Saturday, July 20, 2019

WALL STREET PLUNDERS... It's much easier under Swamp Keeper Trump - PICKS WALL STREET CHOSEN EUGENE SCALIA TO UNLEASH THE MONSTERS THAT LOOT THIS NATION


Trump’s Labor Pick Has Defended Corporations, and One Killer Whale

Eugene Scalia, whom Mr. Trump plans to nominate as labor secretary, has been a go-to lawyer for businesses like UPS and SeaWorld.
Eugene Scalia at a Senate hearing in 2001, when he was a nominee for solicitor of the Labor Department.CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

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CreditCreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

Eugene Scalia, whom President Trump intends to nominate as labor secretary, is often hired by companies when they are sued by workers, or when they want to push back against new employment laws and regulations.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce praised him as an “excellent choice,” saying he would be a valuable asset to the department as it finalizes several regulations.
Senators, especially Democrats, are sure to closely study his long career working on behalf of corporate clients, which was interrupted by a brief tenure as the Labor Department’s top lawyer.
Mr. Scalia, who is the son of the deceased Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, is perhaps best known for his opposition to a regulation that would have mandated greater protections for workers at risk of repetitive stress injuries. But he played a role in several other prominent cases, representing the financial industry and companies like UPS and SeaWorld. Here are three important issues he worked on.

The Obama Labor Department spent six years developing a new rule for how brokers and other financial professionals advised clients on their retirement accounts. Under the old rule, advisers had been required to provide investing advice that was “suitable.” The new rule, which the Obama administration finalized in 2016, required brokers to act as fiduciaries, meaning they would have to provide advice that was in the best interest of their clients.
The administration estimated that conflicts of interest arising under the old standard cost Americans about $17 billion a year.
Mr. Scalia was part of a team at his law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher that sued to block the rule on behalf of several industry groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and the Financial Services Roundtable. The groups argued that the regulation would harm less-affluent investors because firms would simply stop offering them advice to avoid exposing themselves to liability.
Mr. Scalia called the rule a prime example of “regulatory overreach” in an interview with the author of a newsletter. He said investment advice should be overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission and state insurance regulators, not the Labor Department.

Mr. Scalia and his team lost in a trial court in early 2017, after which Alex Acosta, the labor secretary Mr. Scalia will replace, said there was no principled legal basis for delaying initial application of the rule and began to partially adopt it. But Mr. Scalia’s team continued the fight before a federal appeals court, which ultimately ruled in their favor the following year. The rule died when the Trump administration declined further legal challenges.

Mr. Scalia was part of legal teams that defended UPS against claims brought under the Americans with Disabilities Act in two cases during the late 1990s and 2000s. In the first case, UPS employees who could only see with one eye sued the company for refusing to allow them to become drivers, arguing that the company’s policy had discriminated against people who were capable of operating vehicles safely. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought the case, but UPS largely prevailed in two separate appeals.
In the second case, some UPS employees claimed that the company had refused to let them return to work after they had suffered on-the-job injuries because they were unable to perform all the responsibilities of their previous jobs. The workers argued that the company violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by not providing accommodations that would let them resume work.
A lower court certified the case as a class action, but Mr. Scalia and his team successfully argued that the court should not have allowed the plaintiffs to bring their claims jointly before first investigating whether each one should be allowed to return to work under the disability law based on their individual circumstances. An appeals court ruled in the company’s favor in 2009.
Peter Blanck, a professor at Syracuse University who has written extensively about the disabilities law, said that class action suits are often critical to allowing individuals to realize their rights under the law. Absent the class certification, the plaintiffs agreed to a settlement with the company.
In these and other lawsuits involving his clients, Mr. Scalia has “consistently sought to narrow A.D.A. protections on a variety of issues, including the definition of disability and class certification” Douglas Kruse and Lisa Schur, two experts on the employment of people with disabilities at Rutgers University, said in an email.

