For the first time since Texas outlawed nearly all abortions, lawmakers are clarifying the “life of mother” exception. But they don’t plan to address cases where the fetus won’t survive.
1. I can only rate one person on my team “exceptional” no matter how well they do
My company uses a fairly robust framework for discussing performance. This is generally really helpful, as it provides me with clear feedback to share with my team. For example, I can say, “Good performance is handling your workload independently. Exceptional performance is also mentoring newer colleagues while you stay on top of your work.” The problem is that the framework was designed for companies with complex hierarchies with many positions to move through. My company has only 10 levels between the CEO and the lowest person on the chart, so promotions are rare.
Between AAM advice and pure luck, I’ve assembled a really high-performing team. Everyone is super motivated and wants to excel. We’ve now worked together for 5+ years and everyone understands how to surpass the expectations for their roles to the point where a few are even working at my level. But now I’m getting pressure from a new grandboss to force-rank my team and grade them on a curve. On one hand, I get it, the bar can reset to “new normal,” but on the other hand I’m at a loss. If I’m giving Brian feedback, I need to outline a path where he can succeed, but if I get to the end of the year and Abby still stayed slightly ahead of him, I can’t give him the higher rating even if he put in all the work I outlined for him to earn it. My own manager handles it by suddenly getting super critical of things that she’d been saying were excellent, and based on how it makes me feel, I don’t want to manage my team in that way. On my end, I usually try to help my team understand how our systems work, but saying some polite variation of “even though you’re amazing, Abby’s a step ahead of you, so I’m not going to reward you fully because there’s a curve” is clearly a terrible idea.
Personally I think it’s ridiculous that we can’t reward long-tenured employees who are super engaged with the rating they deserve or at least create smaller steps up the ladder to properly reset expectations along the way, but this is a battle I don’t have political standing to fight. So my question is really more how do I speak with my team about their performance in a way that doesn’t demotivate them yet also doesn’t leave me at the end of the year with four employees who did everything I outlined as exceptional behavior and only one rating to award?
The best thing you can do is to be honest about how the system works: let them know you’re being required to force-rank and only have one “exceptional” to give out. Tell them that’s not the way you would have structured it and you’re aware that it creates an opening for people with truly exceptional performance not to be rewarded for it. This won’t be good for morale, obviously — but pretending that it’s not happening (or trying to convince people it’s their fault, as your boss does) would be even worse.
Meanwhile, can you push for them to be compensated appropriately for their high level of work even if they don’t have an “exceptional” rating? Or do raises correlate with the ratings? If the latter, this is even worse — and a recipe not only for demoralizing your team, but for tension in their relationships with each other too, since people are less likely to be supportive of and collaborative with coworkers who they see as being in direct and unfair competition with them for fair pay.
In addition, can you look for other ways to ensure they’re rewarded and be explicit that you’re doing that, even if it’s just getting them more professional development funds or the opportunity to work on a project they’re really interested in?
But also, please try pointing out all of this to your grandboss. I know you said you don’t have the standing to fight this battle, but you don’t need to approach it as a battle; you can simply share the way you expect it to play out on your team, and that it’s likely to disincentivize the high performance you’ve gotten from them under the previous system.
2. My boss asks for weekly constructive criticism, and I don’t have any
My relatively new boss just took a management seminar and came in with a new framework for our weekly check-ins. It’s two pages long and, among other things, asks me to fill out one thing from the week I think I can do better, and one thing I think my boss can do better. I appreciate the sentiment but I feel like I don’t have anything to say to my boss. I’m new in this role too and, while he does bug me sometimes, I feel like I just need to be taking everything in and adapting right now, not sharing any poorly-thought-out feedback with him. He’s also extremely conscientious and type A so I think would be very sensitive — perhaps overly so — to any comments I offered. I want to just say something kind of anodyne, but the prompt is so precise that I can’t think of the right thing to seem like I participated without being specific. (I can answer the question about what I personally can do better okay, although I hope it doesn’t end up being ammunition to use against me later.)
Big picture, I think this structure is unnecessary on a weekly basis — annual maybe — and I’m guessing it will naturally trail off over time … but I don’t want to reject a new idea he’s excited about by saying this isn’t really my kind of thing, especially when our relationship is so new. I’m not much of a talker naturally and tend to be more task-based, while these questions are bigger-picture. Do you have any suggestions about what I can put in the box besides “nothing” every week?
