Harris vs. The High Cost of Things
Harris vs. The High Cost of Things
Speech today on plans to address the price of food, housing, and drugs
Aug. 16: Harris price-gouging plan … Matthew Perry charges … Google breakup? … SAVE LINA KHAN …
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Vice President Kamala Harris today is laying out what she will do to bring down the costs of food, medicine, places where people live, and other stuff.
Food will get the headlines and Harris seems focused not on capping prices at your grocery store but on protecting grocery stores against massive food conglomerates colluding to fix prices.
As your dutiful TFN has written before, price-fixing in our system has been endemic even pre-pandemic. In a handy primer back in May, TFN newsfucked news about price-fucking by the oil industry. And by the meat industry. For two decades.
Luckily, former Pres. Donald Trump helped promote Harris’s speech by calling her a communist at a news conference where a pile of food props sat beside him for a reason that was never explained.
Meat reportedly will be on center stage (ew) in Harris’s remarks today, red meat for her base and, the campaign hopes, for swing states in the Rust Belt, aka the Meat Eaters’ Expanding Belt.
Harris will pitch greater powers for the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to go after price-fixing and/or -gouging companies. She’s also expected to give us a tour of her own record as California attorney general battling with oil and drug companies over pricing long before either Trump or 1.5-year senator JD Vance were even in government.1
I should note there is some skepticism about how much wholesale-level malfeasance is responsible for the past years’ price run-ups, especially since most states have laws on the books against price-fixing. But it’s a popular, adversarial stance against big corporations, so worth encouraging.
It’s also, however, an admission that our markets aren’t working. When suppliers and wholesalers ink contracts for sales, those contracts are supposed to set prices for months in advance, helping to keep prices stable. The price volatility we’ve seen, however, is prima facie evidence that these futures markets aren’t working for agriculture. Or oil. Or minerals. Or other tradeable commodities. Like housing. Or our attention.
Today’s Harris proposals for addressing our ostensible housing crisis reportedly include:
Tax breaks to build new homes for first-time home-buyers2
Stopping Wall Street’s wholesale engorgement on residential housing
Countering rental price-fixing by companies that gosh are just collecting data not making it available for landlords to collude on rental rates!, and
Making all first-time home-buyers eligible for $25,000 in down-payment assistance.3
Regardless of the details, people will like this. And ideally our political press can balance questions about Harris copying Trump’s no-tip-taxing policy with questions about whether Trump will copy Harris’s helping-people-afford-meat,-homes-and-medicine policies.
Because Harris will also focus on drug prices, no doubt touting yesterday’s announcement of a BFD on Rx prices. For the first time, the U.S. government has been allowed to shake the Invisible Hand and negotiate drug prices.
In the past, Republicans blocked the U.S. and us from using the massive leverage of Medicare to negotiate good prices for prescription drugs. So we got fucked! And not just illegally by Medicare fraudsters like Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), but also legally by Medicare fraudsters like Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL).
As Pres. Joe Biden and Harris announced yesterday, new, lower prices have now been negotiated for the first ten drugs. How much did we save? It’s a mystery!
Because thanks to middlemenpersons known as pharmacy benefit [sic] manpersonagers, the actual prices are a mystery. You know, like they should be in a functioning free market!
While Harris’s new, more-aggressive, more-populist approach is a step in the right direction, it’s still about making the system work better rather than giving us a better system. Which, if Trump is calling her a communist, you’d think she might as well live up to the title, but in reality yes our crappy media would have punished her mercilessly if Harris 2024 simply proposed even just some of what Harris 2019 supported:
Medicare for all
Eliminating private health insurance
Phasing in government health insurance while permitting private insurers to still fleece saps.
Both Harris and Biden are on record saying health care is a right. Which has no rational meaning other than it’s free to everyone, which only the government can achieve. If that were the case, we might still have Matthew Perry.
Five Charged in Matthew Perry’s Fatal Ketamine Overdose
Five people have been charged with killing the actor best known as Chandler Bing on Friends, and in a shocking development those five are not Joey, Phoebe, Monica, Rachel, or even Ross. Especially Ross.
Those accused of killing actor Matthew Perry include an acquaintance and his assistant — could that assistant’s updated résumé be more hilarious? — and a woman whose lawyers are pissed that prosecutors are killing her Ketamine Queen.
But also charged are two doctors. Why would doctors get Perry lethal, medically-not-good amounts of Ketamine, which is taken for depression and anxiety but not six times a day?
Money!
“I wonder how much this moron will pay,” one doctor texted a supplier. “Lets find out.”
Who don’t we want in the medical profession? People who want to find out how much addicts will pay for drugs! We have an entire Wall Street for people like that!
So why would people like that go into medicine? Because we’ve made it a for-profit business. And not the reputation-reliant, house-call-making kind.
