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How the kleptocrats and oligarchs hunt civil society groups to the ends of the Earth
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It's a great time to be an oligarch! If you have accumulated a great fortune and wish to put whatever great crime lies behind it behind you, there is an army of fixers, lickspittles, thugs, reputation-launderers, procurers, henchmen, and other enablers who have turnkey solutions for laundering your reputation and keeping the unwashed from building a guillotine outside the gates of your compound.
The field of International Relations has studied the enemies of the Klept in detail: the Transnational Activist Network is a well-documented phenomenon. But far more poorly understood is the Transnational Uncivil Society Network, who will polish any turd of sufficient wealth to a high, professional gloss.
These TUSNs are the subject of a new, timely scholarly paper by Alexander Cooley, John Heathershaw and Ricard Soares de Oliveira: "Transnational Uncivil Society Networks: kleptocracy’s global fightback against liberal activism," published in last month's European Journal of International Relations:
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5e5a3052-c693-4991-a7cc-bc2b47134467/download_file?file_format=application%2Fpdf&safe_filename=Cooley_et_al_2023_transnational_uncivil_society.pdf&type_of_work=Journal+article
The authors document how a collection of institutions – some coercive, others organized around good works – allow kleptocrats to take power, keep power, and use power. This includes "wealth managers, company providers, accounting firms, and international bankers" who create the complex financial structures that obscure the klept's wealth. It also includes "second citizenship managers and lawyers" that facilitate the klept's transnational nature, both to provide access to un-looted, prosperous places to visit, and boltholes to escape to in the face of coup or reform. It includes the real-estate brokers and other asset facilitators, who turn whole precincts of the world's greatest cities into empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, while ensuring that footlose criminal elites always have a penthouse to perch in when they take a break from the desiccated husks they've drained dry back home.
Of course, it also includes the PR managers and philanthropic ventures that allow the klept to launder their reputation, to make themselves synonymous with good deeds rather than mass murder. Think here of how the Sacklers used charity to turn their family name into a synonym for culture and fine art, rather than death by opioid overdose:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed
Beyond providing comfort to "Politically Exposed Persons" and "High Net-Worth Individuals," TUSNs are concerned with neutralizing TANs. Activists in these transnational networks play an inside-outside game: in-country activists will recruit peers abroad to bring attention to the crimes of their local kleptocrats. These overseas partners target the klept in the places they go to play and spend, spoiling their fun – and if they succeed in getting corrupt leaders censured abroad, then in-country activists can leverage that bad press to fight the klept at home.
To fight this "Boomerang Effect," TUSNs seek to burnish corrupt officials' reputations abroad, getting their names on humanitarian prizes, beloved sports teams, cultural institutions and great universities. They seek to capture international governance institutions that might wrong-foot kleptocrats, co-opting them to enable and even celebrate looters.
When it comes to elite philanthropy, TUSNs are necessarily selective. Kleptocrats' foundations don't fund anti-kleptocratic groups – they stick to "education, public health, the environment and the arts." These domains steer clear of human rights questions that might implicate their benefactors. Russian oligarchs love children's charities and disability rights – provided they don't target the Russian state.
