“Never Seen Anything Like It” It’s not clear if Matt Stoller’s brand has been tainted by his brief late-night association with Russell Brand a decade ago. Stoller has nonetheless plunged ahead with his blog, BIG, where he covers “the politics of monopoly power.” Stoller reports — will wonders never cease? — that federal enforcement actions against monopolies is on the upswing: Before the Biden administration, antitrust was mostly dead. It had picked up a bit under Trump, but mostly no one thought much about this area of law. And the reason was pretty simple. Nothing was happening. The FTC was using its authority to go after powerless actors, such as Uber drivers, church organists, bull semen traders, and ice skating teachers. The changeover has been absolutely stark, and it’s accelerating. Many of my sources in the competition policy world are giving me the same message, which is that this is the most extraordinary month they have ever seen in antitrust. There are the big fights, the cases against Google and Amazon, the suits against private equity and meat price-fixing.
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A government shutdown was averted at the last second.
The post Amazon and Google Are Finally Facing the Music appeared first on The Intercept.
In Fresno, Sikhs and Oaxacans unite to pass caste discrimination ban This week, Fresno became the first city in California to ban discrimination based on…
The press ignores the “Banality of Crazy” “Sometimes, you have to write when you’re angry,” Brian Klaas begins. Works for me. Klaas also hates writing about Donald Trump. The orange train wreck gets too much free press as is. But sometimes you just gotta. The banality of evil in the Trump age has become the banality of crazy. A Democratic congressman (Jamal Bowman) does something stupid in a rush to get from the Cannon Office Building to a snap vote in the House chambers and … what you’d expect to happen happens: It’s telling that Republicans aren’t even slightly concerned about the absurdity of calling for Bowman’s expulsion while harboring enablers of Trump’s alleged criminality in their ranks. They know they’re pointing the camera away from themselves and at Dems. That’s the ball game.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: SNL/Kelce, Shatner/Musk, Doctor Who, Umbrella Academy, Rick and Morty, TWD: Daryl Dixon, Bill Maher & more!
Dan Evans and Tom Latchem reveal Dan Wootton’s departure from GB News looks set to be permanent – and examine the true cost to the network of sticking by a £600,000-a-year employee who broke editorial codes with impunity and engaged in sordid activities posing as the fictitious ‘Martin Branning’ and ‘Maria Joseph’
Listening to the choral music on Armonico Consort’s Naked Byrd Two anthology is an unending delight. One of my favourite albums.
For three decades, Ronnie Kasrils engaged in a transnational crusade to bring about the destruction of apartheid in South Africa. A founder member of uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party (SACP), the former government minister began his revolutionary odyssey sixty years ago this […]
A new, well-funded pressure group is fighting to get Apple to weaken iPhone privacy protections in the name of catching child predators.
The post New Group Attacking iPhone Encryption Backed by U.S. Political Dark-Money Network appeared first on The Intercept.
Dear ES/PE community members, find below an abundant list of great academic opportunities: 13 calls for papers for conferences (some are fully or partly funded) and special issues, 10 job openings, 6 PhD fellowships, 4 visiting opportunities, 4 postdoc positions, and a grant in economic sociology, political economy, and related fields, with deadlines from today […]
“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” – Johnny Rotten In my 2015 review of Danny Tedesco’s documentary The Wrecking Crew, I wrote: “The Wrecking Crew” was a moniker given to an aggregation of crack L.A. session players who in essence created the distinctive pop “sound” that defined classic Top 40 from the late 50s through the mid-70s. With several notable exceptions (Glen Campbell, Leon Russell and Mac “Dr. John” Rebennack) their names remain obscure to the general public, even if the music they helped forge is forever burned into our collective neurons.
