Good morning. Hello. How are you? #825
A lovely evening with Jane and Aug and a whole bunch about the FTC
Good morning! Hello! How are you? All well? I do hope so. I sincerely hope so. Had a lovely evening with Aug and Emma by the fire, after a nice bedtime with Jane, where we learned about continents and how humans came from Africa and walked everywhere across the planet. She was VERY excited about humans walking from Africa, jumping over the Bering strait and walking down to Tierra del Fuego. Just loved it to death. We just covered continents I wasn’t gonna go into continental drift just yet.
When she was putting on her new Valentine’s pajamas, I sat down next to her and she looked at me deadpan and said “What are you doing sitting down?” And I finished “You should be horizontal now,” and we both laughed and she’s never made a joke from lyrics before to me so that was nice. Then we went into the other room and did our dancing exercise to Wet Leg on Youtube — their recent bonkers Brit Awards live appearance where both Hester and Rhian looked fantastic. Then we danced to Al Bano and Romina Power’s “Felicita,” then it suggested Abba and I realized she didn’t really know Abba yet and boy she loved Abba. Then I taught her about requests and she requested the Pet Shop Boys so we did It’s a Sin then Youtube autoplayed Alphaville which was great and then it autoplayed Mike Gill’s video of the Go Gos reunion in LA and Jane was very happy and danced but of course that made me very sad. Miss that guy. Hard to believe he’s gone.
Then Aug came home and Jane gave him a hug good night and handed him some love and we went to the bedroom and she asked more about college. She’s very interested in college now because the nice girl we used to see on our walks, and Jane and her would compliment each other’s shoes, has gone off to college. And she’s thinking a lot about school in general. As are her poor parents. We had a good college talk and at one point I explained to her that some people choose to move out of their home and go to college far away and you could see a little panic in her eyes, but I reassured her it was up to her. Then I spiralled a bit about how obsessed I was about leaving town for college and how awful I will feel if she does that and how thoughtlessly I made my parents feel awful when I was so dead set on leaving for college. But it wasn’t you guys, mom and dad, I swear. It was just the town.
Lovely time with Aug by the fire talking about obscure bands (I’m listening to one of them now) and friends and family and life and covid and everything else. Then at like 11 I remembered I had arranged for the car people to work on Aug’s car first thing in the morning and we had to drop it off, so he and Emma took his car to the car place and I went to bed the end.
All right so a woman named Christine Wilson is a commissioner at the FTC. The FTC is one of those supposedly apolitical bodies that congress set up back in the Roosevelt administration to unbiasedly govern trade in the US. It is supposedly apolitical in the sense that it has a board of commissioners who are both Republicans and Democrats and their terms don’t exactly overlap with presidents so they aren’t really beholden to any individual president. The whole thing is run by a chairperson, because, you know, they’re the chairmperson of a board, not a despot on their own.
I’ve spoken a lot about the current chairwoman, Lina Khan. I’m deeply fascinated in her journey and her quest. But Christine Wilson, a Republican on the FTC board, is very upset about Lina Khan, so she is resigning from the board with a barnburner of an open letter. She’s upset for a bunch of reasons. Some of them are kind of interesting — there is a nonpartisan survey of happiness or confidence or something in departments of the US government and Lina’s administration is doing less well than previous administrations.
But the bulk of her complaints are kind of fascinating. They’re such a reflection of the current state of the American bureacracy and the gridlock in congress and the faux hallowed nature of the judiciary and its essentially invisible hold over American politics and law. To whit:
“Due process.” To Christine Wilson — and, really, to anyone of any political bent when they are not in power — Lina Khan is effectively disqualified from position she is in because… she had opinions about trade in America before she became chairperson of the FTC. In this reading of due process, true due process in America can only exist if those involved in the whole process have… no opinions. This sounds lovely but of course it’s bunk. The constitution didn’t say that we deserved a jury of our peers, and those peers have to be utterly clueless about the crimes in question and not have any opinions about crime in general. And of course, even that analogy is flawed: the FTC is not a jury. Nor is it a judge, whom you would expect to be impartial. It’s closest analog would be to an attorney general: it decides when to bring cases. Those cases go to federal court. It argues one side. Every DA in America is political in some way. Imagine if every DA in America was actuall a bipartisan board and they had to vote. That would be amazing! Lina has the votes right now, Christine does not. This is as it should be.
