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Good morning. Today on LegalDocket, three Supreme Court cases where the fight is not mainly around the merits but something more basic.
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The plaintiff's point of view is the thing that should matter because the plaintiff is the master of her complaint.
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Also today, the Monday Money beat David Bonson on affordability, jobs and GDP and what they say about the political road ahead and the world history book today, GK Chesterton on faith, fairy tales and Cinderella.
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A long time ago a lonely little girl named Ella lived with her stepmother and her two stepsisters.
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It's Monday, November 24th. This is the world and everything in it from listener supported World Radio. I'm Jenny Ruff.
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And I'm Nick Eicher. Good morning.
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Up next, Kent Covington has today's news.
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he is feeling very optimistic about the prospects for peace in Ukraine after meeting with Ukrainian diplomats in Geneva on Sunday because.
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This continues to be a working process. You know, I don't want to declare victory or finality here. There's still some work to be done. But we are much further ahead today at this time than we were when we began this morning and where we were a week ago for certain.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did not go into detail over the weekend about a U. S led 28 point peace plan, but it would reportedly require Ukraine to give up more territory in the east of their country and limit the size of their military. Officials in Kyiv definitely have their concerns about the proposal, but the head of the office of the president of Ukraine.
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Andrei Yermak, said Ukrainian people deserve and want this peace more than anymore anyone in this planet.
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Some US Senators claimed Secretary Rubio told them that the plan was a Russian wish list and not the actual plan. But the State Department says that is false. And Rubio himself stated on social media that the US Drew up the plan as a framework for negotiations. After input from both Russia and Ukraine, the secretary said talks would continue today and perhaps deeper into the week. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant says consumer prices are moving in the right direction heading into the Christmas shopping season.
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Some are going to come down in weeks, some are going to come down in months. We just had the in terms of.
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Affordability, we just had the best month.
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In the housing market due to affordability, due to increased supply in October.
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And he says the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner this year will be the lowest it has been in four years. The government did not produce inflation numbers for October due to the government shutdown, but inflation in September ticked up slightly from 2.9 to 3%. Some analysts say President Trump's sweeping tariffs are likely keeping inflation from falling to the Federal Reserve's 2% target. But the president insists the tariffs are good for the economy and the nation. And the White House is exploring a plan to cut $2,000 checks to most Americans funded by tariff revenues. Some critics say that might just further fuel inflation. But U.S. trade Representative Jamison Greer counters.
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I'm not too worried about inflation.
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Right.
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This is not some kind of ongoing new welfare program or something like that that would exacer any inflation. You know, if it's a one time check or something like that, you know, I think American families would probably welcome that, but I don't.
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But many Republicans say that money should go towards paying down the $38 trillion national debt. Lawmakers in Washington have plenty of work to do over the holiday season to prevent another government shutdown. That's the word from Republican Senator John Barrasso.
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We need to get these appropriation bills.
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Done by the deadline date.
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We have five more to go, which.
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Will fund 88% of the government.
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We need to get America back on track.
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We got more work to do.
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We're heading in the right direction.
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The longest ever government shutdown ended nearly two weeks ago, but it could happen again if funding is not passed by the end of January. At the same time, lawmakers are once again debating health care with Obamacare subsidies set to expire at the end of 2025. Democrats held out for six weeks, insisting that no funding bill would pass until Republicans agreed to extend those subsidies before eight Senate Democrats crossed the aisle to reopen the government. Immigration authorities say they have taken a lot of criminals off the streets lately in Charlotte, North Carolina. But Mecklenburg County Sheriff Gary McFadden is pushing back, questioning the need for the operation.
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How many have a violent past? How many were productive citizens?
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How many were contributing to this community?
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But Border Patrol commander in chief at large Gregory Bevino says federal authorities are prioritizing hardened criminals and that They've arrested nearly 400 people so far and what they're calling Operation Charlotte's Web.
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So that operation continues.
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It's going to continue.
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There's a lot of bad people and bad things in Charlotte.
