What to do in a political ecosystem where, for anyone concerned about climate change or whose politics run even slightly left of centre, there is precious little choice?
The U.S. Supreme Court appeared likely on Monday to back a bid by Donald Trump to expand presidential powers and curtail the independence of federal agencies.
The case before the top court stems from the Republican president’s firing of Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic member of the regulatory Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Slaughter was dismissed without cause and lower courts upheld her claim that the move violated rules Congress put in place to protect the members of independent government agencies.
The Trump Justice Department appealed to the conservative-dominated Supreme Court and a majority of the justices appeared to side with the administration during oral arguments on Monday.
Solicitor General John Sauer, representing the administration, urged the justices to overturn a landmark 1935 ruling known as “Humphrey’s Executor” that prevented then president Franklin Roosevelt from dismissing a member of the FTC.
Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, referred to “Humphrey’s Executor” as a “dried husk” during two-and-a-half hours of oral arguments and said the FTC today is significantly more powerful than it was in the 1930s.
Sauer said the current situation amounts to a “power vacuum” and the president as chief executive should have the authority to remove members of the FTC and the two dozen other similarly structured independent agencies at will.
“The real world consequences here are human beings exercising enormous governmental authority with a great deal of control over individuals and businesses … who ultimately do not answer to the president,” Sauer said.
“We think the text of the Constitution confers the executive power, all of it, on the president.”
‘Uncontrollable power’
The three liberal justices on the nine-member court expressed concerns that a ruling in the president’s favour would vastly increase the powers of the executive and strip independent agencies of protections from political influence.
“The result of what you want is that the president is going to have massive, unchecked, uncontrolled power,” Justice Elena Kagan told the solicitor general.
“If there’s one thing we know about the founders, it’s that they wanted powers separated,” Kagan said.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, another liberal, questioned the solicitor general along the same lines.
“You’re asking us to destroy the structure of government and to take away from Congress its ability to protect its idea that the government is better structured with some agencies that are independent,” Sotomayor said.
The FTC’s primary function is to protect the American public against deceptive or unfair business practices and it has taken on Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook parent Meta over how they wield market power.
The FTC consists of five commissioners, typically representing both major political parties, with a chair nominated by the president.
‘Not in the best interests’
Trump fired Slaughter and the other Democrat on the FTC in March, opening the door for the Republican to appoint loyalists at the agency.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a liberal, said it would be a mistake for the court to allow this.
“Independent agencies exist because Congress has decided that some issues, some matters, some areas, should be handled in this way by non-partisan experts,” Jackson said.
“Having a president come in and fire all the scientists and the doctors and the economists and the PhDs and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything is actually not in the best interests of the United States.”
The Supreme Court has overwhelmingly sided with Trump since he returned to office, allowing mass firing of federal workers, the withholding of funds appropriated by Congress and racial profiling in his sweeping immigration crackdown.
The court is to hear arguments next month over Trump’s bid to fire another senior official — Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook.
The justices blocked Trump in October from firing Cook until they could hear her case contesting her dismissal.
The Supreme Court is expected to give its decision in the FTC case by the end of June.
China, our proposed major fossil fuel market, has already stated it will electrify rapidly and dispense with carbon dependency. The opportunity cost of not embracing and investing in next-generation technologies will leave the country with expensive stranded assets and job losses.
A 2022 report by Canada's money laundering watchdog said Vancouver and Toronto are hubs for organized crime that can be linked to China. The same year, the B.C. government received a report on how it could crack down on money laundering in the province. (The Canadian Press/Rich Lam)
An internal government briefing note says Vancouver is still a “hub for China-linked organized crime” and money laundering, even as those organizations have pivoted away from washing dirty money through the city’s casinos.
A 2022 analysis of money laundering linked to China said Vancouver was a “hub” for washing dirty cash.
The Ranch Systems and Viability Planning (RSVP) network supports ranchers in the Northern Great Plains who want to improve their grazing management practices, increase education and skills related to ranch and grass management, monitor ecological changes over time, and network with other producers on similar paths. Currently, ranches must be in WWF’s SRI focal area of central and eastern Montana, western South Dakota, northeastern Wyoming, and the sandhills of Nebraska.
RSVP was started in 2020 and aims to make lasting positive ecological and community impacts across the Northern Great Plains by preventing grassland destruction and supporting improved grazing management. During the first five years, which were considered a pilot, the goal was to impact 1 million acres by 2025. We reached our million-acre goal one year ahead of schedule, and currently, there are 112 ranches enrolled in the program covering nearly 1.3 million acres. Through RSVP , WWF is not only supporting individual livestock producers but also supporting community resilience in rural areas by strengthening the grass-based economy.
Ranches enrolled in RSVP are provided with educational scholarships, access to financial assistance to support grazing infrastructure improvements, grazing and management technical assistance, and in-depth rangeland and ecological monitoring. The ecological monitoring project is the largest of its kind that is conducted on privately owned grasslands in the US. Monitoring crews measure soil organic carbon, soil stability, ground cover, vegetation characteristics, water infiltration, and grassland bird species.
I’ve written far more than I should have had to on the performative inclusion of “stakeholders” in post-2016 tech policymaking. This meant being invited into meetings with government and decision-makers, being told to “assume positive intent” as all manipulative types like to insist, only to find that your presence was strictly performative. You were either there so that they could tick the box of saying they had engaged with you, before proceeding to do what they were going to do anyway, or you were there so that they could spin your presence as an endorsement of what they were going to do anyway.
Turns out it wasn’t just me – the behaviour was so widespread that some academics have now done a study into how UKGov wields “stakeholder” engagement.
They conclude:
These findings show that the use of stakeholder tends to performatively entrench the existing power of “industry stakeholders” or nameless but clearly already engaged and empowered “key stakeholders”. Meanwhile, they also construct a false sense of inclusion through the non-performative use of generic or “other stakeholders”. This creates significant risk of a veil of accountability, and raises significant questions over established processes such as consultation. When it is unclear who is influencing policy, whose voices and interests are being represented, then the indicators from specific uses suggest that the stakeholder becomes a foil for amplifying historical power and privilege, often on political and/or economic lines, and in doing so excludes the needs of those most affected by technologies who already suffer a lack of agency in how data, AI, platforms and other areas are used to shape their lives.
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