Biden Admin

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see Biden 3

merri ok

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3X JOB WHAMMY, DOGE CUTS, SHUTDN, TECH CUTS AI 11 25

AN 11 25

'Really hurting': US job cuts surge to decades-high level amid Trump recession fears

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AN 11 25 LAT

Los Angeles Times Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Michael Hiltzik writes that President Donald Trump has reversed the trend of President Joe Biden's booming economy and it's only getting worse.

Tuesday night's election boon for The Democrats, Hiltzik writes, only proves his point.

"The lesson delivered by the results is that Americans sense that the economy is reeling," he writes. "Most economic indicators are flashing yellow or even red."

Polls also point to Trump's abysmal economy, he notes, adding, "the indicators of economic pain are all around us. Every one of the leading opinion polls taken since Oct. 1 has shown Donald Trump’s approval rating on the economy to be deeply underwater, with the average calculated by RealClearPolling at negative 13.4 points."

Inflation, he writes, is "unmistakably on the rise again," as the consumer price index rose to 3.0 percent in September from a low of 2.3 percent in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

An increase in food prices — up from 2.1 percent in May to 3.1 percent — "has potent political implications, since food is an expense experienced by consumers on almost a daily basis," Hiltzik says.

Job growth has also ebbed, he says, with monthly job creation "fading since Trump took office, with the figures turning negative in June, August and September," he writes.

Farm bankruptcies are rising, too. "Prices of such key crops as corn, wheat and soybeans have been falling as Trump’s trade war shrinks foreign demand for American produce," Hiltzik says.

Consumer spending is also down in "a serious slowdown from the 3.7 percent and 4.0 percent growth rates in the third and fourth quarter of last year, before Trump took office, Fitch Ratings calculated in September," he explains.

As the historic government shutdown continues, "headwinds threaten to keep building" against the economy, one which was thriving under Biden, he says.

"It’s proper to note that the economy Trump inherited from Biden was strong and getting stronger," Hilzik says.

”In truth, Biden inherited an unemployment rate of 6.8 percent from Trump’s first term, and bequeathed second-term Trump a rate of 4.1 percent, the lowest rate since the election of George W. Bush. Annual job growth fell to negative 6 percent during Trump’s first term, and Biden brought it up to an average of 1.4 percent."

Under Biden, "real gross domestic product growth per capita had fallen to an annualized rate of negative 1.8 percent under Trump 1.0; Biden brought it up to positive 2.1 percent," he notes.

Trump 2.0 also inherited an excellent employment to population ratio for workers 24 to 54 years old.

"When Biden took over, it was 76.2 percent, rising to to 80.5 percent when he ceded the White House to Trump — the highest handover value since 2000, according to the labor-affiliated Economic Policy Institute."

Conservatives "viewed Trump’s impending second term with a certain level of trepidation," Hilzik notes, saying some expected “the actual policies [would have been] less severe than suggested by Trump’s blustery campaign platform.”

They were more severe, he writes.

"The strongest headwind against growth is the uncertainty that Trump has imposed on the economy," he says.

About 71 percent of CEOs polled by Yale said that Trump's tariffs"were harming their business, 62 percent said the tariffs weren’t prompting them to invest more domestically and 59 percent said they expected no results from domestic investment as a result of the tariffs."

Despite the White House insisting the economy is strong, Hilzik says "the signs are that the near future, at least, will be economically bleaker than the present," and that "the one unmistakable positive sign in the economic landscape —a stock market reaching record highs — may be less encouraging than it appears on the surface."

Those highs, he says, are gains concentrated "among seven stocks associated with spending on artificial intelligence, and whether they can be sustained is an open question."

Trump's economic future looks bleak, Hilzik says, with no economic development "visible on the horizon that might relieve consumers of the feeling that they’re paying more for necessities and that their very livelihoods are under threat."

Tuesday's election sounded the alarm bells, Hilzik writes, but he's not sure the White House is listening.

"What Tuesday’s election results show is that consumers are voters. A rational administration would take that as a warning siren and reconsider its policies. This administration? Who knows?" he says.