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Protests broke out recently in response to the operation. Around 30,000 students were absent from school at the start of last week. The Trump administration is expanding its push to counter violence against Christians in Nigeria. The president had warned that the US could go after Islamic militants there with guns a blazing. But the State Department says beyond possible military action, the administration is enacting a broader strategy, both carrot and stick. That includes potential sanctions if the Nigerian government doesn't step up counterterrorism efforts. But it also includes intelligence sharing and new assistance programs for Nigeria. That comes as schools and churches in the country continue to face deadly attacks. I'm Kent Covington. And straight ahead, a few Supreme Court cases that answer the same fundamental question on Legal Docket plus, the Monday Money beat and the world history book. This is the World and Everything In It.
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It's Monday, the 24th of November. Glad to have you along for today's edition of the World and Everything in It. Good morning. I'm Nick Iker.
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And I'm Jenny Ruff. Time now for Legal Docket. Today we consider three Supreme Court cases that turn on a deceptively simple question, whether a court has the power to hear a case. Take some absurd ideas just to illustrate the point. A traffic court, for example, has no authority to hear a case about a possible violation of the US Copyright Act. Federal courts cannot hear cases about certain matters of family law. For the most part, that's for the state courts. That is the heart of what lawyers call jurisdiction.
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Now, before we get into the current cases, it may help to remember that questions like this have been with us from the very beginning of the American republic. Leading figures of the founding era argued over them constantly. And it's a shame that we have no audio from those great debates.
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Yeah, it is. But popular culture has recreated those debates. Take HBO's John Adams miniseries, for example. There was this great moment in the series that captures a real disagreement between Adams and Thomas Jefferson about the nature of binding law and the role of a constitution. Maybe you remember this small scene. It begins with a pensive Jefferson.
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I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to its laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another. And then Adams was taken aback. But surely the Constitution is meant to establish the stability and the long term legality essential to the continuation of civilized society.
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That made for great television. But this was not an idle philosophical conversation. Jefferson and Adams famously clashed over the judiciary. President Adams, last minute judicial appointment of William Marbury before he left office. And Jefferson's refusal to be bound by it led directly to one of the most important Supreme Court cases in American history, one that every law student studies, Marbury versus Madison.
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And that case turned on the highly technical question of jurisdiction. The Supreme Court said it simply did not have the authority to hear. Marbury's claim. But that narrow ruling became the foundation for something enormous, the doctrine of judicial review, the court's power to strike down laws it finds unconstitutional.
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So even though jurisdiction might sound dry or procedural, the stakes can be very high. Today we have, as I said, three cases where everything turns on that kind of question. Let's start with a lawsuit about contaminated food. Haynes Celestial versus Palmquist. It began in early 2021. Audio here from a CBS News program.
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First on CBS Mornings, a disturbing new congressional report out later today finds more cases of manufacturers selling baby food with high levels of toxic heavy metals. The report describes dangerous levels of toxins, including arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury in popular baby food products.
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For years, Sarah and Grant Palmquist fed their young son organic baby food, specifically the brand Earth's Best. Later on, he would develop autism and tests would reveal heavy metals in his system. So the Palmquist sued Haynes Celestial, that's the food maker. They also sued Whole Foods. That's the retailer. The parents live in Texas, and they wanted to pursue their case in state court, but Hane wanted the case in federal court.
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Lawyers in this area know that the state and federal courts can feel very different. Plaintiffs often prefer state courts for strategic reasons, more familiarity, local juries, looser rules of evidence. Defendants often prefer federal courts because of features that are the opposite, jury pools that are broader, legal rules that are stricter. That preference battle leads straight into what's known in the law as diversity jurisdiction. Federal courts can hear cases between citizens of different states, but only if every defendant is from a different state than every plaintiff.
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Whole Foods is based in the Texas capital, Austin. If Whole Foods had stayed in the suit, the case would have stayed in Texas. But a trial court dismissed Whole Foods as fraudulently joined, saying the parents added Whole Foods over, only to block the move to federal court. And with Whole Foods out, the trial happened in federal court and Hayne won.
