or…Tyranny for Thee, But Not for Me

Yesterday I wrote:

Of course Kamala Harris is vacuous. If she had an idea in her head, she’d try to lead and that’s the last thing the minions of the administrative state want. They want their anonymity while exercising autocratic, sometimes tyrannical, levels of power. After all, you cannot fight what you cannot find.

“Tyrannical” is not a word I throw around lightly.

Tim Walz behaved quite tyrannically during covid:

When the coronavirus was first spreading, Walz was an enthusiastic promoter of social distancing rules. He described the crowds in public, outdoor spaces as “a little too big.” He even defended Minnesota’s ridiculous hotline for COVID-19 snitches. That’s right: Walz’s government maintained a method for people to report their neighbors for failing to abide by social distancing rules. Walz insisted in a recent interview that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness”; denouncing one’s neighbors as insufficiently loyal to government policies is a fundamental aspect of socialism, however.

Even before they are office the tyrannical reach begins:

The rule covers both physical risks, such as severe weather events, and “transition” risks, such as new green legislation or reduced demand for climate-unfriendly products. Companies’ discussion of such hazards will be riddled with speculation. Which severe weather events will increase due to climate change (and by how much, and where)? Which climate-related regulation, litigation, or shifts in consumer attitudes will in fact arise? In the words of dissenting commissioner Hester Peirce, firms will emit plumes of “climate disclosure spam,” much of it nothing more than “high-priced guesses about the present and future.” (Calculating the cost of complying with its rule, the SEC conjured up a low-ball estimate of $2.3 billion a year.)

Some companies will also have to measure and disclose the greenhouse-gas emissions from their own operations or from the energy they purchase. These are so-called Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, respectively. There are also Scope 3 emissions—those that arise from the activities of the company’s suppliers and customers. The SEC considered requiring disclosure of Scope 3 emissions but thought better of it—which brings us to California.

Enacted late last year, California’s SB 253 and SB 261 don’t even pretend to cater to investors: they govern both public and private companies. Their goal, as one of their authors freely admits, is to pressure firms “to significantly decrease . . . emissions.” They order disclosure of Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions, and they reach all large firms that do any business, however minimal, in California.

There is a lot of regulatory and scientific babble in that – but basically there are now rules, some from the Securities and Exchange Commission and some from the State of California, that require companies to measure not only their own carbon production, but their suppliers, and further to project costs they might incur as a result of “climate change” which is ludicrous since we are not even sure what, nor the extent of, climate change that might occur. That $2.3B compliance cost estimate is way low. These rules would require even single facility company with a dozen suppliers to add a full time staff person – multi facility companies, one staff person per facility, plus the corporate overhead staff – not to mention the IT infrastructure costs which would be immense. And that then will flow down to your suppliers who will have to do the same thing. And all of it to speculate based on speculation, based on limited data sets.

This is indeed tyrannical, but then:

The Environmental Protection Agency, which polices chemical contaminants, has been subjecting employees at its Chicago offices to water contaminated with metal and Legionella, the bacteria that causes the deadly Legionnaires’ disease.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported this week that at least five water fountains or kitchen faucets were found to have Legionella. Two kitchen faucets also busted the acceptable limits for lead and copper.

In Michigan, meanwhile, another federal building was found in 2017 to have a high risk of fire, and experts said it needed a sprinkler system. Seven years later, the problem remained unaddressed, an inspector general found.

And in Bethesda, Maryland, surveyors found stone crumbling off the sides of the headquarters of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2019. They called it an “immediate and potentially imminent danger.” Four-and-a-half years later it still hadn’t been fixed, according to the inspector general.

When the General Services Administration, the government’s chief landlord agency, does get around to fixes, it takes an average of nearly three years to put a plan in place. That shatters the Occupational Safety and Health Administration deadline.

Public Buildings Service “data shows that there are nearly 36,000 actionable, open-risk conditions at almost 2,000 GSA-managed assets nationwide,” the inspector general said. “The same data shows that there are more than 5,000 open-risk conditions that were not corrected or did not have an abatement plan in place within the 30-day period required by OSHA regulations.”

Yep – all that tyrannical pressure on us, but none of it counts when it comes to them. Look, there are very few companies on the planet that have 2000 facilities, but if this level of violation was found in one that did, the penalties would be in the billions of dollars, the employees would have grounds for additional billions in lawsuits and people would be jailed. In fact, the penalties, litigation and criminal action would happen for a company of a dozen facilities.

In Harris/Walz we are looking not at public servants – far from it. I wish I could say we were looking at autocrats, but Harris and Walz are not that smart – they are a vacuum that the administrative state rises to fill. Tyranny by bureaucracy – that’s what we are looking at. Unless, of course, you are in the club – then the rules do not matter.

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