Biden Expected to Nominate Critic of Big Tech to F.T.C. – The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Biden is expected to name Lina Khan, a law professor and leading critic of the tech industry’s power, to a seat on the Federal Trade Commission, a person with knowledge of the decision said on Tuesday.
An appointment of Ms. Khan, the author of a breakthrough Yale Law Journal paper in 2016 that accused Amazon of abusing its monopoly power, would be the latest sign that the Biden administration planned to take an aggressive posture toward tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. Last week, the administration said Tim Wu, another top critic of the industry, would join the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy.
Ms. Khan recently served as legal counsel for the House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee and was among aides who conducted a 19-month investigation into the tech giants’ monopoly power. The committee produced a report advocating major changes to antitrust laws. Before that, she served as an aide to a member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rohit Chopra, a champion of her ideas on antitrust policy.
Ms. Khan, an associate professor at Columbia Law School, would fill one of three Democratic seats on the five-member F.T.C. In December, the commission sued Facebook, accusing it of antitrust violations, and called for breaking up the company. The agency is also investing Amazon for antitrust violations.
Rumors of Ms. Khan’s appointment, which were reported earlier by Politico, immediately sparked strong reactions on Tuesday. Public Citizen, a left-leaning nonprofit public advocacy group, cheered the possibility. The organization and many progressive groups have denounced the F.T.C.’s history — particularly during the Obama administration — for lax enforcement of technology companies. They argue that the federal government’s permissive attitude toward mergers by the tech giants, including Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, helped the Silicon Valley companies grow quickly and dominate their rivals.
“The F.T.C. has failed to take on corporate abuses of power including rampant antitrust violations, privacy intrusions, data security breaches and mergers, and Khan’s appointment as a commissioner at the agency hopefully will herald a new day,” Public Citizen said in a statement.
Senator Mike Lee of Utah, the ranking Republican on the Senate antitrust subcommittee, said Ms. Khan would be a bad fit for the job, however.
“Her views on antitrust enforcement are also wildly out of step with a prudent approach to the law,” Mr. Lee said in a statement. “Nominating Ms. Khan would signal that President Biden intends to put ideology and politics ahead of competent antitrust enforcement, which would be gravely disappointing at a time when it is absolutely critical that we have strong and effective leadership at the enforcement agencies.”
The highest ranking editor at NewsNation, a newcomer to cable news that markets itself as delivering “straight-ahead, unbiased news reporting,” has resigned. She is the third top editor to quit in recent months as some staff have complained of a rightward shift at the network.
Jennifer Lyons, NewsNation’s vice president of news, had decided to depart the channel, effective immediately, the company’s staff were told at a meeting on Tuesday.
Sandy Pudar, the news director, left on Feb. 2, and Richard Maginn, the managing editor, resigned on March 1.
Ms. Lyons did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for the Texas-based Nexstar Media, which owns NewsNation, said in a statement that it was Ms. Lyons’s decision to leave and that the search for her replacement was underway.
At Tuesday’s staff meeting in Chicago, Perry A. Sook, the chief executive of Nexstar, sought to reassure staff of his commitment to NewsNation after several employees raised concerns about its editorial direction and the involvement of Bill Shine, a former Fox News co-president who was hired to lead communications for the Trump White House. The concerns among employees were detailed in a New York Times article earlier this week.
“Despite reports to the contrary that you may read, we’re committed to the vision of unbiased reporting,” he said during the meeting, according to a recording of the comments obtained by The New York Times. “But obviously along the way there will be growing pains. In order for us to establish our product and to grow our viewership we’re going to have to try new things to gain some traction.”
Mr. Sook, asked by a staff member about Mr. Shine, said he had not been in the NewsNation building and did not dictate content.
“This guy was in the room where it happened 25 years ago and helped to build the channel to where it is,” Mr. Sook said of Mr. Shine’s experience at Fox News. “Why would we not avail ourselves of his expertise?”
“NewsNation” launched on Sept. 1 as a prime-time national newscast on the cable channel WGN America. It promised an antidote to the more partisan programming of CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. On March 1, WGN America was rebranded as NewsNation and more news shows were introduced.
The board leading Puerto Rico through its sprawling bankruptcy case issued a new proposal for resolving $85 billion in debt and pensions late Monday, saying retirees would collectively get 95 cents on the dollar if they accepted — a better deal than they were offered before the pandemic.
