Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything.
Donald: Yes, there is, but I wonât tell you what it is.
Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.Â
Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.Â
Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.Â
Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?Â
Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.Â
Trump: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday â and may every day be another wonderful secret.
The text of the note is "framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the womanâs breasts, and the future presidentâs signature is a squiggly 'Donald' below her waist, mimicking pubic hair."
Trump has denied writing the letter or drawing the picture. âThis is not me. This is a fake thing. Itâs a fake Wall Street Journal story,â he said.
âI never wrote a picture in my life. I donât draw pictures of women,â he said. âItâs not my language. Itâs not my words.â
He told the Journal he was preparing to file a lawsuit if it published an article. âIâm gonna sue The Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else,â he said.
The note was collected as a series of birthday cards from Epstein's "family and friends" bound into a book in 2003.
Epstein's death by suicide in prison â in 2019, while Donald Trump was president â has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories. Those conspiracies have been amplified lately after:
Trump's Attorney General changed her tune from having the "Epstein Files on her desk" to claiming "the Epstein Files do not exist".
The DOJ released footage of Epstein's cell the night of his suicide, which were shown to have had three minutes removed. (Source)
Trump himself has shifted from claiming the "Epstein Files do not exist" to claiming that the "Epstein Files were written by Obama & Hilary".
My god, they sure hate Lina Khan. This once-in-a-generation, groundbreaking, brilliant legal scholar and fighter for the public interest, the slayer of Reaganomics, has attracted more vitriol, mockery, and dismissal than any of her predecessors in living memory.
She sure must be doing something right, huh?
A quick refresher. In 2017, Khanâââthen a law studentâââpublished Amazonâs Antitrust Paradox in the Yale Law Journal. It was a brilliant, blistering analysis showing how the Reagan-era theory of antitrust (which celebrates monopolies as âefficientâ) had failed on its own terms, using Amazon as Exhibit A of the ways in which post-Reagan antitrust had left Americans vulnerable to corporate abuse:
The paper sent seismic shocks through both legal and economic circles, and goosed the neo-Brandeisian movement (sneeringly dismissed as âhipster antitrustâ). This movement is a rebuke to Reaganomics, with its celebration of monopolies, trickle-down, offshoring, corporate dark money, revolving-door regulatory capture, and companies that are simultaneously too big to fail and too big to jail.
This movement has many proponents, of courseââânot just Khanâââbut Khanâs careful scholarship, combined with her encyclopedic knowledge of the long-dormant statutory powers that federal agencies had to make change, and a strategy for reviving those powers to protect Americans from corporate predators made her a powerful, inspirational figure.
When Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, he surprised everyone by appointing Khan to the FTC. It wasnât just that she had such a radical visionâââit was also that she lacked the usual corporate law experience that such an appointee would normally require (experience that would ensure that the FTC was helmed by people whose default view of the world is that it should be structured and regulated by powerful, wealthy people in corporate boardrooms).
Even more surprising was that Khan was made chair of the FTC, something that was only possible because a few Republican Senators broke with their party to support her candidacy:
These Republicans saw in Khan an ally in their fight against âwokeâ Big Tech. For these senators, the problem wasnât that tech had got too big and powerfulâââit was that there were a few limited instances in which tech leaders failed to wield that power in the ways they preferred.
The Republican project is a matter of getting turkeys to vote for Christmas by doing a lot of culture war bullshit, cruelly abusing disfavored sexual and racial minorities. This wins support from low-information voters whoâll vote against their class interests and support more monopolies, more tax cuts for the rich, and more cuts to the services they rely on.
But while tech leaders are 100% committed to the project of permanent oligarchic takeover of every sphere of American life, they are less full-throated in their support for hateful, cruel discrimination against disfavored minorities (in this regard, tech leaders resemble the corporate wing of the Democrats, which is where we get the âSilicon Valley is a Democratic Party strongholdâ narrative).
This failure to unquestioningly and unstintingly back culture war bullshit put tech leaders in the GOPâs crosshairs. Some GOP politicians actually believe in the culture war bullshit, and are grossly offended that tech is âwoke.â Others are smart enough not to get high on their own supply, but worry that any tech obstruction in the bullshit culture wars will make it harder to get sufficient turkey votes for a big fat Christmas surprise.
