Matt Stoller

I was never a big fan of most pop music. I found it disposable and a waste of time for the most part. I was always more into cutting edge stuff-- like the just-released song up top by the Scottish band Paris Street Rebels. The band is barely 2 years old and their press agent tried to put their music in context by explaining that they take the best parts of the transatlantic Punk explosion of the 1970's and combine it with towering melodies and 21st century working class outrage. Their region has collapsed economically.

Yesterday we featured a tweet by Frank Schaeffer on a class of elite, entitled, white males represented by Brett Kavanaugh: "They were the tears," he wrote, "of an entitled bully unused to getting caught.

This morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos made a $10 million contribution to the With Honor Fund, a super PAC that aims to elect military veterans to Congress. More identity group politics?

Tom Perez’s lackluster first year as head of the Democratic National Committee provides a metaphoric glimpse into the waning influence of the Democratic Party as a whole, explains Norman Solomon. By Norman Solomon Sometimes a party’s leader seems to symbolize…Read more →

"Democrats don’t know how to use this rhetoric politically, since they haven’t really paid attention to the politics of commerce for decades. They are starting to learn."-Matt Stoller

We tend to think-- and for good reason-- that anything the Trump regime does, is wrong. And in most cases, that is a good rule of thumb to follow, But not in the case of blocking the AT&T merger. No doubt Trump is meddling in the Justice Department antitrust case because of his petty vindictiveness, but blocking the merger between AT&T and Time Warner is good policy.

Last week, Valerie Brown and Elizabeth Grossman, writing for In These Times reported on how Monsanto has captured the EPA (and twisted Science) for it's own corporate ends. Their concern is primarily health issues around glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide and the primary ingredient of Monsanto's Roundup.

Even my twitter polls don't usually result in such unanimity. But let's not kind ourselves, Donald Trump isn't fit to appoint a justice to the Supreme Court. I almost feel sorry for Gorsuch. Almost. But not quite... because I don't feel sorry for corporate whores who seek to make the lives of ordinary American families worse.

"Reckoning with Obama’s legacy won’t be easy for Democrats.

The Republicans have gotten down to brass tacks in terms of dismembering and repealing pieces of Dodd Frank. Thursday they passed two bad bills, Ann Wagner's SEC Regulatory Accountability Act, which passed 243-184, and Michael Conaway's Commodity End-User Relief Act, which passed 239-182.