Tilikum, a killer whale, during a 2009 show at SeaWorld. Mr. Scalia represented the company in a case stemming from the death of one of its trainers.CreditMathieu Belanger /Reuters

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CreditMathieu Belanger /Reuters
In 2010, a killer whale attacked and killed a SeaWorld trainer named Dawn Brancheau. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a division of the Labor Department, investigated and concluded that SeaWorld either knew or should have known that the whale posed a threat to humans and should have taken steps to protect trainers.
The government’s argument prevailed before an administrative law judge, and then again in federal court, where Mr. Scalia’s firm represented SeaWorld. When the company appealed to a federal court in Washington, Mr. Scalia argued on its behalf.
Mr. Scalia and his team maintained that Congress had never intended for the safety administration to regulate an occupation like training and performing with killer whales. They further argued that SeaWorld already had adequate safety measures in place, and that the trainers had accepted the risks inherent in their jobs and that it was their responsibility to manage these risks.
David Michaels, the head of the safety administration at the time, said that it was true that the agency did not have much experience on the subject of killer whales, but it had a responsibility to cover the entire American work force. “We researched the question of what’s known about killer whales, we researched this particular killer whale,” Dr. Michaels said, “and we thought we made the right decision” to bring the case.
Except for the question of whether the company had willfully exposed its trainers to danger, the courts largely agreed with the government. The appeals court rejected Mr. Scalia’s arguments in a 2-to-1 decision, and the company did not appeal the case further.
But should a similar case arise if he is confirmed as labor secretary, the argument Mr. Scalia made might have more currency. The lone dissent in his favor was written by Brett Kavanaugh, who was then a judge on the appeals court and is now on the Supreme Court.
Many sports and entertainment activities, from professional football to the circus, pose hazards to those who participate in them, Mr. Kavanaugh wrote in his dissent.
But, he continued, “it is simply not plausible to assert that Congress, when passing the Occupational Safety and Health Act, silently intended to authorize the Department of Labor to eliminate familiar sports and entertainment practices, such as punt returns in the N.F.L., speeding in Nascar, or the whale show at SeaWorld.”


Noam Scheiber is a Chicago-based reporter who covers workers and the workplace. He spent nearly 15 years at The New Republic magazine, where he covered economic policy and three presidential campaigns. He is also the author of “The Escape Artists.” @noamscheiber



Billionaires Are Behind Efforts to Slow America’s Energy Infrastructure

                                   
Source: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, file
Summer travel season is officially underway. For many Americans that means road trips in the car or heading to the nearest airport to catch a flight. According to AAA, nearly 50 million Americans had plans to travel for Independence Day, and with several weeks until Labor Day the number of travelers is likely to remain high. 
Whether it’s a road trip or plane ride, travel during this time of year is a great reminder of how North American energy helps make efficient and easy travel possible for so many of us. Having reliable sources of safe, affordable energy sources here in the U.S. is a critical part of fueling our everyday life – including our summer travel plans. 
One key component of making sure we have access to North American energy is through a strong national energy infrastructure, including reliable and safe pipelines. Pipelines provide access to affordable energy by helping to deliver energy products like gasoline, jet fuel, and natural gas efficiently to meet the nation’s energy needs. Pipelines are also largely recognized as the safest way of transporting oil and gas, compared to railroads or other ways of transport. 
Over the past several years, the number of pipeline incidents has decreased even as pipeline miles and barrels delivered have both increased. Pipelines remain one of the safest and most efficient ways to deliver energy across the U.S., delivering their energy products safely 99.999% of the time. Some reports also show that pipelines are better for the environment than transporting crude oil by railroad and pose far fewer public health and environmental risks.  
That’s why it’s so alarming that protestors are increasing efforts to prevent current pipelines from being safely updated and improved, and therefore threatening our nation’s energy infrastructure. Honor the Earth is one of the groups working to prevent pipelines from being used as a safe, reliable source of transporting energy to Americans. For example, Honor the Earth was one of the leaders in opposing the Dakota Access pipeline being built, and it’s currently trying to block updates to a pipeline (called Line 3) running through Minnesota, North Dakota and Wisconsin. 
These pipelines have been a critical means of providing needed energy to Americans, especially in the Midwest, but Honor the Earth is focused on undermining our energy infrastructure and preventing safe updates to improve aging pipelines even through it’s safer than transporting oil by railroad. Honor the Earth even recently petitionedMinnesota’s Supreme Court claiming the environmental review of the Line 3 pipeline didn’t adequately review railroads as an alternative to transporting oil by pipelines. 
This seems odd given the environmental track record of railway vs pipeline. But you need only look at the organization’s biggest donors to make sense of it all. Honor the Earth presents itself as an organization intended to protect the environment, but its funded by billionaires like Warren Buffet, who has substantial interests in the railroad industry. In 2017, Honor the Earth listed NoVo Foundation as a top donor, which is funded solely by Warren Buffett and run by Buffett’s son and his wife. But Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns Burlington Northern Santa Fe, the largest freight railroad network in North America.
While Honor the Earth is masquerading as environmentalists, it’s clear they are only doing so when it fits the agenda of their billionaire funders. In the meantime, they are undermining our nation’s energy infrastructure and threatening all Americans’ ability to access safe, affordable, and reliable energy to power our everyday lives. Let’s remember that when we’re on the road this summer. 