You can write, “Nothing this week” or “Nothing comes to mind this week but I will share if/when something does.” However, you could also use that space just for things you need in your job, like “could I get more training in X?” or “this isn’t something you should do better, but I could use your help brainstorming Y.”
You’re right that this question is too much for weekly, especially for someone who’s new! And I suspect you’re right that its use will trail off over time. But if he does nudge you about it meanwhile, it’s fine to say, “I appreciate you making space for it, but I’m still new and learning and not in a position where I have that kind of feedback yet.”
3. Who pays for lunch?
My former manager recently retired and told me that they’d love to meet up for lunch periodically. We had a great working relationship and I’d love to have a friendship moving forward now that they’re no longer my boss. So far, we’ve had one lunch (they paid). We have another lunch scheduled for next month, which they initiated.
Should I assume that my former manager is typically going to pick up the check, or should I offer to pay every other month, or split the bill? Does it depend on who initiates the lunch? I don’t want to offend them by offering to pay, or by NOT offering to pay! If it matters, my former manager is around 30 years my senior and made around five times my salary (my position is slightly above entry-level).
You should offer to cover the check every few lunches. Chances are good that your former boss will say no, it’s on them (because of the differences in seniority/stage of life)— but you should at least offer and be prepared to follow through. You’re very unlikely to offend them by offering to pay (even if they tell you no), and there’s a higher risk of them noticing you never offer and feeling taken for granted (especially if this is moving more toward friendship than business acquaintances).
4. Could a bonus be considered a disability accommodation?
I currently have an injury that makes it painful to work unless I’m lying flat on my back. WFH and 90% behind the scenes work means this hasn’t been a problem, but once in a while I will grit my teeth to sit in an office chair so I can look professional on a client-facing Zoom call. This isn’t strictly required, but it certainly contributes positively to the client relationship.
I’ve been joking with my manager that the company owes me $100 for every hour I sit up in pain for them. Obviously this would never happen. But I’d like to dream. So is it technically possible to get a spot bonus as an accommodation for doing work that my disability prevents me from doing without significant pain? It could go toward physical therapy or my upcoming surgery bill … I just got off one such call and had to roll around shouting and crying while my body adjusted back to not being in The Bad Position.
Being paid extra money as an accommodation would be a hard sell under the framework of the law. Legally, the point of accommodations is to make changes that allow you to perform the essential functions of your job — so removing an activity that causes you pain, yes, or buying an adaptive tool that allows you to sit up without pain, sure. But “be in pain and we’ll pay you extra for it” isn’t likely to be considered an accommodation in the legal sense.
A reasonable accommodation in this case would be “you don’t have to be on camera on client calls, so you can staying lying down.” That sounds like the thing you should be asking for! (In fact, it sounds like you could just do it, if you’re the one who’s been choosing to be on camera. Please choose that rather than the thing that makes you cry in pain!)
The fourth and final chapter of Solver: Wobbly Head (and the last Solver story until September) starts on Monday. Expect eight weeks of thrills, spills and rolling hills.
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The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to eliminate long-standing requirements for polluters to collect and report their emissions of the heat-trapping gases that cause climate change. The move, ordered by a Trump appointee, would affect thousands of industrial facilities across the country, including oil refineries, power plants and coal mines as well as those that make petrochemicals, cement, glass, iron and steel, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica.
The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Programdocuments the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and other climate-warming gases emitted by individual facilities. The data, which is publicly available, guides policy decisions and constitutes a significant portion of the information the government submits to the international body that tallies global greenhouse gas pollution. Losing the data will make it harder to know how much climate-warming gas an economic sector or factory is emitting and to track those emissions over time. This granularity allows for accountability, experts say; the government can’t curb the country’s emissions without knowing where they are coming from.
“This would reduce the detail and accuracy of U.S. reporting of greenhouse gas emissions, when most countries are trying to improve their reporting,” said Michael Gillenwater, executive director of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. “This would also make it harder for climate policy to happen down the road.”
The program has been collecting emissions data since at least 2010. Roughly 8,000 facilities a year now report their emissions to the program. EPA officials have asked program staff to draft a rule that will drastically reduce data collection. Under the new rule, its reporting requirements would only apply to about 2,300 facilities in certain sectors of the oil and gas industry.
