Every month, Democrats Abroad France brings you need-to-know news, events, and information.

In this edition:
      Happy Pride!
      Celebrate Juneteenth with Us
      Meet House Rep. Candidate Derek Marshall
      News That Didn't Make the Headlines
      Register & Request Your Ballot!
      Volunteer with Us
      Intern with Us
      Turning out the Vote: Our Dollars Will Make the Difference
      Events: Join Us in Person & Online

News That Didn’t Make the Headlines: Public Lands and Ticketmaster Antitrust

Public Lands

The Biden-Harris Administration joined the 30x30 international effort to protect 30% of Earth’s surface by 2030. This effort is guided by core principles: relying on science and honoring tribal sovereignty, while supporting the priorities of Tribal Nations. The Biden-Harris Administration, like most Democratic administrations, has its share of scientists. But unlike past Democrats, in response to grassroots pressure from Native leaders, Biden and Harris have placed Indigenous leaders in key land-stewardship roles. Over fierce Republican opposition, 

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, an enrolled Laguna Pueblo Tribe member, was confirmed to the powerful post previously held by Republican anti-environmentalists like James Watt and Ryan Zinke.

Every month, Democrats Abroad France brings you need-to-know news, events, and information.

In this edition:

• News That Didn't Make the Headlines
• Register & Request Your Ballot!
• Taxes and Voting
• Help Write DA's 2024 Platform
• Intern with Us
• Volunteer With Us!
• Phonebank Together
• Turning out the Vote: Our Dollars Will Make the Difference
• Events: Join Us in Person & Online

Every month, Democrats Abroad France brings you need-to-know news, events, and information.

In this edition:

• Our Annual General Meeting
• News That Didn't Make the Headlines
• Register & Request Your Ballot! AND an Easy Way to Spread the Word
• A Party for the Party in Honor of Joe Smallhoover
• Run to be a Democratic National Convention Delegate!
• Help Dems Abroad Write Our 2024 Platform
• Volunteer With Us!
• It's Us against MAGA: Our Dollars Will Make the Difference
• Events: Join Us in Person & Online

News that Didn’t Make the Headlines: FTC Chair Lina Khan

When we go to the polls, at the top of the ticket we don't choose between people. Our votes choose among different visions of the future, enacted by an administration put in power by a coalition. In 2020, our votes empowered FTC Chair Lina Khan to end Reaganomics and defend the economic rights of average Americans. 

The Biden-Harris Administration closed the neoliberal era opened by Reagan and Thatcher with a sharp break with austerity economics, the unraveling of 60 years of union-busting policy, the return of industrial policy and state capacity, and whole-of-government approaches to economic justice and fairness—in short, a concerted effort to rebuild the economy “from the bottom up and middle out.”

If this weren’t enough, as Gerard Edic writes, “nearly every day for the past month, the Biden administration has made an announcement about a finalized regulation. They have completed a minimum staffing ratio for nursing homes, conserved 13 million acres in the Alaskan Arctic, designated “forever chemicals” as hazardous substances, invested in rooftop solar panels in low-income communities, banned most noncompete agreements at U.S. businesses, directed federal agencies to purchase sustainable products, and closed the “gun show loophole,” to name just a few.”

And now it’s going after the neoliberal monsters the Reagan-Bork regime birthed.

On April 23, Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission banned non-compete agreements, allowing employees at all pay levels to change jobs more easily, which will raise wages and create jobs. Last September, the Biden-Harris Administration’s groundbreaking antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, led by Khan, cites degraded product quality as a sign of Amazon’s lawbreaking abuse of market power. Simply put, it is not possible to sell a quality product at a reasonable price on Amazon Marketplace, after paying the Bezos rocket tax. 

Khan, who is 35 and of Pakistani descent, is known around the world as the person whom the largest US companies – tech platform monopolies – fear the most. She remains focused on the quiet (or in the case of robocalls, loud) ways that average people get taken advantage of, from “greedflation” in grocery pricing to “drip pricing” as hidden fees get tacked onto everything from online travel booking to rent. She travels the country, seeking input from everyone being ripped off by the modern economy: gig workers, insulin patients, essential workers at grocery stores, and Hollywood writers. She solicits input by holding public meetings in affected areas and talking to podcasts listened to by workers in the affected industry.

A sampling of her work:

• Challenging hundreds of drug patents. This move, combined with scrutiny from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Tammy Baldwin, has led most inhaler manufacturers to lower their price to $35 from many hundreds.
• Working to open up the use of march-in rights so that drugs based on research originally funded by the public can’t be made inaccessible to the public via high prices, paving the way for a federal program to license the patents of drugs found to be priced excessively. (The Trump administration had tried to forbid this option to protect the profits of Big Pharma.)
• Working to ban “click to subscribe, call to cancel” policies as well as the “junk fees” that get tacked on to everything from concert tickets to rent. 
• Cracking down on the “you are the product” economy, which obliterates the right to privacy.
• Instituting new guidelines that consider worker power and basic economic freedoms.

The pro-enshittification, pro-monopoly, pro-“junk fee” opinion page of The Wall Street Journal has written nearly weekly hit jobs on Lina Khan since she took office in 2021, as well as nonstop attacks from Congressional Republicans. This satire piece combines the text of a small sample (58) of these op-eds.