If charitable giving is reputation laundering's carrot, then "reputation management" is the laundry's stick. Think of organized copyfraudsters who clone websites that have criticized their clients, then backdate the articles, then accuse the originals of infringing copyright in order to get them de-listed from Google or taken offline altogether:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops
Reputation managers also spend a lot of time in court. In the UK – the world's leader in libel tourism, thanks to a legal system designed to let posh monsters sue muckraking journalists into silence – Russian oligarchs have perfected the art of forcing their critics to shut up and go away:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/04/londongrad/#enablers
Indeed, London is a one-stop shop for the global klept, a place were forelock-tugging Renfields will buy you a Mayfair mansion under cover of a numbered company, sue your critics into silence, funnel your money into an anonymous Channel Islands account:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/07/the-klept/#pep
They'll sell you whole galleriesworth of "fine art" that you can have relocated to a climate-controlled container in a Swiss or Irish freeport:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#moneylab
They'll give your thick-as-pigshit progeny a PhD and never check to see whether he wrote his thesis himself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSE%E2%80%93Gaddafi_affair
Then they'll hook you up with a cyber-arms dealer to hunt your enemies by capturing their devices:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas
But don't let Brexit stop you from shopping for bargains on the continent. The Golden Passports of the EU – available in a variety of flavors, from Maltese to Cypriot to Portuguese – offer the discerning failson access to the luxury good shops and fleshpots of 27 advanced economies, making it a favorite of the Khmer Riche – the junior klept of Cambodia's ruling faction:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/cambodia-hunsen-wealth/
But golden passports are for amateurs. Skilled klepts travel on diplomatic passports, which offer the twin benefits of free movement and consequence-free criminality, thanks to diplomatic immunity. The former Kazakh dictator's son-in-law enjoyed a freewheeling diplomatic life in Vienna; one daughters of the dictator of Tajikistan had a jolly time as an envoy to DC; another, to London (where else?).
All this globetrotting serves a second purpose: when rival elites seize power back home and force the old guard into exile, those ex-monsters can show up in the lands they called their second homes and apply for asylum. It turns out that even bomb-the-boats UK will welcome any asylum seeker who enters via the private jet terminal at City Airport (to be fair, these "refugees" have extensive properties in Zone 1 and country places in the Home Counties, so they won't need housing).
This stuff works. After Kazakh state goons murdered at least 14 protesters at a Zhanaozen oil facility in 2011, human rights groups around the world took up the cause. But they were effectively neutralized by TUSNs, with former UK PM Tony Blair writing on behalf of the Kazakh government to the EU condemning any kind of international investigation into the mass killings (add "former Prime Ministers" to the list of commodities for sale in the UK to sufficiently well-resourced murderer).
The authors close their paper with two case-studies. The first is of the daughters of Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, Gulnara and Lola. And President Karimov was indeed a dictator: he trapped his population within his borders, forced them to use unconvertible scrip in place of money, and ordered the murder of hundreds of peaceful protesters, plunging the country into international isolation.
But while Uzbeks were sealed within their borders, Gulnara Karimov became an international player, running a complex network of businesses that mixed the products of the nation's oilfields with her family's fortune. She solicited – and received – bribes from Teliasonera, MTS and Vimpelcom, who were all vying for the contract to provide service in Uzbekistan. All told, she extracted more than $1b in bribes, laundering them through Latvia, Hong Kong and New York. She acquired real-estate in France and Switzerland, and her spree continued until her father collaborated with Uzbek security to seize her assets and place her under house-arrest.
Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva was Gulnara's estranged younger sister. She and her husband Timur Tillyaev ran the Dubai-based SecureTrade, which did extensive business with "opaque Scottish Limited Partnerships," laundering more than $127m in a single year to offshore accounts in the UAE and Switzerland. They acquired many luxe assets – a jet, a Californian villa, and an LA perfumier.
Lola styled herself as the face of the Karimovas abroad, a "philanthropist and cultural ambassador." She was a UNESCO ambassador and commissioned works of monumental art – and also sued the shit out of news outlets that reported factual matters about her family repressive activity at home. She organized AIDS charities in the name of Uzbekistan – even as her father was imprisoning a writer for publishing a book explaining how to have safer sex.
The second case-study is on Isabel dos Santos, "Africa's richest woman," daughter of Angolan dictator Jose Eduardo dos Santos. Isabel's vast fortune stemmed from her personal capture of vast swathes of the third-largest economy in Africa: "telecommunications, banking, diamonds, real estate and cement, among many others." Isabel enjoyed seemingly limitless access to state credit and co-investment, and was given first crack at newly deregulated industries. Foreign firms that invested in Angola were required to "partner" with Isabel's businesses.