Bidenâs ceding of antitrust policy to the left wing of the party, combined with disaffected GOP senators viewing Khan as their enemyâs enemy, led to Khanâs historic appointment as FTC Chair. In that position, she was joined by a slate of Biden trustbusters, including Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ Antitrust Division, Tim Wu at the White House, and other important, skilled and principled fighters like Alvaro Bedoya (FTC), Rebecca Slaughter (FTC), Rohit Chopra (CFPB), and many others.
Crucially, these new appointees werenât just principled, they were good at their jobs. In 2021, Tim Wu wrote an executive order for Biden that laid out 72 concrete ways in which the administration could actâââwith no further Congressional authorizationâââto blunt corporate power and insulate the American people from oligarchsâ abusive and extractive practices:
Since then, the antitrust arm of the Biden administration have been fuckinâ ninjas, Getting Shit Done in ways large and small, workingâââfor the first time since Reaganâââto protect Americans from predatory businesses:
This is in marked contrast to the corporate Demsâ champions in the administration. People like Pete Buttigieg are heralded as competent
technocrats, ârealistsâ who are too principled to peddle hopium to the base, writing checks they canât cash. All this is cover for a King Log performance, in which Buttigiegâs far-reaching regulatory authority sits unused on a shelf while a million Americans are stranded over Christmas and whole towns are endangered by greedy, reckless rail barons straight out of the Gilded Age:
The contrast between the Biden trustbusters and their counterparts from the corporate wing is stark. While the corporate wing insists that every pitch is outside of the zone, Khan and her allies are swinging for the stands. Theyâre trying to make life better for you and me, by declaring commercial surveillance to be an unfair business practice and thus illegal:
And naturally, this has really pissed off all the right people: Americaâs billionaires and their cheerleaders in the press, government, and the hive of scum and villainy that is the Big Law/thinktank industrial-complex.
Take the WSJ: since Khan took office, they have published 67 vicious editorials attacking her and her policies. Khan is living rent-free in Rupert Murdochâs head. Not only that, heâs given her the presidential suite! You love to see it.
These attacks are worth reading, if only to see how flimsy and frivolous they are. One major subgenre is that Khan shouldnât be bringing any action against Amazon, because her groundbreaking scholarship about the company means she has a conflict of interest. Holy moly is this a stupid thing to say. The idea that the chair of an expert agency should recuse herself because she is an expert is what the physicists call not even wrong.
But these attacks are even more laughable due to who theyâre coming from: people who have the most outrageous conflicts of interest imaginable, and who were conspicuously silent for years as the FTCâs revolving door admitted the a bestiary of swamp-creatures so conflicted itâs a wonder they managed to dress themselves in the morning.
Writing in The American Prospect, David Dayen runs the numbers:
Since the late 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials worked directly for a company that has business before the agency, with 26 of them related to the technology industry.
Take Christine Wilson, a GOP-appointed FTC Commissioner who quit the agency in a huff because Khan wanted to do things for the American people, and not their self-appointed oligarchic princelings. Wilson wrote an angry break-up letter to Khan that the WSJ published, presaging their concierge service for Samuel Alito:
For Wilson to question Khanâs ethics took galactic-scale chutzpah. Wilson, after all, is a commissioner who took cash money from Bristol-Myers Squibb, then voted to approve their merger with Celgene:
Or take Wilsonâs GOP FTC predecessor Josh Wright, whose incestuous relationship with the companies he oversaw at the Commission are so intimate heâs practically got a Habsburg jaw. Wright went from Google to the US government and back again four times. He also lobbied the FTC on behalf of Qualcomm (a major donor to Wrightâs employer, George Masonâs Antonin Scalia Law School) after working âpersonally and substantiallyâ while serving at the FTC.
George Masonâs Scalia center practically owns the revolving door, counting fourteen FTC officials among its affliates:
Since the 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officialsâââboth GOP appointed and appointees backed by corporate Demsââââworked directly for a company that has business before the agencyâ:
The majority of FTC and DoJ antitrust lawyers who served between 2014â21 left government service and went straight to work for a Big Law firm, serving the companies theyâd regulated just a few months before:
Take Deborah Feinstein, formerly the head of the FTCâs Bureau of Competition, now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where sheâs represented General Electric, NBCUniversal, Unilever, and Pepsi and a whole medicine chestâs worth of pharma giants before her former subordinates at the FTC. Michael Moiseyev who was assistant manager of FTC Competition is now in charge of mergers at Weil Gotshal & Manges, working for Microsoft, Meta, and Eli Lilly.
