This would normally be an item in a Warm-Up or the equivalent, but I haven’t had time for them lately, so I’m going to let the issue fly solo.
In “The Affair,” the protagonist’s best friend assesses the problems that have befallen him as the result of said affair, and offers him $50,000. The adulterous husband (his wife and the friend has been an inseparable threesome in college) protests, but the friend, who is rich and just became richer (he’s a hedge fund whiz), insists. He has the money, and he won’t miss it, and what are friends for?
A couple years later, the protagonist, who has a best selling second novel and is suddenly rolling in money, fame and opportunities, has an argument with his old friend and benefactor at a party. The freind, insulted at his treatment, says, “You seem to forget you that I gave you $50,000!” He adds, “And you never paid me back!” The author protests, “That was a gift!” His friend responds, “Yeah, well you have the money to pay me back now!”
Duke University professor of economics William Darity wants $14 trillion in reparations to be paid to African Americans. That would roughly break down to $350,000 per recipient. True, he was blathering on the “Dr. Phil” show, and perhaps thought nobody with more than a GED would be watching. Nonetheless he said, for public consumption, that trillions in financial reparations should be handed out to “reduce the wealth gap” between white and black Americans. Where will all that money come from, the phony TV doctor asked? Oh, from the Federal government, which will apparently make it magically appear, replied the evidently phony economist. Will a $350,000 windfall be enough to do any lasting good for the vast majority of blacks who would receive it? Oh, probably not, but it will feel good.
Or something. California’s task force on imaginary reparations things they should be at least $5 million per eligible resident. Sure, why not? Why not $10 million?
In the past, the professor has estimated that reparations would cost between $10 and $12 trillion. Of course, those figures are also impossible and ridiculous, so we need not make too big a thing out of his latest demand.
The National Debt, even the most woke and irresponsible economists will admit if you back them against a wall, is getting, indeed is, dangerously large already at about $32 trillion. Increasing it by 40% in a short period of time is a recipe for economic disaster that would adversely affect all races and creeds.
One doesn’t even need to get into the absurd practical, social, political and legal impediments to such a mass transfer of wealth, which would be enough to make such Darity’s reparations plan madness even if it were affordable, which it is not now and never will be. The ethics question is: How can Duke responsibly employ a professor who advocates such reckless economic policy? What can students learn from this man, who places his race and political biases ahead of his scholarship?
We have come to quite a disturbing point in our political culture when an elected official can be designated an Ethics Alarms Ethics Hero for doing nothing more than telling the truth. Yet here we are.
The House Majority Whip wasn’t revealing any great secret, just telling the truth about what Joe Biden and so many other Democrats have been lying about—well, one of the the matters they have been lying about. Asked on MSNBC about the inflation affecting typical citizens that they feel might be caused by Democrats spending like there is no tomorrow, Rep. Clyburn answered, “Well, let me make it very clear. All of us are concerned about these rising costs, and all of us knew this would be the case when we put in place this recovery program. Any time you put more money into the economy, prices tend to rise.”
Oh. So it wasn’t the pandemic, or Trump, or Putin as the President and his paid liar, Karine Jean-Pierre, have been saying for months, or “unanticipated and large shocks to the economy” as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen claimed in June. It was all the spending by Democrats, like the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Biden signed in March, that sent prices soaring, and Democratic leadership knew it would do exactly that. And I guess they weren’t too concerned, since they went ahead with the huge spending bill anyway, even though the Administration was already exploding the National Debt.
Well, thanks for the candor, Congressman. We knew this anyway, but its refreshing to hear one of those most responsible admit it.
The push to cancel student loan debt is another example of the Left embracing a terrible, foolish, indefensibly unethical policy for no better reason than hope that it will allow them it to gain political power. Word around Washington is that President Biden is “seriously considering” canceling up to $50,000 in student debt for all. Translation: Biden’s puppeteers/handlers/advisers are probably trying to get him to do it, insane and irresponsible as it may be, but Joe may be inclined to do it on his own, because 1) he’s just not very bright; 2) he’s not very bright and his cognitive functions have been deteriorating in front of the whole nation; and 3) he never had any integrity anyway.
