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Yahoo
12-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
This Group's Record in Front of the Roberts Court Is Mind-Boggling
In a provocative dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recently called out her colleagues on the Supreme Court for appearing 'overly sympathetic to corporate interests.' Objecting to a decision allowing fuel companies to sue over clean-air rules that don't regulate those companies, Jackson described how 'moneyed interests' seem to 'enjoy an easier road to relief in this Court than ordinary citizens.' Justice Sonia Sotomayor later echoed that sentiment in a different case, highlighting the court's reluctance to constrain 'regulated businesses' while imposing 'Kafkaesque' rules on other litigants, such as 'politically disfavored noncitizens.' Jackson and Sotomayor are right to be concerned about the court's bias toward industry. As the Constitutional Accountability Center has documented, the court has adopted the position advocated by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in nearly 70 percent of its cases since John Roberts became chief justice 20 years ago. Some terms, the Roberts court has sided with the Chamber 80 percent, 90 percent, and even 100 percent of the time. That is a sharp increase from prior decades, when the Chamber's success rate hovered around 50 percent. Even this remarkable success rate does not fully capture the advances big business has made under the Roberts court. The court's pro-corporate decisions routinely yield landmark rulings that bulldoze settled doctrine in favor of industry. Take, for instance, the recent trio of cases imposing limits on judicial deference to agency legal views, cutting back on agencies' ability to adjudicate certain matters in-house, and brushing away time limits on challenging agency regulations. Each decision undermined long-standing precedent, making it more difficult to enforce laws meant to ensure safe workplaces and products, a clean environment, and fair financial dealings. Industry's 'losses' at the Supreme Court, by contrast, are often simply failures to reshape the law even more aggressively in its favor. In these cases, the court maintains the status quo, but it almost never moves the ball significantly in favor of consumers, workers, or the environment. This term, for instance, the court declined to expand the 'nondelegation' doctrine, which addresses when Congress can give policymaking authority to agencies, something corporations have long urged to make it more difficult for agencies to regulate them. But the court's rejection of that effort simply reaffirmed precedent going back a century—and the Chamber has claimed that even the court's opinion in this case implicitly signals a more restrictive approach to agency authority. This lopsided pattern means that efforts to promote corporate accountability at best tread water, while industry victories regularly reshape the legal landscape. That dynamic is exacerbated by how the court selects cases to hear. Overwhelmingly, the justices choose to review lower-court decisions that go against corporate interests—rarely the opposite. In some recent terms, over 90 percent of the business cases the court chose to hear were corporate challenges to lower-court rulings that favored individuals or the government over industry. By stacking the deck this way, the court gives big business plenty of opportunities to overturn unfavorable decisions, while avoiding putting corporate victories in jeopardy. To illustrate just how skewed the court's practice has been, during one five-year period the court reversed only two lower-court victories for industry, while reversing nearly 50 lower-court victories for plaintiffs and the government. Big business's newfound success is partly driven by another trend that has emerged under Chief Justice Roberts: a deep rift between the Democrat- and Republican-appointed justices in business cases. Based on the numbers, the court's more liberal wing—not its conservative bloc—appears to be following Roberts' professed model of a neutral umpire calling balls and strikes. The more liberal justices have typically voted for the Chamber of Commerce's position roughly 50 percent of the time, while the conservative justices have sometimes done so more than 75 percent of the time. Some years, the conservatives have sided with industry nearly twice as often as their colleagues. And tellingly, when business interests prevail, conservative justices almost never dissent. With the recent comments by Jackson and Sotomayor, the court's own members are now calling attention to this apparent bias. And the conservative supermajority has been unable to muster a response. Justice Brett Kavanaugh attempted to refute Jackson's accusation that the court acts inconsistently when deciding who to let through the courthouse doors. His response was to cite a list of cases that he claimed showed otherwise. But this list, strikingly, does not include a single case in which the court allowed individuals to sue corporations, or prevented corporations from suing the government. What the record actually shows is that the court invariably sweeps aside procedural roadblocks when industries sue to evade oversight and accountability. But the court does not offer the same solicitude to individual plaintiffs attempting to redress corporate abuse. In the 2010 case Free Enterprise Fund v. PCOAB, for example, the court permitted industries to challenge oversight by agencies they claim are unconstitutional, despite lacking any statutory right to do so. In the 2019 case Seila Law v. CFPB, it held that