While Citizens United and other judicial decisions have loosened restrictions on corporate political speech, courts have upheld longstanding bans on political speech by foreign nationals. Therefore, Minnesota and other opponents of corporate speech now seek to redefine large swaths of American businesses as “foreign influenced” to stop their political engagement. Seattle, St. Petersburg, Fla., and Alaska have joined Minnesota in passing laws banning political speech by so-called foreign-influenced corporations. Lawmakers in numerous other states and Congress have introduced similar bills.
The Minnesota law is typical of these measures, making Monday’s hearing an early test of their constitutionality. The law defines “foreign-influenced corporations” as including any U.S. company in which a single foreign investor has “direct or indirect beneficial ownership” of as little as 1% of total equity. This status also may be triggered if hundreds or even thousands of foreign stockholders collectively own 5% of shares. It doesn’t require these stockholders to be of the same nationality or to collude to influence so much as the corporate cafeteria menu.
The law’s breadth is matched by its vagueness. Foreign-influenced status also may be triggered if any foreign investor “participates directly or indirectly in the corporation’s decision-making process with respect to the corporation’s political activities in the United States.” If a single foreign stockholder casts a proxy vote on an activist-shareholder proposal, that could bring the state’s corporate speech ban into effect.
Even aside from the documented instances of plagiarism, Ms. Gay’s work wouldn’t normally have earned tenure in the Ivy League. Tenure at a top-tier institution normally demands ground-breaking originality; her work displays none. In a world where the privilege of diversity is king, Ms. Gay was able to parlay mediocre research into tenure and administrative advancement at what was once considered a world-class university.
Harvard can’t condemn Ms. Gay because she is the product of an elite system that holds minorities of high pedigree to a lower standard. This harms academia as a whole, and it demeans Americans, of all races, who had to work for everything they earned.
John Tierney and Joe Nocera discuss governments’ calamitous overreaction to covid.
GMU Econ doctoral student Janna Lu is correct: “robots free humans from repetitive tasks.” A slice:
AI also helps Amazon create efficient delivery routes, “adapting in real-time to traffic and weather conditions,” and helps Amazon forecast daily demand for packages so that the company can predict where and when things will be ordered. Delivery hubs can handle over 110,000 packages within the holiday season, up from the 60,000 that they typically handle.
Steven Lamb reports on just how very authoritarian is the mindset of the progressives who today rule California. (HT Dan Klein)
Here’s Hans Bader on the antisemitic indoctrination of young Americans. (HT George Leef)