Isabel claimed to be a "self-made woman" – a claim credulously parroted by the western press, including the FT. She used her homegrown fortune to become a major player abroad, especially in Portugal, where she was represented by the leading Portuguese law-firm PLMJ. Her enablers are who's who of corruption-loving lickspittles: McKinsey, Ernst and Young, Boston Consulting Group, and the Spanish BigLaw firm Uri Menendez.
Isabel cultivated a public facade of philanthropic giving and public spirited activism, serving as head of the Angolan Red Cross. She attended Davos and spoke at the LSE (she was also invited to Oxford, but her invitation was subsequently rescinded). On social media, she dismissed critics of her wealth and corruption as "colonialists," decrying their "racism" and "prejudice."
Isabel dos Santos's corrupt sources of wealth were finally, irrefutably exposed through the Luanda Leaks, in which the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists mapped the network of "top banks, management consultants and legal firms that were central to dos Santos’s operations."
Both case studies shed light on the network of brilliant, driven enablers and procurers without whom the world's greatest monsters would falter. It's a rare window on a secretive world, one that is poorly understood even by its inhabitants. As Michael Mechanic wrote in Jackpot, his 2021 book on vast, intergenerational fortunes, the winners of the lucky orifice lottery often lack any real understanding of how The Money is structured, grown and protected:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#affluenza
This point was reiterated by Abigail Disney, in a brave piece on what it's like to grow up subject to the oversight of these millionaires who babysit the children of billionaires:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste
This is an important contribution to the literature. We naturally focus on the ultrawealthy individuals whose reputations and fortunes are the subject of so much attention, but without the TUSNs, they would be largely helpless.
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Going to Burning Man? Catch me on Tuesday at 2:40pm on the Center Camp Stage for a talk about enshittification and how to reverse it; on Wednesday at noon, I'm hosting Dr Patrick Ball at Liminal Labs (6:15/F) for a talk on using statistics to prove high-level culpability in the recruitment of child soldiers.
On September 6 at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.
On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/24/launderers-enforcers-bagmen/#procurers
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Image: Sam Valadi (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/132084522@N05/17086570218/
CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
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CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
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alltheghosties · 1 year
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Covers for my fic series, Learning to Live With Ourselves, which is a rewrite of the ending of the Dream SMP parallel to canon that explores C!Tubbo through the lens of Dissociative Identity Disorder! Each alter is based either upon an abandoned plotline or upon a persona C!Tubbo has!
Links beneath the cut to read!
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illmamnim · 2 years
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If I had a nickel for every time my favorite character in an smp was a judge and it was really stupid I'd have 2 nickels, Which isn't a lot but it sounds about right for me
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eretzyisrael · 1 year
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It was not a one-off. White & Case has also reportedly admitted — after initially denying — that it had sponsored a University of Chicago event earlier this month in which Shakir was invited to speak on Israel’s alleged “crime of apartheid.”
Historically, White & Case faced criticism for defending foreign governments and the German railway against lawsuits filed by Holocaust survivors. Allegations have also recently resurfaced that this firm once relegated its few Jewish lawyers to back-office research work, and forbade them from interacting with clients.
White & Case is the same law firm that the Morningstar financial services firm retained to review alleged anti-Israel bias within its research arm, Sustainalytics. To its credit, the firm found bias, leading Morningstar to drop one of its products and to speak with various groups, including the Brandeis Center, about cleaning up its shop.
Nevertheless, they provided Morningstar with ammunition to fend off pressure from attorneys general in over a dozen and a half states. Now, White & Case will face significant questions about whether it has any credibility as an independent reviewer of anti-Israel bias, when it has been exposed as a source of this very problem.
And the problem extends beyond this one firm.
StandWithUs has exposed several BigLaw firms for bankrolling Berkeley Law’s anti-Zionist bylaws. Four of the student groups that adopted antisemitic bylaws have publicly acknowledged their financial backers. The list includes some of the country’s leading law firms: Morrison & Foerster, where I formerly practiced, as well as Latham & Watkins, Covington & Burling, Debevoise & Plimpton, Skadden Arps, Wachtell Lipton, and Weil Gotshal.
