Tag Archives: politics

Go Ahead On

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IBM was interested in buying the Israeli chip maker, Tower Semiconductor, and the acquisition might have raised antitrust concerns in Israel, the US, the EU, and elsewhere around the world. Each of those antitrust concerns, if acted on, would have had effect only inside the nation raising the concern, however, making the matter purely a business decision whether to go through with the merger and simply not do business in the objection nation. Nobody objected, though, except the People’s Republic of China.

The PRC’s State Administration for Market Regulation balked and withheld approval, so IBM meekly quit the deal altogether, apparently in order to appease the PRC and preserve—IBM hoped—its other business concerns there.

Slow walking or outright blocking tech and other mergers with, or acquisitions by, American companies is part of the PRC’s economic aggression against us as that nation objects to our objecting to the PRC’s economic aggressions and to its tech and intellectual property extortion and theft. IBM is working, it seems, at cross-purposes with our struggle against the PRC.

Other moves by the PRC have included blocking

  • Qualcomm‘s acquisition of Netherland’s chip maker NXP Semiconductors
  • DuPont‘s acquisition of electronics-materials specialist Rogers Corp, an Arizona-headquartered company
  • certain PRC domiciled companies from buying memory chips from US chip giant Micron

It would have been better for IBM—and those other companies, too; IBM‘s managers don’t have a lock on timidity—to proceed with the acquisition and to eliminate the PRC’s antitrust concerns by not doing business associated with the acquisition’s chips inside the PRC or with businesses domiciled inside the PRC. Or for IBM, et al., to stop doing business with the PRC altogether.

It would have been a beneficial twofer had IBM gone ahead on with the acquisition: IBM and Tower merge, Israel, the US, the EU, and most of the rest of the world would reap the benefits of the merging, and IBM and Tower would be out from under the PRC’s regulatory thumb.

It would be beneficial for our nation, too, if the managers of our businesses had the courage to stand up to our enemies and walk away from them.

Chip Manufacturing

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The Biden administration is bent on bringing computer chip manufacturing back into the United States. On its face, that would seem beneficial. However, the administration team he’s formed to oversee the matter and its $39 billion of taxpayer dollars allocated to the program is populated with

investment bankers, private-equity investors, and management consultants.

And apparently no chip engineers or anyone familiar with supplying chip factories.

Uh, huh.

The Manhattan Project and the crash program to develop treatments for the Wuhan Virus were populated, strongly preferentially, with experts in the field, and they just as strongly deemphasized the moneybags experts.

That’s not the case with Biden’s nightmare dream team of money allocators. This isn’t a true crash program, certainly, but it’s still an effort to rapidly guts something up. It needs experts in the field to do the gutsing, it does not need politically connected money handlers.

“Progress on the Horizon”

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Former Biden economic advisor Brian Deese claims us ordinary Americans are skeptical about the economy because we’re too stupid to see what’s before our eyes and draining our wallets. After all,

the president’s low approval numbers on the economy likely come from Americans feeling wary about accepting “progress on the horizon.”

Progress. We’re only just recovering the millions of jobs lost during the Wuhan Virus Situation, a slow recovery that President Joe Biden (D) and his cronies (Deese is just one of them) claim has been one of job creation.

Progress. Inflation remains higher than it was before Biden took office. Inflation is down from its peak a year-and-a-half ago, but it’s starting back up.

Progress. Prices for our goods and services are not coming down; they’re 16%, or more, higher than at the start of Biden’s term in office, and they’re continuing to rise as a result of that continued higher inflation. Food and energy, in particular, remain much costlier to us consumers than before Biden took office.

Deese is just insulting our intelligence with the nonsense he’s spouting.

Buy These Backup Electric Power Stations

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California is moving against the fossil-fuel energy generation industry, along with making its gasoline and diesel fueled vehicles meet ever more extreme mileage and emission criteria in the State government’s effort to run ICE vehicles off the road and…encourage…Californians to buy battery-powered cars and trucks.

Now California’s captive, if not outright State-owned, utility PG&E is proposing a new electricity feed into its greed to supplement its wind and solar generated electricity.

Using electric cars to charge the power grid.
PG&E…sees “great potential” for EVs to act as power grid backup generators. “The grid needs those electric vehicles. We need to make it available, and it can be a huge resource[.]”

And

PG&E believes in a future where everyone is driving an electric vehicle (EV) and where that EV serves as a backup power option at home and more broadly as a resource for the grid[.]

And especially,

The company also said tapping electric cars eliminates “the need for non-renewable resources” like fossil fuels.

Is this the reason California’s governing politicians are pushing so hard for—almost to the point of requiring—Californians to buy all-electric vehicles? Those vehicles are, in fact, intended to be used as distributed power (re)generating stations?

Collusion

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Or worse. The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are on the right track to criticize the sham nature of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint David Weiss as Special Counsel (an illegal appointment, as illustrated nearby) in the Hunter Biden (and possibly et al.) investigation.

Those editors, though, are surprisingly naïve in one regard. On the matter of DoJ’s (Garland’s and Weiss’) move to formally withdraw the plea deal that Federal District Judge Maryellen Noreika had rejected the day it was presented to her, the editors suggested,

He may now end up facing some felony tax charges, as two investigating IRS whistleblowers told Congress they had recommended, or perhaps other charges.

The Editors can’t possibly be this naive. There are only two likely outcomes to this. One is that Weiss drops the charges altogether and walks away. The other is that Weiss proceeds with the present case, and charges Hunter Biden with precisely the charges to which Hunter had agreed to plead guilty.

As to Weiss’ sweetheart “Special” Counsel role, that in no way blocks either of the above moves; his new title is just a mechanism to drag out his new sham investigation for another five years, following which he’ll write a report that shakes his finger very firmly at Biden.

The fix has been made manifest, and Garland has shown that he’s far more deeply embedded than Eric Holder was in his wingman role; Garland is Joe Biden’s made man.