4 ms·

neoliberal deregulation and regulatory capture, not necessarily in that order, has basically killed federal consumer protection in the US.

scrubs 1y ago
And it can get worse. Over shooting right (left) invariably leads to overshoot left (right) which we absolutely do not need either. The American sense (when we get off our butts and do it) is common sense, slowly changing law that always apportions control in equal parts to accountability. It's the last part that is more galling (because increasingly we've failed) and ultimately will be the more decisive in any future inflection point.
- idiotsecant 1y ago
  I think the century of American dominance is probably over. Maybe we can fight our way back to having a functional government, maybe not. I think either way our position in the world order is already diminished and will steadily diminish further. I can see a future where America is a strange backwater, reliant on resource extraction and rules over by a grubby and constantly shifting mafia state.
  - DaSHacka 1y ago
    And who would supersede the states by picking up the mantle?
    - sneak 1y ago
      The US wasn’t the dominant superpower due to cooperation or agreement or leadership, it was the result of pure technological force. Oppenheimer, Teller, and countless nameless others at NASA and Lockheed and Boeing and DARPA. The US built the best weapons, spy planes, launch vehicles, satellites, and communications systems, and was willing to take a no-holds-barred approach to geopolitical strategy. This led to a circumstance which it seems was unparalleled in history thus far. Who else is able to commit such technological progress to being able to command the world order by edict? China, perhaps, but I don’t see the next TSMC or SpaceX or OpenAI or Google starting there. Technology is the name of the game. (My own personal take is that mass scale reusable rockets is the key strategic piece to geopolitical dominance over the next 50-100 years, with perhaps the ability to effectively integrate AI as an alternate or close second.) It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA.
      - DaSHacka 1y ago
        > It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA. And why do you think it couldn't remain that way? Considering SpaceX, OpenAI, and Google were made far, far closer to today than to WWII, why would the assumption be that the output suddenly stops?
        adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
        well in the past year, we have stopped funding science in the US, arrested and deported thousands of foreign students here legally, removing the pipeline for the smartest people in the world to move to the US and start world changing companies, and started a trade war with the entire world, making American businesses much less competitive at buying/selling goods internationally. to consider your examples specifically, Musk and Brin were both immigrants to the US, and musk specifically did exactly the type of visa shenanigans that now is landing people in El Salvador
        sneak 1y ago
        The US used to be run by people with the ability to think strategically, or by people who listened to educated people who could think strategically. The current US leadership either allows or endorses the capricious whims of an TV-educated idiot to consistently undermine national security and the most fundamental national interests. The complete and total mismanagement of the covid pandemic stands as a perfect example of the scale of the positively massive amount of preventable destruction being wrought presently. That’s just one out of many. Hard to build high level stuff while the cities are flooding or burning, measles are spreading, the food is becoming toxic, the water is becoming undrinkable, out of control rogue agencies are kidnapping people indiscriminately off the streets, the literacy levels are falling precipitously, and a greater and greater percentage of the population struggles to buy food, much less healthcare or secondary education (or a useful primary education). You simply won’t have the talent pools required to do hard things at scale after a while. This is to say nothing of the complete unpredictability of the economics of supply chains, as incoherent economic policies are arbitrarily whipsawing tariffs around on a monthly basis. It becomes impossible to plan a year in advance. You need some basic levels of functioning society and infrastructure and economy to build advanced institutions and structures and companies and technology. The US has been attacking its own society’s foundations for decades, and has recently accelerated the pace substantially. I personally anticipate civil breakdown within a generation, certainly not continued technological innovation.
    - rfrey 1y ago
      Corporations. European politics can be captured by large corporations the same way the US has been. It was unthinkable in the US, 50 years ago, that corporations would call the shots politically. It can happen elsewhere as well.
  - ptero 1y ago
    As an American, I would welcome the world without American domination. Or without any single country domination for that matter. Competition of systems is good for the world. It doesn't need to turn the US into some grubby mafia state. It could, but I think it is unlikely. But the road for both the US and the world IMO goes down before it goes up as many systems and alliances around the world that depend on US domination shift or crumble. My 2c.
    - ordinaryradical 1y ago
      If it’s not America it will be China and I don’t think you want to live in that world.
      - DaSHacka 1y ago
        With their population pyramid I doubt it'd stay that way for long, though.
      - dinfinity 1y ago
        Depends on how far down the US is going to slide. It's sadly well underway to become much, much worse than China is (or will become).
        scrubs 1y ago