companies can pursue these sorts of challenges to agency authority without showing that the alleged constitutional flaw made a difference in their case. Both decisions led to major rulings cutting back on agency independence. In West Virginia v. EPA in 2021, the court allowed fossil-fuel interests to sue over an environmental policy that would never have gone into effect regardless, giving the conservative majority the opportunity to endorse the so-called major questions doctrine, which makes it more difficult for Congress to give agencies the authority they need to regulate business. More recently, in Axon Enterprise v. FTC, the justices allowed litigants to go directly to court with objections to agency procedures, instead of waiting for the agency to first complete its proceedings. And in Diamond Alternative Energy v. EPA, which prompted Jackson's remarks this term, the court let fuel companies challenge an emissions standard based on supposedly 'commonsense' speculation about its effects—precisely what the court has long prevented individuals and nonprofits from doing. Compare this indulgent approach with how the court treats other litigants. In sharply divided decisions, it has blocked consumers and employees from leveling the playing field by joining together in class actions. It has repeatedly shut plaintiffs out of court entirely by shunting them into forced arbitration. The court has made itself, not Congress, the arbiter of what counts as an 'injury' that can justify a lawsuit—and in the court's view, being erroneously designated as a terrorist by credit bureaus does not qualify. The court has prevented unhoused people from using the Eighth Amendment to challenge laws that punish them for sleeping outdoors. It has prohibited victims of human rights abuses from suing companies that aided those abuses, pronouncing corporations uniquely immune under a 200-year-old law. It has contorted statutory language to stop immigrants from obtaining effective relief against wrongful detention and deportation. And it has barred individuals from challenging government surveillance because the harms they complained about were too speculative—a lesson the court forgot when industry plaintiffs came before it. As Justice Jackson noted, 'the Constitution does not distinguish between plaintiffs whose claims are backed by the Chamber of Commerce and those who seek to vindicate their rights to fair housing, desegrated schools, or privacy.' But if anyone doubts the reality of that statement in practice, the court's one-sided record 'will do little to dissuade them.'
Bloomberg
03-07-2025
- Automotive
- Bloomberg
Mercedes to LVMH Are Blunting the EU's Fight Against Trump's Tariffs
German automaker Mercedes-Benz Group AG, French luxury giant LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE and other major European firms are spearheading a corporate push that's weakening the European Union's efforts to stand up to Donald Trump's tariff threats. In a bid to head off a transatlantic trade war, some executives have held back-channel meetings with US officials to pursue their own interests. The initiatives have included pressing European governments and Brussels for a quick deal and removing iconic American products — such as bourbon — from a list of goods to be targeted in retaliation to defuse the potential for escalation, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mail & Guardian
04-06-2025
- Business
- Mail & Guardian
Profits before people: How the liquor industry undermines reforms
Alcohol causes many social problems, requiring the revival of the Liquor Amendment Bill. The liquor industry's resistance to reforms and public health measures aimed at curbing South Africa's high alcohol consumption reveals a deep divide between corporate interests and the public good. A new study published in Globalisation and Health sheds fresh light on how the industry flexed its financial and political muscle at the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) to protect its profits with little regard for the devastating effect of alcohol on society. First released for public comment in 2016, the Liquor Amendment Bill proposed several changes: raising the legal drinking age from 18 to 21, comprehensive restrictions on alcohol advertising, sponsorships and promotions, as well as limiting sales within 500 metres of schools and places of worship. Researchers analysing Nedlac's meeting records on the Bill found that the industry exercised 'regulatory capture' by flooding committees with representatives, punting self-regulation over public policy interventions and using financial leverage to keep the Bill from reaching parliament. Community representation at these meetings was woefully low or absent compared with that of business, government and labour. As part of these stalling tactics, industry giants such as Heineken and AB InBev commissioned two socio-economic impact studies of the Bill. One of these assessments discredited the conclusions of the government-initiated study that showed clear public health benefits from tighter regulation. While Nedlac concluded discussions on the Bill some years ago, it still hasn't reached parliament, and there is no indication by the department of trade, industry and competition of when this will happen. These revelations about the alcohol industry's strong objections to some of the proposed changes in the bill are sobering. South Africa has among the highest rates of alcohol consumption in the world. A 2019 Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) study, based on a sample of 3500 adolescents, found that nearly 70% of young people between the ages of 11 