Tag Archives: politics

Confusion

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There is some concerning Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ moves at DoJ concerning local police forces and local policing.  An example is provided in the lede to a recent Wall Street Journal article:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision this week to review concessions by local police departments accused of misconduct is part of a seismic shift at the Justice Department, which has quickly changed its emphasis under the Trump administration from protecting civil rights to promoting law and order.

Of course, there is no dichotomy between protecting civil rights and promoting law and order.  Indeed, the two are inseparable: it isn’t possible to protect civil rights without promoting law and order: it’s those laws and the order they engender that are at the foundation of civil rights—which themselves are matters of those laws and that order.

The confusion extends to the Federal government’s role in overseeing local police institutions, including particularly “consent” decrees concluded or in progress involving Federal demands for police department reforms satisfactory to the Federal government.  Sessions has ordered a review of these and has taken steps to begin rescission of some.  However,

Officials in Baltimore and Chicago say they remain committed to overhauling police forces….

These officials say they’ll proceed within the parameters of existing consent decrees, but the illustration remains: local officials are fully capable both legally and morally to overhaul, to reform, without Federal involvement, and that’s as it should be.  Each locale is different, and each local police force will need its unique and locally oriented reform.  Federal involvement might be needed to clear away impediments to reform, but it is not needed to mandate the nature or structure of reform.

In the end, reasonable men can debate the methods of law and order, and reasonable men can argue whether current law is sufficient for civil rights (beyond that, the question of current law’s adequacy in implementing inalienable rights has been debated since the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, and before).  The immutable fact remains, though, that there are no civil rights, no matter what laws might assert, without laws being enforced—law and order.  And that is, of necessity, a local matter.

Northern Korea and the People’s Republic of China

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On the day before the PRC’s President, Xi Jinping, is to meet with President Donald Trump, northern Korea fired another ballistic missile (this one apparently another test of its solid-fueled model).  Of course, the careful timing of Baby Kim’s missile launch has been denied by the PRC’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying.  There is no “direct relation” between the missile launch and the Trump-Xi meeting, she insisted.

The more telling description of events and event relations, though, was provided by Shi Yinhong, Director of the Center on American Studies at Renmin University in Beijing:

China has nearly exhausted its leverage with North Korea.

Whether that’s true or the PRC is simply continuing to wash its hands of its responsibility for its client state, Shi’s remark makes one thing increasingly clear: we must take more direct action vis-à-vis northern Korea, and that action must come without PRC involvement; they’ll just be left behind.

YGTBSM

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This episode is from Newark Mayor Ras Baraka (D).  He claimed last Sunday, with a straight face that

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is “targeting” mayors like himself, and intimidating them into being “fugitive slave catchers that run around and do their bidding in our cities.”

Milwaukee County, WI, Sheriff David Clarke was more polite than I:

I’ve heard a lot of stupid things [but] comparing fugitive slaves to illegal immigrants is the gold standard of stupidity[.]

I say, rather, that Baraka’s TDS has turned him into an irrational election-denier.

Trade Barriers

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Since the meeting between PRC President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump is a matter of concern these days, and the trade negotiations that are part of that meeting also are a matter of concern, herewith a concern of my own.

Maybe this is the right time for the two leaders to cut a deal to slash Chinese trade barriers.

The three biggest PRC trade barriers are these:

  • the PRC’s demand for government backdoors into American foundational software used by companies wanting to do business in the PRC
  • the PRC’s demand that American companies “partner” with PRC companies as a condition of doing business in the PRC
  • the PRC’s parallel demand that American companies transfer American technology to those “partners”

Absent removal of these barriers, no other barrier removal matters.  Absent removal of these barriers, no deal with the PRC should be concluded.

Robot Employment Acts

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That’s what Andy Puzder, the ex-CEO of CKE Restaurants, calls minimum wage laws.

In a survey released last month, the publication Nation’s Restaurant News asked 319 restaurant operators to name their biggest challenge for 2017. Nearly a quarter of them, 24%, said rising minimum wages.

And so we get:

McDonald’s said last November that it would install self-order kiosks in all 14,000 of its US restaurants. Wendy’s announced in February it would add kiosks at about 1,000 locations to “appeal to younger customers and reduce labor costs.”

The trend toward automation is particularly pronounced in areas where the local minimum wage is high. Eatsa, a 21st-century version of the automat, now lists seven locations in four cities, each of which will be subject to a $15 minimum wage within the next 36 months.

And

Taking automation to the next step, Miso Robotics and the owner of CaliBurger announced in March they have developed a robotic arm, called Flippy, that can turn burgers and place them on buns. CaliBurger plans to install them over the next two years in 50 restaurants world-wide.

And so we get the Americans over whom the Progressive-Democratic Party cries such copious crocodile tears and about whom this Party pretends to care so much—our youth, our first-time job seekers, our single moms trying to augment their incomes, our two-earner families trying to augment family income, in short, the poorest and the least among us—as the ones the most and the most immediately harmed by their precious minimum wage laws.

I haven’t even gotten to the fundamentally racist nature of minimum wage laws, born as they were as a Democratic Party Depression-era naked ploy to trap black Americans on the plantation so they couldn’t compete with white unions for jobs in the American industrial heartland.  Or the plain racist nature of today’s outcomes: the disproportionate impact on black and Hispanic teenagers who are denied entry-level jobs by the same pricing mechanism, an outcome well known to these Progressive-Democrats.  But: more welfare handout voters, they hope, raised in government dependency from their childhood.

I don’t agree that the Progressive-Democrats pushing these laws don’t understand this.  They know full well the outcomes, just as they know full well what follows from those outcomes: unemployed government dependents trapped in the Progressive-Democrats’ welfare cages, and so Progressive-Democrat (they hope) voters.

Our poor are just pawns in a cynical play for political power.