Another clash of competing leftist interests

 The most recent post here at LITD dove into the irony of a countercultural icon, Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone co-founder, who checks off the proper boxes right down to coming out as gay after a marriage that produced a son, getting ousted from the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (which he also co-founded) for telling a New York Times interviewer that he finds white male rock titans more substantive interviews than female or black ones.

Today we look at another deliciously ironic loggerheads: organized labor versus the climate alarmists:

If you want to understand why the United Auto Workers union is striking now, look at the three factories it chose to target for its first wave shutdowns.

The General Motors plant in Wentzville, Missouri, makes the Chevy Colorado and the GMC Savana. The Ford plant in Wayne, Michigan, makes Ford Rangers and Ford Broncos. And the Stellantis plant in Toledo, Ohio, makes Jeep Wranglers and Jeep Gladiators.

What do all these vehicles have in common? Unlike electric vehicles that lose money, these vehicles are among the Big Three’s most profitable products. They are also exactly the type of vehicle President Joe Biden wants to eliminate by 2032, when his new regulations mandate that two-thirds of all cars sold in the United States must be EVs.

Not only do EVs have fewer parts than gasoline models, which means fewer jobs for auto workers, but every plant that produces mufflers, catalytic converters, and fuel injectors will have to shutter, either permanently or long enough for a complete overhaul to make EV parts.

Biden’s obsession with EVs has essentially made all UAW-organized factories in the Midwest obsolete. Why would a car company invest there when they could build a new factory in a state where workers aren’t forced to join unions?

It's all I can do not to digress here and go on a diatribe about Biden's presumption that he can insert himself into the workings of the free market - which, to reiterate the basics, boys and girls, is merely the sum total of the millions of agreements to which buyers and sellers arrive daily, ideally without government interference - by executive diktat, no less. But let's stay focused.

Current UAW president Shawn Fain may not be collectivist enough for the Trotskyists, but he's a pretty classic figure for a labor activist.  He comes from the heart of flyover country - Kokomo, Indiana - where his dad was police chief and two of his grandparents were UAW members who worked at a Chrysler facility there. Fain himself went to work at the Chrysler castings plant as an electrician in 1994 and pretty much immediately started climbing the union ranks. 

In the current situation, he champions the position that union members ought to continue to get paid even if an automaker shutters a plant. 

I do need to digress a bit here and get into the question of what is and isn't a right. 

Fain and his ilk take it as a given that there is some kind of right to a livelihood. Making things that are desirable into "rights" is how we got government involvement in health care - an aspect of life that figures into the current auto industry strike situation.

It's actually understandable that he would conclude thusly. Cars, as well as self-propelling transportation generally, and communications technology, too, came on the scene at the outset of the twentieth century with such impact that by the 1920s, they were a given. And they were made in factories by people earning hourly wages. 

But just as their arrival on the cultural landscape was a manifestation of how unbridled human inventiveness could introduce drastic changes, innovation continued apace and wrought further changes. The 1980s forced the Big Three to move over to make way for foreign car makers to erect US plants. And many of those have stayed non-unionized, which should have been a sign to the UAW that its ability to make demands had limits. 

And now comes another wave of change, albeit not born of human inventiveness but the heavy hand of the state.

So who's going to blink first as the climate alarmists, backed by the coercive power of government, go toe to toe with the UAW, which is still locked in a mindset that sees the mid-twentieth-century model of the town factory guaranteeing generation after generation a secure lifestyle? 

There's a way to avoid this scenario of bad alternatives, if anyone is interested. 

Let people buy the kinds of cars they want to buy, and remove all government - and union - interference in how they're priced - which, to a considerable degree, is still based on the carmakers' costs.  Then we can see what the market says about what the cars are worth.

ADDENDUM: I don't know if this qualifies as a digression or not, but the Very Stable Genius is going to skip the second Republican presidential candidates' debate in order to address the UAW. It's pretty obvious what he's doing: striving to take some of the wind out of the sails of Biden's expression of support for the union. It's of a piece with what he recently said about Florida's six-week abortion ban. When the VSG hedges his political bets, he's not particularly sly about it.

Trump has no principles. He does anything he does in order to see if it will bring him glorification. 

Yeah, I guess that was a little bit of a digression. But it's good to know where the charlatan of Mar-a-Lago fits into the current situation. 

 

 

US women soccer players and the matter of who starts culture-war battles

 Real Clear Politics often usefully juxtaposes two opposing takes on an issue currently on the national radar. Today there was an example involving the US Women's Soccer Team.