“This is a major milestone on the road to recovery,” Natalie Jaresko, the board’s executive director, said in a news conference on Tuesday. She said that if the new deal is approved, Puerto Rico will have settled 90 percent of the $123 billion in debt and other obligations that the territory owed in 2017, when it entered a court-controlled program to rescue it from insolvency.
Puerto Rico’s case has been set back by a catastrophic hurricane, a series of earthquakes, and now the pandemic. The board decided to revisit a previous offer, made in 2019, with the goal of improving the territory’s prospects for economic recovery from the pandemic.
“No one wants Puerto Rico to be restructuring its debt again in 10 to 12 years,” Ms. Jaresko said.
The new offer would cut retirees’ pensions if they exceed $1,500 a month. Excess would be cut by 8.5 percent. More than 70 percent of the retirees are below the cutoff and would not have their pensions reduced, making the overall reduction 5 percent.
Creditors must still approve the new settlement. But the governor of Puerto Rico, Pedro R. Pierluisi, would have to sign any laws necessary for the deal to work and has warned that he will fight any pension cuts.
The deal must also be approved by the federal judge hearing Puerto Rico’s case, Laura Taylor Swain of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Before the pandemic, the board proposed trimming pensions over $1,200 a month. (It did not propose cutting pensions above that amount by 10 percent, as was previously reported here.) The terms were improved, in part, because the board wanted to restore economic growth on the island and saw the retirees’ continued purchasing power as key. If the retirees reject the new terms, Ms. Jaresko said, they will be given the lesser ones from the previous offer.
Two weeks ago, the board announced a preliminary deal with some of the island’s bondholders, who are being offered much less than the retirees but would also receive about $7 billion in cash up front and additional money if economic growth exceeds certain benchmarks.
Should the pension offer be approved, the biggest hurdle left would be the bonds issued by special-purpose government entities like the Electric Power Authority, which are being restructured in separate court proceedings.
When BuzzFeed announced last year that it would buy HuffPost, it was expected that cost-cutting would follow the completion of the deal. On Tuesday, less than a month after the acquisition went through, BuzzFeed laid off 47 workers at HuffPost and closed the publication’s Canadian edition.
At a virtual company meeting, BuzzFeed’s chief executive, Jonah Peretti, said the layoffs were meant to stem losses at HuffPost. HuffPost, which was previously owned by Verizon Media, lost more than $20 million last year and was on track to lose the same amount this year, Mr. Peretti told the staff according to an account of the meeting provided by BuzzFeed.
Employees were given a password to enter the meeting — “spr!ngisH3r3,” a variation on the phrase “spring is here.” The staff members were then informed that if they did not receive an email by 1 p.m., their jobs were safe. The website Defector first reported on the password and other details of the meeting, which were confirmed by two people who attended the meeting and spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. A BuzzFeed spokesman told The New York Times that the company regretted the password’s tone.
The HuffPost Union, which is affiliated with the Writers Guild of America East, said in a statement that the layoffs had affected 33 of its members, nearly a third of the local union. “We are devastated and infuriated, particularly after an exhausting year of covering a pandemic and working from home,” the union said in a statement.
As part of the cutbacks, BuzzFeed closed HuffPost Canada and announced plans to decrease the size of its operations in Australia and Britain, the BuzzFeed spokesman said. At the end of the austerity measures, HuffPost would still have a larger newsroom than BuzzFeed News, the spokesman added.
In the meeting, Mr. Peretti said that HuffPost’s executive editor, Hillary Frey, and its international executive editor, Louise Roug, had decided to leave the company. HuffPost has been without an editor in chief since Lydia Polgreen departed a year ago to become the head of content at Gimlet Media, a Spotify-owned podcasting company. Mr. Peretti said he expected to announce Ms. Polgreen’s successor in the coming weeks.
Whoever takes the job will report to Mark Schoofs, BuzzFeed News’s editor in chief. At the meeting, Mr. Peretti reiterated that BuzzFeed and HuffPost would remain distinct from each other, with separate editorial staffs.
Disneyland, which has been closed for a year, will reopen in late April.
Bob Chapek, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, announced the time frame on Tuesday at the company’s annual shareholder meeting but did not give a specific date.
