Tag Archives: morality

Lose the Claptrap

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Bank management teams are trekking to Conservative States in an effort to get back in the good graces of State governments whose governors and legislatures disdain woke and otherwise bigoted, illegal, and discriminatory policies like redlining whole industries such as gun manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction. These bank management teams are trying to convince the States that they’ve left off those policies and now only lend, or not, for financial, legal, and reputational reasons.

Therein lies these bank managers’ disingenuousness and cynicism. Refusing to do business over “reputational reasons” is just a weasel-worded excuse for discriminating against industries and individual companies about which someone might object. Or even about which a whole political party might object. In either of those cases, “reputational risk” would be wholly manufactured rather than something intrinsically extant in the market.

The only lending criteria for a bank, or any other financial institution lending money, should be the borrower’s likelihood of repaying and the legality of the borrower’s activity. Bank management teams must exclude the chimerical “reputational risk” and do so in a publicly provable manner. Petty political considerations must never be allowed into what is at bottom a purely market and finance question. Banks that do not achieve this should join the growing list of banks already barred from doing business with State governments over their bigoted, illegal, and discriminatory policies.

More Progressive-Democrat Disingenuosity

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Brad Lander, Progressive-Democratic Party Comptroller for New York City and Party candidate for Mayor, wrote to The Wall Street Journal‘s Monday Letters section to brag about his arrest by ICE agents as those agents attempted to take into custody (ultimately successfully so) an illegal alien. Lander wrote

…Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents aggressively arrested me for the heinous act of…walking alongside a frightened asylum seeker and asking to see the warrant law enforcement was using to justify his arrest.

Lander did far more than that. Lander had his hand holding onto the illegal alien’s shoulder, impeding the ICE agents’ ability to move their charge along, and Lander actively and directly moved to block the agents themselves. He wasn’t just verbally demanding to see a warrant. Then, when the agents moved to arrest him for his obstruction, Lander strongly physically resisted his arrest.

Lander’s broad distortion of the facts of his obstruction and subsequent arrest is one more demonstration that we cannot trust the current crop of Progressive-Democratic Party politicians.

False Premise

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The Biden administration had argued, in the course of its participation in a lawsuit against Tennessee’s law barring transgender-based treatments for children, that

A teenager whose sex assigned at birth is male can be prescribed testosterone to conform to a male gender identity, but a teenager assigned female at birth cannot.

The Supreme Court last week issued its ruling that the Tennessee law was, in fact, perfectly fine; the ruling was 6-3, with the three activist Justices voting in dissent. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the Court’s opinion, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a concurrence centered on answering one of the objections in the dissent. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a separate concurrence in which he took to task all the plaintiffs’ demand that the Court knee-jerk accede to so-called experts in the Executive Branch regarding transgenderism.

However, it would have been good if the Court had addressed one more item—the Biden administration’s false premise underlying its argument.

That erroneous premise is this: that sex is assigned at birth. This is blatantly false. Sex is assigned at the moment of conception, when the male sperm, carrying either an X chromosome or a Y, joins with the egg and its X chromosome. The subsequent union, the zygote, is then deterministically a male with an XY combination or a female with an XX combination. That male or female—boy or girl—result is carried on through subsequent development all the way through fetus development and birth. The sex determination is immutably fixed at that first moment of union; it is not “assigned” later.

Had the Court put that underlying false premise to bed, also, would have obviated a myriad arguments (legal, anyway) about the origins of an individual’s transgender situation.

California’s Problem

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Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed into law a resolution rescinding the Biden administration’s EPA’s last-minute waiver for California to mandate more stringent rules for gasoline and battery cars than the Federal government’s—and that EPA’s—rules. That Biden EPA waiver allowed California to mandate only battery cars to be sold in California; average Americans who also are citizens of California would be required to buy battery cars after 2035 if they wanted another car, whether they wanted a battery car or not. The interstate market for transportation vehicles being what it is, that would have been tantamount to a requirement for all of us average Americans all across our nation to buy only battery cars after 2035.

Hours later, California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom led a lawsuit against the Trump administration asking a Federal court to find the waiver rescission…unconstitutional.

Newsom called it “the latest illegal action by a president who is a wholly-owned subsidiary of big polluters.”

Newsom’s Progressive-Democrat State AG Rob Bonta:

We will continue to fiercely defend ourselves from this lawless federal overreach[.]

How dare our elected representatives act against the wishes of California? That’s illegal.

It’s plainly unlawful for Congress to pass a national law of which the State of California disapproves.

Newsom and his syndicate bleat about an allegedly lawless Trump administration. The real lawlessness, though, is Newsom’s claim that a waiver granted by a government agency cannot be rescinded by the elected representatives of the United States, the Congress and the President.

That’s lawlessness, and it’s instructive of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s use of a Newspeak Dictionary to cloak their claims. This is what we can look forward to the moment the Progressive-Democratic Party returns to power.

Newspeak and Immigration

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A letter writer in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section used his copy of the Newspeak Dictionary to mischaracterize what’s going on with the Trump administration’s deportation drive. He started out supposedly on the right path:

Like many others, I support deporting people who are here illegally and have committed serious crimes.

But that turned out to be merely his distracting lead-in to his mischaracterization:

Deporting people who have committed no crime—especially those who have been here for a long time—is morally corrupt.

The ones being deported have, though, committed a crime: they broke, or snuck, into our nation illegally. That crime stands whether the illegal aliens have been here a short time or a long time, and there is no statute of limitations on the crime of crossing our borders illegally.

Another reliance by this letter writer on his Newspeak Dictionary:

Millions of migrants work for low wages in service and agricultural industries.

They are not migrants. They ceased to be migrants when they entered Mexico or Canada illegally under those nations’ laws. Even if having legally entered those nations and thereby maintained a legitimate claim to be migrants, when they entered our nation illegally under our laws, they ceased to be migrants. Entering Mexico, Canada, or our nation illegally makes them illegal aliens. Full stop.

White washing the question, distorting reality via Newspeak-ism, counting illegal aliens as not illegal or as having committed no crime, is not the answer to our immigration problem; it merely encourages the flow of illegal aliens. The correct answer is two-fold: remove the illegal aliens, and streamline our legal immigration laws to enable faster vetting and to ease visa quota limits.

A first step already has been taken by Executive Order, but it badly wants codification into law (with a sunset limit in this case) by Congress. That step, emphasized again by HHS Secretary Kristi Noem at her Thursday press conference, is the offer to all of the illegal aliens currently present the opportunity to take themselves back to their home country, on arrival at which we will give them $1,000 of American taxpayer money, and then they will have the opportunity to return to the US legally, with all associated opportunities, including critically, no longer having to look over their shoulders for ICE, and being able to get onto a path to citizenship if they wish. The backstep here, though, is if they don’t take this opportunity and are caught and deported, their departure will be permanent; they will be barred from ever coming here again.