Last week, it was reported that the Democrat party is struggling to raise funds as their major donors are withholding cash. Leadership at the DNC is plagued by infighting and chaos as they scramble to do basic things like keep the lights on.
thegatewaypundit.com/2025/06/t…
Trump Has Built a Record-Shattering War Chest as Democrats Struggle to Raise Funds | The Gateway Pundit | by Mike LaChance
Last week, it was reported that the Democrat party is struggling to raise funds as their major donors are withholding funds.Mike LaChance (Where Hope Finally Made a Comeback)
Cory Doctorow
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The paper's authors are Martin Gilens, a UCLA professor of Public Policy; and Northwestern's Benjamin Page, a professor of Decision Making. Gilens and Page studied a representative sample of 1,779 policy issues, analyzing the effect that the preferences of different groups of people had on the outcome. They wanted to find out what drove policy: money, or popularity?
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Cory Doctorow
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It's money. It's totally, utterly money. When billionaires want something, it literally doesn't matter how much the rest of us hate it, they're gonna get their way. When billionaires hate something, it doesn't matter how popular it is with the rest of us, we're not gonna get it.
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Cory Doctorow
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As Gilens and Page put it:
> economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
I know the cynics out there are hollering "no duh" at their computers right now, but bear with me here. Gilens and Page's research shows that you and I have *no* voice in policy outcomes.
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Cory Doctorow
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Based on these findings, the only way we can change society is to try and woo oligarchs so they champion our cause. This reduces democracy to a competition to see who can pour the most honey into a plutocrat's ear. Mass mobilizations - millions of people in the streets - only matter to the extent that they bring a tear to a billionaire's eye.
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Cory Doctorow
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This just *shattered* me. I've been haunted by it ever since. I've tried some tactical gambits based on this data, but honestly, I don't want to improve the world by swaying the ultra-rich. Mostly, I've spent the decade since I read the Gilens/Page paper working on mass mobilizations and mass opionion-influencing.
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Cory Doctorow
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I reasoned (or maybe rationalized) that while oligarchs were running the nation *now*, that was subject to change, and that was a change that I was *sure* wouldn't come from America's plutocrats committing mass class-suicide.
Then, something incredible happened. All this decade, a tide of antitrust vigor has swept the planet.
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Cory Doctorow
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The EU has passed big, muscular tech competition laws like the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and has by God *enforced* them, and have patched the enforcement weaknesses in the GDPR. EU member-states - France, Germany, Spain - have passed their own big, ambitious national laws that go further than DSA/DMA.
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Cory Doctorow
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Even Ireland - a country that deliberately prostrated itself to US Big Tech - is getting in on the act, with the country's Social Media Czar railing against the "enshittification" of tech:
independent.ie/business/techno…
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Chairman of Irish social media regulator says Europe should not be ‘seduced’ by Mario Draghi's claims
Adrian Weckler (Irish Independent)Cory Doctorow
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Not just the EU, of course. Australia and Canada have taken some big swings at Big Tech, and Canada is pressing ahead with its digital services tax of 3% for onshore earnings of tech companies with more than CAD20m in annual turnover, despite the fact that Trump has promised to end all trade talks with Canada in retaliation:
financialpost.com/technology/c…
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Digital Services Tax to stay in place despite G7 deal
Bloomberg News (Financial Post)Cory Doctorow
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Antitrust fever has swept both of the world's superpowers. Under Trump I, the DOJ and FTC brought key cases against Facebook and Google, and then Biden's antitrust enforcers *went to town* on all forms of monopoly, carrying on the Trump cases and reviving some of the law's most elegant weapons from a more civilized age, like the Robinson-Patman Act:
ftc.gov/news-events/news/press…
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FTC Sues PepsiCo for Rigging Soft Drink Competition
Federal Trade CommissionCory Doctorow
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Admittedly, Trump's FTC and DOJ have carried on some of Biden's work, even as they've killed some of the Biden era's most important cases, and made a general Trumpian mockery of the idea that antitrust law is a tool for economic justice:
economicpopulist.substack.com/…
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Weekly Rewind: 6/27/25
Economic Liberties (The Economic Populist)Cory Doctorow
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Trump killing antitrust law is *normal*. That's what politics have been like for this whole century, and it's what politics are like in every other domain: billionaires get their way on climate, on labor, on whatever bullshit they get into their fool fucking heads:
usatoday.com/story/entertainme…
But it's a mistake to think that Trump killed antitrust enforcement in the USA out of a special conservative deference to millionaires and enthusiasm for corrosive and predatory monopolies.
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Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez tie the knot in controversial wedding ceremony
Taijuan Moorman (USA TODAY)Cory Doctorow
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In the UK, four consecutive Conservative Prime Ministers presided over the best competition law enforcement in British history - and it was Labour's Keir Starmer who fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-head of Amazon UK:
pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/aut…
It is completely normal for both "progressive" and "conservative" parties to wield the entire apparatus of state to the benefit of powerful monopolists.
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Pluralistic: Keir Starmer appoints Jeff Bezos as his “first buddy” (22 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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The antitrust enforcement - in the US, the UK, the EU, Australia, Germany, France and Spain - are totally *aberrant*. And it's not just in these countries where political science's law of gravity reversed itself: there've been giant, brutal antitrust cases in Japan and South Korea.
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Cory Doctorow
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*China* has passed aggressive tech antitrust laws that strike directly at the giant Chinese tech companies that Cold War 2.0 creeps insist are just branches of the Chinese Communist Party:
pluralistic.net/2020/12/07/bac…
This is fucking *wild*.
This is *water flowing uphill*.
This is pigs flying.
This is hell freezing over.
