1. Today I wrote about the recent blackouts in New York City, the greatest city in America. Monopolization and financialization have put NYC on the brink of disaster. And it's not just electricity. mattstoller.substack.com/welcome
2. Blackouts are scary things. On July 13th, people got stuck in elevators, the subway stopped, theaters shut down, and Jennifer Lopez was interrupted in the middle of a song at Madison Square Garden. nytimes.com/2019/07/15/nyr…
3. Another blackout happened a week later. Just before the blackout, NYC electric utility Con Ed president Tim Cawley embarrassingly said, “By any measure, we are the most reliable electric delivery system in the United States." Oops. mattstoller.substack.com/welcome
4. Blackouts in New York City reflect the politics of the time. In 1965, and then again in 1969, Con Edison had massive outages that inspired frustration with what Americans perceived as an overall breakdown of the New Deal order. Another one in 1977 enabled widespread looting.
5. The Carter and then Reagan eras of deregulation and concentrated capital were in many ways framed against the old, over-regulated, and antiquated systems represented by Con Edison, and in a bigger sense, New York City of the 1970s. mattstoller.substack.com/welcome
6. Deregulation finally hit New York's utilities fully in 1997. But it didn't work. Con Ed still raises dividends every year, its CEO makes $10M a year, and its operations are terrible. Consider what happened after Hurricane Sandy.
7. Half the city went without power, and not because of the storm. Because of the poor electrical grid. The Utility Workers of America released a report on it. Con Ed was so badly run it didn't bother to stock up on ladders before the storm. Ladders! assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4402…
8. But the weak electrical grid is only the first problem in NYC. The second is the Hudson tunnel, the busiest rail link in America. It was built in 1910, and is so old and rundown it could collapse at any moment. mattstoller.substack.com/welcome
9. Chris Christie, to fight Obama, refused to use stimulus money to rebuild the Hudson tunnel. But even if he hadn't been a jerk, we increasingly can't build things in America without spending far more than it should cost. Why? These guys.
10. Increasingly, government contractor is a wretched stew of corruption, due to 'reinventing government' by Bill Clinton and Al Gore, super-sized by Dick Cheney. One consultant, for instance, from BCG, now costs the gov't $33k a week.
11. The resulting system of private governance is both inefficient and expensive. Instead of hiring a gov't employee at $120k/year gov'ts now hire a Booz Allen consultant at $500k/year. If socialists want to socialize something, they should start with, oh, government.
12. The third problem, after electricity and transport, is food. New York City nearly ran out of food after Sandy, because of corporate concentration. Here's @sidhubaba from 2013. citylab.com/equity/2013/10…
@sidhubaba 13. New York state used to grow a lot of the food NYC ate. Even Brooklyn and Queens counties were large vegetable producers! But that system is gone, as large companies like Sysco now run a much leaner and distanced system. NYC's food supply is just farther away.
@sidhubaba 14. We have pooled risk in hidden ways. At Boeing it means the company was generating gobs of cash, but planes started crashing. In NYC that means residents are vulnerable to losing electricity and food, and to transit collapses. mattstoller.substack.com/welcome
@sidhubaba 15. Governor Andrew Cuomo is part of the problem. His defining experience, in my view, was his alleged attempt in 1988 to take over a south Florida savings and loan bank and drain the bank of its assets. He's a finance guy first and foremost. sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-19…
@sidhubaba 16. Cuomo can't see the problems of corruption and financialization because his political success relies on them. He believes in corrupt contracting and corporate concentration. The regulators he appoints often see the world that way too. mattstoller.substack.com/welcome
@sidhubaba 17. There’s a political rebellion going on all over American society because it’s obvious our leaders can’t handle the job we’ve given to them. I just hope the rebellion succeeds before a crisis really shows us why that rebellion needs to succeed. mattstoller.substack.com/welcome
@sidhubaba 18. Anyway, that's my NYC disaster movie. Right now it's just spreadsheets and the theme to Jaws. All fixable, of course, if we choose to fix it.
P.S. Subscribe to my newsletter if you like stories like this on the politics of monopoly and finance. mattstoller.substack.com/welcome
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1. Let's talk about Jeff Bezos's manipulation of the Washington Post for political purposes to help Trump and what this choice is causing Democrats to realize. For a long time, there's been a debate over the merits of big business and billionaires.
2. Writers like Matt Yglesias and @EricLevitz see Amazon as generally good. Here's Yglesias: "Amazon, as far as I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.” slate.com/business/2013/…
3. But they've systematically ignored the darker side of oligarchy these firms represent, and not just evidence that Amazon is overhyped as a business. For instance:
It's not just a white young male problem, it's a young male problem, period. Part of the answer is progressive elites dramatically overvalue civility and order, and thus disdain much of the cultural stuff that young guys enjoy.
I once attended a Young Dems conference, and there was an hour when all the different caucuses met. Disability caucus, black caucus, women's caucus, LGBT caucus, et al.
What was left were a group of straight white guys just standing around, awkwardly. What kind of shit is that?
How many Democratic activist-types actually listen to Joe Rogan? He's funny and weird and not at all how he's portrayed. Think about the angry reaction to Rogan endorsing Bernie.
1. Since 2008, Google has systemically destroyed evidence relevant to antitrust investigations. And judges are beginning to hold Google accountable. Today I was a courtroom to watch Judge Leonie Brinkema, the latest judge, who is presiding over Google's third antitrust trial.
2. Why so many trials? Well Google has many lines of business! One trial was on its control of app stores. Another trial was about search. This one's on its power over online ad software that manages publishing sites and ad buying. All involve Google's document destruction.
3. In the app store trial, Judge Donato gave jury instructions known as 'adverse inference' meaning that the jury should consider Google operating in bad faith for destroying evidence. Google lost. In the search trial, Judge Mehta was scornful of Google, and ruled against them.
"Our tool ensures that [landlords] are driving every possible opportunity to increase price even in the most downward trending or unexpected conditions.”
BOOM. That's illegal, and antitrust enforcer Jonathan Kanter just dropped the hammer.
"In its pitch to prospective clients, RealPage describes AIRM’s and YieldStar’s access to competitors’ granular, transactional data as a meaningful tool that it claims enables landlords to outperform their properties’ competitors by 2–7%."
Interesting.
Price-fixing clip art!
(This is from a landlord's internal training presentation.)
1. Ok why is Kamala Harris talking about price-fixing, gouging, mergers, and general pricing bullshit? Obviously it polls well. But why? Let's go over the *evidence* for why Americans are mad at big business over pricing. Let's start with rent. propublica.org/article/yields…
2. A company called RealPage works with the biggest corporate landlords to hold apartments empty so they can increase prices. That's illegal. How important is this conspiracy to increased rents? “I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,” said Andrew Bowen, a RealPage executive.
3. There are private antitrust cases against RealPage. The Biden-Harris administration is investigating and will probably bring an antitrust suit soon. The FBI already raided one of America's biggest corporate landlords. finance.yahoo.com/news/fbi-searc…
Chuck Schumer probably experienced a bit of antisemitism as a kid. But seriously stop it. Jews are super-empowered in America in virtually every way, which he knows when he talks to the disproportionate number of Jewish Senators. We aren't defined by our grievances.
There are anti-semites in America, but that's just because we're a big country so of course there are jerks. Some of them are even violent because we're a violent country.