Donald Trump should apply Teddy Roosevelt's monopoly busting to tech
"President Donald Trump has an opportunity to follow in former President Teddy Roosevelt’s footsteps.
Will Donald Trump follow TR’s lead?
...Roosevelt built a strong reputation by
going after the trusts, huge combinations that placed control of entire industries in the hands of one or a few men.
He broke up John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, the Google of its day.
He shut down J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Co., which would have monopolized rail transportation in much of the United States.
And he pursued numerous other cases (45 in all) that broke up monopolies and returned competition to markets.
...
Monopolies are an economic and political threat
Big monopolies aren’t just an economic threat:
They’re a political threat.
Because they’re largely free of market constraints, they don’t have to put all their energy into making a better product for less money.
Instead, they put a lot of their energy into political manipulation to protect their monopoly.
...Today, things look a lot like Teddy Roosevelt’s era.
A few monopolies occupy much of the tech world: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google —
FANG, as they’re often abbreviated.
They gobble up potential competitors, as Facebook did with WhatsApp and Instagram.
...Facing a similar situation, Roosevelt declared,
“When aggregated wealth demands what is unfair, its immense power can be met only by the still greater power of the people as a whole.”
...With today’s economy dominated by the FANG companies, will Donald Trump — another brash New Yorker who found himself in the White House — follow TR’s lead?
Perhaps a better question is, why wouldn’t he?"
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Students bark in protest to save the trees
We’re determined to fight this egregious measure because constitutionally-protected rights should never be subject to a popularity vote. The wealthy elitists behind I-1639 want to turn a right into a regulated privilege. This measure was only designed to have a chilling effect on the exercise of a constitutional right by honest citizens while having no impact at all on criminals, and we cannot let it go unchallenged.
Vacancies for doctor and nurse positions have reached all-time highs.
Mexico and three Central American countries have filed a protest with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights over President Trump’s new asylum policy, arguing their citizens should be allowed to flee their countries to find refuge in the U.S.It was a moment of the kind that changes lives. At a press conference held by climate activists Extinction Rebellion last week, two of us journalists pressed the organisers on whether their aims were realistic. They have called, for example, for UK carbon emissions to be reduced to net zero by 2025. Wouldn’t it be better, we asked, to pursue some intermediate aims?
A young woman called Lizia Woolf stepped forward. She hadn’t spoken before, but the passion, grief and fury of her response was utterly compelling. “What is it that you are asking me as a 20-year-old to face and to accept about my future and my life? … This is an emergency. We are facing extinction. When you ask questions like that, what is it you want me to feel?” We had no answer.Softer aims might be politically realistic, but they are physically unrealistic. Only shifts commensurate with the scale of our existential crises have any prospect of averting them. Hopeless realism, tinkering at the edges of the problem, got us into this mess. It will not get us out.