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trump inherited the strongest economy ever? trump 2016 BO’s

but

Trump claims that U.S. manufacturing slowed down during former President Joe Biden's four years in the White House, and he insists that his tariff-driven trade policy will lead to a renaissance in manufacturing jobs.

But according to Cleanview Energy founder Michael Thomas, Biden — not Trump — is the one with the stronger record on manufacturing jobs.

In a Thursday, April 10 post on X, formerly Twitter, Thomas posts, "The manufacturing boom that started under the Biden administration is grinding to a halt under Trump." And Thomas backs it up with a chart.

IFrame Content

The chart, using U.S. Census Bureau figures, shows data on manufacturing jobs between 2016 (when Barack Obama was still president) and 2025 (when Trump returned to the White House). Altogether, the chart offers data spanning four presidential administrations.

U.S. manufacturing jobs, according to the chart, declined slightly during Trump's first presidency — before surging during Biden's four years as president. The chart shows the number of manufacturing jobs continuing to climb under Biden, peaking in 2024 before starting to decrease under Trump.

In separate tweets, Heatmap News' Matthew Zeitlin and Hassan Khan offer some reasons why Trump's policies aren't conducive to creating manufacturing jobs.

Zeitlin, in an April 10 tweet, notes that "buyouts at the department of energy could cripple its industrial policy efforts."

In response to Zeitlin, Khan tweets, "The dismantling of LPO and sidelining of CHIPS staff are not things you do if your primary goal is re-industrialization. They’re doing this because they spite anything the other guys did."

See the chart above or at this link.

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NO LNX

Gavin Newsom and the next political uprising

California Governor Gavin Newsom, along with local congressional representatives, state officials and supporters, speaks as he announces the redrawing of California's congressional maps, calling on voters to approve a ballot measure, in response to a similar move in Texas being supported by U.S. President Donald Trump, in Los Angeles, California, U.S., August 14, 2025. REUTERS/Mike Blake

John StoehrNovember 03, 2025

Is the No Kings movement the new Tea Party movement?

That’s certainly the opinion of some Never Trump conservatives. In the more than 7 million people who protested against the Trump regime, they see the highest ideals of the Tea Party, chief among them limited government, individual liberty and the sovereignty of the people.

But that’s the thing. Those highest ideals were darkened by the fact that the Tea Party was an artificial construct. It’s sometimes called “astroturf” to distinguish it from a real, organic grassroots movement.

The Tea Party was funded by billionaires, conspicuously by the Koch brothers. It may have had the veneer of high-mindedness, but in truth it aimed to spread fear, hate and lies about the first Black president in order to expand and consolidate the power of those self-same elites.

So no. No Kings is not the new Tea Party if we are talking about the Tea Party in terms of the noblest principles of the American republic.

Because it wasn’t. It was, however, a political movement against elites. In this, No Kings has something in common with the Tea Party.

The key difference, of course, is that No Kings has the potential to reject the legitimacy of elites generally. The Tea Party wanted us to believe that the “elites” were all those wine-and-cheese liberals on the east coast who forced “real Americans” to live under the rule of a secret Muslim and covert Marxist by the name of Barack Obama, who was himself a mere puppet of a global conspiracy against America.

The Tea Party movement was a gigantic shuck and jive – a means of distracting Americans, but especially white Americans who are (um) receptive to such messaging, while actual elites pick their pockets.

While No Kings is mainly focused on Donald Trump, it holds the promise of expanding its scope to include all those elites that the Tea Party was intended to serve. Indeed, the circumstances are changing rapidly. No Kings could evolve into a mass movement against oligarchs, which could turn into a mass movement against billionaires, which could turn into a mass movement against the monopoly control that all those billionaires now have over the institutions of democracy.

And like the Tea Party, No Kings is emerging from an economic emergency. Back then, it was a crisis of collapsing assets, mainly housing, and how that impacted jobs. The crisis now is much, much greater, as inflation and cost of living affect vastly more people than unemployment ever did. It’s so bad that retailers that manage to hold their prices down are being celebrated as champions of the people!

