Hot Topics

 

                                    Hot Topics

Today’s op-ed by Democrat turned Republican, turned idiot, Betsy McCaughey, leads with a headline which, as so many from the Right seem to do, implies that the Biden administration is specifically targeting and endangering employee 401K plans.

The headline, specifically written to strike fear into the hearts of anybody with any investments, says “President Joe Biden is going after 401K retirement accounts, risking millions of workers comfortable retirement funds; if you put money in a 401K, beware.” Reading just that, one might well believe that something disastrous and devious is happening in Washington when, in fact, the reverse is true. The Trump administration, catering to the anti-environment tenor of the Republican Party, enacted regulations which not only were aimed at discouraging 401K providers from including entities which invested in environmentally aimed products but actually stipulated that they could not unless they could guarantee that there would be a profit involved. In fact, no fund manager, no matter how brilliant, can guarantee that any investment will always make a profit. Market pressures don't care what fund managers think. No financial adviser can truthfully guarantee profit.

Employers have a legal duty to thoroughly assess funds’ risk and return when picking 401(k) plan investments; for example, they can’t subordinate the fiscal interests of workers in favor of a cause like climate change. The new rules don’t change these duties. What the Biden administration has done is to recommend removal of that Trump era restriction at the request of many financial product providers, employers, employees and at the recommendation of the Secretary of Labor. In essence, every 401K allows employees to choose how their contributions are invested in options provided. Under the Trump restriction some options were simply not available because they were environmentally and sustainability oriented and employees had no option to invest in that sector.

The way Ms. McCaughey puts it implies that The Biden administration is directing that fund providers must invest in companies that “follow left wing policies.” That verbiage, alone, tells you what her real agenda is. She then says, “It is legalized theft; the future return on your investment nest egg is being sacrificed to advance a woke agenda.” First off, the use of the word “woke” here is entirely inappropriate since the dictionary definition of woke mentions racial equality and has nothing to do with environmental activism. Giving Ms. McCaughey her due; she does understand “trigger words.”

Simply put, the Biden removal of the Trump directive is the very opposite of the veritable flood of Trump reversals of Obama policy for no reason other than personal spite. It mandates nothing, but simply allows more leeway for employees and employers to put their money in places the Trump gang didn’t like because it failed to fit their “ignore environmental issues” attitude.

Where, one wonders, was all this heartfelt Republican concern for American workers' financial security  in 2004 to 2008 when investment bankers were bundling incredibly high-risk mortgages and selling them to 401K providers and retirement fund managers as investment grade instruments? That massive failure of appropriate financial market regulation and the recession it precipitated is an indictment of everyone involved. What the Biden administration is seeking to do is simply to increase the options that employers and employees have for where they put their money. Period.

On an even more ridiculous note:

In case you missed it like I did, in late October, the national poster child for dumbass of the year, AKA Fox’s Tucker Carlson, proclaimed that, “The United States is "about to run out of diesel fuel ... by the Monday of Thanksgiving week." "Thanks to the Biden administration’s religious war (religious war??) in Ukraine, this country is about to run out of diesel fuel”, he said, continuing, "There will be no deliveries because there’ll be no trucks, there’ll be no diesel generators and then, invariably, our economy will crash because everything runs on diesel fuel, not on solar panels, not on wind farms — on diesel fuel."

Where to start with this lunatic? First off, not “everything” runs on diesel fuel. Electric power generation stations don't run on diesel fuel. Many trucks don't run on diesel fuel and even fewer cars run on diesel fuel. Having said that, it still would be a serious matter if we were going to run out of diesel fuel. The problem is that Carlson, like most of his Fox News cohort, makes a statement that he knows will scare the hell out of his gullible viewers, omitting the part that proves the statement is simply false. Carlson made his statement based on the amount of diesel fuel that was currently available which, if there wasn't any more diesel fuel made would only get us to about Thanksgiving Day. What he omitted is the fact that there were, at the same time, American refineries continuing to produce more diesel fuel and we continued importing fuel, ergo there was no shortage of diesel fuel, there was not going to be a shortage of diesel fuel and Tucker Carlson is simply a liar. Why would he say that? It was an obvious attempt to influence voters to vote “red.” Didn’t work all that well, huh?

