Tag Archives: ethics

More Government Interference

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The Obama administration plans to require large employers to peel back the curtain on how much they pay men and women in a push to narrow long-standing earning gaps between the genders.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will roll out details of the plan Friday to begin gathering a summary of pay data from employers with 100 or more workers.

Leave aside the lack of validity of the data so confiscated by the government.

Statisticians and economists note…that analyzing wage disparities is a complex undertaking, and that aggregating data about many occupations is especially tricky.

“You can’t compare apples and oranges in the same group and draw meaningful conclusions,” said David Cohen, president of DCI Consulting Group, a Washington, DC, firm that conducts pay-equity analyses for companies. “You’re going to get too many false positives and too many false negatives.”

Beyond that, far beyond that, the data are none of the government’s business absent a specific allegation of wrong-doing. If there is a specific complaint—not a blanket fishing expedition borne of this administration’s FDR-esque paranoia about business in general—then get a warrant upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized, just like the 4th Amendment requires.

Lawlessness

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The intelligence community has deemed some of Hillary Clinton’s emails “too damaging” to national security to release under any circumstances, according to a US government official close to the ongoing review. A second source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, backed up the finding.

But they weren’t too damaging for Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to bruit about via her unprotected email server: to pass along to staffers lacking the clearance to have access to this sort of information, to make available to the intelligence services of our enemies, or to make available to any hacker who might have taken a notion to go look at what Clinton had on her unsecured server.

Once again, whether the emails were marked classified is irrelevant. Classified data are classified by their existence and nature; markings do not classify anything, they only indicate data that are classified.

Once again, intent in the handling of classified data is irrelevant. Simply mishandling them is a felony.

Despite these plain facts, the Democratic Party continues to support Clinton for President, and it continues to deny the lawlessness of Clinton’s behavior and to minimize the damage to our country from her lawlessness.

This is the party that would rule us after the coming elections, if we’re not very careful.

More Disingenuousness in Government

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Mens rea is a criminal law concept that says in order to commit a crime, a man must have intended to commit the crime; he must have had a “guilty mind.” Lack of this guilty mind doesn’t mean the man didn’t do anything wrong; he may well have, and a trial and a jury can make that determination—it would be civil wrong, for which he still would be held accountable on that jury deliberation. He just didn’t commit a crime.

In addition to the current move in the Senate to reform sentencing and jail terms, some Senators want to clarify the specifics of mens rea in criminal law.

The House Judiciary Committee last year passed a bill on mens rea…reform that would create a default standard for criminal intent in instances when no standard exists. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch and House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte would like to see it pass along with sentencing reform.

However.

Both Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA) and President Barack Obama (D) disagree with mens rea reform and for largely the same reasons, and they’re moving to block this reform.

Grassley is blocking it because

…strengthening the requirements for criminal intent would make it harder to convict corporations than under the current amorphous state of the law.

Obama wants to block it because

…a default standard of criminal intent would make it harder to prosecute companies for regulatory violations.

This is a cynical reading of Government’s role in trials. The purpose of bringing charges and having trials isn’t so prosecutors can get convictions and look good in the shower or otherwise have something to show for their taxpayer-funded paychecks. The purpose of standards of guilt or innocence in criminal law—or civil law, to stretch for a time the definitions of guilt and innocence—is not to stack the deck against the defendant.

The purpose of these things is to provide justice for the people wronged and for the people accused.

Full stop.

Delays, Delays

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Stalls, stalls. That’s what State is doing over the Clinton email national security disaster with its latest request to be “late” delivering the court-ordered documents.

“The Clinton email team must perform its work on site. … This storm will disrupt the Clinton email team’s current plans to work a significant number of hours throughout the upcoming weekend and could affect the number of documents that can be produced on January 29, 2016,” agency lawyers wrote in their request.

No. State has been stalling and outright obstructing this release for years—that’s why the matter is before a Federal court and under that court’s order and nominal supervision to deliver on a set schedule in the first place. All through that ordered schedule, too, State has continued to delay, stall, obstruct, release at less than the court-ordered rate. The latest such stall was when State whined that the Christmas holiday schedule for their precious email sorters was more important than complying with the Court’s order and the people’s right to know what Democratic Party Presidential candidate was doing with her private, unprotected email server while she was Secretary of State. This storm would be irrelevant if State had complied with the original requests in the first place, or had complied with the court’s order in the second place.

No. State plainly is now in contempt of court. The Federal judge needs to hold, promptly, a hearing wherein State supervisory personnel should show cause why they shouldn’t be jailed for their contempt until the emails have been delivered and the contempt condition resolved.

Well, Of Course

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…the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General on Wednesday effectively cleared the EPA of allegations of bias in its quest to preemptively kill a proposed mine in southwest Alaska.

The EPA’s IG—which works for the EPA’s Administrator—reached this conclusion even though it was “unable” (it claimed) to get hold of two years’ worth of emails from a key, carefully unnamed, retired employee. The IG claims in the report to have subpoenaed that worthy, but there’s no indication the IG ever bothered even to try to enforce the subpoena.

What else could we expect from an “inspection” function that works for, and is beholden to, the head of the agency it’s putatively inspecting?