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The Palmquists appealed, and the appellate court said Whole Foods was a proper defendant, so the case should have stayed in state court all along. It ordered a new trial in state.
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Court, and now, on appeal to the US Supreme Court, Hain argued a new trial is unnecessary. The parents had their day in court, and they can still pursue a separate lawsuit against Whole Foods in Texas if they want.
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But Justice Sonia Sotomayor wasn't sure that was the way to fix the mistake. Here she is in an exchange with a lawyer for Hane, Sarah Harrington.
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This plaintiff wanted to be in state court. It sued two parties, your client and Whole Foods. All right, it wanted to litigate. It couldn't because someone that it had a right to include Whole Foods was dismissed erroneously. It was deprived permanently of its opportunity, tactical opportunity, to try this in state court. It had a tactical advantage that was erroneously deprived of.
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I don't think that's right.
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Justice Editor Moyer being able to sue in state court isn't a tactical advantage? Oh, absolutely. I mean, we wouldn't have all the removal arguments that we encounter if it wasn't.
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Haynes attorney argued it would be a waste of resources to have another trial. But that didn't sit well with Justice Neil Gorsuch.
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What do we do about the fact that the problem here was created by your client through an improper removal? I mean, in terms of fairness, that, you know, your hands aren't exactly clean here. On the other hand, perhaps the plaintiffs acted unfairly, too. They could have moved sooner in the process to appeal to the trial court's decision to dismiss Whole Foods, and they chose not to. Justice Amy Coney Barrett pointed that out. That makes it seem like your choice was to take a wait and see.
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Approach and then decide whether you like the result or not before you chose to fight it.
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No, that's not correct, you, Honor.
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But Hane's attorney emphasized that the plaintiffs lost on the merits of their food contamination case. They failed to prove the toxic substances caused their son's condition, so a do over wouldn't matter. But Justice Elena Kagan pushed back to remind Hane how litigation is designed to work.
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But in fact, from the plaintiff's point of view, the thing that went wrong is that the plaintiff is the master of her complaint. She clearly structured a suit in order to bring it in state court. That was why she joined these two parties perfectly legitimately in order to have the suit in state court rather than in federal court where it was. And the effect of this district court misjudgment was not that two parties were separated, is that the suit was tried in the wrong place from the plaintiff's point of view. And the plaintiff's point of view is the thing that should matter because the plaintiff is the master of her complaint.
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So that's diversity jurisdiction. Our next case quickly has to do with personal jurisdiction, the court's power to make a legally binding decision about the person being sued.
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Vista Pro Automotive filed for bankruptcy and went after Coney Island Auto Parts for unpaid invoices. But Vista Pro incorrectly addressed the complaint and Coney island never responded. Eventually, a bank bankruptcy court would enter a default judgment against Coney island and order the company to pay about $50,000 in outstanding debt for purposes of this.
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Case, assume 2 points 1 the bankruptcy court lacked personal jurisdiction to enter the judgment because service was improper, meaning Coney island did not receive the right kind of notice that it was being sued. Point 2 A judgment entered without personal jurisdiction is considered void. Those are not the disputes. The dispute here is whether there's a time limit for asking a court to set aside a void judgment.
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Vista Pro says yes, there is. A federal rule requires challenges to come within a reasonable time. Coney island says no, there isn't. You can't put a time limit on something that was void from the get go.
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Justice Samuel Alito asked how others have handled this conundrum. You'll hear him use the term void ab initio. That just means void from the beginning.
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What have the courts of appeals asked and the commentators said about this question of whether there's a reasonable time limitation.
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On.
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Seeking relief from a judgment that's void ab initio?
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Most others favor Coney island, but this case arose in the 6th Circuit and it's the only one that imposes a time limit. So this decision will resolve the split among the federal appeals courts. Finally, a case on appellate jurisdiction. Most of the time, an appeals court can only hear an appeal after the case is finished.
