I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on THURSDAY (May 15) at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. More tour dates (London, Manchester) here.
Trump's coalition includes a huge number of people who will suffer terribly from his policies, but who voted for him anyway. Trumpism requires that he find ways to keep those Christmas-voting turkeys happy, or at least distracted.
Trump's go-to move for keeping his base happy is inflicting pain on people they hate, like immigrants, racialized people, queers and women. That goes a long way, obviously: there's a kind of person who can be distracted from their own deteriorating material condition by the spectacle of cruel treatment for their enemies.
But Trumpism can't just run on sadism. There's a lot of people who enjoy the sadism, but not so much that it cancels out their own rage at their deteriorating personal conditions. Trump's main tactic is to blame the suffering of his base on the rest of us: "radical leftists," "wokeism" and other hobgoblins of the small-minded. That, too, has its limits – especially when Trump controls Congress, the courts, the senate and the White House. Obviously, Trump isn't above blaming his own people for being traitors (e.g., by sending a literal noose-bearing lynch mob after his own vice president), but there are limits to this, even for Trump. If all the power-brokers in Trump's coalitions are branded as disloyal, cowardly, or traitorous, Trump will have no one left to do the actual work of advancing his agenda.
Ultimately, keeping Trump's base happy requires providing some form of material benefit to that base. Every authoritarian has a version of this – like the cash handouts that Poland's former far-right government gave out:
For Trump, this presents a problem: because he represents the interests of exploitation, extraction and looting, everything nice that he gives to everyday people in his base potentially gores the ox of someone who really matters to him. It's no surprise, for example, that he reversed Biden's price-cuts for Big Pharma's most expensive drugs – the cheaper drugs are for sick people, the less profitable they'll be for pharma companies:
Luckily (for Trump), Biden's consumer protection and antitrust agencies teed up a long list of extremely good policies that would directly shift money from rich parasites to everyday people. For example, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau passed a rule that would make it very easy to find out which bank would charge you the least and pay you the most, and let you switch banks with one click:
It was a move that would have shifted $667m/year from banks to everyday people, every year, forever. But Trump's most important barons, like Elon Musk, hated the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and insisted that it be shuttered, so that $667m/year will go to the banks after all – indeed, virtually all of the good things Biden's CFPB decreed the American public would enjoy henceforth have been destroyed. Sure, Trump would have liked to have taken credit for these, but the conflict between stolen valor and displeasing Shadow President Musk will always cash out in Musk's favor.
It's not just the CFPB. The FTC also set up a whole roster of ambitious projects to improve life for Americans. Some of these made the news in a big way, like the antitrust case against Meta:
Trump has lots of upsides from pursuing the Meta case. Everyone hates Meta products, including (especially) the people who are trapped using them because that's where their friends, family, communities, customers or audiences are. Breaking up Meta would be hugely popular with the American people. But also, once a court has convicted Meta of violating antitrust law, Trump can solicit favors – cash and favorable algorithmic treatment – from Meta in exchange for ordering his FTC to go easy on Meta in the "remedy phase," letting them off with a fine, rather than forcing them to spin out Whatsapp and Instagram:
But even if Trump lets Meta walk, there's plenty of great stuff Biden's FTC did that he could take credit for – policies that would help everyday people.
The most prominent of these is the FTC's "Click to Cancel" rule. It's a pretty simple rule: companies have to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it was to sign up for it.
In other words, they can't do that thing – beloved of everything from the New York Times to every manosphere influencer's supplement business – where you can sign up for a subscription with one click, but you can't cancel unless you phone them, wait on hold, and beg them to let you off the hook.
Companies do this on purpose, because it's super profitable. Amazon executives carried on internal email threads where they straight up said that they'd deliberately made it confusingly easy to sign up for Prime and basically impossible to stop paying for it:
This is a no-brainer. Companies make signing up for subscriptions into a greased slide, and they make canceling subscriptions into a greased pole.
No wonder, then, that when the FTC solicited public comments on a proposed "click to cancel" rule, they had no trouble building up the evidentiary record needed to pass the rule.
Now, Trump's FTC has announced that they are delaying enforcement of the rule until mid-July:
This is the second time they've delayed enforcement (originally, the rule was supposed to go into effect in January). Trump FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson had no trouble getting the votes for the suspension, because he illegally fired the two Democratic Commissioners, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter:
Ferguson is proof that the FTC can't do anything material for Trump's base. Sure, he can set up a snitch-line so tht FTC employees can rat each other out for being "woke":
This should be a slam dunk. It epitomizes the "unfair and deceptive" business practices Section 5 of the FTC Act empowers the agency to snuff out. The Trump admin is unwilling to gore the ox of out-and-out scammers, people who trick you into unkillable subscriptions. It seems that there's no material benefit that Trump's oligarch backers are willing to cede to working people. All they can offer is cruelty.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Davino Watson was imprisoned as a deportable immigrant for 1,273 days, despite having U.S. citizenship. Now a court says he is not eligible for $82,500 in damages he was awarded.
Jamaican-born Davino Watson became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2002, at the age of 17. In 2007, he pleaded guilty to selling cocaine. When his sentence ended in 2008, ICE arrested him and began deportation proceedings.
Watson, then 23 years old, told the immigration officers that he was a U.S. citizen. He told jail officials that he was a U.S. citizen. He told a judge that he was a U.S. citizen. He even provided the name and phone number of his U.S. citizen father. But Watson had only a partial high school education, no legal training, and no lawyer because there is no right to an attorney in immigration court. So everyone ignored him, no one called his father, and ICE held this U.S. citizen in custody as a deportable alien for 1,273 days--nearly 3½ years.
