#trust busting

August 2-9 2024

The Department of Interior announced the largest investment since 1979 in outdoor recreation and conservation projects. The $325 million will go to support State, territorial, DC, and tribal governments in buying new land for parks and outdoor recreation sites. It also supports expansion and refurbishment of existing sites.

The EPA announced that Birmingham Alabama will get $171 million to update and replace its water system. The city of Birmingham is 70% black and like many black majority cities as struggled with aging water systems and lead pipes causing dangerous drinking water conditions. This investment is part of the Biden-Harris administrations plan to replace all of the nation's lead pipes.

The Department of Energy announced $2.2 billion in investments in the national power grid to help boost resiliency in the face of extreme weather. The projects will add 13 gigawatts of capacity, support 5,000 new jobs and upgrade 1,000 miles of transmission. Major projects will cut power outages in the west, drive down energy prices in New England, add off shore wind, and enable the development of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s wind resources.

The Justice Department won its massive anti-trust case against Google. A federal judge ruled that Google was an illegal monopoly. The DOJ has an ongoing antitrust suit against Apple, while the Federal Trade Commission is suing Facebook and Amazon for their monopolist practices

The US Government announced $3.9 billion in direct aid to Ukraine. The money will help the Government of Ukraine make up for massive budget short falls caused by the war with Russia. It'll help pay the salaries of teachers, emergency workers, and other public employees, as well helping displaced persons, low-income families and people with disabilities.

The Department of Energy announced $190 million to improve air quality and energy upgrades in K-12 schools. The grants to 320 schools across 25 states will impact 123,000 students, 94% of these schools service student bodies where over half the students qualify for free and reduced lunch. In the face of climate change more schools have been forced to close for extreme heat. These grants will help schools with everything from air filtration, to AC, to more robust energy systems, to replacing lighting.

USAID announced $424 million in additional humanitarian aid to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Due to ongoing conflict and food insecurity, 25 million Congolese are in need of humanitarian aid. This year alone the US has sent close to a billion dollars in aid to the DRC, making it the single largest donor to the crisis.

Sigismund de Ivanowski’s 1910 portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, on display at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, operates less as a conventional likeness and more as a symbolic drama that perfectly captures the ethos of the Progressive Era. Roosevelt is depicted descending the stone steps in formal attire, evoking a mythic figure entering the underworld to confront a formidable beast. The serpentine creatures entwined with industrial machinery—pipes, gears, smokestacks—represent the tangled forces of rampant greed, monopolistic power, and moral decay that Roosevelt famously battled during his presidency and beyond. The soft illumination on Roosevelt contrasts sharply with the shadowy chaos behind him, casting him as a beacon of reform, resolve, and righteous confrontation.

They worship an imaginary version of their dead founder, treating him as though he were some perfect Renaissance man, God’s gift to the entertainment industry, when he was a cutthroat, conniving, bigoted capitalist from the start.  I can’t get behind the company culture, I can’t pretend like it’s some benign entity that just wants to make people happy; it’s a soulless money vacuum that seeks to limit creativity by monopolizing the industry and funneling everything through itself.  Gotta make sure everything is in line with The Brand™, don’t want to do anything that’s Off Brand™, wouldn’t want The Brand™ to appear sub-optimal to the investors.

The Walt Disney Company is single-handedly responsible for destroying the concept of the public domain; Congress will just keep extending copyright law to keep the Mouse happy, and nothing will ever become public domain again.  “The Mouse” doesn’t even exist, it’s just a drawing; the corporate entity itself is made up of a bunch of conservative billionaires in suits with names and faces, but we act like it’s some omnipotent, omniscient, omnivorous being that’s beyond control or comprehension.  Like it’s just some force of nature, an unchanging part of the universe, a vital cog in the machinery of reality that has always been there and always must be there.  It’s gotten to the point where if you critique the company structure, people will jump to its defense and call you out as a hipster who only hates it because it’s popular. “Hating Disney is not a personality trait, Scrooge.  Lighten up.  I’m gonna go give them free advertising on my YouTube channel!”

The Broncho Buster at Work

October 16th, 1901

President Roosevelt rides the wild Trusts octopus, trying to tame it.

Contemporary news accounts relate that Roosevelt had appointed a commission to settle a dispute between coal union workers and the coal trust.

See Also: Theodore Roosevelt; Trusts and Antitrust

From Hennepin County Library

In just 10 years, the world’s five largest companies by market capitalization have all changed, save for one: Microsoft. Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Citigroup and Shell Oil are out and Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon and Facebook have taken their place. 

They’re all tech companies, and each dominates its corner of the industry: Google has an 88 percent market share in search advertising, Facebook (and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) owns 77 percent of mobile social traffic and Amazon has a 74 percent share in the e-book market. in classic economic terms, all three are monopolies.

We have been transported back to the early 20th century, when arguments about the “curse of bigness” were advanced by President Woodrow Wilson’s counselor, Louis Brandeis, before Wilson appointed him to the Supreme Court. Brandeis wanted to eliminate monopolies, because (in the words of his biographer Melvin Urofsky) “in a democratic society the existence of large centers of private power is dangerous to the continuing vitality of a free people.” We need to look no further than the conduct of the largest banks in the 2008 financial crisis or the role Facebook and Google play in the “fake news” business to know that Brandeis was right.

While Brandeis generally opposed regulation - which he worried inevitably led to the corruption of the regulator - and instead advocated breaking up “bigness,” he made an exception for “natural” monopolies, like telephone water, and power companies and railroads, where it made sense to have one or a few companies in control of an industry.

Could it be that these companies - and Google in particular - have become natural monopolies by supplying an entire market’s demand for a service, at a price lower than that what would be offered by two competing firms? And if so, is it time to regulate them like public utilities?

Consider a historical analogy: the early days of telecommunications.

In 1895 a photograph of the business district of a large city might have shown 20 phone wires attached to most buildings. Each wire was owned by a different company, and none of them worked with the others. Without network effects, the networks themselves were almost useless.

The solution was for a single company American Telephone and Telegraph, to consolidate the industry by buying up all the small operators and creating a single network - a natural monopoly. the government permitted it, but then regulated this monopoly through the Federal Communications Commission.

AT&T (also known as the bell System) had its rates regulated and was required to spend a fixed percentage of its profits on research and development. In 1925 AT&T set up Bell Labs as a separate subsidiary with the mandate to develop the next generation of communications technology, but also to do basic research in physics and other sciences. Over the next 50 years, the basics of the digital age - the transistor, the microchip, the solar cell, the microwave, the laser, cellular telephony - al came out of Bell Labs along with eight Nobel Prizes.

In a 1956 consent degree in which the Justice Department allowed AT&T to maintain its phone monopoly, the government extracted a huge concession: all future patents were licensed (to any American company) royalty-free, and all future patents were to be licensed for a small fee. These licenses led to the creation of Texas Instruments, Motorola, Fairchild Semiconductor and many other start-ups.

True, the internet never had the same problems of interoperability. And Google’s route to dominance is different from the Bell System’s. Nevertheless, it still has all of the characteristics of a public utility.

Like they’d make a trilogy, and that was it.  No spin offs, no multimedia campaigns, nothing extra you needed to watch for the main thing to make sense.  A series had a definitive beginning, middle, and end instead of just being an ongoing sprawling mess with no clear goal in mind.