Cory Doctorow
"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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Cory Doctorow
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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Cory Doctorow
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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Cory Doctorow
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:
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Cory Doctorow
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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Cory Doctorow
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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Cory Doctorow
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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Cory Doctorow
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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Cory Doctorow
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-poorUber pioneered this when they started increasing the cost of cab rides for riders whose phone batteries were about to die.
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Cory Doctorow
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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Cory Doctorow
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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Cory Doctorow
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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Cory Doctorow
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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Cory Doctorow
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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Cory Doctorow
> 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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Cory Doctorow
> 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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Cory Doctorow
> 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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Cory Doctorow
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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Cory Doctorow
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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Cory Doctorow
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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Cory Doctorow
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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Cory Doctorow
Replacing Chopra is hard for Trump in part because Trump has imposed a federal hiring freeze. That means that anyone who replaces Chopra has to already be working for the US government, and all the finance grifters are cashing out of the government to go work for giant financial institutions they've been carrying water for while drawing a public salary. Even the people who might take the job can't, because then no one could be hired to do *their* job.
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Cory Doctorow
For example, there's a ghoul at the FDIC who'd fit the bill, but if he takes over from Chopra, then the FDIC will have just two members. If the GOP stooge on the FCC quits to take the job, then the Democratic commissioners will have a majority. You love to see it, really.
But - as Dayen points out - they're almost certainly gonna give Chopra the axe eventually. When they do, the CFPB will continue to do some enforcements.
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Cory Doctorow
It's likely that Ferguson will eventually direct the FTC to do something apart from peering under their beds looking for "woke." When they do take action, they'll probably take action against companies that are wildly, lavishly corrupt. After all, that describes basically all of American big business, a sector that has festered thanks to 40 years of antitrust negligence.
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Cory Doctorow
It will be tempting for Trump's opponents to decide that if Trump hates these giant, evil companies, well, then, they must be good. Think of when "progressives" fell in love with the "intelligence community" just because a couple spooks decided they hated Trump. The FBI isn't your friend, folks - this is the agency that tried to blackmail MLK into killing himself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_letter
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Cory Doctorow
The enemy of your enemy? Still your enemy, provided that they're a big, predatory monopolist. Boss politics is about punishing corruption - selectively. Trump-style antitrust is going to target a ton of bad businesses. That won't make them good.
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Cory Doctorow
*Picks and Shovels* is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You have THREE MORE DAYS to pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton:
eof/
gregg r
@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"
TobyBartels
@pluralistic : Correction to the alt text: that's Theodore Roosevelt, not his distant cousin Franklin, wielding the big stick.
Cory Doctorow
@tofugolem I find it relaxing.
Tofu Golem
@pluralistic
Great article as always, but what's up with that monospace typeface? Just curious.
Angus McIntyre
@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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