Sandeep Vaheesan
@sandeepvaheesan
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Legal director @openmarkets. Fellow @cplusci. Advisory council @PeoplesParity. Book Democracy in Power @UChicagoPress. All opinions are my own.
Washington, DC
Joined February 2014
1. My book Democracy in Power is out today! It examines the history of cooperative and public power in the United States and lays out one possible future. I’m indebted to so many people for their encouragement, support, and wisdom. I’ll highlight a few.
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In final rule, FTC bans non-compete clauses for *all* workers!.
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Canceling $10,000 in student debt while ending the moratorium on loan payments is a good example of bad policy and bad politics.
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If you believe unionization is solely about wages and benefits, organizing by Google workers might puzzle you. If you recognize unionization is about injecting democracy into autocratic workplaces, organizing by all workers makes perfect sense.
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In hindsight, it is surprising this investigative reporting didn't happen soon after Antonin Scalia's death in 2016 at a wealthy businessman's giant ranch.
Get ready for this: The best investigative reporters in the country are now going to be digging into the corruption of the Supreme Court, and the whole right apparatus behind the right wing judicial takeover, for many months to come.
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The chief legal officer of Uber had a far bigger influence on the Harris campaign than any unnamed progressive groups did
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When he signed a major rail deregulation bill, Carter declared, "This act is the capstone of my efforts over the past 4 years to get the Federal Government off the backs of private industry by removing needless, burdensome regulation which benefits no one and harms us all.".
Mistake to see Carter as a *failed* president. He started the neoliberalism turn which meant he had a greater shadow than any president since FDR.
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"Fintech" sounds cool. The alternate name--credit and payments with fewer consumer protections and more surveillance--is honest though.
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"Unaccountable bureaucrats" at agencies. - Answerable to president, Congress, courts, and (in notice-and-comment rulemakings) public.- Subject-matter expertise. Nine bureaucrats in robes. - Life tenured and effectively accountable to no one.- No subject-matter expertise.
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Just when you think private equity firms cannot be any more socially destructive, you read this
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"It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." - FDR.
Minneapolis’s mayor on the supposedly dangerous precedent set by the ride share ordinance: “Are we now planning to set a minimum wage for every industry?”
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In the 1950s, investor-owned utilities attacked electric co-ops as "socialistic" and launched a propaganda campaign against them in corporate mouthpieces like Reader's Digest. Good illustration of how the Red Scare's true target was the New Deal, not mythical Soviet infiltration.
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Since they are throwing the *sitting* president a desperately needed lifeline, AOC and Sanders should have demanded Biden do things now--most notably end the American-Israeli war on the Palestinians--in return, instead of seeking "promises" to do things in 2025.
Scoop: In WH mtg, Sanders pressed top aides for Biden to outline 100-day agenda for working class - including medical debt forgiveness. Sanders & AOC threw Biden huge political lifeline, want progressive agenda at center of campaign. See Biden as best chance for their policies --.
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In the absence of George W. Bush's moral leadership, many of us are lost.
The silence of George W Bush during the most consequential election in our lifetime is indefensible.
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New Deal state >> neoliberal state.
In 1947, New York City vaccinated 5 million people against smallpox in two weeks. How can we be so much worse at this 75 years later?.
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Breaking up Facebook and Google is necessary but that alone is a conservative remedy that preserves their socially destructive methods of moneymaking. Abolishing their basic business model (targeted advertising built on mass surveillance) should be the end goal.
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Centrist revisionism is so shameless. In the final two months, the Harris campaign was mostly trying to appeal to voters with the domestic views of Uber executives and foreign policy preferences of Raytheon lobbyists.
I feel like a lot of centrist pundits are having a meltdown because people didn’t let them get away with their blatant blame the left strategy.
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And it makes existing non-competes null and void for everyone except senior executives.
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I wish we had more of this innovation and investment and less of the Silicon Valley variety, i.e., figuring out new ways to break laws, spy on us, and waste energy.