        It's not clear to me that China is batting that well. I do not wish bad upon the Chinese citizenry, and China has done well in its own day since the 1960s. But don't forget at the same time where China was during the end of the British power, nor Chinese revolutions, nor the state control over the Chinese populace. Although the US vastly overweights what we think non-US-democracies would do (think Middle East and our meddling there) given the chance for US like freedom, I do not think we're seeing China in the natural so to speak. HK, for example, was not pleased with the "two systems one country" rule the CPP landed on. Add in the fact that trade can no longer be assumed to be Chinese central, and China is slowly getting dragged into wars through Russia, and China still hasn't tried its mettle with Taiwan. A post invasion China will hit different. It's got internal issues of employment, real estate, have v. have nots ... it's got its hand full. My guess is that China, like the US is seeing now on stretches, will be the master of its own demise. In the US a major contributing factor to Trump is the fact the US Congress has become an institutional zero especially since Gingrich. That power vacuum has been filled by the Executive branch under Trump. There's more to it of course, but this two-part crisis is an important matter to keep in mind. China takes its state craft more seriously in some sense, but that seriousness may get it into trouble. And in fact, several articles in the Economist have argued that if China wants to keep 5%+ YOY GDP growth, the CCP will have to take a back seat which is the one thing it will not do. CCP political power is foremost; good economy is damn nice to have to when you can get it -- and the CCP will go after it hard -- but there are limits ...
- MSFT_Edging 1y ago
  When has the US actually overshot left though? There was a short period of social justice awareness, but that didn't translate to actual leftwing economic legislation. Even protests and movements with left wing goals were co-opted by the nominally center-right establishment and neutered. This both-sides stuff gets me, man. Our history is by and large very right wing and every time there's a flutter of left leaning ideas, people chalk it up to some far-left political success and therefore the far right backlash is deserved, as if things ever actually went left in the first place.
  - xphilter 1y ago
    They’re talking about those times we let women vote, implemented social security and got rid of Jim Crow. Really overshot lol.
    - MSFT_Edging 1y ago
      Ah yes, the period of slightly-less-suffering. What a monumental mistake on all our parts...
- Arubis 1y ago
  When we “overshot left” it was by electing a centrist cishet man who identified as Christian and had different colored skin from the prior presidents. Overshooting right has us building concentration camps.
  - malfist 1y ago
    We overshot so far to the left on the ACA that it was a Republican proposal a decade prior. We overshot on the right and just stripped health care away from 12 million people who can't afford it to pay for tax cuts for the rich
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - inquirerGeneral 1y ago
    [dead]
  - scrubs 1y ago
    The dyad left-v-right is just stupid. The issues are complex. We must move under and out of the political bs of conservative v. liberal if we're gonna get anywhere.
    - Arubis 1y ago
      While I generally agree with this framing, “whatever you call what’s currently holding the reins of power” vs. “not that” still feels useful currently; the empowered party and its ideology are pretty extreme.
- thrance 1y ago
  Surely you're joking, right? The current administration building concentration camps and cutting medicare for 12 millions people is just balancing... what? Obamacare? Don't be ridiculous.
  - scrubs 1y ago
    Take the stupid of the far right and idiots like Trump, then multiply through by -1. It presents differently but it'll still screw stuff up keeping the idiocy in cycle. There's morons on left too! The middle ground is far, far preferred. Instiutional competency is much preferred. Course correction is preferred. Equal justice under law is preferred. But as I say under the political noise is a larger problem: failure to balance control with accountability. Congress isn't checking Trump in any substantive way. The DOJ probably took too long to prosecute Trump. And on the right the housing crisis booked no jail time after a run of deregulation. Failure to respect due process or judges orders is another problem on the right. Forget outrage: where are the real world consequences? Congress time and time again is directly implicated in many of these issues. If Congress was doing its job instead of pretty boys shadow boxing twaddle wedge issues for complex problems on TV, there'd be less of a power vacuum that Trump ultimately filled. I think one would have to be nieve in thinking the left did not play a major part in its own demise 2016 and 2024.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
fuzzy_biscuit 1y ago
I don't see the neoliberal deregulation you're talking about, so I'll bite. Regulatory capture I have seen too often e.g. net neutrality getting killed by a Verizon cronie masquerading as a public servant in the FCC. However, from my perspective, it's been mostly conservative powers undoing consumer protections. Unless you mean liberalism in the more European sense, in which case I agree.
- nyeah 1y ago
  "Neoliberal" means free markets. Most US conservatives insisted on free markets from 1980 until 2016. They claimed it would benefit the overall US economy (and maybe it has). They claimed those benefits would be shared by all Americans (which listen to them now). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
- HybridCurve 1y ago
  The Asian Financial Crisis in 1997: deregulated capital flows allowed speculators to rapidly pull money out of countries like Thailand, causing their currencies to collapse. The IMF stepped in, but their 'rescue' packages demanded strict conditions- forced privatization, and further deregulation, which often made things worse. And let's not forget Black Wednesday, when speculators broke the Bank of England. This was called "a textbook case of a speculative attack enabled by capital mobility" which is a core neoliberal policy. Just like all politics: never trust the meaning or identity of something derived from it's headline, title, name, or label- those are always the first lies we are told.
claytongulick 1y ago
Did you read TFA? This had nothing to do with neoliberalism or whatever. Everyone agreed with the spirit of the rule, even the two republican appointees who voted against it. They voted against it because the FTC cheated and broke their own rule making process, they believed it would be struck down by the courts because of this. They were right. The courts sympathized with the rule, but held that the FTC cheated it's process, and that if left unchecked it could create a tyrannical FTC issuing rules at their whim, ignoring the true economic impact of their rule. All this court ruling said is that the FTC needs to follow the law and their own defined process for rule making. They are free to implement this rule, they just need to do it the right way. While we may not be happy with the short term effect, this was a good ruling. The FTC will go back and do this properly, and hopefully next time will follow the law when making rules.