Is Corporate America Selling Out Our Country?


Within hours of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt began summoning the heads of American industry to Washington. Roosevelt knew the country would need an unprecedented buildup of planes, ships, and other war materiel. Without hesitation, American companies responded. Ford, Packard, Chrysler, 3M, Hormel, General Mills, Pillsbury, Cargill, Boeing, and many other major U.S. companies gave their all to the war effort. At Roosevelt's request, the president of General Motors even left his company to oversee the war production effort as a lieutenant general in the U.S. Army. Roosevelt's initial request for 50,000 new airplanes per year was openly mocked by the Germans as outlandishly high and impossible to achieve. But the mighty U.S. industrial base roared to life and pulled it off. By war's end, the United States was producing 100,000 warplanes a year. U.S. industry literally transformed itself to save our country. It's fair to wonder if our current CEOs would do the same.
Would American companies in a new globalized economy drop everything for their country? Do American companies even consider themselves American anymore? The Daily Caller News Foundation asked 19 of the biggest names in corporate America if they saw themselves as "American" companies. It shouldn't be a very hard question to answer. But 10 of the 19 -- including Amazon, Apple, Chevron and General Electric -- refused to answer altogether. The others mostly gave weasel answers. Only General Motors and the bank JPMorgan Chase were willing to clearly identify as American institutions. And even with them, the actual record is cause for concern.
Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel brought this issue to light recently when he accused Google of "seemingly treasonous" behavior for cozying up to the communist Chinese government. Amazingly, Google has been working on a censored search engine: Project Dragonfly, built for the Chinese government and designed to keep the Chinese people from seeing the free flow of information. At the same time, Google refused to work with the U.S. military. Thiel suggested that the FBI and CIA should investigate Google, which seems like a good place to start. More broadly, though, can we really call Google an American company?
Google and many other U.S.-based companies have operations, sales, and customers all over the world. They think of themselves globally. They value the bottom line above all. A dollar made in China is the same as a dollar made in America.
The question for America is whether this is sustainable. Every big company has a Washington office dedicated to influencing U.S. government policy and regulation. With our increasingly powerful government and regulatory regime, it's smart for companies to do this, and there is nothing wrong with it in theory. But now that corporate America is pushing Washington for its often globalist positions instead of for policies that benefit Americans, we may have a real crisis on our hands.
We're not talking about just a few corporate offices. Washington is completely dominated by corporate America. Big companies fund the influential trade associations all over Washington and hire lobbyists all over Congress and the regulatory agencies. These lobbyists understand our increasingly complex labyrinth of regulations. And they are often writing the laws Congress enacts.
Think tanks are supposed to be independently analyzing and commenting on our policies. But who do you think funds the think tanks in Washington? Corporate America dominates in this sphere as well. When they want a new law or to stop a law or regulation they don't like, these companies go even further, hiring public relations firms and ad agencies to convince us of their positions. All of this is a multibillion-dollar business.
Lately, when senators and representatives leave Congress, they go to work for the corporate influence machine. Over two-thirds of the congresspersons who retired or lost their seats this last election cycle is now corporate lobbyists. That's a record level. A seat in Congress has become an extended tryout for a high-paying corporate influence job.
All of this would be of less concern if corporate interests still aligned with actual American interests, but those days seem to have ended sometime between the great industrial ramp-up for World War II and Google's recent siding with communist China over the U.S. military. Where does this leave the American people?



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