No Kings is already huge. Its recent one-day march was the biggest in American history. Everyone who is not capable of bribing a president is struggling to pay for the necessities of life. Many of those folks are going to be open to a movement that gives them someone to blame. A protest of seven million-plus people could double before you know it.

Donald Trump looked at the Tea Party and found ways to harness its energy. (He chose “birtherism,” because he understood what it was really about.) Ambitious Democrats are surely doing the same regarding No Kings. One of the most ambitious is Gavin Newsom.

In an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Kark, California’s governor said we ought to be standing up for the noblest principles of the American republic. “The founding fathers did not live and die to see us as cowards,” Newsom said. Then he identified the cowards, broadening the scope of the No Kings movement to include “the richest, most powerful people selling their souls and selling out this country.”

He then implied a list: the Republicans in the Congress, Wall Street and the corporate media, elite universities and elite law firms. Missing was the supermajority of the Supreme Court, but Newsom’s message was otherwise clear. Americans should be “disgusted” by the “cowards” who have monopoly control over the institutions of democracy.

Newsom borrowed from the No Kings by saying that the language of liberty is requisite to fighting for it. “It’s a revolution that’s going on in this country and I think you have to start using those words,” he said. “[Trump] is attacking every single institution of independent thinking and he’s succeeding because we’re still playing by the old set of rules.”

“The old set of rules” is hotly debated among liberal folk, but at its root, it refers to a status quo that, by dint of being a status quo, gives certain elites every advantage they could hope for in preventing the Democrats from developing into a fully realized opposition party.

It means continuing to make room for certain elites who (in good faith, let’s say) wish to stop the Democrats from becoming “too extreme,” which really means stopping them from centering the interests of the people. Once these are set aside, Newsom suggests, the Democrats can “fight fire with fire” for the purpose of establishing a new normal.

The language of revolutionary freedom in the context of old rules serving elites is important to understanding what Newsom says in the very next breath – that once order is reestablished, “we will continue to build on the legacy, I would argue, of the former president, who I think was one of the most successful presidents of the last century.”

He meant Joe Biden.

Far too few realized Biden was the bridge between the past and the future that so many Americans want to see in their president. His economic policies in particular were transformational, as they reversed the priorities of previous administrations, including Obama’s.

Biden privileged workers over “job creators.” (He was the first president to cross a picket line.) He oversaw a dramatic increase in hourly wages. (They outpaced inflation for the first time since the 1960s.) Unemployment, especially Black unemployment, had rarely been lower. By the end, inflation was returning to pre-pandemic levels.

For these reasons and more, elites hated Biden.

The hatred was especially sharp among corporate bosses. Biden championed their workers. He regulated their industries. He put the national interest above theirs. Most of all, they hated that Joe Biden threatened to stem the tide of consolidation. Capital will concentrate if left alone. Biden didn’t leave it alone. He knew that the unchecked concentration of money and power spells doom for democracy.

He was right. We know he was right. Look what’s happening now.

And that brings me back to No Kings. It has the potential to clarify history. The conventional wisdom is that Biden, through his hubris, brought himself down, paving the way for Donald Trump’s return.

With enough effort, another story can come to light – that the elites who are now lording it over us, who are now planning to pal around with a criminal president in his new gold-plated “ballroom,” conspired against a truly working-man’s president. Yes, he was old. Perhaps he overstayed his welcome. But no one can dispute the stone-cold fact that elites across the spectrum attacked him virtually from the start.

And from that betrayal of democracy and the common good arose the stirrings of an organic grassroots movement against not only despotic rule but against “the richest, most powerful people selling their souls and selling out this country” – those who made despotism possible.

Newsom didn’t bring up Biden only because he’s still popular with the Democratic base. He did so also because he knows that what the former president did is the foundation on which to build the next chapter of American history as well as the history of the Democratic Party – and whoever the base chooses to be the party’s next leader.