and 18 had already consumed alcohol. Most had tasted their first drink at the ages of 13 and 14. The Soul City Institute's 2017 study found that school-aged youths were bombarded with alcohol advertising from billboards and TV. Outlet density is also a major concern. In the same study, Atteridgeville, home to 60,000 according to the 2011 census, had no less than 147 taverns. Evidence suggests a direct link: the more alcohol outlets in an area, the greater the risk of early initiation to alcohol. This is especially true for poor communities with limited social infrastructure to keep young people engaged and connected. Sobering as they are, the industry's actions are hardly surprising. These tactics are part of the industry's playbook globally. According to a report called From Sports to Screens – Exposing Big Alcohol's Predatory Practices in 2024, the industry employs strategies such as targeted adverts for people seeking online help with alcohol dependence; marketing 0% alcohol drinks to gain a foothold in spaces where alcohol consumption is not the norm; sponsoring major sporting events; and courting politicians to enact laws in the industry's interests. Despite the World Health Organisation's (WHO) efforts to promote evidence-based policies to reduce alcohol harms, the industry often disregards its recommendations. A striking example is the growing trend of alcohol sold in larger containers, like the one-litre beer, despite the WHO's explicit warnings against this. These predatory practices are not new. In our country, alcohol has long been entangled with racist oppression and economic dispossession. Black women who flocked to the cities searching for independent incomes after mining and manufacturing uprooted men from all over Southern Africa established independent livelihoods selling skokiaan or utywala . These activities flourished under the watchful eye of a state that criminalised black people for consuming the 'white man's liquor'. But this independence was short-lived. The state soon clamped down, creating a municipal monopoly on the sale of sorghum beer. Municipal beer halls — perched conveniently along major train stations — became symbols of control and exploitation. It was no accident that the municipal beer halls became targets of the wrath of the 1976 youth. The wine industry, too, carries this bitter legacy. The notorious dop system — a labour regime that compensated workers with cheap wine — directly contributed to alcoholism in farming communities across the Western and Northern Capes. This imbrication of alcohol and racial domination is also a global story. A recent book by political scientist Mark Lawrence Schrad, Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibitio n, contests the idea that the prohibition movements of 19th and 20th century America were exclusive domains of white supremacists. At the forefront of these movements, he argues, were those who bore the brunt of ordinary people's subservience to a lethal substance — women, native Americans and black people. Far from being moral crusades against sin, these movements emerged as a response to predatory capitalism. Yet these revelations of regulatory capture barely caused a public storm. Why? One possibility is that there is political fatigue around the issue. The Young Communist League, which earned the ire of liquor traders in the 2000s by calling for the closure of shebeens near schools, has long abandoned the issue. The ANC Youth League no longer campaigns against glamourising alcohol through deceptive adverts. And although the Economic Freedom Fighters' early legislative efforts included a private member's Bill to ban alcohol advertising, some of its provincial structures are now cosying up to the liquor industry. The second possibility is that there is no cohesion in government about what needs to be done to address alcohol harms, with fierce contestation over concerns about jobs and trade versus public health and broader social impacts. The third could be the industry's success in framing excessive alcohol consumption as a personal issue, solved by 'responsible drinking', rather than a clash between public good and global corporate power. Even so, encouraging efforts are taking shape to challenge the status quo. Among those pushing back against the power of the predatory industry is the jazz collective iPhupho L'Ka Biko, whose Amanzi Sessions create space to challenge ritualised alcohol consumption. Sonke Gender Justice's work highlights the link between alcohol and domestic violence, while DG Murray Trust's 'rethink your drink' campaign continues to call for a shift in national policy. To succeed in reining in the alcohol industry, membership-based organisations with a nationwide presence, such as trade unions and political parties, must step up to loosen the industry's grip on policy. A good step forward would be to pressure the government to revive the Liquor Amendment Bill. Phindile Kunene is an activist, political educator and head of democracy and political culture at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. She writes in her personal capacity.
CNN
16-05-2025
- Business
- CNN
A trip to Rome for state officials. Paid for in part by companies they regulate.
A group of US state officials flew free to Italy and stayed in a five-star Rome hotel thanks to a group funded by corporate interests. CNN's Kyung Lah reports.
CNN
15-05-2025
- Business
- CNN
A trip to Rome for state officials. Paid for in part by companies they regulate.
A group of US state officials flew free to Italy and stayed in a five-star Rome hotel thanks to a group funded by corporate interests. CNN's Kyung Lah reports.
