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Matt Stoller Profile picture
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21 Dec, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Rich Republican white people flipped to Biden as non-whites flipped to Trump. Can we be honest now and admit Trump won in 2016 due economic frustration and all the careerist racecraft scolds were embarrassingly wrong? Or do we have to wait until President Hawley takes office?
Here's Paul Krugman calling Josh Hawley a Nazi for making a class-based argument. In the time since Hawley has worked with noted anti-semite Richard Blumenthal to address big tech and famous bigot Bernie Sanders to move relief checks to working families.
That last tweet was sarcastic. The point here is the pervasive nature of what @thomasfrank_ calls Anti-Populism, how elites frame calls for democratic self-government over rule by experts as malevolent and dangerous.
Hawley is a good illustration, but it's not about him, per se. The Vox children of David Broder use the same attack line on whoever is a threat to ruling orthodoxy, whenever anyone gets out of line, be it Bill Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, etc.

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More from @matthewstoller

Matt Stoller Profile picture
20 Dec
Just so people are aware @aoc voted against the CARES Act and no one had her back when she did so.
@AOC voted against it but it was a voice vote so it’s not recorded on the roll call website. Her statement is the record. But yes she voted against it.
Brad is a former member of Congress explaining how the House works. The reason there was no roll call vote is because of the pandemic - House leadership didn't want people showing up due to safety issues.
Read 6 tweets
Matt Stoller Profile picture
19 Dec
So @BharatRamamurti is correct insofar as he goes but he's leaving out that the tools Toomey's proposal would kill were used to boost big business and toxic private equity shops, and that virtually nothing ended up going to state and local gov'ts and small business.
We all agree the Fed has helped Wall Street and stiffed ordinary people. But @BharatRamamurti thinks the Fed will eventually get around to helping ordinary people under a Biden administration, whereas I don't. That's the disagreement.
There's just no evidence for this perspective. I watched the Federal Reserve cover up foreclosure fraud during the Obama administration and refuse to lift a finger to aid Puerto Rico while the New York Fed encouraged PR to cut its minimum wage.
Read 7 tweets
Matt Stoller Profile picture
13 Dec
I'm enjoying @jimmy_dore putting House progressives on the spot on how they aren't demanding anything in return for giving Pelosi their vote for Speaker. He's pointing out they have not organized a coherent political agenda.
Progressives should either become a coherent independent Dem faction or fully embrace what they effectively are, a loyal supportive faction of Democrats with no independent policy goals.
I don't even think Medicare for All is a coherent idea. I would ask for changes to House procedure, independent committee decisions and more personal office funding to do investigations. Pelosi has centralized power in her hands. Break that. But ask for *something.*
Read 7 tweets
Matt Stoller Profile picture
11 Dec
1. @ShaoulSussman and I wrote about a key scholar named Herb Hovenkamp. It's a story of how corporate power lives not in seedy politics, but in academia, in expert jargon, and in false histories about who we are written by those who distrust democracy. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
2. Let's start with the Google and FB antitrust actions, which should be slam-dunk cases. Mark Zuckerberg de facto wrote in cited emails "let's do more crimes." Yet we hear from experts that corporate break-ups are hard, an uphill climb, etc. Why? nytimes.com/2020/12/10/tec…
3. First, modern leeriness of break-ups is profoundly weird and ahistorical. Corporate break-ups, as @RoryVanLoo observes, are not a big deal and are quite common. It's mostly just changing some legal documents. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
Read 27 tweets
Matt Stoller Profile picture
10 Dec
"In a 2008 internal report entitled “Facebook Secret Sauce,” the company identified as one of the four pillars of its success the fact that it was responsive to users’ desire
for privacy and gave them control over their data."
These internal FB emails on acquisitions are damning.

“Yes – smart idea. we should buy them and own this leverage point . . . .”

“an acquisition could be interesting if for a few million we could slow some competitors down for a quarter or so . . . .”
Oh man. As one Facebook executive put it, “IF ever there was a time to AVOID controversy, it would be when the world is comparing our offerings to G+.” He then recommended that Facebook save any controversial changes “until the direct competitive comparisons begin to die down."
Read 8 tweets
Matt Stoller Profile picture
5 Dec
These narratives about family and hardship are designed to position extremely powerful people who enrich themselves via public office as victims. It's a bizarre affect. Working for Google and Goldman to help a poor family might be a necessary choice, but it doesn't make you good.
The revolving door is a tricky problem. I am not opposed to working in business and government. But Google and Goldman have been massive beneficiaries of government aid and being honest about that instead of whining about purity would go a long way.
No one is free of conflicts. Academia and nonprofits have extremely weird politics that can be brutal, and civil servants can be petty tyrants. The problem is systemic corruption for 40 years flowing through elite institutions that goes unrecognized.
Read 5 tweets

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