Posts Tagged ‘Eric Schneiderman’

Another step toward climate speechcrime: New York subpoenas

Months of agitation promoting a government investigation of supposedly wrongful advocacy on the issue of climate change have begun to pay off. As Holman Jenkins [paywall] notes, purportedly levelheaded Democrats and environmentalists are now jumping on the bandwagon for a probe of possible unlawful speech or non-speech by energy companies and advocacy groups they’ve backed. Perhaps the most remarkable name on that list is Hillary Clinton, who said the other day in New Hampshire, referring to Exxon, “There’s a lot of evidence that they misled people.” That’s right: Hillary Clinton, of all people, now wants to make it unlawful for those who engage in public controversy to mislead people.

The first high-profile law enforcer to bite, it seems, will be Eric Schneiderman, whose doings I’ve examined at length lately. “The New York attorney general has launched an investigation into Exxon Mobil to determine whether the country’s largest oil and gas company lied to investors about how global warming could hurt its balance sheets and also hid the risks posed by climate change from the public,” reports U.S. News. Show me the denier, as someone almost said, and I will find you the crime: “The Martin Act is a nearly empty vessel into which the AG can pour virtually any content that he wants,” as Reuters points out. More on the Martin Act here and here.

At Forbes, Daniel Fisher notes the possible origins of the legal action in an environmentalist-litigator confab in 2012 (“Climate Accountability Initiative”) in which participants speculated that getting access to the internal files of energy companies and advocacy groups could be a way to blow up the climate controversy politically. Fisher also notes that Justice Stephen Breyer, in the Nike v. Kasky case dismissed 12 years ago on other grounds, warned that it will tend to chill advocacy both truthful and otherwise by businesses if opponents can seize on disagreements on contentious public issues and run to court with complaints of consumer (or presumably securities) fraud.

Perhaps in this case chilling advocacy is the whole point. And very much related: my colleague Roger Pilon’s post last week, “Whatever Happened to the Left’s Love of Free Speech?“; Robert Samuelson (“The advocates of a probe into Exxon Mobil are essentially proposing that the company be punished for expressing its opinions.”)

Filed under: climate change, climate deniers to the wall, Eric Schneiderman, Exxon, free speech, Hillary Clinton, oil industry, subpoenas

Banking and finance roundup

Robert Litan in Fortune on why Elizabeth Warren went after him;
“Economists have no idea how to measure the value created by the financial sector.” [Arnold Kling]
W$J at end of August had an investigative report on the (opaque, high-discretion, unaccountable) system of installing “monitors” in banks and other financial institutions to settle civil or criminal charges;
Update: in a sidebar to my City Journal piece on New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman this summer, I covered his charges of “redlining” against small upstate banks that did not operate in inner cities; now Schneiderman has extracted $825,000 from a Buffalo bank [NY AG press release]
No kangaroo courts at the SEC, please [Bloomberg View editorial on in-house adjudicators, earlier here, etc.]
How the FATCA law, deplored in this space for years, makes life hard for U.S. expatriates/spouses [Colleen Graffy, WSJ]
“Except for the ten to twelve million people who use them every year, just about everybody hates payday loans.” [New York Fed “Liberty Street Economics” via Tabarrok] Despite reports of FDIC back-off, Operation Choke Point controversy not over [Ballard Spahr via Kevin Funnell]

Filed under: banks, Elizabeth Warren, Eric Schneiderman, FATCA, Operation Choke Point, settlement monitors

Eric Schneiderman’s herbal-supplements adventure

“Never apologize, never explain” is not a maxim to recommend for a state’s top law enforcer, and that goes for New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the subject of my recent City Journal piece. Early this year Schneiderman charged that herbal supplements on sale at GNC, Walmart and other major retailers, when subjected to special tests arranged by his office, were found to lack DNA associated with the advertised herbs. Within days close observers and experts in the field had deduced why Schneiderman’s tests had produced such remarkable results: he had relied on testing methods badly unsuited to identifying active ingredients in substances that, like most of the supplements, had undergone extensive processing [see, e.g., Nicola Twilley, New Yorker; Live Science; Bill Hammond, New York Daily News]

Other officials might have beat a timely retreat. Schneiderman’s office instead dug in, refusing to apologize, back down or even publicly disclose key facts about its testing methods. I’ve done a Cato Daily Podcast with Caleb Brown about the whole episode, including what is perhaps the most ominous aspect: such is the legal leverage of a New York attorney general that the targets chose to settle anyway. City Journal piece, again, here.

Filed under: Eric Schneiderman, on TV and radio, pharmaceuticals

The very model of a Left attorney general

My lengthy profile of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in the new City Journal ranges over many topics, including mortgage and Wall Street settlements; Uber, Lyft, AirBnB and the sharing economy; unions’ efforts to light legal fires under fast-food operators; the unreconstructed Left politics of Manhattan’s Upper East Side; and much more, including Schneiderman’s dubious campaign against herbal supplement retailers. One section that I hope is of interest beyond New York is a sidebar on the politics of state attorney general offices. An excerpt:

…State attorneys general really took off as players on the national scene in the 1970s and 1980s, a period in which the number of staff attorneys in AG offices quadrupled, according to figures in Paul Nolette’s new book, Federalism on Trial. Once the National Association of Attorneys General, or NAAG, began to take a more active role in helping beef up and coordinate formerly scattered efforts, multistate AG litigation, in which many state offices band together to file suit, began to grow, from fewer than five cases a year three decades ago to 40 to 50 cases a year more recently.

