Jan. 19, 2024 ❧ Supreme Court may gut federal regulations, a brewing beer strike, and Nikki Haley's shady Boeing connections
Plus: an underage worker killed in Mississippi, Eric Adams' "table of success," opposition leader under house arrest in Uganda, and the mysteries of bee flight
WARNING: DO NOT proceed to the news before donning your protective NEWS GOGGLES
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
LOOMING SUPREME COURT DECISION COULD MAKE IT HARDER FOR FEDERAL REGULATORS TO REGULATE
The US Supreme Court will soon rule on a case that could determine the future of America’s executive agencies and their ability to create regulations by taking away their ability to make decisions about ambiguities in the law. If your eyes just glazed over upon reading that last sentence, it’s understandable. But this decision potentially has major ramifications for thousands of consumer-protection regulations over everything from food and drug safety to wildlife protection to communications to air pollution.
Under the constitution, the executive branch enforces laws passed by Congress—often this takes the form of regulatory agencies being handed statutes passed by Congress that they are empowered to enact. When Congress, for example, passes a new regulation on prescription drug ingredients, the Food & Drug Administration is responsible for putting it into practice. But there’s a problem: Sometimes the law is not always clear. Congress can’t possibly plan for every conceivable situation. And since they don’t have a copy of “What To Do In Every Conceivable Situation,” the question arises of whether courts or the regulators themselves get to interpret any ambiguities.
For a long time, the precedent has been that this interpretation is made by the regulators. This was determined in the 1984 Supreme Court case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which surrounded ambiguities within the Clean Air Act whether certain kinds of manufacturing plants not defined in the law were required to obtain permits from the Environmental Protection Agency. The Court was tasked with determining whether the EPA—tasked with enforcing the law by Congress—also had the power to resolve those ambiguities themselves and require permits without having to receive a new law from Congress or a ruling from courts on what the law means. By a 6-3 vote, the Court in Chevron determined that when a regulation from Congress has multiple reasonable interpretations, it should be up to regulatory agencies—in that case the EPA—to determine which of those interpretations makes the most sense.
This “Chevron deference” has been the standard ever since, and it makes quite a lot of sense. Regulatory agencies are staffed with subject-matter experts who are far better equipped than judges to interpret what Congress likely meant when it passed a regulation. This also allows for the enforcement of important regulations to happen more swiftly without the legal process gumming up the works and prevents judges from “interpreting” the law based not on expertise but on their political preferences. As Jeff Turrentine at the Natural Resources Defense Council points out, Congress often leaves laws intentionally vague to allow agency experts to chart the best course of action:
Sometimes Congress is purposefully inexplicit in order to give the subject-area experts space to decide how best to implement a regulation. For example, an agency made up of occupational safety specialists should already be well equipped to decide how to handle the technical, nuts-and-bolts aspects of imposing workplace protections—rules about equipment usage, say, or the need for periodic employee rest breaks—without the meddling of judges. And given the complexity of weather patterns, EPA scientists are better equipped than judges at determining how much a state should curb its air pollution in order to protect people living in other states downwind.
As you can imagine, conservatives really hate the Chevron deference. They argue that it allows the executive branch to effectively make laws. But Congress still has the ability to pre-empt that by making its regulations as clear as possible. The real conservative objection is obviously that they oppose anything that makes it easier to regulate industry. It’s become increasingly common for right-wing politicians to make promises about gutting “the administrative state.” (Both Vivek Ramaswamy and Donald Trump have made promises to fire lots of federal employees unilaterally.) Groups like the Federalist Society and the Cato Institute have been champing at the bit to reverse the Chevron deference for years. And with the most conservative court in a century in place, it looks like they might finally get their way.
A new case, brought by a group of fishing companies against the National Marine Fisheries Service was the subject of oral arguments this week and the Chevron deference was a central topic of discussion for the justices. As two lawyers with the Natural Resources Defense Council described, this could usher in a new era of chaos that could make thousands of important regulations unenforceable. As Christina Pazzanese writes in The Harvard Gazette:
For nearly 100 years, Congress has delegated power to expert agencies to regulate our modern economy, set and enforce public health standards, protect consumers, and much more. Those tasks necessarily and unavoidably require agencies to make legal determinations when Congress has left gaps to fill. If the court overturns Chevron, it will have aggrandized its own power at the expense of Congress, the administrative state, and the president, and thrown critical day-to-day decisions necessary to implement scores of federal statutes to the federal judiciary.