Wilson’s other complaint is kind of interesting, and I have written about it here a bunch. Lina is a bulldog in a china shop. Lina is rebelling against the massive amount of court cases that have, in her view, twisted the plain intent of the laws that the government has passed with a giant body of BS jurisprudence that clearly goes against the plainly stated laws that the government wrote and that any human sitting in congress back when they wrote the antitrust laws would have laughed in your face if you had said something like “well clearly this law you’re writing against monopolies won’t count when that monopoly trades in eyeballs or brass buttons or a bunch of money that isn’t spent by people but by companies in transactions during the manufacturing process but not at the end to the consumer” or whatever weird-ass academic limitations the courts have put on antitrust laws. Lina’s view — and I share this — is the courts have for decades chipped away at the power of the laws that congress wrote, and it is her job to slowly claw that power back. Wilson’s view, in this very specific circumstance, is that the courts are so important and hallowed and everything they’ve done is gospel and you can’t claw it back. But of course she’s a Republican and she is plenty happy, one would assume, about all the other places in American society power is being clawed back from the courts (ahem Roe v Wade).
And of course I’m the same way! I wrote just a week ago about the bold new tactics the newly-Republican supreme court in NC is undertaking, immediately revisiting cases that were just heard. And I am outraged! But I tell ya, when the day comes that we take back the US Supreme Court, I sure hope they immediately re-try like ten cases and undo the misery Beerbelly Kavanaugh and Amy Covid Bash have imposed upon us.
So Wilson whines that Khan is pushing the FTC past the clear intent of the law and look here the court says here that you can’t “find a new power” in an old law but of course that happens all the time and in any case Khan thinks she’s reclaiming the power inherent in the law and they both know this and Wilson doth protest that Khan should go get these “new” powers clarified with a new law in congress hahahaha yeah right we all know getting new powers out of congress is a joke so even if Wilson is right, our president appointed someone like Khan to the FTC because this is what he wants, and like Wilson says she believes, elections have consequences, and she and her pals will do the exact same thing when they get the majority on the commission again, and of course, they have many times which is why we let stupid mergers happen whenever Republicans control the FTC.
So we have Lina, who knows all this too, and she’s taken the strategy of taking up cases that she knows she may well lose, to slowly get “new” “novel” legal theories (i.e. theories literally anyone in congress would have agreed with when they passed antitrust legislation) into the court’s bloodstream, to slowly tilt at windmills and make a bit of progress that might take decades and I respect that.
But then at the same time she does things that I as a “businessman,” even a socialist one, think are kinda silly on the face of it and I don’t always agree with her or her tactics. But I get what she’s doing and, like Wilson said, “elections have consequences.” And this is what most people who voted for Biden would want, if they understood all the mechanics of it.
And on and on it goes. And I had a whole list of interesting things to write about but I guess I’m just writing about the FTC all day.
I would just like to close by saying that someone out there founded a company called Pish Posh, and they are taking it public, and their IPO process is looking pretty successful and they have expanded the number of shares they’re gonna offer or something I am unclear on that part and don’t care I just love that someone out there has named a company Pish Posh and carried on this process to IPO and I just feel like that person is maybe living their best life and my hat is off to them.
Today’s playlist isn’t by me it’s by my old high school friend Davey Benson. It is a playlist of goth bands (mostly) covering goth bands (mostly) and it’s great. I found myself adding song after song to my “covers” playlist series and realized I could just share his, so here it is. It’s great.
Till tomorrow!