The Out-of-Control NY Attorney General's Office Takes on ExxonMobil

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Law enforcement is serious business.  We give prosecutors tremendous powers over the citizenry, including the powers to put people in jail and to impose enormous fines on businesses; and then we trust them to act with the highest levels of honesty and integrity and discretion to protect us from the bad guys while also upholding our civil rights.  Or at least, that is how you might think it ought to work.  

Then there is the New York Attorney General’s office.  Twenty years ago, that office began a long and accelerating downward spiral when Eliot Spitzer won the head job.  With Spitzer, bona fide law enforcement promptly took a back seat to pursuit of a new headline every day, preferably to be obtained by shaking down some disfavored financial institution under New York’s notorious Martin Act, which under vague language can be argued to authorize prosecution of every financial unfairness as criminal “fraud.”  After achieving multiple hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements from major institutions, Spitzer went on to become Governor, before resigning in disgrace in a prostitution scandal.  His success in the Martin Act shakedown game was not lost on his successors.

In 2011 the Attorney General job was won by Eric Schneiderman, another wealthy Manhattanite and a darling of the progressive left.  Schneiderman promptly upped the Martin Act shakedown game to become the primary focus of his office, devoting dozens of staffers to investigations of essentially every financial institution doing business in New York. Most of these investigations were for alleged misrepresentations to investors relating to the financial crisis that was already three years in the rearview mirror when Schneiderman assumed office, and involved wrongdoing, if any, that had already been thoroughly investigated and prosecuted (or not) by federal authorities.  So why waste precious law enforcement resources on such an effort?  Clearly, Schneiderman had other goals in mind, notably including not only headlines, but also protection money (“settlement”) payments from his targets, aggregating in the billions, that went not to the supposed investor victims of the alleged wrongdoing, but rather into slush funds controlled by Schneiderman himself that could be passed out to his progressive colleagues and supporters.

And now, why limit the Martin Act shakedown game to just financial institutions? In 2015, Schneiderman’s sights landed on the next obvious and perfect corporate target, Exxon Mobil --  home of tens of billions of dollars in annual cash flow ripe to be plundered, besides being vulnerable to having the catchphrase “climate change” attached to its name by reason of involvement in the oil business. . . .

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Two Alternative Approaches To Fundamental Economic Policy. Which One Works?

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The mid-term elections are upon us. Time to recognize once again that there are two alternative approaches to fundamental economic policy, and that one works while the other does not. For most of my life, both political parties opted to advance the approach that does not work. Today, that is much less true.

There can be many details and nuances to economic policy, but here I am talking only about the one big overriding fundamental issue, namely, which is better for economic success and prosperity: higher taxes and bigger government, or lower taxes and smaller government? They are opposites, and they can’t both be right. Today, the Republicans, and President Trump, whatever else you might think about him, are (mostly) advocates for lower taxes and smaller government. The Democrats are universally advocates for higher taxes and bigger government, although not all of them go to the same levels of extremism.

We’ve just been through a big real-world experiment to test the two competing theories. . . .

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No, Democrats Have Not Been "Forced" Into Complicity With Corruption

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You really have to feel sorry for the Democratic Party and its New Jersey supporters. If you believe today’s New York Times, they have been “forced” into complicity with some rather thoroughly-exposed and over-the-top political corruption. Now, how exactly does that work? Is somebody holding a gun to their heads? Of course not. The only issue here is that the Times — and apparently the national and local Democratic Party hierarchies as well — regard a reliable vote in the Senate for “our side” to be far more important than seeing the defeat even of a politician who has been proven to be on the take and corrupt to the core. How’s that for an uplifting political value system?

The article in today’s Times has the headline “Democrats in an All-Hands-on-Deck Scramble to Save Menendez in New Jersey.” The authors are Nick Corasanti and Jonathan Martin.

This involves the re-election campaign of incumbent Democratic New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez. Although the RealClearPolitics poll average today has Menendez ahead by 6.5 points, Republican candidate Bob Hugin has recently been claiming to have surged to a lead in his “internal polls.” Not sure that I believe those internal polls (pollsters have a way of telling client candidates what they want to hear), but the Pravda piece indicates that internal polls by the Democrats may be showing close to the same thing. (“In Washington, Democrats grew increasingly alarmed when in mid-October their own internal polling indicated that Mr. Menendez’s lead had fallen to only two points.”)

So what has been the reaction? . . .

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More On The "Morality" Of Throwing Money At The Problem Of Homelessness

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After reading the comments to my post on Friday about the upcoming voter initiative in San Francisco to cure “homelessness” by throwing lots more money at the problem, it occurred to me that there were several more points that I should have made.

Here is a quote that comes near the end of Mr. Benioff’s New York Times piece:

It’s also time to put to rest the claim that more generous support for the homeless will only attract more homeless people to our community. The city’s own analysis found “no research” that expanding homeless services increases homelessness. An overwhelming majority of homeless people in San Francisco are from San Francisco. They are our neighbors and they desperately need our help.

Interesting. I don’t know if it rises to the level of “research,” but did San Francisco’s genius analysts look at the data from New York City, where since 2013 annual city spending on services for the homeless has soared from about $1 billion to well over $2 billion, and the number of people counted as “homeless” has gone from about 43,000 to about 76,000? Other cities that have greatly increased spending on services to the homeless, only to see the number of people counted as homeless skyrocket, include Los Angeles and Seattle. Cause and effect? I can’t even think of how, after looking at the data from New York, Los Angeles and Seattle, you could say with a straight face that “no research” supports the proposition that expanding homeless services increases homelessness. I guess that theoretically somebody could always make the argument that without all the extra spending the number of homeless people would have been even higher; but at some point such a contention becomes completely preposterous. . . .

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The Morality Of Our Progressive Elite

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Have you heard of Marc Benioff? He’s one of those tech billionaires out in San Francisco. After becoming the youngest vice-president of Oracle back in the early 1990s, he went on to found Salesforce.com, where he continues to serve as Chairman and co-CEO. Today, Salesforce has a market cap of over $100 billion, and Bloomberg puts Benioff’s personal net worth at over $6 billion. Not quite Bezos or Zuckerberg territory, but still impressive. Benioff clearly deserves credit for starting and building a very successful business. Like many others of the tech elite, he also exemplifies the progressive world view and sense of morality.

Yesterday Benioff put that all on display in a big op-ed in the New York Times, headlined “The Social Responsibility of Business.” The immediate reason for the op-ed is to advocate for something called Proposition C, which will appear on the ballot in San Francisco on November 6. Proposition C will impose a gross receipts tax — one half of one percent on revenues in excess of $50 million — on large businesses in San Francisco. The purpose is to raise revenue to combat the explosion of “homelessness” in that city. The projection is that the annual revenue from this tax will be in the range of $300 million per year.

Benioff pitches his case in terms of basic human morality. With human suffering all around us, businesses must now stand up and take “social responsibility”!

Back . . . in the 1980s, I was taught . . . that the business of business is business. . . . [But t]he business of business is no longer merely business. Our obligation is not just to increase profits for shareholders. We must also hold ourselves accountable to a broader set of stakeholders: to our customers, our employees, the environment and the communities in which we work and live. It’s time for the wealthiest businesses and business owners to step up and give back to the most vulnerable among us.

Yes, it is the classic statement of the morality of our progressive elite: There is an important human need that must be addressed, and therefore “we” must “hold ourselves accountable” and “step up” and “give back” in the form of a tax.

Am I the only one who sees a problem with this? Here’s my problem, Marc. . . .

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