Tag Archives: politics

Failing Money Market Funds and Dysfunctional Regulation

Posted on by
Reply

Money market funds had trouble during the Panic of 2008, and Federal regulators felt like they had to justify their jobs by Doing Something. So by 2014, they developed and adopted a rule that, in essence allowed money market funds to tell their investors that they couldn’t have their money back under certain fund- and SEC-determined conditions. For the investors’ own good.

Fast forward to the then-active Wuhan Virus situation in early spring 2020, and money market funds found themselves in trouble again. Enter the Gotta Do Something regulators again. This time the international consortium that is the Financial Stability Board (created in the panicky aftermath of that Panic and to which then-President Barack Obama (D) surrendered much of our financial regulatory sovereignty) is contemplating

proposals would discount the value of shares in money funds when lots of investors all want to cash them in simultaneously.

Telling investors they can’t have all of their money back when they need it most. For their own good because the money market fund “needs” their money more, and the money market fund’s “needs” are more important.

Think about that.

Think, next, about a couple of alternatives. One would be to require money market funds to hold a measure of cash capital in reserve and separate from investors’ money. But that’s those regulators, again.

Another would be to let the money market fund that finds itself in trouble go ahead and fail. Let several of them fail. Certainly, that will be painful in the moment, and for more than those funds and unlucky or bad judgment investors. But it also would be the only time, as the industry would be forced by free market imperatives to clean itself up. That would result in far less pain in the medium- to long-term.

On the Verge

Posted on by
Reply

…not only regarding the vast damage that will be done to our economy by President Joe Biden (D) and his deliberately anti-bipartisan Progressive-Democrat cronies with their soon to be unilaterally inflicted spend- and tax-o-rama bills.

Biden’s Progressive-Democrat Treasury Secretary is about to surrender American national sovereignty to an international consortium in the form of putting our Congress’ Constitutionally mandated taxing authority under the control of an international taxing agreement.

The Wall Street Journal worries about Congress’ careful silence on the matter and the paper’s editors are right.

The only saving grace, such as it is, to Yellen’s behavior and Congress’ complicit silence is that Yellen and her cronies will be able to enter into such disastrous tax agreement only via a Biden-executed Executive Agreement, and that sort of thing can be undone with a pen by the next President. The Yellen Tax Abrogation will not become a treaty so long as there are 34 Senators who care about American national sovereignty.

The destruction wreaked in the interim, though, will be broad and deep.

Utterly Illegal

Posted on by
Reply

And the Progressive-Democrats don’t care. They have the power, so they don’t need any stinking authority, and they’re going ahead: with censorship of what average Americans are allowed to say, even allowed to know.

The White House announced their efforts with Facebook to take aggressive action on problematic social media posts. The administration said they would work to flag and censor anything they deemed to be disinformation about COVID-19.

Biden’s Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy:

We expect more from our technology companies. We’re asking them to operate with greater transparency and accountability. We are asking them to monitor misinformation more closely.

Biden himself, through his Press Secretary, Jen Psaki:

“There are also proposed changes we have made to social media platforms, including Facebook….

And

We are flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation[.]

And overt spying on private citizens’ personal communications to facilitate the censorship, per the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Democratic National Committee:

…plans to work with SMS carriers to monitor text messages and dispel misinformation about vaccines.
“If you send a text message to a friend or to a family member or to whoever and it includes whatever they deem as misinformation that somehow you’re going to get a message on your phone from the government,” David Rubin of the Rubin Report.

And the threat, from none other than President Joe Biden (D):

Mr Biden was asked what his message was to social media platforms when it came to Covid-19 disinformation.
“They’re killing people,” he said. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that—and they’re killing people.”

Never mind that the censorship is a blatant violation of our 1st Amendment and of long-standing and myriad case law:

As recently as 2019, the Supreme Court reasoned “‘a private entity can qualify as a state actor,’ subject to First Amendment protections….” Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck (2019) …;
“When the private entity performs a traditional, exclusive public function,” Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co. (1974);
“When the government compels the private entity to take a particular action,” Blum v. Yaretsky, (1982);
“When the government acts jointly with the private entity.” Lugar v. Edmondson Oil Co. (1982).

The government doesn’t get to avoid censorship by farming out its censoring to third parties.

