Is GM feeling iffy about EVs?

Make Me Smart November 29, 2023 Transcript

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Kai Ryssdal

Who’s in charge?

Kimberly Adams 

That would be Juan Carlos. Hello, everyone. I’m Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where we make today make sense.

Kai Ryssdal 

I’m Kai Ryssdal, thank you for joining us on this Wednesday. It’s the 29th of November I think.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes, it is. How was your holiday, by the way?

Kai Ryssdal 

It was very, very nice. All the kids were back. My mom was here for a spot on perfect two days. No, we had that we had 14 people for Thanksgiving dinner. It was really nice. What about you?

Kimberly Adams 

Oh, it was good. It was good. I was at my mother’s house. There were many children, many children. I love them, all the children. And now we all had a great time. It was good. So yeah, we are going to do some news. We’re going to do some smiles. So let’s get to it. Kai, what you got?

Kai Ryssdal

I think it’s a singular smile today, by the way, I did not find anything that struck my fancy. I’m not cranky. I’m not grumpy, I didn’t find anything that did it for me today. So this is a little off the beaten path of the news these days of the macroeconomic news of the general political news in this economy. I found an item that there was an item today in The Wall Street Journal that I found very interesting and somewhat discouraging. General Motors CEO Mary Barra, who has been making a play for electric cars and on this program, in fact made a whole long spiel about why GM is gonna go electric. Maybe not so fast. From The Wall Street Journal today, General Motors plants to sharply increased cash returns to shareholders as chief executive Mary Barra seeks to reinsure investors about the health of GM’s core carmaking business, after setbacks in fledgling pursuits such as electric and driverless vehicles. Driverless vehicles we know about they’re really challenging. It’s super hard, way harder than anybody thought. EVs though, they’re really expensive to make. But I think you got to make them and this is not a great sign that GM is like worried that people are going to turn on them because they want to make EVs. So $10 billion worth of share buybacks will make investors feel better. I don’t know if it’s gonna make the planet feel better.

Kimberly Adams 

You know, what stuck with me when I saw those buyback numbers and dividends, whatever, was that we just came out of these bruising, UAW negotiations, right, and the the carmakers talking about what they could and could not do in terms of money to the workers and things like that. And now that the deal is done, it’s like, and here’s $10 billion to shareholders.

Kai Ryssdal 

Right, right. Right. Yeah. And there’s there’s also sorry, another item in the journal today, which which I probably should have piggybacked on this one. Shawn Fein as CEO, I guess he’s the President of the United Auto Workers, has been vocal about his desire to expand unionization, he said at some point, either today, or in the last couple of days, when we go to renegotiate these contracts in 2028, it’s not going to be against the big three, it’s going to be against the big five or six is going to be Toyota, and Mercedes and other plants mostly in the South that are not unionized.

Kimberly Adams 

Tesla.

Kai Ryssda

Right, also getting into electric vehicle makers and battery makers and all that jazz. So the the EV sphere is going to become more unionized. So it’s, it’s, they’re challenging times ahead. But we still gotta get there is what I’m saying.

Kimberly Adams 

Or they going to attempt it,  will depend a lot on sort of what administration is your workplace and what the NLRB looks like in in that moment. Actions and consequences as it were, totally. So this is a pretty wonky and complicated case, but it actually is important. So I hope you all will bear with me as I walk through sort of these three arguments that the case is making as to why the SEC, as it currently exists, should not exist this way. So here it is in SCOTUS blog. So the first one is this idea that everybody in the United States under the Constitution should have a right to a trial by jury. And the way the SEC is set up with these administrative law judges operates without a jury and therefore it is unfair, and so rather than the SEC being able to charge someone and convict somebody in house, charge them fines people should have a right to a jury trial. The second question and I’m reading here from SCOTUS blog is whether Congress can delegate to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the power to decide whether or not a case should be pursued as an administrative and administrative proceeding, or a civil enforcement action that is either within the agency or within the federal court system. And so this idea that Congress can’t give away powers that the Constitution is granted to Congress. And that’s what they’re doing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And then the third one, is the way that the judges within the SEC who make these decisions, have their jobs and keep their jobs in some technical way about the multiple levels that protect them from removal. So all three of these arguments are designed to weaken the Securities Exchange Commission, not just for the sake of you know, hedge fund managers being able to avoid fines. But also, it’s the latest attack on the administrative state, which we’ve talked about quite a bit on here. This idea that the way the federal government works is that agencies will pass regulatory agencies will make regulations to interpret the laws passed by Congress. And the agencies themselves are often the enforcement mechanism, whether it be because they’re issuing fines, or because they’re taking people to federal court, or businesses to federal court. But a lot of the times they do the work in house, they will say that somebody has, you know, in under the EPA made an environmental violation, and then they will find you for it, and you can sue saying that fine, was unjust. But you know, it’s done kind of in house. And this is an attack on that system. And if this case, goes in the favor of the plaintiffs, it could substantially, you know, turn over the way that federal agencies work. And just to sort of walk through what this would look like, imagine if, you know, you reported to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that your credit card company was scamming you and charging you all these fees. And the CFPB went and found that they were doing that to tons and tons of people, and they say stop doing that, and here’s a fine, you have to pay it, they would have done all that in house. If this goes away the plaintiffs, maybe that credit card company would say no, we want to go to a jury trial. And what that would mean in practice is that in order to enforce a lot of regulations, the federal government would have to use up a lot more lawyers a lot more time and a lot more resources, which would probably lead to less enforcement, which might be the goal here. So that was one thing.

