Since lots of gossips are now gunning for me, I'm redoing this thread. It's clear something messed up happened in Platner's relationships, and he hasn't hidden that. But there's a big difference between 'normal people in bad relationships who hate each other' and 'crime.'

So let's be adults. This is a political attack.

Top Maine Democratic Party donors in recent years are Reid Hoffman, Haim Saban, and David Ellison. David Ellison! As in the Trump ally who fired Stephen Colbert and is taking over TikTok, CBS News, and CNN. These names should mean something. Saban may be the single most important AIPAC donor in the Democratic Party.

Another big donor to the Maine Democratic Party is the founder of Zynga, Marc Pincus, who said in 2024 that "an attack on Amazon is an attack on America." It goes beyond big tech and Wall Street. Crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried’s partner Nishad Singh at FTX gave $100k to the Maine Democratic Party in 2022.

The insiders running the party are the people funded through these streams of revenue, they are the ones dealing with the donors and currying favor with them. And while I will not speak out of school, the Maine Democratic establishment simply cannot be trusted and that is well-known.

Platner may be a fatally weakened candidate, that is for others to decide. It's a wave year in a blue state, but I get that Susan Collins is a strong incumbent. Winning this Senate seat matters, so I get why people might see value in ditching him. I generally think that polls and electoral guesses are mechanisms to get ordinary voters to focus on anything but policy. It's a disciplining mechanism, since no one can tell the future. But it's not crazy to see Platner as a poor candidate.

Let's be clear, the goal of pushing Platner aside is to destroy the agenda on which he was elected, which is about taming oligarchy and reorienting us from endless war. That is why the Maine Democrats aren't saying 'let's respect Platner voters and transition to someone else,' they are taking a sanctimonious 'he gets NO say in ANYTHING.' Those are not the actions of people who want to win a Senate seat, those are the actions of nasty insiders claiming factional power for themselves.

If Platner steps down, he will be characterized as a deviant, and that's just how it'll be forever. True or not. And everyone will be tarred as supportive of immoral behavior. It doesn't matter if you are a liberal, centrist, young, old, whatever. People are saying the Bulwark, a centrist outlet started by ex-Republicans who were skeptical of Platner, are tarred by this. Punchbowl is reporting that Senate progressives will never have credibility going forward. The ploy here is obvious.

That is, even though the actual immoral behavior at issue here is the genocide in Gaza, the corruption of DOGE and Musk, and the neoliberal turn in American politics for 40 years that has destroyed our faith in society and each other.

Platner has been consistent about his platform, and there's no reason to assume that will change. 70% of Maine Democrats picked him as their candidate, and he has the right to represent their views. So he should stay in the race or, if he feels he cannot win, leave on terms that will ensure his platform, and not that of Maine Dem Party oligarch donors, is the one on the ballot in November. The Maine Dem establishment cannot be trusted.

And frankly, this kind of ugly scenario is how power works. They make ordinary people pick among ugly scenarios, and then they make it seem like the obvious path is the one that accords more power and wealth to oligarchs. And if you don't choose that one, you're a bad person who deserves approbation and scorn. That's why I had to delete the original thread and rewrite it, because endless numbers of reporter gossips - who don't report on government policy - are using this extremely obvious ratfucking to try and destroy people like me telling you the truth. This person runs a dark money political group and is offering to pay accusers of Platner. Who are her funders?

https://x.com/CheyenneHuntCA/status/2074666136088481895?s=20

Platner is offering to step down and Maine insiders are demanding he let them pick an Israel supporter. That’s playing with fire and deeply evil.

https://twitter.com/JakeSherman/status/2074661654206296326

Say what you want about Platner but he won the Maine primary on a platform and it is perfectly reasonable for him to demand a replacement candidate adhere to the wishes of his voters.

1. Pope Leo XIV wrote a long policy statement on AI. I'm reading it, it's pretty interesting. I'll pull relevant quotes. vatican.va/content/leo-xi… 2. "Today, however, the main drivers of development are private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments."

Very similar to statements from many politicians about the power of big tech.

