Category Archives: morality

It Appears to be Time

Posted on by
Reply

…to walk away from Afghanistan commercially, if not militarily.  Our commercial presence flows from the mission creep that has long infested our war there—a creep from the Bush doctrine of going anywhere there are terrorists and burning them, which in the Afghan implementation meant burning al Qaeda and the Taliban.  Period.  Full stop.  That mission, following the destruction of those two terrorist organizations as viable entities in Afghanistan, unfortunately quickly morphed into nation-building, an attempt to meld widely and wildly disparate tribes and clans into an actual, unified country.

Here is an example of the failure of that mission creep and of the foolishness of allowing it.  Tamerlane Global Services, Inc, provides contracting services for the US government and is exempt from Afghan taxation.  At the time of this incident, Tamerlane was in the middle of a legal dispute in a US Federal court with an Afghan firm, Global Hub Logistics, over mutual allegations of breach of contract.  Whether impatient with the proceedings or disinterested in an anticipated outcome, or some other reason, Global Hub complained to the Afghan government, and the latter manufactured a tax dispute against Tamerlane.

And then they snatched a Tamerlane employee off the street and threw him into jail.

Tamerlane and its employee are not alone in this abuse.

Afghan companies have begun turning to the Attorney General’s Office to resolve business quarrels through criminal investigations and arrests, rather than going to arbitration, mediation or commercial courts, attorneys here said.

It took the involvement of American Congressmen to get the Tamerlane employee released from gaol, and the employee never has been charged with any crime.  His employer and attorney, Kimberley Motley, said afterward,

There’s no legal basis for this at all.

The US has over 33,000 American contractors in Afghanistan at risk of this treatment: with the employer having a dispute with an Afghan company, and the dispute not going in a direction that suits the Afghan company, the latter bellyaches and the Afghan government grabs a likely looking employee and jails him.

Ward Scott, an American commercial lawyer in Kabul:

Our firm is increasingly getting calls from Western executives fearing, with good cause, the imminent arrest of their managers in Afghanistan over commercial disputes[.]

This misbehavior has to stop, and unfortunately, the most effective way to stop it seems to be to stop dealing with Afghanistan commercially in the first place.

Gun Control…Ignorance

Posted on by
Reply

…or outright dishonesty.  As one demonstration, we have a breathtakingly ignorant claim from the Congresswoman who’s pushing a gun control bill in the House of Representatives.  Congresswoman Diana DeGette (D, CO) actually said this, out loud and in public, about firearm magazines and the usefulness of banning them:

These are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now, they’re going to shoot them, so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high-capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available[.]

For another demonstration, we have Barack Obama’s similarly ignorant (or, in his case, deliberately distorting) claim about the weapons used in the Sandy Hook massacre—the latest crisis this Progressive is trying not to let go to waste.  It’s interesting to note, also, that he made this remark at one of his campaign stops in in San Francisco [emphasis in the original].

…it is possible for us to create common-sense gun safety measures that respect the traditions of gun ownership in this country and hunters and sportsmen, but also make sure that we don’t have another 20 children in a classroom gunned down by a semiautomatic weapon—by a fully automatic weapon in that case, sadly.

Leaving aside his arrogance in presuming—contra the 2nd Amendment—that the Federal government has authority to determine the permissible purposes for owning weapons, Obama knows two things about this: he knows that that Lanza killed his victims with a semi-automatic rifle, not a fully automatic one, and he knows the difference between a semi-automatic rifle and a fully automatic one.

Mayor Michael Nutter and Censorship

Posted on by
Reply

The Weekly Standard ran an article in their 15 Apr issue concerning an egregious assault on free speech by none other than the self-important mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter.  It seems the Philadelphia Magazine was so rude as to run an article about one journalist’s view of “Being White in Philly,” and Nutter has used his office as mayor—not his status as resident—to attack both the magazine and the article’s author and publisher.  His official letter—on city stationary—to the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission can be read here and here.

In response to Nutter’s assault, I sent the letter below to the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission.  We’ll see whether the PHRC takes it seriously, and by extension whether they take race relations and/or free speech seriously.

Ms Rue Landau
Executive Director
Philadelphia Human Relations Commission
601 Walnut Street
Suite 300
South Philadelphia, PA 19106

Dear Ms Landau:

I am a blogger, but that’s not why I’m writing to you.  I’m writing to formally object to an egregious attempt at government censorship by Mayor Michael Nutter, an assault that, if allowed to go unsanctioned, harms not only Philadelphians, but all Americans.