Climate experts expressed shock and dismay about the apparent decision to stop collecting most information on our country’s greenhouse gas emissions. “It would be a bit like unplugging the equipment that monitors the vital signs of a patient that is critically ill,” said Edward Maibach, a professor at George Mason University. “How in the world can we possibly manage this incredible threat to America’s well-being and humanity’s well-being if we’re not actually monitoring what we’re doing to exacerbate the problem?”
The EPA did not address questions from ProPublica about the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. Instead, the agency provided an emailed statement affirming the Trump administration’s commitment to “clean air, land, and water for EVERY American.”
The agency announced last month that it was “reconsidering” the greenhouse gas reporting program. In a little-noticed press release issued on March 12, when the EPA sent out 24 bulletins as it celebrated the “most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin described the reporting program as “burdensome.” Zeldin also claimed that the program “costs American businesses and manufacturing millions of dollars, hurting small businesses and the ability to achieve the American Dream.”
Project 2025, the far-right blueprint for Trump’s presidency, suggested severely scaling back the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program and also described it as imposing burdens on small businesses.
In contrast, climate experts say the EPA reporting program, which tallies between 85% and 90% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., is in many ways a boon to businesses. “A lot of companies rely on the data and use it in their annual sustainability reports,” said Edwin LaMair, an attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund. Companies also use the data to demonstrate environmental progress to shareholders and to meet international reporting requirements. “If the program stops, all that valuable data will stop being generated,” LaMair said.
The loss of that data could have a devastating effect on the world’s ability to rein in the disastrous effects of the warming climate, according to Andrew Light, who served as assistant secretary of energy for international affairs in the Biden administration. Light noted that addressing the dangerous and costly extreme weather events requires international collaboration — and that our failure to collect data could give other countries an excuse to abandon their own reporting.
“We will not get to the kinds of temperature stabilization needed to protect Americans against the worst climate impacts unless we get the cooperation of developing countries,” Light said. “If the United States won’t even measure and report our own emissions, how in the world can we expect China, India, Indonesia and other major growing developing countries to do the same?”
In its first months, the Trump administration has shown waning support for the reporting program. The EPA left the portal through which companies share data closed for several weeks and, in March, pushed back the emissions reporting deadline. Then last Friday, a meeting held with several program staff members raised further questions about the fate of future data collection, according to sources who were briefed on the meeting and asked not to be named for fear of retribution.
At the meeting, political appointee Abigale Tardif, who is principal deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s office of air and radiation, instructed staff to draft a rule that would eliminate reporting requirements for 40 of the 41 sectors that are now required to submit data to the program. Tardif did not respond to inquiries from ProPublica about this story. Political appointee Aaron Szabo, who was present at the meeting and is awaiting confirmation as assistant administrator to the office, declined to answer questions, directing a reporter to EPA communications staff.
Before joining the EPA, Tardif and Szabo worked as lobbyists. Szabo represented the American Chemistry Council and Duke Energy among other companies and trade groups and Tardif worked for Marathon Petroleum and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Association.
Some climate advocates noted that industry stands to benefit from the elimination of greenhouse gas reporting requirements. “The bottom line is this is a giveaway to emitters, just letting them off the hook entirely,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Cleetus derided the choice to stop documenting emissions as ostrich-like. “Not tracking the data doesn’t make the climate crisis any less real,” she said. “This is just putting our heads in the sand.”
For four years, Trump supporters regularly exploited the federal judiciary, carefully selecting friendly judges in single-judge districts to block Biden administration policies through nationwide injunctions. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, with courts regularly ruling against Trump’s executive actions, they’re crying foul — claiming an army of “radical leftist” judges has secretly infiltrated the courts.
The flood of judicial rulings against Trump isn’t coming from some shadowy cabal of leftist judges — it’s coming from Trump’s own unprecedented wave of executive actions while Congress sits idle. Law professor Steve Vladeck, who has been studying jurisdiction shopping extensively, recently analyzed the data and found that “the cause of this unprecedented flurry of judicial activity is neither the judges nor the courts; it’s the policies they’re reviewing.”
During the Biden administration, certain names became very familiar in major policy cases: Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, Judge Reed O’Connor, Judge Terry Doughty. This wasn’t coincidence — it was strategy. MAGA lawyers deliberately filed cases in jurisdictions with single judges known to be sympathetic to their cause, guaranteeing their cases would land before friendly faces.