California officials announced on Friday that theme parks in the state could reopen on a limited basis as soon as April 1. Eligibility, however, will depend on coronavirus transmission statistics in individual counties.
For instance, theme parks in counties where the virus threat remains the most severe (in the purple tier under the state’s system) must remain closed. But parks in areas where the threat of infection has eased somewhat (red tier) will be allowed to reopen at 15 percent capacity. Even less threat (orange tier) will allow for 25 percent capacity, ultimately rising to 35 percent for the lowest threat (yellow).
California will restrict attendance to in-state visitors. Regulators will also restrict indoor dining. Some indoor rides may be required to remain closed.
Disneyland is in Orange County, which is in the purple tier. But if coronavirus cases continue to decline in Southern California at the current pace, the county could fall within the orange tier by late April. The Walt Disney Company said last year that reopening a park at less than 25 percent capacity would not make economic sense.
Before the pandemic, roughly 32,000 people worked at the 486-acre Disneyland Resort, which includes two separately ticketed theme parks, three Disney-owned hotels and an outdoor shopping mall. Some furloughed employees have already returned; the Downtown Disney retail district, for instance, reopened over the summer. Mr. Chapek said that roughly 10,000 additional furloughed employees would be called back for the April limited reopening of rides and hotels.
By the time Disneyland reopens, it will be the last of the company’s six theme park resorts to come back online. (The others are in Orlando, Fla.; Paris; Hong Kong; Tokyo; and Shanghai.) Mr. Chapek said the still-closed Disney Cruise Line may have “limited” sailings by the fall.
In other shareholder meeting news, Disney disclosed that its streaming service, Disney+, now has more than 100 million paying subscribers worldwide. And Robert A. Iger, who passed the chief executive baton to Mr. Chapek last year and transitioned to an executive chairman role, reiterated his intention to leave the company at the end of December.
The House on Tuesday approved the most significant expansion of labor rights since the New Deal, advancing a bill that would neutralize right-to-work laws in 27 states and bolster workers’ ability to unionize after years of eroding clout.
The bill, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, would amend a decades-old labor law to protect workers seeking to form a union from retribution or firing, strengthen the government’s power to punish employers who violate workers’ rights and outlaw mandatory meetings that employers often rely on to try to quash an organizing drive.
It would also make it harder for companies like Uber and Lyft to classify workers as independent contractors, paving the way for a potentially dramatic expansion in the pool of workers eligible to unionize.
The measure was all but certain to run into a brick wall of opposition in the Senate, where 60 votes would be needed to advance it past a filibuster and Republicans are broadly opposed. It passed the House 225 to 206, with five Republicans joining Democrats in favor.
Democrats, led by President Biden, have embraced the bill as a centerpiece of their agenda, seeking to elevate labor rights as an answer to economic and racial inequality and woo back white working-class voters who abandoned the party for former President Donald J. Trump. It comes as Mr. Biden, an outspoken defender of unions, has already taken an unusually active stance to wade into a battle over unionization at Amazon.
“As America works to recover from the devastating challenges of deadly pandemic, an economic crisis, and reckoning on race that reveals deep disparities, we need to summon a new wave of worker power to create an economy that works for everyone,” Mr. Biden said in a statement on Tuesday.
Business groups and most Republicans fiercely oppose the measure, arguing that it is a giveaway to union leaders by Democrats looking for campaign donations. They contend that it would hurt workers, trample on states’ rights and decimate businesses at a time when thousands of small companies have folded because of the economic turmoil surrounding the coronavirus pandemic.
The bill is “radical, backward-looking legislation, which will diminish the rights of workers and employers while harming the economy and providing a political gift to labor unions and their special interests,” Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, said during the House’s debate.
The vote on the labor bill is one of almost a dozen House Democrats are plotting this month to push forward a flurry of long-sought liberal priorities on gun safety, gay rights, immigration, voting rights and other issues that would reshape the economy and several aspects of American society. Each faces similarly long odds in the Senate, but Democrats are working to ratchet up pressure on Republicans ahead of the 2022 midterm elections while persuading conservative Democrats to agree to eliminate the filibuster to achieve lasting policy changes.
Boeing said on Tuesday that it sold 31 airplanes in February after accounting for cancellations, the first month in more than a year that the aerospace giant had positive sales, suggesting that it is starting to regain its footing after the 737 Max crisis.