Xavier Becerra is likely to become the California governor. He’s dumb, arrogant, incompetent and tolerates criminal behavior by staff. He’ll likely be recalled fairly soon. “Becerra out-polls all of his rivals when it comes to Black and Latino voters.”

I’m a broken record, but corporate power in the Democratic Party flows through black boomer voters.

yahoo.com/news/articles/…

The reason Democrats have no position on the war is because no one has a coherent view on what to do. It’s not on them.

The U.S. is basically the bank account and army for global oligarchs. This positioning is not good for Americans and it’s not good for the world. But it’s also impossible to imagine an alternative.

The foreign policy establishment sees their work as a hobby. The U.S. is so endlessly rich and heroic that it’s all a game. They don’t think that the realm of foreign affairs should be good for ordinary people; that’s a rhetorical afterthought. To them the deindustrialization and erosion of the middle class at the heart of the destabilization of the world is sad but necessary, if they bother to notice it at all.

The left foreign policy world is not actually that different. They are libertarian and hostile to Americans, and they don’t care about economics. Foreign policy to them is a hobby of the rich, it’s just the U.S. is the central villain instead of central hero. They do not understand or care about deindustrialization as a result of Chinese overcapacity, which is a central and fundamental foreign policy challenge. To them that’s handwaving away as ‘economics’ and boring. Let’s just do ‘care’ work, they imagine, as if a nation that makes nothing and imports food can afford to have its young people do nothing but wipe the asses of the old.

What does a non-oligarch driven America actually do? What does it look like? Well for starters we pull back dramatically from the rest of the world. No troops in Europe, maybe offer some defense weapons to East Asian nations. No presence in the Middle East. Cut Israel loose entirely. Total revamp of our bloated and incompetent military and its corrupt establishment. Fire most admirals and generals and put in a new generation capable of actually thinking.

This change will require us to be a LOT more protectionist. We put up huge trade barriers so that we can rebuild our industries. We also impose capital controls and confiscate or tax assets held by foreigners. No foreign ownership of land. We are not your bank account, Mr. Saudi Prince or Chinese money launderer.

Finally, we crush capitalism. Rebuild our farms and factories. No more driving our corporations for shareholders. Lots of public utility regulation or nationalization of assets. No more private equity. No more crypto or corporate gambling. If you want to make money, you do something useful. Otherwise it’s poverty or handcuffs.

America needs to be run for its people, not for the Epstein Class or for weirdos who can’t go over the Iranian overthrow of the shah or for lefty hobbyists funded by Koch industries to deindustrialize what’s left of what we have. I was a China hawk because the U.S. was a possible balance to their power. No longer. We are too weak and must go into an emergency posture to protect ourselves.

1/3. A good day for antitrust. The Ninth Circuit mostly upheld the injunction against Apple for screwing app developers in the lawsuit vs Epic Games. Apple can charge, but only for its actual costs. fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/… 2/3. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued medical health care records monopolist Epic Systems. texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/…

In her oversight hearing today, Attorney General Pam Bondi got a surprising number of questions about corruption at the Antitrust Division. Here's @amyklobuchar. Here's Senator Mazie Hirono asking about corruption in the Hewlett-Juniper merger case, Bondi responds by saying that Hirono was out protesting with Antifa.

I'm baffled by @DKThomp's piece on Dallas housing.

He claims that Dallas builds so many houses that there can't be an oligopoly fostering a lack of housing.

He also claims Dallas doesn't build enough houses because of zoning choices.

Which is it?

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1950890865041236251

Here's where @DKThomp is wildly inconsistent.

Either there are restrictions on supply in Dallas driving up housing prices, or there aren't. Thompson wants to have it both ways.