Ready to be unwrapped. Tanzania enters a new age of high-speed rail as service from Dar es Salaam to Morogoro starts Friday, cutting travel time from 4hours to 1hr40 minutes. The new trains in the photo will be used when Dar es Salaam to Dodoma service begins July 25.
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So much of contemporary Silicon Valley innovation is just "appwashing"--presenting predatory business models as socially beneficial because they are offered through an app.
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Do neoliberals like this Big Tech lobbyist realize that their fellow neoliberals are responsible for the United States not having adequate state capacity to deliver public services and works?.
“Can you build a tunnel under a highway in one weekend?” is a good litmus test for state capacity. (The Netherlands passes, the US does not).
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A Democrat attacks very reasonable product safety standards using right-wing talking points.
A new rule mandating finger-detection technology in table saws could raise costs by hundreds of dollars and result in a government-mandated monopoly. I introduced a bipartisan bill to protect consumer choice and block this mandate until the patents for this tech are made public.
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Bernie is right. H-1B and other guest-worker visas, like non-compete clauses, tie workers to their employers and rob them of a critical source of leverage: the freedom to leave for a better job.
Elon Musk is wrong. The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire “the best and the brightest,” but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad. The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.
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1. The New Deal delivered broadly shared abundance in the United States. Here is one important way in which it did—universal electrification.
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Social priorities. China: Hit renewable energy capacity target six years early. United States: Waste lots of energy to power copyright infringement machines that produce bad art.
Microsoft has spent twice as much in Capex on generative AI in the last quarter than Chinese's biggest tech firms have in the last six months *combined.* This shit is so stupid. I want it to stop. It's so wasteful.
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Airline executives making $30 million a year should be able to anticipate and plan for things like Chicago and Denver are cold and snowy in December.
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Imagine being horrified by the prospect of spending more money on things that make life better for people everywhere and less on things designed to kill people outside the U.S. .
Time to face the harsh reality, socialist Bernie Sanders will become the chairman of the Sen Budget Committee. He has vowed to use his position to enact his progressive agenda on healthcare, climate, infrastructure spending, & cutting defense spending. @standamericanow.
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Mainstream economists are eternally afraid of a small risk of 5% annual inflation but are conspicuously silent about the 10,000% overnight increase in wholesale electricity prices in Texas last week.
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A revealing fact about the antitrust community: Many scholars and previously even the FTC were convinced that Uber had succeeded exclusively due to its app, instead of primarily through its large-scale lawbreaking and predatory pricing.
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U.S. Chamber of Commerce official: Because some workers have exceptional tolerance for high temperatures, the federal government should continue to let people unnecessarily suffer and die on the job from extreme heat
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Instead of recognizing that Jeff Bezos' wealth is the result of legal entitlements that allow him to run Amazon and control many markets, mainstream economists believe he is millions of times more productive than the average person is.
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On many issues, centrist wonks favor the solution that is both bad policy and bad politics.
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Elite liberal lawyers deserve a lot of blame for telling the public for years that the Supreme Court is a basically decent and honorable institution. But this term's decisions were merely a culmination of what the Court has been doing since the 1970s--re-empowering oligarchy.
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I still can't quite believe that the Department of Justice did not sue a single monopolist between 1999 and Oct 2020 (the Google case).
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1. Do many voters remember Alberto Gonzales? No. 2. Do those who do remember him fondly? Also no.
I’m still baffled that Harris at Univision town hall kept touting her endorsement by Bush’s AG Alberto Gonzales (who resigned in disgrace) as though that would mean anything to the audience. Kinda sums up how well this catering to the center right is going.
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The Obama administration, in which Summers served, showed similar hostility to aiding distressed homeowners, while extending unlimited public support for big banks.
To those who say $2,000 checks not optimal, but better than nothing: what is limiting principle? How about $10,000 checks? More?. Hard to justify support for near-universal giveaways when income losses fully replaced, w/ no liquidity problem for most.