Last month Mayor Michael Nutter sank to a new low even for a member of a party that has long pretended that its constituents were the only citizens civically engaged and socially active in the Philadelphia area.  His March letter, “Mayor Letter to PCHR,” published among other places at Philly.com’s http://media.philly.com/documents/MayorLettertoPCHR.pdf Web page, aggregates the disparaging beliefs, the negative stereotypes, the ignorant condemnations typically, and historically ascribed to those who disagree with his party’s principles into one pathetic, uninformed letter that objects to an article in Philadelphia Magazine.  Mayor Nutter, among other things, decries those Philadelphia residents, “many of whose names either the author or the speakers themselves were too cowardly to provide,” for their anonymity without any trace of the irony that not only is anonymity a right in free speech, Mayor Nutter demonstrates the necessity of that anonymity with his governmental attack on them and on that article.  That a mayor of a major city in the United States thought a collection of these despicable, over-generalized, mostly foolish objections to a civil discourse the trend of which he disapproves rose to the level of warranting governmental attack is unfortunate enough.  Worse, the beefs of the mayor of the nation’s fifth-largest city about the “offending” article—all of them—go unanswered by him: what matters is that those who wrote and published this speech of which he disapproves be investigated, to allow the mayor to pass along his own misguided perception of certain others as a group that, in its entirety, is dishonest, uninitiated, irresponsible, and largely bigoted.  Moreover, compounding the sin of having made his complaint an official governmental charge, the mayor cynically and hypocritically insists that his own motive is purely for the benefit of all Philadelphians.

Anyone who reads a newspaper or watches network (or cable!) news knows that conversations about race must, of necessity, include not only black but Caucasians, Latinos, and members of other ethnic groups as well—either in the same conversation or individually in a collection of conversations—a position suspiciously absent from a letter that decries an article that attempts to be one of those conversations about race.  More egregiously, Mayor Nutter, who quotes the article that so offends him that “[w]hat gets examined publicly about race is generally one-dimensional, looked at almost exclusively from the perspective of people of color,” commits the same sin, by examining race exclusively from the perspective of, apparently, a city government that has used isolated argument by groups that are not “in” to draw pervasive generalizations that the mayor then ascribes to the belief system of Philadelphia’s entire non-liberal population.  Mayor Nutter avers his objections decision by decrying, first, the magazine’s statement that it “is a story” merely because it features white Philadelphians, as opposed to Philadelphians of color, talking about race, as if merely a government official claiming the article’s illegitimacy makes it so.  Mayor Nutter’s second contention seems to center on the premise that publishing a piece about race to which he objects renders the problems of the city’s “underclass” no longer his party’s, and its alone, to fight, as if the city’s race relations—good or ill—are not a matter for all Philadelphians, or more broadly, for all Americans.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “letter” as “2. A written or printed communication directed to a person or organization[,]” with no intimation of factual basis inherent in the concept.  However, as Mayor Nutter notes about the article that offends him, trying to deconstruct his letter’s many logical fallacies not only is an exercise in futility but offers his letter unearned credibility.  Obviously, unless the Mayor personally knows the publisher or author, an assumption of nefarious purpose by him is patently foolish.  Obviously, the many positive, quality opinion pieces and news articles of the Philadelphia Magazine‘s publishers and journalists, and those of journalists of all political persuasion, are denigrated by the cynical presumptions of a mayor whose job, after all, seems to be to root out all writings of which he personally disapproves.

Rather than raging against the abject ignorance reflected in this uninformed, ill-advised, ill-considered, uninspired, and thoroughly unimaginative letter, I believe we should take the opportunity Mayor Nutter’s letter offers to conduct a more comprehensive, fact-intensive evaluation of the racial issues and attitudes that provide the prism through which not only Mayor Nutter’s administration, but administrations at all levels across the country, view the many challenges that confront us as a community and as a nation.  I therefore request that the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, which is charged by the Philadelphia Home Rule Charter with a mandate, among other duties, to “institute and conduct educational programs to…promot[e]…understanding among persons and groups of different races, colors, religions and national origins,” conduct an inquiry into the state of racial issues, biases, and attitudes within and among the administration of the City of Philadelphia.

Also, because “[i]n the performance of its duties the Commission may cooperate with interested citizens and with public and private agencies,” I ask that the Commission take testimony from individual citizens and from organizations including but not limited to community groups, non-profit organizations, community development corporations, law enforcement agencies, and religious organizations—perhaps citizens and organizations representing the ethnic, economic, and social diversity easily found in your great city—for the purpose of publishing a report on the state of racial issues in Philadelphia, identifying the racial attitudes, both positive and negative, that pervade the Philadelphia city administration’s civic interaction and discourse; the obstacles and opportunities that those attitudes present; and recommendations for the improvement or enhancement of the city government’s racial interaction and the encouragement and embrace of the diverse culture that Philadelphia should be able to enjoy.

