US Republicans and right-wingers vs. capitalism

[lpetrich]

US Republicans and right-wingers have long professed deep undying love of capitalists and capitalism -- "the magic of the marketplace" and suchlike.

But they are very sore losers when capitalists do thinks that they dislike. Consider the "liberal media". Right-wingers howl with outrage while ignoring the uncomfortable fact that nearly all US news media is capitalist. They refuse to accept that the economic system that they love so much has totally failed to punish these "liberal" news-media companies.

Senator Josh Hawley has written this book:
The Tyranny of Big Tech - - Regnery Publishing

The reign of Big Tech is here, and Americans’ First Amendment rights hang by a keystroke.

Amassing unimaginable amounts of personal data, giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple—once symbols of American ingenuity and freedom—have become a techno-oligarchy with overwhelming economic and political power.

Decades of unchecked data collection have given Big Tech more targeted control over Americans’ daily lives than any company or government in the world. In The Tyranny of Big Tech, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri argues that these mega-corporations—controlled by the robber barons of the modern era—are the gravest threat to American liberty in decades.

To reverse course, Hawley argues, we must correct progressives’ mistakes of the past. That means recovering the link between liberty and democratic participation, building an economy that makes the working class strong, independent, and beholden to no one, and curbing the influence of corporate and political elites.

Big Tech and its allies do not deal gently with those who cross them, and Senator Hawley proudly bears his own battle scars. But hubris is dangerous. The time is ripe to overcome the tyranny of Big Tech by reshaping the business and legal landscape of the digital world.

I'm not impressed by him seeming like Bernie Sanders, because what he wrote is so contrary to all the usual arguments about capitalism that one sees from the right wing.

It also seems like he's supporting labor unions and worker-run cooperatives.

 

[lpetrich]

Josh Hawley’s ‘Big Tech’ Book Overthrows the Tyranny of Reality | WIRED

And in The Tyranny of Big Tech, Hawley has produced a deeply cynical book. The Missouri senator raises valid concerns about the technology industry, and he proposes solutions worth taking seriously. But he embeds these ideas in a broader argument that is so wildly misleading as to call the entire project into question.

Hawley’s substantive critiques of Silicon Valley will be familiar to anyone who has watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix: Smartphones are addictive. Behavioral advertising is manipulative. Social media is bad for children’s mental health. The biggest tech companies together spend tens of millions of dollars each year to buy influence in Washington. Facebook, Google, and Twitter wield too much power over communication. And they use it, Hawley says, to discriminate against conservatives.

... Where Hawley’s book departs from the standard anti-tech treatise is in his attempt to tie the current moment into a grand theory of American political history. In Hawley’s telling, people like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are the direct ideological descendants of the original Gilded Age robber barons. Their dominance is the culmination of what he calls “corporate liberalism,” a philosophy in which, he writes, the state and big business conspire to deny the common man his independence and self-government. According to Hawley, corporate liberalism became entrenched a century ago in both major political parties, and today, “Big Tech and Big Government seek to extend their influence over every area of American life.”

He then makes a hero out of trustbuster Teddy Roosevelt.

The WIRED article's author then argues that JH got his history wrong, that Teddy Roosevelt was more conciliatory to big businesses than Woodrow Wilson. JS mostly discussed TR and WW, and omitted most of the rest of the 20th cy.

The amount of antitrust enforcement and legislation during the middle four decades of the 20th century could fill a book—indeed, it is covered in great detail by other recent books about the anti-monopoly movement, including Antitrust, by Hawley’s Senate colleague Amy Klobuchar, and Stoller’s Goliath.

...
What really cut the antitrust movement off at the knees was not a Democratic president in 1912, as Hawley claims, but a rising school of economic thought in the 1970s. Led by figures including the archconservative legal scholar Robert Bork, a group of economists and lawyers known as the Chicago School persuaded political leaders—and, crucially, the Supreme Court—that aggressive antitrust enforcement was economically irrational.

...
And so, if you zoom out far enough, Hawley is quite right: Today’s tech giants have been allowed to take over the economy thanks in part to a bipartisan shift away from antitrust enforcement. This is why it so utterly mystifying that he leaves out any mention of the long period during which the government did fight corporate concentration.

...
A generous answer would be that Hawley is trying to reach a conservative-leaning audience that might be turned off by any friendly words about Franklin Roosevelt. A less charitable explanation is that Hawley is not actually trying to make the case for a policy agenda—that his true goal is to blame the alleged sins of the tech giants on “liberalism” and present himself as the best person to bring the fight to Silicon Valley and the left.