Make health care a profession where you can’t get rich because you can’t pad profits — in fact, take the profit margins out of all the things we all have a right to — and maybejustmaybe we still have Perry, Taylor Hawkins, Juice WRLD, Mac Miller, Tom Petty, Prince, Chyna, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joan Rivers, Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger, Keith Moon, and Jesus this list of prescription-drug deaths is longer than I expected. 😢
And Justice for Google
As your vigilant TFN wrote the other day, there’s some worrying lack of commitment in Kamala Harris World about Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.
And yet it’s Khan who arguably is taking the most aggressive stand on our behalf against the big corporations Harris today is taking on. The only question is, does Harris see that as a feature or a bug? Is Khan going too far for Harris’s liking? Or for the likings of Harris’s deepest-pocketed supporters?
Just this week, Khan — whose gamer name is Monopoly’s Bane — submitted an amicus brief in the epic case of Epic Games v. Google The Giant Monopoly LLC. Google has already been adjudicated as an illegal monopoly, monopolizing both search and ads; the question before the court now is what to do about it.
On the one hand, the court could impose a complicated, costly oversight regime in which taxpayers would have to pay for dedicated Google Cops to pound the beat every day stopping Google from criming.
On the other, easier hand, the court could simply end Google’s monopoly by breaking it up, the way the government used to break up monopolies all the time to protect us from them.
Reportedly, the Justice Department is considering requesting the latter, breaking up Google (presumably into Go and Ogle).
According to one analysis I spotted, Khan’s amicus brief — and the outcomes it endorses — imply that a breakup would be hunky-dory.
No wonder the Tech Babies are crying to former Pres. Donald Trump to save them from We The Befucked-By-Big-Tech People.
Stahnning Khan
Guardian writer Moira Donegan yesterday pitched the idea that my brain didn’t know it wanted to come up with.
Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan — her again! — had just on Wednesday finalized new rules banning fake reviews to make you think that shitty predatory companies aren’t predatory and shitty.
In response, Donegan wrote:
“One of my more crackpot ideas is that we need to create a liberal cult of personality around Lina Khan—complete with tee shirts, prayer candles, etc—to maximize the political cost of ousting her.”
NB: This is not a crackpot idea.
I know, I know, TFN has an official No Stanning policy. But there are exceptions (as of right now) for campaigns to save officials who may be on the brink of getting bounced. Especially when they’re one of the most consequential government officials in decades.
If we could do this for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, even after her decision not to resign cost us a very important seat on the right-wing Supreme Court, we can certainly do it for Khan, who is poised to literally change the entire Corporate People-Eating Landscape if she is allowed to continue her work under Pres. Kamala Harris.
So go tell Donegan you’re on board. Tell her TFN sent you. Share your ideas for shirts, slogans, gifs, whatever. Let’s see ‘em! And tag TFN!
Make Khan exactly the kind of fun, positive cause the Harris campaign loves.
Because why should Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) have all the fun?
Five Quickies
Twenty news outlets, seven press-freedom groups, and 113 journalists have written to the U.S. State Department asking that the U.S. stop supplying Israel with arms that are being used to kill journalists.
In case you still aren’t motivated to use every fucking weapon in the federal arsenal to make big companies small and terrified, Disney is asking a court to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit — after a Disney restaurant fed allergens to a customer who clearly and repeatedly asked not to be killed by food — on the basis that the family agreed to settle disputes with Disney through arbitration…when they signed up for Disney’s streaming service.
Looks like Tim Walz’s congressional campaign lied about his drunk-driving bust back when he first ran in 2006. Which is not good. Walz has already said he stopped drinking at the time. I suspect no one will care about this, but in the name of pretending we still have functioning civics, it’d be good to see this addressed forthrightly.
Donald Trump guy and Russia guy but definitely not a Trump-and-Russia guy Dmitri Simes had his home searched by the FBI this week. Whatcha got, Attorney General Merrick Garland? (h/t)
Former Pres. Donald Trump said yesterday at his news [sic] conference that San Francisco “was a great city 15 years ago.” Gavin Newsom was mayor at the time. Kamala Harris was the district attorney. How’s that for kicking off your weekend?
TCB
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Go get yourself a great weekend, kids.
They have literally 5.5 years in government combined. Neither of them has ever served in a legislative majority.
Why must the money always flow to the companies rather than the people and why can it never just be “here’s a house” if “here’s a tax break” is possible?
Though honestly I can’t tell whether that’s a federal loan or what.
Catching up having been out of it with covid (first timer here 🙌🏼) and was only well enough to watch the DNCC and nothing else for a few days. I just want to say I love the bit on ‘Stahnning Khan’. It has got to catch fire. I will wear a button!
I'm all for stahnning for Khan. KHAN!!!!! All over that. Even thought of trying to sneak in a sign to the Walz rally tomorrow in blue-dot-ville. But it appears that the secret service will not be allowing that to happen (still going to sneak in my trusty sharpie to maybe add to a distributed sign).
Edit: I also bought my kid a year's worth of new-fucking - she needs it to educate her boyfriend on why he needs to vote for president (and for Harris). Am rounding up other substackers to gift to her, too.