TGIF!

Jim Jordan Misfires in Attacks on Lina Khan

As Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan entered the House Judiciary Committee hearing room on Thursday, every expectation was that she would face a grilling, along the lines of what FBI director Christopher Wray experienced the day before. And it did start out that way, with committee chair Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and his allies hammering on two familiar subjects: whether Khan ignored an ethics official’s advice in declining to recuse in a merger case involving Meta, and whether Khan overstepped boundaries in seeking information from Twitter about releases of personal user data to journalists.

But as the hearing went on, Republican committee members either moderated their rhetoric or even expressed support for her actions at the FTC. Some started asking about specific cases of monopolistic conduct, from pharmacy benefit managers to grocery chains. The vast majority of Republicans stayed away from Jordan’s line of inquiry. And even where they disagreed with Khan, it was relatively substantive. Remarkably, it became an actually interesting hearing—at times a bipartisan inquiry into various aspects of corporate power, a faint glimmer of actual congressional work on a committee characterized often by spin and shouting.

In the end, the hearing showed that Jordan, in attempting to link his broader critique of the weaponization of government to Khan’s work at the FTC, didn’t have buy-in from his colleagues. If this was supposed to be a springing of a trap, the trap didn’t spring. Jordan’s ambush turned disastrous for him.

In broad strokes, it was difficult to see how the hearing affected Khan’s standing in any way. The main headline out of the hearing at the Financial Times was the revelation, which Khan basically confirmed, that the FTC sent a civil investigative demand to OpenAI about use of personal data, accuracy of information, and “risks of harm to consumers, including reputational harm.” Any news about Khan herself was sidelined.

Faiz Shakir, interim executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, twisted the knife on Jordan in a statement: “I want to thank Jim Jordan for holding a hearing showing that he’s in the minority in Congress on taking on monopolies.”

TWO JUDICIARY COMMITTEE REPUBLICANS, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL), offered unrestrained praise of Khan. Buck undermined his own party’s case against Khan’s lack of recusal in the Meta case, pointing out that the ethics official who expressed concerns about Khan’s participation actually had stock in Meta herself, while Khan has no such holdings. Several Democrats reiterated the ethics official’s potential conflict.

Buck also asked if Khan’s children worked for any Big Tech companies. Khan amusingly replied that her child is just six months old. Joke aside, the point was to highlight how Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has two children who work for Facebook and Amazon. He said openly that Khan was being held to an unrealistic ethical standard solely “because you wrote a law review article,” referring to her work prior to government service in writing about Amazon.

Gaetz, after a back-and-forth about the Twitter requests, dug in on the FTC’s enforcement of privacy rules, referring to investigations over Amazon-owned smart doorbell maker Ring and data broker Kochava. He suggested that stronger privacy rules needed to be put together, getting some Democratic colleagues and even Jordan to agree.

Other Republicans focused on Khan’s work, rather than leaning in on Jordan’s critiques. Rep. Tom Massie (R-KY), chair of the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on antitrust, which has been relatively dormant in the past six months, initiated his questioning by asking about the FTC’s investigation into independent small businesses going up against dominant grocery chains. Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) brought up FTC investigations into robocalls. Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX) asked about allegations of doping of horses, and even suggested that the FTC could conduct a search of facilities without a warrant, under a law governing horse racing.

All told, it was a remarkably substantive discussion, at least by the low standards of this Congress.

International negotiators just missed a deadline to regulate deep-sea mining. Now what?

This month, a small group of diplomats is meeting to hash out a plan that could affect the future of nearly half of Earth’s surface — including regions containing metals that are vital for the energy transition, like nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese.

That group is the International Seabed Authority, or ISA, an autonomous international organization tasked with regulating mining on the ocean floor, in waters outside any nation’s jurisdiction. On July 9, the regulatory body missed an important legal deadline to finalize those rules. Now the ISA is scrambling to complete them, or agree to a fall-back plan, before companies start applying for deep-sea mining permits.

The stakes in this regulatory race are high. Some deep-sea ecosystems are rich in metals used in electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels. To transition off fossil fuels, the world needs to dig up enormous quantities of these metals, and deep-sea mining proponents say that can be done with less impact on the ocean floor than on land.

A low-impact mining industry is unlikely to materialize in the absence of ISA rules governing environmental standards and oversight. However, if a company submits a commercial deep-sea mining application before the ISA completes those rules — officially called the Mining Code — the agency will be legally obligated to consider the request nonetheless. Some industry watchdogs fear this will trigger a literal race to the bottom, in which companies destroy fragile seafloor ecosystems in the pursuit of profits.

But a catastrophic outcome is far from assured. Pradeep Singh, an ocean law expert at the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam who attends the ISA meetings and advises governments on deep-sea mining, says member nations have rallied behind the idea that there must be regulations in place before any deep-sea mining companies are given the go-ahead — and that there are several options on the table to ensure that outcome. States, Singh said, are starting to ask: “Do we really want to rush this process for the benefit of one private mining company?”

Singh is referring to The Metals Company, the Canadian mining firm at the center of the high seas hullabaloo. In the summer of 2021, the Pacific Island nation of Nauru gave the ISA notice that a subsidiary of the firm, which Nauru is backing as a state sponsor, intended to submit an application to begin deep-sea mining. The Metals Company is one of 18 commercial or state-backed entities that have received exploration permits from the ISA to test technology, take samples, and investigate the overall resource potential of deep-sea rocks called polymetallic nodules, in areas that each span nearly 30,000 squares miles. No company has been granted a contract to mine underwater.

