BC LAW
Saved by @SteveeRogerr

It took decades after the passage of America's landmark antitrust laws - the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act - for trustbusting to occur in earnest, and what spurred the action wasn't mere corporate bullying, not just price hikes and labor abuses.

1/

 What tipped America over into a state where a leader (FDR) who told activists "I want to do it, now make me do it" found the political will to "do it" was the corruption that attended the extreme concentration of wealth.

2/
Monopoly was never merely an issue of economics - it's fundamentally an issue about POLITICS. Yes, the monopolist bleeds workers and suppliers, sucks them dry and amasses a tremendous fortune, but that's just accumulating ammunition.

3/
What the monopolist does with that ammunition is far more consequential: when the powerful are small in number and command vast fortunes, they can come to a consensus about how to deploy their fortunes to corrupt the political process.

4/
The economic harms are just a warmup, the political harms are the real deal.

Hoover was beholden to plutes, had a cabinet full of them, turned over the nation's treasury to a sociopathic monster called Andrew Mellon whose stated ambition was to own all the world's aluminum.

5/
And so, as the Depression raged, as the nation's breadbasket turned to dust and blew away, as the country disintegrated and as veterans of the Great War starved, Hoover continued to make policy on behalf of the 1%, immiserating the country.

6/
FDR won the election in 1932 - but even more compellingly, Hoover lost it. The nation wasn't just angry about the economy - they were furious about politics, about the fiddling indifference of the rich and powerful to the collapse of their lives, fortunes and future.

7/
The trustbusting tradition endured for generations, and it treated inequality, monopoly and wealth concentration as political problems, as the visible sign of an imminent takeover of the nation by self-styled neo-aristocrats whose wealth was evidence of greed, not ingenuity.

8/
It was Ronald Reagan who made America's official position that wealth was virtue and virtue was wealth - the plute's circular logic that the system works if it elevates the best people, and that they, the elevated were therefore the best.

9/
Reagan, his court sorcerer Robert Bork (a disgraced Nixon administration criminal) and the Chicago School of economists reframed monopoly as a purely economic matter, altering the rules so that monopolies were only prevented or punished if they made prices go up.

10/
The "consumer welfare" version of antitrust abandoned all political questions - questions that every person had a legitimate say in - in favor of complex economic models that they alone could create and interpret.

11/
Thus they could act as modern haruspices, who would evaluate every monopoly question by staring into the inscrutable guts of an equation and then pronounce that the gods approved of the monopoly.

12/
The result was the steady encroachment of priorities of the wealthy into the political sphere, so that Boeing could self-certify its flying deathtraps, Purdue could lie about its murder pills, bailed out banks could robosign your house right out from under you.

13/
When people embraced conspiracies about vaccines or aerospace companies or impunity for rich sexual predators, we blamed "online radicalization" for exposing the traumatized and desperate to false explanations for their misery - rather than blaming immiserating corruption.

14/
Wealth is power, and it's unaccountable power that allows it to corrupt without check. That sounds abstract, so let me make it concrete by talking about the Epleys, a powerful and fearsome family that dominates New York State's Hamptons.

15/
The Epleys were longtime allies of Southampton Mayor Michael Irving, who was trounced by Jesse Warren in a Jun 2019 election. Warren went on to remove Zach Epley from Southampton's planning board, as is his prerogative as mayor.

https://t.co/1Tqq9DMh6d

16/
In October 2019, Epley left a voicemail message for Warren, telling the mayor that it was "game on."

Last July, the Epleys bought the house Warren rents from a Citibank exec called Brandt Portugal.

17/
After initial saber-rattling, the Epleys pledged to leave their new tenant Warren alone, but then Zach Epley lost a local Village Board election to a candidate that Warren had backed. Then the gloves came off.

18/
Warren was also unable to renew his lease for his home in October, but New York State's eviction moratorium protects him.

Warren continued sending rent checks to the Epleys, but they claimed the certified letters never arrived - so they served him with eviction papers.

19/
Eviction would end Warren's residency in Southampton and thus his eligibility to run again for mayor. On Jan 16, Zach Epley and his father Mark Epley (formerly the town mayor) showed up to demand that Warren leave in an absurd encounter that was recorded and posted online.

20/
Warren has closed on a new home in town and will be moving at the end of the month.

On the one hand, this is a spicy story about small town politics, but on the other, it's a tale of how money becomes power becomes corruption.

21/
A powerful family of sore losers can turn their wealth into the power to evict the mayor and thus expel him from town and end his political career in town - it's a perfect microcosm for how money can undo the democratic will of the people.

22/
And that's why inequality is bad: not merely because the wealthy hoard the resources the rest of us need, nor because the alleged prosperity that allowing these soi-dissant giants direct our resources never materialized.

