Follow-up to the giant big tech CEO grillings. Thursday is a hearing on how to re-write antitrust. I'm hearing that, once again, @Jim_Jordan is pushing for pro-big tech nonsense. Meanwhile @RepKenBuck is actually trying to fight monopolies. Split among Rs. wsj.com/articles/break…
So @Jim_Jordan tried and failed to sabotage the big tech CEO hearing a few months ago. He's relentlessly working on behalf of big tech.
Ok so @Jim_Jordan's witnesses for the Antitrust big tech hearing follow-up are Christopher Yoo and Tad Lipsky. Both are funded by Google, Facebook, and Qualcomm.
There are some good Republicans on that subcommittee but Jordan is owned by big tech. It's embarrassing.
If @Jim_Jordan wants Google and Facebook to write the antitrust laws, he should just be honest and invite reps from those companies directly. axios.com/scoop-lawmaker…
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1. You learn a lot about politicians when the spotlight is not on them. So I want to offer an observation about something Kamala just did - a quiet and almost wholly unnoticed favor to big business and Mitch McConnell - suggesting she would have been a problematic President.🧵
2. In late November, after the election, the Biden White House nominated two people for something called the International Trade Commission. The ITC is the body designed to address cheating by foreign companies who dump products to destroy US producers.
3. The ITC is one of those places where free traders have run the roost for decades, crushing industry after industry by refusing to uphold anti-dumping law. It's also a place that few in D.C. care about. Domestic producers? Pffeh, who cares about steel and mattress imports?
1. This is a useful response in terms of how to understand the Abundance theory of politics. Yglesias is making a *policy* argument about private equity. It's not bad! It depends! We have to be nuanced! Ok, that's true. So what's the problem?
2. People increasingly hear 'private equity' and associate it with pillaging. It's not always true; KKR has done a great job with Simon & Schuster. But it's often true. So demonizing private equity is like demonizing Wall Street - it's a symbol of a society with haves/have nots.
3. That's the *political* story that populists like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump tell. It's a true political story, private equity billionaires are doing horrific things and corrupting politics. We all know that's true. But anti-populists don't like that political story.
1. There's a fascinating dynamic among Trumpy venture capitalists trying to manipulate the right-wing for their own purposes. For example, here's vc Marc Andreesen saying the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau forces conservatives to lose their bank accounts.
2. Andreesen says the CFPB 'terrorizes' financial institutions and denies them access to the banking system, and says it is going after conservatives. But is that true? Well, as @dorajfacundo points out, the CFPB is doing the opposite.
Trump is a lot like Obama. He is about to destroy the Republican Party as badly as Obama destroyed the Democrats, and for the same reason. He's promised a realignment for the people, he's going to deliver a realignment for Wall Street.
Trump is also a godsend for Democrats the way Obama was for the Rs. In 2024, the Democrats are a spent force, dominated by horrible Obama retreads. By 2028 MSNBC will be gone and a wave of populists will have redefined the Dems as a renewed faction.
Obama and Trump jointly and fully buried the post-Cold War era of domestic politics. Obama took the moral currency of the civil rights movement and openly spent it on Wall Street, Trump proved that voters don't buy into the moral myths of the 20th century anymore.
1. Identity politics is bad because it's fundamentally a con, a way of ensuring plutocrats control our society. It's the inversion of 'rights' to support authoritarian corporate power. Here are some examples.
2. Regulating trillion dollar social media and search monopolists to protect children from addiction is actually an attack on gay people. wsj.com/politics/polic…
3. Another... Getting paid $1500/hour to help steal from chicken farmers is about women's empowerment.
1. Since the new line on why antitrust is bad is the Spirit Airlines bankruptcy, let's talk about what is really happening. Here's a hint. The CEO of Spirit was paid a $3.8 million bonus the week before the bankruptcy. But you don't hear about that. wlrn.org/business/2024-…
2. What's really going on isn't a bad enforcement regime, it's a bunch of greedy incompetent airline executives blaming the government for not letting them violate the law for money. Let's start at the beginning. npr.org/2024/11/18/nx-…
3. In 2022, there was a bidding war between Frontier and JetBlue over Spirit Airlines. Spirit's board hired a consultant to evaluate, who told execs/shareholders that the JetBlue deal was *illegal." They accepted it anyway since it was more money. financierworldwide.com/jetblues-38bn-…