The States Hold Meta to Account

The settlement between Meta Platforms and nearly all state governments to resolve litigation concerning the harms to young people caused by its social media apps is a landmark in corporate accountability. With a potential value of more than $17 billion, it is the second largest corporate penalty of the past 25 years, surpassed only by the $20.8 billion settlement paid by BP in 2015 in connection with the Deepwater Horizon oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

It is by far the largest payout by a tech company, more than tripling the previous record of $5 billion paid by Meta itself in 2019 after the Federal Trade Commission found that it failed to comply with a 2012 order to stop deceiving users about their ability to control the privacy of personal information.

The new settlement brings Meta’s U.S. cumulative penalty total since 2000 to more than $25 billion, putting it in eighth place, just behind Volkswagen’s $26.2 billion total, which is linked largely to its emissions cheating scandal.

On the other hand, the amount being paid by Meta is only a fraction of the more than $100 billion Philip Morris has shelled out as its share of the massive settlement between the tobacco companies and the states in the late 1990s.

There is no question that Meta can easily afford to give up the $17 billion. This is a company, after all, that took in over $200 billion in revenue last year and currently has a market cap of $1.4 trillion. The deal is made more affordable by the fact that Meta’s payments will be spread out over a decade. The company also stands to lose a lot less than would be the case if the U.S. were to follow the lead of other countries and ban social media entirely for young people.

The question, as always, is whether a substantial penalty will get the company to change its practices. Fortunately, the settlement with the states is not purely monetary.

The agreement also requires Meta to make changes in its Instagram and Facebook services with the aim of discouraging compulsive use by young users. The company is supposed to re-program the apps to prevent minors from using them more than two hours a day and not at all after midnight. The limits are supposed to become stricter if operators of other platforms agree.

Among the other provisions are limits on notifications and the creation of an option for a non-personalized feed that doesn’t use an algorithm and thus doesn’t promote endlessly scrolling. The company is also required to give an independent auditor extensive access to internal data and will be subject to an injunction prohibiting it from making false, misleading, or deceptive statements about its safety features.

The settlement is unusual in that a substantial portion of the payout is contingent on Meta’s success in getting its main social media competitors to agree to similar restrictions and pay their own penalties. Meta was apparently willing to incur a larger legal liability if its platforms are not the only ones bound by the restrictions on under-age usage.

The Meta settlement may not completely eliminate the problem of social media addiction, but it shows how the states can join together to address a corporate abuse at a time when federal oversight is missing in action.

For Once a Corporation is in the Right

The Dirt Diggers Digest is normally in the business of cheering on regulators and prosecutors as they go after rogue corporations. I tend to be skeptical of claims of government overreach made by business apologists.

In the bizarro world created by the Trump Administration, I am at the moment forced to take a different stance. I find myself in the unfamiliar position of rooting for a major corporation in a dispute with a federal agency.

I am speaking, of course, about the conflict between the Walt Disney Company and the Federal Communications Commission. Disney and its American Broadcasting Company subsidiary have taken the unusual step of bringing suit to halt to an FCC process that threatens ABC’s broadcast licenses.

Like so much of what the Trump Administration does, the FCC’s move is based on a flimsy premise; namely, the claim that ABC has engaged in prohibited diversity practices. Trump and his administration’s officials like to bandy about the illegal DEI charge as if it had some solid basis in law. In fact, it derives solely from dubious executive orders issued by Trump asserting that any policies designed to remedy discrimination are themselves discriminatory.

The argument is especially problematic when it comes to the FCC. Back in the 1960s, public interest groups pressured the agency to adopt policies to combat discrimination and promote diversity in the communications industry. The policies required broadcasters to take positive steps to promote the hiring and promotion of minorities and women.

