Category Archives: morality

“Inversions”

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US corporate income is taxed at the highest rate in the world. “Inversion” is the process of American companies packing up, usually through merger with foreign entities, and reincorporating (if not physically relocating) in a foreign country in order to avoid US corporate income taxes.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew wants the inversions stopped. Writing to the Senate and House tax-writing committees, he said he said those two bodies “should enact legislation immediately…to shut down this abuse of our tax system.”

His letter went on:

What we need as a nation is a new sense of economic patriotism, where we all rise or fall together. We should not be providing support for corporations that seek to shift their profits overseas to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

Prior to that,

the Obama administration in its budget…proposed tightening the rules to substantially limit inversions.

Of course, it’s utterly inconceivable to this administration that the abuse is our tax system itself. It’s utterly inconceivable to this administration that what is patriotic is lowering tax rates.

More fully, and contrary to the nonsense Lew is spouting, the proper tax action for preventing inversions is to lower corporate income, and related, taxes so as to remove the incentive to go overseas in the first place. Lowering the current rate to 20% would be a good start, especially if done with a view to eliminating corporate income, and related, taxes altogether in just a couple more years.

I’ll ignore, for now, the New Nationalism, Teddy Roosevelt Progressivism in Lew’s letter.

One Face of Terrorism

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Just as soon as Israel accepted an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire Hamas fired 47 rockets killing one Israeli citizen.  Anyone who has followed the conflict could have predicted this with certainty; the point of a ceasefire—for a terrorist organization—is to break it for exactly the same reason it purposely attacks women and children.

Dr Anna Geifman expanded on this:

[C]hildren are the last consecrated absolute. …militant nihilism strives to ruin first and foremost what their contemporaries hold sacred.

And

Random, en masse brutality against civilians—emblematic for the 20th-century terror—culminated in a spectacular act of apocalyptic destruction on 9/11.

And today, the Palestinian Authority’s avowed goal is the spectacular act of apocalyptic destruction of Israel.

This is what Israel is facing today from the Palestinian Authority’s terrorism. This is part of what makes the UN’s call for equal parts of “restraint,” as though the PA’s terrorism were of a piece with Israel’s self defense efforts, so reprehensible. This is part of what makes the moral equivalence that the Democrats in the White House, in the State Department, and in the Senate espouse with their insistence on even-handed treatment of Israelis and PA terrorists so despicable.

h/t Belmont Club

The Word of a Union

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The UAW broke its pledge to cease organizing activity at the Chattanooga auto plant that rejected unionization, announcing on Thursday afternoon that it would form a voluntary union for factory workers.

The union signed a neutrality agreement with the German auto manufacturer that gave organizers an advantage during its campaign.

However, that agreement also contained a provision barring the union from any organizing activity for one year following the vote.

The union decided to break that pledge on Thursday, announcing the formation of a new local that would allow workers to join voluntarily.

Who can trust a union’s promise?

Moral Equivalence Pollution

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As the Palestinian Authority’s rocket attacks on Israeli cities proceeds apace, the United States supported a unanimously passed UN Security Council “press statement” calling for an immediate cease fire on Saturday. Because Israel acting, militarily this time, to protect its people from this murderous assault is of a piece with the terrorism that is the assault.

Or so holds this administration. That’s the shame of the US, inflicted by the Obama administration: this pretense of moral equivalency between the terrorism of the Palestinian Authority—an entity that now has as its primary goal the destruction of Israel—in shooting rockets into Israel for the express purpose of killing civilians and children, as well as damaging the Israeli nuclear power facility in Dimona (an act even the UN used to regard as nuclear terror) on the one hand, and the Israeli response of defending itself against such terrorism by shooting back, seeking to destroy the terrorists’ equipment and infrastructure and to kill the terrorists, during which killing civilians and children are avoided at great cost, if imperfectly.

All the Palestinian Authority, this shiny, new unity government, needs to do to stop the “deteriorating situation in the Palestinian territories” is to stop its terrorist rain of rockets on Israel and to expel the terrorists from Palestinian territory. All of them from all of it.

Israel has no obligation to stop its active defense before that is complete.

Rockets on Israel

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The Executive Vice President of B’nai B’rith International, Daniel Mariaschin, is on the right track. In an op-ed written for Fox News, he very appropriately decried the European Union’s inability to identify, much less understand, who the enemy is in the current explosion of the confrontation between Israel and the terrorists bent on Israel’s destruction.

However, Mariaschin makes his own critical error:

Who exactly does the EU think is firing rockets at Israel?

One thing is for sure: the Hamas rockets have nothing to do with Israel’s settlement policy.

It’s true that those rockets and Israel’s settlement policy are unrelated. But they’re not Hamas rockets. When the Palestinian Authority merged with Hamas in a “reconciliation” government, those rockets became Palestinian Authority rockets.

Mariaschin, and too many others, still draw a distinction between Hamas and the rest of the PA; however, this belies the new reality. Hamas and the PA are one and the same. Hamas’ mission and goal have become the Palestinian Authority’s mission and goal.

Full stop.