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But most of the time is not all of the time. There are times when a party can appeal a decision to a higher court while the case is still in progress. In this last case, Alejandro Menical was detained at an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement facility in Colorado that was run by a government contractor known as GEO Group. He and others claim GEO forced them to work in violation of federal law.
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GEO argued it was simply following ICE orders because it was acting in the government's place. It argued it should receive the same immunity the government gets. The trial court denied that claim. GEO tried an immediate appeal, but the appellate court said it lacked jurisdiction to hear the challenge while the litigation was still in progress.
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Justice Alito said that if it were the government bringing the case, it could get an early appeal. So why should the contractor be treated any differently? ICE and the officials could raise sovereign immunity. They could raise qualified immunity and Westfall act immunity.
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And if the district court denied any.
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Of those, then they could get an interlocutory appeal. So why shouldn't the rule be the same for geo?
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If GEO is immune, the case would not move forward. But Alejandro Menocal and the other detainees argue GEO is only entitled to bring its argument as a defense during trial. Interestingly, the Trump administration supports the detainees legal position here to return to the place we started. From the days of Marbury versus Madison until now, the law around jurisdiction has evolved and these current cases get into the weeds of it. But if you listen carefully enough, you'll hear the echoes of those original arguments between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.
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Continuing on of a disconcerting lack of faith in your fellow man, Mr. A. And in yourself, I may say.
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Yes.
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And you display a dangerous excess of faith in your fellow man, Mr. Jefferson.
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And that's this week's legal docket.
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Additional support comes from Cedarville University, equipping students for professional excellence and gospel impact cedarville. Edu World. From Dort University, where pre med students gain knowledge through undergraduate research and hone skills through hands on simulations dort. Edu and from Free Lutheran Bible College, grounding students in the word of God for life in Jesus Christ on campus and in person in Plymouth, Minnesota. Flbc Edu World.
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Coming up next on THE WORLD and everything in it, the Monday Money beat.
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All right, time now to talk business markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bonson. David heads up the wealth management firm the Bonson Group, and he is here now. Good morning to you, David.
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Well, good morning, Nick. Good to be with you.
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Well, David, the New York Times carried what has to have been the strangest political headline of the week. I think you know it's coming. Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani, the fascist and the communist, all the sudden acting like a couple of dudes from Queens starring in a Budd movie. And what a movie it was. I was following the White House feed on Friday afternoon, the two of them laughing together, yucking it up in the Oval Office, patting each other on the arm, batting away tough questions aimed at the other and bonding over the very thing they supposedly agree on, which is the cost of living in New York City. The two of them commiserated about sky high utility bills, the cost of real estate, the need for more housing construction in New York. These, of course, all issues that Trump campaigned on. These are issues Mamdani built his own political rise around. So now we've got Marjorie Taylor Greene out and Zohran Mamdani in. Left wing, socialist, right wing, populist, together, suddenly unified. So, David, is there a single economic theme in here that you want to comment on?
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Yeah, I mean, I think that there is an economic theme behind the fact that many on the right and the left are of looking to governmental solutions and governmental policy as part of the economic ills. I don't know that the friendly rendezvous in the White House is necessarily indicative of that. I think it has a lot to do with President Trump's media savvy that he didn't want to get. You know, Mamdani's a really clever guy. He's energetic, he's young, he's quick on his feet. And I don't think President Trump wanted to go into an adversarial situation with cameras rolling with a young, a savvy guy like Mandani. So I think he played a little excessively nice. And I don't know that's necessarily just because there's more policy overlap than I wish there were. I think it was more, you know, everybody being careful to avoid a gotcha moment on camera. But all that said, I am concerned that there is more and more of the economic framework on the right that is actually more compatible with Mandani, where it used to be that the economic framework of the right existed to oppose things like greater price controls, rent controls, governmental ownership of certain elements of production, things like that. So overall, I wouldn't say I'm very encouraged by any of it.