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'Epic ocean victory': Biden permanently bans offshore drilling across 625 million acres

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New Biden rule would rein in Medicare Advantage — but will Dr. Oz let it stand?

Jake Johnson Common Dreams

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the Biden administration's Environmental Protection Agency on Monday announced a permanent ban on a pair of carcinogenic chemicals widely used in U.S. industries, including dry cleaning services and automative work.

According to the Washington Post:

The announcement includes the complete ban of trichloroethylene—also known as TCE—a substance found in common consumer and manufacturing products including degreasing agents, furniture care and auto repair products. In addition, the agency banned all consumer uses and many commercial uses of Perc—also known as tetrachloroethylene and PCE — an industrial solvent long used in applications such as dry cleaning and auto repair.

Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, applauded the move but suggested to the Post that it should have come sooner.

"Both of these chemicals have caused too much harm for too long, despite the existence of safer alternatives," Kalmuss-Katz.

The EPA's decision, reports the New York Times, was "long sought by environmental and health advocates, even as they braced for what could be a wave of deregulation by the incoming Trump administration."

The Timesreports:

TCE is known to cause liver cancer, kidney cancer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and to damage the nervous and immune systems. It has been found in drinking water nationwide and was the subject of a 1995 book that became a movie, “A Civil Action,” starring John Travolta. The E.P.A. is banning all uses of the chemical under the Toxic Substances Control Act, which was overhauled in 2016 to give the agency greater authority to regulate harmful chemicals.

Though deemed "less harmful" than TCE, the Times notes how Perc has been shown to "cause liver, kidney, brain and testicular cancer," and can also damage the functioning of kidneys, the liver, and people's immune systems.

Environmentalists celebrated last year when Biden's EPA proposed the ban on TCE, as Common Dreamsreported.

Responding to the news at the time, Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group (EWG), said the EPA, by putting the ban on the table, was "once again putting the health of workers and consumers first."

While President-elect Donald Trump ran on a having an environmental agenda that would foster the "cleanest air" and the "cleanest water," the late approval of EPA's ban on TCE and Perc in Biden's term means the rule will be subject to the Congressional Review Act (CRA), meaning the Republican-control Senate could reverse the measure.

In his remarks to the Times, Kalmuss-Katz of Earthjustice said that if Trump and Senate Republicans try to roll back the ban, they will be certain to "encounter serious opposition from communities across the country that have been devastated by TCE, in both blue and red states."

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Even though President Joe Biden has pledged to peacefully handing the reins of power to President-elect Donald Trump on January 20th, he's still aiming to make sure his successor won't be able to easily undo his signature legislative accomplishments.

The Financial Times recently reported that both Biden and his Cabinet are working at breakneck pace to spend down tens of billions of dollars in projects that have already been approved by Congress before the Trump administration can claw it back or spend it elsewhere. Domestically, this includes $39 billion in incentives for semiconductor manufacturing plants throughout the U.S. as part of the CHIPS and Science Act, which is fueling approximately 115,000 manufacturing jobs in multiple states.

Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said her agency is instructing employees to work overtime and through the weekends to make sure the CHIPS and Science Act funds are out the door before Trump's inauguration less than two months from now. This apparently also included one-on-one calls to tech executives in an effort to fast-track several deals currently in the works.

"The CHIPS team has announced preliminary agreements with two dozen companies for CHIPS awards, and over the next two months, plans to announce preliminary agreements for all $39 billion of that funding, and is well on its way towards securing final agreements for may of those entities [where] preliminary awards were announced," an unnamed White House official told the Financial Times.

One of Biden's most significant legislative achievements was the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which Earthjustice referred to as "the largest climate spending bill ever." One major component of that law was the appropriation of $369 billion in clean energy subsidies, which Trump campaigned on repealing. Biden climate advisor John Podesta told the Times that if Trump tries to undo the IRA, he may face unexpected resistance from Republican state governments.

"Many Republicans, especially governors, know all this activity is a good thing for their districts, states and for their economies," Podesta said.