scrubs 1y ago

And it can get worse. Over shooting right (left) invariably leads to overshoot left (right) which we absolutely do not need either. The American sense (when we get off our butts and do it) is common sense, slowly changing law that always apportions control in equal parts to accountability. It's the last part that is more galling (because increasingly we've failed) and ultimately will be the more decisive in any future inflection point.

idiotsecant 1y ago
I think the century of American dominance is probably over. Maybe we can fight our way back to having a functional government, maybe not. I think either way our position in the world order is already diminished and will steadily diminish further. I can see a future where America is a strange backwater, reliant on resource extraction and rules over by a grubby and constantly shifting mafia state.
- DaSHacka 1y ago
  And who would supersede the states by picking up the mantle?
  - sneak 1y ago
    The US wasn’t the dominant superpower due to cooperation or agreement or leadership, it was the result of pure technological force. Oppenheimer, Teller, and countless nameless others at NASA and Lockheed and Boeing and DARPA. The US built the best weapons, spy planes, launch vehicles, satellites, and communications systems, and was willing to take a no-holds-barred approach to geopolitical strategy. This led to a circumstance which it seems was unparalleled in history thus far. Who else is able to commit such technological progress to being able to command the world order by edict? China, perhaps, but I don’t see the next TSMC or SpaceX or OpenAI or Google starting there. Technology is the name of the game. (My own personal take is that mass scale reusable rockets is the key strategic piece to geopolitical dominance over the next 50-100 years, with perhaps the ability to effectively integrate AI as an alternate or close second.) It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA.
    - DaSHacka 1y ago
      > It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA. And why do you think it couldn't remain that way? Considering SpaceX, OpenAI, and Google were made far, far closer to today than to WWII, why would the assumption be that the output suddenly stops?
      - adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
        well in the past year, we have stopped funding science in the US, arrested and deported thousands of foreign students here legally, removing the pipeline for the smartest people in the world to move to the US and start world changing companies, and started a trade war with the entire world, making American businesses much less competitive at buying/selling goods internationally. to consider your examples specifically, Musk and Brin were both immigrants to the US, and musk specifically did exactly the type of visa shenanigans that now is landing people in El Salvador
      - sneak 1y ago
        The US used to be run by people with the ability to think strategically, or by people who listened to educated people who could think strategically. The current US leadership either allows or endorses the capricious whims of an TV-educated idiot to consistently undermine national security and the most fundamental national interests. The complete and total mismanagement of the covid pandemic stands as a perfect example of the scale of the positively massive amount of preventable destruction being wrought presently. That’s just one out of many. Hard to build high level stuff while the cities are flooding or burning, measles are spreading, the food is becoming toxic, the water is becoming undrinkable, out of control rogue agencies are kidnapping people indiscriminately off the streets, the literacy levels are falling precipitously, and a greater and greater percentage of the population struggles to buy food, much less healthcare or secondary education (or a useful primary education). You simply won’t have the talent pools required to do hard things at scale after a while. This is to say nothing of the complete unpredictability of the economics of supply chains, as incoherent economic policies are arbitrarily whipsawing tariffs around on a monthly basis. It becomes impossible to plan a year in advance. You need some basic levels of functioning society and infrastructure and economy to build advanced institutions and structures and companies and technology. The US has been attacking its own society’s foundations for decades, and has recently accelerated the pace substantially. I personally anticipate civil breakdown within a generation, certainly not continued technological innovation.
  - rfrey 1y ago
    Corporations. European politics can be captured by large corporations the same way the US has been. It was unthinkable in the US, 50 years ago, that corporations would call the shots politically. It can happen elsewhere as well.
- ptero 1y ago
  As an American, I would welcome the world without American domination. Or without any single country domination for that matter. Competition of systems is good for the world. It doesn't need to turn the US into some grubby mafia state. It could, but I think it is unlikely. But the road for both the US and the world IMO goes down before it goes up as many systems and alliances around the world that depend on US domination shift or crumble. My 2c.
  - ordinaryradical 1y ago
