Matt Stoller

key paragraph:
"In this moment in history, the network of institutions that comprise the Democratic Party, from cable news channels to law firms to campaign operative networks to Silicon Valley lobbying outposts like Facebook and Google, are hollow and obviously incompetent."

This seems to be hyperbole, but I am not familiar with Matt Stoller so I reserved judgement and read a number of the back issues of his newsletter (archived at no charge on the site at https://mattstoller.substack.com/ ). I came across this https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/airplanes-and-accounting-games-the which was written in December and correctly predicts the subsequent collapse of Boeing.

Both articles are well written and insightful, the analysis is not from a political perspective but from a careful review of governance models and the impact of incentives on behavior.

I agree almost fully.

But Capitalism is about the private ownership of capital and means-of-production as opposed to state-owned. And if the state is actually run democratically, then that non-capitalist approach could be a democratic economy. That has its own set of issues, but it's not exclusive of the free exchange of goods in markets with money. See, e.g. Market Socialism.

Capitalism does not equal markets. Markets predate capitalism. Capitalism can well have totally non-free dysfunctional markets controlled entirely by monopolists. That's today's situation. See https://mattstoller.substack.com for great reporting on this.

It's just as much a mistake to assert that Capitalism is synonymous with markets as to assert that it's synonymous with today's crony-capitalism with regulatory-capture etc.

This reminds me of counterfeit capitalism
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/wework-and-counterfeit-capitalism

"Engaging in such a strategy used to be illegal . Capitalism works because companies that thrive take a bunch of inputs and create a product that is more valuable than the sum of its parts. That creates additional value, and in such a model companies have to compete by making better goods and services.

What predatory pricing does is to enable competition purely based on access to capital. Someone like Neumann, and Son’s entire model with his Vision Fund, is to take inputs, combine them into products worth less than their cost, and plug up the deficit through the capital markets in hopes of acquiring market power later or of just self-dealing so the losses are placed onto someone else."

This is actually a very interesting point that I've come across on a few different platforms recently (Patreon, for example, [also targets their homepage to creators, not consumers](https://www.patreon.com/)). I wonder if Substack just doesn't want to deal with opening the door to some newsletters getting "free promotion" by being features on their homepage? Nonetheless, I'd love to see "trending" or "editors picks" or something.

Nonetheless, here are some I subscribe to:

Big, by Matt Stoller (about monopolies): https://mattstoller.substack.com/

Margins (about business and tech): https://themargins.substack.com/

Flow State (music): https://flowstate.substack.com/

Normcore tech (tech, data science): https://vicki.substack.com/

The Passion Economy (business): https://passion.substack.com/

No this is not how Boeing has always operated. Boeing had a great engineering culture for most of its' history. A fundamental shift happened around the time that the company merged with McDonnell Douglas, a merger that was shepherded largely by the Department of Defense. Around this time began the "Financialization" of Boeing. The following is a good read on the shift within the company and how that new culture enabled the Dreamliner and the 737 Max debacles.

https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-investigation-indonesia-lion-air-ethiopian-airlines-managerial-revolution

Matt Stoller also talked about this cultural shift that enabled Boeings problems in an article a year ago.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout

This is what he wrote about in a longer form here:
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?gi=sd

This is also what Matt Stoller is writing about, the "monopolisation" of the world, particularly in tech of course:
https://mattstoller.substack.com/

Funnily, I've recently read "Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism" by Lenin. Multinational companies were called trusts, monopolism was called imperialism, and train, coal and steel was since replaced with telcos and internet but it's incredibly apt at describing our world. Even the "systemic banks" were mostly the same 100 years ago : BNP, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, JPMorgan...