Another big chunk of unspent money Biden is aiming to get out the door is $7 billion in military assistance to Ukraine that has yet to get to Kiev. Biden is aiming to fast-track that money before Trump gets into office, under the assumption that the president-elect will allow Russian President Vladimir Putin to conquer contested territory in Eastern Ukraine without putting up a fight.

The U.S. has already approved Ukraine's use of long-range weapons to strike at Russian targets, and is sending anti-personnel mines to the Ukrainian military to use against Russia along with the larger anti-tank mines it's already been deploying. Biden believes Kiev will be in a stronger negotiating position with Moscow if it has more weaponry at its disposal when Trump is inaugurated.

Finally, Biden is urging Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to make the most of the Democratic majority's final months to speed through his last remaining judicial nominees. Schumer recently took advantage of several Republicans' absence in the chamber to hold votes on several nominees that had been held up, getting those judges confirmed to lifetime positions while Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and JD Vance (R-Ohio) were with Trump on a SpaceX flight.

"We've been working with [Senate Democrats] very, very closely to get as many of the president's nominees confirmed because he believes that he wants to leave a lasting impact on the judiciary," a White House official said.

Click here to read the Times' report in full (subscription required).

READ MORE:['You will see a real push': Journalist reveals 'main focus' of Biden's lame duck period

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As the 2024 election draws closer, U.S. tax policy will be among the many issues debated by Republicans and Democrats.

On Monday, June 17, the U.S. Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), CNBC reports, released a plan they say would "close a major tax loophole" and raise an estimated $50 million in tax revenue over the next ten years.

CNBC's Kate Dore reports that the plan targets "related party basis shifting," which Dore describes as a process in which "single businesses operating through different legal entities trade original purchase prices on assets to take more deductions or reduce future gains."

IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, on June 14, told reporters, "These tax shelters allow wealthy taxpayers to avoid paying what they owe."

According to Dore, the plan would ramp up IRS efforts to increase audits for the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.

In an official statement, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said of the plan, "Treasury and the IRS are focused on addressing high-end tax abuse from all angles, and the proposed rules released today will increase tax fairness and reduce the deficit."

Similarly, Lael Brainard, a White House National Economic Council advisor, said, "We should ensure ultra-wealthy taxpayers pay what they owe and play by the same rules by maintaining the president's investment in the IRS."

*Read CNBC's full report at this link.

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icn

...“We do not do petitions, we do direct action,” the group states on its website. And in drawing eyes and ears to their demands, Climate Defiance’s tactics have yielded undeniable success: in less than a year of existence, the group has had one-on-one discussions with Zaidi, deputy secretary of energy David Turk and then-senior advisor on clean energy, now senior advisor to the president for international climate policy, John Podesta. The meeting with Podesta occurred in the White House, where he discussed the controversial CP2 liquid natural gas (LNG) terminal with members of the activist group.

Climate Defiance confronted Deputy Secretary of the Interior Tommy Beaudreau five times in one day after he signed off on the controversial Willow project oil drilling project in Alaska. He stepped down from his position with the Department of the Interior two weeks later.

Less than a month after the group crashed a fundraiser in San Francisco to give Harvard Law professor Jody Freeman a “Big Oil Bestie,” award for being a board member of ConocoPhillips, the company responsible for the Willow project, Freeman subsequently resigned from her position on the board. And just a month after Climate Defiance’s meeting with Podesta, the Biden administration made the landmark decision to halt all new LNG export projects.

The timelines don’t prove that Climate Defiance caused Beaudreau, Freeman and Podesta’s actions, and it wasn’t alone in pressuring these figures or criticizing the projects they were associated with. The group frequently collaborates with a broad range of environmental organizations in movement-wide fights. The LNG decision, for instance, came after a multi-year campaign from a national network of organizers and groups that began organizing long before Climate Defiance came into existence. Many of them come from frontline communities along the Gulf Coast, where many LNG terminals have been proposed.

“It was definitely a team effort,” Greenberg said of the LNG decision.