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Pluralistic: 07 Dec 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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There is no billionaire constituency for antimonopoly work. Oligarchs aren't funneling dark money to trustbuster orgs. Antimonopoly work strikes at the beating heart of the system that creates and sustains billionaires.
This is a political outcome that the people want, and that billionaires hate, and billionaires are *losing*.
How is this happening? Why is this happening? I don't know, exactly.
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Cory Doctorow
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I suspect that some of this is related to Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Monopolists corrupt our political system, maim and impoverish workers, gouge their customers on enshittified, overpriced garbage. They are an existential threat to the survival of the human species.
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Cory Doctorow
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The system is *so* broken and the mainstream of politics endlessly gaslights us, telling us that corrupt and degraded institutions are either just fine ("America Was Always Great" -H. Clinton) or need to be destroyed, rather than redeemed ("Delete CFPB" -E. Musk). People *know* that the system only caters to the whims of billionaires and tells the rest of us to eat shit. They *hate* the fucking system.
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Cory Doctorow
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Over and over again, we've seen outbreaks of furious, joyous, uncompromising leftist activism: Occupy, Bernie 2016, Bernie 2020, George Floyd, the Women's March, No Kings, Climate Strikes, on and on. Over and over, liberal "centrists" have joined with the right to crush these movements.
Meanwhile, the right has only moved from strength to strength by offering a libidinal, furious promise of root-and-branch change.
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Cory Doctorow
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The *only* team that's promising radical change is the right. Parties like UK Labour and the Democrats offer austerity and genocide with slightly more polite aesthetics ("[If I'm elected], fundamentally nothing will change" -J. Biden).
I think that centrist suppression of the left has pushed 90 percent of the energy for major change into right wing nihilist movements, but the anti-corporate, anti-monopolist energy has not dissipated.
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Cory Doctorow
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It's formed a kind of invisible political wind that has filled the sails of these antimonopoly projects all over the world.
But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Zohran Mamdani just won the NYC Democratic mayoral primary election. That wasn't supposed to happen. The worst people on Earth showered the hereditary King of New York with so much money it was coming out of his fucking *pores* and he still ate shit.
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Cory Doctorow
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Guys who've got so much money they were able to get Columbia University to collude in shipping its students off to gulags for having the temerity to oppose genocide tried to do it to Mamdani and we kicked their teeth in.
The world is organized around the whims of billionaires, but it doesn't have to be.
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Cory Doctorow
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Most of us are not esoteric authoritarian freaks pining for a CEO of America who'll track us all using mandatory Fitbits and assign us jobs based on an AI's estimation of our cranial geometry. Those ideas are *not popular*. Now, it's true that this century has been defined by extremely unopopular ideas winning the day. But anything that can't go on eventually stops.
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Cory Doctorow
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Sure, they smeared Jeremy Corbyn and replaced him with Austeritybot 3000, and Labour is collapsing as a result, and if an election were called today, Nigel Farage would sweep the board, assuming the PM's seat ahead of a Ba'ath Party style majority.
But on today's Trashfuture podcast, I learned about the leadership contest for the Green Party, in which genuinely progressive candidate, Zack Polanski, is running:
backzack.com/
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Back Zack for leader of the Green Party
djnstech (Back Zack)Cory Doctorow
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Labour walked away from voters. Tories are in chaos. Libdems permanently discredited themselves in the coalition government. The youthquake that buoyed up Corbyn was driven by a desperate hunger for change. The party grandees that purged Labour of everyone who wanted a better country have created a massive constituency that's up for grabs. I
I'm desperate for change, too. I've joined the Greens, and I'll be voting for Polanski in the leadership race:
join.greenparty.org.uk/join-us…
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Sign up - Green Party
Green PartyCory Doctorow
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I'm at the end of my 24-city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*!
Catch me in #LONDON with RILEY QUINN from #TRASHFUTURE on TUESDAY (July 1):
howtoacademy.com/events/cory-d…
And in #MANCHESTER at Blackwell's Bookshop on WEDNESDAY (July 2):
eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-…
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Cory Doctorow – The Fight Against the Big Tech Oligarchy | How To Academy
How To AcademyCory Doctorow
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Image:
Frank Vincentz (modified)
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Petri Krohn
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CC BY-SA 3.0
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eof/
File:Chrysler building- top.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
commons.m.wikimedia.orgHenk Langeveld
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Enjoy!
No escape trip to Amsterdam?
Cory Doctorow
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Henk Langeveld
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First things first.
Some other time, at ABC, perhaps?
Cory Doctorow
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bm
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Cory Doctorow
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Aurelian Dumanovschi
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Cory Doctorow
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Henk Langeveld
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Ah, remember that Anti monopoly board game from the 70s?
I don't have my copy anymore, but I still have a photograph of the euro currency from that time. Bright orange, with an e and two vertical lines.
Prophetic, and then again, not.
6g
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for onshore earnings of #techcompanies with more than CAD20m in annual...
"Tax affecting tech giants like #Apple, #Google and #Amazon kicks in on Monday"
NOT TRUE, the payment (for 2022-2025) is due June 30
Only US companies that make over 20 million CAD have this 3% tax. From shopping and ads, ⭕NOT from co. like Netflix
⭕️Do other countries have similar taxes? Yes.
⭕️France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom all have tax regimes...
SEE VIDEO
cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-di…
Susanna the Artist 🌻
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Cory Doctorow
Unknown parent • • •@Judeet99
Dude.
"When pigs fly" as a metaphor for "something that is very improbable" is not deeply offensive to *anyone*.
outsiderPDX
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only ONE thing has to change to fix this problem in our society.
just one thing!
baboons, stress, and overcoming hierarchy in primate societies
youtube.com/watch?v=_dEYwQ1dD2…
baboons, stress, and overcoming hierarchy in primate societies
YouTubewsm
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