Now that Trump is back in power, the people who loved the ability to go to a single judge knowing they’d likely rule against Biden and issue a nationwide injunction are suddenly freaking out and accusing those bringing suits of using far leftist radical Marxist judges. There’s just one big problem: it’s not true. At all.
Vladeck and his researchers find that, yes, courts are ruling against Trump frequently, but note that’s because he’s doing a ton of crazy shit, issuing over 100 executive orders while Congress is sitting on its hands. But, more importantly, there’s little evidence of the kind of judge shopping that MAGA was famous for the last four years:
With one fleeting exception, one of the 67 lawsuits we found in which interim relief has been sought against Trump administration policies have been filed in “single-judge divisions” (where a case has a 100% chance of being assigned to a specific judge). This kind of “judge-shopping” is distinct from “forum-shopping,” in which litigants with options pick where to file based on various factors, perhaps including the overall composition of the local bench. At least with regard to finding a way to bring a case so that a specific, hand-picked judge will be assigned to decide it, we haven’t seen any of those in the cases in our dataset.
(And if you’re wondering about that “fleeting” exception, that case was reassigned 24 hours later).
Indeed, they found that the one court in a “blue” state that has a single judge division (in Massachusetts) just quietly changed its rules so these kinds of cases (targeting nationwide injunctions) would be more randomly assigned across all 20 judges in the district. This stands in stark contrast to the response in Texas, where courts famous for judge shopping essentially refused to implement new policies meant to prevent it.
Meanwhile, Dems seem to be bending over backwards to make sure judge selection is random and fair. It’s almost as if one party wants to cheat and the other actually cares about judicial fairness. Crazy.
But… maybe everyone challenging Trump is still getting these supposed crazed Marxist judges. Well, the data again says “fuck no.”
To help make clear how the party of the President who appointed the relevant judge is not driving these rulings, of the 20 cases in our dataset that were assigned to Republican-appointed district judges, nine of those saw grants of a TRO and/or PI. Thus, even looking at the cases before Republican-appointed district court judges alone, plaintiffs have still obtained preliminary relief in 45% of the cases in which they’ve sought it. That’s … high.
One last point on the data: The only subset of appointees whose rulings have been uniform are district judges appointed by President Trump. Of the 67 cases we identified, eight have been assigned to judges Trump appointed between 2017 and 2021. In all eight of those cases, the district court denied interim relief. Whatever that says about Trump appointees, note what it says about judges appointed by previous Republican presidents: Of the 12 cases in our dataset assigned to such judges, nine of them have produced a TRO against the challenged policy, a PI, or both. I understand that there are those to whom you literally can’t be a Republican if you do anything to oppose Trump. But any claim that judges like John Bates, Richard Leon, and Royce Lamberth are liberal squishes betrays the claimant’s utter lack of seriousness.
The pattern here is striking: Trump-appointed judges protect Trump, while other Republican-appointed judges frequently rule against him when his actions violate the Constitution. Yet in MAGA world, this becomes evidence of some vast leftist conspiracy.
It’s a perfect example of the “every accusation is a confession” phenomenon. Having spent years actually gaming the judicial system through careful judge shopping, they assume everyone else must be doing the same thing — even when the evidence shows exactly the opposite.
And now, in a final twist of irony, MAGA forces are suddenly calling to eliminate nationwide injunctions entirely — the very tool they relied on repeatedly during the Biden years. It’s almost as if their only consistent principle is “whatever helps Trump.”
by Stephen Morris, Paul Caruana Galizia, Kana Inagaki, and Chris Cook, Financial Times
Job cuts at the US traffic safety regulator instigated by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency disproportionately hit staff assessing self-driving risks, hampering oversight of technology on which the world’s richest man has staked the future of Tesla.
Of roughly 30 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration workers dismissed in February as part of Musk’s campaign to shrink the federal workforce, many were in the “office of vehicle automation safety,” people familiar with the situation told the Financial Times.
The cuts are part of mass firings by Doge that have affected at least 20,000 federal employees and raised widespread concern over potential conflicts of interest for Musk given many of the targeted agencies regulate or have contracts with his businesses.
