"Boss politics" are a feature of corrupt societies. When a society is dominated by self-dealing, corrupt institutions, strongman leaders can seize control by appealing to the public's fury and desperation. Then, the boss can selectively punish corrupt entities that oppose him, and since everyone is corrupt, these will be valid prosecutions.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/24/enforcement-priorities/#enemies-lists
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In other words, it's possible to corruptly enforce the law against the guilty. This is just a matter of enforcement priorities: in a legitimate state, enforcers prioritize the wrongdoers who are harming the public the most. Under boss politics, priority is given to the corrupt entities that challenge the boss's power, without regard to whether these lawbreakers are the worst offenders. Meanwhile, worse wrongdoers walk free, provided that they line up behind the boss.
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This is how Xi Jinping prosecuted his purges in the run up to his lifetime appointment as Party Secretary (2012-2015). Xi prosecuted the guilty,but not the most guilty. The public officials who were defenstrated and/or imprisoned during Xi's purges were all corrupt, but they were also the power base of Xi's rivals. Meanwhile, corrupt officials in Xi's own orbit were untouched:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181222163946/https://peterlorentzen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Lorentzen-Lu-Crackdown-Nov-2018-Posted-Version.pdf
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Trump is a classic boss - that's what people mean when they call him "transactional": he doesn't act out of principal, he acts out of self interest. The people who give him the most get the most back from him. This means that Biden's brightest legacy - militant antitrust enforcement of a type not seen in generations - is now going to become "boss antitrust," where genuine monopolists are attacked under antitrust law, but only if they oppose Trump:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy
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We're now living through the first days of boss antitrust. Remember those monopolistic tech billionaires who donated millions to Trump's inauguration and arranged themselves in a decorative semicircle behind him on the dias? Trump just went to Davod to speak up for them, arguing that EU and other offshore prosecutions of these companies were attacks on "American businesses" and saying he would defend them with the full might of the US government:
https://gizmodo.com/trump-returns-big-techs-ass-kissing-at-davos-2000554158
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Tthis is the same government that, under Biden, secured multiple convictions against these same companies for monopolistic conduct.
The Federal Trade Commission has lost its Biden-era chair, the extraordinary Lina Khan, who did more in four years than all her predecessors did in the preceding forty years, combined.
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The new chair is Republican Andrew Ferguson, whose first day on the job was a bloodbath, in which he killed off multiple, significant actions aimed at producing real, material benefits from Americans who are being absolutely screwed by corporations:
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-01-24-executive-action-reaction-day-4/
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Ferguson killed off a public comment process on "surveillance pricing," where companies spy on you and then reprice their goods based on their estimation of how desperate you are:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor
Uber pioneered this when they started increasing the cost of cab rides for riders whose phone batteries were about to die.
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But other companies took it way further: McDonald's is co-owner of a company called Plexure that sells companies the ability to charge you more for your normal order at the drive-through if you've just been paid:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again
But surveillance pricing is even worse for workers than it is for shoppers. Nurses in the USA increasingly work for Uber-like nurse-on-demand apps like Shiftkey, Carerev and Shiftmed.
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These apps can buy nurses' financial data from the unregulated data-broker industry, and then offer nurses with overdue credit-card bills lower wages, on the grounds that they're so desperate they'll take a paycut:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point
Ferguson also killed off a notice-and-comment action on predatory pricing - when companies sell goods below cost in order to destroy competitors, then drive up prices.
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This is what Uber did, setting $31b of Saudi royal money on fire over 13 years, losing $0.41 on every dollar they brought in. This killed off all the regular taxis, and convinced city governments to abandon public transit investment on the gruonds that Uber was cheaper than a bus. Once they'd captured the market, Uber doubled the price of a ride and halved the wages that they paid drivers.
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So this is what Ferguson has killed off. In its place, Ferguson has instituted an internal action, aimed at rooting out "DEI" and "wokeness." The agency's top priority right now is running a snitch line where FTC officials can rat each other out for being anti-racist. This isn't just offensive, of course - it's also deeply unserious.
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Even if you stipulate that "woke" has some meaning (it doesn't, but go with me here), then killing off all the "woke" at the FTC will not make Americans more prosperous, let alone protect them from corporate predators.
In his dissenting statement, FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya didn't mince words:
Andrew Ferguson could have made his first public act as Chairman a motion to study the rising cost of groceries.
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He could have acted on a pending petition from a group of wall and ceiling contractors to investigate how lawbreaking contractors can effectively rig contract competitions in the commercial construction industry. He could have investigated a pending public petition from shrimpers from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama to investigate potentially false and misleading claims about shrimp imports from India that are farmed with forced labor and shot full of antibiotics...
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I have met with corn growers and cattlemen in Iowa. I have met with shrimpers in Biloxi. I have met with pharmacists in Knoxville, grocers in Tulsa, and patients and their doctors in Charleston, West Virginia. I met with the men who build Miami’s million-dollar skyscrapers in 110-degree heat.
Let me tell you what they didn’t talk about: “DEI.”
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What they do talk about is how powerful companies are skirting or abusing the law to force farmers, workers, and small businessmen to do what they want, when they want, or else. How the government isn’t doing anything about it. And how they’re going broke because of it.