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During his time in the Obama administration, Larry Summers expressed this extremely right-wing view (and kept his job). “One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated.”.
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Fingers crossed we are on the verge of federal action against what appears to be one of the most harmful price-fixing schemes: third-party assisted collusion among landlords in cities across the country.
SCOOP: DOJ’s #antitrust investigation into algorithmic price-fixing into rental housing market deepens with a dawn raid on a property management company @JusticeATR #cartel
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The "sea of evidence" in which we are supposedly drowning: "We found the average upzoning would result in a 0.8% increase in housing supply in the short to medium term after the change, three to nine years after the upzoning.". This was a meta-study btw.
We are drowning in a sea of evidence that says that cities that liberalize zoning end up building more housing and lowering rents. You are living on another planet.
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I suspect most neoclassical economists exclude the creation and maintenance of property rights, enforcement of contracts, and chartering of corporations from their definition of "government intervention".
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According to the attorney general of D.C., 60% of large apartment buildings in the city and 90% in the metro area are part of the RealPage-coordinated rent-fixing scheme. This collusion is likely a major contributor to the local housing crisis.
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Law school trains and, even more importantly, socializes students to be aspiring judicial clerks and judges (instead of civil servants, administrators, legislators, public advocates, etc.). It's a big problem for lawyers in an (aspirationally) democratic society.
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A class action lawsuit estimated as many as *20 million* rental units in the U.S. may be part of a collusive arrangement in which landlords raise rents and let more units sit empty to increase profits. This cartel is an underrated driver of unaffordable housing and homelessness.
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A common belief among progressives, including lawyers, is that bad Supreme Court decisions are divided ones--previously 5-4 and now 6-3. In reality, many bad rulings are 9-0, such as AMG Capital Management v. FTC this week.
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Critics of "cancel culture" are generally silent about at-will employment--and its adverse effects on free speech--because they support top-down control and seek to preserve hierarchical systems in the face of popular discontent.
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This action alone, which marginalized the Free File program and left millions of Americans at the mercy of Intuit every tax season, should disqualify Renata Hesse from government positions
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Imagine if the federal government funded municipal broadband utilities to compete against Comcast. That is what the Public Works Administration did in the 1930s for cities that were frustrated with the high rates and poor service of power companies.
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Truly love the cover @chadzimmerman_ and his colleagues designed for my book. Deeply grateful for all their work and support.
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The only state in the U.S. where all electric utilities are either cooperatives or publicly owned
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At all levels, the Democratic Party appears to favor people who exude careerist ambition and treat every elected or appointed position as merely a stepping stone to something bigger, instead of a public responsibility that should be taken seriously and done well.
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What should tarnish academia's reputation but doesn't: Not mythical "nutty left-wing professors of underwater basket weaving" but the many glorified corporate lobbyists umm "libertarian scholars" who teach in economics departments and law schools.
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Just cancel it all and use it as first step toward fixing financing of higher ed.
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Legal scholars: The law grants Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk entitlements to run and derive great wealth from Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla.Mainstream economists: These individuals are actually millions of times more productive than the rest of us.
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Opposing predatory lending should be the bare minimum for any purported economic populist. But J.D. Vance sounds just like a lobbyist for payday lenders.
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Democrats, please stop asking your political opponents to do your work.
Democrats ask chief justice to investigate Clarence Thomas trips: "It is your duty"
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FDR: We must deliver electricity to all farms. Biden: We must generate more AI slop.
Breaking 🚨: Biden issues Executive Order giving energy-guzzling AI data centers preferential access to siting and exclusions from bedrock environmental laws. Big Tech companies get more subsidies and special treatment. Meanwhile, your utility bill goes up and the climate burns.
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"Few people will ever search for and buy things on their smartphone." - FTC economists in 2012.