KITCHENER, ON – Sources report that Brody Richards, 33, desires to bring small humans into the world while apparently unaware that he will also be required to parent them. “Oh yeah, I can’t wait to have kids,” says Richards. “Tossing a ball around, wrestling for thirty seconds before bed making sure they’re too amped up […]
WASHINGTON—Bragging that he had forced the world leader into “total submission,” President Donald Trump boasted to reporters Thursday that he had strong-armed President Donald Trump into pausing his latest round of tariffs. “I said to him, ‘Donald, these reciprocal tariffs have got to go,’ and that poor son of a bitch was like putty in my hands,” said Trump, who claimed the pause as a major victory for his administration, adding that he knew from the beginning a “weak, spineless loser” like Trump would cave to his demands. “It took a five-minute phone call to the White House and I made him pause those tariffs like a dog. He was beggin’ for mercy, so I said, ‘Okay, I’ll let you keep the tariffs on China, but no others,’ and he said, ‘Thank you, sir,’ with his tail between his legs. He was kissing my ass by the end. People from these shithole countries like America just can’t negotiate like I do, so I make them fall in line.” At press time, Trump added that he would bring America to its knees if Trump ever tried something that stupid again.
Don’t be embarrassed, it’s a common mistake. You look around and think, Yep, this is it. Paramilitary deportations, apocalyptic foreign policy, and private corporations looting the federal government. This has to be the Fourth Reich.
Not so fast, my friend. That’s a protected term. Technically speaking, it’s only the Fourth Reich if it comes from the Reich region of Germany. Everything else is just sparkling fascism.
Fascism can come from anywhere, of course. Spain and Italy have produced their own versions over the years. Some of the stuff coming out of California rivals the classic vintages. However, only one region holds this unique appellation.
This is fascism, obviously. No one is arguing that. It’s simply a matter of designation. You see, every region has what they call terroir, something in the land that imparts a certain je ne sais quoi on a given far-right government. You might not be able to describe it, but you know it when you see it.
The economy is tanking, public services are being stripped for parts, and the government’s only solution is to pump more money into the police and military. This can’t be anything other than the Fourth Reich. Nein! You could label it “Fourth Reich Style” or “Fourth Reich Method,” but don’t confuse this with the real thing.
Believe me, I see where you are coming from. A white South African is tag-teaming with a New York City real estate developer. Those are textbook Fourth Reich ingredients. It’s not a matter of better or worse, I’m just saying that only one type of fascist insurgency can lay claim to that special title.
I know I’m splitting hairs. When higher education is outlawed and your local post office is sold to a used car dealer, most people aren’t worried about naming conventions. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, as they say. But rules are rules, dammit. If everything can be called the Fourth Reich, that devalues the work of longtime German Reich producers.
Think of this as an opportunity. You have a whole new brand of American fascism. Why lean on old protected terms when you can coin a new one? How about “French Fry Fascism” or “Anti-Vax Authoritarianism”? Maybe “Yankee Doodle Death Spiral”? That has a nice ring to it. You could put that on a T-shirt.
Look on the bright side. You don’t need Europe anymore to define what is or isn’t a fascist death cult. You have your own style, your own spin on it. If that doesn’t brighten your day, I don’t know what will. Cheers!
The county's Refugee Health Services Program, which serves about 11,000 annually and provides nearly 35,000 immunizations per year, is facing layoffs and other financial challenges after funding was frozen by the administration of President Donald Trump.
The U.S. Commerce Secretary defended the country’s decision to impose tariffs on Heard and McDonald Islands, an uninhabited archipelago populated only by penguins and seals. What do you think?
“There go our closest allies.”
Nora Summerville, Systems Analyst
“But my mollusk futures!”
Gary Bates, Truck Puller
“It’s about time they start paying their fair share of krill.”
“Anyone who doesn’t talk about how big the crowds are in an erotic way goes in the Iron Maiden!” The Beaverton Weekly Report is back to cover all the top stories, from the tariffs to the election, with a lot of talk about The Fast & Furious in between. Luke and the Panel (Clare Blackwood, […]
Along with the parade, a free event scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday, the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art is holding a series of related festivities from Thursday through Sunday.