The FCC’s MAGA-friendly chairman Brendan Carr may not be aware that his agency’s website still has a page on equal employment rules and policies that includes the following statement: “The EEO rules require broadcasters employing five or more full-time employees, and MVPDs [multichannel video programming distributors] employing six or more full-time employees, to maintain an EEO recruitment program. The recruitment rules include requirements to provide notice of job vacancies and to undertake additional outreach measures to all qualified job candidates, such as holding job fairs and establishing scholarship programs.” That sure sounds like DEI.

Apart from the FCC’s hypocrisy, there is the fact that Disney has already been reversing many of its diversity initiatives and has removed references to DEI from its SEC filings.

In short, Disney is well justified in arguing that the FCC’s unorthodox review of ABC’s licenses has little to do with DEI and is, instead, part of Trump’s vendetta against what he views as unfriendly news media outlets. Disney’s lawyers did not have to work very hard to make their case. In their court filing, they quoted various statements from Trump himself calling for the revocation of licenses of  such outlets.

None of this is to claim that Disney is a paragon of corporate virtue. The company has a problematic history when it comes to labor practices at its theme parks and in the foreign sweatshops that produced its merchandise.

It has also faced charges of discrimination, and last year it agreed to pay $43 million to settle class action litigation alleging it paid thousands of women in middle management less than their male counterparts But such serious discrimination is not what the FCC is targeting.

As long as this regulator is helping to carry out Trump’s grievance campaign, it does not deserve support from those of us concerned about corporate accountability.

How To Confront Corporate Abuses

Amid the endless threats to democracy and social well-being posed by the Trump Administration, less attention may be given to the more enduring harms created by the powerful corporations that control so much of our life. A valuable reminder of the importance of confronting those business behemoths can be found in a new book by Michael Marx called Reining in the Bulls: How to Stop Corporate Abuses in an Age of Unbridled Greed.

Marx has produced the first comprehensive guide to what are known as corporate campaigns: efforts by environmental groups and other civil society organizations to pressure companies to alter specific detrimental practices. They are also called pressure campaigns, market campaigns, or anti-corporate campaigns. Examples include the Greenpeace effort to get Nestle to stop using palm oil linked to rainforest destruction in Indonesia and the campaign by the Natural Resources Defense Council and U.S. PIRG to get Columbia Sportswear to eliminate toxic PFAS forever chemicals from its products.

The “how to” in Marx’s subtitle should be taken literally. His book provides detailed tips on every aspect of a corporate campaign—from documenting the harm and choosing the target company to the choice of tactics, recruitment of allies, fundraising, and much more. For those situations in which companies bend to the pressure, he offers advice on negotiating agreements that will institutionalize the victory. For those in which the company resists, he offers guidance on dealing with the counterattack. (Full disclosure: in his chapter on power-mapping the target company, Marx makes a brief complimentary reference to my Dirt Diggers Digest research guide.)

Marx is well qualified for this task. For the past 30 years, he has worked on corporate campaigns with groups such as Rainforest Action Network, ForestEthics (now Stand.earth), and the Sierra Club. He founded Corporate Ethics International, which gave rise to the Business Ethics Network, a sort of trade association for corporate campaign groups.

Like all good handbooks, Reining in the Bulls is full of lists such as the Corporate Ethics Ten Commandments and the Typical Stages of a Corporate Campaign. There are various step-by-step guides to campaign elements, including shareholder advocacy, recruitment of corporate insiders, and mobilization of actions both online and in the streets. There is even a chapter on the challenges (and rewards) of devoting one’s life to corporate campaigns.

Despite all this valuable content, there are a couple of gaps. First, I would have liked to see more attention paid to corporate campaigns mounted by labor unions. In his preface, Marx mentions the path-breaking role of the campaign against J.P. Stevens conducted by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in the 1970s, and he notes a few others such as the Steelworkers campaign against Ravenswood Aluminum in the 1990s. Yet, for the rest of the book, unions are pretty much ignored, even though Marx has a whole chapter on organizing employees of target companies. The chapter on organizing shareholders does not discuss the important work done by activist union pension funds.

