Part of the issue here is that a lack of real enforcement for 30 years turned aggressively anti-competitive business models into the only reliably high-growth strategy rewarded by investors. A whole generation of executives identifies market-cornering “moats”with capitalism per se.
Why are corporate CEOs cozying up to Trump?
Yes, the tax cuts — but it's not just that.
Biden is reviving anti-trust in a massive way, with lawsuits against Amazon, Apple, Ticketmaster, and many more.
Corporate execs are terrified of their monopolies being broken up.
Wall Street’s pathological and ruinous demand that companies show perpetual growth, as opposed to healthy sustainable profits, is only possible in a world where firms are allowed to lock up markets, eliminate competition and collect increasing extractive rents at increasing scale.
It’s ruining everything but this fucked up set of incentives selects for executives and managers who literally don’t understand anything else. Trying to correct course toward healthy competitive markets strikes them as a wholesale attack on business as they know it. It’s a bad scene.
These CEOS see anything that turns away from this mode of Capitalism as an attack on Capitalism. The reality is there were many, arguably more successful, precursors to the Jack Welch view of corporate responsibility, and it’s time to tack away from those ideas
Pressure to deliver back to shareholders erodes ethical governance. Profit regardless. Take Boeing and it's approach to safety and product integrity. That approach is now ingrained in the corporate lexicon
It's great but also minimal/incremental. Like, this isn't a reinvigorated Sherman Act, it's just the very least you could ask of these borderline (and in some cases not at all borderline) monopolies. A good and important but mild reassertion that antitrust law should seek to benefit the consumer
It has to be incremental because so many antitrust laws have been weakened or eliminated. The sweeping changes we need require legislation.
FTC chair Lina Khan is part of an international effort to use current antitrust laws creatively to rein in corporate power.
No, it's just that we decided to stop enforcing them. I agree we need new laws, and 40 years of fanciful court decisions overturned, but there's plenty to do with the laws we have.
Well, yeah. It’s a threat to their wealth. Capitalism always tends towards monopolies, and if regulation stands in the way, it uses its wealth and power to undermine that. They did exactly this before.
I remember a commenter who was withering-oh, now we're supposed to feel sorry for you? boo hoo, you're a victim.
But it wasn't about that. He wasn't fishing for sympathy. He was reframing the quest for ever-more wealth as an illness. Not normal. I wish it'd gotten more traction, bc I agree.
I once read an article/essay, I forget where, by a former stockbroker who was coming at it from the POV of a former addict, naming the thought processes and behavior of Wall Street-ers as addiction. Totally skewed view of how much money they "need."
Back when I was a mutual fund lawyer working for a large investment advisory firm, I begged management for more lawyers to do the massive amount of work we had to do. I was told “the Street doesn’t like high personnel costs so no.” 🤷🏻♀️
Wall Street is only acting on the incentives placed in front of it… the failure to properly adjust the rules of the market to meet societal goals is a governance failure of epic proportions…
Absolutely…. All part of a 50 year plan by Reagan’s puppet masters to harness racism and bigotry to strip mine the American dream on behalf of their racist patrons ….
Though tbh Democrats have been pretty dumb about allowing the right to buy up media distribution networks…. Like twitter…. If Steve Mnuchin buys Tij Tok I’m gonna throw a shoe…
That Mnuchin is first in line just confirms what I suspected from the start, which is it has fuck all to do with our security, & everything to do with TikTok not artificially amplifying right wing extremism like Meta, Twitter & YouTube. It leans much more to the left overall.
I’m not totally convinced that it isn’t a security threat at some level - Katie Porter says it is and I believe her.
But if the GOP were actually concerned about Chinese hacking we’d have actual data privacy laws like Europe - not data brokers…
Ron Wyden is the most tech savvy member of Congress. He opposed SESTA/FOSTA, & he opposed a TikTok ban. He has proposed the legislation we actually need, but it has gone nowhere.
He voted for it because it got bundled with important stuff. But I think we get his laws instead if we get enough Dems.
The part that fascinates me is their support of political policies that will keep shrinking the consumer base, both how many ppl have $$ to spend and how many $$ everyone can afford. How did you keep up perpetual growth while shrinking the consumer base?
They are playing Monopoly with people's lives and livelihoods and it will not end well.
When taxes are removed from the wealthy elite and the burden dumped on the People the end result is usually a revolution.
The only question remains is how long can they keep their scams going?
Most stocks are almost as ridiculous as NFTs. Any corporation which never pays dividends as a permanent policy is not really selling an investment in the business, they are just selling branded tokens with a value determined by how awesome the corporation seems on paper rather than actual payout.
Naive.
There were a tonne of extremely exploitative businesses, and they had to be broken up. Reagan isn’t the original sin, just a symptom of how the rich can take control because power collects upwards.
There were monopolies for sure. But the vast majority of business was done in partnership with society, likely a product of decades of labor and union pressure. All of that Reagan immediately started unraveling in his first term.
And it is all in service of the fact that the people at the top can extract as much cash as possible from it—large fortunes in the hands of individual humans are the Achilles heel of the free market and we should *ban* them.