23/
But because wealth is power without accountability, and that power corrupts.

The Epleys are why Reagan and Bork were wrong: wealth concentration was never solely (or even primarily) an economic matter.

It's always been political.

eof/
ETA: If you'd like to read or link to this as a blog post on a site without any surveillance, tracking or ads, here's a permalink:

https://t.co/GbAqYGdMSZ

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
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Surveillance companies assure us that they employ safeguards to ensure that their customers aren't abusing their products to engage in unlawful or unethical surveillance. And yet, inevitably, these companies abuse their tools THEMSELVES.

1/


It's almost as though being the kind of person who dreams of achieving incredible wealthy by spying on people makes you kind of an asshole.

2/

Like the people at @VerkadaHQ, "a fast-growing Silicon Valley surveillance startup" whose male employees used its own products to sexually harass their female colleagues and received the barest wrist-slaps for

Male Verkada employees maintained a private Slack channel where executives posted photos of female employees - captured with the company's own surveillance tools - and made sexually explicit remarks about them.

4/

When this came to light, the company's founder and CEO Filip Kaliszan called an all-hands meeting, expressed disappointment in the harassers, and told them that they could either quit...or lose some stock options. They chose the latter and remain employed there to this day.

5/
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
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There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.

1/


First you need to understand the underlying mechanics of the story. Stock markets are fundamentally a way of making bets, including bets on the outcome of other peoples' bets, and bets on the outcomes of THOSE bets.

2/

All this complexity creates lots of exploitable opportunities. Some of these opportunities are considered legitimate and are given respectable names like "arbitrage." Others are considered illegitimate, and are called disreputable things like "stock manipulation."

3/

A hypothetical Martian observing all this through a telescope could not tell you which kinds of bets were honest and which were dishonest, because the difference isn't about any objective standard, but rather, about power.

4/

The strategies of powerful people are legit, while the strategies of their would-be dethroners are not legit. Sometimes, even outright frauds are OK if they're done by people with enough power.

5/
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
The Night of the Short Fingers saw many of the US's largest tech companies blocking Trump and trumpist platforms like Parler, provoking a storm of punditry about What It All Means for the tech companies to have taken this content moderation step.

1/


The best expert I know on the subject is @jilliancyork, my @eff colleague. She's published "an ongoing list" of "everything pundits are getting wrong about this current moment in content moderation."

You should read it.

Here's some highlights:

“Deplatforming Trump sets a precedent."

York: "The only 'precedent' set here is that this is indeed the first time a sitting US president has been deplatformed by a tech company."

3/

But political leaders around the world have already received this treatment: Lebanon, Burma, etc. Even the reach of the deplatforming is nothing new: last summer's US Iran ban saw blocks of everything, up to and including Etsy listings for "Persian dolls."

4/
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
We are in an extraordinary moment, but not an entirely unprecedented one. Since the earliest days, societies have had to cope with disasters that wiped out the ability of everyday people to service their debts and thus threatened to destroy their societies.

1/


If you've read U Missouri econ prof Michael Hudson's writings on the subject, you know that for millennia, rulers in these circumstances simply wiped out the debts, declaring a "jubilee" that allowed people to rebuild after disasters rather than being trapped in debt spirals.

2/

In a new essay on @NakedCapitalism called "How an 'Act of God' Pandemic Is Destroying the West: The US Is Saving the Financial Sector, Not the Economy," Hudson reveals the abyss on whose brink we are balanced, and what we must do to pull back from

Hudson's oft-repeated golden rule is "Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." That is to say: making it harder to declare bankruptcy, or binding debtors over to arbitration or wage-garnishing won't actually get them to pay debts they cannot afford.

4/

This is a very sharp observation in the US context. The 2008 crisis was "solved" by bailing out finance, not people - and so the finance sector was able to lend to consumers to buy things again, while consumer debt mounted to spectacular levels.

5/
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

1/

We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

2/

Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like @amyklobuchar's #CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech - it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

5/
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How about a brief refresher on federal bail, since everyone's got opinions on it this week? Yes?

Okay, here we go. In federal criminal cases, bail is governed by the Bail Reform

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1/n How come we still have academics sustaining narratives of #obesity rather than of how real people find value & meaning in everyday lives? Revisit @whatsthepont on @tobyjlowe / @snowded & accept criticising "neoliberal" does not make things

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In all #becausehuman fields, we see justifiable professional kick-back at reductionist agendas driven by a focus on #obesity & nonsensical CMO guidance of 60 min of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) per day for healthy growth and development


What's fundamentally missing is not just a respect for complexity. It's respect for Homo-Narrans - for the ordinary, everyday story-telling folk all around us whose aspirations & dispositions provide the context in which we find meaning, purpose & value

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