HUNTSVILLE, AL—Confirming that the group’s long ordeal was finally over, NASA announced Thursday that it had successfully rescued three children stranded for more than nine months at Space Camp. “At 12:07 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time today, 11-year-olds Lillian and Evan Peltier were safely returned to their home in Chattanooga, TN after an extended 286-day educational experience at Space Camp,” said NASA spokesperson Heather Frugé, adding that the twins’ planned week-long summer camp program had been significantly lengthened after the malfunction of the family Toyota Sienna that was intended to take them home. “By staying focused on their model rocketry experiments and carefully rationing Tang and chicken nuggets from the cafeteria, Lillian and Evan were able to endure the demanding conditions of Space Camp while NASA scientists worked around the clock to bring them back home. The siblings are in good health, though their extended stay at Space Camp has left them both 2 inches taller. We’re proud of the team-building and problem-solving skills they developed during their visit, and we’re grateful to SpaceX for providing the bus that ultimately allowed them to make their return.” When reached for comment, the Peltier children denied having ever felt “stuck” or “abandoned” at Space Camp and instead begged for another turn on the Multi-Axis Trainer.
The most remarkable thing about antitrust (that no one talks about) (permalink)
It's hard to remember now, but for more than three years under Biden, it was possible to read the headlines every morning and feel excited that your government was taking big, decisive action to tame the corporate behemoths that rip you off, maim you on the job, and undermine our democracy.
The antitrust surge under Biden was and is a truly remarkable thing: a sustained, organized, effective government policy that supported the interests of the majority of people against the interests of a tiny cohort of ultra-wealthy wreckers and looters. According to political scientists, that antitrust surge should have been impossible. In 2014, a pair of political scientists from Northwestern and Princeton published their landmark study, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens":
The paper analyzes 1,779 US policy fights from 1981 to 2002, and conclude that the US only does things that regular people want if those are also things that rich people want:
Ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.
When ordinary people want something that rich people don't want, ordinary people lose. Even when 80% of us want something, we only get our way 43% of the time. This is antidemocratic in the most fundamental sense: rich minorities get their way at the expense of working people, nearly all the time.
And then there's antitrust. Ordinary people don't like having their wages stolen. They don't like having their rents jacked up by algorithmic collusion. They don't like having their air and water poisoned. They don't like being mangled or killed on the job. They don't like having to sign noncompetes that bar them from taking a better job if one opens up.
More to the point, working people are not made better off when stuff like this happens. On average, working people own either zero or nearly zero stocks, not even in a 401(k) retirement account, because 40 years of wage stagnation and the near-abolition of employer based defined-benefits pensions has left most Americans with nearly no retirement savings (hence the panic over Trump and Musk's attempt to kill Social Security):
By contrast, the richest 10% own 94% of all the stocks held by Americans. Even if you, personally, don't want to be locked up by a noncompete or have your water poisoned by frackers, if you're in the top 10%, you probably benefit when this happens. After all, businesses cheat and maim because it's profitable, not because they're sadistic (they may be sadistic, or they may be depraved in their indifference to the harms they visit upon the rest of us, but the reason they do it is money):
Antitrust systematically attacks the sky-high monopoly rents extracted by the largest corporations and redistributes them to working people and small businesses, which, for the most part, are not listed on stock exchanges or traded over the counter. In other words, antitrust is a way to clobber the policy priorities favored by the wealthy in order to benefit the rest of us.
That means that the antitrust surge is amazing. It's one of those things that shouldn't exist at all. It defies political science. What's more, antitrust fervor precedes the Biden administration. Some of the Biden administration's most important antitrust cases (like the Google case) started under Trump. Some were even kicked off by far-right state attorneys general, like Texas's cartoonishly corrupt AG Ken Paxton, who led a coalition of nearly every AG in America in suing Facebook.
Antitrust fervor isn't a US phenomenon – it's global. Take Canada: in its entire history, the Competition Bureau (Canada's answer to the FTC) filed only three merger challenges, and won zero of them. But last year, Parliament passed a massive, muscular new bill giving the Competition Bureau unprecedented powers:
In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority led the world in investigating and punishing Big Tech monopolies…and they did so under a succession of shambolic Conservative governments. Indeed, it was a Labour (or "Labour") Prime minister, Keir Starmer, who fired the head of the CMA and replaced him with the former head of Amazon UK:
We've seen big, ambitious antitrust action all over the world: Germany, France, Spain, the EU, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and even China.
It goes without saying that there is no dark money org funneling billionaires' wealth into this project to destroy billionaires. This is a groundswell political phenomenon, it's global, and it's powerful. The fact that Starmer and Trump have gutted their wildly effective antitrust agencies is heartbreaking, but it's not the end. The reason the US and the UK pursued such an ambitious antitrust agenda is the public groundswell. Getting rid of the agencies doesn't kill that groundswell – if anything, it only makes people madder.
