Category Archives: ethics

Tariff Bankruptcy?

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Or is that just an excuse? Marelli, which supplies Nissan and Stellantis with auto parts like lighting and internal electronics, has filed for bankruptcy and is blaming the current tariff environment for the filing.

However, as Marelli’s CEO David Slump admitted in his company’s bankruptcy filing, as summarized by The Wall Street Journal,

…the company had already been struggling with long-term supply-chain issues stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic….

The company also has been struggling with losses and a hefty debt load for years.

Slump said the pandemic restricted access to both raw materials and the labor market, and set off a series of events that led to Marelli being unable to sustain its nearly $5 billion of debt. Even after the pandemic subsided, the impeded supply chain for semiconductors had an acute effect on automotive production.

Obvious questions arise:

  • what has the company been doing to reduce and then eliminate those losses over those years?
  • how assiduously has the company been working to pay down that debt? Has it only been paying the contractually obligated minimum payments, or has it been paying something extra against the principle in each payment period? Coupled with that, the company’s debt repayment has been heavily complicated by operating at a loss for years.
  • what has the company been doing to readjust its own supply chains? It saw, empirically, those five years ago during the supply chain disruptions of the Wuhan Virus situation, that its existing supply chains were heavily vulnerable.
  • what has the company been doing to develop new products and new buyers?

Slump’s claim of macroeconomic headwinds associated with the imposition of tariffs in countries around the world may well have been the trigger, but those “headwinds” are only that. This has been a bankruptcy building toward actuality for a few years. Excuse-making isn’t much in the way of a solution.

Some Editors are Worried

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Some editors, here The Wall Street Journal‘s, worry that a criminal investigation into Biden White House staffers’ apparent coverup could get those staffers to clam up and not talk. They’re happy with House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer’s (R, KY) civil-oriented investigation into the coverup and worry further that a criminal investigation could interfere with the civil one.

Maybe, maybe not. The only way the staffers could clam up in a criminal investigation would be to plead the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. They could otherwise slow-walk their testimony, be evasive in their answers, fail to remember things, and on and on. But they can do those things in Comer’s investigation, too—especially, plead the 5th.

The editors closed their piece with this:

Learning more about how the White House covered up Mr Biden’s decline matters, but raising American incomes matters more.

The two are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, increasing American incomes depends critically on a mentally competent President. Learning how the last President’s mental decline occurred, and especially how it was covered up and by whom—the positions as well as the incumbents—is critical to maximizing our chances of having mentally competent Presidents in future.

And that requires a criminal investigation, also, to determine if any criminal laws were broken, if so by whom, and locking those persons up. They’ve done their damage, criminally or civilly, but locking up those who broke criminal laws would discourage future staffers from doing the same thing.

I’d Go One Step Further

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In a Friday letter to the WSJ‘s Letters section, Samuel Estreicher and Rudra Reddy, of the New York University School of Law, reminded us of a suggestion for curbing Federal district judge arrogance in issuing nationwide—universal—injunctions:

Aside from raising the legal standard for issuing such injunctions, the Supreme Court should also consider procedural steps that could be taken to challenge a nationwide injunction once issued, such as an expedited appeal to the regional circuit or to the high court itself.

My one further step is this: automatically stay each universal injunction until its final review by the relevant appellate court and Supreme Court, or by the Supreme Court directly. In conjunction with this, require the appellate court or Supreme Court to take up the case within an explicitly defined number of days (not many) of the injunction having been issued, with that takeup done either by appeal or by the appellate court on its own initiative, whichever is necessary to meet the deadline. Apply the same time-constraint to the Supreme Court in the event of a direct appeal.

I’d give serious consideration, given the serious nature and wide scope of a universal injunction issued at the district level, to having the injunction’s appeal go directly to the Supreme Court. That Court is, after all, the only one with universal jurisdiction, and it’s the only Constitutionally mandated Court in the US.

And an incentive step: in the event the universal injunction is struck down, even if it’s allowed to stand as it applies solely to the litigants, the appellate/Supreme Court should overtly chastise the issuing district court judge for his overreach.

It’s Not Only That

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A letter writer in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote, regarding who or what is responsible for safeguarding our rights and liberties,

the security of our rights depends on ourselves. When one considers what we hold self-evident—that government doesn’t possess the power to grant or deny our inherent and unalienable natural rights—we find that all we got from Benjamin Franklin and his colleagues was a federal government that has rarely upheld the terms of our social contract and poses the greatest threat to our freedom and prosperity.

That’s not all we got from Franklin, though. The letter writer missed Franklin’s critical criterion, included in his 17 April 1787 letter to the Abbes Chalut and Arnaud, that defines “ourselves:”

Let me add, that only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.

Our pursuit of being virtuous, though—especially today—requires a complete revamp of our education system to emphasize performance, merit, Western Civilization values and history, along with STEM, all of that being done from pre-K through whatever degree level a student might pursue. And an elimination of professoriate opinion in the teaching of facts along with a strong demand for free and open debate on the meaning of those facts, a debate informed solely by logic and additional facts.

And at least as critically, the active participation of parents in the raising of our children and in their education. Schools cannot, profitably for the weal of our nation, be treated as babysitters, child care centers, or even ex loco parentis facilities.

Progressive-Democratic Party Self-Importance

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In a Just the News article centered on Kamala Harris’ decision to absent herself the California State Progressive-Democratic Party convention to nominate Party candidates for Governor, Stephen Cloobeck, a candidate and convention attendee, said this—and he was serious:

If she decides to get in this race, shame on her for not showing up for the most important people in the party, which is the people who are here today[.]

I always thought that the most important people in a democracy—whether popular, republican, representative—were the people themselves, the citizens of the polity at hand. Here, that would be the good citizens of the United States who also are citizens of California and who self-identify as Party members.

Oh, wait—here’s the State Party rule on who’s eligible to attend and have a say in candidate selection:

3. Delegates to the Convention shall be the members of the Democratic State Central Committee, or their qualified proxies as specified in the Bylaws, whose appointment/election has been transmitted to the State Party no later than Tuesday, March 18, 2025, 60 days prior to the biennial state convention in May 30 – June 1, 2025.

The people, the citizens of California, Party members not exalted enough to be in the Central Committee, have no say in candidate selection(s); these unwashed are not important. It really is the convention delegates who are the most important people in the party.

Silly me.

Or, more likely, this is Party’s utter contempt for average Americans made explicit, with Party Important Ones applying it to average Californians.