Tag Archives: rights

Hearings

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As some of you are aware, there are three committees in the House of Representatives that are conducting…hearings…purporting to investigate President Donald Trump with a view to impeach him over this or that Progressive-Democrat-perceived peccadillo, or simply to keep the smear alive after the failure of the Mueller investigation in order to prejudice the 2020 Presidential and Congressional (and down ballot) elections.

As you also are aware, these committees are conducting their hearings in secret, behind closed doors, doors that are so tightly sealed that Republican members of one of the three committees are barred from any of the other committees’ hearings.

But they’re not that tightly sealed; varied news outlets routinely publish what they claim are excerpts from those hearings.  That brings me to a couple of questions.

One is, what are the sources for those things the news outlets publish? The hearings are, after all, secret. Or so the Progressive-Democrat committee chairmen claim.  No news outlet will identify any of its sources.  This is an old question.

Another question is why the news outlets are so incurious about the existence of the leaks? Do they really not care about the lack of integrity the Progressive-Democrat-controlled committees demonstrate with their leaks?

These committees seem to be running Star Chamber inquisitions rather than serious investigations.

Yes and No

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) wants to break up Facebook, and in the meantime, she wants Facebook to shut down free speech the speech of those of whom she disapproves—especially political ads posted to Facebook (for a fee charged by Facebook) by Republicans and Conservatives.  Zuckerberg’s response?

Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications Nick Clegg wrote that the company does not believe its role is to “prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny.”

Warren is, of course, angrified that a mere business won’t submit to her bidding, and so she tried to expose Facebook’s arrogance:

She taunted the company by submitting a false ad of her own claiming that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had endorsed Mr. Trump “to see if it’d be approved.” It was.

Of course it was. It was a political ad, by Warren’s design.  It also was not a false ad; it told the truth. The truth wasn’t that Zuckerberg had become a Trump supporter; that was obvious parody.  No, the thing that made the ad a true one was Warren’s own statement, early on in her parody, that her claim regarding the new Zuckerberg-Trump palsiness was itself false, its purpose being to show Facebook’s penchant for running false political advertisements solely to take money to promote lies.

(Given Warren’s own penchant for lying for her personal gain, that last is especially parodical.)

It’s too bad that Facebook’s position here is contaminated by its penchant for censoring conservative speech that isn’t part of overt political ads.

Lack of Understanding

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This is demonstrated in the lead paragraph of a recent Wall Street Journal article.

Chief executives are taking vocal stands on issues like gun control, climate change, and immigration, but global affairs bring a different complexity and calculation, especially for companies doing business in China*.

After all,

In the aftermath of Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s now-deleted tweet, the National Basketball Association has found the consequences of even implicitly criticizing Chinese policy can be swift and sizable.

Not to pick on the NBA in particular (although its behavior has been especially public, cowardly, and so reprehensible), Apple and Alphabet, among lots of others, also have sacrificed principle for company “security” in the PRC, while favoring yuan, also, over principle.

No, taking principled positions don’t get complexified by the environment in which they’re taken. The fundamental tenets of ethics, of morality, are universal and constant; the only adjustments are in the manner of their implementation.  There’s nothing at all complex about that. Company personnel are either principled, ethical, moral, or they are not. These are not matters of situation or convenience.

And this:

Executives have to thread a needle when a company’s commercial and financial interests clash with the CEO’s personal values and the cultural values of an enterprise and its home country, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a leadership expert at the Yale School of Management. “One of the rarely discussed downsides of globalization is you get caught in those crosscurrents,” he said.

Those “cross-currents” are irrelevant. Either the CEO or the enterprise have principles worth standing by and sacrificing for, or the CEO or the enterprise have no principles. It’s that simple.

Another misunderstanding is this one by Paul Argenti, Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business Professor of Corporate Communication:

The job of a CEO is not to save the world or make the world safe for democracy[.]

No, but it is a core part of his job to be, at all times and in all circumstances, ethical, moral, and not hypocritical.  An example of business’ glaring hypocrisy: the Business Roundtable. That group is carefully and with deliberation silent on the NBA’s, et al., meek acquiescence to the PRC’s tyrants.

One last misunderstanding, this one by Rick Wartzman, Drucker Institute’s Director of the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society [paraphrased by WSJ]:

The fracas sparked by ephemeral statements can distract from more substantive questions of social responsibility[.]

And

“What concerns me is whether statements, while important, become a substitute for the more meaningful work around what it means to be a responsible company and take care of all your stakeholders[.]”

Again, no. The only way such things can distract is if the statement maker chooses to be distracted. Staying focused on the business of the company in such a circumstance may be hard to do, but being hard means it’s eminently possible.

 

*The WSJ, like most of the NLMSM, refers to the People’s Republic of China as though it were the one and only. They ignore the nation just across a narrow straight from the mainland, the Republic of China that sits on the island of Taiwan.

Warren, Again

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At last Thursday’s CNN-hosted Equality Townhall attended by many of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Presidential candidates, Senator and candidate Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) had this exchange with a townhall questioner:

Townhall Questioner: “Let’s say you’re on the campaign trail … and a supporter approaches you and says, “Senator, I am old-fashioned, and my faith teaches me that marriage is between one man and one woman.” What is your response?
Warren: Well, I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that, and I’m going to say, “Then just marry one woman.  Assuming you can find one[.]

Now, the question appears to have been planted by Warren or her staff, but that just emphasizes the matter: this is the utter contempt with which she, and by extension, Party, view ordinary Americans.

Keep this in mind next summer and fall.

First, They Came for our Guns

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Then they came for our freedom of speech.  Now they’re after our freedom of religion.  Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke has made the attack on the core of our Bill of Rights open and explicit.  After having promised to take our guns (and his Bestie, Eric Swalwell (D, CA) presaged him by threatening to nuke us if we didn’t give up our guns), and after Party has pressured social media to censor speech of which Party disapproves, we get this from O’Rourke at the CNN town hall meeting which it held with a number of Party Presidential candidates last Thursday:

…religious institutions should lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage.
“There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights or the full civil rights of every single one of us,” the former Texas congressman said at CNN‘s Equality Town Hall in Los Angeles.
He added: “And so as president, we are going to make that a priority, and we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.”

Never mind the human rights of believers.  Religious institutions will be punished by the state if they don’t destroy their religions by violating their religions’ fundamental tenets in favor of state diktats.  Our religious institutions must surrender themselves into instruments of the state.

The 1st Amendment, along with the 2nd, have no place in the lives of modern Americans.

The Constitution, having been written more than 100 years ago isn’t, as that sage philosopher Ezra Klein has said, binding on anything.

After all, no less a light than Woodrow Wilson, one of the founders of the modern Progressive movement and the first Progressive-Democrat President, said this of our Constitution:

This is where the living and breathing constitution comes from. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.

We the People—us ignorant voter-citizens—have no role in the life of our Constitution; Article V is just a bunch of pretty words.  No, our Constitution, the very fabric of our nation, is to be modified at will according to whatever our Progressive-Democrat Betters determine to be the relevant pressures of life.

Keep this in mind in the summer and fall of 2020.