It's hard to overstate just how weird the antitrust surge is. We've been fighting for decades for even tiny concessions to the interests of working people – a modest, below-inflation rise in the minimum wage, say, or small-dollar efforts to improve public education, reduce student debt, or control the price of prescription drugs. These efforts have largely failed, and when they've succeeded, the victories were modest, or worse, merely symbolic.
But antitrust is the exception. Antitrust – again, a movement that is squarely aimed at neutralizing the power of the wealthy – is the most successful popular movement of the past decade. Companies worth trillions of dollars are facing breakup as a result of antitrust cases. Everyone from meat-packers to landlords to sea freighters to pharma companies have faced massive, multi-billion-dollar setbacks at the expense of the antitrust movement.
Like I said, the current antitrust surge kicked off under Trump. But of course, that doesn't mean the GOP power-brokers support it – rather, they were cornered into it by their own base. The same is true of the Democrats: Biden didn't appoint the most effective antitrust enforcers the US has seen since the 1970s because he opposed corporate monopolies. Remember, this is the guy who, on the campaign trail, told business audiences that "nothing would fundamentally change" under a Biden administration:
Nor does the Democratic Party power-structure support this stuff. Remember when Harris's billionaire surrogates Marc Cuban and Reid Hoffman demanded that Harris fire the Biden administration's antitrust enforcers?
The success of the antitrust movement happened in spite of the Democratic Party, in spite of the GOP. To the extent that either party embraced an antitrust agenda, it's because the people demanded it, so undeniably that the parties chose the public interest over the interest of the billionaires who call nearly every shot for them.
It's impossible to overstate what an anomaly this is. On today's episode of the excellent Organized Money podcast, hosts Matt Stoller and David Dayen reminisce with Jonathan Kanter, Biden's former DoJ antitrust boss, about a conference they attended together in 2017 where the after-dinner keynote speaker was Richard Posner, a judge who was hugely influential in the dismantling of antitrust in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Dayen, the substance of Posner's keynote was:
Antitrust. That's dead, isn't it? I don't know what you guys are even talking about. This is ridiculous. There is no such thing as antitrust law.
And Kanter, Dayen, Stoller and future FTC chair Lina Khan were all sitting around a table, listening to this in 2017. By 2021, Kanter and Khan were running the DoJ and FTC antitrust agenda, and they did more in the next three years than all their predecessors over the past 40 years, combined.
Khan, Kanter, and their colleagues (like Rohit Chopra at the CFPB) did incredible work during the Biden administration. There is no denying their skill, their competence, their commitment. But the reason they were able to bring all those virtues to bear in service to working Americans is the massive popular surge of rage at corporate dominance. In other words, the Biden administration's prodigious trustbusting accomplishments were the effect of the antitrust movement, not its cause.
The corollary is that just because Trump has dismantled the agencies that were buoyed up by the movement, it doesn't make the movement itself smaller or less powerful. If anything, the Trump regime's relentless pursuit of an agenda in service to the rich at working people's expense will only add fuel to the anti-corporate, anti-billionaire wildfire. Trump's tariff chaos might be bad for some parts of the ruling class, but as Van Jackson writes for Labor Notes, there's plenty of plutocrats who love the prospect of a deep recession sparked by global trade chaos:
[L]avish tax cuts, deregulation, and an environment friendly to union-busting are just as valuable to most CEOs as a growing economy. What they lose in the stock market, they will more than make up in surplus labor, a fire sale on distressed assets, and Trump’s promise to totally eliminate the capital gains tax.
American wealth is more concentrated today than it was in France on the eve of the French Revolution. People are pissed. That anger is out there, waiting to be harnessed by smart political movements:
To grab that anger and mobilize it, we need to show people that their rage over specific issues is actually downstream of excessive corporate power. Furious that one company owns every brand of eggs and has used the excuse of bird flu to make record profits? You're not angry about eggs, you're angry about corporate power:
Worried that the EPA has been put in an induced coma and that means your kids will grow up with asthma and lead poisoning? You're actually angry about corporate power:
The Department of Education is in the hands of a woman who took over her rapey husband's professional wrestling monopoly, a corporation that misclassified performers as contractors, leaving them without health care so they have to beg for pennies on Gofundme so they can die with dignity of their workplace-related injuries:
Trump's Secretary of Education is monumentally unqualified for her position. Not only is she is planning to fire teachers en masse and replace them with AI, she doesn't know what AI is and just gave a speech where she repeatedly referred to it as "A-1":
Angry about this? Worried that your kids' teachers are about to be replaced with steak-sauce thanks to the incompetence of this fucking muttonhead? Me too. But you're not just angry at Trump or Linda McMahon – you're angry at corporate power.