The late Rush Limbaugh, commenting on Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, lamented that “You can’t beat free stuff!” He said that Democrats were always willing to buy votes by promising to pay for more or making “the rich” or private business do so, from living wages for jobs not worth them, to national health, to free college degrees and more. Tilting the U.S. to socialism and a “nanny state”? If that’s what it takes to win, sure! Turning the national debt into a ticking time bomb that future generations will have to suffer for? Why not? Student loan forgiveness is as good an example of Rush’s point as I can imagine.
This will be an interesting test of the gullibility and brain mass of the American public. Faced with epic inflation greatly worsened by the Democrat’s wild spending sprees, incompetent handling of supply chain disruptions, and virtue-signaling suppression of oil production that cannot possibly have any ameliorating effects on global climate change whatsoever, the Donkey High Command has apparently decided on a carpet-bombing “Jumbo” strategy: “Inflation? What inflation?”
We have discussed already the “Putin price hike” mantra Jen Psaki keeps repeating. Last week, I saw a White House release admitting the inflation explosion but noting that if you took out food and gas prices, the rate of inflation increase had declined thanks to deft Biden policies. This, of course, brought back memories of former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry’s immortal statement that if you didn’t include all the murders, D.C. crime rate was actually pretty good! Nancy Pelosi, Psaki and Biden have all distorted the meaning of a letter from a group of acclaimed economists endorsing the trillion dollar infrastructure bill to falsely claim that they said spending all that money would reduce inflation, so, SEE? It’s can’t be Biden’s fault! (The letter actually said, correctly, that repairing and upgrading the infrastructure would make commerce more efficient and less costly in the long-term. As the Washington Post confirmed, they were not making any statement about current inflation.)
Last week we learned that the Biden new military budget assumes only 2% inflation, meaning that its numbers are fictional.
We have to keep baseball ethics alive even if baseball itself is in a state of suspension: the owner and players are, for the first time in decades, arguing about how to divide up their billions, everything from roster size to minimum salaries are on the table, and as of now, the two sides aren’t even talking with the season just a couple of months away. One of the issues to be settled is whether the National League will finally capitulate and adopt the designated hitter rule, which was accepted in the American League on this date in 1973, a day which many traditionalist fans then and now regard as an unforgivable scar on the integrity of the game. Baseball has always been celebrated for its equity and balance: as it was envisioned, every player on the field had to both hit and play defense. The DH, which is a batter who never uses a glove, also allowed the pitcher to be a defense-only specialist, never picking up a bat which, advocates of the new rule argued, was a result much to be wished, since the vast majority of hurlers are only slightly better at hitting the ball than your fat old uncle Curt who played semi-pro ball in his twenties. All these decades years later, the National League and its fans have stubbornly maintained that the DH was a vile, utilitarian gimmick spurred by non-ethical considerations, mainly greed. When the rule was adopted, American League attendance lagged behind the NL, which also was winning most of the All Star games, in part because that league had embraced black stars far more rapidly than “the junior league.” The DH, the theory went, would make games more exciting, with more offense, while eliminating all the .168 batters in the ninth spot in every line-up.
I had a letter published in Sports Illustrated in 1973 explaining why I opposed the DH as a Boston Red Sox fan. Since then, I have grudgingly come to accept the benefits of the rule: it gave the Sox David Ortiz, allowed Carl Yastrzemski to play a few more years, and let American League fans see such all-time greats as Hank Aaron at the plate after they could no longer play the field. It was a breach of the game’s integrity, but it worked.