As Cory Doctorow, who coined the term “enshittification,” put it:

<blockquote>My god, they sure hate Lina Khan. This once-in-a-generation, groundbreaking, brilliant legal scholar and fighter for the public interest, the slayer of Reaganomics, has attracted more vitriol, mockery, and dismissal than any of her predecessors in living memory.</blockquote>

She sure must be doing something right, huh?”

Why is Khan going after Amazon? Online shopping was supposed to make our lives easier, but the enshittification of the experience has made it more of a headache than it is worth. Search results on monopoly platforms like Amazon are cluttered with sponsored content, flagrant lies, knockoffs, and dropshipping scams from brands with inscrutable names and no address or customer service number. This enshittification follows immediately from how Amazon runs the search algorithm on its platform and how it uses its monopoly power to charge sellers exorbitant fees to appear in the search results and bully them into handing over their logistics to Amazon, which slows delivery on and charges more for sales off the platform. Wanting to replace customer loyalty to a manufacturer or seller with loyalty to the platform, Amazon hides sales information from sellers and rips off their products when they do well, using the data it collects from and fees it wrings from sellers to subsidize its own Amazon Basics products.

Amazon’s corporate greed and monopoly power are so extreme that Amazon collects about 45% of the sale price of a product on the marketplace platform it controls. To keep its prices competitive, Amazon must demote sellers who sell at fair prices consistent with quality and decent working conditions. Even if Amazon’s prices are reasonable, the quality isn’t.

This enshittification is a direct result of policy failures that can be traced back to the Reagan era. The Reagan Administration upended our notion of antitrust policy. Unchecked corporate greed and abuse of power was now welcome, so longer consumers experienced low prices. This allowed Walmart to make the Waltons the richest family in the country, with more wealth than the bottom 40% of Americans, by suppressing wages, squeezing producers, buying up competitors, displacing small businesses, and subsisting off government largesse for everything from local land and infrastructure to its workers’ healthcare and housing…while keeping prices low, so antitrust regulators need not scrutinize.

Every month, Democrats Abroad France brings you need-to-know news, events, and information.

In this edition:

• Super Tuesday: Time to Vote!
• March is Women's History Month
• Little-Known Biden-Harris Success Stories
• Register & Request Your Ballot NOW!
• Volunteer With Us!
• Help Build Democrats Abroad’s 2024 Platform
• Run to be a Democratic National Convention Delegate!
• Facts: Why Your Dollars Make the Difference
• Events: Join Us in Person and Online

News that Didn’t Make the Headlines: Obscure Federal Program of the Month: Department of Energy Loan Programs Office (LPO)

When we go to the polls, we select not only our 500,000 elected officials, but also the teams they appoint. The Biden-Harris Administration has reinvigorated the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, or LPO, facilitating a new wave of green manufacturing.

Construction spending on manufacturing plants is at an all-time high in the US, thanks to Biden’s industrial policy. Source: FRED (St. Louis Fed).

Private banks do not possess the technical expertise needed to evaluate new technologies’ risk. Luckily, the US Department of Energy is full of experts on new clean energy technologies. Recognizing that public finance is a key tool to push new technologies from research and development to deployment, one of the first acts of the new Democratic Congress after the 2006 midterms was to grant the LPO the authority to guarantee loans. President Obama expanded their lending portfolio to over $50 billion through a long series of successful loans, turning a profit for the government while helping utility-scale solar and electric vehicles get off the ground.

However, under President Trump, Energy Secretary Rick Perry (who had pledged to get rid of the Department of Energy) brought along someone with no experience in renewable energy to lead the LPO—the guy who has overseen the restoration of Texas’s governor’s mansion during Rick Perry’s last term as governor. And so the program hibernated, supporting only the Vogle nuclear reactor in Georgia, and issuing solicitations for fossil fuel projects, though none got support (incompetence often beat out evilness in Trump’s first term, but the MAGA movement won’t let this happen if they take power again).

Biden’s pick for the post, Jigar Shah, came in with big plans to restart the office. Then the Inflation Reduction Act gave the LPO $400 billion in lending authority. His office is in part behind the EV battery manufacturing boom in the US, the virtual power plants preventing grid failure during extreme weather events, battery recycling, carbon-free steel and cement, greener battery chemistries, and advanced geothermal technologies. Now he is partnering with state and local green banks to finance proven technologies in communities needing environmental justice, boosting the power of existing financing mechanisms, like Biden’s robust low-income solar program.

Given the success this office is having in reducing demand for fossil fuels, it is no surprise that Republicans are unleashing new attacks on the program and its director.

In order to keep up this momentum, we will need all Democrats to cast their ballots, ensuring a Blue Wave in November!

 Source: Canary Media.

Super Tuesday is around the corner!

Vote in Democrats Abroad’s Global Presidential Primary, either remotely by email, or in person at one of our Voting Centers in Paris, on Super Tuesday, March 5 or Saturday, March 9. When you vote in the Global Presidential Primary, you’re showing our elected representatives how important elections are to US citizens living abroad – and how important we are to those elections.

Read on for other important announcements and events from Democrats Abroad France!