The Max was banned from flying passengers two years ago this week after a total of 346 people died in a pair of crashes aboard the plane, prompting intense scrutiny of the plane and the company. But late last year, the Federal Aviation Administration lifted its ban on the plane, allowing the Max to begin carrying passengers again after required changes are made.
Most of the world’s 190 aviation authorities have now approved the Max to fly again, according to Boeing, and 14 airlines have used the plane for more than 9,000 flights.
Sales of the plane have rebounded, too. On Tuesday, Boeing said it had received 82 new airplane orders in February, about half of them for the Max, including a large order from United Airlines. Another 51 aircraft orders were canceled, and the company now has 4,041 orders in its backlog.
It was Boeing’s first month of positive sales since November 2019, but its difficulties are far from over.
The coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the travel sector, prompting airlines to cancel orders and rethink plans to expand or update their fleets. And Boeing has also halted deliveries of the 787, a twin-aisle plane, amid quality concerns.
And the company is facing lawsuits over the Max from shareholders who say it mismanaged its response to the crisis and the families of those who were killed.
The first Max crash occurred in October 2018 in Indonesia. The second happened two years ago this Wednesday in Ethiopia. To mark that grim milestone, the families of people who died in the crashes plan to host a vigil outside the F.A.A. in Washington, and some are scheduled to meet the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, to discuss their concerns about the safety of the Max.
Stocks around the world rose on Tuesday as bond yields fell back from their recent highs. Tech stocks regained their footing, leading Wall Street higher.
The S&P 500 climbed 1.4 percent, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite rose 3.7 percent. The Stoxx Europe 600 index climbed about 0.8 percent, led by utilities and tech stocks. The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes fell to 1.54 percent.
Tech stocks have borne the brunt of the stock market volatility in recent weeks amid rising bond yields and inflation fears. There has been some concern that stronger economic growth will lead to inflation, and that central bankers would respond by tightening monetary policy. On Monday, the Nasdaq dropped 2.4 percent, ending the day more than 10 percent off its January peak. A drop that large is known as a correction. The S&P 500 fell 0.5 percent on Monday.
These concerns appeared to have been set aside on Tuesday, as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said it expected the American economy to grow 6.5 percent this year because of the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package and the widening availability of coronavirus vaccine. That’s more than double the pace of growth the organization predicted in December.
In other upbeat economic news, there was an unexpected increase in German exports in January. Analysts at Citigroup said they had expected the pandemic and supply chain disruptions to cause exports to drop alongside imports. Instead, this data is a “large upside risk” to their G.D.P. forecasts for the first three months of the year, the analysts said.
It remains to be seen whether more market participants will buy the message from central bankers that the risks of high and sustained inflation are low. On Monday, Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary and former chair of the Federal Reserve, also said she didn’t believe the stimulus package would lead to higher inflation. “I really don’t think that is going to happen,” Ms. Yellen said on MSNBC, adding that she expected the economy to be back to full employment by next year. She added, though, that there were tools available if the spending did prove to be inflationary.
On Wednesday, U.S. inflation data for February will be published. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg forecast the annual inflation rate will climb to 1.7 percent from 1.4 percent.
The next round of stimulus checks that Congress is expected to approve this week will not include President Biden’s name, a White House official said on Tuesday, a decision that breaks with the practice of his predecessor, President Donald J. Trump, who sought to take credit for the payments by personally branding them.
Millions of Americans are expected to receive direct payments of up to $1,400 in the coming weeks once Congress enacts a $1.9 trillion relief package. Most of those payments will be made electronically, by direct deposit, but some Americans will receive paper checks in the mail.
The last two rounds of checks included Mr. Trump’s name, along with a signed letter accompanying the funds, prompting criticism from Democrats and watchdog groups that he was politicizing the relief money, which passed on a bipartisan basis.
“He did not want his name to appear on the checks,” the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters, “and he didn’t think that was a priority.”
The announcement came as Mr. Biden visited a hardware store in Washington to promote the Paycheck Protection Program, a small-business lending program that was started under Mr. Trump but has been criticized for allowing money to go to big companies rather than mom-and-pop shops.
“A lot of money went to people who shouldn’t have gotten help,” Mr. Biden said to the employees of , W.S. Jenks & Son, which received a loan from the program along with Little Wild Things Farm, an adjoining business.