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Well, David, the GLP1 gold rush last week seemed to hit a new peak. Eli Lilly, the 150-year-old Indiana company, it became the first healthcare firm ever to reach a trillion doll billion dollar valuation almost entirely on the strength of weight loss drugs. So big pharma here, getting fat on getting Americans thin. Do you think that this is a durable economic story or is it possibly just a very expensive moment on the way to something else?
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Well, look, the one that's a bigger competitor than Lilly, Novo, that makes Ozempic, is down over 50% this year while their sales are up, I think, 130. So it's actually been a debacle of a performance from those peak levels. And Lilly is a very different story because while it has one of these big weight loss drugs, I believe it's called Zepbound, that is a competitor to Ozempic. Lilly is a multi, multi drug and category pharmaceutical company where some of these others, they're really kind of living off of one drug and they lack that diversification. And that's what you're going to end up seeing, much like what Lily has done. De Novo Amgen has a product in development. Pfizer's working on one, Merck is working on one. So competition ends up pushing a lot of these stock prices down. But that the medical technology exists for these different weight loss drugs is out there and it's created a bubble, it's created a burst, and there's still at this point, some winners. But no, I mean, I think that there is a lot of downward pressure to think about too, because not only are you getting pressure for reimbursements in terms of the insurance companies, but now you have competition as well and they can't all win at once at the same level.
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David, I'd like to talk a bit about your Dividend cafe. You were pretty direct this weekend about the two stories that matter the most in the macroeconomic world, jobs and gdp. So on jobs, you said that you find yourself somewhere between mildly cautious and genuinely concerned. Not a collapse here, not a panic, just a labor market that is clearly softening. And then on gdp, you're equally sober. You're expecting for the year economic growth to come in at maybe 1.8 to 2.1% for all of 2025. So it does fall roughly in line with the muted sort of 2% middling trend of the post crisis economy. So not strong, not collapsing, but a long way from the campaign promises heard very recently. So if that is the trajectory, and I hate to just put it in purely political terms, but it is kind of hard to imagine either the White House or Republicans being thrilled headed into the midterms.
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No, and I would say it's actually a little worse than that because the big expectation was that there would be something. And so if you just sort of hold the line and it doesn't get better, doesn't get worse. And we already see this in the polling, by the way, that the voters do seem dissatisfied. Now sometimes that can just be because of impatience or there's other factors outside of anyone's control. But I think in this case a lot of it is self induced. For example, manufacturing employment is going down and many people were told the tariffs are gonna bring manufacturing jobs back. There's less factory construction and it isn't like, well, you know, we're seeing a few of these things go backwards, but at least we're, we've gotten prices lower. You know, the year over year inflation rate is higher now than it was when Biden left office, not by much, but by a little. And some of those things are tariff related. And you know who agrees with me on that is the White House because they've come out and said, okay, one of the things we're going to do to address affordability is we're going to get rid of the tariffs that we put on, on coffee and bananas and certain grocery items. And I'm very glad they're doing it. I, I think they're doing the right thing to get rid of them. But those were self induced policy mistakes. So the question going into 2026 is going to be what wins out in the upside opportunity of some of the foreign investment that's supposed to be coming into the country as a result of some of These trade deals versus the downside of constrained trade and a 300 to $350 billion higher tax on the US economy from these additional tariffs. Those two things are in a tug of war. And I'd be very skeptical of anybody, including myself, who, if they were to claim that they know how it's gonna play out. I don't know how it's gonna play out, but I think that that's the tension and I think that that's, as you point out, Nick, it's in a backdrop of already a sort of unsatisfactory level of economic activity. We know the Fed's gonna be cutting rates more, but there just isn't a great catalyst to see improvement in affordability or, or much pickup in economic growth. And so that muddle through place from the baseline we're at is gonna leave some unsatisfied at this point.
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Okay, well, we have just a couple of minutes before we need to go, but one more thread from the Dividend Cafe, David, and it loops back to where we started, the Trump Mamdani moment. Affordability, the question of affordability. You noted that housing remains one of the biggest constraints in the entire economy. Would you touch on that before we wrap things up?