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tmmyrp · 2 years
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IF YOU WISH TO LIVE bribe me AND PERHAPS I WILL AMEND YOUR QUALIFICTIONS INTO
the BIG FILES
@officialbiglaw
I HAVE SO MANY WOMEN AND SO MANY PRIMES ILL GIVE YOU SO MANY OF THEM BIG LAW PLEASE IM AN UPCOMING THERAPY WRITER AND HAVE SOLVED SO MANY MARRIAGE PROBLEMS WITH MY GENIUS I CAN HELP SOLVE YOURS IF YOU EVER HAEV THEM. AREYOU MARRIED?
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watchmebitch · 2 years
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I think that earnestly, unironically, my biggest problem with being a first year in biglaw is that the stupid old saying that “first years don’t know enough to add value; your only value is your availability” literally doesn’t apply to me in practice. 
I do, in fact, add substantive intellectual value to 85% of the matters I get added onto. the remaining 15% are like, when i’m relegated exclusively to straightforward braindead document review where it is impossible to do more than you’ve told.
there are arguments in multiple reply briefs we’re filing this week that i discovered wholesale, by myself, and without being asked to find them. 
i have been asked to review and validate the substantive work product of multiple mid-level attorneys on one of my civ lit cases before it goes to the partner because they acknowledge that i know more than them about the relevant law and facts at this point. a third year recently asked me to meet about deposition strategy, which i thought was going to be for my benefit. she proceeded to ask questions and take notes on what I had to tell her about our strategy for a particular deponent.
every single day, 2-3 other juniors come to me with questions about what they’ve been asked to do and what our goals are as if I am in charge of them, which i am not.
in december i had to explain to a partner that a plaintiff does not have to offer “evidence” to satisfy the fucking 12(b)(6) pleading standard. he wouldn’t budge on being “optimistic about the standard of review” and we lost on a motion to dismiss, obviously.
that same exact partner told me when i wanted to miss (1) internal meeting on a vacation i planned 6 months prior that “we pay you extraordinary sums not because you are smart, but because you are available.” 
yeah no shit man. i can see that.
and it’s a pretty stupid way to spend your money.
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expatesque · 2 years
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Interesting that big law has awful hours but also less difficult work! I find that hard to picture: do you have any particular experiences or memories that you can share? Thank you :)
The work is repetitive and not intellectually difficult - it can still be very difficult in practice because there's so much of it and there's a constant flow to keep on top of (you receive literally hundreds of emails a day) but the actual content of the work itself isn't very difficult. Like, managing a DD checklist is just keeping track of a lot of different strands and checking in with people. Making most docs is just inserting the company name and details into the house template. Putting together a bundle for court is just being obsessive about details, but there's nothing intellectually difficult about getting documents into the correct order with the correct tabulation and the correct cover page. Even negotiations with the other side, turning docs, it's just seeing what they've changed and working through the implications of that for your client.
In my first seat, I sat with a principal who was widely considered one of the smartest people in the firm who handled the most difficult work. And we sat down and talked through what he did (essentially securitizations) and it just... isn't that hard? There's a fair amount to keep track of and you have to have a decent grasp of how cap markets work but again, the legal side of it is just not that difficult. Law is not like TV shows - in reality, it's very rare that there's an intellectual leap required, you're just a document monkey, churning out doc after doc based on precedent.
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talesformthestaffside · 2 months
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Toxic Leadership Exposed
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In viewing this video, and thinking of my life in Big Law as a non-lawyer, I've found that what Simon says to be completely accurate. As it applies to law firm life, here are my key take aways:
Rewarding High Performers Regardless of Trust (A.K.A Why Being Toxic Can $Pay$ Off Here)
In Big Law the primary metric for success and reward is often performance, particularly revenue generation or "rainmaking." This system inherently values results over methods or interpersonal dynamics. The consequence of such a system is twofold:
High Performers with Low Trust: Individuals who excel in their roles but may engage in behaviors detrimental to team cohesion and trust (e.g., hoarding information, undermining colleagues, where abuse is seen as directness) are still rewarded. This not only perpetuates but potentially encourages, a culture where unethical or toxic behaviors are overlooked if the financial outcomes are favorable.
