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Matt Stoller Profile picture
Matt Stoller
@matthewstoller
Hi. I work at the American Economic Liberties Project. I wrote a book called Goliath and the monopoly-focused newsletter BIG: https://t.co/8QDW3bH1y3
Oct 6, 2018 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
1. A lot of people wonder why I'm constantly harping on the Democrats when Trump is in the White House. One of the reasons is the old Democratic establishment protected Susan Collins. 2. Susan Collins has always portrayed herself as a moderate. And she is soft-spoken and nice, which is appealing to voters. She speaks openly about being pro-choice, and talked up working with Senators like Ted Kennedy.
Oct 3, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I wasn't disappointed in Obama, I was disappointed in the tens of millions of Democrats who decided that he was the greatest thing ever even as he presided over the destruction of the middle class. Obama lied about really important things, like foreclosures and health costs. This notion that he was decent man dealing w/an impossible situation is as silly as the idea that Trump is a self-made billionaire. Obama shaped policy around aristocratic goals.
Oct 3, 2018 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
This isn't hard to explain. Progressives don't have a way to talk about what it means to be a working class white man in America right now, but there are real awful things happening to this cohort. First of all, working class white men are dying younger, largely killing themselves.
Oct 3, 2018 • 17 tweets • 5 min read
1. Ok, I see I'm going to have to explain the Amazon minimum wage hike. There are two ways of protecting our liberties as individuals. First are rules to protect producers: patent, copyright, union, farm supports, etc. Second are rules to restrain capital: antitrust, finreg, etc. 2. The key is to block the ability of the financier to use the corporation and bank to control us. That means cutting off the ability to pour free capital from Wall Street into a segment to monopolize. That's why we had rules against predatory pricing.
Sep 29, 2018 • 20 tweets • 5 min read
1. Kavanaugh's clearly on display anger and pain was quite confusing to millions of Americans. Many saw authenticity in his voice and thus in some way believed he is telling the truth. It is time for us to wake up to what aristocracy is. Aristocracy is a moral system. 2. Most Westerners have a hard time imagining aristocracy. The enlightenment kind of pushed the end of feudalism as a moral frame. The idea of divinely ordained social hierarchies doesn't make any sense to us.
Sep 16, 2018 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Agree with the sentiment here, but privilege is the wrong frame. Growing up affluent means growing up with the ability to be free. That's not privilege. It's what *everyone* should have. It's not unfair that some have it, it's unfair that some don't. Being able to go to college without debt, being able to raise kids and see a doctor, not having to worry about food, shelter, being able to have leisure and make non-coerced political and social choices... That's not privilege. That is what every person in America should have.
Sep 9, 2018 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
1. Ok, time to address this piece by Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke on the need for more bailout authority to address financial crises. It is a surprisingly interesting but hidden political argument. 2. The argument is that the banking system 'outgrew' protections against panics put in place during the Great Depression. They didn't see the crisis coming, but their response as firefighters was pretty good. Banks were bailed out, which was unfair, but America recovered.
Sep 6, 2018 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
1. There's a lot of wishful lefty thinking going on right now. The young generation isn't necessarily progressive. Gillum supported fast track corporate trade authority. Pressley opposed Medicare for All. Beto supported bank deregulation. 2. The crevices where power really lives in America is in the arcane technical boring stuff about banks, trade, monopoly rules - aka big money. That's not excitable stuff right now. What someone does when you're not looking is who they are.
Aug 25, 2018 • 20 tweets • 6 min read
1. A short thread on how ideas travel, with a case study on the problem of monopoly, now being studied by central bankers at Jackson Hole. How did this idea break into modern discourse? It started in the late 1990s, with a journalist named Barry Lynn (now my boss). 2. Lynn noticed that an earthquake in Taiwan took down a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated factories halfway across the world, toys, cars, etc. He asked, what happened? The answer is that essential components had been sole sourced in Taiwan.
Aug 24, 2018 • 20 tweets • 9 min read
1. Ok, I'm going to talk about an under the radar fight over wealth, power and the law. It's going on at the most important Federal agency no one cares about, the Federal Trade Commission. And there's even something you can do about it. 2. The FTC is charged with policing America's markets. It has massive power over mergers, monopoly, and unfair trade practices. It won't surprise you that for forty years, because of law and economics "scholars" like @ProfWrightGMU, it has enabled fraud instead of stopping it.