    If it’s not America it will be China and I don’t think you want to live in that world.
    - DaSHacka 1y ago
      With their population pyramid I doubt it'd stay that way for long, though.
    - dinfinity 1y ago
      Depends on how far down the US is going to slide. It's sadly well underway to become much, much worse than China is (or will become).
      - scrubs 1y ago
        It's not clear to me that China is batting that well. I do not wish bad upon the Chinese citizenry, and China has done well in its own day since the 1960s. But don't forget at the same time where China was during the end of the British power, nor Chinese revolutions, nor the state control over the Chinese populace. Although the US vastly overweights what we think non-US-democracies would do (think Middle East and our meddling there) given the chance for US like freedom, I do not think we're seeing China in the natural so to speak. HK, for example, was not pleased with the "two systems one country" rule the CPP landed on. Add in the fact that trade can no longer be assumed to be Chinese central, and China is slowly getting dragged into wars through Russia, and China still hasn't tried its mettle with Taiwan. A post invasion China will hit different. It's got internal issues of employment, real estate, have v. have nots ... it's got its hand full. My guess is that China, like the US is seeing now on stretches, will be the master of its own demise. In the US a major contributing factor to Trump is the fact the US Congress has become an institutional zero especially since Gingrich. That power vacuum has been filled by the Executive branch under Trump. There's more to it of course, but this two-part crisis is an important matter to keep in mind. China takes its state craft more seriously in some sense, but that seriousness may get it into trouble. And in fact, several articles in the Economist have argued that if China wants to keep 5%+ YOY GDP growth, the CCP will have to take a back seat which is the one thing it will not do. CCP political power is foremost; good economy is damn nice to have to when you can get it -- and the CCP will go after it hard -- but there are limits ...
MSFT_Edging 1y ago
When has the US actually overshot left though? There was a short period of social justice awareness, but that didn't translate to actual leftwing economic legislation. Even protests and movements with left wing goals were co-opted by the nominally center-right establishment and neutered. This both-sides stuff gets me, man. Our history is by and large very right wing and every time there's a flutter of left leaning ideas, people chalk it up to some far-left political success and therefore the far right backlash is deserved, as if things ever actually went left in the first place.
- xphilter 1y ago
  They’re talking about those times we let women vote, implemented social security and got rid of Jim Crow. Really overshot lol.
  - MSFT_Edging 1y ago
    Ah yes, the period of slightly-less-suffering. What a monumental mistake on all our parts...
Arubis 1y ago
When we “overshot left” it was by electing a centrist cishet man who identified as Christian and had different colored skin from the prior presidents. Overshooting right has us building concentration camps.
- malfist 1y ago
  We overshot so far to the left on the ACA that it was a Republican proposal a decade prior. We overshot on the right and just stripped health care away from 12 million people who can't afford it to pay for tax cuts for the rich
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- inquirerGeneral 1y ago
  [dead]
- scrubs 1y ago
  The dyad left-v-right is just stupid. The issues are complex. We must move under and out of the political bs of conservative v. liberal if we're gonna get anywhere.
  - Arubis 1y ago
    While I generally agree with this framing, “whatever you call what’s currently holding the reins of power” vs. “not that” still feels useful currently; the empowered party and its ideology are pretty extreme.
thrance 1y ago
Surely you're joking, right? The current administration building concentration camps and cutting medicare for 12 millions people is just balancing... what? Obamacare? Don't be ridiculous.
- scrubs 1y ago
  Take the stupid of the far right and idiots like Trump, then multiply through by -1. It presents differently but it'll still screw stuff up keeping the idiocy in cycle. There's morons on left too! The middle ground is far, far preferred. Instiutional competency is much preferred. Course correction is preferred. Equal justice under law is preferred. But as I say under the political noise is a larger problem: failure to balance control with accountability. Congress isn't checking Trump in any substantive way. The DOJ probably took too long to prosecute Trump. And on the right the housing crisis booked no jail time after a run of deregulation. Failure to respect due process or judges orders is another problem on the right. Forget outrage: where are the real world consequences? Congress time and time again is directly implicated in many of these issues. If Congress was doing its job instead of pretty boys shadow boxing twaddle wedge issues for complex problems on TV, there'd be less of a power vacuum that Trump ultimately filled. I think one would have to be nieve in thinking the left did not play a major part in its own demise 2016 and 2024.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

