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>Katyal is an MSNBC mainstay who came to prominence as a liberal defender of Republican president Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, all of whom will now ru

>Katyal is an MSNBC mainstay who came to prominence as a liberal defender of Republican president Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, all of whom will now rule on the case. In recent years, Katyal has helped Nestlé defend itself in a child slavery case before the Supreme Court and represented Johnson & Johnson in its bid to use bankruptcy to block lawsuits from cancer victims. Listed on the Katyal-authored amicus brief alongside SAFE is the group’s senior adviser, former Louisiana Democratic senator John Breaux, who also lobbies for ExxonMobil, Norfolk Southern, and Boeing — corporations whose top executives could have a financial interest in the outcome of the case. Breaux also lobbies for billionaire financial magnate and Democratic megadonor James Simons. What a fucking scumbag. This guy is a corporatist, and blatantly for sale. >SAFE is organized as a so-called social welfare nonprofit, which allows it to hide the identity of its donors and avoid taxes while spending money to influence policy decisions. This scheme needs to be outlawed. Lobbying to ease the tax burden of billionaires is not social welfare, it's social cancer. Also, if donors chose to avoid taxes, they don't get to provide "input" on policy decisions. You pay tax, you get a voice. You avoid tax, you don't get to have a voice.

jfengel 3y ago
It helps if you assume that every political action group lies about its name. Anybody who lives in DC knows instinctively that "Saving America’s Family Enterprises" is about enormous, usually publicly-traded, companies. You don't even need to know who the donors are; your guesses are usually right. (The political groups that are actually there to represent the people doing actual work usually have dull, on-the-nose names like "Society of Paper Towel Manufacturers", or occasionally the personal name of their founder.)
- fakedang 3y ago
  The issue is that while people in DC know that, the people in Louisiana voting for these guys don't.
tennisball3 3y ago
> Johnson & Johnson in its bid to use bankruptcy to block lawsuits from cancer victims I'm not an expert, I really only know what Matt Levine has published in his Bloomberg newsletter, but this sounds like a very disingenuous description in order to stoke outrage. The bankruptcy proceedings were more about orderly management of a bunch of different lawsuits in different jurisdictions on different timelines. At least by Levine's analysis, the victims were likely to fair better as a whole through the bankruptcy proceedings (all victims would be guaranteed a fair share) than without it (victims who got their court cases through the system faster might get more than later verdicts). Or maybe Levine was unfairly charitable to them and the bankruptcy thing was purely to minimize total payments.
- ClarityJones 3y ago
  Yeah, bankruptcy generally exists to protect creditors.

jfengel 3y ago

It helps if you assume that every political action group lies about its name. Anybody who lives in DC knows instinctively that "Saving America’s Family Enterprises" is about enormous, usually publicly-traded, companies. You don't even need to know who the donors are; your guesses are usually right. (The political groups that are actually there to represent the people doing actual work usually have dull, on-the-nose names like "Society of Paper Towel Manufacturers", or occasionally the personal name of their founder.)

fakedang 3y ago
The issue is that while people in DC know that, the people in Louisiana voting for these guys don't.

tennisball3 3y ago

> Johnson & Johnson in its bid to use bankruptcy to block lawsuits from cancer victims I'm not an expert, I really only know what Matt Levine has published in his Bloomberg newsletter, but this sounds like a very disingenuous description in order to stoke outrage. The bankruptcy proceedings were more about orderly management of a bunch of different lawsuits in different jurisdictions on different timelines. At least by Levine's analysis, the victims were likely to fair better as a whole through the bankruptcy proceedings (all victims would be guaranteed a fair share) than without it (victims who got their court cases through the system faster might get more than later verdicts). Or maybe Levine was unfairly charitable to them and the bankruptcy thing was purely to minimize total payments.

ClarityJones 3y ago
Yeah, bankruptcy generally exists to protect creditors.