To be clear: Yes, it is illegal for U.S. immigration authorities to hold American citizens in detention.
In November of 2011, ICE finally released Watson “into rural Alabama (where he knew nobody), without money, and without being told the reason for his release.” His deportation proceedings continued for more than another year before ICE finally conceded that Watson was a U.S. citizen.
Watson sued the government in federal court for false imprisonment. In 2016, the court awarded him $82,500, criticizing ICE’s conduct as a “legal disaster,” “mindless failure,” “carelessness,” and “easily avoidable error.”
“Plaintiff was badly treated by government employees. He deserves a letter of apology from the United States in addition to damages. But the court is not empowered to order this courtesy.”
The government appealed, and in 2017 the appellate court threw out Watson’s award in its entirety. The court did not question any of the underlying facts, but held that the two-year statute of limitations on Watson’s claim for false imprisonment had expired back in 2010, while he was still in ICE custody. Without a lawyer.
“It is harsh to place the burden on Watson to file a claim for damages while he is in immigration detention and fighting to prevent his deportation.”
Mike Lee and Jim Jordan want to kill the law that bans companies from cheating you
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on FRIDAY (May 2), and in WELLINGTON on SATURDAY (May 3). More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.
House and Senate Republicans are on the verge of killing Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, one of the most potent anti-corruption laws on the US statute books:
More than a century ago, Congress passed the FTCA, and they made a point of including a clause that granted the new independent agency broad authority to investigate and prohibit "unfair and deceptive methods of competition." As Matt Stoller writes, over the ensuing 100 years, the FTC has used Section 5 to go after "illegal commissions, firms spying on rivals, sabotage, messing around with patents or regulations."
But starting with the Reagan era, both Republican and Democratic presidents have appointed FTC chairs who were loathe to invoke FTCA 5, shying away from the power and duty Congress had given them. This all changed with Biden's FTC chair Lina Khan, who revived the law, using it to punish companies for invading your privacy, blocking repair, locking workers in with noncompete clauses, and more:
FTCA has been repeatedly upheld by the Supreme Court, and Congress liked the way it worked so much that when they created the Department of Transport, they copy-pasted the language of FTCA into the DOT's enabling legislation. Pete Buttigieg, Biden's Transport secretary, refused to use this power, but when Khan's chief of staff moved over to Transport, it became a powerhouse regulator, fighting ripoffs and scams in aviation, rail and more:
Neoclassical economists hate laws like Section 5. The entire basis of neoliberal economics is that the economy can be modeled – and thus controlled – using mathematics. This ideology requires that economists ignore all qualitative aspects of society. Notoriously, economic modeling treats power as irrelevant, because it can't be quantified and plugged into a model:
This is a hell of a deal for the powerful. Ignoring power lets a rich person who buys a starving person's kidneys claim to be engaged in a "voluntary transaction." Ignoring power lets private equity funds claim that gouging you on emergency room care and ambulance rides is fine, because you "freely chose" to be rushed to their hospital while dying of a heart attack. If we can all agree that power doesn't matter, then we can do away with all workplace protections, from the minimum wage to worker safety. Take power out of the equation, and you can claim that any worker on starvation wages who loses an arm in a badly maintained machine "freely contracted" into that situation.
Oligarchs and their lickspittles have waged a generations-long war on the very concept of power, and this assault on Section 5 of the FTC Act is just the latest skirmish. You see, "unfair and deceptive" is a qualitative idea, one that requires consideration of power relationships.
The abolition of fairness as a concept is central to Trumpism. Notoriously, Trump has claimed that any time he successfully rips someone off, "That makes him smart":
The Trump movement is full of extremely successful cheats and liars. There's VCs like Mark Andreesen, whose fund paid a $100m bribe Kickstarter execs in exchange for a fake cryptocurrency launch, in a bid to lure more retail investors into the crypto bubble that Andreesen-Horowitz played a central role in:
And of course, there's Elon Musk, who lies about his cars, his robots, his rockets, his AI, and everything else. No wonder Elon Musk wants to get rid of a law that bans "unfair and deceptive methods of competition."
The bid to kill Section 5 of the FTC Act is hidden deep in a budget reconciliation amendment introduced by Rep Jim Jordan (R-OH), which pastes in sloppy language drafted by Sen Mike Lee (R-UT). The mechanism by which this amendment will neuter Section 5 is eye-glazingly complex, though Stoller does his best to make it comprehensible.
Far more important than the method by which Section 5 of the FTC Act will be gutted is the consequence of doing so. Stripping the FTC of the power to chase unfair and deceptive conduct will fire a starting pistol for even more ripoffs and scams. Worse than that, the Jordan amendment will kill enforcement of existing consent decrees from companies that have been successfully prosecuted under Section 5, allowing them to restart the scams that attracted regulatory scrutiny.
The Trump administration has been touting antitrust as its "alternative to regulation," drawing an arbitrary line between "regulation" and "antitrust." Antitrust is absolutely regulation:
Indeed, antitrust is the most important regulation of all, because it's the regulation that keeps companies from getting so large and powerful that they can ignore all the other regulations. Without antitrust, companies become too big to fail, then too big to jail, then too big to care. The Trump admin will absolutely continue to do antitrust, but in the Trumpiest way possible – by attacking companies that offend Trump, rather than attacking companies that harm the public:
This is gangsterism, the thing that comes after capitalism collapses into feudalism. In gangsterism, "fairness" and "power" have no place. All that's left is a kind of caveat emptor brainworm that insists that if you got scammed, you should have shopped more carefully. And if you got scammed at gunpoint, you just need to understand that the gun was held by the invisible hand, and it was pointed at you in an economically efficient manner.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, a d-free, tracker-free blog:
