Boss politics antitrust
Trump will use Xi Xinping’s “anti-corruption” playbook.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy
Xi Jinping inaugurated his second term with an anti-corruption purge that ran from 2012–2015, resulting in a massive turnover in the power structures of Chinese society.
At the time, people inside and outside of China believed that Xi was using the crackdown to target his political enemies and consolidate power. Certainly, that was the effect of the purge, which paved the way for reforms to Chinese law that have effectively allowed Xi to hold office for life.
In 2018, Peter Lorentzen (USF Econ) and Xi Lu (NUS Policy) published a paper that used clever empirical methods to get to the bottom of this question:
Working from the extensive data-files published during the corruption trials of the purged officials, Lorentzen and Xi Liu were able to estimate the likelihood that an official had really been corrupt. They concluded that overwhelmingly, the anti-corruption purges did target corrupt officials, some of them very highly placed.
But when they considered the social graph of those defenestrated officials, they found that they came from blocs that were rivals of Xi Jinping and his circle, while officials who were loyal to Xi Jinping’s were spared, even when they were corrupt.
In other words, Xi Jinping’s anticorruption efforts targeted genuinely corrupt officials — but only if they supported Xi’s rivals. Xi’s own cronies were exempted from this. Xi did use the anticorruption effort to consolidate power, but that doesn’t mean he prosecuted the innocent — rather, he selectively prosecuted the guilty.
Donald Trump will be America’s next president. He campaigned against “elites” and won the support of Americans who were rightly furious at being ripped off and abused by big business. The Biden administration had done much to tackle this corruption, starting with July 2020’s 72-point executive order creating a “whole of government” approach to fighting corporate power:
https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby
Trump will have to decide what to do about these efforts. It’s easy to say that Trump will just kill them all and let giant, predatory corporations rip, but I think that’s wrong. After all, the Google antitrust case that the DoJ just won started under the last Trump administration. Trump also sued to block the absolutely terrible merger between Warner and AT&T.
I think it’s safer to say that Trump will selectively target businesses for anticorruption enforcement — including antitrust — based on whether they oppose him or suck up to him. I think American business leaders know it, too, which is why every tech boss lined up to give Trump a public rim-job last week:
https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/i_wonder
Trump killed the AT&T-Time Warner merger to punish CNN. He went after Google to punish “woke” tech firms. That doesn’t make AT&T, Time Warner or Google good. They’re terrible monopolists and the US government should be making their lives miserable.
Trump will not need to falsify evidence against corporations that are disloyal to him. All of America’s big businesses are cesspits of sleaze, fraud and predation. Every merger that is being teed up now for the coming four years is illegal under the antitrust laws that we stopped enforcing in the Reagan era and only dusted off again for four years under Biden. They’re all guilty, which means that Trump will be able to bring a valid case against any of them.
This will create a trap for people who hate Trump but don’t pay close attention to anticorruption cases. It’s a trap that Trump sprung successfully in his first term, when he lashed out at the “intelligence community” — the brutal, corrupt, vicious, lawless American spy agencies that are the sworn enemies of working people and the the struggle for justice at home and abroad — and American liberals decided that the enemy of their enemy was their friend, and energetically sold one another Robert Mueller votive candles:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/
Over the next four years, Trump will use antitrust and other corruption-taming regulations to selective punish crooked companies. He won’t target them because they’re crooked: he’ll target them because they aren’t sufficiently loyal to him.
If you let your hatred of Trump blind you to the crookedness of these companies, you lose and Trump wins. The reason Trump will find it easy to punish these companies is that they are all guilty. If you let yourself forget that, if you treat your enemy’s enemy as your friend, then Trump will point at his political rivals and call them apologists for corruption and sleaze — and he’ll be right.
It is possible for Trump to fight corruption corruptly. That’s exactly what he’ll do. But just because Trump hates these companies, it doesn’t follow that we should love them.