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Yeah, because I think that with housing, much like almost everything in Mamdani's policy portfolio and where President Trump stands now, trying to address things going in a midterm year, one of the scariest things is that when politicians say, okay, we gotta go do something, where sometimes what they're going to do is going to make it worse. And so some of the ideas that have been thrown out because of housing, you know, every politician recognizes we have a affordability issue with housing. But then you throw out ideas like a 50 year mortgage, or you throw out Vice President Harris's idea about supplementing down payments. These are all things that are not only going to not make it better, they will make it worse. And that's what I get worried about. So, for example, people say groceries are too expensive, rent is too expensive in New York City, let's go try the 1970s playbook. That all makes it worse. You have to incentivize more production and, and you can't build more housing stock when people believe they're going to come in and take away your ability to make money with rent freezes. We've talked about this before. You know, they've made it very difficult for landlords to want to be landlords. And so on a federal policy level, I just want the administration to be careful that they don't, in the name of doing things to address problems, do things that make it worse. And there's an expression that us portfolio managers have that churns the popular idiom, you know, don't just stand there, do something. Very often the best thing to do is don't just do something, stand there.
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And this of course, coming from a man of action, David Bonson, founder, managing partner and chief investment officer at the Bonson Group. He writes regularly for World Opinions and each week@dividendcafe.com David, I hope you have a great week.
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Thanks so much, Nick.
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Good to be with you.
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Today is Monday, November 24th. Good morning, this is the world and everything in it. From listener supported World Radio, I'm Jenny Ruff.
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And I'm Nick Iker. Next up, the world history book. It's been 10 years since Disney released its live action remake of the film Cinderella. In a world of revisionist remakes, critics described this film as refreshingly traditional and remarkably faithful to the original. The tale is much older than Disney, of course. The story has been a classic for more than 300 years.
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One of the children listening during those years was a boy named Gilbert Keith. We know Gilbert Keith today as GK Chesterton. So now his thoughts on fairy tales, faith and Cinderella. Here's World correspondent Caleb Weld.
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Now here's a theme that never grows cold. Always dear to young and old.
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In G.K. chesterton's book Orthodoxy, he writes this of his childhood. The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now are the things called fairy tales.
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A long time ago, a lonely little girl named Ella lived with her stepmother and her two stepsisters.
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As a boy, Chesterton listened to the story about a girl faced with the facts. Her mother was dead and her father remarried a cruel woman who treated her terribly.
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Fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly that is in the child already, because it is in the world already.
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John Gager as the voice of Tester.
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What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of evil.
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Good morning.
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Good morning, Miss Ella.
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Good morning, Tom.
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Ella rejects self pity and bitterness and emerges from a painful childhood. Beautiful. Her stepmother has her working with the servants.
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What a lovely chanticleer.
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Well Done.
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Thanks.
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But Ella thanks the chickens for the eggs and endeavors to love her stepmother and sisters.
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Love is not blind. That is the last thing it is. Love is bound. And the more it is bound, the less it is blind.
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She remains strong in the face of many trials. But then her stepsisters begin calling her by a new Cinderella, the dust and ashes of her existence, a metaphor of death. It's a low point in the story, but not the lowest.
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One day, the prince of the realm gave a ball and invited everyone in the kingdom. How Cinderella did long to go.
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But Cinderella wasn't to go, at least if her stepmother had anything to say about it. And she did. Cue the Fairy Godmother.
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Go fetch me a pumpkin.
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A large one, my dear. Six mice and two lizards, and bring them right here.
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When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the Fairy Godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turn to horses, We must answer that it is magic.
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For Chesterton, fairy tales take him back to Eden.
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These tales say that apples were golden, only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green.
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Everything in Eden was surprising, including the rule. In Cinderella, the rule isn't forbidden fruit. It's a curfew that cannot be broken.
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Cinderella received a coach out of Wonderland and a coachman out of nowhere. But she received a command. If Cinderella says, how is it that I must leave the ball at 12? Her godmother might answer, how is it that you are going there till 12, Miss Ella?
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Ashes exchanged for glory, Ella arrives at the ball and looks up.