There's Olivia Luppino's piece at Salon, which employs as what she sees as the most useful arrow in her quiver the fact that the Very Stable Genius and his drool-besotted leg-humpers chimed in. This, in her formulation, delegitimizes any aspersions that might be cast on the team.

This, boys and girls, is the kind of situation I've been trying to bring to the fore of your attention since 2015: Letting that opportunistic, rudderless, bombastic fool anywhere near the classic conservative argument sets conservatism up as a punching bag for progressives. And in the years following the establishment of his cult, its memes and slogans - and his social-media posts - have for all intents and purposes drowned out the reasoned and history-steeped arguments by which conservatives had always made their case.

Anyway, along with citing Trumpist examples of childish reactions to the team's World Cup loss, she trots out the equal-pay "issue." She also does mention instances in which women soccer players have explicitly dissed the United States on the playing field, as well as Megan Rapinoe's history of vocally wading into sociocultural matters - from the left, of course. Luppino just reports this with no commentary, as if anybody reading it would, of course, find that perfectly acceptable.

Listed immediately below Luppino's column is a piece about this at National Review by Noah Rothman entitled "No, Republicans Did Not Politicize Women's Soccer." He offers, shall we say, a different perspective:

For the better part of a decade now, the U.S. women’s soccer team has served — often willingly and with the direct participation of its members — as the avatars of a campaign to illustrate the supposed “pay gap” endured by women performing the exact same roles as men. President Barack Obama deployed the team’s members as human props in a campaign to popularize the injustice of the so-called pay gap — a claim so baseless Obama’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics and a handful of U.S. district courts disputed the pay gap’s very existence.

U.S. women’s national soccer team co-captain Megan Rapinoe has delighted in starting political feuds with Republican lawmakers and using her celebrity to advance divisive political causes. She is not shy about using the most incendiary language available to make her points, even at the risk of alienating would-be consumers of her sport. She has so deliberately inserted herself into the national political debate that Democratic pollsters tested her appeal in a hypothetical presidential election against Donald Trump. And Rapinoe isn’t alone. In 2019, the Associated Press celebrated the team’s “off-the-field activist role” as champions for a variety of “social-justice causes.”

Rapinoe and her teammates engaged in polarizing political debates, and that activism has had a polarizing effect. Republican lawmakers are not responsible for injecting politics into the apolitical conduct of professional athletics; they’ve merely noticed its injection and singled out those doing the injecting for criticism.

This inversion of cause and effect is the foundation upon which all “Republicans pounce” commentary rests. It is a bankrupt style of journalism that seeks to redirect a reader’s attention away from an event — usually, one Democrats find discomfiting — by highlighting the Republican reaction to the event. If the enterprise is successful, the public becomes conditioned to the idea the GOP’s response to a controversy is more newsworthy than the controversy itself.

BTW, let's look at the key paragraph of the district-courts link Rothman provides, just to be sure the record is set straight:

Klauser ruled May 1 the women could not prove discrimination over pay and granted in part the USSF’s motion for a partial summary judgment. He said the union for the women’s national team rejected an offer to be paid under the same pay-to-play structure as the men’s national team’s collective bargaining agreement and the women accepted guaranteed salaries and greater benefits along with a different bonus structure.

The team collectively, as an organization, chose to go a different route regarding pay.

But two groups need to understand truths each will find uncomfortable. MAGA needs to see -but won't, which is why the next year and three months is going to be such a political clusterf--- -  that it has precluded any possibility of persuasion or decisive prevalence with its schoolyard gloating. Progressives need to see that by no means is a majority okay with their intention to uproot norms, institutions and understandings about the way the universe is designed that have been distilled over millennia. 

 

 

 

The bill averting a rail workers' strike - initial thoughts

 Some interesting fault lines appearing in this one.

As of this writing - Friday afternoon - the president has signed it. It does not expand the paid leave to seven days. Congress seems to be taking its cue from the fact that eight four railway-related unions with the majority of he industry's workers support an agreement that included a number of other favorable features from labor's standpoint, but not the paid sick leave. Four didn't support it.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is in hot water with the Democratic Socialists of America for voting for the bill in the form Biden signed. Most other Squad members also voted in the affirmative.

This also, rather interestingly, puts her position in resonance with that of Marco Rubio: 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said Thursday that she and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., had found common ground in the potential rail worker strike that has concerned many across the nation.

