Audrey Stienon

bsky.app/profile/asti...

🚨 Starting a new thread here because I think there may still be more attempts to delay ranked-choice voting in D.C.

It is currently set to be implemented for next June's primary, but some back and forth today makes me think two councilmembers could try to derail that.

Still reeling from the Stanford report on Brexit. Reduced GDP by up to 8% and investment by as much as 18%. The UK Treasury would have £40 billion more each year if Britain had remained in the EU. Devastating self-immolation.

The danger is not that Trump is failing to check the power of corporate America.

The danger is that Trump is empowering corporate America in order to capture that power for himself.

All that to say: we need to break out of the habit of framing econ and industrial policy as if the only variable were more/less government enforcement.

The "why" behind policy matters. The "who," as in "who-is-getting-more-powerful-from-this," matters.

Neoliberalism helped get us here, btw.

It's telling that corporate America has become so dependent on mergers to succeed, and so fixated on the profits they bring, that they will do *anything,* even bow down to a despot, to get them approved.

This is how Putin disciplined the Russian oligarchs.

If you're his friend, you can break all the laws you want — but the minute you step out of line, all your crimes are crimes again.

If everyone is granted an illegal monopoly...well, then anyone can be threatened to have it taken away

So, he and JD will rail against the power of Big Tech when those companies are seen as aligned with Dems, or when they kick him off their platforms.

But once they invite him back, rig algorithms right-wards, pay for his ballroom, etc. ... well, free pass.

For as long as they stay aligned, that is.

THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS WHAT TRUMP IS DOING.

Trump is not bringing us back to a world of non-enforcement of the law, however many mergers his admin lets through.

He is creating a world of selective enforcement. The full weight of the law if you're his enemy, and a free pass if you're his friend.

For decades, antitrust laws have gone unenforced.

The government, led by both parties, *chose* to permit unfair mergers and abuses of market power.

Because the goal of neoliberalism is "free" markets, i.e. no gov restriction of corporate actions. Because what is good for corporates trickles down

Antitrust can deny companies the mergers that could make them very very rich. Or ban unfair corporate actions. Or even break up the worst offenders.

Because antitrust makes these tactics illegal.

But it's the government's prerogative to decide whether to enforce the law, or not.

Antitrust is "one of the most important checks on excesses of corporate power," for sure.

But it is also, more broadly, one of the most powerful economic policies in the government's arsenal. Whether the government goal is to check excess corporate power...or not.

More than any other outcome — more than increasing jobs, or lowering inflation, or even ensuring any one company or industry succeeds — Trump's policy priority is to consolidate power around himself.

This is authoritarian industrial policy.

Opinion | Trump Falls Short of His Populist Rhetoric

Trump's weaponization of antitrust is about more than his falling short on campaign promises:

"the government is cynically wielding its antitrust authority...as a means of punishing its enemies, rewarding its friends and consolidating Trump’s political authority."

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/o...

A large flock of turkeys in an industrial barn, with a text overlay that reads: "bird flu hits a consolidated turkey industry ahead of thanksgiving."

Bird flu has killed 8.7 million turkeys, chickens, and ducks in the U.S. since September, alone. Outbreaks on turkey farms earlier this year plunged the U.S. turkey flock to its lowest size in 40 years. As a result, wholesale prices for whole turkeys surged 75% between October 2024 and October 2025.

Europe in dangerous territory. Putting democratic protections on the chopping blocks for trade concessions invites a slippery slope. Increasingly tariff negotiations cuts at the heart of European national security.
www.ft.com/content/5820...

Ahem. "You can pry the end dash—which AI risks ruining—out of my cold, dead hands."

Citizens United and the Decline of US Democracy: Assessing the Decision’s Impact 15 Years Later - Roosevelt Institute In a new analysis, Rachel Funk Fordham examines the 15-year legacy of Citizens United, assessing its impact on democracy through new evidence and political science research and offering recommendation...

This didn’t happen overnight. Citizens United opened the floodgates to unlimited spending, and 15 years later, we’re living with the consequences—more polarization, less accountability, and policymaking tilted towards the ultra-rich.

Reform is still possible: rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...

Big Tech Poised to Win Immunity Shield From State AI Regulation - The American Prospect The Trump administration is readying an executive order preempting constraints on AI. It could become a much more wide-ranging deregulatory tool.

NEW from me: the proposed executive order to block states from regulating AI is indicative of the purchase of our government by tech overlords, & likely to spread to shield any business able to persuade Trump that because they use an algorithm or a computer, they're part of the AI revolution too.

Stack of blocks labeled, all modern digital infrastructure. A ratchet tipping over the entire stack is labeled AI. A load bearing pillar is labeled unpaid open source development. Another label is AWS, and Cloudflare and Unpaid Open Source Developers.

Extremely upset that a throw-away XKCD joke somehow became the organizing principle for the Internet.

Family Affair: Commerce Secretary’s Sons Cash In on A.I. Frenzy

NEW: As Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick drives billions of dollars in foreign payments to help build AI data centers in the US, his sons help run a company earning tens of millions in fees helping finance AI data centers. A NYT investigation. (Free link)

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/u...

States Must Appeal Judge Mehta’s Feckless Remedies Decision in Google Search Case, Advocates Urge - States Must Appeal Judge Mehta’s Feckless Remedies Decision in Google Search Case, Advocates Urge Following Judge Amit Mehta's decision in September on remedies in U.S. v. Google search, in which he declined to terminate the tech giant's monopoly despite finding last year that Google illegally mai...

We teamed up with a range of public interest groups to urge state AGs to appeal the incredibly weak, insufficient remedies to address Google's monopoly over search.

www.economicliberties.us/press-releas...

The GOP represents one of these poles. Democrats are now split between the two others.

Just because neoliberalism was the defining policy view of both parties prior to Trump's 2016 election does not mean that this status quo was not conservative — and an extreme version of conservatism at that

There are 3 poles to this fight:

far-right ethno-nationalists who want the econ to benefit some more than others

neoliberals for whom wealthy businesses = wealthy society

progressives, who see business as one of many stakeholders in the economy, next to workers, consumers, communities, etc.

Yes, this is the result. Market-based policies, and the broader goal of prioritizing business as the key actor in the economy, become the norm — anything else is depicted *by leading Democrats* as radical, divisive, and impossible to implement.

A big problem in politics today is that neoliberalism is treated as the "centrist" position as opposed to a fairly radical form of conservatism. This allows for the normalization of far-right positions as part of the conservative umbrella, while portraying the traditional center-left as radical

Last week: vote with the far-right to concede to Trump's demands for deregulation of climate policy.

This week: weaken data privacy and AI rules to the benefit of Trump's Big Tech backers.

Does the EU really want to be joining us under techno-oligarchal rule?

Grand theft government President Trump is in the process of sending millions of dollars in taxpayer money directly to his political allies — and himself.

President Trump is in the process of sending millions of dollars in taxpayer money directly to his political allies — and himself.

One of the biggest beneficiaries may be Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security advisor.

Death rates rose in hospital ERs after private equity firms took over, study finds The increased deaths in emergency departments at private equity-owned hospitals are most likely the result of reduced staffing levels, researchers say.

Economists: markets knows best!

The real world: www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

New York pauses its landmark gas ban in new buildings The state will delay enforcement until a legal dispute is settled, the latest in a string of moves from Gov. Hochul to “govern in reality” around energy.

it is extraordinary that gov. hochul's response to seeing a war on clean energy from washington dc is to capitulate in advance, and that she thinks that's somehow evidence of good, commonsense politics

www.canarymedia.com/articles/car...