Medium has the Caitlin Johnstone article Russiagate Explained.

The term Gish gallop refers to a fallacious debate tactic in which one barrages one’s opposition with a deluge of individually weak arguments which take far too long to debunk individually in a way that sustains the audience’s interest. This is all Russiagate amounts to. When Russiagaters tell you that there’s “too much smoke for there not to be fire” and there’s so much incriminating news coming out that there’s definitely a there there, they are unwittingly telling you “I’ve been won over by a Gish gallop fallacy.

This is the first time I have heard a name given to this debate technique. I have observed this technique used many times in other situations, too. It also irks me to see so many people fall for this.

The Dictionary of American History has the article Fair-Trade Laws. There is a section that discusses Domestic Fair Trade.

In the United States, fair-trade laws were first enacted in California in 1931 to protect small retailers and druggists.

Growing up in the 50s and 60s as the son of a small drugstore owner in Massachusetts, I may have had more awareness of fair trade laws than most of my peers. In my previous post The Antitrust Paradox, I had the excerpt that said the following:

The paradox of antitrust enforcement was that legal intervention artificially raised prices by protecting inefficient competitors from competition.

I immediately thought about the fair trade laws which might rightly be the target of the above complaint. I was quite aware of the history as described in the Domestic Fair Trade article.

In the 1950s, fair trade was hotly contested among various corporations and in the court system, particularly at the state level. By 1956, eight state supreme courts had ruled against fair-trade statutes, making the laws meaningless in some areas. Manufacturers were no longer able to dictate the retail price at which their goods could be sold, which was at the heart of fair-trade laws. Supporters of fair trade redoubled their efforts at the state and national level in the 1950s and 1960s, but by mid-1975, fair trade had been eliminated in 25 states.

At the time this overturn of the fair trade laws was happening, I could see the problems that these laws caused. Ironically, the fair trade laws passed out of existence in 25 states three years before Bork’s book was published. In thinking over the relation of Bork’s criticism of the anti-trust laws as raising prices and the connection to the fair trade laws, I came to realize that the situation was more complex than these rulings would encompass. When the courts looked at consumer prices alone, or fair trade alone, or anti-trust alone, they failed to take into account the interaction of these factors. A decision that fixed a problem in one sphere could cause untold damage in one or more of these and other related spheres. Is this any way to interpret laws? No wonder we have such a mess. We have lawyers and judges making decisions about domains in which they are way outside their areas of expertise.

WikiPedia has the article The Antitrust Paradox.

The Antitrust Paradox is a 1978 book by Robert Bork that criticized the state of United States antitrust law in the 1970s.

This book is important because “The Antitrust Paradox has shaped antitrust law …” Not having read the book, but only after reading another article and this WikiPedia article, I take the gist of the book as the following:

Bork argued that the original intent of antitrust laws as well as economic efficiency make consumer welfare and the protection of competition, rather than competitors, the only goals of antitrust law.[3] Thus, while it was appropriate to prohibit cartels that fix prices and divide markets and mergers that create monopolies, practices that are allegedly exclusionary, such as vertical agreements and price discrimination, did not harm consumers and so should not be prohibited. The paradox of antitrust enforcement was that legal intervention artificially raised prices by protecting inefficient competitors from competition.

I see a very major flaw in this analysis. “Consumer welfare” is a very short-sighted view of what is good for the economy and society. There is another very important group that can be identified, but is not mentioned in anything I have read about the book. That group consists of the workers.

With Bork’s focus on consumers, business has focused on another class that they could victimize. Instead of raising prices to which Bork shifted the courts to focus on, business realized that it could focus on cutting costs. With monopolies and cartels, you gain control over suppliers of goods to sell. You can force the suppliers to cut quality standards, outsource labor, cut wages, and accelerate the use of automation.

It is rather perverse economics and sociology to fail to see that consumers and workers tend to be the same people. So while you keep prices low to protect people in their role as consumers, the courts seem to have no care about keeping wages up to protect the same people in their roles as consumers.

We have people in judicial positions making decisions on what is good for society while they seem to have no clue as to how society works. Society is also an ecosystem, meaning that it is complex with many parts interacting with each other. If you mess with one part, there are all sorts of unintended (or unrecognized) reactions in the other parts. If you do not take a holistic view of the system, you can fix one part while doing great damage to another part. This is exactly what Robert Bork and the judicial system has done. Congress has taken no action to stop the damage.

My previous posts The Democrats Confront Monopoly and Big CEOs’ Thanksgiving Tax Feast also relate to this topic.

Inequality.org has an article about the video Big CEOs’ Thanksgiving Tax Feast.