Exit of High Trust Individuals: High performers who also embody high trust and ethical standards (unicorns) may find themselves at odds with the Firm's culture. This can lead to their voluntary exit from the firm, as the environment becomes incompatible with their values. This attrition of high-trust individuals (please, don't go) further skews the culture towards valuing performance over ethical considerations.
Mirroring Reward Structures in Non-Lawyer Staff (A.K.A As Above, So Below: The Echo Chamber)
The extension of this reward structure to the non-lawyer professional staff within the firm creates a parallel dynamic where:
Toxic Team Dynamics: Staff members exhibiting high-performance yet low-trust behaviors often rise through the ranks, culminating in a surge of toxic leadership and declining team cohesion. As these individuals ascend to senior positions, they tend to favor hiring or promoting only those who mirror their traits or can endure their management style, essentially echoing their toxicity throughout the organization. In this environment, those ready to adapt their values or alter their personas (because, let's face it, we've all got bills to pay—no judgment here) learn to navigate the waters to stay afloat. Meanwhile, those who stand firm in their principles or have the flexibility to leave are likely to make their exit, perhaps complaining a bit on Glassdoor – in hopes that someone might read it and avoid this misery altogether (good deed done for the day).
Lack of Ownership Prospects: Unlike partners and potential partners (associates), staff members do not have the prospect of ownership to justify enduring or contributing to a toxic culture for long-term gains. This disconnect further exacerbates the revolving door syndrome, particularly among staff who are either high performers with medium-high trust or medium performers with medium-high trust.
Cultural Implications (A.K.A. The Truth Not Found on a Vault Ranking)
I've come to understand that a firm's true culture and values are determined by the behaviors owners choose to reward or penalize.
Culture Defined by Top Performers: The values, integrity, and behaviors of the highest performers (regardless of their ethical standards) become the de facto culture of the firm. This can lead to a culture that prioritizes success at any cost, potentially at the expense of ethical considerations, employee well-being, and long-term sustainability.
Short-term Gains vs. Long-term Health: According to Sinek, rewarding top performers without considering trust may boost immediate profits, but it's generally a recipe for long-term troubles—except, I argue, in Big Law. Here, the culture seems almost designed to thrive on or at least tolerate toxicity, shrugging off the usual consequences like high turnover, recruitment challenges, and even reputational hits. That one rainmaker? Always worth their weight in gold—until they're not. But not to worry, there's always another ready to step into their shoes.
If this scenario sounds dreadful? Congrats, you're bound for better places—I'm genuinely envious of where you'll land. Find it appealing? Chances are, we've already crossed paths.
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lamajaoscura · 4 months
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biglawwoes · 7 months
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If you are a future law student, do know that
affinity groups are cliques.
you will figure out how to do law school in a way that best suits you.
big law is easy to snag from a T14. Not just more acceptable, but straight up EASY to snag. Source: 2Ls at a certain blue law school that got TOP big law in certain regions despite having HORRIBLE personalities lol and most likely bottom of the barrel grades.
