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Brazilian Judge Orders Total Suspension of Elon Musk's X Social Network
"Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary," said Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.
Aug 30, 2024
Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes on Friday ordered the nationwide suspension of Elon Musk's X social media platform in response to the billionaire's failure to comply with the judge's directive to appoint a legal representative in the South American country.
Moraes ordered the "immediate, complete, and total suspension of X's operations" in the nation of 215 million people, "until the court's judicial decisions are complied with and the fines applied are paid" and "until a representative of the company in the country is appointed."
The judge also infuriated Musk by blocking his SpaceX company from conducting financial transactions in Brazil over millions of dollars in unpaid fines imposed on X—formerly known as Twitter—for breaking Brazilian laws.
"X Brazil failed to comply with several court orders, as well as the willful intention of evading responsibility for complying with the court orders issued."
Earlier this month, Musk withdrew X's staff from Brazil after Moraes threatened to arrest the company's legal representative if the platform did not delete user accounts spreading far-right misinformation and hate speech in violation of Brazilian law.
"Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country," Moraes said.
"The president of the National Telecommunications Agency, Carlos Manuel Baigorri, must take all measures to ensure the suspension," Moraes continued, adding that he "also ordered Apple and Google to take measures to block the use of the application by iOS and Android systems, in addition to removing it from their virtual stores."
Internet service providers and app stores have five days to comply with Moraes' ruling. People who use virtual public networks (VPNs) to skirt the new ban are subject to a roughly $8,900 fine.
Moraes stated that he "made every possible effort and granted every opportunity for X Brazil to comply with the judicial orders and pay the fines, which would have avoided the adoption of this more serious measure."
"Unfortunately," he added, "the illicit conduct was repeated in this investigation, making it clear that X Brazil failed to comply with several court orders, as well as the willful intention of evading responsibility for complying with the court orders issued."
In April, Moraes
launched a criminal investigation into Musk's alleged obstruction of justice and incitement to crime.
Friday's decision comes amid a monthslong feud between Musk—the world's wealthiest person—and Moraes. Musk has accused the judge of "censorship" and of being a "tyrant."
"Alexandre de Moraes is an evil dictator cosplaying as a judge," Musk
said Thursday on X in one of several increasingly sophomoric posts.
However, as Brazil-based journalist Brian Mier
explained, "this is about sovereignty."
"Treating a system where the rich can buy more reach than normal citizens as if it were a democratic commons, as a 'free speech' issue, is ludicrous," Mier wrote on X. "In the Global South, U.S. social media corporations are coup machines."
In the 1960s, the United States played an instrumental role in overthrowing a democratically elected Brazilian government and installing a 21-year military dictatorship in which a young Jair Bolsonaro—the former right-wing Brazilian leader who is the target of multiple criminal probes led by Moraes—served as an army officer.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva offered thoughts on Musk and the case ahead of Friday's ruling during a television interview.
"Who does he think he is?" asked Lula. "He has to respect the rules of this country."
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NLRB Head Says Corporate Union-Busters Want to Distract Public With Legal Challenges
"These esoteric arguments came about why?" said National Labor Relations Board Chief Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. "Because we dared to issue a complaint against SpaceX after it unlawfully fired eight workers."
Apr 10, 2024
Amid an ongoing nationwide surge in union organizing across numerous industries in the U.S., powerful corporations in recent months have argued the federal watchdog tasked with ensuring fair labor practices is, itself, unconstitutional—but the nation's top labor lawyer said Tuesday she doesn't buy the claims of Amazon, Trader Joe's, and other companies.
The "deep-pocketed, low-road employers want to divert [the National Labor Relations Board's] sparse resources to defending ourselves in court," NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo said at a virtual event, "to slow down or prevent us from engaging in concerted action. They're just trying to stop our enforcement actions."
Abruzzo spoke at a webinar titled "Preserving the Administrative State: Threats to Administrative Law Enforcement in the Courts," hosted by the left-leaning think tank Roosevelt Institute.
Watch the event below:
The event was held just over three months after SpaceX, billionaire enterpreneur Elon Musk's space exploration company, filed a complaint against the NLRB after the board accused it of unlawfully firing eight employees. SpaceX claimed that a "constitutionally required degree of control is lacking" at the agency because its judges and five board members cannot immediately be dismissed by a president.
In moves Abruzzo on Tuesday called "jumping on the bandwagon," an attorney for Trader Joe's argued at a hearing weeks later that the "structure and organization" of the NLRB is unconstitutional, and Amazon made a similar claim in February. Starbucks said in its own legal filing that the limitation on removing NLRB judges and members "frustrates the presidential control Article II [of the U.S. Constitution] demands."
