Bernie Sanders and AOC Go to War With Billionaires Over Lina Khan

By Jacob Weindling  |  October 10, 2024 | 11:10am
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Billionaires FTC
Bernie Sanders and AOC Go to War With Billionaires Over Lina Khan

There is admittedly, not a whole lot for us lefties in Kamala Harris’s platform. She describes herself as an avowed capitalist and her policies reflect that, as for the most part, she does not want to directly intervene in the economy to accomplish her economic goals. Her platform is filled with middle and low-income tax cuts and credits in the hopes that she can incentivize the economy to work for people with a net worth under a million dollars.

However, Kamala Harris does allude to one kind of direct economic intervention quite a bit in her platform, as she has taken up the mantle of decrying anticompetitive practices by businesses in her bid to lower prices. Greedflation is so clearly real that the Wall Street Journal uses the term (in a positive manner, albeit), and properly addressing it requires more than a few tax cuts and credits to try to incentivize our capitalist economy away from the direction it naturally travels in.

Which brings us to the most obvious way that Kamala Harris can take on anticompetitive practices: the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan.

Billionaires hate her, which is enough reason for you to like her, and Democratic megadonors like Reid Hoffman have publicly called for her removal. Harris supporter Mark Cuban recently joined this growing chorus emanating from his economic class, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders responded by laying down markers letting the Democratic Party know where the current lefty red line in Congress resides: in front of Lina Khan’s office.

Mark Cuban claims that Khan’s aggressive policies on some things like Pharmacy Benefit Managers has been good, as she has fought back against these companies who make money by artificially inflating drug prices, but apparently these same standards applied to tech make her a tyrant opposed to progress.

Hoffman, of LinkedIn fame who now sits on Microsoft’s board, is far more antagonistic towards the FTC Chair, and he was joined by Barry Diller, billionaire of Fox Broadcasting Company fame, in calling for Khan to be excised from any future Harris administration the same week they gave millions of dollars in “donations” to the party. There is a serious, concerted campaign by billionaires to get rid of a public official who has been one of the great successes of the Biden administration. This is the battle of our era in a nutshell.

Almost a year after Biden won the 2020 election, the FTC reached a settlement with Amazon to repay nearly $60 million in withheld tips to its drivers. They also made Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli pay up to $40 million to consumers in his plan to jack up the price of a life-saving drug by 4,000 percent. The FTC sued FleetCor and its CEO Ronald Clarke for charging small businesses millions of dollars in mystery fees associated with their fuel cards, and it forced the company to institute new disclosure practices. The FTC returned over $115 million to MoneyGram users over the companies’ failure to meet agreements to crack down on consumer fraud involving money transfers, and $100 million to consumers trapped by illegal dark patterns and junk fees when trying to cancel Vonage’s service.

The FTC also discovered that “many internet service providers collect troves of personal data” and that “users have few options to restrict use,” and it voted to go after unlawful anti-repair restrictions by tech companies. Shortly afterwards, Apple launched a new resource for public access to parts and repair manuals.

Under Lina Khan’s stewardship, the FTC has broadly cracked down on “junk fees” that could cost Americans an estimated $10 billion over the next decade, a policy that Harris has adopted into her own platform. The FTC also won a ruling against Intuit over its deceptive “free” advertising of TurboTax’s product that most taxpayers can’t use, and it helped small businesses and ranchers in their new Made in USA rule which requires marketers to prove their products are “all or virtually all” made in the United States to earn the label.

So you can see why billionaires, policy failures and the leeches on society creating this modern Gilded Age, would hate someone so aggressively cracking down on corporate fraud and anticompetitive practices. Mark Cuban’s argument seems to be that this is good in some areas, but fraud and anticompetitive practices are apparently too important to the development of artificial intelligence, and the entirety of the progress detailed above takes a backseat to this alleged world-changing technology that still amounts to mostly just incoherent chatbots sold by hucksters who are on Lina Khan’s radar.

Progressives don’t have much in Kamala Harris’s tax cut and credit-heavy policy platform she is pained to discuss in detail, but she does express a real dedication to the principles that Lina Khan has fought for over the last four years. Harris clearly views them as central to her pitch to bring down prices for Americans, indicating that there is some kind of a lefty seat at the table in a Harris administration on domestic policy.

Billionaires want to take that seat away from us.

In 2020, there were entire Sanders and Warren policy teams adopted into the Biden White House, and Lina Khan is one of the fruits of that victory. In Harris’s “do what Biden did but less ambitious” policy platform, the best lefties can hope for is to preserve and advance upon what we have won, which means drawing a ring of fire around Lina Khan to protect her from the billionaires.

 
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