FIGHTING BACK
TEAMSTERS BEER STRIKE BREWING
In a little more than a month, the workers who make some of America’s most popular beers may be walking the picket line. On December 16 of last year, roughly 5,000 workers at Anheuser-Busch breweries across the country voted to authorize a strike, by an overwhelming 99 percent. Their current contract with the company ends on February 29, and according to Teamsters leadership, negotiations have broken down—since November 16, company executives haven’t even met with the union, having refused to consider its demands for greater job security. “Without a contract by February 29, there won’t be any beer come March,” the union has warned on social media, and they’re not kidding. Anheuser-Busch makes 40.4 percent of the beer sold in the United States, including Michelob, Rolling Rock, LandShark, Busch (of course), and the many varieties of Budweiser. A prolonged strike could take all those brands off the shelves—and it would come during the March Madness basketball season, one of the biggest beer-drinking events in the entire U.S. calendar. This gives the workers a significant amount of leverage. If the bosses don’t come to the table, millions of Americans might have to drink Pabst, and nobody wants that.
The demands are pretty reasonable, too. As the union has laid out in a helpful infographic, they come in four main areas: wages, medical care, retirement, and job security. Full details haven’t been released, but we know that one key demand is an end to “tiered” healthcare benefits at the company—a system in which workers hired after 2019 receive significantly worse medical plans than those hired earlier, despite doing the same work. Wage and benefit “tiers” were also a key issue in the recent UAW strike against the Detroit auto manufacturers, and in the Teamsters’ own campaign at UPS. More than just a sign of companies’ stinginess, they’re a divide-and-conquer tactic used to pit veteran workers against new ones, damaging their organization and collective bargaining power. The workers also want a better pay raise than they got in 2019, when their current contract came into effect; back then, Anheuser-Busch offered raises of just $2.50 an hour over five years.
It’s not that the company can’t afford to treat its workers better, of course. It recently made a $1 billion stock buyback, following a $3.5 billion bond buyback in 2022. Despite a transphobic boycott campaign against Bud Light, it still made a gross profit of $32 billion for a twelve-month period ending in September 2023. It’s just that, like all capitalist corporations, Anheuser-Busch wants to squeeze more and more labor from people, while paying them less and less. Pretty soon, the Teamsters may have to remind them that when you try pushing that agenda, workers push back.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ Earlier in January, passengers on a Boeing 737 jet for Alaska Airlines experienced a scare when the plane’s door flew off mid-flight. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, but it led certain models of the 737 to be temporarily grounded until the Federal Aviation Administration can figure out what the hell is going on. It turns out that GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley may have something to do with it. She served on the board of Boeing after leaving the Trump administration in 2020. While there, according to The Lever:
“Haley helped kill an initiative designed to force the company to more comprehensively disclose its spending to influence politicians and safety regulators, government filings show. The Boeing board’s opposition to the shareholder measure came the same year that the company was lobbying the Federal Aviation Administration on “certification,” or approving planes to fly — and the agency lifted its grounding order of the company’s 737 fleet, which had been in effect since two of the airliners had crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people. Haley was a member of Boeing’s board when it unanimously opposed shareholders’ transparency proposal, which proponents said was designed to uncover whether Boeing had bought itself regulatory relief from federal safety officials.”
TRUMP: CORN IS NOT A LIQUID
“I just met non-liquid gold. You know where it was? Iowa. It’s called corn! They have—it’s non-liquid. More non-liquid gold. They said, ‘what is that?,’ I said ‘corn.’ They said ‘we love that idea.’ You know, it’s a pretty cool thought, isn’t it? That’s a nickname in its own way, but we came up with a new word—a new couple of words for corn.”
