Aug 7
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Democrats are are starting to make proposals for what they will do if they take control of Congress. Bans on surveillance pricing, restructu
So what will an opposition party do about this state of affairs? On Sunday, I described a little noticed set of actions by the corrupt side of the Democrats promoting the stock market AI sector. That side of the party has been dominant for as long as I’ve been alive, which is at this point quite a long time. But yesterday, we got a different and more compelling vision from a few different people.
Senator Cory Booker, along with Elizabeth Warren, Martin Heinrich, Chris Murphy, and Mazie Hirono, introduced an important bill that would genuinely discipline Wall Street and reorder corporate America to serve Americans. It is called the “CLEAN Mergers Act,” and it would automatically undo every corporate combination above $10 billion occurring during the Trump administration, as well as smaller deals organized through corrupt means.
Some of the deals that would be undone include Paramount and Warner in media, Sysco and Restaurant Depot in food distribution, Compass-Anywhere in real estate, Hewlett Packard-Juniper in networking, Google-Wiz in cloud computing, Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern in rail, et al. There is some wiggle room, if the corporations can prove their merger didn’t reduce competition. But this bill draws a line in the sand, warning Wall Street that anything they do merger-wise in the Trump era could be undone.
"No, really! This time's for real!"
The Jeff Epstein saga isn't a scandal about pedophilia, it's about a Russian word called 'blat,' a Soviet-era word meaning 'the use of personal networks for obtaining goods and services in short supply and for circumventing formal procedures.' It's about a kind of government. As with the large number of 'blatniks' in the Soviet era who made sure their factories got what they needed outside the formal state procurement process, Epstein greased the wheels for the neoliberal state. His job was governance. What does that mean? Well it's clear that Epstein was an entrepreneurial broker across multiple public and private bureaucracies, helping organize 'under-the-table' deals among the legal, business, intelligence, and political elites to allow them to escape the rule of law and traditional conflict of interest restrictions. It's statecraft to allow a superclass to systemically escape the formalized rules. The pedophilia and prostitution were part of it - that is obviously violating the rule of law - but so are the random favors Epstein bestowed. Like Epstein sending Senator Joe Manchin's request for a yacht, a request which came from the First lady of the Virginia Islands, to a random NY financier who might have one. Or working with Joi Ito at MIT and billionaire Reid Hoffman to restructure the Bitcoin Foundation. It's all about matching capital and talent and inputs outside of the restrictions ordinary people are subject to. This kind of governance is particularly important in Soviet-style states, where everyone knows the rules are fake, where skirting the system IS the system. Epstein and his affiliates thrived because of the weakened institutions of the United States, institutions enfeebled in many cases by the men in his network, like Larry Summers. These men adopted multiple roles - advisor, businessman, academic, board member, regulator - and put on the hat that best maximized their self-interest and the self-interest of their narrow network at that moment. The old world, where handing someone your business card meant you represented that institution, disappeared in the 1980s. Over the course of the 1990s, neoconservatives, neoliberals, bankers - ultimately Epstein's network - built this new social order. It was one where you couldn't succeed through the formal rules, but if you were let into the networks of trust by blatniks, you could do anything you wanted. While all the specifics of Epstein's network are not known, and while conspiracy theorists often have crazy views, they have correctly fingered that the world of meritocracy and formalized systems is increasingly a fraud. And that the real government lies elsewhere. In short, when formal democratic institutions like Congress stop governing, the networks of men like Epstein fill the power vacuum. Epstein built what Roy Cohn always wanted to have, but never achieved, because the then-institutions were too strong for him to break. Here's a passage from sociologist Janine Wedel's Shadow Elite on how this form of governance works.