Category Archives: politics

Other Implications

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Automakers are starting to adjust their level of dependence on Just in Time manufacturing, a technique whereby manufacturers vastly reduce inventory holding costs by having the relevant inputs—car parts, for instance—arrive at the factory just before they’re needed. In some of the more extreme cases, that includes arriving on the moving assembly line just before it’s needed for addition to the growing product.

The hyperefficient auto supply chain symbolized by the words “just in time” is undergoing its biggest transformation in more than half a century, accelerated by the troubles car makers have suffered during the pandemic. After sudden swings in demand, freak weather, and a series of accidents, they are reassessing their basic assumption that they could always get the parts they needed when they needed them.
“The just-in-time model is designed for supply chain efficiencies and economies of scale,” said Ashwani Gupta, Nissan Motor Co’s chief operating officer. “The repercussions of an unprecedented crisis like Covid highlight the fragility of our supply-chain model.”

That’s true, and it’s also good that that fragility finally is being taken seriously.

There are two other factors in JIT supply chain fragility beside those largely innocent ones. One is the fact that an enormous amount of trade goods, including raw materials and components for assembly into larger components or finished products, passes through the South China Sea. A large majority of Japan’s inputs and trillions of dollars of value for the US pass through the that Sea. Those shipping lanes are at increasing risk from an increasingly aggressive and acquisitive People’s Republic of China.

The other source is supply chain disruption by union strikes. Strikes generally and supply disruption by strikes are ways in which unions extort concessions out of manufacturers.

Inventory on hand, rather than on trucks or rail cars, helps manufacturers get through those deliberate disruptions.

Sexism of the Left

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It’s written all across New York City politics, explicitly so in the contest for mayor.

Andrew Yang is running for the Progressive-Democratic Party nomination for mayor. So is Eric Adams. And so is Kathryn Garcia. Both of the first two have said they’d be glad to have the third as their Deputy Mayor should one of those two win the general election for mayor.

Oh, the hue and cry from Garcia. So desperate is she to make a name for herself (she’s down in the weeds, polling at 5% as of last Friday, while Yang and Adams are at 22% and 17% respectively, and five more candidates are between 11% and 7%) during her own campaign, she has chosen to manufacture a sexist beef out of the other two’s willingness to recognize, and to let New York City benefit from, her talents. She cries,

It’s totally sexist. Totally sexist.

And

Are you not strong enough to actually do this job, without me helping you? You should be strong enough. You shouldn’t need me[.]

It’s true enough that a New York City mayor doesn’t need Garcia in particular in the Deputy’s slot. NYC does, though, need a Deputy Mayor.

Yang says through “a rep” that he

has enormous respect for Kathryn Garcia and that’s why he’s often said he’d seek her partnership at city hall if elected mayor.

It could be that Yang is blowing smoke with his complimentary remarks about Garcia. It could be, too, that he’s entirely sincere.

It’s instructive that Garcia has chosen the one interpretation of Yang’s suggestion to push and not the other. (Adams has chosen simply to ignore Garcia’s…claim.)

It’s further instructive that Garcia doesn’t even acknowledge the other interpretation, much less explain why she’s chosen her sexist beef and rejected the sincere (potential) offers.

That’s Garcia’s sexist bigotry—the manufacture of her beef out of whole cloth and without deigning explain her bald claim.

Conversations about Race

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Gerald Seib had an op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal that centered on the race conversation that our nation needs to finish having and how Senator Tim Scott’s (D, SC) response to President Joe Biden’s (D) speech to Congress. Seib noted that, while our race conversation badly wants resolution,

in fact, that it may be getting harder rather than easier to resolve.

It’s especially getting harder because of the racists of the Left and the Progressive-Democratic Party’s resident politician racists.

There are the Left’s White Saviors carefully and solemnly explaining that a black man doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he talks about his black experience and about the black experience generally.

There are the black racists being shocked and embarrassed that a black man spoke for himself or calling him “a stone fool,” “slow-witted,” “a token.”

Party racists include the likes of Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D, IL) who said Scott’s police reform proposal was just tokenism and the studied silence regarding the Left’s racial slurs against Scott—Uncle Tim, Oreo, worse—inflicted by Senator Cory Booker (D, NJ) and Raphael Warnock (D, GA).

Not a single black Progressive-Democrat Representative in the House has spoken in condemnation, or even mild objection, to that racist treatment of Scott.

All because a black man dared leave the Left’s cash crop vote plantation and actually think and act for himself.

Mistake

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Congressmen Matt Gaetz (R, FL) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (D, GA) are hitting the campaign trail (a bit early, IMNSHO, but that’s beside my present point), taking their America First Tour to the nation:

The radical left is coming for you. And they know I’m in the way. Come stand with me as we fight back together against this radical president and his far-left agenda[.]

However, and here’s the mistake. They intend, also, to

call out so-called Republicans in Name Only, or RINO’s, and politicians whom they consider part of the country’s “radical left.”

These two need to stay focused on the real Leftist extremists, their Progressive-Democratic Party, and Party’s and Biden’s destructive policies and the destruction they’re trying to wreak with yet more of their extremist proposals.

Hitting RINOs, and other Republicans who are squishier than many of us like, however emotionally agreeable to us, will be counterproductive. Republican majorities—especially strong majorities—in both houses of Congress from 2022 forward is far more important than demanding party purity. That last can only weaken a majority, even put gaining either majority in jeopardy.

Purity-demanding caused a lot of Republican failures in 2010-2016 period when Republicans had majorities. The current crop needs to learn that lesson.

C Boyden Gray vs NASDAQ

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I know who should be winning. I know how the matter should be resolved.

Recall that NASDAQ wants to require companies, as a condition of being listed on the NASDAQ exchange, to have quotas of particular groups of Americans on those companies’ boards of directors:

“at least one director who self-identifies as female,” and “at least one director who self-identifies as Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Asian, Native American or Alaska Native, two or more races or ethnicities, or as LGBTQ+.”

And

Noncompliant firms must publicly “explain”—in writing—why they don’t meet Nasdaq’s quotas.

Gray’s and his colleague, Jonathan Berry’s, summary of their Comment filing before the SEC is spot on.

Nasdaq’s discriminate-or-explain rule is unlawful, unconstitutional, and unsupported by the evidence. Quota systems like this unjustifiably classify people by arbitrary categories of sex and race in violation of equal-protection principles, and the “alternative” of explaining why a firm won’t discriminate compels speech in violation of the First Amendment.

Yet, this is the damage the social justice warriors that infest our government at all levels would inflict.