The GOP sure knows how to pick them The Messenger: In 2013, Joseph Roberts was accused of verbal and online sexual harassment and suspended from Savannah State University. He claimed he was suspended from school and “denied due process.” Five years later, he’d go on to share his story with Betsy DeVos, then former President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education, as an advocate for men who were wrongfully accused of sexual misconduct on college campuses. In 2020, Roberts appeared on YouTube’s The Exceptional Conservative Show, where he recalled the day he was expelled from campus after three unidentified female students reported him. “They said things like they were afraid for their lives,” Roberts, who left the school just three weeks before graduation, claimed. “It was just total lies.” More than a decade later, Roberts, 42, was arrested on Sept. 7 in a separate incident for the gruesome death of his girlfriend, Rachel Imani Buckner, a recent law school grad whose dismembered body was discovered wrapped in plastic with duct tape along the shore in California’s Alameda County.
Kevin Drum: A regular reader asks if I can post a chart of gasoline prices over my lifetime. Of course. In fact, I can do better: I was born right in the middle of that warm postwar summer of ever-declining gasoline prices—which ended abruptly in 1973 with the first oil embargo. And then again in 1979 with the second oil embargo. And again in 2002-08 during the Iraq War. And again in 2011 because of turmoil in the Middle East. And then finally yet again in 2022 thanks to the Ukraine War. Will gasoline ever get down to $2 again? Probably not. OPEC countries need a higher price than that to avoid bankruptcy. But it will probably recede to $3 one of these days. I feel as if my whole life I’ve been aware that we are running out of oil and part of that was assuming that the price was going to go up. Obviously, we are now dealing with the crisis of climate change and have an obligation to drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels so we have even more incentive to end our dependence on gas.
Should we be reading into Doctor Who Showrunner Russell T. Davies's Instagram comment regarding Jemma Redgrave's Kate Lethbridge-Stewart?
And they love him more than ever Tom Sullivan already did a great post on the Trump speech in California yesterday and I can’t think of anything to add. But I do think you should see some more of what he said. It’s truly unbelievable: Trump’s charisma rests in this: He invites every one of us to liberate the worst version of ourselves from the shackles of decency and convention; to let the id trample our ethics. Gleefully. It’s an intoxicating and irresistible opportunity for tens of millions of Americans. https://t.co/zw3zqizJ9F — Terry Moran 🇺🇸 (@TerryMoran) September 30, 2023 Cheers from the audience that has been having a full blown hissy fit over the assault on decorum in the Senate if men don’t wear suits.
‘Green growth’ withers in the heat of evidence. Humanity’s demands are creating a ‘global land squeeze’. Another year of murder for environmental defenders. Green growth: saviour or snake oil? Economic growth, expressed as an ever-expanding GDP, often justified with the claim that a larger pie makes for a fairer redistribution of its delights, is frequently Continue reading »
In the final of this three-part series, I explore why China’s emphasis on expanding land and naval forces suggests its focus is on defence of its borders and seaborne trade, not offence. In the first two articles of this series, I explored how US narratives on the ‘China threat’ have become entrenched in Western security Continue reading »
My mates and I, growing up in our happy, homogenous and very white suburbia in the 1960s and 70s, would probably not have met an indigenous Australian but for playing footy. Without our great game, we might, at least as kids and teenagers, have remained stuck in the fearful ignorance that was pretty common at Continue reading »
If stress has its own Richter scale, the people standing outside political offices of late seem to be under massive pressure. Vigils by stranded refugees have been ongoing for the past fortnight outside the Victorian electoral offices of Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil and Immigration Minister Andrew Giles. These events have been characterised by chants, music, heart signs Continue reading »
Commentary on the tenure of Secretaries of Commonwealth Government departments is becoming perilous territory as those wading into it continue to make basic errors of fact. Geoffrey Hawker is the latest to do so (“Tenure and its Troubles”, Pearls and Irritations, 17 September 2023). Let’s take four of Hawker’s statements. “The trajectory from Whitlam through Continue reading »
The RSL was once one of the most influential lobby groups in Australia. Today it is better known for the number of poker machines it operates. Back in the day, as they say, they were knocking on doors in Canberra where the people they met to lobby often had returned service badges in their lapels. Continue reading »