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Pierce writes: "The Masters of the Online Universe - Twitter Jack excepted - beamed into a House subcommittee on Wednesday in what was ostensibly a hearing on the antitrust implications of the corporate behemoths they run. This was a noble and healthy enterprise."

Republican Jim Jordan. (photo: Getty)
Republican Jim Jordan. (photo: Getty)


Jim Jordan's Paranoid Stupidity Let the God-Kings of Tech Off the Hook

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

30 July 20


Whenever the CEOs of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple were cornered on antitrust issues, they just had to wait for the coatless nuisance from Ohio to take things to Stupidville.

he Masters of the Online Universe—Twitter Jack excepted—beamed into a House subcommittee on Wednesday in what was ostensibly a hearing on the antitrust implications of the corporate behemoths they run. This was a noble and healthy enterprise. There are, in fact, serious antitrust implications of how Facebook, Google, Amazon et. al. do their business, and their CEOs should be held responsible for those. However, this continues to be a House of Representatives with a Republican caucus, so all the four Godlike Beings had to do when things got tight was wait for someone like Rep. Jim Jordan, the coatless nuisance from Ohio, to take the proceedings on the express train to Stupidville. Jordan is a more reliable station agent on that one than anyone else in Congress.

In mid-afternoon, when his time came to question the witnesses, Jordan spent his five minutes haranguing Google CEO Sundar Pichai about Google’s alleged political partisanship. Listening to Jordan and the rest of the Republicans on the committee was to hear a virtual symphony in put-upon victimhood. (Retiring Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner was so deeply into his part that he tried to get Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to answer for an action taken against Donald Trump, Jr. by Twitter. That was embarrassing.) Jordan sang a bravura solo on these themes against Pichai.

JORDAN: So here's the question I think is on so many Americans’ minds. They saw the list we read here earlier. All the things Google has done. Google is siding with the World Health Organization over anyone who disagrees with them, even though the World Health Organization obviously lied to America and shills for China. YouTube and Google is siding with them. We have the history of what Google has done and the history of 2016, where they obviously, according to one of your marketing executives, tried to help Clinton. And here we are 97 days before the election and we want to make sure it's not going to happen again. Can you assure us you're not going to tailor or configure your platform to help Joe Biden? And second, that you're not going to use your search engine to silence conservatives? Can you give us those two assurances today?

PICHAI: Congressman, on our search engine, conservatives have more access to information than ever before—

JORDAN: We appreciate that, that wasn't the question. Can you assure us you're not going to silence conservatives and assure us that you're not going to configure your features as you did for Clinton in '16, can you assure us you're not going to do the same thing for Joe Biden in 2020?

Pichai did his best to answer Jordan’s performative paranoia. The next questioner, Rep. Mary Scanlon, Democrat of Pennsylvania, decided to try and get things back on track while also giving Jordan an elbow on the way by. 

Thank you, gentlemen. I’d like to redirect you to antitrust law rather than fringe conspiracy theories.

Annnnnd, thanks to Jim Jordan, we were off and running.

Mr. Chairman, we have the email! There is no fringe conspiracy theory.

Chairman David Cicilline of Rhode Island slammed the gavel. “Excuse me. It’s not your time!”

A general uproar ensued—"Mr. Jordan, you do not have the time. Will you please be respectful of your colleagues?"as committee voices seemed united in their desire that Jordan put a sock in it. Finally, Congressman Jamie Raskin hollered at Jordan, "Put your mask on!" To which Jordan replied:

Talk about staying on message. Thus do we achieve the unified field theory of Fox News.

What was striking about the hearing was that neither the witnesses nor many of the congresscritters showed much fluency in the language of monopoly power, which once was a lever moving the entire discussion of the American political economy. It was the energy behind the Progressive Movement in the early 20th Century. It was identified as being one of the primary villains behind the Great Depression. In the past 20 years, it manifested itself in the perils wrought on the country by the idea of Too Big to Fail. And, by the time the tech entrepreneurs hit the scene, they succeeded so well that, as has been the case in almost every breakthrough field in the economy down through time, they developed the skills of the monopoly power to crush (or to buy out) any newer ideas that came along. 

Somehow, over the past several decades, monopolies came to be seen again as natural products of a capitalist economy, and not as a perversion of, and a threat to, the fundamentals of capitalism. Politicians forgot how to talk about monopoly power. Therefore, antitrust law fell into desuetude. Monopolists, old and new, were of course perfectly fine with that. Tuesday’s hearing could have been a first step at reclaiming that progressive economic language. If only Jim Jordan would have put a sock in it.

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