1. At least that’s fixed. The Supreme Court issued a corrected transcript of the oral arguments in the Biden vaccine mandate case, and it now accurately records Justice Gorsuch as saying he believes the seasonal flu kills “hundreds…thousands of people every year.” The original version wrongly quoted him as saying hundreds of thousands, which allowed those desperately trying to defend the outrageously wrong assertions by Justice Sotomayor regarding the Wuhan virus to point to Gorsuch and claim, “See? Conservatives are just as bad!” Prime among these was the steadily deteriorating Elie Mystal at “The Nation,” who, typically for him, refused to accept the correction. Sotomayor is one of the all-time worst Supreme Court justices, though she will be valuable as a constant reminder of the perils of affirmative action. Her jurisprudence makes the much maligned Clarence Thomas look like Louis Brandeis by comparison. Continue reading →
Singer Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose on October 4, 1970. The anniversary prompts me to make an unkind observation that I was tempted to make after reading all of the tributes and expansive rhetoric praising “The Wire” actor Michael K. Williams after he died of an overdose of fentanyl and heroin on September 6. For at least a hundred years, anyone who takes heroin does so knowing that it is addictive and frequently fatal. My attitude toward Joplin, Williams, John Belushi, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Billy Holliday, and many other artists who have killed themselves this way involves more anger than sympathy. The world was robbed of their gifts because they were reckless. In the case of black artists, they endanger their admirers by creating a romantic aura for what is, in the final analysis, stupid and irresponsible conduct. How hard can it be not to start using an addictive substance that you know might kill you? The fact that the drug is illegal should be a big clue.
1. And speaking of the joys of recreational drugs...In a new study published in Psychological Medicine, researchers in the University of Birmingham’s Institute for Mental Health and the Institute of Applied Health Research found a strong link between “general practice recorded cannabis use” and mental ill health. Senior author Dr. Clara Humpston said: “Cannabis is often considered to be one of the ‘safer’ drugs and has also shown promise in medical therapies, leading to calls for it be legalized globally. Although we are unable to establish a direct causal relationship, our findings suggest we should continue to exercise caution since the notion of cannabis being a safe drug may well be mistaken.”
Continue to exercise caution? Who’s exercising caution? Popular culture and upper-middle class whites have been issuing pro-pot propaganda for half a century, while mocking government efforts to discourage widespread use and acceptance of another destructive recreational drug. Now nearly every state is on a path to legalize it, especially because they smell tax revenue.
The big legal ethics story of the day is a Wall Street Journal report showing that 131 federal judges, appointed by nearly every President from Lyndon Johnson to Donald Trump, have violated federal law by failing to recuse themselves in cases where either they or family members held a financial interest in one of the parties, meaning that the judge’s decision could have resulted in a direct or indirect benefit. This is, of course, a conflict of interest. Even if the judge was as trustworthy as a saint and would never dream of allowing such a conflict to interfere with his or her judgment, allowing these cases to appear before them violates the judicial ethics canon requiring judges to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.
The Wall Street Journal report found that the judges failed to recuse themselves from 685 court cases since 2010. About two-thirds of all federal district judges had holdings of individual stocks, about one of every five of these heard at least one case involving those stocks without withdrawing. When these judges participated in such cases, about two-thirds of their rulings on motions favored the party that their or their family’s financial interests would benefit from prevailing.
Welcome to the first Russian doll Ethics Alarms post, in which a series of essentially identical essays are nested to shout out a truth that hasn’t changed in decades. That truth is that the infrastructure of the United States is getting progressively worse.
Sub-truths nested in that one include these:
This was an urgent crisis 40 years ago, and has only been getting worse since.
Both parties and all Presidents since—Nixon? Johnson?—are equally responsible, because they all participated in “kicking the can” down the rotting road for political gain. This was and is political cowardice. Maintaining the infrastructure is one basic function of government, like national defense and law enforcement, that both Big Government and limited government advocates can agree on. However, since infrastructure rot is only a headline matter when bridges collapse, airliners crash or sewer pipes burst spreading disease and death, it’s a long term expense with benefits that the public won’t see immediately, if at all. Their grandchildren, however, will have better lives.
Politicians prefer short-term benefits, like sending checks directly to potential voters (and favored interest groups) under the fantasy of “economic stimulus.” This is a bi-partisan breach of duty and ethics.