And there’s this: it’s well established in Civil Rights law and Supreme Court rulings that private enterprises that are public accommodations (of which diners are a canonical example) may not discriminate, under the 14th Amendment, on the basis of race. It’s an easy extension of that “may not discriminate” to include 1st Amendment speech, and it’s quite clear that Facebook et al., have become, if they weren’t created as, public accommodations.

Us average Americans need to keep this blatant disregard for our Constitution firmly in mind in November 2022.

 

H/t Grim’s Hall

Human Rights Violations

Posted on by
Reply

The nation that fought a civil war to end slavery, whose people passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, put an end to Jim Crow laws now is to be the subject of a UN-run(!) human rights investigation. This is at the invitation of the Progressive-Democrat President, Joe Biden, and his Progressive-Democrat Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.

The Progressive-Democratic Party, a 21st century evolution of the Democratic Party.

It was the Democratic Party that forced that civil war so that Democrats in their effort to keep their slaves and create more.

It was the Democratic Party that created the KKK, whose Democrat white supremacist domestic terrorists lynched freed blacks and those whites who supported them.

It was the Democratic Party that pushed gun control to keep blacks disarmed in the face of the Democrats’ KKK atrocities.

It was the Democratic Party that enacted Jim Crow laws explicitly intended to keep blacks from voting.

It was the Democratic Party that resegregated the Federal government after Republicans had succeeded, in the main, in integrating it in the post-Civil War years.

It was the Democratic Party that nationalized minimum wage laws explicitly to keep blacks trapped on southern plantations instead of being able to move north to compete on wages for factory jobs.

It was the Democratic Party that built racist and sexist affirmative action programs with welfare cliffs built in so as to keep blacks and other minorities trapped in the Democrats’ welfare cages.

We have now that party’s modern evolution, the Progressive-Democratic Party. That evolution has all of this in its short history:

It is the Progressive-Democratic Party that continues to pursue race- and sex-based affirmative action.

It is the Progressive-Democratic Party that pursues racist college and university admission preferences.

It is the Progressive-Democratic Party that objects to blacks and other minorities having access to quality K-12 schooling by blocking voucher and charter schools and by suing States to prevent black children from switching from failing public schools to voucher/private schools.

It is the Progressive-Democratic Party that pursues identity politics, which is nothing but 1950s-era racist segregation brought forward to the 21st century to include sexist segregation alongside racist segregation.

If Progressive-Democrats are really concerned about human rights violations, they need to look in their mirrors.

A Thought on Judges Retiring

Posted on by
Reply

Article III Judges are appointed to their office for life. This is by entirely correct design and mandated in our Constitution: it’s to maximize the political independence of the judges in our court system.

Engraved above the west entrance to the Supreme Court Building is the promise Equal Justice Under Law. Not equal justice on the law, not equal justice under any particular law. Equal justice under law: equal justice under our system of laws. That’s not a binding promise, it’s an aspiration. Binding, though, is our Constitution, which aside from Order[ing] to form a more perfect Union, provides for that equal justice throughout the first 10 Amendments and makes that requirement for equality under law explicit in the 14th Amendment:

…nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

All of that requires judges to be independent of politics.  We the People go further: all Article III judges must take an oath of office:

I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

Support and defend our Constitution. Judges must bear true faith and allegiance to our Constitution, not to any political consideration or entity.

Supreme Court Justices take this additional oath:

I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as [TITLE] under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.

There’s that equal justice under law bit, again, this time made binding. Again: it isn’t possible for a Justice to faithfully and impartially discharge or perform his duties if politics enter into his considerations.

Against that backdrop was a shocking degree of Leftist pressure on the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire while a Progressive-Democrat President was in office along with a Progressive-Democrat-controlled Senate so that a politically suitable replacement could be appointed to the Supreme Court. Now there is equally shocking Leftist pressure on Justice Stephen Breyer to retire right damn now so a sitting Progressive-Democrat President and a Progressive-Democrat-controlled Senate can appoint a politically acceptable replacement.

Politically acceptable. Not legally adept. Not judicially talented and skilled. Not qualified by extensive experience in law. Politically acceptable.

If our court systems are to maintain even a pretense of independence, if our legal system is to maintain even a pretense of determining justice in an even-handed way, rather than making politically acceptable decisions, judges at all levels must serve as long as they’re of sound mind and sound enough body, and they must retire only when they see fit rather than when it’s politically convenient to one party or another.

Sadly, Progressive-Democrats and their Leftist supporters insist on elevating their politics above justice.