“A rarity,” she said in reference to a tweet from the Florida Republican earlier this week in which he said he would object to a deal that does not reflect the wishes of the workers.

“The railways and workers should go back and negotiate a deal that the workers, not just the union bosses, will accept,” he said in a post Tuesday. “I will not vote to impose a deal that doesn’t have the support of the rail workers.”

Ocasio-Cortez retweeted the message and said, “Glad we are on the same page [regarding] railworkers’ paid sick days.”

“The House just sent over what you asked for: the full TA deal w/ sick days as supported and demanded by our railworkers. Can they count on your YES vote for the amendment?” she questioned.

Rubio seems to have found an opportunity for his common-good-conservatism rubber to hit the actual-legislation road. 

And he may have found solid ground to do so. Morale in railway jobs seems to be in the pits:

Even if paid sick leave is secured, rail workers have years of bad feelings around their employers. Jason Doering, who has worked at Union Pacific for 18 years, told me in July that even a good contract would not solve “rock-bottom” morale issues. 

“Everybody goes to work and there’s nothing positive to talk about,” said Doering, who is also the Nevada legislative director for SMART Transportation Division, a labor union of train, airline and other transportation workers. “There are no positive things going on within the industry. You are forced to choose between your career and your life.” 

Doering previously said workdays lasting up to 19 hours, consisting of 12-hour shifts and hours of waiting around for transportation or relief crews, have become the norm. So too has spending more time in motels waiting for one’s next gig than at one’s actual home. 

The other side of this matter, though, is the human-agency factor. Nobody's forcing these people to be in these jobs. Let us not lose sight of the element of choice. Yes, they have built lives on the basis of the financial planning they're able to do, but at some point doesn't one become miserable enough to investigate alternative ways to make a living?

Industry consolidation has permitted the remaining firms to say to shippers, "Face it, we're the only games in town." That's not healthy for a railway industry that works for everyone:

Decades of consolidation have left the U.S. with only seven Class I railroad companies. Four of those companies collectively control more than 83 percent of the freight market. And the vast majority of train stations in the U.S. are served by exactly one railroad.

Thus, most shippers can’t credibly threaten to take their business elsewhere. At the margin, rail customers could shift their transport needs toward trucking, but most are reliant on the inherent scale and efficiency of rail transport. So when freight carriers reduce their operating costs, they’re less inclined to pass on those savings in the form of improved customer service or lower rates than to simply shower their shareholders in dividends.

Last year, the seven dominant North American railways had a combined net income of $27 billion, nearly twice their margin a decade ago. In the interim, the railways have collectively doled out $146 billion in dividends and stock buybacks while investing only $116 billion into their businesses.

This, of course, isn't the first time government has intervened in a standoff between two private-sector entities (a union and a management consortium). The rational given generally seems to Article 1, Section 8 of he Constitution, which addresses interstate commerce, as well as the 1926 Railway Labor Act. 

Sometimes government has gotten quite brazen, as was the case in in 1952: 

During the Korean War the government imposed controls on raw materials, production, shipping, credit, wages, and prices. When the wage-price controls created a collective-bargaining impasse in the steel industry, threatening a nationwide strike, President Harry S. Truman ordered the secretary of commerce on April 8, 1952, to seize and operate most of the country’s steel mills for the ostensible purpose of maintaining production of critical munitions.

Owners of the seized properties obtained a court injunction against the seizure, and an appeal of that injunction to the U.S. Supreme Court gave rise to one of the “great cases” in constitutional law, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. et al. v. Sawyer.1 Although the Court found the President’s actions to be unconstitutional, its decision did not signify a triumph of private rights or a significant check on the government’s exercise of de facto emergency powers.

By 1952 Truman had become an unpopular president, even among Democrats, and his attempted seizure evinced a power struggle with a hostile Congress. He had alternative ways to proceed. Although no current statute authorized him to nationalize the steel industry, he had authority under the Taft-Hartley Act to order an 80-day “cooling- off period,” during which the union- management dispute might have been settled without a strike. The pro-union President chose not to issue such an order, however, because he opposed the Taft-Hartley Act, which Congress had passed over his veto in 1947. He did not ask Congress to authorize his seizure of the steel industry.

Instead, Truman rested his seizure order on legally vague national-emergency grounds, citing his inherent powers as president and as commander in chief of the armed forces.2 Afterward, he and his official spokesman sought clumsily “to transform the steel crisis from a particular labor dispute into a broader battle against ‘big business,’” a rendering that had little resonance.3

You see, he had, in the parlance of a more recent decade, a pen and a phone.