Finally, I ask that the Commission consider specifically whether Mayor Michael Nutter is appropriate for rebuke by the Commission in light of the potentially inflammatory effect and the reckless endangerment to Philadelphia’s racial relations and more broadly to free speech possibly caused by him with his official, government-sanctioned complaint to this Commission, made with a view to attack the speech of which he personally disapproves and whose speakers he used government auspices to seek to sanction.  While most Americans fully recognize that constitutional protections afforded the press are intended to protect the media from censorship by the government, Mayor Nutter clearly does not.  It’s true that the First Amendment, like other constitutional rights, is not an unfettered right, and notwithstanding the First Amendment, a publisher has a duty to the public to exercise its role in a responsible way.   However, government is not allowed, under our Constitution, to dictate the definition of “responsible.”  Mayor Nutter’s cynical claim of equivalence between a serious article concerning race relations is akin to “shouting ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater,” is little more than a disingenuous attempt to arrogate control over a conversation about so serious a matter as race relations to government.  I therefore ask the Commission to evaluate whether the “speech” employed in Mayor Nutter’s letter is itself prejudiced, fact-challenged generalizations and so an extreme reaction.  Only by debunking myth with fact, and by holding accountable those who seek to confuse the two, can we insure that the prejudices reflected in the letter are accorded the weight they deserve: none at all.

Sincerely,

Eric Hines
APlebesSite.com

The Consequences of Unintended Consequences

Posted on by
Reply

It used to be that when Jeroen Dijsselbloem, President of the Euro Group, would talk to reporters, he’d open with

Maybe it’s good, if I say something.

And then recently he did say something.  He said that the Cyprus model of raiding depositor accounts to bail out failing banks—in addition to holding the failing banks’ investors and creditors responsible—should be the model for all of the eurozone.

In future aid packages, one must look into whether bank shareholders, bond holders and large depositors could participate so as to spare taxpayers from having to foot the bill.

Now we get the hue and cry from the left—Spiegel International Online included.  Because, you see, it’s somehow wrong to spare those taxpayers—folks who had no investment, no control, no relationship at all with those failing banks—from their Left-manufactured responsibility to indemnify private investors and creditors from the failures of their investments.  After all, it was Very Important People who were benefitting from having their hands in the taxpayers’ pockets.

The advantages were enjoyed not only by actors on the global financial markets, but also by major banking centers, such as those in Luxembourg and London, which could count on seeing governments prop up teetering financial institutions.

And so we see a consequence of unintended consequences made manifest: the naked greed of politicians and their accomplices.

And another, more favorable, consequence of these unintended consequences is being forced to the front:

A growing number of politicians and experts are demanding an end to this arrangement.  In the future, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “banks must save themselves.”  And German central bank board member Andreas Dombret is convinced that the financial sector can only regain health once there are no longer “implicit state guarantees for banks.”

Even the Luxembourg Finance Minister, Luc Frieden, his financial constituency notwithstanding, is figuring out a larger result of raiding depositor accounts to pay for businessmen’s and politicians’ failure to perform.

This will lead to a situation in which investors invest their money outside the euro zone.  In this difficult situation, we need to avoid anything that will lead to instability and destroy the trust of savers.

After all, the political futures of these foxhole-converting politicians depend on it.  Because in yet another consequence of these unintended consequences, the voting public—those taxpayers—are noticing the grubby political fists in their pockets.

And there’s the potential for another consequence of these unintended consequences.  The IMF has released their latest report on the currency reserves held by the various nations of the world.

Third World economies unloaded $45 billion worth of euros in 2012 in an accelerating trend.  Some of that, certainly, is related to the failed global recovery from the Panic of 2008.  However, Europe’s decision to raid Cyprus depositors’ funds to bail out failing banks, together with the Euro Group’s view that such raids are appropriate solutions for other eurozone bank failures, won’t encourage folks from outside the EU to place their money with eurozone—or EU—banks.  Which will contribute to continued dumping of euro holdings.  Which will continue the EU’s de facto dependence on the $US as the reserve currency, rather than elevating the euro in importance and from that, elevating the EU.

Unless Merkel, Frieden, et al., can prove themselves serious.

Why We Protect Inventions

Posted on by
Reply

The Indian Supreme Court has rejected the idea of patent protection for Novartis’ drug Glivec, saying that an active ingredient in Glivec was well-known prior to the development of the drug.  Those worthies also rejected Novartis’ argument that the innovation that deserved patent protection was their transformation of that active ingredient into a “beta crystal” form, which made it a viable treatment for cancer.

Never mind, said the Court, India doesn’t feel like patenting this and making it harder for an Indian company to profit from the foreign Novartis’ work.

Novartis isn’t alone in this strait.

India’s patent office last year ordered Germany’s Bayer AG to issue a license allowing an Indian generics company to copy its patented cancer drug Nexavar and market it at one-thirtieth the cost.

And

In November, India’s government approved caps on a third of the country’s drugs, up from 18% under a previous regime—a level of price control not seen since the 1970s.

Novartis had this on the wisdom of further investment in India:

If innovation is rewarded, there is clear business case to move forward.  If it isn’t rewarded and protected, there isn’t.

And

We’ll continue to build our business, but we will certainly be cautious in investments in R&D and innovation in India.  And until the climate for intellectual property and the ecosystem is fully in place, I don’t think any investment in R&D will take place here.

Well, NSS.  It’s time for the Indian government to figure this out, too.