Kai Ryssdal 

So look, I think that’s, um, you know, it wasn’t like it well, it is wonky, but it’s super important. I think that is the goal here. Right, less enforcement, it’s letting the free market work and getting government out of the economy and all that stuff that you hear from the GOP. But here’s the bottom line, the administrative state, is how this economy works. Full stop. And if you dismantle the administrative state, well, do I have to go on its own just, you know, and the real the real challenge here is the Supreme Court as currently constituted, may well abide by this argument.

Kimberly Adams 

Right. And that’s what the story, there’s a story in thehill.com, that we’ll link in the show notes that, you know, a lot of these conservative justices seem, you know, kind of on board with that they’re like so, you know, if you are sued by a if you’re a company sued by a person for monetary damages, you can ask for a jury trial. But if you’re a company sued by the government, you can’t ask for a jury trial. That doesn’t make sense. And so we’re gonna hear a lot of these these arguments. But you know, the practical implications of it are pretty significant. One other quick thing, just to flag with the Supreme Court, in at the beginning of December, the court is going to hear oral arguments on Harrington versus Purdue pharma, which is that challenge we’ve talked about before, of the US Court of Appeals approving that deal to settle, you know, some of those, you know, opioid lawsuits while protecting the Sackler family’s assets and not, you know, making them vulnerable to future lawsuits. And, and what they were saying in SCOTUS blog about this is that it’s not just about this one case, but also about this system that’s become very popular in recent years of using the bankruptcy process to kind of get out of class action lawsuits and the, you know, consequences thereof. So yeah, yeah.

Kai Ryssdal 

Another interesting case to watch, lots going on.

Kimberly Adams 

Alright, smiles.

Kai Ryssdal 

That would be smile singular because I didn’t find anything. Yes, yes, go ahead. You go.

Kimberly Adams 

But I love this. This was a great story that I read this morning in The Washington Post. I think it came out yesterday, but it’s an opinion piece in The Washington Post by Dev Shah, and it says, “I won the national spelling bee. This is what it takes to master spelling.” And you know, when I started reading this, I’m expecting to read about his, you know, wild study habits and how he spent all this other time. And, you know, that’s not at all what this piece is about. He says, How did I finally break through? There are almost half a million words in English dictionary, add in thousands of roots, and hundreds of language patterns and it is impossible to memorize everything. Once I realized that I changed the way I trained, I trained and started focusing on sharpening my intuition, the skill of guessing is everything. Though I could and did study words for hours on end, I knew my greatest asset would be learning to guess correctly. In stressful situations, sometimes you just have to breathe, study yourself and leave things to chance. And he goes on to describe how, you know, you wouldn’t once you learn enough about language and roots, and whether they’re Greek or whether they’re Latin, and how in French, words that have their origins and friends may have different endings, depending on whether they’re nouns or adverbs. And if you learn enough of these rules about how the English language usually works, then what you can do is just make guesses and hope for the best. And that’s what he was doing with a lot of these challenging words. And, you know, I really encourage people to read this. But you know, he ends it by saying, winning the spelling bee is worth more than having an impressive line on my resume. Spelling has better prepared me for life. Competitive spelling teaches you to be unafraid to take risks, no matter how well we may think we know something, eventually we all have to take a guess.

Kai Ryssdal 

I love that. That’s great. Take a deep breath.

Kimberly Adams 

I love it, too. It was a it was a really nice piece. I really encourage folks to read it.

Kai Ryssdal 

We will of course, put it on the show page. We are done for the day, back tomorrow. On a Thursday, we’ll play some sound from the week and sort of talk about that. Before we go quick update on Giving Tuesday, which was yesterday, listeners, which is all y’all contributed more than $98,000. We were so close to unlocking those extra challenge funds. It is an amazing show of support for the work we do here at Marketplace and on this podcast and everything else that we do in this production house. We’re gonna get another whack at that matching grant later this year. So if you haven’t yet made a gift, hang on. It’s coming to you. We’ll give you more chances. Yeah, we promise.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes. And thank you everybody who did contribute. We appreciate it. Yes, please and thank you. Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Today’s program was engineered by Juan Carlos Torrado. And our intern is Niloufar Shahbandi.

Kai Ryssdal 

Ben Tolliday and Daniel Ramirez composed our theme music. Our senior producer is Marissa Cabrera. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital and on demand.