The Lever - SCOTUS to America: Eat 💩

⏪ ICYMI in The Lever: Many clean energy boom towns voted for Trump. Will his administration put their jobs at risk?

👇 Spend four minutes reading this 996-word newsletter to learn about:

• A fresh SCOTUS ruling that could force Americans to literally eat shit.
• The history behind the tariff obsession.
• Trump’s massive jailbreak for corporations under investigation.
• Crypto’s newest ally on the Hill.
• The White House’s plan to lower egg costs.

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💩 San Francisco and SCOTUS team up to make you eat shit. The Roberts Court this morning delivered a 5-4 ruling for San Francisco in the city’s fight to kill off regulation of sewage discharge. The Environmental Protection Agency fined San Fran for dumping sewage into the ocean, but the city argued the rules were too vague. The court’s decision prevents the agency from holding a  polluter “responsible for the quality of the water in the body of water into which (it) discharges pollutants.” SCOTUS also recently limited EPA’s authority to combat climate change and protect wetlands.

🤑 Corporate Clemency For All? The Trump administration has halted 25 percent of pending federal corporate enforcement actions tracked by the nonprofit Public Citizen. In all, at least 89 corporations have been let off the hook since Jan. 20. Meanwhile, more than 30 corporations that donated a combined $34 million to Trump’s inauguration face 60 federal investigations and lawsuits — the fate of which seem less certain by the day.

🥚 They’re gaslighting you about eggs. Trump’s Agriculture Secretary just encouraged Fox News viewers who can’t afford eggs to consider raising chickens in their backyards (which probably won’t save money). Meanwhile, The Atlantic insists that “it’s weird that eggs were ever cheap” — an attempt to convince you to believe eggs are a luxury.

• USDA head Brooke Rollins’ grand plan for the egg crisis doesn’t involve regulating the monopolistic agrocartel choking out the industry — instead, the Trump administration will gift Big Egg up to $500 million for “biosecurity measures” while deregulating state laws mandating minimum spacing requirements for poultry... one of the few restrictions to slow the spread of avian flu on megafarms. 

🪙 The crypto cabal gets a new member. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) — who accepted a torrent of finance industry campaign cash — is teaming with House Republicans to launch the Congressional Crypto Caucus with the “goal of advancing crypto-friendly policies.” Torres has promoted cryptocurrencies as a boon for the working class — but research shows blockchains’ massive resource draw is actually hurting low-income communities. Crypto’s having a big week in D.C.

🚀 One small step for man, one giant leap for commercializing space. Four years after Jeff Bezos went to space, one private company just landed a module on the moon, and another successfully tested a supersonic jet. Huzzah — the private sector has achieved what the government achieved decades ago! Next, Bezos’ Blue Origin will shoot Katy Perry and Gayle King into outer orbit. 

🔍 Check our work — we link to all our sources in the web version of this newsletter.

From 2003 to 2018, the average amount of time Americans spent reading for personal interest fell by almost a third. (Source: American Academy of Arts and Sciences)

🍕 Delivery workers get their stolen tips back. DoorDash, the nation’s largest food delivery app, covertly used customers’ tips to subsidize the company’s own contributions towards workers’ wages. Now, it owes 60,000 New York couriers a combined $17 million in back tips. DoorDash spent millions along with Uber and Lyft lobbying for the right to keep underpaying drivers by keeping them in the gig economy.

In a composite image, President Donald Trump appears next to Texas billionaire Ross Perot.

Greedflation meets a trade war. Trump’s long-awaited tariffs on Mexican, Canadian, and Chinese goods went into effect this morning. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — who previously denounced tariffs as inflationary — claims prices won’t go up, even though economists largely predict they will. Much of the recent inflation came from monopolies using market power to inflate profits (greedflation) — which means tariffs will force corporations to choose whether to raise prices or accept lower margins. 

• “Companies are scared of the new administration,” writes Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project. “So, for instance, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook may decide he will simply eat the extra $35 or so charged on each iPhone, and lose a few billion in profit, rather than anger Trump.” 

NAFTA dies at age 32. Trump’s new tariffs come almost exactly 32 years after President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which ushered in an era of offshoring and deindustrialization — and a pivotal political shift of some blue-collar constituencies to Republicans as Democrats betrayed their promises to reform the deal. 

Where did Trump’s tariff obsession come from? Probably from the original Billionaire’s Campaign in 1992, when Texas mogul Ross Perot warned of a “giant sucking sound” of jobs if NAFTA passed, and pushed for a “social” tariff that would fluctuate with Mexico’s wages. Perot’s predictions were largely proven correct — and Trump’s first foray into presidential politics was with Perot’s Reform Party.  

Watch for the corruption. Companies will be lobbying for special tariff exemptions — and that could end up becoming a bacchanal of corruption, just like it did during Trump’s first term. One study of campaign finance data found that “politicians are effectively using [tariff] exemptions to reward supporters and withholding exemptions to punish supporters of their opposition.”

JB Pritzker might be doing great things as Illinois’ governor, but televised boasts of being “an actual billionaire” (see last year’s DNC) are probably not going to help Democrats depict themselves as an authentic opposition to oligarchy.

✊ Tell Your Governor: Protect Workers Rights! With a new, anti-union president, the battle to protect workers’ rights shifts to the statehouse. Trump’s top surrogate, Elon Musk, is currently suing in the hopes of getting the Supreme Court to kill the National Labor Relations Act.

🐚 Martian waves, beach days. New evidence suggests Mars was once home to giant vacation-worthy beaches with wind, water, and sand. Don’t tell Jared Kushner.

🪷 He-who-must-not-be-named checked into The White Lotus. Mike White, you’ve done it again.

💫 (Bill Murray singing voice): Star Wars, nothing but Staaar Wars. Season 2 is coming. LFG.

Once you realize that everything is rigged for the rich, it all becomes clearer.

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