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Obama's turncoat antitrust enforcer is angry about the Google breakup
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The DoJ’s antitrust lawsuit against Google triggered an avalanche of pearl-clutching editorials from establishment lawyers and economists who argue that such a move is both counterproductive and legally incoherent. These Very Bad Takes are only to be expected, since they emanate from ideologues who volunteered to serve as Renfields for vampiric monopolists.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/13/the-last-man-to-die-for-a-mistake/#dont-let-the-door-hit-you-in-the-ass-on-the-way-out
The DoJ’s antitrust lawsuit against Google triggered an avalanche of pearl-clutching editorials from establishment lawyers and economists who argue that such a move is both counterproductive and legally incoherent. These Very Bad Takes are only to be expected, since they emanate from ideologues who volunteered to serve as Renfields for vampiric monopolists.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/13/the-last-man-to-die-for-a-mistake/#dont-let-the-door-hit-you-in-the-ass-on-the-way-out
A prime example is the Washington Post’s unsigned editorial, which starts with the conclusion that monopolies are both legal and generally beneficial, then works backwards to invent facts to support that conclusion:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/11/justice-department-google-antitrust-lawsuit-promise/
As Jason Kint writes, the editorial simply handwaves away the factual record cited in the 153-page lawsuit, with howlers like “no one is forcing advertisers and publishers to use Google’s advertising services” — this is, in fact, exactly what the DoJ alleges:
https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1624866873882861570
They back that allegation up with some pretty damning eviddence of deceptive and illegal tactics that Google used to block competitors and punish publishers who tried to use their service. Kint’s got a great breakdown of the case:
https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1618029720599408643
It’s wild to see the Post go all in on the idea that monopolizing the ad market is legally sound and economically beneficial, given how much of the DoJ suit turns on the fact that Google (and Facebook) have been stealing ad revenues from publishers like the Post.
Why does the establishment fall all over itself to invent reasons that the DoJ’s case is both wrongheaded and doomed? They may not be particularly invested in defending Google itself. Rather, they represent the last gasp of a 40-year-long conspiratorial legal ideology that embraced the Reagan-era idea of “consumer welfare”:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down
This ideology begins with Robert Bork, Nixon’s crooked solicitor general, whose crimes scuttled his Supreme Court nomination (his failed confirmation hearing was so cringe-inducing that it spawned the term “borked”). Bork codified this ideology in a 1978 book called “The Antitrust Paradox,” which argued that monopolies are engines of efficiency.
You can tell they’re efficient because they are able to take over their markets. Attacking monopolies is counterproductive — why should we punish companies for success? This is the heart of the “consumer welfare” theory, but it’s underpinned by a much weirder and risible idea: not only is this how the law should be written, it’s how the law is written.
That is, Bork claimed that a close reading of existing antitrust laws — the Sherman Act, the Clayton Act, the FTC Act — would reveal that Congress didn’t want regulators or judges to prevent or break up monopolies. No no no! These laws were only drafted to punish bad monopolies.
A “bad monopoly” is one that uses its market power to raise prices or lower quality. These bad monopolies hurt “consumers” — but (Bork says) they probably don’t exist, because if they did, new companies would spring into existence to compete them out of existence. For Bork, America’s landmark antitrust laws exist to fight a mythical bogeyman, the “bad” monopoly, which probably doesn’t exist, and if it does, it only lives long enough for entrepreneurs to take notice of it and hunt it to extinction.
This is just bonkers. It’s what physicists mean when they say something is “not even wrong.” As a technical matter, it’s plain that monopolists can capture their markets and use that market capture to prevent new companies from taking the field and disciplining them with competition — that’s painstakingly obvious from the factual record developed in the DoJ brief against Google.
But even more bonkers is the conspiracy theory at the heart of consumer welfare economics: the idea that not only should antitrust laws tolerate monopolies, but they actually are tolerant of monopolies, and everyone who enforced these laws from their inception until the Reagan era was reading them wrong.
That is an unsupportable, laughable idea. I mean, think about Senator Robert Sherman’s senate-floor speech in support of America’s first antitrust law, Sherman Act: “If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.”
https://marker.medium.com/we-should-not-endure-a-king-dfef34628153
Those are not the words of a man designing a law to shield monopolists from government overreach except in those rare instances where a monopolist turns out not to be a benevolent dictator. Rather, Sherman — and, later, Henry “Clayton Act” Clayton — didn’t want any monopolies. These laws were unambiguously animated by lawmakers’ fear that if corporations grew too powerful, they would be too big to fail and too big to jail. In other words, a “benevolent dictator” was still a dictator:
https://doctorow.medium.com/small-government-fd5870a9462e
I want to draw a parallel here to chiropractic. On the one hand, chiropractic’s theoretical foundation has some serious scientific problems that should give potential patients pause:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2690192/
But beyond the technical critique of chiropractic, there’s also some profound foundational problems, including the fact that the founder of chiropractic said that he learned how to fix people’s backs from a ghost:
https://nationalpost.com/health/the-first-chiropractor-was-a-canadian-who-claimed-he-received-a-message-from-a-ghost
Consumer welfare antitrust is like chiropractic, then, in that it has serious technical deficiencies — monopolies do exist, they do raise prices and lower quality, markets don’t correct them, and they can and do corrupt the political process, and therefore Bork-believing economists are factually wrong and bad at managing economies.