The trouble with this video (not the article) is that it does not explain why tax cuts won’t produce more jobs at higher wages. I’d like to ask the people who think that tax cuts for corporations will stimulate the economy, why do they think that a company that is sitting on lots of cash because they can’t find anything worth investing in will suddenly decide to invest if they have more cash? If companies can’t find customers for what they can already produce, why would they think they could make money by producing more? Corporations are doing fine boosting their profits by cutting production and cutting wages. If they don’t sit on the cash they accumulate, they use it to buy up the competition so that they have more power to keep prices up in the face of falling demand. Monopoly power has never been good for the consumer no matter what Robert Bork wrote in his book “The Antitrust Paradox”.

The Wall Street Journal has the article George Soros’s $18 Billion Tax Shelter.

But others, including Mr. Soros and Michael Bloomberg, have turned private foundations into massive de facto lobbying operations for bigger government and liberal causes like higher minimum wages, gun control, universal health care, and a carbon tax. Mr. Soros’s $18 billion gift alone is the equivalent of maybe 100 Heritage Foundations. This kind of weaponized philanthropy has the potential to undermine the American free enterprise system.

What a nasty man that George Soros is.

The biography of the article’s author is the following:

Mr. Moore is an economic consultant with FreedomWorks and a founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. He was a senior economic adviser to the Trump campaign.

I am glad we have these right wingnuts to expose those nasty liberals.

Seriously, though, the ability to make huge capital gains profits which will never be taxed is a distortion of our economy that needs to be addressed

Motherboard has the article To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet.

We must end our reliance​ on big telecom monopolies and build decentralized, affordable, locally owned internet infrastructure.

This is a possibility I had not considered. The Massachusetts fiber optic backbone goes right through Sturbridge. The town is already connected to it.

Naked Capitalism has the article Capitalism: Not With a Bang But With a (Prolonged) Whimper.

“How will capitalism end?” is the title of a brilliant book by the German thinker Wolfgang Streeck. (Verso, London 2016, published in India by Juggernaut Books.) It provides a cogent and persuasive critique of the nature of contemporary capitalism, and describes its ongoing extended demise, without surrendering to any optimism that as it fails to deliver even in terms of its own logic, all the nastiness and injustice it has generated must inevitably change for the better.

I don’t believe it is quite as dire as the book’s author and the article’s author think it is. It is normal for us not to be able to predict the future. If we can’t see the solution now, it is a failure of our imagination. It is not proof that there can be no solution. Some of us, particularly science fiction writers, can imagine a better future. We just don’t know exactly how we will get to that better future. Admittedly, the path to that future may not be smooth and painless.

The Guardian published the article Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media with a dateline of Thursday 17 March 2011 09.19 EDT.

Military’s ‘sock puppet’ software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda.

This article is over six years old. Remarkably, this indicates that the USA was developing a capability that they now disingenuously accuse Russia of using. One way to figure out what to accuse your enemy of doing is to pick the worst thing you have done yourself and accuse the enemy of doing it.

I can only imagine that our government has developed techniques of countering this type of weapon. Their only stumbling block is to convince the USA citizens that in this one tiny little aspect, we need to put constraints on the freedom of our press. They are evidently working at this countermeasure, and succeeding.

Medium has the Caitlin Johnstone article Lee Camp Just Destroyed The Entire Establishment Narrative About RT.

In the article she discusses the following Lee Camp video The Truth About RT America:

This is a sure sign that the oligarchs are worried. That’s at least a small step forward.

The Washington Monthly has the article The Democrats Confront Monopoly.

Taking on corporate concentration has gone from a fringe idea to a key plank of the party’s strategy. Here’s how that happened—and why it matters.

I have been saying for years that the recent failure to aggressively enforce the anti-trust laws was leading to a lot of our economic and societal ills. I never did understand all the forces that led to this abandonment of the policy that had done so much for the world.

This article explains the academic forces that were arrayed against anti-trust to drive it from the field of economics and thus law and politics.

As I was reading the article, I was waiting for some hint that the Democratic Party was serious about this. Toward the end of the article I was getting bored and tried to skim through to the punchline. I don’t think there is a punchline.

The Democratic Party, as now constituted, will never truly face the issue. Their donors won’t allow it. Senator Elizabeth Warren has shown her true colors by willingly trying to sell us Hillary Clinton, when Warren knew that Clinton was nothing like what Warren was trying to sell us.

It’s a lot to ask of a political candidate, in the midst of a campaign, to simultaneously run on an issue and teach voters what it is.

The above belief was the weakness of the Clinton campaign and most other Democratic candidate campaigns. Not believing this was the strength of Bernie Sanders’ campaign. A weak politician tries for what is politically possible in the current political climate. A strong leader knows that it is her or his job to change the current political climate.

The counter to the Bork argument that monopoly or oligopoly is good for the economy is the failure to understand how monopolies work. Monopoly wannabes may lower prices to drive their competition out of business, but when that job is done, the prices go way up.

The way Amazon and Walmart got to be so powerful was that for years their investors subsidized the low prices so that they could get to the promised land of monopoly. Now Amazon is going after the grocery market via Whole Foods’ drastic price cuts.