Revolving Door

Scrutinizing the “ideological warfare” a business community mouthpiece says drove Corporate America into the arms of a fascist.

The Texas senator has introduced a bill allowing any AI company a streamlined path around regulations.

In his latest broadside against the left, Mattew Yglesias took aim at longtime critics of Uber’s blatant lawbreaking. In Yglesias’s view, these critics who range from anti-monopoly voices like Lina Khan to anti-corruption experts like our own Jeff Hauser and academics focused on financial regulation like Professor Hillary Allen, constitute a coterie of economics-hating zealots eager to make people’s lives worse. 

“We’ve lost the culture war on climate,” Harvard law professor and former Obama administration adviser Jody Freeman told Politico last Wednesday. The article amounts to a dry eulogy for efforts to combat climate change, with Freeman’s refrain that the climate movement failed to go mainstream in the background. What goes unmentioned: Freeman’s extracurricular work as oil industry whisperer.

The private sector rewards for public sector experience creates a conflict in which the public good and an employee’s own career prospects may be in tension. Not only does it incentivize public servants to consider the interests of the private sector (and how their decisions as a public servant might impact future employment prospects), but it erodes public confidence in civil servants.  

This week the Trump administration deepened its wildly corrupt and lucrative crypto grift, sought to further enrich wealthy supporters at the direct expense of working households, and continued to pardon white-collar criminals who don the red MAGA cap.

This week the Trump administration continued to dedicate itself to tearing down the safeguards that protect Americans from things like dangerous consumer products and predatory sales tactics, all while his officials and donors (often one and the same) enrich themselves.

The PTAB’s inter partes review (IPR) process was designed to swiftly weed out low-quality patents—the kind that stifle competition, inflate consumer prices, and entrench monopolies. But since Trump and Lutnick’s arrival, a quiet bureaucratic coup at the USPTO has undermined this critical safeguard. Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart has moved to centralize power and gut accountability measures, opening the door to a flood of dubious patents.