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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (402545)	3/12/2019 4:53:19 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 544079

Good - so at least we are in agreement on the basics of the plot. We both agree that she is making rhetorical noises to further her political career. And we both agree that she is being more dogmatic and rash than we'd be. The difference is that you think this is ok as part of a campaign trail vote grab - and I think it is a terrible idea. Why? (1) Because her rhetoric is not harmless and can push apolitical and left leaning companies into the GOP arms (2) Because it plays into the worst claims that Dems are a bunch of socialists hell bent to destroy businesses. And (3) if she wins, she will add one more notch in the bedpost of f*kd up voters who believe politicians are full of empty promises and she'll add to the disillusionment. Now I understand that to some none of this matters - or as Carville once put it, "all is fair in love, war, and election campaign". But I am not ok with that. I want better.

To: JohnM who wrote (402545)	3/12/2019 5:13:21 PM
From: Alex MG	1 Recommendation Recommended By Ron Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 544079

Warren is a fan of Teddy Roosevelt The Theodore Roosevelt Centennial CD-ROM: Too much cannot be said against the men of wealth who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses —whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter. Such a man is only the more dangerous if he occasionally does some deed like founding a college or endowing a church, which makes those good people who are also foolish forget his real iniquity. These men are equally careless of the working men, whom they oppress, and of the State, whose existence they imperil. There are not very many of them, but there is a very great number of men who approach more or less closely to the type, and, just in so far as they do so approach, they are curses to the country. (Forum, February 1895.) Mem.Ed. XV, 10; Nat. Ed. XIII, 9. “malefactors of great wealth” bloomberg.com Theodore Roosevelt is an American icon. His face appears on Mount Rushmore, and his confident, confrontational approach is still remembered fondly. But Roosevelt wasn't quite a Republican of the laissez-faire Reaganite mold. Much of his campaign rhetoric now reads like language from a Bernie Sanders campaign rally. Roosevelt’s main attack against the “malefactors of great wealth,” as he called them, was to try to break up the monopolies and cartels that he saw as siphoning wealth from working-class Americans. Now, modern-day Democrats are taking a page out of Roosevelt’s book. As part of a plan called the “ Better Deal,” New York Senator Chuck Schumer and other party leaders have pledged to combat market concentration. The plan would create a new federal agency specifically devoted to prosecuting companies for anticompetitive practices. It would make government review of mergers mandatory instead of optional, and require regular postmerger follow-up assessments. It would judge mergers based not just on how they affect consumer prices, but on whether they hurt suppliers. And, most importantly, it would put the burden of proof on companies that want to merge, forcing them to show that their combination wouldn’t hurt competition, rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt.

To: JohnM who wrote (402545)	3/12/2019 5:16:37 PM
From: cosmicforce	1 Recommendation Recommended By Sun Tzu Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 544079

In simplification we lose fidelity. It is like they say about equations in presentations - even one will cost you some part of your audience's attention - even technical ones. We need talking points. Okay - maybe $25BB is not the right number! What is? 1% or 2% of GDP? Then you have to talk about what counts as GDP. You lose your audience. We can come up with a list of companies with sales of over $100 BB - it is concrete. It's understandable. They aren't all equally profitable but they are all big fish. Let's count their competitors - classic economics says that if there are less than three - you have a likely monopoly. Are there any on this list that deserve some scrutiny regarding who owns them and where their cash comes from and to whom it goes?

To: JohnM who wrote (402545)	3/12/2019 6:46:41 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 544079

John, it doesn't sound like mere "campaign rhetoric". It sounds like the outlines a real plan. And the details are as Sun says. Unless you want to equate her with Trump's "take her seriously but not literally", this is a detailed plan. And I agree with him, as I said when I first posted about it. It is crazy to make sets of rules for a diverse group of companies based on their revenue (over or under $25b), ignoring what businesses they are in. Is she going to break up Walmart? Or just restrict it to "tech" companies? Actually Walmart is very technically savvy and has a huge online operation, is very solar friendly and they track their inventory and do fulfillment as well as anyone, including Amazon. Break 'em up?! And when she says things like "they think they can roll over everyone" and gives Amazon's recent "tour" as an example, she is clearly being populist in the worst sense (which is to say, in the Trumpian sense). What was Amazon supposed to do, just move into a city in a dead of night? Did they hold a gun to the head of those cities to compete for its business? As it was, they not only didn't go the city which "gave" them the most, but after there were complaints in NYC, they said OK, we won't go there. Then of course they got complaints about pulling out, lol. Here is the NYT article on her plan. There are a lot of details in it. It is not just some vague thing. nytimes.com And here are a couple of excerpts with some of the details: At a rally in Long Island City, the neighborhood that was to be home to a major new Amazon campus, Ms. Warren laid out her proposal calling for regulators who would undo some tech mergers, as well as legislation that would prohibit platforms from both offering a marketplace for commerce and participating in that marketplace. “We have these giants corporations — do I have to tell that to people in Long Island City? — that think they can roll over everyone,” Ms. Warren told the crowd, drawing applause. She compared Amazon to the dystopian novel “The Hunger Games,” in which those with power force their wishes on the less fortunate. “I’m sick of freeloading billionaires,” she said. Ms. Warren’s policy announcement sent reverberations from New York to Silicon Valley, as she further cemented herself as one of the Democratic candidates most willing to call for large-scale changes to the country’s structure in the name of equality. Among the crowded field of Democrats seeking the presidential nomination, Ms. Warren has done the most to add detail to those early proposals, including a plan for universal child care, a tax on the country’s wealthiest families, and, as of Friday, breaking up big technological giants. Ms. Warren’s regulatory plan would also force the rollback of some acquisitions by tech giants, the campaign said, including Facebook’s deals for WhatsApp and Instagram, Amazon’s addition of Whole Foods, and Google’s purchase of Waze. Companies would be barred from transferring or sharing users’ data with third parties. Dual entities, such as Amazon Marketplace and AmazonBasics, would be split apart. [....] Ms. Warren’s plan creates two tiers of companies that would fall under the new regulations: those that have an annual global revenue of $25 billion or more, and those with annual revenue of $90 million to $25 billion. The upper tier would be required to “structurally separate” their products from their marketplace. Smaller companies would be subject to regulations but would not be forced to separate themselves from the online marketplace. Ms. Warren, who has previously said moving to Boston would have been a “good opportunity” for Amazon, said in a Medium post Friday morning that companies have grown so powerful that they can bully cities and states into showering them with massive taxpayer handouts in exchange for doing business, and can act — in the words of Mark Zuckerberg — “more like a government than a traditional company.” During a brief interview later in New York, Ms. Warren refused to say whether Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo was right to have offered hefty tax incentives to Amazon in return for the proposed campus in Queens. Boston’s mayor, Martin J. Walsh, from Ms. Warren’s home state, also offered similar incentives. “That’s not the point,” she said. “Before you even get into the question of do you need to change the statutes, there are structural changes you can make in the economy to prevent Amazon from dancing its way across America saying, ‘What will you offer me if I came?’”