-Democrats scuttled out of the end of Texas’ last legislative session, and that in response to their misbehavior, Governor Greg Abbott said he’d veto the part of Texas’ budget appropriations that funded the legislature. Last Friday, Abbott did precisely that.

Texans don’t run from a legislative fight, and they don’t walk away from unfinished business. Funding should not be provided for those who quit their job early, leaving their state with unfinished business and exposing taxpayers to higher costs for an additional legislative session. I therefore object to and disapprove of these appropriations.

Now hear the squalling by Texas’ Progressive-Democrat legislators.

…the budget article also funds rank-and-file staffers such as clerical and maintenance workers

Fox News cites them as saying. And House Democratic Caucus Chair Chris Turner:

Texas has a governor, not a dictator.

Never mind that it’s the minority Progressive-Democrats who are openly attacking democracy, attempting to impose their own diktats, by refusing to allow our State’s democratically elected legislature carry out its democratic duty by voting on a bill those Progressive-Democrats don’t like. Since they fear (probably accurately), they’d lose the vote, they moved to block the vote altogether. How dictatorial is that?

Regarding the rank-and-file staffers such as clerical and maintenance workers about whom those Progressive-Democrats so piously pretend to care, it’s those Progressive-Democrats’ misbehavior that has put the rank-and-file at risk. If they had allowed democracy to proceed, there would have been no need for Abbott to take such action.

The Progressive-Democrats know this full well.

Texas’ Progressive-Democrats are loudly—and offensively, I say—crying their crocodile tears.

An Illegal Offering?

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The Biden administration intends to lease some Federal lands in the waters roughly between Long Island and New Jersey, ostensibly to build a wind farm there.

The problem with that intent is this:

The proposed “competitive lease sale”…the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) [an arm of the Interior Department] is seeking feedback on several mandates tied to the sale, including the requirement “to create good-paying union jobs and engage with all stakeholders and ocean users[.]”
The “announcement of new proposed lease stipulations puts a priority on creating and sustaining good-paying union jobs….”

And there’s the problem. In addition to President Joe Biden’s (D) administration picking and choosing winners and losers in this enterprise—unethical at best, and completely out of bounds for the government of a free nation—the openly stated requirement for union jobs is illegal to the point of unconstitutional.

Picking winners and losers: the lease sale is, by design, not at all a competitive offering. Open shop companies—companies that are not unionized—are deliberately excluded from even bidding on the contract. That also creates artificially inflated costs to us taxpayers for any of these leases through that lack of competition and through the unions getting a free hand to raise their wage demands.

Illegal, unconstitutional: those non-union companies are denied their statutory rights to competitively bid at all for these Federal contracts. Beyond that, those non-union companies are denied equal protection under the 14th Amendment by being denied an opportunity to compete at all, much less on an equal footing, for participation in the contracts.

All non-union employees of those companies, individually and severally, are denied their equal protection under the 14th Amendment by being denied any opportunity to earn a paycheck under those contracts solely on the basis of their not being union members.

Aiding and Abetting

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In response to the ransomware attack against JBS USA Holdings that briefly disrupted some of the company’s Australian and American operations, JBS paid the hackers $11 million—more than twice that paid by Colonial Pipeline in its cowardly reward to its attackers.

JBS paid those $11 million dollars in its own craven reward for its own privilege of having been hacked.

In many—most?—milieus, aiding and abetting a criminal in the performance of the criminal’s activities is a felony.

It needs to be one here, too. Rather than compensating ransomware hackers—which compensation is directly, if not solely, responsible for the current sharp rise in ransomware attacks—these criminals need a different sort of reward, one that withdraws current criminals from the board and that discourages others from deciding to play.

Yet More and Bigger Spending

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The House Problem Solvers Caucus, with 29 Progressive-Democrats and 29 Republicans, are proposing their own “infrastructure” bill—to the tune of $1.25 trillion dollars, more than double the Senate Republicans’ original proposal of some $570 billion (and which, in their own abject meekness, they exploded into a nearly trillion dollar supplication).

The Republicans in this “problem solver” gang are engaged in their own surrender to the spending and taxing Party.

Of course President Joe Biden (D) and his Congressional Party leadership aren’t negotiating in good faith—they don’t need to. They can hold out for everything in their original demand because they know they’ll get it.