Mr. Biden, who announced changes to the program that were intended to get more funds to smaller businesses, said that Mr. Trump had not done enough to fairly distribute the loans.
“In the previous round of P.P.P., in the previous administration, there was documented problems from the inspector general of the Small Business Administration that tens of thousands of companies that were not eligible for P.P.P. ended up receiving it,” Bharat Ramamurti, a deputy director of the National Economic Council, told reporters when he was asked to explain what the president meant. “We’ve changed that.”
The Paycheck Protection Program has made some $687 billion in loans to more than 7 million borrowers since last spring, according to data from the Small Business Administration. But it has also been plagued with problems. The Trump administration initially put few safeguards on the application process, allowing large, often publicly-traded companies to qualify for loans. Recipients have complained that their applications were delayed by technology glitches. A single typo could tank an application.
The Biden administration announced a series of changes to the program late last month, including opening a two-week window to better prioritize businesses that employ fewer than 20 people. as well as those owned by noncitizens who are lawful residents of the United States.
Mr. Ramamurti said that the two-week period led to an increase in loans to minority and women borrowers, and the administration logged 200,000 loans to first-time borrowers.
“There’s still plenty of money available,” he said.
The White House is under pressure from banks to extend the deadline for loans past March 31, the date the program is set to expire, because of the influx of applications. Several lawmakers have signaled a willingness to extend the deadline, but the White House did not respond to a request for comment on a possible extension on Tuesday.
The program has historically been a rare opportunity for bipartisan negotiation — Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, has gone so far as to call it a “slam dunk” — but economists have said it has saved relatively few jobs at a high cost.
On Thursday, Mr. Biden will deliver a prime-time television address from the White House, marking the one-year anniversary of widespread shutdowns caused by the pandemic. Mr. Biden is expected to showcase his economic relief plan and outline the measures his administration is taking to help workers and businesses recover from the pandemic downturn.
President Biden’s video message last week expressing support for organized labor amid a heated unionization drive at an Amazon warehouse outside Birmingham, Ala., has invigorated the drive to improve working conditions at the retail giant in a state historically inhospitable to organized labor.
“I couldn’t believe he said something,” said Darryl Richardson, one of the workers helping to organize a campaign that has targeted one of the world’s most profitable companies and its billionaire chief executive, Jeff Bezos.
“It matters. It eased minds that might be worried about losing their job,” he said.
Around 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, a former steel town, are voting this week on whether they want to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
If successful, they would be the first of Amazon’s 400,000 American workers to join a union — a landmark undertaking and early test of Mr. Biden’s campaign claim that he will be the “most pro-union president” ever.
“Workers in Alabama, and all across America, are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace,” Mr. Biden said in a direct-to-camera address posted on the White House Twitter page after a recent pressure campaign by pro-union groups pushing him to weigh in on the drive.
“We’ve been waiting on him,” added Mike Foster, one of the lead organizers for the union.
The drive has pitted company against worker and neighbor against neighbor as a potentially broader labor push brews at a corporation that has long resisted similar efforts. Mr. Biden’s words demonstrated a willingness to support communities such as working-class voters in Republican states, many of whom are Black, that have often fallen outside the Democratic Party’s governing focus.
The message also elevated the national debate about the future of labor and unions, a cross-ideological issue on which Mr. Biden can uniquely find common cause with the progressive wing of his party even as many Democrats continue to shy away.
Mr. Biden’s statement did not mention Amazon specifically and carefully avoided backing the union, calling instead for a fair election that followed federal labor guidelines.
What’s more, the presidential nod to Alabama supercharged the Democratic arms race to find the next Georgia, where the party capitalized on decades of organizing and demographic change to break Republicans’ grip on statewide elections.
The task will be tougher in Alabama: The state is much more firmly Republican than its Southern neighbor. It has not experienced the rapid demographic change that made Georgia’s political transformation possible, and it does not have Georgia’s considerable numbers of college-educated suburban moderates.
Still, Alabama Democrats see the growth of unions — and the vote in Bessemer — as a crucial first step.
“Watching what happened in Georgia has given people a lot of hope,” said Kathleen Kirkpatrick, the political director of Hometown Action, a statewide activist group. “What Stacey Abrams did started a decade ago and took a lot of help. So let’s think about where we are on that path.”