Tag Archives: political economy

Hillary Clinton, Homosexuals, and Money Collections

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Democratic Party Presidential Candidate Hillary Clintons claims she’s on the side of gays, transsexuals, and others living alternative life styles.  She claims she’s against discrimination against these folks based on their lifestyle.  This is where a significant fraction of her foundation’s money comes from.

  • Algeria: ($250,000-$500,000) Algerian law states: “Anyone guilty of a homosexual act is punishable with imprisonment.”
  • Brunei: ($1 million-$5 million) Brunei’s penal code states: “Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman, or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to 10 years.”
  • Jamaica: ($50,000-$100,000) Gay men caught having sex face up to 10 years in prison.
  • Kuwait: ($5 million-$10 million) Kuwaiti law states: “Consensual intercourse between men of full age (from the age of 21) shall be punishable with a term of imprisonment of up to seven years.”
  • Oman: ($1 million-$5 million) Law states: “Anyone who commits erotic acts with a person of the same sex shall be sentenced to imprisonment from six months to three years.”
  • Qatar: ($1 million-$5 million) Sentences for acts of homosexuality range from one to seven years in prison.
  • Saudi Arabia: ($10 million-$25 million) Islamic law in Saudi Arabia enforces penalties for homosexual sex, ranging from public flogging to death. For a non-Muslim who commits sodomy with a Muslim, the penalty is death by stoning.
  • United Arab Emirates: ($1 million-$5 million) Emirati law states: “All sexual acts outside of heterosexual marriage are banned in the United Arab Emirates.”

Within the reporting precision levied on the Clinton Foundation, that works out to $19,300,000 to $55,600,000 from this subset of donors.  Even if the true value works out be on the low side of this range, that’s a lot of money for Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Notice two other things about that list.  One is the penalty for being gay or for engaging in homosexual activity that these donors levy against their own citizens.

The other thing is that these all are foreign nations, and all of those donations are serious money compared to the donor nation’s economic capacity.  These nations plainly are buying influence with the candidate whom they anticipate being our next President.

Interestingly, gay rights groups think her hypocrisy is OK.  They’re carefully silent on the matter.  In the end, though, Clinton is the one running for President, not anyone from those groups pretending to favor gay rights.

Can our nation afford an additional four years of Democrat hypocrisy?

Time to Decertify the Local

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Some employees of Cablevision in Brooklyn, members of the Communication Workers of America union, were at a company BBQ circulating a petition to decertify their local, 1109.  Naturally the local’s officials objected, and they threatened the petition circulators.

I just want you to understand, to be perfectly clear that CWA we’re probably going to personally sue y’all[.]
…
[W]e’re going after y’all personally[.]

It’s especially serious when an NLRB administrative judge objects to the union local’s behavior, ruling these union officials had violated Federal labor law with their threats.  It’ll be interesting to see how the NLRB board itself rules on the union’s inevitable appeal.

States Competing for Corporations

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Competition is at the heart of America’s economic success, but not every type of contest benefits society.  Consider the growing trend of businesses cajoling states and politicians to compete for who can dole out the most corporate welfare.  It’s especially frustrating because there are already plenty of ways to promote job growth without robbing taxpayers.

And

States could start with eliminating tax carve outs and replacing them with lower-overall tax rates and lighter regulatory burdens.  Federal lawmakers could also do their part by lowering America’s highest-in-the-developed-world corporate tax rate.

And

Embracing these policies would protect taxpayers…multinational firms with multimillion-dollar profit margins.

You bet.  Lower-tax rate policies, among other things, would directly increase those entities’ profit margins by reducing the size of a cost center.  They also would let these entities lower their prices (if only slightly), which would increase their sales (if only slightly), which would then increase their profits if not their profit margins.

In the end, States compete better on the basis of who has the lower tax and regulatory rates over all rather than who gets to the better carve-outs and special treatments.  In fact, the carve-out/treatment path, among other things, leads to an enormously byzantine tax structure within which it’s increasingly difficult to measure which State’s carve-outs/treatments are better.

Bank Bail-ins

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But this legacy [of bank financing of trade deals] is now under threat in Europe from new regulation aimed at preventing another bank bailout.

That’s right.  The EU has decided that tools banks use to finance trade agreements between other parties must be regulated by the Know Betters of the European Commission.

The new rules are designed to shield taxpayers from bailing out distressed financial institutions again[.]

“EU authorities” are, as usual, operating from a false premise.  There’s no need for a government entity to bail out, or to avoid bailing out, any bank.  Banks don’t need bailing out.  It’s all right if they fail.  It’s good, in fact, for bad banks (e.g., those otherwise thought to need bailing out) to fail; that’s how dead wood gets got rid of.

It’s really quite simple, for all that government experts have over-complexified the thing.  The way to not to bank bail-outs is to not bail them out.  Let the free market decide a bank’s (or any enterprise’s) fitness to continue operations, and if the market turns thumbs down, let the bank fail.  Full stop.

The Fed’s Rule by Fiat

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Federal Reserve officials strongly signaled they will be toughening big-bank capital requirements even further than they have since the 2008 crisis, a move that will further increase pressure on the largest US banks to consider shrinking.

Fed governors Daniel Tarullo and Jerome Powell, in separate public comments Thursday, said the Fed will require eight of the largest US banks to maintain even more capital to pass the central bank’s annual “stress tests.”

Notice that they’re acting by rule and moving sharply away from their knitting, which is to concern themselves with maintaining price stability and full employment.  With this rule, they’re nakedly broadening their interference in the free market place.

Here’s Tarullo:

“Effectively this will be a significant increase in capital,” Mr Tarullo said on Bloomberg television.  He recently said in an interview that he expected big banks to have to change their size, organization, or business model in response to the Fed’s regulatory moves.

Never mind that a business’ size, organization, or business model are solely the decision of the business’ owners—private citizen shareholders—and not the interest of any government in a truly free market economy.

Here’s Powell:

“I have not reached any conclusion that a particular bank needs to be broken up or anything like that,” he said.  The point is to “raise capital requirements to the point at which it becomes a question that banks have to ask themselves.”

This is disingenuous.  When it’s government rather than owners forcing the question onto a business, it’s government dictating the answer.  Especially when using this sort of tool for the forcing.  Capital requirements and associated risk handling are solely the decision of the business’ owners—private citizen shareholders—and not the interest of any government in a truly free market economy.  Assessment of the outcomes of those decisions are solely the province of the business’ owners, customers, and a free market; they are no concern of government.

Of course these two and their fellow Fed Governors know this.  The move, though, is consonant with the Left’s general move toward ever larger government with ever larger intrusions into private affairs, driven by their ideology that Government is the answer, and where it fails the proper corrective action is to increase Government.