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Hochul sides with bad employers and loses any claim to be "pro-worker." This ban would have pressured firms to retain workers by offering good pay and fair treatment, instead of using non-competes clauses.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul will veto a bill to ban non-competes after facing intense opposition from Wall Street, hospitals, and business groups.
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TLDR: Let's ignore Amazon's unfair competitive practices, alleged in great detail by the FTC, and instead assume the FTC is suing the company for offering lower prices and better service. Being an Econ 101 bro means never having to take facts seriously.
The FTC's complaint against Amazon makes an Econ 101 mistake: confusing a shift of a curve for a movement along a curve. Fellow Econ 101 teachers, our time has come! A 🧵.
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Finally read this complaint carefully. Damning stuff--RealPage helps landlords jointly raise rents in Phoenix, Tucson, and cities across the country and contributes to the housing crisis. This should be a national scandal.
Yes, it's outrageous! From our @arizonaago complaint, here are two maps showing multifamily apartments where RealPage is allegedly collecting and sharing pricing and occupancy information in the Phoenix and Tucson areas. Camaron - thank you for sharing this.
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What RealPage enables and why it is so popular among landlords
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Oh yes, The Economist, let’s celebrate another “ruthless CEO” for buying companies, laying off thousands of workers, slashing R&D, and then jacking up prices! This is just an extreme form of late-stage capitalism.
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In oral argument in NCAA v. Alston, Clarence Thomas just asked the NCAA's lawyer (Clinton era solicitor general Seth Waxman) why the "amateurism" principle (benign name for collusive wage suppression) applies to players, but not to coaches. A very good question.
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The First Circuit's decision last week that workers, regardless of employment classification, can organize and strike for better terms and conditions of work (without violating the Sherman Act) may be the most important and best antitrust development in 2022 so far.
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Shouldn't the president of Lebanon be selected by the people of Lebanon?.
🇺🇸🇱🇧Scoop: The White House wants to use Hezbollah's weakness to elect new Lebanese president in the coming days. My story on @axios .
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Believe it or not, former public servants can feed their families and live comfortably without becoming corporate lobbyists.
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My read of the initial reactions to FTC non-compete ban:. Everyone seems to love it, except for Big Law attorneys, corporate lobbyists, and their favorite antitrust professors.
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Complementing this fiscal conservatism, the Biden-Harris administration took a conventional approach to controlling inflation--the harsh and crude medicine of interest rate hikes--instead of vigorously attacking corporate pricing power and pursuing other targeted measures.
Harris's unappealing platform originated in March 2022, when the Biden-Harris admin gave up on economic populism and pivoted toward austerity and historic Pentagon budgets.
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My book Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States will be out on December 3. If you are interested in cooperative and public power, economic democracy, climate policy, or the New Deal, consider pre-ordering! @UChicagoPress
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When neoclassical economists claim they are "non-ideological," recall what they consider government "intervention" (and hence suspect):. Intervention: Consumer protection, labor, and minimum wage laws.Not intervention: Property rights, contract enforcement, and corporate charters.
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To paraphrase Keynes, mainstream economists take great pride in being precisely wrong rather than roughly right.
Re: heterodox vs not. I don't care how radical your conclusions are. I just care your methods are sound, your assumptions are formal and sensible, and your proofs are correct. The problem is a lot of heterodox econ just isn't that formal.
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This is a great idea. The drivers and cars didn't go anywhere, they are still in Minneapolis. If the people who do the work get financing, they could establish a democratic alternative to the VC-run Uber and Lyft.
Inbox: Minneapolis City Council will consider giving $150,000 to transportation network companies to replace Uber and Lyft
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Elite law school faculties are principally made up of the ideological equivalents of Amy Klobuchar and John Kasich and yet are somehow "leftist" in the eyes of right wingers.
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I'm old enough to remember Harris/Walz generating real excitement by attacking Republicans and pledging federal action against price gouging. Nothing inevitable about Tuesday's loss.