I am not at all comfortable with what's going down. 

I understand that a strike would bring the economy to a screaming halt, and that even national security could be imperiled. I also understand the crummy life railway workers have had for several years. 

But when the entity with a monopoly on legitimate use of coercion and force inserts itself into a private-sector disagreement between two parties each striving for a favorable outcome, I bristle. That's the rationale climate alarmists use to take away the choice of energy forms people use. 

The labor-management relationship is really one of producer and consumer. Management would like to consume what labor is producing, provided a compensation package it finds within its budget can be agreed on.

When we erode this basic principle, even for what appear to be compelling reasons, we do freedom no favors. 

 

 

 

Barney & Clyde - episode 19

It's here.

Welcome back to the Libation Station! Pour yourself something bracing, pull up a bar-stool, and get in on the fortnightly exchange of libertarian and conservative perspectives on the weighty matters of the day. Specifically: 1 - Pavlov's Tribalist Dogs - the Utter Predictability of Everybody's Hot Take on the Impeachment Hearing. 2 - Meanwhile, Back in Athens - Red for Ed comes to our City and State 3 - Old News - Jeffery Epstein continues to Mystify even afer Croaking; How Social Media is Keeping the Story Alive. 4 - The Assault on the Second Amendment - The Supreme Court Allows the Families of Sandy Hook Victims to Sue Arms Manufacturers.

Saturday roundup

From the the-UN-is-a-sewer-of-moral-rot file: The General Assembly rejects Nikki Haley's resolution  condemning Hamas. 

And, regarding the threat on Israel's northern border from Hezbollah, Israel has been striking the tunnels Hezbollah has been digging. Pretty big setback to Hezbollah's strategic aim of taking control of as much of Galilee as it can.

Labor and employment attorney Adam Mill writing at The Federalist, says that the Pence rule - the policy of never being alone with a woman not your wife - is actually ill-advised. He uses Brett Kavanaugh's track record of amassing a lifetime of female colleagues to vouch for his stellar character to illustrate his point:

Kavanaugh relied heavily on female character witnesses in his Senate testimony. Consider the below portions:

One feature of my life that has remained true to the present day is that I have always had a lot of close female friends. I’m not talking about girlfriends; I’m talking about friends who are women. That started in high school. …

The committee has a letter from 65 women who knew me in high school. They said that I always treated them with dignity and respect. That letter came together in one night, 35 years after graduation, while a sexual assault allegation was pending against me in a very fraught (ph) and public situation where they knew — they knew they’d be vilified if they defended me. Think about that. They put theirselves (sic) on the line for me. Those are some awesome women, and I love all of them. …

One of those women friends from college, a self-described liberal and feminist, sent me a text last night that said, quote, ‘Deep breaths. You’re a good man, a good man, a good man.’ …

Throughout my life, I’ve devoted huge efforts to encouraging and promoting the careers of women. I will put my record up against anyone’s, male or female. I am proud of the letter from 84 women — 84 women — who worked with me at the Bush White House from 2001 to 2006, and described me as, quote, ‘a man of the highest integrity.’

Kavanaugh was surrounded by a ring of women who stood by him. It was necessary for his attackers to recruit accusers from the distant past outside his circle of friends. Kavanaugh-supporting women wept tears of frustration over the totally unsubstantiated accusations.

Because Ford was recruited from so far outside Kavanaugh’s social and professional proximity, her story had a number of problems. I identified 10 red flags one should look for in a sexual assault case here. Ford met many or all of these tests.

For example, she eagerly shared her story with The Washington Post, but delayedcooperation with Senate investigators (flag 1).  She asked that Kavanaugh be forced to testify first before she committed to a final version of her account (flag 5). She made unusual demands to modify or control the process (flag 7). And Ford’s witnesses either didn’t corroborate or contradicted her account (flags 9 and 10).

These weaknesses demonstrated a lack of confidence in her account and were emphasized because she stood so far outside the established circle of friends and colleagues who had more than 30 years of first-hand experience with Kavanaugh. These women Kavanaugh chose to include in his life were assets, not liabilities.

As an employment attorney, I need these women in my client’s corner. Not only can women speak up for their colleagues when the chips are down, but they also seem to have an uncanny sense of the workplace dynamics that can really help in defense of a falsely accused executive.