As with everything else, the news media is stunningly incompetent in explaining the facts. I just heard two Fox News talking empty-heads arguing about whether sewer and water pipes were “infrastructure.” This is because much of the partisan attacks on Biden’s proposal has focused on the relatively small proportion of the financial requirements that will pay for “roads and bridges.'” Of course sewer and water pipes are infrastructure, and indeed among the most dangerous parts of a nation’s infrastructure to let deteriorate, as ours have in too many major cities to count. You people (Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer in this case) are incompetent idiots, and should be working at a 7-11. Also included in the “infrastructure,” in case you care: canals, airports, railways, public transportation, barges, ferries, waterways, traffic signals, the power grid, and more. You are making the public even more ignorant than they already are. You’re a disgrace. I hate you.
Jobs are not infrastructure, but to listen to the advocates of renewal, you would think that creating jobs is the main reason to undertake the effort. This is disinformation, and also unforgivable.
A rotting infrastructure hurts the economy in thousands of incremental, sinister, unavoidable ways, making goods more expensive, people poorer, limiting economic growth, and yes, costing jobs, with all of these effects getting worse over time.
No, the nation can’t afford to do what needs to be done–which is what will lead to national disaster if it is not done. That is because we have allowed the national debt to reach the red zone, and again, both parties are to blame, Republicans for irresponsible tax cuts, and Democrats for creating out-of-control social programs. However, whether we can afford it or not, we have to do it, spend the money, raise the taxes, be responsible…or we are dooming the nation. That is the situation cowardly, incompetent, venal and dishonest leadership has created.
I see little hope that President Biden’s efforts are any more serious or that they will be any more successful than the proposals that have gone before. It is true that even some infrastructure repair is better than none, but Democrats and progressives have painted themselves, and the nation, into a corner.
For example, the Biden administration has blocked a major highway expansion in Houston, Texas, claiming that the project is racially discriminatory and harmful to the environment. The state was about to begin a proposed widening of certain sections of Interstate 45 that has been years in planning when the Department of Transportation invoked the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to temporarily shut it down pending further review, Politico reported.
The department’s intervention is supposedly a “test case” for Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, has claimed “racial injustice” in highway construction and vowed to make “righting these wrongs an imperative” under his leadership. Local activists say that the highway expansion would disproportionately harm black and Hispanic communities by displacing more than 1,000 homes, hundreds of businesses, five houses of worship, and two schools along the stretch of highway.
If race, class and the environment are going to be the priorities, then essential infrastructure maintenance is impossible. It is that simple.
The recent House hearing on Wall Street did not actually dig into the scandals that are threatening our financial systems. The blatant manipulation of the stock market by market players has been made clear and people are just ignoring it. The same is true with precious metals trading, with JP Morgan being fined almost $1 billion for manipulating metals the same way the hedge funds manipulated GameStop above. This is after being fined $550 million in 2015 for rigging currency prices. In 2013, they were fined $410 million for price fixing energy In 2019, they were fined for manipulating the currency market. In one 3-year period, they were fined $35 billion for financial wrongdoing. Why is such a company still allowed to dominate key financial sectors? Why is it even allowed to be in business?
Is our entire system ‘rigged’? Look at the feedback loop the Fed is currently in:
A. “We don’t have inflation because inflation would cause the government to collapse under the interest of $30 trillion in debt.” B. “We have inflation due to unrestrained printing of money, so foreign government dump Treasury bonds that pay little interest and are being devalued by inflation.” C. Interest on the Treasury bonds increase to attract customers. D. This can’t happen, so the Fed declares there is no inflation, prints a lot of new money to buy the bonds off the market to make the bond more valuable (because there are fewer of them). E, This still isn’t enough and only half the bonds are purchased. F. The fed prints more money to buy the bonds that didn’t sell to keep interest rates from increasing due to inflation from printing…
Return to A... Certainly looks rigged. Cue hyperinflation!
Ethics Alarms 