Tag Archives: politics

Public Servants and Respect

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A Letter to the Wall Street Journal Editor last week revealed a problem in the Federal bureaucracy, but not the one the writer intended.  The writer wrote in part,

While Peter Hoekstra in his March 16 op-ed Can Americans Trust Their Spies? clearly states the problem of intelligence leaks from spies employed by the US, he stops short of mentioning a broader issue of morale and trust that is at the heart of a national problem and has stalled our government. Public servants, like all of us, want to feel they are respected and supported by those in high office and that their efforts are taken seriously by our government. When this doesn’t occur, information leaks develop. Modern cyberspace warfare requires the trust and support of our spies and an understanding of who our enemy is.

What this letter writer has ignored is that the right answer to such lack of respect—whether real or imagined—is not for the public “servant” to violate his oath of office by leaking confidential information, nor is it to commit felonies like unmasking the incidentally surveilled.

The right answer is for the public “servant” to resign his position and go to work somewhere else where he can feel properly appreciated.

Full stop.

NATO and Mutual Defense Alliances

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was in Europe at the end of the week, and among other things, he pushed for NATO member states to honor their decades-old commitment to spend 2% of their GDP on defense.

Germany, among other members, insisted that honoring their commitment was “unrealistic.”

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said demands for 2% of GDP spending were “totally unrealistic.” He said that to meet the US target, Germany would have to increase spending by some €35 billion ($37 billion).

After all, Gabriel has argued,

…a strong defense isn’t enough to ensure security.

That’s a cynically offered straw man, though; no one is arguing that a strong defense is sufficient, only that it’s necessary.  Gabriel will have to play with his dolly without me.

There are others who agree that the nations need to boost their own spending—Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, for instance, and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.  But it isn’t sufficient.

We need to be developing a mutual defense alliance that includes eastern European nations, anyway.  Maybe the result of that development should be a separate alliance, not an expansion of NATO.  Perhaps even the result should replace NATO, or at least our role in the new alliance should replace our role in NATO, since so many of the nations of NATO have so little interest in their own treaty responsibilities.

“Our Federal Dollars”

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It doesn’t get any clearer than this.  Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has illustrated the addictive nature of Federal funds transfers to the States and lower government jurisdictions with that phrase.

In defending his city’s lawsuit against the Federal government over DoJ’s decision to withhold Federal monies from cities that violate Federal law by protecting illegal aliens from enforcement of immigration law, Murray said this:

The federal government cannot compel our police department to enforce federal immigration law and cannot use our federal dollars to coerce Seattle into turning our backs on our immigrant and refugee communities.

Our federal dollars.  The dollars aren’t theirs.  Those dollars are Texas citizens’ money.  Those dollars are New York citizens’ money.  Those dollars are Illinois citizens’ money.  Those dollars are Oregon citizens’ money.  Those dollars are the money of the citizens of every State and territory in the nation, including Washington.  Those dollars are money transferred from all those other citizens around the nation.

This is what such transfers lead to: the powerful addiction of a sense of entitlement to other people’s money and the loss of any sense of responsibility for a jurisdiction’s own money.

Port Automation

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It’s coming to west coast ports, and the unions don’t like it.

The push over the last decade by international maritime ports to fully automate operations has sparked the ire of many US longshoremen whose high-paying jobs and way of life are at stake. The trend also sets up a battle between their unions and companies and governments who see automation as a cleaner, more efficient and more cost-friendly alternative to the current system.

Never mind that west coast ports—three in particular, Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Oakland—do 40% of the nation’s (not just the west coast’s) container traffic and so costs there have sharp impact on the nation’s economy.

Never mind that the west coast ports often are subject to expensive longshoremen union work slowdowns.

The Washington Council on International Trade this week released a report that attempted to quantify how severely the [2015] slowdown directly impacted Washington state businesses. That final price tag: $770 million.

Never mind that west coast ports often are subject to even more expensive longshoremen union strikes, including illegal strikes.

Never mind that longshoremen union strikes against west coast ports often turn violent.

The automation will reduce costs—good for the shippers and ultimately for us consumers—and increase profits—which means jobs, albeit different ones and with lags for the different jobs to develop.

And robots don’t do work slowdowns, robots don’t strike, robots don’t get violent when they don’t get their way.

Irrational NLMSM

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Now it’s getting out of hand as the NLMSM has gone full-on hysterical.  Chris Matthews, of MSNBC, has said that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are akin to Uday and Qusay Hussein.

Uday and Qusay working for Saddam Hussein: you couldn’t go into a restaurant and have eye contact with those guys without getting killed.

Imagine getting into a fight in the office with Jared or Ivanka—they have enormous power and they’re always going to be there[.]

Hmm….