It would also have been helpful to have more content oriented to grassroots corporate campaigns. Marx focuses on efforts launched by groups with significant resources, including paid staff, foundation funding, and a robust online presence. It thus makes sense that he recommends, for instance, that organizations carry liability insurance and pay to obtain targeted mailing lists.

But what about groups that are operating on a shoestring? They are the ones that need the most help in conducting their campaigns. Much of Marx’s guidance will serve them well, but they have many additional challenges.

Addressing those challenges is all the more urgent, given that the most vibrant form of corporate campaigning seen today are the grassroots groups that have sprung up across the country to fight against the explosion of data center construction in support of the AI mania. They need all the help they can get.

That said, I hope Marx’s book inspires more people to take up the noble cause of confronting corporate abuses of all kinds.

Trump’s Latest Sham Tariffs

Donald Trump needs tariffs almost as much as he needs flattery. For him they function less as a trade tool and more as a cudgel that allows him to exercise his will against other countries. They also create a system under which domestic corporations need to curry favor with him to get exemptions for their specific products.

Given their importance to him, Trump is willing to do just about anything to preserve his tariff initiatives. That includes ignoring the powers of Congress and concocting far-fetched rationales to try to get around adverse Supreme Court rulings.

The latest concoction is the recent announcement that Trump is imposing a new set of tariffs on 60 countries because of their supposed failures to prevent the importation of goods produced with forced labor. These duties range from 10 to 12.5 percent.

Forced labor is a real problem, but Trump is hardly a credible champion of labor rights. One only has to look at his inconsistent posture toward China, widely viewed as the biggest culprit.

The report that the U.S. Trade Representative issued to justify the new tariffs contains very little in the way of real evidence. The fact that it lumps countries such as Australia and Canada together with China makes it all the more dubious.

Critics of Trump’s plan argue that the tariffs will make it more difficult for countries to work together to adopt stronger measures against forced labor. The U.S. has already been an obstacle to such efforts, given its refusal to ratify the International Labor Organization’s 2014 Protocol to the Forced Labor Convention of 1930.

There is also evidence that Trump’s tariff pretext may be undermining legitimate work being done to combat forced labor in some countries. Two NGOs in Chile, Libera and Ecoceanos, report that their staff members have received death threats and other forms of intimidation after the groups were blamed for the new U.S. tariff on Chilean goods.

In a published interview, the director of Ecoceanos, acknowledged that his organization did provide information to the U.S. Trade Representative regarding abusive conditions in Chilean agriculture and fish farming, but he said the group recommended against raising tariffs and instead sought help in getting the Chilean government to adopt stronger measures against forced labor.

Back in the U.S., the new Trump tariffs are not going unchallenged. A group of 25 states have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade arguing that the measures are pretextual and are inconsistent with prior forced labor cases brought under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 and the language of that statute.

The states’ complaint points out that the “USTR identifies no mechanism by which an economy could be released from the tariffs through strengthened forced-labor-import enforcement, sets no benchmarks to measure the effectiveness of a country’s import controls, and erects an effective floor of 10% even on countries that the USTR acknowledges are making efforts to combat forced-labor-imports, signaling that no level of remedial action would suffice to lift the tariffs under this Administration.”

It is widely expect that the tariffs will not survive judicial scrutiny, but until that happens they will bring harm both to economies around the world and to the real movement against forced labor.

Trial Lawyers Outshine Federal Prosecutors

Johnson & Johnson has just agreed to pay at least $5.5 billion to settle tens of thousands of claims that its talcum powder products cause ovarian cancer. A federal court recently gave final approval to a settlement in which Anthropic will pay out $1.5 billion to authors who claimed the AI company improperly used their work to train its Claude chatbot. Last month, another federal court gave preliminary approval to a settlement in which Visa and Mastercard will reduce swipe fees charged to merchants by tens of billions of dollars over the next decade.

While all this has been happening, the Justice Department seems to be doing everything possible to avoid major cases against large corporations. The DOJ has not announced a single case resolution with a fine anywhere near $1 billion since Trump retook office. Many investigations have been dropped, and others are not starting in the first place.

