Day Laborers in LA, Nuclear Power and Corporate Finance
Los Angeles lawmakers require home improvement stores to construct shelters for day laborers who wait for work in their parking lots.
Electricity provider Constellation Energy seeks permission to build a new nuclear reactor at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland.
The Securities and Exchange Commission announces a new system for using fines to reimburse investors in companies that violate financial regulations.
More headlines: Listen to the new CEI Weekly Podcast here.
1. LEGAL
Los Angeles lawmakers require home improvement stores to construct shelters for day laborers who wait for work in their parking lots.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Special Projects Counsel Hans Bader on how the L.A. City Council is out of control:
“Thumbing its nose at property rights, the Los Angeles City Council has just passed an ordinance requiring big-box stores like Home Depot to build shelters for the day-laborers (virtually all illegal aliens) who congregate on their premises. Recently, the City Council passed an ordinance banning new fast food restaurants in predominantly-minority South Central Los Angeles, enforcing what Slate’s Will Saletan has called ‘Food Apartheid.’ Although the ban was passed in the name of fighting obesity, it may well increase obesity, since the junk food sold in convenience stores is often much less nutritious than a Big Mac or Quarter Pounder.”
2. ENERGY
Electricity provider Constellation Energy seeks permission to build a new nuclear reactor at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Adjunct Fellow Steven Milloy on the opposition from environmental groups:
“Maryland’s Gov. Martin O’Malley — who is well-regarded by environmentalists for consuming and metabolizing the green Kool-Aid on global warming — supports the Calvert Cliffs expansion. O’Malley apparently realizes that Maryland needs the electricity given the fact that the state is facing rolling blackouts on summer days starting as early as 2011. Moreover, nuclear power is emissions-free, another plus for Maryland’s warmer-in-chief. His support is even more remarkable since he recently barred the installation of wind turbines on public lands. The governor’s picking nukes over wind must have sent the greens into meltdown. So in response, the desperate greens came up with a bizarre new argument: nuclear power causes global warming.”
3. BUSINESS
The Securities and Exchange Commission announces a new system for using fines to reimburse investors in companies that violate financial regulations.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Center for Entrepreneurship Director John Berlau on how CEI is challenging a major element of the federal government’s finance rules:
“For more than two years, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has been involved in a constitutional challenge to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the giant agency set up by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 to create auditing rules under the law. CEI attorneys Sam Kazman and Hans Bader are of counsel to the plaintiffs in Free Enterprise Fund (FEF) v. PCAOB, and they have worked with the lead attorneys at the Jones Day law firm on the case. Representing both the FEF and Beckstead & Watts, a small Nevada accounting firm burdened by the PCAOB’s mandates, we have argued that the agency violates the Constitution’s Appointments Clause because it wields enormous power (and the individuals on its its five-member board actually get paid more than the president), yet its leaders are not subject to the Presidential appointment and Senate confirmation.”
Listen to the new CEI Weekly Podcast here.