But then there’s the other way in which consumer welfare is like chiropractic: its foundational tenets are just bonkers. Chiropractic’s founder talked to ghosts, and Robert Bork found gnostic meaning in Qanon-grade close readings of the text of the Sherman, Clayton and FTC Acts that revealed that their drafters were secretly in favor of monopolies. That’s the “not even wrong” part.
Even skeptics of chiropractic have largely forgotten that it is ghost-based medicine, and even skeptics of consumer welfare have largely stopped talking about whether the string of court decisions that followed from Bork’s ascendancy are simply wrong as a matter of law (that is, even if you think these cases resulted in good economic policy, the judges clearly misinterpreted the law).
American antitrust law always was, and continues to be primarily concerned with power — namely, the power of large companies to usurp democratic accountability and act with impunity, able to use their economic might to buy off or scare off lawmakers and regulators who would otherwise hold them to account.
The fact that we’ve largely forgotten this truth — a truth that can be easily verified simply by reading the Sherman Act and its successors — isn’t an accident of history. Some of the richest people in the history of the human race poured enormous fortunes into burying it. Take the Manne Seminars, lavish junkets for federal judges that bamboozled them with the Bork’s conspiratorial account of antitrust laws’ true intent:
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/22/1124477182/federal-judges-economics-boot-camp
40% of the federal judiciary processed through the Manne Seminars when they were running, including Supremes like RBG, who later parroted their dogma in their written opinions, which shifted measurably and dramatically to support monopolies:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w29788
Bork-driven antitrust’s ghost-based foundations were so thoroughly buried that anyone who broke from its orthodoxy was considered a lunatic-fringe radical. Until, that is, Biden appointed three effective, brilliant, charismatic trustbusters who dared to speak the long unspeakable truth that monopolies are both bad, and illegal.
These three — Tim Wu, recently departed from the White House; Lina Khan at the FTC; and Jonathan Kanter at the DOJ — wasted no time turning word into deed, taking on mergers, addressing anticompetitive conduct (like blocking noncompetes and protecting Right to Repair), and filing suit against abusive firms:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/09/rest-in-piss-robert-bork/#harmful-dominance
This naturally triggered an exodus of the government economists and lawyers who’d presided over the ghost-based antitrust era in which monopolies were encouraged and celebrated. Economists who’d built their careers on this collapsing idea wept into their beers, describing this as the end of “independent thinking” at the FTC (“independent thinking” being a synonym for “repeating billionaires self-serving dogma”):
https://www.techdirt.com/2021/07/28/ftc-is-driving-away-good-economists-favor-political-henchmen/
This was genuinely surreal! Imagine if a new NIH chief declared a commitment to evidence based-medicine and think-tankies published feverish editorials lamenting the brain-drain as chiropractors and reiki healers left government service.
This requiem for the ineffectual monopoly-enablers of the waning Bork era continues to this day. The DoJ’s Google suit has triggered fresh rounds of garment-rending from corporate shills who once presided over catastrophic mergers while drawing a public salary.
Writing for The American Prospect, Jeff Hauser and Andrea Beaty from the Revolving Door Project do what they do best — reveal the glaring conflicts of interest these monopoly enablers fail to disclose in attacking the DoJ’s case:
https://prospect.org/power/2023-02-13-justice-department-antitrust-attack/
Exhibit A: Dave Gelfand, who served as the DoJ’s antitrust boss during Obama’s second term. Gelfland has spent his career rotating between BigLaw firms like Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton and public service. His rap sheet includes advising T-Mobile on its acquisition of Sprint, a catastrophic merger that has since plunged the enshittification of American telecoms to new lows. Gelfand also represented Coors before the DoJ when it bought Miller, accelerating the process whereby two companies sell nearly all the beer in the world.
