Ted S. Warren/AP Photo
Vehicles drive past the Boeing factory in Renton, Washington, where the company’s 737 Max airplanes are built, December 17, 2019.
TOP OF MIND
“This company provides thousands of good jobs in my district!” It’s a statement many politicians have made over the years, and it’s the back end of a type of bribe. The politician knows that those jobs can go away if he or she doesn’t perform meritorious service on behalf of the corporation. That’s the implied threat, and it usually works to turn members of Congress into full-on lobbyists.
Big Tech is taking a run at this. The House Judiciary Committee has been investigating Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google for the last 7 months. The chair of the House Judiciary Committee is Jerry Nadler. His district includes a large portion of the West Side of Manhattan. So, and you’re not going to believe this, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have been placing large offices in the West Side of Manhattan. It’s expected that there will be 20,000 employees of the Big Four tech firms on the West Side by 2022.
My story about this is here. Nadler isn’t particularly corruptible, and there’s no reason to believe he’s about to call off the investigation. But what’s important here is that Big Tech is pulling out this trick. They’re scared that they can’t control the investigation through their normal means – lobbying, defining the issue through academics on the payroll, etc. So they’re moving to the “jobs in the district” gambit. Pretty sneaky, sis. (Read the story here)
AND ANOTHER THING
News out of Iran intimates that someone shot down the Boeing jet bound for Ukraine, meaning there wasn’t mechanical failure on the 737. Boeing already has enough to deal with. Text messages released Thursday show employees’ disregard for… pretty much everyone involved with making the 737 Max, which was “designed by clowns and supervised by monkeys,” per the quote. More troubling for Boeing are the chats describing how to deceive regulators and conceal problems with the Max from the FAA. During the financial crisis, the perfidy of the banks was almost not real to the media until they had internal chats of Wall Street bros mocking their clients and regulators. Boeing has now hit that threshold. It was already bad for the firm, and now it’s worse.
OVER AT THE PROSPECT
As mentioned, my story on Silicon Valley trying to influence a top Congressman by putting jobs in his district. (Read the story)
I also interviewed Tom Steyer, who’s having a moment after good polling in Nevada and South Carolina. (Read the story)
Adam Levitin looks at Joe Biden’s roll call votes on the 2005 bankruptcy bill. It’s brutal. (Read the story)
Great piece by Josh Kramer on Tulsa paying remote workers to relocate to their city. (Read the story)
WHERE I’LL BE
Los Angelenos, I’m moderating a debate of the Californians angling to be the next members of the Democratic National Committee. It’s on Sunday at 3:00pm at the MLK Auditorium at the Santa Monica Library, Main Branch, 601 Santa Monica Blvd.
TODAY I LEARNED
Gavin Newsom wants California to manufacture and sell generic prescription drugs. (Sacramento Bee)
Florida’s attempt to disenfranchise black ex-convicts may have backfired, leading to only ex-cons in blue districts getting their voting rights. (Slate)
Devastating Pete Buttigieg story on his role in racism among the South Bend police. (TYT)
Wells Fargo trying to get its vendors to pay its fraud fines. (Reuters)
Facebook paying to plant fake PR in Teen Vogue. (Boing Boing)