Still, he thinks his group had a strong impact.

“We made it really, really clear that that was kind of a red line for us and I think the administration noticed,” he said.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) said the group had an impact, and the White House quoted Climate Defiance’s post calling the decision “monumental” among the host of praise for the LNG decision that it featured on its official website.

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an 11 22

Although Democrats overperformed in the 2022 midterms, it’s likely that they will still narrowly lose the House of Representatives. At the least, their majority will be much reduced. They may pick up one seat in the Senate still, but even so, they are going to continue to struggle to pass vital measures like the protection of abortion rights and voting rights.

That doesn’t mean that Democrats can’t make needed changes though.

Presidents have a great deal of power. And President Joe Biden has been using that power in some hopeful ways.

For example, his administration appears to be reversing a decades-long status quo and embracing vigorous antitrust enforcement.

This is a vital step in reducing inequity and breaking the hammerlock the wealthy currently have on policy and public life.

With the threat of authoritarianism looming, the reinvigoration of antitrust policy could be one of the few positive signs of democratic renewal.

The biggest recent victory for the administration’s tougher trust-busting approach was in the book industry. The Biden Justice Department brought a lawsuit to block the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.

The US District Court Judge Florence Y. Pan agreed with the Justice Department that the merger would “lessen competition” for “top-selling books.”

Joseph Kanter of the Justice Department said the decision was the correct one, because the deal “would have reduced competition, decreased author compensation, diminished the breadth, depth and diversity of our stories and ideas, and ultimately impoverished our democracy.”

The Justice Department argued that Penguin Random House Simon & Schuster would be so large that it would be able to push down advances for books from top authors like Stephen King (who testified against the merger.)

The Justice Department also said that the merger would significantly reduce the number of book releases, limiting what was available to readers and shrinking the breadth of public discourse.

Those sound like good reasons to prevent a deal. However, those arguments for antitrust action have been denigrated and even verboten for decades.

As Stacy Mitchell, co-director at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, explains on Twitter, “For 40 years, antitrust has largely operated within the narrow confines of the consumer welfare standard — ie, the only harm that matters is to consumer prices.”

What this meant was that the Justice Department would only prevent mergers if the merger was deemed likely to raise consumer prices. Under that rubric, lower advances for authors wouldn’t matter, since authors are providers, not consumers. Neither would a reduced diversity of books.

As Mitchell suggests, it wasn’t always this way.

In the book How to Think Like an Economist, Elizabeth Popp Berman explains that antitrust used to have a broad remit.

In the early 20th century, antitrust was seen as an important means of regulating the economy and society as a whole.

Antitrust lawyers and government regulators saw antitrust legislation as an important means of protecting small businesses, which were seen as essential to the health of civic life. Limiting mergers prevented individuals from accumulating vast wealth and power, which could damage the health of democracy.

These goals led to aggressive enforcement of antitrust legislation in the early 20th century, Berman says. The 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act prevented companies from buying one another’s stock if the effect would “substantially limit competition.”

This provision was largely enforced by lawyers using a prosecutorial frame. When they felt the law was being violated, and that they could win in court, they would sue.

Over time, however, the framework for government action in general, and for antitrust in particular, began to shift.

Republicans had long been very skeptical of antitrust enforcement. As they gained power in the 1980s, Democrats went on defense and began to turn to what Berman calls an “economic style” of thinking.

The economic style emphasized efficiency first and foremost, dismissing other goals. Through this frame, the point of antitrust was simply to make markets as efficient as possible.

That meant that antitrust regulators focused only on whether a merger would raise consumer prices. BORK BORK BORK!

Even in cases where officials thought they could win, they started to do assessments of whether the merger would raise prices or not. If it would, they would move forward. If it wouldn’t, they wouldn’t even try to stop the merger, even if it might reduce competition in other respects.

The results of the lax enforcement regime have been stark.

Concentration of businesses has increased markedly since the 1970s. Competition has fallen. In the 1990s, a profitable business had a 50 percent chance of being profitable in 10 years; today it has an 80 percent chance. That’s an indication that entrenched businesses are using market power to squelch rivals.