— Donald Trump, speaking on the big issues
AROUND THE STATES
❧ A Mississippi chicken plant is directly responsible for an underaged worker's death, according to a new OSHA ruling. Duvan Perez was only 16 years old when he was hired to work at the Mar-Jac poultry plant in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, which processes chickens for Chick-Fil-A and other corporate customers. There, he cleaned and sanitized the deboning machines—and in July, one of those machines was left plugged in. According to OSHA, Perez was “caught in the rotating shaft and sprockets and pulled in, sustaining fatal injuries.” That’s a polite way of describing what must have been a painful, terrifying death. By all rights, it should have been impossible, because dangerous machinery is supposed to be equipped with a “lockout-tagout” system, literally locking down the power supply before cleaning can start. More importantly, it’s illegal for minors under the age of 18 to work any job that involves “meat processing and slicing,” which this clearly did. OSHA has recommended a fine of $212,646 for Mar-Jac’s various safety violations, which the company has 15 days to either pay or legally contest. But even that is a half-measure. You can’t put a dollar value on a human life, and allowing the company responsible for Duvan Perez’s death to simply write a check and walk away makes a mockery of justice. When someone dies in a workplace accident that was easily preventable, simply because their employer didn’t bother to use the proper safeguards, Mississippi law defines that as manslaughter, and it should be prosecuted as such. At the bare minimum, nobody involved should ever hold decision-making power over a workplace again. Meanwhile, the current political push to expand and deregulate child labor needs to be stopped in its tracks, before we see a hundred more tragedies like this one.
❧ A group of tech billionaires is trying to build a new city in California. It’s not going great. A company called “California Forever” has been quietly buying up farmland in the state’s Solano County, amassing around 60,000 acres at a cost of nearly $1 billion. For six years, they’ve been operating under a veil of secrecy, using nondisclosure agreements to prevent anyone knowing who they actually are. It’s only recently that details have become public: the group is led by Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader who’s described himself as a “son of Ayn Rand and Gordon Gekko,” and has investors like Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn. On paper, the city these self-appointed luminaries want to build seems downright utopian: it would run on clean energy, support “at least 15,000” new jobs, and be completely walkable. Sounds great, right? But the problem is, it’s tech billionaires doing it. Whenever extremely rich people decide they can just “disrupt” and “innovate” their way into a new field of human endeavor, it tends to cause huge problems. When they do this with transportation, for example, we get fiberglass submarines that implode in the middle of the ocean, or ridiculous cars like the Tesla Cybertruck. In the case of city-building, the geniuses behind California Forever forgot one key thing: cities need water! California already has a well-known drought and wildfire problem, and as the manager for the Solano County Water Agency puts it, a new city would require “a lot of water that doesn’t currently exist.” In theory, there are ways around this (like removing the salt from sea water,) but they’re expensive and impractical. Meanwhile, people who actually live in Solano County are becoming increasingly skeptical about the plan, describing it as a “drain on resources,” and resent the fact they haven’t been invited to important meetings about it. If you need to move, we’d recommend a city that’s been proven to actually exist and function—not one that a handful of Silicon Valley guys have convinced themselves is a great idea.
⚜ LONG READ: New York City mayor Eric Adams famously said “All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success.” As Adams faces an FBI investigation surrounding his shady ties to the Turkish government, we may want to ask ourselves who else is sitting at the table of success with him. Thankfully, the New York-based investigative journalism outlet Hellgate NYC has a terrific interactive database of every connection the mayor has with the real estate industry, police unions, business lobbyists and other malefactors.
SONG OF THE WEEK
On “Mayor’s a Cop,” rappers MIKE and Wiki critique the way Eric Adams has spent millions on policing while ignoring the urgent needs of the poor:
The mayor's a cop, the blue’s quadrupled up
The block is hot, shit, this how they chose to use the guap?
With this amount of human loss
Could've been for schools or parks
Coats in the winter and the summer, something to cool ‘em off
Food and warmth ‘cause once the leaves on the trees start falling off
People want heat to keep their ears from falling off
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ One of Uganda’s most important opposition leaders is under house arrest. Robert Kyagulanyi, better known by his stage name “Bobi Wine,” was Uganda’s most popular rapper and pop musician before he got into politics. Known for songs like “Ghetto” and “Time Bomb” that criticized the conditions of poverty and government corruption in Uganda, Wine was elected as a Member of Parliament for Kyadondo County East in 2017. In 2021 he ran for President, challenging the incumbent Yoweri Museveni—who has been in power since 1986, and has become increasingly autocratic, making homosexuality a criminal offense and even forcing the United Nations to close its human rights office in Uganda. The election was widely seen as illegitimate, in part because the government shut down internet access to the entire country on Election Day, and put Wine under house arrest soon after he was nominated. Now, both Wine and former presidential candidate Kizza Besigye have been arrested again, just before a planned protest against the poor condition of Uganda’s roads. It’s yet another heavy-handed measure from Museveni, who’s become a dictator in every sense of the word—and it’s sure to catalyze even more resistance, and greater protests to come.
