Category Archives: politics

A No-Brainer

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Or it would be for anyone other than a dyed-in-the-wool Leftist. The supposed conundrum centers on England’s Premier League’s supposed cream of the crop Manchester City soccer club (not to be confused with the Manchester United soccer club, which appears to have entirely clean hands). It appears that Man City has been caught in more than 100 violations of the Premier League’s rules on spending, violations like

“‘sham’ commercial deals” from 2009 and continuing into the 2017-18 season, the Premier League said following an independent investigation. The purpose, it added, was to “artificially inflate the club’s revenues, and reduce its costs, by more than £900 million ($1.2 billion) during the affected period to appear to comply with financial rules.”

The price of this cheating could extend to this:

…the club stripped of several championships and Manchester City expelled from the Premier League. In that scenario, it would be busted down one or more divisions and forced to work its way back up over the course of several seasons.

The supposed conundrum is this:

The predicament is especially awkward for [UK Prime Minister Andy] Burnham, who built much of his political appeal on his everyman soccer-fan image, but now finds himself caught between a major investor in the UK economy and defending the integrity of the Premier League, Britain’s most popular cultural export since the Beatles.

Hmm…. Let’s see, does Burnham do the right thing, the moral thing, the honest thing, and let the League hammer City for its blatant and long-lasting cheating? Or does he wink at it in order to curry the favor of a major (foreign) investor? What to do, what to do….

As I said at the outset, only a Leftist, a British Liberal, would find himself challenged by the choice. Or, the WSJ‘s news writers are overstating the case, and Burnham will have no trouble reaching the correct decision.

Two Things

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Here are two things, taken in isolation but not separated from each other.

Last week, five likely terrorists were caught in the process of scoping out, if not actually attacking our B-1 bombers housed at RAF Fairford in the UK. The five terrorists were back out on bail within hours of their arrest, functionally free to resume their plot.

This week, the Israeli government closed the British Consulate in Jerusalem, sending home the Consul General and the bulk of the consulate staff; this came in response to the UK’s decision to harm Israel by banning trade with Israeli settlers operating in the West Bank. A skeleton crew remains in a small diplomatic mission, styled UK Mission, Jerusalem, left to serve…Palestinians.

These two things, in their aggregation, seem to imply that the UK favors Palestinian terrorists over its obligations to NATO and to UK allies. They appear to suggest that the UK has no interest in Israel—which is further consistent with government rhetoric condemning Israel’s efforts in Gaza to defend itself against repeats of Hamas’ and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s atrocities of 7 October 2023.

This, by Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, makes the matter plain [emphasis added]:

We have been clear that we do not accept that the government of Israel has the legal right to close the British Consulate General in Jerusalem, which has been there for nearly 200 years. The UK government reiterates its long-standing view that East Jerusalem is occupied territory.

It’s a Start

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If it passes, a draft bipartisan Federal permit reform bill that’s circulating in the Senate would be a good start. As is the usual case in politics, it wants improvement, but first pass this first step, then return forthwith with improvements, and pass those.

What the bill has, if the Senate as a whole can pass it and then the House do so, too:

  • strict deadlines for agencies to complete environmental reviews—two years for bigger projects and one for smaller ones—and lets developers sue if their reviews are delayed
  • requiring plaintiffs to challenge permits within 150 days of their publication—they now have six years—and to have suffered direct harm or face imminent injury
  • 150-day statute of limitations would apply to challenging so-called biological opinions
  • if a judge faults an environmental review, agencies could correct the purported lapse rather than restart the permitting process
  • repair and replacements of critical infrastructure, including transportation, water, grid and energy projects, would be exempt from NEPA reviews
  • generally prohibit federal agencies from rescinding or suspending permits and allow permit holders to sue for damages if they do

I suggest the following improvements for enactment in the next legislative session:

  • one year to complete large project environmental review, six months for smaller projects. If the deadline passes without Agency action, the permit is deemed issued with no caveats or conditions and cannot be challenged in court. Agencies also must have the burden of proving they didn’t just rubber stamp a rejection in order to meet the deadline. Agencies have these newfangled devices called computers along with software with which to facilitate reviews. There’s no need to mosey along with manually done procedures
  • require plaintiffs to challenge within 60 days. They also have access to modern computers and software with which to review the permit and produce their challenges
  • 60-day statute of limits to challenge all opinions, not just biological ones. See the above about computers and software
  • generally prohibit federal agencies from rescinding or suspending permits, period

I know; it’s a pipedream to get the initial step passed, much less the improvements. But I dream.

Know Better Socialism Made Manifest

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Michigan’s Socialist Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Senator, Abdul el-Sayed, is a poster child for socialism’s Know Better ideology. He’s claiming now that

[m]ost billionaires don’t park their money making more businesses. They park their money in the stock market. That is not meaningfully investing in opportunity. It’s just investing in other billionaires.

Not only is el-Sayed completely ignorant about how rich folks gained their wealth generally, he’s completely ignorant of how they grow their wealth. (I’ll leave aside the shibboleth that they already have “enough” wealth and shouldn’t be looking to earn more.)

He’s also insisting he’s the primary, if not sole, arbiter of what constitutes meaningful investing. The folks who got their wealth by investing in their own way in areas of their choosing don’t know as much about it as he does, and so he must direct their investing for them.

El-Sayed’s position is insulting to us average Americans in two ways.  One is that we’re too stupid to manage our own financial affairs; his Socialist Government must do that for us. The other is that we’re stupid enough that we cannot see his self-absorbed arrogance in representing himself as Knowing Better how the Evil Rich should deploy their assets than do those Evil Rich, or that he won’t be coming after us later.

Bonus third insult: that we’re stupid enough to believe he’s not as economically ignorant as he really is.

Costs and Aggregated Statistics

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A Just the News news writer wrote that [p]ositive US economic indicators have been left out of much of the mainstream media’s reporting on the state of the economy.

He’s right—the mainstream media really is that mendaciously biased. His claim, though, also is wholly irrelevant in the present election season.

All those economically favorable data that the news media studiously ignores are aggregated data; they refer to the nation and not to any particular individual, not even to any small groups of people in local communities.

Folks don’t care that, as a nation, inflation is down sharply from the Biden years or the nation’s median household income has risen to nearly $87,500. Who is this Mr/Ms Median Household person, anyway? Has anyone actually met him or her? Nor do folks care that the nation‘s jobs data are favorable.

What an individual—a voter—cares about is that he’s personally paying gas prices that are up 30-40 percent over the pre-Biden years; he, the trucker, is personally paying diesel prices that are up nearly double; her grocery bills at the local grocery store are up 40-50 percent; his/her income—what he or she gets in an actual take home paycheck—doesn’t stretch to pay those higher costs. It’s not that he notices that his take home pay isn’t growing enough to keep up with inflation—generally he doesn’t. Nor does he need to, what he sees is that his paycheck no longer covers his gas, groceries, utility bills, and on and on. That’s if the individual has a job at all, which personal datum is invisible in those aggregated statistics. He’s just a depersoned number in the collection of labor statistics.

What are politicians, especially Republican politicians, going to do about that? This is what, so far.

Republicans are going to be swept into oblivion next month if they don’t stop hiding under their desks avoiding these simple facts and get out among their constituents—diners, rec centers, town halls, letters to local editors, interviews on local television and radio stations—and say, in so many words, what their particular policies are that will address their constituents’ particular cost of living concerns.

Being specific is the bane of politicians, exposing them as specifics do, to broad criticism and sharp opprobrium. It’s time now, though, for Republicans to find some backbone and be specific, which, as a happy side effect, would let them point out the failure of their opponents to have any sort of plan for these ills other than that they’re not Trump and they’re not Republicans.