Examining Airline Market Power in Light of COVID-19 Bailouts
Giants run the airline industry. Today, four airlines, American, United, Delta, and Southwest, control over 65 percent of the market. They achieved this level of dominance in just the past twenty years, with merger after merger cutting the number of major airlines left today into less than half the number that existed in 2000. The [...]
The TikTok Controversy Should Be a Catalyst for a Deeper Look at China's Data Governance Policies
To Americans, TikTok means many things. For some, it is only an onomatopoeia. To others, it is the defining social media app of their generation. For Republicans and Democrats, it may be the one foe that can actually unite the two parties. But the policy world should let it act as a catalyst for a [...]
Yesterday, the CEOs of Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple testified before the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee in a hearing on “Online Platforms and Market Power.” As Congress takes up the question of market power in the tech sector, the time is ripe to consider the issue in our broader economy. For decades, corporations in a [...]
Trump's Trumped Up Order: Rupture of the 'American Dream' Bubble
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday, June 22nd to suspend several categories of working visas until December 31, 2020. The “Proclamation Suspending Entry of Aliens Who Present a Risk to the US Labor Market Following the Coronavirus Outbreak” includes suspension of various working visas namely, H-1B, which is most favored by Indian [...]
Congress needs to act to restore the balance of power and prevent future administrations from undermining legislative intent and wreaking havoc on the lives of so many Americans that depend on a functioning immigration system. This means taking back the power of the purse when it comes to immigration benefits and creating Article I courts [...]
Wednesday’s decision by the D.C. Circuit granting General Mike Flynn’s petition for mandamus is a dangerous precedent. In directing US District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan to grant DOJ’s motion to dismiss the false statement charges against Flynn, the court disrupted orderly court proceedings. While I believe DOJ would have ultimately prevailed in due course, the [...]
A Lesson for the Indian Judiciary from Its American Counterpart
In the case of Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, the US Supreme Court upheld its lower court decisions that concluded US President Donald Trump’s 2017 move to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) program, created in 2012 by former President Barack Obama, was unlawful. The court found [...]
When we talk about defunding the police, we focus on what we can see. We imagine hiring fewer cops to flock in subway stations and wander sidewalks. We picture fewer high-priced tanks and military-grade tools of war in our communities. But today’s policing infrastructure also spends millions of dollars on an invisible, sprawling data surveillance [...]
Flynn Argument in D.C. Circuit: Is the Ball Back in Judge Sullivan's Court?
The D.C. Circuit held oral argument on Friday on General Mike Flynn’s mandamus to Judge Emmet Sullivan to grant the Department of Justice (DOJ) Motion to Dismiss false statement charges against Flynn (see my preview, discussed here). A majority of the panel seemed to believe Judge Sullivan should take the first crack at deciding DOJ’s [...]
1. There’s something happening here; What it is ain’t exactly clear On Sunday, May 31, 2020, I posted on my Facebook that we should expect the repression to come soon. And almost like predictable clockwork, the repression started the next day. We can note the teargassing and flash grenading of peaceful demonstrators and international press [...]