It used to be that federal prosecutors and plaintiff’s lawyers worked in a kind of coordination. The feds would bring a criminal action against a company for misconduct and thereby set the stage for a follow-on private civil action.

Now the DOJ is making life a lot easier for rogue companies. Along with abandoning many prosecutions, Justice is allowing many corporate defendants to avoid criminal charges by offering them leniency in the form of non-prosecution agreements, deferred protection agreements, and declinations. This makes those follow-on civil lawsuits more challenging.

Additional obstacles have been erected by the business-friendly conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Among other things, SCOTUS recently ruled in favor of Monsanto and its parent Bayer in litigation relating to the herbicide Roundup.

Trial lawyers, nonetheless, continue to file a steady stream of class actions and achieve many substantial settlements. In the dozen categories covered in Violation Tracker, about 50 settlements worth $50 million or more have received final court approval since the beginning of 2025. About half of those had a value of $100 million or more.

There are also many settlements that have been agreed to by the parties but which have not yet received final court approval (and thus are not yet shown in Violation Tracker). About three dozen of these are worth at least $50 million, including 18 with a value of $100 million or more. The most frequent issues in these cases are price-fixing, privacy abuses, and consumer protection violations. The defendants include some of the biggest names in the corporate world, such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Comcast, and AT&T.

With the feds increasingly out of the picture, plaintiff’s lawyers often find themselves working parallel to state attorneys general instead. This has occurred most notably in the national opioid litigation, which has yielded more than $70 billion in settlements from drug companies and pharmacy chains.

The Trump Justice Department may be focused on the wrist-slapping of business defendants, but rogue corporations are still being held to account in a serious way by the states and by the plaintiffs’ bar.

The Big Retreat from Enforcement

Tech barons have long dreamed of creating a libertarian territory free of all regulation and taxation. They have not yet succeeded in that self-serving effort, but the Trump Administration is increasingly adopting policies that push the United States in that direction.

One sign of that is the growing decriminalization of business misconduct. The trend has reached the point that the Wall Street Journal published a front-page story this week headlined “Justice Department Pulls Back on Corporate Crime.” The article noted that the DOJ has recently been “closing a string of criminal investigations with lenient resolutions or no charges at all.”

The DOJ often defends that approach by claiming it is better to prosecute individual executives rather than the company. Yet the Journal points out that in those recent cases no charges were brought against individuals either.

This permissive approach is not limited to criminal cases. It also appears to be the modus operandi of many regulatory agencies. The New York Times recently reported that the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which is charged with investigating discriminatory practices at federal contractors, inexplicably dropped a case involving pervasive and egregious sexual harassment at the Navy shipyard operated by BAE Systems in Norfolk, Virginia. The investigation was also said to have found that black women were paid less and promoted less frequently than their male counterparts.

It appears that many other cases are being dropped or not initiated. Since Trump began his second term, the OFCCP has not announced a single new conciliation agreement, the document used when the agency has reached a settlement with a contractor to end an abuse.

A related agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, is radically changing the way it operates. It is abandoning cases in which employer practices have a disparate negative impact on certain groups of workers, usually racial minorities. It is also undermining future cases of that kind by moving toward the elimination of the requirement that large employers report demographic information on their workforce through the EEO-1 survey. At the same time, the EEOC is giving priority to cases in which white men claim they are victims of reverse discrimination.

A retreat from enforcement can also be seen in the environmental arena. The EPA is announcing fewer and fewer major penalty cases against polluters. Trump is helping to undermine regulations by issuing a series of pardons to individuals who had been convicted of crimes under the Clean Air Act for selling devices that enable diesel trucks to defeat their emission controls and thus emit far more pollution.

The same goes for consumer protection, especially with regard to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which once took on the big banks and is now a shell of its former self. After Trump returned to office, the CFPB was essentially demolished. Now it is being brought back to life for the pernicious purpose of investigating non-profit community lenders whose customers may include immigrants.