1. The discussion over 'AI taking all the jobs' has been bothering me for awhile. In 2013, Jeff Bezos was asked about bookselling. "Amazon isn't happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling." Blaming abstract forces is what monopolists ALWAYS do. 2. Anthropic's CEO says that AI may 'cure cancer' but also eliminate entry-level jobs. Policymakers need to get a hold of that, he says. Weird he doesn't want to talk about how his firm's models are trained on massively pirated content. thebignewsletter.com/p/why-are-we-p…

1. Ok so let's talk about socialism, aka the state taking over from private industry. Here are some examples you haven't heard of - Kentucky and Ohio - replacing their pharma pricing middlemen with state agencies. 2. In 2018, the Columbus Dispatch revealed that pharma middlemen CVS Caremark and UnitedHealth Group's OptumRx were ripping off the state Medicaid program, destroying pharmacies, and hurting patients. So Ohio... fired them. And built its own state PBM. thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-rou…

Obama was a malevolent leader and as a person is a mean spirited greedy narcissist. The authoritarian turn we are experiencing now is directly his doing, though not solely his doing.

So is our gruesomely dishonest conversation on race and identity.

https://twitter.com/Tyler_A_Harper/status/1931786307174379602

I worked on the financial crisis and I remember hearing from people in the White House mockery of the ‘deadbeats’ who couldn’t pay their mortgages. It’s hard to convey the meanness of the Obama insiders.

1. Since Yglesias won't address the argument @musharbash_b made about housing, I will. His argument is that Texas, which Abundance authors @DKThomp and @ezraklein point to as a model, has the same housing cost inflation they ascribe to blue areas. Why? thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with… x.com/mattyglesias/s… 2. It's corporate power among homebuilders. Don't just take @musharbash_b word for it, it's a well-known story. Here's a shockingly good CNBC report on how big homebuilders withhold housing supply.

Mark Zuckerberg is on the stand, the FTC lawyer is grilling him on documents showing the point of the service is to connect to friends. This is about market definition. #ftcvmeta FTC asks if Meta is still built on a 'social graph,' Zuckerberg says he's not sure what that means but that it's a 'core concept' of Facebook.

"The friend part has gone down quite a bit."

He wants the judge to see TikTok as a rival.

The basic problem with America is that nearly all of our major institutions are led by vastly overpaid incompetent greedheads who all have agreed to not snitch on each other. It's easy to explain how to fix it once you get this basic diagnosis. Here are a few ideas. 1) Corporate boards are full of lazy kiss-assers who get $100k to show up to a meeting a few times a year. So how about this? No board members of a company can get paid while there's a strike going on at their company.

Deepseek is forcing the entire Silicon Valley ecosystem to recognize that Lina Khan was right, even if they won’t admit it. Here’s the point. ftc.gov/system/files/f…

So an insane story by @musharbash_b, a private equity roll-up of fire trucks is why more than half the fire trucks in Los Angeles were out of service during the catastrophic wildfires in the Palisades and Eaton. Link: thebignewsletter.com/p/did-a-privat…

1. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is bad because it was a way of taking the civil rights movement - which was about prohibiting economic discrimination at its core - and corrupting it to serve corporate interests. Here are some examples, starting with UnitedHealth Group. 2. Biglaw's Latham and Watkins bragged their team keeping poultry price-fixers out of jail was a historic 'all-women team' of defense lawyers.

1. Want some fun news before the Monday inauguration that you won't have heard anywhere else? The antitrust enforcers (Lina Khan et al) went full Tony Montana on big business this week before Trump people took over. Here's just part of what they did. 2. The FTC filed a monopolization claim against agricultural machine maker John Deere for generating $6 billion by prohibiting farmers from being able to repair their own equipment, a suit which Wired magazine calls a “tipping point” for the right to repair movement.

There’s a nontrivial chance that Trump’s new term is the actual catastrophe that liberals imagined his first one would be. I don’t mean authoritarian, I mean economic, military and social collapse. Here's why I think there's a nontrivial chance of a serious dislocation under Trump. It's not because of him, per se, but structural things he won't fix.

Here are a few. The U.S. net international investment position is negative $23 trillion and sinking rapidly. That's crazy.

There's something off about all of the post-election recriminations among Democrats. It's not that any of the theories are wrong, it's that none of these pontificators actually know how to make government do anything.

https://twitter.com/jmart/status/1872647725013250117

Like, sure, use different language if you think that matters. The bottom line is Obama said you can keep your doctor and health costs would go down and that didn't happen and most Dems don't seem remotely curious why that is.

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.

whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…