Aug 12, 2018 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
This cycle Democratic voters are electing mostly centrists with a smattering of leftists. What matters far more than these labels, which are basically about how much to spend on social welfare, is whether people broadly are seeing the threat of corporate concentration. Just by watching hearings in Congress, it isn't really the left interested in the details of corporate power. There are some progressives who are there, but it's mostly the GOP, random centrists, and a few progressives who are trying to figure out how to structure commerce.
Jul 16, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Russia is a dangerous and hostile power that meddled in the U.S. election. It's worth remembering that Russian lifespans dropped radically after Larry Summers and Bill Clinton's neoliberal boys went over to help the USSR transition to capitalism. Russia is mad at us for a reason. The Chinese however have no reason for hostility to the U.S., which has historically been a good friend. China's increasing dangerous posture is purely a result of Wall Street's recklessness, bad policy from Clinton to Obama (and now Trump), and its own autocratic government.
Jul 1, 2018 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Everyone in the Midwest just loves student debt and shitty health care monopolies. Last time I was in Des Moines people would not stop praising the price of pharmaceuticals. One of the reasons @Ocasio2018 did well is because Obamacare obviously didn't work for the majority. In 2009, 7% of large employers offered high-deductible health care insurance. Today it's 39%. Insured people are losing their health care and the Democrats didn't notice!
Jun 29, 2018 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
1. Since I'm the liberal that Democratic socialists both love and hate, let me do some history on the origin of modern Democratic socialism. Democratic socialism is in many ways actually just old school Democratic populism. 2. I understand why young people dislike liberalism and Democrats. There's been a total failure of leadership among liberals and Democrats for decades. Why would anyone want to follow liberals or Democrats? I certainly don't. Most Americans don't.
Jun 27, 2018 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
I'm going to show you just who @Ocasio2018, Justice Democrats, and DSA beat tonight. it isn't @JoeCrowleyNY. It's the most powerful people in America. Here are Crowley donors Sheryl Sandberg, Sean Parker, Google NET Pac, and Facebook's PAC. Crowley donors who lost tonight: Facebook, Google, Blackrock, Humana, Raytheon, Capitol One, AFLAC, Microsoft, CIGNA, TD Bank, H&R Block, Salesforce dot com, United Technology, Deloitte, Covington and Burling, Anheuser-Busch, Honeywell...
Jun 18, 2018 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
1. Destroying vulnerable families is a specialty of the Trump administration. I will point out that @AjitPaiFCC at the FCC made a below-the-radar policy to do this to the families of prisoners. 2. One of the more evil policies in America is to fund prisons by withholding contact between prisoners and the families of prisoners unless those families can come up with a bunch of cash. This is how a lot of prison services work, including phone calls.
Jun 8, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Why is single payer gaining steam? The last time Dems debated health care in a primary was in 2008. Then, the avg cost of health care for a family of four was $15,600. Right now it's over $28k. By 2019 it'll be $30k. This is no longer a leftie thing, and it's not about access. Even the rich are getting mad. Like they go to a hospital and are like "I have to pay $6999 for an Advil?!?" Or their doctor goes concierge. This is not a poor sad tragedy problem for those without coverage. It's hitting people WITH insurance.
Jun 5, 2018 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
I guess I should explain why my fear of the Chinese Communist Party is not rooted in nationalism, and is actually a critique of US and Western policy for the last 20 years. Take this remarkable story. wsj.com/articles/how-c… The CCP has improved the lives of the country, bringing hundreds of millions of out poverty. It did this by accepting the deal that Clinton and Bush cut, which was to move our industrial and tech base to China. Clinton and Bush were influenced by libertarians like Larry Summers.
May 24, 2018 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
The allegation here vis-a-vis Facebook is explosive. I don't know if it's true. The argument is that Mark Zuckerberg was using his control of data and violating the 2011 consent order to ensure that Facebook could transition its desktop social networking monopoly to mobile. That's why Cambridge Analytica happened.
May 16, 2018 • 15 tweets • 7 min read
1. There's a political realignment going on, and it's not right-left. It's tech platforms versus everyone else. Let's start with Jim Cramer talking about all the CEOs freaking out about Amazon. 2. And then marketing guru Scott Galloway at the Digital Media Summit getting *a standing ovation* for calling for the break-up of big tech.
May 15, 2018 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
1. I mentioned this last night, but this memo by new FTC Commissioner @chopraftc is really worth reading. It is a bad-ass and extremely important statement on corporate crime and has significant implications for Facebook. propublica.org/article/rohit-… 2. First, some context. This memo is about recidivism, or committing a crime again once you've been caught. In 2011, Facebook was caught in 2011 engaging in "unfair and deceptive" practices, and the FTC stated the company "violated federal law." Today's scandal is a repeat crime.