Regulatory agencies, like the Justice Department, are increasingly being shorn of their legitimate enforcement functions and are showing vigor only when it comes to pursuing MAGA ideological objectives.

Is the Price-Fixing Crackdown for Real?

Throughout his second term, Donald Trump has struggled to find an effective message on the issue of inflation. For a time, he tried to deny the problem existed, choosing to depict the affordability crisis as an invention of the Democrats.

Then he concocted far-fetched claims such as the idea that “illegal aliens” were to blame. After his attack on Iran caused fuel and other prices to shoot up, Trump insisted the increase would last only a short time.

Now, at long last, Trump seems to be acknowledging that inflation is real and the government needs to do something about it. Yet, of course, he wants to give the impression he can solve the problem with what amounts to a wave of a magic wand. He just tried that by taking credit for some selective grocery price reductions announced by Walmart, only to end up with egg on his face when the retailer disclosed that the cuts were scheduled well before Trump stepped in.

Apart from Trump’s antics, some parts of the administration are taking a more serious approach by focusing on one of the  more significant causes of high prices: collusion among producers.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission put out a statement saying they are taking a close look at anti-competitive practices  in the gasoline industry while also urging state attorneys general to conduct investigations and bring appropriate enforcement actions.

Around the same time, the DOJ and state AGs announced that they had been working together to investigate actions by the country’s largest egg producers to inflate prices by manipulating an industry benchmark rate. Companies such as Cal-Maine agreed to settle the case by paying the states $3.3 million in cash and donating over 50 million eggs to food banks and community organizations.

Earlier, there were reports that the DOJ was investigating the big meatpacking companies to determine whether they are manipulating the price of beef. This came after Trump made some fleeting social media comments about collusion in the industry.

These moves by DOJ and the FTC stand in contrast to the lackluster approach to antitrust that has marked Trump 2.0, especially when it comes to criminal price fixing cases. Yet it is unclear how seriously they should be taken. They may be little more than another facet of the administration’s current effort to give the impression it is getting tougher on price manipulation–to placate angry voters until after the midterms–while not much may actually change.

The emphasis on the state AGs in the DOJ-FTC statement may be setting the stage for passing the blame when little comes of the initiative.

If the administration were serious about addressing price manipulation, the place to look would be the realm of private litigation. Class action lawsuits have been filed alleging price fixing abuses in industries ranging from pork products to PVC piping. Tens of millions of dollars in settlements have been reached.

Back in the 1960s the country was riveted by a case in which managers at more than two dozen electrical equipment manufacturers, including General Electric and Westinghouse, were charged with price-fixing and bid-rigging for heavy-duty utility equipment. Some of the defendants ended up serving prison time.

Until we see corporate executives being led away in handcuffs and put on trial, the Trump administration’s campaign against price-fixing cannot be taken too seriously.

Trump’s Interventionist Power Trip

Dual Freq, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Donald Trump may have thought that giving a 250th Independence Day speech at Mount Rushmore would help his shameless effort to have his image added to those of Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lincoln.

Instead, what he earned is an eventual spot at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Appleton, Wisconsin, the final resting place of Sen. Joe McCarthy. That’s because Trump devoted a significant portion of his address to the kind of crude Communist scare rhetoric McCarthy employed to such harmful effect 70 years ago.

Trump’s Red Scare revival is his response to the growing political success of candidates identifying themselves as democratic socialists. Ignoring the policies these candidates actually endorse, Trump conflated socialism with communism and denounced both as threats to American liberty in the most simplistic terms.

It is unclear whether Trump is aware that the key characteristic of socialism is government control of the means of production, especially major industries. Someone should point out to him that his administration has moved the country further in that direction than any president since FDR.

Over the past year, Trump has pressured various corporations to give the federal government partial ownership or control of their operations, or a share of their profits.

