The soon-to-be chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa, is helping stoke a popular right-wing sentiment that the Obama administration is wildly anti-business.
The New York Times reports that last month, Issa (pictured) "dispatched letters to 150 companies" asking them which federal regulations they believe should be rewritten. The newspaper said Issa's action prompted predictable responses from the two major political parties, with Republicans bemoaning a heavy-handed government under the Obama administration and Democrats saying Republicans are tied to closely to powerful corporate interests.
The nonprofit public interest group, Public Citizen blasted Issa's move saying, "Rather than providing a platform for presentation of a corporate wish list, Representative Issa should be subjecting corporate claims to the withering scrutiny he promises for the Obama administration. It's time we ended the Kabuki theater of corporate whining, and got on with the serious business of creating jobs and making America safer and cleaner."
While the new House majority may, not surprisingly, be aligning itself with big businesses, some public interest groups are raising concerns that the conservative wing of the Supreme Court is increasingly supportive of corporate interests. Last year, the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) issued a report that the Roberts Court's five conservative justices tend to side with corporate interests.
ty Center
the workers, the brands insist it's not their problem to fix. Factories close, bosses skip town, the brands wash their hands of the matter - and workers are left high and dry.
ntury, the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that America's main law against securities fraud does not apply to investment deals that occur outside of this country, even if they have some domestic impact or effect. For the first time, the Court declared that the most-used U.S. stock fraud law cannot be used in American courts to challenge a "transnational" securities deal involving a company whose stock is not traded in the U.S., and when the trade does not occur inside the U.S. With evident sarcasm, Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion for the Court rapped Circuit Courts for having created, by judicial invention, the authority to decide such lawsuits when filed by private investors. This, Scalia said, is "judicial-speculation-made-law."
Big business versus the little guy. The Ninth Circuit running amok. The specter of "frankencrops." All of these tropes -- some familiar to Supreme Court-watchers, one more novel -- were potentially in play last month when the Court considered Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms, its first case dealing with federal regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Yet the oral argument found the justices preoccupied with fine points of jurisdiction, administrative law, and equity, suggesting that their actual ruling may turn out to be a narrow one.