[daveguy]

Wait, are you trying to blame this decision on Kamala Harris not pre-committing to keeping an anti-trust advocate in the FTC? I'm not sure if you noticed, but Kamala Harris is not president and never made these decisions about the FTC. I guarantee you her decisions would have been night and day better than the fraud currently inhabiting the whitehouse.

Maybe I'm just misinterpreting your words.

[LarryDarrell]

I'm saying our tenuous attempts towards reestablishing the most basic of anti-trust was dead regardless of who won the election[1].

I think this decision would have been the same regardless of who won. As for the next few years... Harris was clearly signalling that her FTC would be a return to rubber stamping mergers and acting only against the most egregious corporate actions, and even then only when the penalties wouldn't be substantial. I doubt very much that her appointment to FTC Chair would be much different than the current Andrew Ferguson.

Nothing I've written endorses Trump or his actions. But we have to be a little bit more realistic about the interests that Harris was aiming to represent.

We can say that Harris would have been better than Trump in the aggregate, while also prioritizing the interests of Business over those of Consumers. Both these things can be true.

[1]https://jacobin.com/2024/12/harris-khan-antitrust-west-elect...

[daveguy]

Misinterpreting a lack of commitment as a commitment to the opposite is a failure of logic.