"These esoteric arguments came about why?" said Abruzzo. "Because we dared to issue a complaint against SpaceX after it unlawfully fired eight workers for speaking about their workplace concerns. And then Amazon jumps on the bandwagon, Starbucks jumps on the bandwagon, Trader Joe's, others get in on the action just because we're trying to hold them accountable for repeatedly violating workers rights to organize and collectively bargain through representatives of their free choosing."
All the companies have been accused by the board's prosecutors of violating labor law—a fact that Abruzzo said the corporations are eager for the public to forget.
A key goal of the legal filings is to "to divert attention away from the fact that they are actually lawbreakers who need to be held accountable in a timely manner," Abruzzo said at the Roosevelt Institute webinar. "And frankly, that strategy is working. There's a lot of public reporting about the challenges as opposed to the law-breaking."
In addition to SpaceX's alleged illegal firing of workers, the companies have been accused of retaliating against employees, limiting workers' access to a warehouse, and closing store locations to discourage union activity, among other violations.
NLRB judges have already ruled against Starbucks, Amazon, and Trader Joe's in several workers' rights cases.
Two of the companies—SpaceX and Amazon—were founded by the two richest men in the United States, Musk and Jeff Bezos.
"Once billionaires are scared of the power of the NLRB, they bring in the big guns," Diana Reddy, a labor law professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, said at the Roosevelt Institute event.
Abruzzo said courts are likely to reject the companies' claims, noting the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the organizational structure of the NLRB in 1937.
Other federal agencies, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Securities and Exchange Commission, have also been challenged as unconstitutional by corporate interests. Rulings in those cases are expecting in the coming months.
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In 'Direct Attack' on Labor Movement, Amazon Backs Claim NLRB Is Unconstitutional
"So now capital, unable to hold back labor any longer, is arguing that the NLRB's very existence is unconstitutional," said one law professor.
Feb 16, 2024
Amid a recent surge in unionization and other workers' rights victories, wealthy U.S. corporations have fired union organizers, surveilled employees as they voted on forming a collective bargaining unit, and closed store locations to penalize labor leaders—but a court filing by Amazon on Thursday suggested a new tactic as the e-commerce giant seeks to dismantle the federal agency tasked with protecting employees.
Fighting accusations from prosecutors at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that Amazon illegally retaliated against warehouse workers who unionized, the company submitted a legal filing arguing that the board itself is unconstitutional.
Amazon claimed it did not break the law by limiting workers' access to the warehouse, which the NLRB said last year was a transparent effort to quash union activity. In its filing, the company also claimed "the structure of the NLRB violates the separation of powers" by "impeding the executive power provided for in Article II of the United States Constitution."
The company is the third corporation to make such a claim in recent weeks.
In January, a lawyer for grocery chain Trader Joe's argued in an NLRB hearing over union-busting charges that the board, which was created nearly 90 years ago under the New Deal, is "unconstitutional"—"including but not limited to the structure and organization of the National Labor Relations Board and the agency's administrative law judges."
That claim came weeks after astronautics company SpaceX, owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk—currently the second-richest person on Earth—claimed the NLRB's enforcement proceedings violate the company's right to a jury trial.
Amazon echoed that claim on Thursday.
Seth Goldstein, an attorney for Trader Joe's United, which sued the grocer over illegal retaliation, said last month that the company's argument suggested that workers "don't have the right to organize at all."
"This is really dangerous," Goldstein toldHuffPost. "Are we really going back to 1920?"
On Thursday, he called Amazon's decision to launch its own anti-NLRB legal argument "a direct attack on the American labor movement and workers' rights."
Amazon's filing follows more than 250 NLRB complaints against its labor practices in recent years. In 2022, employees at the company's JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York won what was called a "David versus Goliath" victory, defeating Amazon's multimillion-dollar anti-union effort by voting to form the Amazon Labor Union (ALU).
"So now capital, unable to hold back labor any longer, is arguing that the NLRB's very existence is unconstitutional," said Cornell Law School professor Robert Hockett.
Former New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse pointed out that the new anti-union efforts by Amazon and SpaceX are being led by two of the richest men in the world—Musk and Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos.
"Billionaires," said Christian Smalls, president of ALU and fired Amazon worker, "they gotta go!"
Corporate interests have previously worked to dismantle regulatory agencies tasked with protecting working Americans, with a trade association representing payday lenders taking its case against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the U.S. Supreme Court last year. The group has argued the CFPB's funding structure through the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional.
Pawel Popiel, a researcher at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, called Amazon's filing an "incredibly troubling lobbying effort."
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