And before that? Gelfand represented Google in its acquisition of DoubleClick — one of the anticompetitive mergers the DoJ is currently seeking to unwind.
Given this history, the fact that Obama — a self-style progressive Democrat — put this guy in charge of the nation’s antitrust enforcement is darkly hilarious. You couldn’t ask for a more canid dingo babysitter. But even more grimly funny is the fact that Law360 — a trade journal for lawyers — got Gelfand to write its op-ed on the DoJ’s Google suit:
https://www.law360.com/competition/articles/1572647/biden-admin-s-anti-merger-stance-is-leading-to-bad-policies
In his editorial, Gelfand laments that the DoJ’s action against Google is “pushing aside decades of bipartisan antitrust enforcement.” Ummm…yeah, that’s the point. Gelfand, who built his career enabling monopolistic mergers and today makes millions helping monopolists extract billions, is not a reliable narrator on the subject of antitrust.
Shamefully, the Law360 piece includes no disclosures of Gelfand’s current clients and which mergers they might be contemplating, nor does it describe whether his partners at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton represent Google or other firms that would be adversely affected by a precedent in favor of the DoJ in the Google suit.
Gelfand says that Kanter and the DoJ are “throwing out 40 years of learning” about the correct way to regulate monopolists. Anyone who’s paying attention can see through this self-serving nonsense. As Hauser and Beaty write, “Getting Law360 to publish a piece where Gelfand takes credit for steering one of the most consequential and harmful mergers of the 21st century through the merger review process is terrific marketing for Cleary!”
As trustbusters go after monopolists, you’re going to hear a lot of this: “fighting monopolists goes against 40 years of precedent.” It does. It should. It must. We’ve just been through 40 years of ghost-based antitrust, founded on a surreal, easily-debunked conspiracy theory about the intent of the drafters of antitrust law. The task before us is precisely to overturn these precedents.
Another common rejoinder you’re likely to encounter as we banish Bork to the scrapheap of history: “You can’t break up a company like Google — that’s like ‘unscrambling an egg.’” This week on the Capitalisnt podcast, Dina Srinivasan makes short work of this claim, pointing out that if Google’s CEO announced that he was spinning the adtech businesses out as standalones, he’d be praised for his vision and the stock price would shoot up. If an activist investor like TCI Fund Management demanded that the company spin out the business, they’d be lionized for their aggressive business tactics. It’s only when regulators propose breaking up a sprawling and unweildy conglomerate like Google that we’re told that such a thing is impossible:
https://www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/should-we-breakup-google-with-dina-srinivasan
This week (Feb 14–17), I’m in Australia, touring my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’re in Melbourne tonight (Feb 14), Sydney tomorrow (Feb 15), then Canberra (Feb 16/17). More tickets just released for Sydney!
[Image ID: 'What a Funny Little Government,' Horace Taylor's 1899 editorial cartoon from The Verdict, depicting John D Rockefeller as a giant holding the White House in his hand, peering intently at it through a jeweler's loupe. In the background, the Capitol dome rises, surrounded by smoke-belching chimneys. The whole scene is set on a plane of oil-barrels.]
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blithe-bee · 6 months
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first mate and doctor nap time
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attyattlaw · 3 months
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ive been bullying law too much lately
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xrnoodle · 10 months
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many thoughts
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tmmyrp · 2 years
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tjank you for memorybooks =)
@officialbiglaw
SHHHHHHSHHH SHUT THE FUCK UP
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watchmebitch · 2 years
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me: actually the best thing in life is sitting quietly and savoring the environment around you, unhurried
my profession: if you aren’t working 16 hours a day, are you even a lawyer? was there even any reason to take the bar? what’s wrong, are you sick? you’ve barely touched your mountain of weekend work
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