And: 

I'm sure Star Parker means well. I'm sure she's a nice enough young woman. I'm also sure that she doesn't recognize that using religious grounds to define marriage means that she is guilty of the same the theocratically blind approach to government that she maligns in Afghanistan and other places in the world because their religion is different than hers. This is not the first time she has railed about the topic but the almost certain signing of a new federal law certifying that a marriage legally entered into anywhere, regardless of gender of the participants, is legal everywhere, seems to really offend her.

 Ms. Parker rejects the Respect for Marriage Act simply because it doesn't fit her religiously driven idea about what marriage is. Accordingly, she is absolutely free to marry as she sees fit. And now in America everybody else will be accorded the same privilege. When I look at the many ways in which dogmatic religious fervor has damaged humanity over the years it reaffirms the Jeffersonian belief that any established religion is a mistake in a national sense.

 I’m quite sure that MS Parker, a woman of color, is aware that only since 1924, and the USSC decision in Loving v Virginia, can she marry across racial lines, should she so choose. I am not so sure that she is aware that the hundreds of years of prohibition of such a union was largely derived from Christian religious dogma as well. Ms. Parker, as far too many do, seems to suffer from a common ailment, 1) the belief that freedom of religion is a good thing only if it is her religion and 2) Choosing who one loves is only allowed if she agrees with the choice.     

A knowledge of history, while it does tend to show marriage has traditionally been between men and women, also shows that the purpose of a formal marriage is, and has been, even in intensely religious societies such as the Puritans in Massachusetts, a legal procedure to ensure inheritance and property. Our founding fathers in Massachusetts had a civil ceremony which cemented those legal procedures and if they desired, as most of them did, they had a religious ceremony as well. Ms. Parker, in essence says, “What I believe is right and only what I believe can be right. How arrogant and short sighted that is.

And:

I subscribe to the online version of the Washington Post. Contrary to what those of the Right tend to feel, the Post carries op-ed commentary from both sides of the aisle. However, even when I differ with the writer, the columns are generally rancor free and use data to support arguments.

 Today, however there is an exception. The op-ed is headlined: “It’s time the Pentagon ended its Covid vaccine mandate for the military.”  I reflected a bit and couldn’t come up with a single idea that justified this position, so I read the column. The writer, a physician, takes the position that, since the Omicron variant is less affected by the current vaccines, there is no reason to give the shot. She then however acknowledges the development of a more potent one. She then also states that current Covid vaccines, especially the newer ones, both greatly reduce the severity if infected (as in greatly reduce the possibility of hospitalization) and also decrease transmissibility. In a military setting such as, oh I don’t know, maybe a submarine(?), any thing that reduces the likelihood of a crew becoming disabled and requiring hospitalization is a good thing, since hospitals are in short supply underwater, where I spent five years of my life, 90 days at a time.

Some facts: While civilians have the right to refuse vaccination and demonstrate their total lack of good judgement (and die if that is the result) military personnel don’t. Period. How odd is it that some, anti-vaxxers and Trumpists alike have chosen to be critics of mandatory vaccination even though the current Covid vaccines have been shown to be as safe or actually safer than most common vaccines? Could it be political? Of course it is, playing to the “You can’t tell me what to do” mindset of the Red Hat brigades. Well, Jethro, we can tell you what to do. We can make you have a driver’s license or walk. We can require you to have auto insurance. As of now, most civilians are not mandated to be vaccinated, but that doesn’t make it a bad idea.

Choosing to single out the military is far more nonsensical. Every new recruit already gets a slew of shots in basic training. These include measles, mumps, diphtheria, flubicillin, rubella and smallpox. It isn’t voluntary; it is a condition of employment, and the enlistee has signed a contract. If deployed, even in the Submarine Force where we were unlikely to ever contact most diseases, we also got periodic Pertussis, tetanus, Smallpox. (Every 10 years), Typhoid, Yellow fever, and Plague immunizations. They weren’t optional. We got these even if our likelihood of infection was exceptionally low, since any communicable disease can rapidly render a unit ineffective (think USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2020 - 1257 Covid cases, one death). Unfortunately, we still live in a world affected by a global pandemic. Covid is communicable and it is everywhere. Congressmen bitching about mandatory shots for the military are ones who have never served, or they’d know better. For a doctor to do so is even harder to grasp.

And finally, on a lighter note: Why do soccer players scream, writhe, and roll in agony on the ground when they fall, yet are able to hop back up and resume play when the ref fails to call a foul? An NFL wide receiver takes a bone shattering hit, gets up, looks at the guy who hit him and says, “That’s all you got?” I’m just sayin.’