Tag Archives: ethics

Aiding and Abetting

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In response to the ransomware attack against JBS USA Holdings that briefly disrupted some of the company’s Australian and American operations, JBS paid the hackers $11 million—more than twice that paid by Colonial Pipeline in its cowardly reward to its attackers.

JBS paid those $11 million dollars in its own craven reward for its own privilege of having been hacked.

In many—most?—milieus, aiding and abetting a criminal in the performance of the criminal’s activities is a felony.

It needs to be one here, too. Rather than compensating ransomware hackers—which compensation is directly, if not solely, responsible for the current sharp rise in ransomware attacks—these criminals need a different sort of reward, one that withdraws current criminals from the board and that discourages others from deciding to play.

Yet More and Bigger Spending

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The House Problem Solvers Caucus, with 29 Progressive-Democrats and 29 Republicans, are proposing their own “infrastructure” bill—to the tune of $1.25 trillion dollars, more than double the Senate Republicans’ original proposal of some $570 billion (and which, in their own abject meekness, they exploded into a nearly trillion dollar supplication).

The Republicans in this “problem solver” gang are engaged in their own surrender to the spending and taxing Party.

Of course President Joe Biden (D) and his Congressional Party leadership aren’t negotiating in good faith—they don’t need to. They can hold out for everything in their original demand because they know they’ll get it.

Not Such an Obstacle

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The Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that President Joe Biden’s (D) and his fellow Progressive-Democrats’ “infrastructure” bill can, indeed, be effected through reconciliation, if certain steps are taken in the process. The idea is that the bill can be passed as a modification of the existing reconciliation-passed Wuhan Virus “relief” bill passed earlier this year.

One of those steps is the Parliamentarian’s requirement that the infrastructure modification to that prior bill begin anew at the Budget Committee level. This would give the Republicans a chance to block the bill altogether by boycotting the committee, thereby denying Progressive-Democrats a quorum and a vote, thus preventing the bill from being passed out of Committee to the Senate as a whole.

R Street Institute Resident Senior Fellow for Governance James Wallner, though, says that there are workarounds (unidentified by Wallner or the Fox News cite at the link) to the Committee-level blockage.

The other step is forcing the Senate into a vote-a-rama on the bill, during which lots and lots of amendments can be proposed by any Senator and each amendment must be given a roll-call up-or-down vote. Chad Pergram has written—and he’s serious—that

A “vote-a-rama” is a lengthy, arduous process which sometimes consumes an entire calendar day or more.

Wow. A whole day. Worse (here, Pergram isn’t the only one claiming this is an impediment), the vote-a-rama votes would put Progressive-Democrats on the record as supporting this spendiforous bill. Never mind that they do support it, and they’re proud of their support.

What’s missed altogether in this hand-wringing about a vote-a-rama for this bill is the shenanigan the Progressive-Democrats pulled with the vote-a-rama run on that prior Wuhan Virus relief bill. The Senate Majority Leader gets to go last on the amendment proposing and voting-on process.

It didn’t matter how many of the Republicans’ amendments to that relief bill actually got voted up. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY) amendment, the last of them all, was to withdraw all of those approved Republican amendments and restore the relief bill to its original, un-Republican-amended form. Of course, that amendment was voted up strictly unilaterally, along party lines—all those supposedly vulnerable Progressive-Democrat Senators proudly voting on the record with Schumer—with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie breaking vote.

Schumer and Harris will do that with this so-called infrastructure bill. The Parliamentarian’s ruling is no obstacle at all.

Maybes and Could Bes

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Illumina is a company that makes platforms that do genetic sequencing for the likes of Covid variants and fetal abnormalities. Grail is a company that has blood tests that can detect DNA from cancer cells before people show symptoms. At the outset, Illumina created Grail for that purpose then spun the company off so each could focus on what it does best.

Grail succeeded, strongly.

Now Illumina wants to (re)acquire Grail, and Grail wants to be (re)acquired. Illumina says its regulatory satisfaction expertise can greatly facilitate bringing Grail’s tests to market and to the benefit of countless folks at risk of any of the 50 cancers Grail’s tests can detect quickly and reliably, along with the 12 most deadly cancers with 60% accuracy. All with a simple blood draw.

Potential competitors petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to block the merger, and the FTC agreed and has sued to block the merger.

That’s a problem. The FTC’s case centers on two premises and a false underlying assumption. The merger would, according to the FTC,

lessen competition in the US multi-cancer early detection (MCED) test market by diminishing innovation and potentially increasing prices.

“Diminishing innovation”—not at all. Aside from the lack of actual evidence of such a diminution—this is just tacit speculation—this sort of development only spurs competition (my own, no more or less valid speculation).

“Potentially increasing prices”—again, not at all. That first word says it all: the plaint is just overt speculation. There are no increasing prices here, and there’s no evidence that increasing prices are per se anticompetitive (as opposed, for instance, due to too high demand for too little product. Never mind that neither demand nor product yet exist.)

The false underlying assumption is that a market for this sort of thing even exists. It does not, and that lack renders both of those speculations, individually and severally, wholly irrelevant.

Maybes and could bes in a nonexistent market—what a way to regulate.

Modern Bread and Circuses

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The Biden administration is using today’s spending in an effort to buy votes for the election seasons of 2022 and 2024.

The White House predicts a two-year growth boom of 5.2% in 2021 and 4.3% in 2022, as the country returns to normal after the pandemic and record amounts of government spending flood the economy to goose consumer demand.

Then,

the White House says growth will sink to 2.2% in 2023, and then average below 1.9% for the next eight years.

As the Wall Street Journal editors put it,

One is that the White House is essentially conceding that all of its unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulus really is living for today with little regard for the future. It implicitly concedes that the growth it spurs now will have to be paid back later in the form of higher taxes or tighter monetary policy, which might reduce growth. This is the definition of a “sugar high.”

Bread and circuses. And a clear illustration of the utter contempt President Joe Biden (D) and his fellow Progressive-Democrats have for us average Americans: he and his confreres think we’re just too grindingly stupid to understand this, or to remember it in those election years.