Thereâs a whole bunch more, but Dayen reserves special notice for Andrew Smith, Trumpâs FTC Consumer Protection boss. Before he was put on the public payroll, Smith represented 120 clients that had business before the Commission, including ânearly every major bank in America, drug industry lobbyist PhRMA, Uber, Equifax, Amazon, Facebook, Verizon, and a variety of payday lendersâ:
Before Khan, in other words, the FTC was a âconflict-of-interest assembly line, moving through corporate lawyers and industry hangers-on without resistance for decades.â
Khan is the first FTC head with no conflicts. This leaves her opponents in the sweaty, desperate position of inventing conflicts out of thin air.
For these corporate lickspittles, Khanâs âconflictâ is that she has a point of view. Specifically, she thinks that the FTC should do its job.
This makes grifters like Jim Jordan furious. Yesterday, Jordan grilled Khan in a hearing where he accused her of violating an ethics officialâs advice that she should recuse herself from Big Tech cases. This is a talking point that was created and promoted by Bloomberg:
That ethics official, Lorielle Pankey, did not, in fact, make this recommendation. Itâs simply untrue (she did say that Khan presiding over cases that she has made public statements about could be used as ammo against her, but did not say that it violated any ethical standard).
But thereâs more to this story. Pankey herself has a gigantic conflict of interest in this case, including a stock portfolio with $15,001 and $50,000 in Meta stock (Meta is another company that has whined in print and in its briefs that it is a poor defenseless lamb being picked on by big, mean ole Lina Khan):
Jordan called his hearing on the back of this fake scandal, and then proceeded to show his whole damned ass, even as his GOP colleagues got into a substantive and even informative dialog with Khan:
Mostly what came out of that hearing was news about how Khan is doing her job, working on behalf of the American people. For example, she confirmed that sheâs investigating OpenAI for nonconsensually harvesting a mountain of Americansâ personal information:
Other Republicans, including confirmed swamp creatures like Matt Gaetz, ended up agreeing with Khan that Amazon Ring is a privacy dumpster-fire. Nobodies like Rep TomM assie gave Khan an opening to discuss how her agency is protecting mom-and-pop grocers from giant, price-gouging, greedflation-drunk national chains. Jeff Van Drew gave her a chance to talk about the FTCâs war on robocalls. Lance Gooden let her talk about her fight against horse doping.
But Khanâs opponents did manage to repeat a lot of the smears against her, and not just the bogus conflict-of-interest story. They also accused her of being 0â4 in her actions to block mergers, ignoring the huge number of mergers that have been called off or not initiated because M&A professionals now understand they can no longer expect these mergers to be waved through. Indeed, just last night I spoke with a friend who owns a medium-sized tech company that Meta tried to buy out, only to withdraw from the deal because their lawyers told them it would get challenged at the FTC, with an uncertain outcome.
These talking points got picked up by people commenting on Judge Jacqueline Scott Corleyâs ruling against the FTC in the Microsoft-Activision merger. The FTC was seeking an injunction against the merger, and Corley turned them down flat. The ruling was objectively very bad. Start with the fact that Corleyâs son is a Microsoft employee who stands reap massive gains in his stock options if the merger goes through.
But beyond this (real, non-imaginary, not manufactured conflict of interest), Corleyâs judgment and her remarks in court were inexcusably bad, as Matt Stoller writes:
In her ruling, Corley explained that she didnât think Microsoft would abuse the market dominance theyâd gain by merging their giant videogame platform and studio with one of its largest competitors. Why not? Because Microsoftâs execs pinky-swore that they wouldnât abuse that power.
Corelyâs deference to Microsoftâs corporate priorities goes deeper than trusting its execs, though. In denying the FTCâs motion, she stated that it would be unfair to put the merger on hold in order to have a full investigation into its competition implications because Microsoft and Activision had set a deadline of July 18 to conclude things, and Microsoft would have to pay a penalty if that deadline passed.