If any of today's roundup links is a must-read, it's this Townhall column by Craig Rucker on the current gathering of human-advancement-haters in Katowice, Poland:

Any blizzards that blanket Poland this winter can’t compare to the massive snow job climate campaigners are trying to pull off.

Some 30,000 politicians, activists, computer modelers, bureaucrats, lawyers, journalists, renewable energy sellers and a few scientists are in Katowice, Poland December 2-14, for another Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conference. Four issues will dominate the agenda.

* Proclaim that humanity and the planet face existential cataclysms, unless fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are slashed to zero by 2050 – to “prevent” average planetary temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F) above what they were in 1820, when the Little Ice Age ended and the modern industrial era began.

* Finalize 300 pages of “guidelines,” to implement the Paris climate agreement – by driving the switch from coal, oil and natural gas to wind, solar and biofuel energy.

* Reach a binding agreement that wealthy countries (excluding China and other newly rich nations) must transfer at least $100 billion annually to poor countries.

* Ensure “transparency” on discussions, disclosures and treaty compliance.
This entire agenda deserves skepticism and ridicule.

Earth’s climate is always changing somewhere, due to powerful natural forces over which humans have no control. To say we can now perpetuate current conditions by controlling emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide is sheer fantasy. 

Average global temperatures have already (thankfully) risen nearly a degree since 1820. To suggest that another half degree would be catastrophic is absurd. Indeed, average temperatures were higher during the Medieval Warm Period – and except during recent El Niño events have barely risen since 1998, even as CO2 levels climbed significantly, spurring plant growth worldwide.

Constant references to the “hottest ever” day or month involve hundredths of a degree, less than the margin of measurement error, often by activist scientists who have a history of doctoring data. They also ignore record cold snaps, like this Thanksgiving weekend in the U.S. Northeast. 

Human activities certainly affect climate and weather to some degree, at least locally. But there is no real-world evidence that they have major (much less cataclysmic) impacts. Computer models say otherwise, but their record for accuracy is abysmal to zero. 

AOC is proving to be that exquisite combination of overly-sensitive snowflake, jackboot ready to silence critics, economically illiterate buffoon, and Dem legislator with a decidedly underbaked understanding of the body of which she's about to become a member:

Donald Trump Jr., whom Ocasio-Cortez is unhappy with after he published a meme to Instagramfeaturing Ocasio-Cortez asking why people are so afraid of socialism and Trump responding “because Americans want to walk their dogs, not eat them.”

Ocasio-Cortez, being the kind of person who takes herself too seriously, didn’t take Trump Jr.’s strike at her very well, and took to Twitter where she literally threatened to subpoena him.

“I have noticed that Junior here has a habit of posting nonsense about me whenever the Mueller investigation heats up,” tweeted the New York Democrat.

“Please, keep it coming Jr – it’s definitely a “very, very large brain” idea to troll a member of a body that will have subpoena power in a month,” she continued. “Have fun!”

From the because-nothing-is-more-important-to-the-Very-Stable-Genius-than-whether-he-looks-like-a-winner file. He's been keeping a constant eye on the stock market, because to him it's one of the main indicators of whether he's a good president or not:

The president still sees the Dow Jones Industrial Average as a significant benchmark for his performance, the report said, citing sources close to Trump. The blue chip index is up about 23 percent since Trump's inauguration but turned negative for the year during another rough market session Friday.

One person close to the White House told the WSJ that the president is "glued" to the stock market.

 And his over-sensitivity to barbs - and tendency to display it for all the world to see on Twitter - is way out there in Ocasio-Cortez territory:

President Trump fired back at Rex Tillerson after his former secretary of State called the president undisciplined, unread and willing to break the law. 

"Mike Pompeo is doing a great job, I am very proud of him. His predecessor, Rex Tillerson, didn’t have the mental capacity needed. He was dumb as a rock and I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. He was lazy as hell. Now it is a whole new ballgame, great spirit at State!" Trump tweeted.

I'd say to the VSG regarding Tillerson the same thing I'd say regarding the personal lawyer upon whom he has turned, Michael Cohen: Um, you hired the dude.

Important Noah Rothman piece at Commentary entitled "France's Yellow Vests Are Not Your Friends":

American conservatives might be tempted to sing this movement’s praises, but that would be ill-considered.

The Yellow Vests are many things, but they are not anti-tax. They’re certainly not for the kind of smaller government championed by Macron’s government. Following the announcement that the Yellow Vests had forced the French president to suspend the implementation of his gas tax for six months, Yellow Vest spokesmen Benjamin Cauchy sounded a note of defiance. “Our demands are much bigger than this moratorium,” he said. “We want a better distribution of wealth, salary increases.” Indeed, one of the Yellow Vests’ central grievances is one of Macron’s first acts as president: a substantial reduction of the tax burden on France’s high earners. Among the “people’s directives” the Yellow Vests endorsed are an increase in the minimum wage, a “maximum wage” that caps income at €15,000 per month, the repeal of tax credits for employers, rent controls, dramatic increases in public spending on schools, post offices, and railroads, a ban on outsourcing, and a lower retirement age.

Most of the hundreds of thousands who turned out to protest Macron’s green initiatives were peaceful, but those who weren’t were terrifyingly violent. Over the last two weeks, Paris experienced the worst street violence and rioting since 1968. Protesters torched over 100 hundreds of cars, set historic buildings on fire, looted stores, and assaulted police, who were forced to deploy tear gas and water cannons against the rioters. They built barricades in the streets, vandalized monuments, blocked access to fuel depots and petrol stations, and fought running battles both with police and the French gendarmes. At least 133 people were injured in the violence. Four died. And as of Monday, over 400 were arrested.

The first real crisis of this beau monde, center-left presidency may seem a welcome development for anyone eager to see the aloof and Olympian Macron brought back down to earth. But being humbled into governing as a populist means something very different in France than it does in the United States, and it would yield policy that few American conservatives would welcome. What’s more, it does not follow that the spoils of this fight will accrue to a responsible center-right party. The responsible center-right in France is nowhere to be found.

Andrew McCarthy digs the new AG nominee:

 Bill Barr will restore order.

Barr brings much-needed experience and instant credibility to the task. After all, he has already been the nation’s chief federal law-enforcement officer, serving as attorney general in the last years of President George H. W. Bush’s term. He is a lawyer’s lawyer, having led the Department’s Office of Legal Counsel before being elevated by Bush 41 to deputy AG and, ultimately, the top job. He has rightly been adamant that, while an attorney general is a consequential administration official, the AG’s first allegiance is to the Constitution and the laws.

Some specific areas that impress McCarthy:

Barr has been one of the country’s best thinkers on counterterrorism for the post-9/11 era. This has come naturally to him: Upon graduating from Columbia in 1973 with degrees in government and Chinese studies, Barr went to work for the CIA as an intelligence analyst and assistant legislative counsel. At the same time, he attended law school at night at George Washington University (later accepting a clerkship on the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit). His range of legal and intelligence studies led him to see the need for a comprehensive government approach to the international terrorist threat — a strategy in which, rather than addressing the jihad as a mere crime problem, the Justice Department plays a critical support role alongside the government’s intelligence, military, Treasury, and diplomatic components.

And

As Congress continues its bipartisan push to reform sentencing law and practice, Barr is an ideal law-enforcement pro to have at the helm. I believe he will be open to reasonable proposals to reduce prison terms for actual non-violent, non-recidivist offenders, while simultaneously recognizing that most federal prisoners serving lengthy sentences do not fit that bill. Barr’s deep experience in the system will provide valuable insight about which anti-recidivism programs show promise and which would more likely imperil communities by releasing unreformed criminals. 

And

In his stint in the Bush 41 administration, Barr also dealt with the savings-and-loan crisis, and he engineered policies to protect financial institutions. In addition, he brought federal resources to bear against violent crime, worked cooperatively with state and local law-enforcement agencies, and enforced civil-rights laws.

And

In the private realm, Barr is a highly experienced and successful corporate executive. For many years, he was general counsel at Verizon, the international communications giant. Indeed, Barr helped steer the merger of GTE and Bell Atlantic that formed Verizon. (As a board member of Time Warner, Barr has been on the opposite side of the Trump Justice Department’s effort to block the company’s merger with AT&T. A federal district judge ultimately approved the merger, and, earlier this week, a federal appeals court heard arguments in the Justice Department’s appeal.) He has been in the forefront of the telecom industry’s challenges to stifling government regulation. As the Trump Justice Department deals with big antitrust questions and the administration continues to pursue the president’s deregulation agenda, Barr’s knowledge of these legally complex issues will be a boon.

WSJ piece entitled "American Entrepreneurs Who Flocked to China Are Heading Home, Disillusioned." 

Virginia Teacher Fired after Refusing to Call Trans Student by Preferred Pronoun

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