There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen. I’m not a big Lenin guy, but I remember this line from my course reading in school. I’d say it pretty accurately captures the year we just went through. The political chaos that unfurled had some distinctly 1960s notes to it, with assassination attempts, presidential nominee swaps, and mass protests over bloody foreign wars supplied with our country’s weapons. After the party’s evisceration at the ballot box in November, Democrats now find themselves in disarray yet again as they try to chart a course forward. Leadership is still clinging onto power, though their grip is slipping under the weight of catastrophic missteps.
The unwinding of the country apparently doesn’t look so bad from the vantage point of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, whose oligarchs are lining up to kiss the ring of the incoming Trump administration far more subserviently than they did the last time around. A mergers and acquisitions boom is already under way, the stock market is up, and the C-suite class can hardly contain their giddiness at the prospect of looting the country without strictures when appearing on business news shows like Squawk Box.
As we close the chapter on 2024, there are still many developing storylines that will carry into next year. Here are some of my favorite pieces from the past year:
“Frontline Democrats Won With Progressive Populist Messages”
I’ll start on a somewhat more optimistic note. One of the trends I observed this campaign season is a shift among the more centrist flank of the party. Traditionally, congressmembers in the New Democrat Coalition or Blue Dogs have been moderate to outright conservative on a host of issues. Some of them justify these stances as an electoral calculus, given that they’re in conservative-leaning swing districts; others do it for purely ideological reasons. This camp has typically been devoutly free-market when it comes to how to manage the economy. But this year was different. New Democrats started to adopt a much more populist economic message this campaign season; for instance, first-term congressmember Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in a Trump +10 Washington district or Rep. Sharice Davids in Kansas, who nearly became the New Dems’ chair this year. Those stances entailed championing trust-busting and many of the policies being enacted at the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission. They came to the defense of FTC Chair Lina Khan when she was being attacked by the party’s own billionaire donor class for her strict enforcement approach. They didn’t do this out of the goodness of their hearts but because they saw that the messaging was good politics. Those members in frontline districts who ran as populists won their elections, showing that the administration’s antitrust policies are popular.
“The Newcomer From the Shop Floor”
In March of this past year, I was at a fundraising event around Capitol Hill and ran into this guy Dan Osborn before he became a household name in the 2024 elections as a populist independent Senate candidate from Nebraska. He lost the race but had the highest overperformance rate of any Senate candidate in the cycle compared to the Democratic national ticket. I met up with him during his first-ever trip to the nation’s capital, which matched his outsider image as a crusader against corruption in Washington. I shadowed Osborn for a few days and wrote the first major profile of him before the national media started to take notice once the polls showed him neck and neck with Republican opponent Sen. Deb Fischer. As we went around town to campaign events, he showed me the scars he bore from working at a Kellogg’s factory, the same site where he led a nationwide strike as a union leader in 2021. We talked about his independent candidacy, what he thinks both parties get wrong, and how he hoped to spark a new movement to shift power back to working-class Americans.
“Three Algorithms in a Room”
This June, we did an entire special issue on new pricing strategies companies have devised to leverage market power to get consumers to pay more. Our work showed how these pricing schemes were a major factor in why prices remained high well after the inflationary supply shocks coming out of the pandemic had abated.
My contribution to this issue was an investigation into an emerging form of price-fixing taking place through algorithms and Big Data instead of the old-fashioned way in smoke-filled backroom meetings between company executives. Algorithmic price-fixing is where competitors in the same market all use the same third-party software to set their prices and share competitive sensitive information with those entities. It’s a practice becoming commonplace in housing, health care, agriculture, hospitality, and airlines. My piece looked at the emerging regulatory actions and lawsuits cracking down on these collusive arrangements across sectors. Some months after my piece was published, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against one of these third-party algorithms, RealPage, which is accused of facilitating a landlord price-fixing cartel jacking up rents across numerous local housing markets all over the country.
“The Raiding of Red Lobster”
This past spring, the restaurant chain Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy. Immediately, the media narrative blamed the chain’s “Endless Shrimp” promotional deal, which supposedly led to huge revenue losses. This explanation conjured up a caricatured image of a gluttonous American family staking out a table at a Red Lobster all day for the shrimp deal. Except it was completely untrue, as I discovered from actually going through the bankruptcy docket filings and recent company history. Red Lobster’s losses from the shrimp deal were puny compared to the looting that had taken place by its previous private equity owner, Golden Gate Capital. To finance its initial purchase, Golden Gate struck a “sale-leaseback agreement” to sell off the chain’s real estate, turning the locations into permanent renters. This delivered a nice infusion of cash straight to investors but set up a ticking time bomb for the chain’s long-term success. When commercial leases started going up, Red Lobster was highly exposed. The real estate firm that Golden Gate sold the land to was upselling the chain well above the market value.
By going through the bankruptcy docket, I found that the law firms conducting the bankruptcy on Red Lobster’s behalf had already billed the company $10.5 million, nearly equivalent to the entire loss on the shrimp promotion. Private equity ran the company into the ground. Now, the chain has been taken over by another private equity firm, the Fortress Group, which also holds the debt obligations the company owes from its 2021 refinancing.
“The Convention Nobody Gets to See”
The Democratic National Convention this year came at an inflection point. Looking back on it now, that was likely the moment when the honeymoon period ended for the Harris-Walz campaign and things started to spiral in a doom loop leading up to the election. At the events held all around Chicago that week, I got a glimpse inside the beating heart of the Democratic Party—the party’s foot soldiers and also its donor class, whose corporate sponsorships were splashed all over the convention, everywhere you turned. I gleaned just as much from the events I got kicked out of as the ones I successfully attended, which I recount in this piece.