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The chief pleasure is surprise. Towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest star are the creations of humility. For towers are not tall unless we look up at them.
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I'm frightened, Mr. Lizard.
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I'm only a girl, not a princess.
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And I'm only a lizard, not a footman.
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Enjoy it while it lasts.
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The lesson of Cinderella is the same as that of the Magnificat. Exaltavit humilis.
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For those of us with rusty Latin that's he has exalted the humble. As for Ella's stepmother, the proud are cast down. I forgive you.
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The criminal we must forgive unto 70 times 7. The crime we must not forgive at all. Christianity divided the crime from the criminal. There was room for wrath and love to run wild in Cinderella.
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That love, love leads to marriage, as Ella and the Prince live happily ever after. Modern critics of fairy tales decry such tidy, happy endings, claiming they're not realistic or that they raise unrealistic expectations. But for G.K. chesterton, happy endings remind us of ultimate reality.
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Our future hope, my ideal, was fixed before the foundations of the world. My vision of perfection assuredly cannot be altered, for it is called Eden. You may alter the place to which you are going, but you cannot alter the place from which you have come. In the upper world, hell once rebelled against heaven. But in this world, heaven is rebelling against hell. At any instant, you may strike a blow for the perfection of which no man has seen since Adam. No unchanging custom, no changing evolution can make the original good anything but good.
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That's this week's world history book. I'm Caleb Weley.
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Tomorrow, states weigh legalizing assisted suicide as pro life advocates warn of the logical outcomes. And we open the pages of the first Bible published in American colonies. That, that and more tomorrow. I'm Jenny Ruff.
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And I'm Nick Icker. The world and everything in it comes to you from World Radio. World's mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates and inspires. The Bible says, do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication. With thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Verses 6 and 7 of the fourth chapter of Philippians. Go now in grace and peace.
Episode: 11.24.25 – Legal Docket, Moneybeat, and History Book: G.K. Chesterton on Fairy Tales
Date: November 24, 2025
Hosts: Jenny Ruff, Nick Eicher (WORLD Radio)
This episode features three well-structured segments. First, the Legal Docket dives into three Supreme Court cases where the key issue is not the merits but jurisdiction: whether a court has the power to hear a case. Then, on Monday Moneybeat, financial analyst David Bonson discusses economic themes emerging from the surprising Trump-Mamdani meeting, the status of affordability, jobs, and GDP. Finally, the History Book explores G.K. Chesterton’s timeless insights on fairy tales—particularly Cinderella—and their significance for faith and the human spirit.
[06:33 – 17:42]
Why Jurisdiction Matters
Case 1: Haynes Celestial v. Palmquist — Diversity Jurisdiction
Case 2: Vista Pro Automotive v. Coney Island Auto Parts — Personal Jurisdiction
Case 3: GEO Group v. Menocal — Appellate Jurisdiction for Contractors
[18:49 – 29:18]
Trump-Mamdani White House Moment
Big Pharma and Weight-loss Drug Boom
Jobs, GDP, and Voter Sentiment
Housing Crunch and Policy Warnings
[29:55 – 36:09]
Chesterton on Fairy Tales and Evil
Cinderella as a Metaphor for Christian Truth
Forgiveness and Happy Endings
[06:33] – Legal Docket Segment Begins
[18:49] – Monday Moneybeat Segment Begins
[29:55] – History Book: G.K. Chesterton on Fairy Tales
The hosts maintain a measured, literate tone—respectful, deeply informative, and sprinkled with playful historical references and moral reflection. They let expert voices (from the Supreme Court to Chesterton) illuminate the big questions lying beneath headlines.
From the basics of legal jurisdiction to big-picture economics and the rich truths of fairy tales, the episode consistently asks: What is really at stake—in courts, in politics, and in how we understand life’s greatest stories?
Notable Quotes Recap:
Useful for: Anyone seeking a comprehensively Christian worldview on law, economics, and culture, or wanting a thoughtful recap of important legal, financial, and philosophical issues making news.