Is this a spontaneous upsurge reflecting the decentralized genius of our system? Not quite: as Nolette explains, Congress was, in fact, busy over this period funneling federal grants to state AG offices to build up their strike-force capacity against business defendants, while revamping laws to give them more enforcement power. The executive branch helped, too: “[F]ederal agencies have aggressively promoted [state AG] litigation working groups,” Nolette writes….

The tobacco episode — and the idea it encouraged that AGs should step in to reform national industries through litigation and master settlement when the U.S. Congress declined to do so — changed everything. One of its consequences was to send hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars in settlement money sloshing through the formerly sleepy AG offices:

…It’s common for AGs’ offices to keep at least enough money from settlements to cover their own investigation; state laws vary widely, however, on whether they have to turn over surplus money to a general fund. When they don’t do so, the AG office can quickly become a power center, handing out (in effect) appropriations that bypass the state legislature’s scrutiny. In states like Arkansas, Massachusetts, and West Virginia, AG offices have channeled settlement funds to health nonprofits, police and fire charities, and agencies of their own choosing within state, county, and local government. Other favored beneficiaries include legal-aid programs, bar associations, and law schools—the legal profession being, of course, a key political constituency of any AG’s office. With control over big money flows, smart AGs can populate a political landscape with grateful allies. …

Last week I linked a sidebar on the legal system’s failure to protect businesses (small banks, in this case) from the exercise of arbitrary authority by officials like Schneiderman. While my piece is critical of his enforcement actions, it also makes clear that most of what he’s up to simply applies the set of far-reaching powers assembled by earlier state attorneys general before him, from Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo in New York to figures in other states like Jerry Brown, Richard Blumenthal, Jim Hood, and even Bill Clinton. Whole thing here.

Filed under: attorneys general, Eric Schneiderman, WO writings

One small banker’s warning

Small banks and other regulated businesses now live at the permission of arbitrary regulators in a legal system that no longer protects individual rights. That’s the message of a letter sent to shareholders earlier this year by Frank H. Hamlin III, CEO of the small Canandaigua National Bank in upstate New York. In particular, Hamlin cites the way the office of New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman has pushed around two other upstate banks (not his) on ill-defined redlining charges based on doing too much of their lending in the suburbs. I write about it in a new post at Cato at Liberty.

The piece is a sidebar from a much longer piece I wrote on Schneiderman’s record in the Summer issue of City Journal, newly online. I’ll have more to say next week about other parts of that article.

Filed under: banks, Eric Schneiderman, New York state, rule of law

“Occupy Albany: New York’s far-left attorney general”

Just out: the New York Post excerpts my upcoming cover story in City Journal on business-bashing New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. The full piece is much longer and gets into a host of individual controversies omitted for space from this one.

Filed under: attorneys general, Eric Schneiderman, New York state, WO writings

New York investigates retailers over unpredictable schedules

“New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, has sent a letter to 13 retailers asking for information about how they schedule employees for work, the Wall Street Journal reports. Not on the list of targets for the attorney general: CVS, Starbucks, or Costco.” New York is one of eight states with a “reporting-time” statute that, Schneiderman argues, requires an employer to pay for at least four hours of work when it has obtained employees’ agreement to be available for work, whether or not it actually calls on them to come in. [Ira Stoll, Future of Capitalism; NPR]

Filed under: Eric Schneiderman, New York, wage and hour suits

When unexplained deaths happen, borrow from the British?

The coroner’s inquest, familiar to readers of Agatha Christie, might be worth importing to the U.S. to look into police-caused deaths [Josh Voorhees, Slate, on ideas of Paul MacMahon]

Related: “The Grand Jury System Is Broken” [John Steele Gordon, Commentary, written post-Ferguson, pre-Garner]; New York Times “Room for Debate“; New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman asks for authority to take over prosecutorial authority in police shootings [WGRZ (auto-plays), New York Observer, Paul Cassell]; Harvey Silverglate via Todd Zywicki (don’t gut grand jury protections). And from Michael Bell, “What I Did After Police Killed My Son,” Politico: “In 129 years since police and fire commissions were created in the state of Wisconsin, we could not find a single ruling by a police department, an inquest or a police commission that a shooting was unjustified. …As a military pilot, I knew that if law professionals investigated police-related deaths like, say, the way that the National Transportation Safety Board investigated aviation mishaps, police-related deaths would be at an all time low.” (& Wisconsin aftermath)

Filed under: Eric Schneiderman, New York, police, prosecution, United Kingdom

Schneiderman demands 225,000 NYC AirBnB users’ records

Because you thought he was some kind of big privacy advocate or something? “Attorney General Eric Schneiderman subpoenaed the data as part of an investigation into the website stemming from a 2010 law that makes it illegal to use such sites to rent out your own apartment.” He says he’s after the 15,000 or so customers who used the service to let guests stay on their premises for a fee. Next: Craigslist? [New York Daily News, Matt Welch/Reason]

Filed under: Eric Schneiderman, hotels, lawyering vs. privacy

Schneiderman vs. market-clearing prices

Some politicians just want there to be random shortages [WSJ editorial]:

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has subpoenaed the Craigslist website for the identities of people who advertised gas for sale at high prices. Mr. Schneiderman is doing this in the name of a New York law that forbids charging an “unconscionably excessive price” during an “abnormal disruption in the market.”

Filed under: attorneys general, Craigslist, Eric Schneiderman, New York