After reversing the Biden Administration’s rejection of Nippon Steel’s purchase of U.S. Steel, Trump obtained a golden share that gave the federal government a substantial amount of influence over the company.

In exchange for permission to export certain AI chips to China, Nvidia and AMD had to agree to hand over 15 percent of their Chinese revenue to Uncle Sam.

The federal government took an equity stake of nearly 10 percent in Intel, which was financed in part by converting grants the company was supposed to receive under the Biden-era CHIPS and Science Act.

The Pentagon invested $400 million in MP Materials, a company created to reduce U.S. dependence on China for rare earth resources, positioning the government as the company’s largest shareholder with an effective 15 percent stake.

The Trump Administration signed an $80 billion strategic partnership with Westinghouse Electric to build nuclear power plants across the country. The arrangement could end up with a 20 percent stake in Westinghouse, whose current majority owner is Brookfield Asset Management.

The administration signed preliminary agreements to provide $2 billion in funding and take equity stakes in nine companies, including IBM, involved in quantum computing.  

According to the Council on Foreign Relations’ U.S. Government Deal Tracker, the federal government has negotiated equity stakes and other forms of involvement in at least 30 companies.

Previous presidents took such actions reluctantly, usually as part of bailouts meant to address financial crises, and they arranged it so that federal investments were time-limited. Trump, by contrast, relishes his interventions and seems to be angling for many more.

While some of the investments may make economic sense, there is little indication that they are part of a coherent strategy or that they are providing real benefits to the public. Instead, the deals often seem to be motivated mainly by Trump’s desire to exercise control over as many things as possible. They are less a matter of industrial policy than they are additional fuel for a never-ending power trip.

It may also turn out that these deals, like so much of what the administration does, are somehow enriching Trump family interests.

Trump may think that rekindling old-style red-baiting will help Republicans in the mid-term election, but this tactic cannot hide the fact that his economic policies are failing to serve the needs of the vast majority of the population.

Presidential Capture

For many years, the U.S. regulatory system has been hampered by the excessive influence large corporations and trade associations exercise over the agencies. Critics call this regulatory capture.

With its sweeping new ruling establishing the right of the president to fire agency commissioners at will, the Supreme Court has created another impediment to effective oversight of business. Let’s call it presidential capture.

In theory, giving the White House absolute control over the leadership of the agencies could be a good thing—if the President in office strongly believed in curbing corporate abuses. That is far from the case with regard to the current occupant of the Oval Office. Trump regards the regulatory agencies the same way he views the Justice Department—as a means to reward his friends and punish his perceived enemies. The rewards include deregulatory policies such as severe cutbacks in environmental protection, while the punishments include moves such as the FCC’s threats to rescind the licenses of television networks that don’t adhere to MAGA ideology.

From the point of view of corporate accountability, now is the worst possible time to give the president more power over regulation. For all of their limitations, the formerly independent agencies have engaged in a significant amount of enforcement. My colleagues and I have been documenting those efforts in Violation Tracker. Here are some highlights of the track records of the major agencies now effectively under Trump’s thumb.

Securities and Exchange Commission. Created in 1934, the SEC oversees securities markets and protects investors. Among other things, it helps to enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. For the period from 2000 to the present, Violation Tracker documents more than 3,000 successful enforcement actions against companies, with total penalties of $45 billion. For example, in 2020 Wells Fargo paid a penalty of $500 million in connection with the bogus bank accounts scandal.

Federal Trade Commission. With responsibilities relating to consumer protection and merger oversight, the FTC, created in 1914, has completed more than 600 successful enforcement actions against companies since 2000, collecting $19 billion in penalties. Among its biggest cases was a $5 billion penalty imposed on Facebook in 2019 for deceiving users about its privacy policies.

Environmental Protection Agency. Created in 1970, the EPA is charged with enforcing laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Since 2000, it has collected more than $70 billion in penalties from some 22,000 enforcement actions. Among its most significant cases was a $14 billion settlement in 2016 with Volkswagen relating to allegations that the automaker rigged emissions tests to deceive regulators and the public about the amount of pollution generated by its vehicles.