fuzzy_biscuit 1y ago

I don't see the neoliberal deregulation you're talking about, so I'll bite. Regulatory capture I have seen too often e.g. net neutrality getting killed by a Verizon cronie masquerading as a public servant in the FCC. However, from my perspective, it's been mostly conservative powers undoing consumer protections. Unless you mean liberalism in the more European sense, in which case I agree.

nyeah 1y ago
"Neoliberal" means free markets. Most US conservatives insisted on free markets from 1980 until 2016. They claimed it would benefit the overall US economy (and maybe it has). They claimed those benefits would be shared by all Americans (which listen to them now). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
HybridCurve 1y ago
The Asian Financial Crisis in 1997: deregulated capital flows allowed speculators to rapidly pull money out of countries like Thailand, causing their currencies to collapse. The IMF stepped in, but their 'rescue' packages demanded strict conditions- forced privatization, and further deregulation, which often made things worse. And let's not forget Black Wednesday, when speculators broke the Bank of England. This was called "a textbook case of a speculative attack enabled by capital mobility" which is a core neoliberal policy. Just like all politics: never trust the meaning or identity of something derived from it's headline, title, name, or label- those are always the first lies we are told.

claytongulick 1y ago

Did you read TFA? This had nothing to do with neoliberalism or whatever. Everyone agreed with the spirit of the rule, even the two republican appointees who voted against it. They voted against it because the FTC cheated and broke their own rule making process, they believed it would be struck down by the courts because of this. They were right. The courts sympathized with the rule, but held that the FTC cheated it's process, and that if left unchecked it could create a tyrannical FTC issuing rules at their whim, ignoring the true economic impact of their rule. All this court ruling said is that the FTC needs to follow the law and their own defined process for rule making. They are free to implement this rule, they just need to do it the right way. While we may not be happy with the short term effect, this was a good ruling. The FTC will go back and do this properly, and hopefully next time will follow the law when making rules.