This is surreal: a judge ruled that a corporationâs radical, massive merger shouldnât be subject to full investigation because that corporation itself set an arbitrary deadline to conclude the deal before such an investigation could be concluded. Thatâs pretty convenient for future mega-mergersâââjust set a short deadline and Judge Corely will tell regulators that the merger canât be investigated because the deadline is looming.
And this is all about the future. As Stoller writes, Microsoft isnât exactly subtle about why it wants this merger. Its own execs said that the reason they were spending âdump trucksâ of money buying games studios was to âspend Sony out of business.â
Now, maybe you hate Sony. Maybe you hate Activision. Thereâs plenty of good reason to hate bothâââtheyâre run by creeps who do shitty things to gamers and to their employees. But if you think that Microsoft will be better once it eliminates its competition, then you have the attention span of a goldfish on Adderall.
Microsoft made exactly the same promises it made on Activision when it bought out another games studio, Zenimaxâââand it broke every one of those promises.
Microsoft has a long, long, long history of being a brutal, abusive monopolist. It is a convicted monopolist. And its bad conduct didnât end with the browser wars. You remember how the lockdown turned all our homes into rent-free branch offices for our employers? Microsoft seized on that moment to offer our bosses keystroke-and-click level surveillance of our use of our own computers in our own homes, via its Office365 bossware product:
If you think a company that gave your boss a tool to spy on their employees and rank them by âproductivityâ as a prelude to firing them or cutting their pay is going to treat gamers or game makers well once they have âspent the competition out of business,â youâre a credulous sucker and you are gonna be so disappointed.
The enshittification play is obvious: use investor cash to make things temporarily nice for customers and suppliers, lock both of them inâââin this case, itâs with a subscription-based service similar to Netflixâsâââand then claw all that value back until all thatâs left is a big pile of shit.
The Microsoft case is about the future. Judge Corely doesnât take the future seriously: as she said during the trial, âAll of this is for a shooter videogame.â The reason Corely greenlit this merger isnât because it wonât be harmfulâââitâs because she doesnât think those harms matter.
But it does, and not just because games are an art form that generate billions of dollars, employ a vast workforce, and bring pleasure to millions. It also matters because this is yet another one of the Reaganomic precedents that tacitly endorses monopolies as efficient forces for good. As Stoller writes, Corleyâs ruling means that âdeal bankers are sharpening pencils and saying âGreat, the government lost! We can get mergers through everywhere else.â Basically, if you like your high medical prices, you should be cheering on Microsoftâs win today.â
Ronald Reaganâs antitrust has colonized our brains so thoroughly that commentators were surprised when, immediately after the ruling, the FTC filed an appeal. Donât they know theyâve lost? the commentators said:
But of course Khan is appealing. The only reason thatâs surprising is that Khan is working for us, the American people, not the giant corporations the FTC is supposed to be defending us from. Sure, I get that this is a major change! But she needs our backing, not our cheap cynicism.
The business lobby and their pathetic Renfields have hoarded all the nice things and they donât want us to have any. Khan and her trustbuster colleagues want the opposite. There is no measure so small that the corporate world wonât have a conniption over it. Take click to cancel, the FTCâs perfectly reasonable proposal that if you sign up for a recurring payment subscription with a single click, you should be able to cancel it with a single click.
The tooth-gnashing and garment-rending and scenery-chewing over this is wild. Americaâs biggest companies have wheeled out their biggest guns, claiming that if they make it too easy to unsubscribe, they will lose money. In other words, they are currently making money not because people want their products, but because itâs too hard to stop paying for them!
We shouldnât have to tolerate this sleaze. And if we back Khan and her team, theyâll protect us from these scams. Donât let them convince you to give up hope. This is the start of the fight, not the end. Weâre trying to reverse 40 yearsâ worth of Reagonmics here. It wonât happen overnight. There will be setbacks. But keep your eyes on the prizeâââthis is the most exciting moment for countering corporate power and giving it back to the people in my lifetime. We owe it to ourselves, our kids and our planet to fight one.
If youâd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, hereâs a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
[Image ID: A line drawing of pilgrims ducking a witch tied to a ducking stool. The pilgrims' clothes have been emblazoned with the logos for the WSJ, Microsoft, Activision and Blizzard. The witch's face has been replaced with that of FTC chair Lina M Khan.]