...
Hawley the author is at his least trustworthy when he is trying to tie the Big Tech tyrants to liberals, or liberalism, writ large.

 

[lpetrich]

Antitrust by Amy Klobuchar: 9780525654896 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

In a world where Google reportedly controls 90 percent of the search engine market and Big Pharma’s drug price hikes impact healthcare accessibility, monopolies can hurt consumers and cause marketplace stagnation. Klobuchar—the much-admired former candidate for president of the United States—argues for swift, sweeping reform in economic, legislative, social welfare, and human rights policies, and describes plans, ideas, and legislative proposals designed to strengthen antitrust laws and antitrust enforcement.

Klobuchar writes of the historic and current fights against monopolies in America, from Standard Oil and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to the Progressive Era’s trust-busters; from the breakup of Ma Bell (formerly the world’s biggest company and largest private telephone system) to the pricing monopoly of Big Pharma and the future of the giant tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google.

She begins with the Gilded Age (1870s-1900), when builders of fortunes and rapacious robber barons such as J. P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt were reaping vast fortunes as industrialization swept across the American landscape, with the rich getting vastly richer and the poor, poorer. She discusses President Theodore Roosevelt, who, during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920), “busted” the trusts, breaking up monopolies; the Clayton Act of 1914; the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914; and the Celler-Kefauver Act of 1950, which it strengthened the Clayton Act. She explores today’s Big Pharma and its price-gouging; and tech, television, content, and agriculture communities and how a marketplace with few players, or one in which one company dominates distribution, can hurt consumer prices and stifle innovation.

Book Review: ‘Antitrust,’ by Amy Klobuchar - The New York Times

But the book is an impressive work of scholarship, deeply researched — it has over 200 pages of footnotes — highly informative and surprisingly readable in the bargain.

...
Many industries at the time were controlled by business combinations known as trusts. There were trusts in petroleum, meatpacking, railroads, sugar, lead, coal, whiskey and tobacco. By restricting competition the trusts not only hurt consumers and workers and damaged the functioning of the capitalist system, they also came to be seen as a threat to American democracy itself. The battle to break them up became a highly visible feature of American political life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Politicians of both major parties campaigned against “monopolies” and “big business combinations.” The Sherman Act of 1890 (enacted with almost unanimous support in both the House and Senate) and the Clayton Act of 1914 remain today the primary weapons against misuse of corporate power. In the years from 1901 to 1914 the federal government brought some 120 suits against so-called monopolies, including the well-known suit to break up Standard Oil. Whole industries were restructured and the industrial landscape transformed by government action.

Over the last 40 years, antitrust enforcement has gone downhill, and it has produced Gilded Age II, complete with monopolies and quasi-monopolies arising from new technologies.

The central figure behind this change — and the primary villain in Klobuchar’s telling of the story — was Robert Bork, the enormously influential legal theorist from Yale, whose nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate in 1987. He argued that the governing principle for judging competition should be whether consumers were harmed in some way. It was a doctrine that became a cornerstone of American antitrust policy for the next 30 years.

The reviewer then asks what to do about businesses that grow big simply by economies of scale.

Klobuchar has probably exaggerated the adverse consequences of the last 30 years of laissez-faire policy toward corporate power, and the same reasoning causes her to overstate the potency of reversing it. Perhaps she should temper her enthusiasm, evident throughout this book, for Woodrow Wilson and his zeal for a vigorous antitrust policy, and rebalance it with some of Theodore Roosevelt’s skepticism.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

more competition / serving consumers should take priority over petty nativism

Another case of Right-wing anticapitalist hypocrisy is their condemnation of Chinese imports and immigrant labor. All competition is good for the economy, if you're a true capitalist, because the free market requires more competition, which benefits everyone, meaning there should be unlimited access to immigrant labor and foreign labor.

Cheap labor is good for the economy is a fundamental premise of capitalism, and yet the Trumpsters are constantly bashing the capitalists for practicing this and being good capitalists and serving consumers better by saving on labor cost. By bashing employers they are putting their petty pseudo-patriotism above the free market and the good of all consumers = everyone = the whole economy = the nation.

 

[lpetrich]

Ted Cruz on Twitter: "To America’s watch-me-woke-it-up CEOs I say: When the time comes that you need help with a tax break or a regulatory change, I hope the Democrats take your calls, because we may not.

