Another Excuse…

…for Leftist-dominated governments to grab power. Farmers Insurance, and other insurance companies, are moving to restrict policy sales in California and Florida due to rising payout costs from a recent spate of natural disaster claims. Public Citizen said that such moves are

prime example of the insurance industry’s hypocrisy on climate change.

Progressive-Democratic Party politicians insist that insurance companies aren’t doing enough to combat global warming and want to impose requirements on them to do more. Connecticut’s Leftist politicians are proposing a 5% surcharge on “any premium payments from any fossil fuel company” to any insurer licensed in the state.

Insurers, in a free market economy, are in the business of insuring risk—transferring the risk of a business venture, or ownership of a home, from the venturer/homeowner to the insurer in exchange for a fee based on the risk’s likelihood of occurring and its cost should it occur.

Insurers, in the Progressive-Democrat economy, are tools of the State, usable by the State to achieve the Progressive-Democrats’ personal goals.

Another Reason…

…to disband altogether the Securities and Exchange Commission and build a new exchange watchdog from the ground up. Now it wants a database of all investor personal information whenever those investors make a move in our stock market.

The Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) database was originally proposed by the SEC in 2010 to help regulators track order and trading activity throughout US markets for listed equities and options. According to the ASA, the database will list all the financial holdings and personal information of investors, including their name, phone, address, brokerage accounts, birthdate, and Social Security numbers.

Then, a year ago,

the SEC released an order that granted temporary relief from certain requirements of the CAT, delaying its full implementation until 2024. In the interim, the SEC is requesting the information be given voluntarily, with expected forced implementation by next year’s deadline, according to the ASA [American Securities Association].

This is just weasel-working around the SEC’s demand to have all personal information, even though it has no need for those data.

This SEC has shown, once again, that as an institution it cannot be trusted with American investor data.

“Undemocratic”

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers (D) used his “line-item” veto power to veto part of a legislatively-passed law regarding public school funding. His veto authority actually is less a line-item veto authority than it is a words and phrases veto authority.

Evers, a Democrat, used his veto pen Wednesday to strike out text intended to increase funding for the 2024-25 school years, crossing out the “20” and the hyphen. The updated language allows K-12 schools to raise their revenue per student by $325 a year until 2425.

Lucas Vebber, Deputy Counsel for the Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, says his organization is considering suing the State over the governor’s inherently undemocratic move.

Evers’ move was assuredly undemocratic, but existing law allows the move. Vebber expanded on his beef, and with that expansion, he has a case—and with that case, he may be able to get the law struck down as unconstitutionally (under Wisconsin’s constitution) vague.

Here you have the people who elected the legislature and are represented here in Wisconsin, in the Senate Assembly to write laws, have written a law they intended. The governor’s veto makes it something completely different.

In Wisconsin, as in each of our States and at the Federal level, it’s the legislature that writes the law(s). A governor’s authority, in this context, begins and ends with signing the legislature’s bill into law or vetoing it. Or, as is the case in a few States, a governor’s authority can include vetoing specific parts of the bill and signing the rest into law. Wisconsin allows a governor to veto words and phrases. However, in no State is a governor allowed to rewrite the bill before signing it.

That’s what Evers has done with his carefully chosen words and phrases veto: he’s rewritten a one-year funding law into a 400 year funding law, and that is plainly unconstitutional. Evers’ move also illustrates how flexible is a Wisconsin governor’s words and phrases veto authority: it’s so flexible as to be too vague to pass muster.

The matter likely will end up in front of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Unfortunately, that court has an activist liberal Justice majority.

More Progressive-Democratic Party Racism

This example is breathtaking in its explicitness. California Assembly Public Safety Committee Chairman Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D, 59th District) has proposed a piece of openly racist legislation:

Whenever the court has discretion to determine the appropriate sentence according to relevant statutes and the sentencing rules of the Judicial Council, the court presiding over a criminal matter shall consider the disparate impact on historically disenfranchised and system-impacted populations.

Because the way to eliminate racial discrimination in sentencing is to engage in racial discrimination in sentencing.

This is how steeped in victimhood Party has become. Its members no longer can…discriminate…right from wrong, can no longer discriminate being racist from not being racist.

These Special Ones cannot even perceive the “disparate impact” on crime victims or discriminate the criminal from his crime’s victim.

Useful, but Insufficient

The Biden administration is looking to restrict—but not block—Peoples Republic of China companies from accessing American cloud-computing services.

That’s a useful move, to the extent it actually comes to fruition and to any meaningful extent, but it’s not enough by itself, or even against the backdrop of existing restrictions on technology exports to the PRC.

Some are concerned, though, that this could further strain relations between the world’s economic superpowers.

[The Peoples Republic of China] set export restrictions on two minerals the US says are critical to the production of semiconductors, missile systems and solar cells….
The minerals—gallium and germanium—and more than three dozen related metals and other materials will be subject to unspecified export controls starting August 1, Beijing’s Ministry of Commerce said Monday.

The particular PRC response just shows the importance of us moving our supply chains completely out of the PRC, and it emphasizes the shamefulness of American company managers for their slowness in making the necessary adjustments in their businesses.

Beyond that, we need to stop this foolish call and response method of restrictions on technology exports to the PRC. We need to apply the restrictions faster and deeper than they can respond. Simply doing tit-for-tat moves lets the PRC adapt and respond, especially to respond with more pain inflicted on us than would be the case if we stayed solidly inside their Do Loop.

The PRC’s response looks more like escalation than tit-for-tat. They’re already moving to get inside our Do Loop while the Biden administration tiptoes around.

Those concerned need to identify the war—and the PRC is inflicting war on us, even if it’s not, yet, kinetic—in which one side suffers no consequences during the war. Of course friendly-side damage needs to be minimized, but wars are won by inflicting more pain on the other side than that other side is willing to suffer than that other side can inflict on the one compared to the one’s pain tolerance.

Nor is it enough simply to restrict our technology exports/transfers to the PRC to tech that’s our second tier/prior generation technology. Our exports/transfers—to the extent we make any at all—needs to limited to what would constitute the PRC’s second tier/prior generation technology. If our own such tech is ahead of the PRC’s, those exports still would enable the PRC’s catchup and gaining superiority.