In announcing The Metals Company’s plan to become the first, Nauru activated the “two-year rule,” an obscure legal provision that obligates the ISA to finalize mining regulations within that time frame, or consider any applications if the deadline passes before the rules are done. Nauru and The Metals Company might have been hoping that the ISA would buckle down and finish a rulemaking process that began in 2014. But the sudden imposition of a deadline came in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had caused ISA negotiations to grind to a halt.

Negotiations resumed last year, but at the end of the ISA’s last meeting in March, the Mining Code was far from complete. The next meeting of the ISA Council, the key group of negotiators tasked with hashing out its details, began on July 10 — a day after the two-year deadline passed.

If the ISA Council manages to finalize the Mining Code by July 21, it could be put before the entire ISA Assembly — including representatives of 167 countries and the European Union — for a vote at the end of the month. Many ISA observers think that’s extremely unlikely, considering the wide range of issues that still need to be worked out within the code itself, including setting the overarching environmental goals and objectives of deep-sea mining, public consultation processes related to environmental plans, and how compliance inspections will work. But Singh points out that the council did reach one important decision at its March meeting: that commercial deep-sea mining shouldn’t happen in the absence of regulations.

Part of the council meeting taking place this week will be devoted to discussing what the ISA should do if Nauru, or another country, submits an application for commercial deep-sea mining before the Mining Code is complete. The ISA could, for instance, decide that it will start considering applications immediately, but it will defer making any decisions about them until regulations are in place. Or it could grant an applicant’s mining plan “provisional” approval, but hold off on the negotiation of the final contract until the rulebook is finished. The ISA, Singh says, can also choose to reject any applications that don’t meet its standards. But in the absence of a Mining Code, it is unclear what standards it would base such a decision on.

More dramatically, the ISA could choose to impose a temporary pause or mining moratorium — something that major environmental organizations like Greenpeace, as well as multinational corporations like Google and Patagonia, have called for in recent years. “If governments are serious about their environmental credentials, they have to say no to deep-sea mining,” said Arlo Hemphill, a senior oceans campaigner at Greenpeace USA. “This is the moment to take the wind out of the sails of an industry that has no future.”

“A moratorium or pause is the only responsible way forward at the moment,” deep-sea biologist Diva Amon told Grist. Amon is lead author of a study, published Tuesday in Nature npj Ocean Sustainability, concluding that rising ocean temperatures will cause the range of commercial fish species like yellowfin tuna to overlap more with areas of the eastern Pacific where companies wish to mine. Also on Tuesday, several seafood groups released a letter calling for a pause on deep-sea mining until there is a “clear understanding” of its impacts on the marine environment.

BREAKING: We just swarmed the field at the Congressional Women's Softball Game. As rooftop snipers aimed their guns at us and Members of Congress begged us to evacuate, we held our ground.

This is an emergency. We act like it. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/pOctj6sJUC

— Climate Defiance (@ClimateDefiance) July 13, 2023

Are you a billionaire with a favorite House or Senate candidate?

Give some firm $5 million and they can turn some portion of that (millions probably) into hard money for their candidate.

We've seen this coming for some time, it seems here at scale now.

— Tim Tagaris (@ttagaris) July 14, 2023

Biden to cancel $39bn in US student debt to fix ‘historical inaccuracies’

Joe Biden’s administration will cancel $39bn in student debt for more than 804,000 borrowers, the education department said on Friday, describing the relief as the result of a “fix” to income-driven repayment (IDR) plans.

Borrowers will be eligible for forgiveness if they have made either 20 or 25 years of monthly IDR payments, the department said. The IDR program caps payment requirements for lower-income borrowers and forgives their remaining balance after a set number of years.

The department said the relief addresses what it described as “historical inaccuracies” in the count of payments that qualify toward forgiveness under IDR plans.

“For far too long, borrowers fell through the cracks of a broken system that failed to keep accurate track of their progress towards forgiveness,” the secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, said.

Biden has said he will pursue new measures to provide student loan relief to Americans after the US supreme court blocked his plan to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in debt.

The education department launched a regulatory “rule-making” process to pursue his $430bn loan relief plan. That process is expected to take months.

Friday’s relatively smaller relief falls under a separate payment count adjustment program that the Biden administration announced in April last year, the department said.

In late June the court ruled against the Biden administration’s $430bn student debt forgiveness plan in a blow to up to 40 million borrowers in the US.

In a 6-3 decision, the conservative-leaning supermajority of justices ruled that the 2003 Heroes Act, passed in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, does not authorize Biden’s debt forgiveness plan.

The law gave the secretary of education authority to make changes to any provision of applicable student aid program laws in the aftermath of the attacks.

The decision strikes down a major tenet of the Biden administration’s program, with the 2024 election quickly approaching.

It would be interesting to see how many borrowers can take advantage of the program. This is less than 10% of what was originally proposed. My sense is that Biden is relieved he can spend more money on DoD encumbrances such as cluster bombs but at least he can make a “half” check box on this program he promised to deliver on.

Heard the remnants left in Three Dog Night live at a local theater last night. They played most of top 40 hits they had from the 70s. In particular, this one resonates with me more than ever.

Kevin McCarthy: "Stop using taxpayer money to do their own wokeism. A military cannot defend themselves if you train them in woke. We don't want Disneyland to train our military." pic.twitter.com/czkyARfmvu

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 14, 2023

What an honor to stand beside my roomie @RepSummerLee and great friends @RepMaxwellFrost & @RepCasar to share during @Netroots_Nation how as young progressives we are pushing forward progressive policies for working families! ¡Vamos por más! #NN23 pic.twitter.com/LiM1xBnvD8

— Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (@repdeliaramirez) July 15, 2023

Nice to see Squad 2 speaking to a half progressive crowd – centrists will still welcome them in hopes to snare them into their court. I don’t see a lot of evidence of that happening, but I think to continue getting name recognition is important considering demographics of NN skew older – and they do vote.