The FTC and DoJ have been hitting it out of the park recently, unfortunately, there are a lot of judges out there that think corps should be able to do anything they want.
I think the problem is that some corporate america WOULD be a fan of her, but they either died or had no opportunity to exist in the first place.
I want to see them go after the credit card companies. They can start by passing usury laws that cap interest at 10%.
Here’s an article (gift link, so no paywall) that describes the whole situation:
Good interview with Jon Stewart:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM
Simple examples are:
- Kroger and Albertson’s (grocery stores)
- Illumina and Grail (cancer detection)
- Amazon for dark patterns regarding signing up for prime, and for privacy violations with Alexa and Ring
- Lost challenge to Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard (good to look into, not sure about the specific case)
- FTC released a framework for anti-trust that should be a regulatory win.
That’s not meant to be a political statement about Biden. But I’m assuming you are talking about the current DOJ/FTC.
The Sherman Antitrust Act is one paragraph long.
9 constitutional amendments are only one sentence long, not even a paragraph!
It's all case law.
But judges care way more about constitutional amendments than Sherman Antitrust Act. Most have limited intellectual interest in the problems it tackles.
And really, who cares about the price of concert tickets, online ads and in-app purchase fees? These guys went to law school not business school.
They. Just. Don't. Care.
Could the DoJ and FTC make them care as much about antitrust as like, at least 2 amendments? Yes.
I have no idea how the DoJ and FTC have failed to drum up excitement about this stuff. Nobody is going to rule against the status quo without passionate feelings about it.
Judges can just as easily find pet causes that don’t align with your interests, I don’t think that’s the mechanism you or I want our country to rely on.
The original Sherman Act has 7 sections (one additional was later added) one of which has two subsections, none of which have multiple paragraphs, for a total of 8 paragraphs.
More to the point, US antitrust law isn't just the Sherman Act and case law, because:
1. There are two other main antitrust-related statutes, the Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act, and
2. The FTC Act as well as its direct mandates also creates regulatory authority for the FTC,
3. In addition to federal antitrust law in the US, there is also state antitrust law.
> But judges care way more about constitutional amendments than Sherman Antitrust Act.
I'm not sure what the bases for your intuition about how much judges care about those things are; there is certainly a sense in which Constitutional provisions definitionally have priority over statute and administrative law, but its hardly as if antitrust law isn't an area that has gotten extremely detailed judicial attention.
[0] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/23
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-21_3e04.pdf
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/05/22/t...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69045271
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/21/politics/trump-nazi-allus...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/after-backlash-trump-pulls-...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/21/dona...
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/21/trump-unified-reich...
https://apnews.com/article/trump-election-2024-rhetoric-germ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/20/us/donald-trump-reich-vid...
Once there is backslash, just blame a junior staffer instead of making the head honcho resign for not controlling what goes into an important PR stream.
American politics are full of superlatives, and very devoid of any real actions. Once the hero or the devil gets elected, nothing happens much.
Weren't there similar predictions back in 2016? How is it different this time? Or to back up a bit, what exactly does "democracy existing as we know it today" mean? It could mean anything between "US becomes North Korea" and "the whitehouse revoked the press credentials of someone who said something mean about trump".
So to confirm you're predicting that if he gets elected he'll stay in power beyond 2025?
That's typically how coups go, as far as history go.
That the coup failed and Congress wasn't murdered doesn't mean they didn't try.
Of course "it wasn't wrong" if claims are vague like "democracy as we know it", which means they can be used in a motte-and-bailey manner to initially imply that the US is going to turn into China/North Korea or whatever, but then later be walked back on to whatever the predictions don't really pan out.
>That the coup failed and Congress wasn't murdered doesn't mean they didn't try.
Was the claim back then that they'll "try" (however poorly planned/executed), or that they'll actually succeed?
There was a lot of equivocating that it was all some campaign schtick, the media was misrepresenting him, etc. "4D chess" and all that.
It turned out that the straightforward analysis was the correct one. Sometimes a spade really is a spade.
This round he's playing for double or nothing - having broken a bunch of laws is slowly catching up with him. He continues playing the victim while indignantly expressing a desire for overt revenge. We've already seen the mechanisms by which this will happen (paralysis of federal law enforcement, mobilization of paramilitary goon squads into the power vacuum, and political reality distortion field justifying everything as if President is equivalent to Dictator). So yeah by any reasoned analysis, 2024 really is Trump xor America - you decide.