The failure of antitrust policy is linked to rising inequality. The gap between the rich and everyone else started to widen substantially in the 1980s.

Between 1975 and 2014, households in the bottom 60 percent of income saw income rise 9 percent. Income grew 22 percent for those in the 80th percentile. It grew a stunning 36 percent for those at the 95th percentile.

One calculation suggests that between 1975 and 2020, the economy transferred a staggering $50 trillion from working Americans to the wealthy.

Early trustbusters worried this kind of concentration of wealth and power could damage democracy. And, given our current predicament, they appear to have been right. Billionaires gave a staggering, record-breaking $881 million to candidates in the midterms.

Almost all of that money went to Republicans who are seen as pro-business, and who are also increasingly embracing authoritarian attacks on democratic norms and institutions like the J6 coup attempt.

The Penguin Random House/Simon & Schuster might not have raised prices for consumers. But it would have reduced payments for authors — increasing inequality by allowing (very, very rich) corporations to keep more money from (some rich, some not so rich) authors.

And it would have reduced the number of books published. That would have cut access to ideas in the public sphere.

A shift in antitrust enforcement philosophy won’t reverse wealth inequality or save democracy all at once or all on its own. But after four decades of increased business concentration and growing oligarchy, it’s well past time to start busting trusts again.

Hopefully the Biden Administration’s new focus indicates a long-term shift by Democratic leadership away from a model based solely on efficiency, and back to a recognition that antitrust can be a tool to restrain the wealthy and powerful for the public good.

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an 11 22 maker said better than hu b/c no compassion; team human tenant w/ perfect record booted b/c potential higher profit out there; encourage empty.

The senator tasked with overseeing federal antitrust enforcement is urging the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether a Texas-based company’s price-setting software is undermining competition and pushing up rents.

Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, sent a letter to the DOJ’s Antitrust Division this month. It was also signed by two other Democrats, Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey.

“We are concerned that the use of this rate setting software essentially amounts to a cartel to artificially inflate rental rates in multifamily residential buildings,” the letter said. It encouraged the DOJ to “take appropriate action to protect renters and competition in the residential rental markets.”

In mid-October, a ProPublica investigation documented how real estate tech company RealPage’s price-setting software uses nearby competitors’ nonpublic rent data to feed an algorithm that suggests what landlords should charge for available apartments each day. Legal experts said the algorithm may be enabling violations of antitrust laws.

ProPublica detailed how RealPage’s User Group, a forum that includes landlords who adopt the company’s software, had grown to more than 1,000 members, who meet in private at an annual conference and take part in quarterly phone calls. The senators raised specific questions about the group, saying, “We are concerned about potential anticompetitive coordination taking place through the RealPage User Group.”

RealPage did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

RealPage has said that the company “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner” and that its software prioritizes a property’s own internal supply and demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors’ rents. The company has said its software helps reduce the risk of collusion that would occur if landlords relied on phone surveys of competitors to manually price their units.

The DOJ declined to comment on the letter.

The department five years ago reviewed RealPage’s plan to acquire its biggest competitor in pricing software, but federal prosecutors declined to seek to block the merger, which doubled the number of apartments RealPage was pricing.

The senators noted that transaction, saying RealPage has made more than 10 acquisitions since 2016. They said in data-intensive industries, “the ability to acquire more data can result in the algorithms suggesting higher prices and can also increase the barriers to entry” for other competitors. The lawmakers encouraged the department “to consider looking back at RealPage’s past behavior to determine whether any of it was anticompetitive.”

The letter follows two others sent by lawmakers urging the DOJ or Federal Trade Commission to investigate RealPage. Since ProPublica’s investigation was published, three lawsuits have been filed on behalf of renters alleging that the software is artificially inflating rents and facilitating collusion. RealPage has denied allegations in a lawsuit filed in San Diego, and it has not responded to calls for comment about the other two legal actions, filed in federal district court in Seattle.

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