In his book The Public Domain, the copyright scholar James Boyle talks about the political salience of the term "ecology." Boyle recounts how, prior to the rise of the word "ecology," there were many standalone issues, but no movement. Sure, you care about owls, and I care about the ozone layer, but what does the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere have to do with the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians?
The term "ecology" welded all these thousands of issues together into a movement. When I look at the incredible, organic, bottom-up surge of antitrust energy, the only explanation I can find is that something similar is happening here. Concentrated corporate power is the common enemy of beer drinkers, surgeons, shippers, patients, farmers, grocery shoppers, social media users, any anyone who wears sneakers:
Something remarkable is happening, right under our noses. Nothing like this has happened in my lifetime. The world is terrifying, but this? This is exciting.
Smart political organizers have a once-in-a-century opportunity here. Trump's wildly unpopular destruction of the antitrust enforcement system opens up all kinds of opportunities for state enforcers (remember, states can also enforce antitrust law):
A massive political change that bubbles up from the bottom, aimed directly at the richest, most powerful people in the history of the human race, is an amazing thing. As bad as things are – and boy are they bad – this remains true, and important.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
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“President Trump on Wednesday abruptly reversed course on steep global tariffs that have roiled markets, upset members of his own party and raised fears of a recession. Just hours after he put punishing levies into place on nearly 60 countries, the president said he would pause them for 90 days.” — New York Times, 4/9/25
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Folks, I’m thrilled to announce that the gamble paid off. Nobody believed we could do it, but here we are. The plan worked—stocks are skyrocketing back to less than they were before.
You’ve probably seen the numbers by now, and they’re incredible numbers. An absolutely fantastic set of numbers. In fact, these numbers are nearly halfway to the numbers we had before we tried any of this.
Now, a lot of people are saying we did a whole lot of damage for nothing. But you know what? That couldn’t be further from the truth. On the contrary, we’re pretty confident that this is the smartest thing anyone’s ever done. We undid so much damage that, as of today, we’re only mostly damaged.
Think about it:
Tariffs? Not a problem anymore—we just lowered them back to way higher than they’ve ever been.
Retirement funds? Doing great—they’ve made huge gains, all the way up to so much worse than anyone was expecting.
International relations? Totally copasetic—other countries are really warming up to us. They only hate us twice as much as they did a month ago.
Still not on board with this whole strategy? Still don’t see why it’s been a huge success? Maybe a metaphor would help.
It’s like if you were on a cruise ship during a storm, and suddenly the captain said, “I’ve got a plan. Everybody tie rocks to your feet and jump in the ocean, right now!” So you did, and you started sinking—fast. And then the captain said, somehow audible underwater, “Okay, untie those rocks!” And so you got rid of the rocks and shot back to the surface. And now you’re treading water during a hurricane. Isn’t that wonderful? Don’t you feel excited? That’s the power of negotiation.
Look, we’re not going to pretend like all our dreams have just come true. But we did just make an absolutely enormous amount of money by pushing stock prices down, buying, and then bringing the prices back—wait, sorry, um, forget that part.
We’re proud to announce that we stayed the course, and our plan to help the American people paid off. The economy is finally back to being worse than it was before any of this. And if everyone continues to do exactly as I say, we’ll never have to worry about anything getting better ever again.
According to the CDC, more than one quarter of U.S. adults suffer from seasonal allergies. The Onion shares tips for managing allergic rhinitis symptoms.
Try a nasal-removal spray.
Politely ask the flowers in your neighborhood to stop blooming.
Ask ADT about their anti-ragweed security systems.
Teach the trees in your area that sexual reproduction is shameful.
Cross the street if you encounter a gang of street pollen.
Get your hazmat suit in a seasonal, pastel color so you don’t look weird.
Sudafed can easily be synthesized from any spare meth you have lying around.
Consider alternatives to breathing.
Try to convince your sensitive immune system not to take pollen so personally.
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