Newslet
What would be a yuuge story in any other year is being hidden under the deluge of Corona updates such as the one below (it’s already out of date since we have hit 3000 deaths daily for the last couple of days - passing 9/11). I find it amazing that the disease is killing more people than 9/11 everyday and yet there isn’t the kind of national outrage that we might expect. No one to bomb I suppose.
Now for the yuuge news: I am talking about the anti-trust lawsuit against Facebook. Both the FTC and the States want FB broken up. A similar (but less damning) effort against Google is already under way. I think Biden is going to have to address Big Tech head-on. If you want to read the extended legal case against Facebook, read Dina Srinivasan’s paper from 2019.
It’s important enough that I am going to add another topic to the roster of indepth T2B coverage after I am done with COVID (Codename: Viden), which is Biden’s tryst with Big Tech. Codename Ziden in honor of Zuck.
TGND
In five words: Trump made the GND possible.
The Obama era didn’t embrace radical solutions to the climate crisis. It didn’t see a merger of racial justice and climate justice movements. It didn’t see politicians getting elected on climate change platforms and youth mobilization that made climate its priority.
BLM (Black Lives Matter) went from a POC/Progressive issue to a mainstream topic this past year. Climate Change found political champions. None of this would have happened without Trump making Democrats so unhappy that they were willing to embrace far more strident politicians.
The entire party moved to the left.
Before Trump, the upper hand in the climate movement was - on balance - with the technocrats, the scientists and the organized environmental movement. Today, the worldwide face of the climate movement is a teenager who was trolled by Trump.
But now Biden has won. The question is how the organizational approach will build off the energy on the street AND a business friendly climate agenda.