FTC challenges 'junk' patents held by 10 drugmakers, incl Novo Nordisk's Ozempic

There's a lot of talk about "both sides being the same", but the FTC alone has been a night & day difference from previous administrations.

Nobody suggesting that "both sides are the same" has a shred of intellectual honesty.

I would like to point out the administration's accomplishments in the last two weeks (shamelessly copied from Matt Stoller's recent piece "This Is What Governing Looks Like")

* Banned non-compete agreements for 40 million workers

* Raised overtime wages for 4 million salaried workers

* Forced airlines to automatically offer refunds for canceled flights and poorly handled baggage

* Banned illegal junk fees in mortgage lending

* Forced divestment of TikTok from Chinese ownership

* Blocked corporate merger in insulation

* Filed to block a corporate merger in fashion

* Announced tariff increases on steel to protect domestic producers

* Announced an end to the duty free period on Chinese solar panels to encourage U.S. manufacturing.

* Passed the first Federal privacy law to stop data brokers from selling sensitive information to China and Russia

You can tell she's doing a good job by the number of hit pieces in the WSJ. Just search "Lina Khan WSJ" and have fun scrolling through the headlines.

Most of it needs backed up by Congress or it'll just go away given a few administrations.

> Announced tariff increases on steel to protect domestic producers

The Trump Admin went after China far more than Biden has so far, the Democrats were overwhelmingly silent about how that qualified as impressive governing. He needs to do a lot more to bolster US labor and US manufacturing, it's not even a good start yet.

I can't find it right now, but there's a quote about being able to tell someone's character by whether they've made the right enemies.

Declarative moral statements like this are so vacuous. Of course there are intellectually honest people who believe both parties are the same. They may be evaluating or prioritizing the evidence differently, but that doesn't make one side or the other 'dishonest'. Casually impuning the morality of an entire swath of people is rhetoric that drives division and strife, not progress.

For example, yes Bidens FTC is a standout actor, but 'both sides' just voted to perpetuate overseas wars with more American tax dollars. In terms of the American war machine, it's 100% accurate to say both sides are the same.

"I ask you to judge me by the enemies I've made" - Franklin D. Roosevelt

To be fair, her first two years were bunk. She had management and morale issues, a series of court losses (including one glaringly incompetent one with Facebook) and then a retrenchment that looked like submission.

It wasn’t. She was re-working her game. It looks like it worked and I’ve gone from critic to fan. But the FTC was mockably awful 2020 - 2022, and a non-entity early 2023.

> * Passed the first Federal privacy law to stop data brokers from selling sensitive information to China and Russia

At the risk of sounding dismissive, I'd much rather they banned the selling of sensitive information. Full stop. China and Russia have much less reach into my day-to-day than any of the other buyers much closer to home like a local gov't bodies let alone private corps.

There will always be carry over from one administration to the next at the bureaucratic level within the various agencies. It takes time to figure out how to get them aligned to make progress with the new administration's agenda.

Both sides are the same in the way that, they generally work in tandem to erode the common individual in favor of the wealthy. That doesn't mean the totality of what they do is to that end, it doesn't mean that they aren't at odds with eachother as to how to reach that collective goal at times, just that, pragmatically, it doesn't matter anywhere but on very short, ultimately inconsequential time scales.

These things get planned and implemented far outside of the normal 2/4/6 year election cycle, so it's easy to hide what's actually happening.

Fact is, red tie, blue tie, they're all drinking and merrymaking together, they attend the same parties, they bang the same hookers, and they're in the same corporation's pockets. You have some outliers here and there, but, aside from the occasional filibuster, they do little more than create a spectacle.

None of this is unusual, it's simply how systems of government have been exploited and subverted since humans had the idea the government should exist. That being a somewhat esoteric idea only serves to further the degeneration of a system, much in the same way doing nothing, which is likely what some find so offensive about the idea that "both sides are the same", furthers the degeneration of a system.

Then I suppose the appropriate way to phrase this would be "people suggesting both sides are the same need to qualify their statements."

Do they? I'm not well immersed in the socials, but I thought "both side are the same" peaked around 2000, and now the pendulum has swung to "the other side is wrong in every way".

> takes time to figure out how to get them aligned

From what I understand, Khan was learning to manage a large team. She failed at it. Noticed. Corrected. And seems to have figured it out.

The early FTC was highly centralised. In its new iteration, staffers appear to be trusted to pursue probes on their own. This not only broadens their firepower, but brings to the table staffers’ decades of experience around what wins in court.

You're making the assumption that they haven't, at length, until people got uncomfortable and wanted to leave.

You might say she's running the FTC like a startup: hire exceptional people you trust to execute with autonomy.

I think for stuff controlled by the president, “both sides are the same” is indeed clearly false. But there’s a decent argument to be made that it doesn’t really matter who you vote for for Congress, since the system is structured to require both parties to agree on almost any controversial legislation.

This frankly sounds like cynical rubbish.

> she's running the FTC like a startup: hire exceptional people you trust to execute with autonomy

The exceptional people were there from the start. In the early days, their complaint was around being locked out of decision making. Khan and a small group ran the FTC like academics.

That failed both internally and in the courts. To her credit, she noticed the failure, regrouped and re-oriented. But the change wasn’t in star hiring but recognising the talent that was being ignored.

The scenario you’re proposing sounds like one person lecturing another and not listening to any counter points… wanting to leave feels like a natural reaction.

In the last week I've read stories here and elsewhere about the current administration:

- Ending non-competes

- Ending salaries being used to avoid paying overtime

- Un-banning marijuana

- Restoring net neutrality

- Fining carriers for sharing location data

- And now, challenging dumb patents

Despite your cynical take, that looks like a lot of stuff that's good for me as an individual person.

Mostly people don’t give praise because Trump’s protectionism was largely ineffective and a large tax increase on working Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_tariffs

What ever the cause of the slow start, it'll be a shame if it all comes to a grinding halt on Jan 20, 2025 now that this agency seems to be effectively doing its job.

I’m definitely seeing more of this on the left than warranted by reality.

They also passed a FISA bill that expanded government spying on its citizen. I'd trade all those items you listed to have illegal spying killed.

And of course, the conservative Supreme Court is likely to strip the FTC of its power and render many of its decisions invalid, giving conservatives the last laugh on this and many other issues.

I'm doing this first thing in the morning, thank you!

As they chortle over the rubble of this once hopeful progressing nation.

> * Announced an end to the duty free period on Chinese solar panels to encourage U.S. manufacturing.

> * Announced tariff increases on steel to protect domestic producers

These are bad things.

Why?

The Supreme Court is a joke nowadays. We really need terms at every level of major governing position.

Judge for life is a terrible precedent. Not that far from kings.

Especially the republican judges who take lavish trips funded by billionaires. Clear conflict of interest in open.

Sounds like you are making the case that "both sides are aligned in some rare cases". not that "they are the same".

Because these tarifs do more harm than benefit.

The harm is diffused among many, the benefits accumulates to a few.

https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/section-232-t...

It is a national defense and manufacturing supply chain security premium. You might call that harm if you're optimizing the for the lowest cost possible, but that is not good policy in the current geopolitical climate.

No, and that reading is the exact dogmatic dipolism I'm talking about avoiding. Both sides are human, both sides are American, both sides of political spectrum are represented by the wealth elite. There are millions of common denominators between both sides, and a relatively miniscule number of differences. Most of the differences themselves are exaggerated by the political class, to show division and strengthen in-group ties. Believing one side or the other is morally superior is meaningless- the other side is always going to believe the same thing about you, with just as much supporting evidence.