(Once again, standard disclaimer - unaligned libertarian here. I'd never voted for a major party candidate before 2020. Specifically, I considered a 2016 a toss up between two differently-bad options, and still have no regrets there. But now that we've seen a concrete track record as opposed to mere vacuous campaigning, it would be utterly foolish to ignore it)
(Just for context here, lest the postmodern fence-sitters write me off as some rabid partisan - I'm an unaligned libertarian who had never voted for a major candidate in a national election before 2020)
It's better but it's still a half measure and far away from the blanket pardons that the President (any president) needs to be signing asap.
I get the whole "progress is slow thing" but this is a case of politicians being the only slow ones. A supermajority of the public supports alcohol/marijuana parity.
Hahaha. Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I agree, but VP? There's a reason why there's a Veep TV show.
It's a very old mispelling that I'm sticking with.
> I'd be interested in seeing a non-crank source for your assertion. Everything I've read suggests that it'll likely be inflation-neutral or slightly reduce inflation over the next 10 years.
Over the next 10 years, maybe. But circulating money that didn't exist before (that's what happens when the government increases the debt) devalues existing currency proportionally. It is, by definition, inflation. It's effectively a flat tax which disproportionately affects the poor (as all flat taxes do).
The result is an _immediate_ spike in inflation that _maybe_ cools if the projected revenue is real (it often isn't). That inflation had been staved off for the last... two decades or so by lowering interest rates, encouraging people to spend money they wouldn't otherwise (or borrow it themselves) thereby increasing their buying power and offsetting their devalued currency.
Unfortunately, you can't lower interest rates forever and so, when they reach rock bottom, all your inflation chickens come home to roost.
> Even if spending on it gets up to a trillion dollars over a ten year span, you're still talking about one tenth of what gets spent on defense contractors and the military every year.
Spending more money you don't have is worse than spending less money you don't have.
> I'd be interested in seeing a non-crank source for your assertion.
Back to that though... The reason why the government is spending the way it is recently is because of Modern Monetary Theory[1]. Politicians love it because it says they can spend as much money as they want and debt doesn't matter. They don't really believe it though because they only implement the part where they get to spend all the money you want and the debt doesn't matter. I don't think it's very controversial to consider the "mainstream" (in quotes because the reason they are mainstream is because politicians and political think tanks love them, they aren't actually mainstream among economists) MMT sources to be the cranks.
They know the judges won't let anything bad happen to their friends so they can pretend to act tough every four years (when the billionaire class's preferred candidate/party is in office of course).
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/...
It's been nonstop for the whole duration of the admin.
The US as a democracy isn't supported by evidence.
> “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
The primary thing that causes drift from fairness is lack of voter turnout.
If you have causes you are passionate about but you refuse to participate in the (hard won, bloodily won) civic right of voting, then your ability to affect those causes will evaporate. No matter how much you think your government doesn't care now, they will care even less when it is truly, wholly, dictatorially unaccountable to you. And then what? What was your anti-voting stance for?
A substantial chunk of the electorate seems to prefer losing and then whining about outcomes as long as it allows them to pat themselves on the back for 'staying above it all and seeing the futility all along'. I implore you instead to care, hold your officials accountable, and vote. A bad future is not inevitable.
"Francis's term "anarcho-tyranny" refers to armed dictatorship without rule of law, or a Hegelian synthesis when the state tyrannically or oppressively regulates citizens' lives yet is unable or unwilling to enforce fundamental protective law."
> Dictators can actually get something done for you, I'd prefer that to our current [x]
the historical track record of that sentiment is both plenty long and plenty awful. Are you ignorant of that history or dispute it or think it’ll be different this time or what?
That's the trick. What material thing happened?
Over the years, hundreds of thousands (?) of people have been ripped off.
If I did that I'd be in jail.
Artists set their ticket prices, tickmaster is a middleman/scape goat. Pretending to go after the scapegoat is just for show.
What are you referring to here?
There is a great deal of documentation and discussion, but this document covers some of it, here are a couple of on-topic quotes:
>"Documents from and testimony by FTC managers show that Chair Khan marginalized the litigators and investigators at the FTC who had the skills necessary to win cases."
>"One manager consulted with his team and reported to the Chief of Staff that Chair Khan was “[s]capegoating the career staff for the FTC’s ‘underenforcement’ of the antitrust laws”26 and “contributing to an external narrative that denigrates staff.”"
This document reads like political theater because it is political theater.
Taylor Swift didn't become a billionaire because of Ticketmaster fees.
Additionally, if artists were to continue the high prices in a more transparent manner without them, then that’s fine - it’s a free country and a free market.
This is exactly why this board is a waste of time. Half of what you read on here are people talking about things they have no idea about and/or no vested interest in the outcome.
Just a large collection of wankers.