But Chairman Ferguson seems uninterested in the challenges that regular human beings face.
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/bedoya-statement-emergency-motion.pdf
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Bedoya is still hanging in there at the FTC; these administrative agency appointments outlast the presidents that made them. It's common for agency heads to step down when there's a changeover - Lina Khan didn't stay - but the commissioners often hang in there. I hope Bedoya stays at the FTC: he's one of the good ones and we're all better off for his presence.
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There's one Biden agency head who hasn't left, and surprisingly, it's one of Biden's best appointees: Rohit Chopra, head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureaus. Chopra is the first CFPB head to explore just how much power this new-ish agency has, and has seen his far-reaching, muscular regulations upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court.
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Trump's backers hate the CFPB, and Elon Musk really hates the CFBP, and crypto grifters really, really hate the CFPB. Ironically, the demonization of the CFPB seems to be the key to Chopra's enduring tenure. According to David Dayen at The American Prospect, no one in Trumpland wants his job. The Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that presidents can fire CFPB heads, but there's no one who wants to replace Chopra and take their turn in the barrel:
https://prospect.org/economy/2025-01-24-rohit-chopra-still-has-a-job/
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Chopra's using his time well: he's brought a flurry of new actions, most lately against the credit bureau giant Transunion. And in the final weeks of the Biden administration, Chopra launched a whole boatload of enforcements, investigations, and other actions against the most predatory companies in America. As Dayen notes, over the past four years, Chopra has forced American rip-off businesses to pay back $6b in stolen loot, and to cough up more than $3.2b in fines.
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@pluralistic semi-related: i've heard rumours that the disgraced Jiang Faction (AKA "the Shanghai Clique") are the driving force behind our current cryptocurrency nightmare, using their control of offshore gambling and crypto to regain their lost wealth and power.
dunno if it's true but it's always sounded highly plausible to me (and i've heard it a few times).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_clique
[#]ShanghaiClique #JiangFaction #PRC #China
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@pluralistic
need a guy like Eliot Ness
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@pluralistic
Good word choice
Boss: ORIGIN early 19th century (originally US): from Dutch baas ‘master’.
As Black people were required to call white masters in South Africa.
baas /bɑːs /
noun South African English often offensive a supervisor or employer, especially a white man in charge of Black or Coloured people: ▸[as title] Baas O'Brien.
(Oxford Dictionary of English)
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@pluralistic "Authoritarian societies are inherently corrupt, and corrupt societies are inherently unstable. Rule of thieves brings collapse, eventually, because they can't stop stealing." William Gibson, '"Agency"
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@grheavyroller @pluralistic
I can't place who first said that.
Gibson's police inspector with powers to delete individual Klept who would destabilise the whole was the solution that remained in his dystopia.
Sir Terry Pratchett introduced the Guild of Assassins of Ankh Morpork, who knew "the value of human life, to the penny, in many cases".
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@midgephoto @grheavyroller @pluralistic Was the Guild of Assassins also a big employer of actuaries? 😁
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@dneary @grheavyroller @pluralistic Possibly vice versa?
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@midgephoto @dneary @grheavyroller @pluralistic Think the quote perfectly encapsulates the launch of #TrumpCoin, #MelaniaCoin, and the sale of half of Trump's other crypto scam #WLFI to Chinese nationals all within 48 hours.
They literally can't help themselves.
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@grheavyroller Also happening right now in Serbia. Corrupt kleptocrats reconstructed the overhang at the train station in Novi Sad, which then collapsed, killing 15 people and seriously injuring 2 more. And since the autocrat's government won't prosecute those responsible and won't even provide the whole documentation, today we are on general strike. The fucker IS going down. 12 years of corruption have to end. @pluralistic
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@grheavyroller
Sadly a lot of people will be killed before that collapse occurs
@pluralistic
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@grheavyroller @pluralistic
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@pluralistic this is what #TrumpCoin is for...
https://cryptadamus.substack.com/p/the-trumpcoin-cometh
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@pluralistic I love that your Picks and Shovels book tour is planned as conversations with eminent and personable writers. That seems pretty great!
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@jmeowmeow Thank you!
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@pluralistic : Correction to the alt text: that's Theodore Roosevelt, not his distant cousin Franklin, wielding the big stick.
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@pluralistic
Man, and I've even seen the Puck original I believe is linked in Wikipedia someplace.
Also historical note: apparently Roman plebeian assemblies were not quite as free as the generic word might imply because the patrician class always had the privilege votes to tip the scales and they were always present to witness what was said and debated over
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@pluralistic Mention of "boss politics" & selective enforcement makes me think of “Big Tim" Sullivan, whose Sullivan Act made it a felony to carry unlicensed firearms in public in New York. The purpose was to disarm Sullivan's enemies; it wasn’t enforced against his friends.
Like many corrupt politicians, Sullivan also dispensed patronage. He reportedly used to say “I never asked a hungry man what his politics were. It was enough for me to know he was hungry.” That's not a Trump-like sentiment.
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@angusm @pluralistic
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@pluralistic The enemy of your enemy is still your enemy.
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text/gemini