❧ Farmers’ protests have broken out in France and Germany—but for bad reasons. The demonstrations have been big, loud and disruptive, and they’ve attracted international headlines. In France, around 1,000 protestors got in their tractors and dumped a huge pile of manure on the steps of an administrative building in Toulouse. In Germany, they’ve paraded through the Brandenburg Gate bearing slogans like “The republic is dying and the government is its killer,” and trapped vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck on a ferry for hours. On its face, this kind of protest might seem pretty sympathetic; when similar tractor-based rallies broke out in India in 2021, it was the country’s Communist Party organizing many of them, and largely poor and working-class people on the march. In Europe, though, things are different. As Paul Hockenos points out in Foreign Policy, many of these “farmers” aren’t poor at all. In Germany, some of them represent huge commercial operations, who want to pressure the government to keep handing them enormous subsidies:
[T]he average income of a full-time farmer is 82,000 euros a year—and that’s just agricultural income, usually only one part of many farms’ total income. In fact, an astounding half of this income, roughly, hails from subsidies. And that’s just for being farmers—not for specifically being small, family-run farms, or farms hit hard by drought, or farms that are cleaner or less-emissions-intensive or more decent to livestock. On the contrary, most of the subsidies are distributed per hectare, meaning that the largest agribusinesses are reaping the lion’s share.
The protests are driven by explicitly anti-environmental politics, too. Robert Habeck was targeted on the ferry because he’s a member of the Green Party, which has pushed to introduce tough new regulations on nitrogen-based fertilizers and cut subsidies for diesel fuel specifically. And worst of all, the farmers’ grievances are being used to build support for far-right parties like the German AfD (Alternative for Deutschland), which barely pretends not to be fascist. Counter-protests against these groups have dwarfed the far-right themselves, and that’s a good sign—but to fully neutralize the threat, Europe’s leaders need to come up with strong, democratic, worker-controlled agricultural systems that work for everyone.
❧ As if we weren’t already teetering precariously enough on the edge of a massive global war, Pakistan and Iran are now firing at one another. According to Al Jazeera, Iran launched a strike on separatist militants in the Balochistan region on the Pakistani side of the border, which killed two children and wounded three girls according to the Pakistani government. This led Pakistan to launch a retaliatory strike in the same region on Iran’s side, which killed nine people, including four women and three children. Both Iran and Pakistan accuse the other of providing a safe haven for the Baloch—an ethnic minority that has launched insurgent movements against both Iran and Pakistan, seeking an independent state. Cross-border violence has been a source of strife between the two nations for years, but this week’s attacks have brought relations to the most frigid point in recent memory. Diplomacy between the nations has deteriorated as Iran said it “considers the security of its people and its territorial integrity as a red line.” Iran is already at the center of the ongoing Middle Eastern wars, supporting Lebanon’s Hezbollah militants as they trade fire with Israel. Iran also backs Yemen’s Houthi government, which has attacked ships in the Red Sea in an effort to force a ceasefire in Gaza. Iran becoming entangled with Pakistan, another US ally, only increases the likelihood of direct, potentially catastrophic conflict between America and Iran.
BEE FACT OF THE DAY
Bees can fly backwards!
Their method of flying is unique among insects. Unlike other flying creatures, their wings flap independently of one another thanks to two sets of muscles in the thorax. This gives them more control over their flight, allowing them to flap in whatever direction they please.
(That’s one question answered, but it leaves us no closer to answering another even more important question, once posed by MAGA pollster Bill Mitchell on Yahoo! Answers: “Would a bumble bee the size of a man be able to fly?”)
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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