Starting now, we won’t take your money either. (link)" / Twitter
linking to his editorial in the Wall Street Journal:
Your Woke Money Is No Good Here - WSJ - "Corporations have taken advantage of Republicans for too long. I won’t take their PAC dollars anymore."

I like this response:
Melanie D'Arrigo on Twitter: "Sen. Ted Cruz acknowledging what we already knew— Congress sells their policies to the highest corporate bidder.

One more time, louder, for the people in the back:
Corporate PAC is bribery " / Twitter

Marie Newman on Twitter: "Aww, did you get caught telling the truth that your legislative actions were for sale and had zero to do with making American lives better?" / Twitter

Many others who retweeted TC's tweet agreed that TC was confessing that he was on the take.

 

[lpetrich]

Vikram Bath1 on Twitter: "This is quite a confession letter (link)" / Twitter

This is the point in the drama when Republicans usually shrug their shoulders, call these companies "job creators," and start to cut their taxes. Not this time.

This time, we won't look the other way on Coca-Cola's $12 billion in back taxes owed. This time, when Major League Baseball lobbies to preserve its multibillion-dollar antitrust exception, we'll say no thank you. This time, when Boeing asks for billions in corporate welfare, we'll simply let the Export-Import Bank expire.

For too long, woke CEOs have been fair-weather friends to the Republican Party: They like us until the left's digital pitchforks come out. Then they run away. Or they mouth off on legislation they don't understand-and hurt the reputations of patriotic leaders protecting our elections and expanding the right to vote. Enough is enough. Corporations that flagrantly misrepresent efforts to protect our elections need to be called out, singled out and cut off.

Ted Cruz’s warning to ‘woke CEOs’ blasted by former government ethics boss
Walter Shaub on Twitter: "This may be the most openly corrupt thing any Senator has said. It's the part everyone knows: these crooks sell access. Others have the sense not to admit it. This is why our republic is broken. Immoral politicians selling power we've entrusted to them like it's theirs to sell." / Twitter
From the article:

As his op-ed progressed, Mr Cruz dug his hole deeper. While promising not to accept corporate money – from now on – he quantified exactly how much he’d accepted in the past.

“In my nine years in the Senate, I’ve received $2.6 million in contributions from corporate political-action committees,” he wrote. “Starting today, I no longer accept money from any corporate PAC. I urge my GOP colleagues at all levels to do the same.”

In the next paragraph, he listed a few things he and his colleagues had “allowed” corporations to do at the United States’ expense.

“We’ve allowed them to ship jobs overseas, attack gun rights, and destroy our energy companies,” he wrote

TC ended with

“When the time comes that you need help with a tax break or a regulatory change, I hope the Democrats take your calls, because we may not,” he scolded. “Starting today, we won’t take your money either.”

 

[lpetrich]

Ilhan Omar on Twitter: " (pic link)" / Twitter
with picture quote

Charlie Kirk
@charliekirk11

The US Supreme Court should overturn the Facebook's "Oversight Board's" "ruling" which upholds the outlawing of the 45th President of the United States from social media.

This is a big tech, corporate oligarchy without standing and it's gone too far. Enough is enough.

Austin Brown on Twitter: "@IlhanMN I love this pic of you. I can imagine its the look and laugh you gave when reading Charlie (pic link)" / Twitter


Book review of The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley - The Washington Post

Which means that to get his ideas across as a serious thinker and player on one of the wickedest of wicked problems facing Washington today — what to do about Big Tech — he will need to make those ideas stand out on their own, distinct from a persona that conveys a blind fealty to Trumpism and the insult-laden, grievance-driven divisiveness that the former president rode to the end of his term and beyond.

The book does not offer a promising path in that regard. Even as Hawley attempts to build an intellectual scaffolding around his challenge to Big Tech — he posits that giant companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are the descendants of the robber barons of the Gilded Age — he finds a way to blame liberal thought for today’s dilemma. These companies, he argues, are products of a “corporate liberalism” that derives from an unholy collaboration between Big Business and the state. The tech companies, he says, are “draining prosperity and power away from the great middle of our society and creating, as they do, a new oligarchy.” (Amazon chief executive and founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Reviewer Susan Berkelman also notes some oddities in that book's history of antitrust efforts. Like its portrayal of President Woodrow Wilson and its skipping over a century of history.