National Labor Relations Board. Established in 1935, the role of the NLRB is to safeguard the right of workers to organize and to remedy unfair labor practices. Violation Tracker documents only those cases in which an employer agreed to provide back pay to workers improperly fired for union activity. Not all of these agreements are made public. The database contains data on more than 14,000 cases in which $1.7 billion in back pay was disclosed. The largest case involved a $130 million payment by Alcatel-Lucent, now Nokia, in 2001.

There are a couple of dozen other entities that were set up as independent agencies whose independence has now been obliterated by the Supreme Court. One notable exception is the Federal Reserve, which it is worth noting is not only the country’s central bank but also one of the agencies that regulate banks.

The Fed oversees bank holding companies and some state-chartered banks. Since 2000, the Fed has brought some 185 successful enforcement actions against such banks, collecting over $7 billion in penalties. For example, in 2015 the Fed imposed $1.8 billion in fines on six major banks for abuses relating to foreign exchange markets.

The Supreme Court’s decision to prevent Trump from ousting Fed governor Lisa Cook on the same day it established the president’s right to fire commissioners at will at every other regulatory agency shows the arbitrary nature of the Court’s action.

SCOTUS’s effective abolition of independent regulatory agencies is less a victory for Trump than it is the culmination of a decades-long effort to consolidate presidential control of the executive branch, in part to protect the interests of big business. The Right may be celebrating now, but it may later come to regret its success. If the country ever elects a truly progressive president, the tables will be turned and it will be a lot easier to hold corporations to account.

Thrown Out of Court

The conservatives on the Supreme Court are fervent in the promotion of religious freedom, but they seem to be even more ardent in their efforts to protect corporate power. This is once again clear in a new ruling in a case involving tech giant Cisco Systems.

Cisco has been the defendant in a lawsuit brought on behalf of a group of Chinese nationals who accused the company of building a surveillance system used by the Chinese Communist Party to assist in the persecution of members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement.

The Chinese plaintiffs filed their case under the Alien Tort Statute, which for several decades has been used by foreign citizens to hold corporations and other parties accountable in U.S. courts for alleged human rights violations around the world, including cases involving torture and genocide. It has been employed by groups such as EarthRights International to bring suits on behalf of individuals and communities against companies such as Unocal, Chevron, Shell, and Chiquita.

It has not been an easy task. Although the law was originally enacted in 1789, the supposed originalists on the Court have treated it with disdain, repeatedly narrowing its application. The new ruling continues that trend by effectively overruling a 2004 decision.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett literally said the ruling closes the door on the ability of plaintiffs to sue for violations of international norms. While acknowledging Alien Tort Statute cases often involve “heinous and inhumane acts,” she claims that such transgressions should be addressed by the political branches of the U.S. government.

It is impossible to imagine the current executive branch taking on that responsibility. In fact, the SCOTUS ruling comes only days after the Trump Justice Department urged a federal court in Mississippi to throw out an environmental lawsuit brought by the NAACP to stop Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence business xAI from operating dozens of natural-gas-burning turbines in the state without having a permit.

In doing so, the DOJ made the far-fetched argument that the turbines are essential to U.S. national security and took the outrageous position that the federal government should have unchallenged authority to block environmental lawsuits brought by private groups or individuals.

It is not surprising to see the Trump Administration or the right-wingers on the Supreme Court side with corporate interests. What is alarming is the extent to which they are trying to prevent citizen groups from bringing suits against corporate abuses at all.

At a time when the regulatory system is swinging sharply in favor of business, NGOs should be able to turn to the courts for some measure of relief. As that option is increasingly unavailable, large companies will become untouchable.

That trend is exacerbated by the inclination of many large companies to ingratiate themselves with an administration that is perfectly willing to provide special favors to those it regards as allies. A combination of corporate legal immunity and unabashed cronyism does not bode well for the future of democracy.