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An idea for improving Shark Tank: . Instead of Mark Cuban and some other rich people deciding whether to invest in mostly trivial business ideas, have a modern Harold Ickes award federal grants to fund projects proposed by state and local governments.
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Democracy in Power is here in physical form--can't quite believe it! Grateful for the opportunity, guidance, and support, @chadzimmerman_ and @UChicagoPress!
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Between Bill Clinton supporting the demolition of public housing and Barack Obama letting millions lose their homes to foreclosures, these two Democratic presidents contributed greatly to the nation's chronic housing crisis.
Bill Clinton saying we need more affordable housing when he proudly dismantled public housing in the city he's speaking in. can we please move on from him.
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The end goal of neoliberal attacks on unions, occupational licensing, and other forms of non-corporate market governance is to Uberize all work arrangements.
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Rest assured that Ezra Klein and co would absolutely oppose cancellation of medical, credit card, and payday debt too.
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Just honestly saying "We fully support the destruction of Gaza and its people" would be better than this condescending nonsense.
Pete Buttigieg applauded Kamala Harris for her stance on the “fiercely challenging and painful issue” of the war in Gaza, saying she's displayed the “kind of nuance doesn’t go onto a bumper sticker” ⬇️.
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The moral courage displayed by these law students is such a refreshing change from the relentless careerism commonly seen in the legal profession.
New Columbia Law Review statement—the student board has voted to refuse to work until:.(1) Rabea Eghbariah’s Article is published online without qualification or disclaimer, and .(2) CLR’s Board of Directors commits to complete editorial independence of the journal
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Delighted to share that I am writing a book for @uchicagopress on the successes and shortcomings of cooperative and public power in the United States (working title Democracy in Power) and how they can inform the #GreenNewDeal today. I am excited to work with @chadzimmerman_!.
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Hostility to the basic idea of public market governance, and not merely particular applications of the idea, defined his presidency.
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Obama since leaving office:. 1. Helping install Tom Perez as DNC chair.2. Endorsing Macron for French presidency (in first round)*.3. Reassuring Theresa May that she would keep her majority against Corbyn's insurgency.4. Orchestrating centrist consolidation against Bernie Sanders.
Former president Barack Obama says he supports Sen. Joe Manchin III’s effort to scale back a sweeping voting rights bill in hopes of securing some Republican support
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I imagine this is why Frum is actually against AMLO and Sheinbaum
The news from Mexico is . not good. Latest in @TheAtlantic
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Someone who is "a public servant at heart" probably wouldn't choose to be Uber's chief legal officer and lead its fight against labor and employment rights for drivers
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The post-1970s antitrust revolution is an underappreciated culprit in the Great Regression. For instance, the growth of poorly paid, precarious jobs (fast food, Uber, Amazon, etc.) was brought to us by Supreme Court decisions like Sylvania.
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In this very good article, Brett Christophers explains how the Obama administration not only failed to assist distressed homeowners but also facilitated the transfer of their properties to private equity firms like Blackstone
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In @HarvardBiz, @brian_callaci and I offer our thoughts on housing. The RealPage-orchestrated collusion among landlords shows we need a *lot* more than just upzoning to make decent and affordable housing universal.
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The New Dealers expanded the housing stock and improved its quality, while also raising labor market standards. They didn't say, "Does everyone really need a toilet? Latrines are cheaper and fine.". Let's follow the New Deal model and make it universal this time.
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I really hope concentration in land ownership, particularly in cities, is soon a big topic in empirical economics research.
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Mostly forgotten radicalism of the New Deal: . In addition to the Rural Electrification Administration extending credit to electric cooperatives, the Public Works Administration gave loans and grants to municipalities to take over investor-owned utilities.
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If you excluded its debt obligations, Lehman Brothers looked strong on September 14, 2008.
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Great excerpt in U.S. v. Google on how Google shares its monopoly profits with Apple. Google pays billions for exclusive pre-installation on Apple devices--payments that are as much as one-fifth of Apple's annual net income.
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